In September 1999 B.J. Habibie, then President of Indonesia, made a public statement concerning the proposed deployment of UN peacekeeping troops to East Timor. Habibie made ‘the statement’ twice, once in Indonesian, then again in English, and differences between the two resulting texts cannot straightforwardly be explained in terms of the different languages employed. This paper examines the two original versions, along with various representations of these that appeared in British and US news media. Processes of text production and dissemination are discussed, and linguistic and translational choices analysed in relation to context and audience, along with the possible reasons underlying those choices and some of their potential effects upon interpretation. In this case, it is argued, different news audiences may have received significantly different impressions of the content and tone of the original speech — depending, for example, upon the particular media through which they accessed the text.