Samizdata hasn’t done all that much reporting of or commentary on the Kelly Affair and related matters, so the least we can do is nod humbly towards those who have done more, such as these persons in interesting posts like this, and this guy, David Steven. I’ve no time for more now as I am soon to be out socialising, but this piece, about Andrew Gilligan‘s track record during the Iraq War, is a classic example of the power of the blogosphere, first because the material which David Steven is analysing itself first appeared on a BBC Blog, and second, because of how good an influential this particular piece has been.
Did the BBC realise quite what a hostage to fortune it would be to allow their foreign correspondents to just say whatever they liked, and have it all up there permanently on the record? They already know that if they tamper retrospectively with more stuff, that only gets them into more trouble.
(Someone recently blogged about a case of the BBC surreptitiously adding some distancing quotes to some outrageous piece of Stalinoid nonsense which it had presented as straight fact, after a blogger had already quoted it as an example of their bias, but I can’t remember who tells this story. Helpful comment please.)
We’ve been, as I say, a bit behind the story here, but I think I can feel a feeding frenzy beginning to develop about the BBC, not unlike the one that did such serious things not so long ago to the New York Times.
I think the vital change has not been the complaining that’s long been going on here. What has changed is the American attitude. 9/11 did so many things, and one of them was to cause Americans to pay more attention not just to the big wide world out there, but also to the most influential organisations, theirs and other peoples’, that have for decades been reporting it.
And I wonder if the BBC saw that one coming on 9/12.
For years the EUnichs have complained that we didn’t listen to them.
Be careful what you wish for.
Not only can we listen, we can read, and get rough translations when we can’t. Merde has a charming little cartoon posted from the paper Liberation.
I agree that 9/11, in addition to ratcheting up American jingoism, had the effect of a boot to the head, awakening people to the sad situation in the political and military spheres, in much the same way that the burst bubble of the dot-com boom awakened people to the sad situation in the economic sphere. We are now at least attempting to keep an eye on corporate pirates and government bozos, while we are more often refusing to accept the “official line” at face value, regardless of how many flags or dollar bills those in authority wrap around it.
The bottom line, as ever more people are realizing every day, is that we’re going to pay, regardless, for the decisions made in our names. So the only question is, who is going to call the shots?
It’s hard to say that the institutions we Americans are peeved at are getting the right message.
For example, the humiliated NY Times recently hired Weekly Standard editor David Brooks for the Op-Ed page. The ‘Standard is a good conservative periodical, featuring a variety of mostly conservative & some libertarian news analysis. Brooks is a heck of a good writer, very sharp, with a lot of range. Brooks will be a well used counterweight to the Times’ Mo Dowd, Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman, and yes, liberal “conservative” William Safire.
I’m glad that Brooks is getting this opportunity, but the Op-Ed page isn’t the problem. The problem is the 1000 member news staff, which is overwhelmingly left-liberal to far left. One expects the Op-Ed page of a paper to lean right or left and to reflect the views of the ownership and management. One would hope for something approaching centrism, however, in the news reporting and the news section analysis. That’s where the NY Times gets into trouble, and that’s the part that is unfortunately the least likely to change.
I believe the problem is that the left establishment views our problem with the press organs they control, through their own eyes. They think we are just another victim group, like the Black race hustlers or MECHA or Lambda, and the way to appease us is to give us token representation on the Op-Ed page. (Bob Herbert, call home…) This ignores the fact that we might have a legitimate, objectively cognizable problem with the way the news staff reports the news.
So welcome to the multi-culti ghetto, Mr. Brooks. Enjoy your stay…
And once we start indexing legal documents to make them machine-searchable then lawyers will be even more scared than old-style journalists.
The more quickly the rest of us can check references, the more carefully once-glib experts will have to behave – and the fewer of them we need.
I think the blogging of the BBC “surreptitiously adding some distancing quotes to some outrageous piece of Stalinoid nonsense which it had presented as straight fact” is Brian Carnell, writing about the BBC reporting on a Korean war veteran.
“And once we start indexing legal documents to make them machine-searchable then lawyers will be even more scared than old-style journalists.”
At least in the US, this is already done with respect to all federal legislation, regulations, and opinions of any court, and most state legislation and court opinions. The minicipal stuff is pretty spotty, though. Various paid services give you greater or lesser degrees of indexing and researching capabilities, but its all online if you know where to look.
What you find is an almost impenetrable mass of verbiage that is so immense and complex that you need, yes, a professional to help you navigate and understand it. Most competent lawyers won’t even attempt to deal with all this stuff outside of their own specialty.
I found an interesting way to frame this in a few discussions with the anti-Bush types here in the US.
I asked them, “When the US military comes out with statements, do you assume they are true and just let it go? Or do the statements kick off a series of thoughts and questions in your mind? Such as, ‘Well, it could be true, BUT… what else is going on here? Do they have an agenda? Have they lied in the past? Do I think they would be willing to lie again to further their agenda? Can I trust just them, or should I look for two, three, four corroborating reports on what they are saying’ “?
“Does your mind work this way, or do you just accept what the military says as truth and move on?”
Well, given that 90% of such people have their brains stuck in rice paddies in SE Asia, they invariably say something like “Of course you have to think that way and ask those questions. Are you crazy?”
To which I say, “Great. Are you asking the same things when you read the New York Times, when you hear the BBC, when you watch CNN? Are you? Better start. And better get used to the fact that even if you are not, millions upon millions of Americans are doing just that, for the very same reasons. And now we are going to question such organizations, and their agendas, the same way you have been questioning the military for three decades now. Hope they can stand up to it.”
Whole new world.
Use this argument. Nails ‘em flat-footed every time.
I can imagine there’s already too much of it, T. Hartin! [re copious indexing of legal documents]
Actually, I meant ‘indexing’ more in the sense Tim Berners-Lee, author of HTML back in the 1980s, means it.
So creating a kind of “legal markup language” of HTML-resembling tags, which would enable smart search engines to sift through millions of pages of Common Law, statute law, and French-style Napoleonic Code law, and come up with – not final opinions of course, but with at least document paths of relevant citations, statistical estimates of possible judgements.
Biotechnology is pressing ahead with so far rival protocols of markup tags to do just this for documents about genetics and cellular chemistry. Smart search engines multiply a thousand-fold the ability of junior chemists to follow up interesting lines of reasoning across the massively-growing professional literature.
Once something similar starts happening with legal texts, the advisory role of lawyers [well over 90 per cent of what they do, I believe] which involves knowing where to look relevant things up, will be under massive machine-assisted attack. The first users will be lawyers themselves, but it will rapidly enable paralegals, law students, accountants and, yes, the rest of us, to access the same vast stacks of scattered texts that are now hidden inside legal libraries you have to pay through the nose to a solicitor/advocate/lawyer to enter and look stuff up for you.
That’s what I meant.