We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
Over on Media Influencer, Adriana has an article called Wikiality, discussing both the rise and rise of Wikipedia and just how badly some commentators misunderstand what Wikipedia is and is not. The issue is not “can bogus content end up on Wikipedia?” (yes, it can) but rather “does it get discovered and corrected?”
Just as bloggers can write any old cobblers they want about some subject, does that mean nothing on blogs can be trusted? No, because not only are blogs generally quite open about where they are coming from (i.e. their ‘biases’), unlike MSM with their untenable claims to be ‘unbiased’, when a blog makes some questionable assertion it is subject to an army of peer reviewers who will pull apart inconsistencies and errors. Moreover the more influential the blog, the quicker and harder errors or fanciful interpretations of events are pounced on in the comments and (more importantly) on other blogs.
The rapid retraction of a photoshopped image of ‘Beirut burning’ being offered for sale by Reuters just a few hours ago indicates that the era of the deference for the purveyors of The News is well and truly over. Peer review, it is not just for blogs and wikis anymore.
Following a precision strike by bloggers from around the world, the mainstream media’s reputation can be seen going up in photoshopped smoke in Lebanon
A modest contribution to the debate between the media and bloggers… Thanks to Jon Stewart for pointing out yet another way in which the credibility and professionalism are the flavour of the day. Obviously.
The astonishingly skewed reportage relating to the Middle East, and the reactions to it on the internet, reminds me of the reportage in the aftermath of 9/11 and how that changed the way a great many people understood how news is reported. The reaction to ideologically or commercially motivated massaging of facts in the mainstream media, which claimed to be objective reporting, is what more or less created the pundit blogosphere as we know it today.
The spotlight is once again on the reporters and networks who accept staged ‘photo-opportunities’ and rebroadcast them as factual ‘news’ (suitably edited). It is on the journalists who report every single Lebanese casually as ‘civilian’ even if they are members of Hezbollah (true but completely misleading). It is on the reporters operating within Lebanon under close Hezbollah direction and yet not adding a disclaimer to their reports pointing out this. It is on major western news agencies selling obviously photoshopped images of the aftermath of Israeli bombing.
Of course not every journalist allows themselves to be used in return for a ‘sexy’ story, as this July 30th article shows…
THIS is the picture that damns Hezbollah. It is one of several, smuggled from behind Lebanon’s battle lines, showing that Hezbollah is waging war amid suburbia. The images, obtained exclusively by the Sunday Herald Sun, show Hezbollah using high-density residential areas as launch pads for rockets and heavy-calibre weapons. Dressed in civilian clothing so they can quickly disappear, the militants carrying automatic assault rifles and ride in on trucks mounted with cannon. The photographs, from the Christian area of Wadi Chahrour in the east of Beirut, were taken by a visiting journalist and smuggled out by a friend.
So why is that not ‘front page’ news on the BBC or the hilariously named ‘Independent’? Could it be because it suggests that what the ‘Zionist entity’ has been claiming all along might actually be true?
To quote the movie Network, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more”. We can fact-check your ass.
For those who missed this in the Samizdata comment section a few days ago, take a look at this and make of it what you will.
Horray for Hollywood Pallywood. Truth is all in the editing it would seem.
Update: And that applies to still images as well. Reuter’s has its ‘Dan Rather moment’ as a picture of the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike is proven to be a Photoshop ‘enhancement’
In accordance with their ongoing commitment to the principles of constant development and change and to show that the organisation remains determined to accurately reflect the ever-changing social and cultural landscape, the BBC today unveiled its new corporate logo:
There is an article in the National Review by former Sunday Telegraph journalist Tom Gross what lifts the lid on what the British taxpayers who fund the BBC gets for their appropriated money… not that CNN et al are much better:
CNN senior international correspondent Nic Robertson admitted that his anti-Israel report from Beirut on July 18 about civilian casualties in Lebanon was stage-managed from start to finish by Hezbollah. He revealed that his story was heavily influenced by Hezbollah’s “press officer” and that Hezbollah have “very, very sophisticated and slick media operations”.
[…]
Yet Reliable Sources, hosted by Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz, is broadcast only on the American version of CNN. So CNN International viewers around the world will not have had the opportunity to learn from CNN’s “Senior international correspondent” that the pictures they saw from Beirut were carefully selected for them by Hezbollah.
[…]
First the BBC gave the impression that Israel had flattened the greater part of Beirut. Then to follow up its lop-sided coverage, its website helpfully carried full details of the assembly points for an anti-Israel march due to take place in London, but did not give any details for a rally in support of Israel also held in London a short time later.
Without the internet to fact-check and contextualize what the media shows us, our ability to form opinions about what is happening in the world would be totally at the mercy of organisations whose reportage comes filtered through world views that are perhaps no more or less distorted than any other but which claim, without any justification, to be ‘objective’. Blogs like Samizdata do not claim to be ‘objective’ as we do not hesitate to say who we think that the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ or ‘less-worse-guys’ (we do try to be truthful however) as we take the view that as long as our biases are transparent, the reader can make his own mind up about the things we say. Bias + Transparency = Credibility. You make not agree with our conclusions but we will not intentionally lie to you.
However when organisations like CNN or the BBC claim to be ‘unbiased’, they are quite simply lying. I recall that pool reporters during the last Gulf War often said words to the effect “we are reporting under the restrictions imposed on us by the US military” before delivering their reports, which is fair enough as a disclaimer. I have yet to hear anything similar said by a reporter in Beirut reporting under Hezbollah restrictions (although I did hear one in Israel mutter that he was being prevented from saying exactly where Hezbollah rockets had struck), which in effect makes them a willing participant to Hezbollah’s propaganda efforts. In short, you are being deceived.
The Spectator is, and has been for many years, the leading conservative magazine in the United Kingdom. By ‘conservative’ I do not mean that it always supports the Conservative party (it has often had articles that have attacked the certain aspects of the Conservative party), but that the magazine opposes the socialist-social democratic forces that have dominated the United Kingdom for many decades (and it must be remembered that the basic cultural institutions of the United Kingdom remained under socialist-social democratic control even when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister).
However, it has long been a open secret in conservative and libertarian circles that The Spectator is often somewhat half hearted in its opposition to the “left” (for want of a better word). So one has to be careful about buying it. Under a poor editor, or even on a bad week in the time of a good editor, it may be little better than the BBC.
Last week I bought a copy of The Spectator. I wanted a change from the death-to-Israel, death-to-America line of all the television and radio stations and much of the print media in Britain (not that they have guts to just say ‘death-to-the-Jews’ of course – outlets like the BBC on the Daily Mail claim not to be anti Jewish in the slightest, it is just a matter of opposing the bad things that Israel does and opposing the backing of the United States gives to Israel).
The editor of The Spectator (Matthew d’Acona) may be a friend of the unprincipled David Cameron (present leader of the Conservative party), but he (like, to be fair, many of the people around Mr Cameron) is known to be pro-America and pro-Israel.
Also on the front cover of The Spectator it was advertised that Norman Tebbit had written an article. Tebbit was Chairman of the Conservative party when Margaret Thatcher was leader. He was always an independent man willing to argue with Mrs T. if need be, but always a loyal and honourable and was badly wounded by an IRA bomb (the same bomb left his wife paralysed and many other people dead) which led to his semi withdrawal from politics, thus leaving Margaret Thatcher exposed to the plots of her enemies. The Tebbit article was good (a polite demolition of Mr Cameron’s line of policy – too polite for my taste, but that is the way Norman Tebbit writes).
And there were other good articles in the magazine, however two very bad articles were present.
Reuters journalist Paul Hughes chose to spend a holiday with his wife in Beirut. just as the violence broke out. Here’s his vivid take on what it is like in that city at the moment. When it comes to covering events in Lebanon with a salty mixture of black humour, PJ O’ Rourke, of course, remains the master.
There is an example in the Telegraph that demonstrates yet again that we are all prisoners to the meta-context (frames of reference) within which we understand things and explain ourselves to others.
Bush turns back on science to veto stem cell Bill
… is the title of a piece by Francis Harris, reporting from Washington. And what is he writing about? Bush has vetoed a bill increasing government-funded research using human embryo cells. So Bush is not turning his back on ‘science’ at all, but rather is turning his back on providing tax money for activities that some taxpayers regard as murder. Personally I am all for stem-cell research and I do not any moral problems with the use of human embryos for research, but I fail to see why people who take a very different view should be forced to fund something they regard as child-killing… but then I would rather see no scientific research whatsoever funded with taxpayer’s money.
But within the meta-context that constrains Francis Harris’ views, to oppose tax-funding for certain types of research on moral grounds is to turn your back on ‘science’ rather than turning your back on what you may regard as ‘murder’. Just as a thought experiment, ponder this: if Bush managed to get a law enacted that allowed for the testing of dangerous experimental drugs on the inmates in Guantanamo Bay, would the title of Francis Harris’ article be “Bush backs laws supporting the advancement of science”?
Somehow I do not think so, yet logically it should be.
I was just watching a BBC Two special on the TV on political youth movements in Putin’s increasingly repressive Russia. During the programme a member of Yabloko was interviewed, the voice-over describing it as a ‘liberal’ (in the British sense of the word) opposition group, which according to its stated platform it sort of is (at least by local standards).
And on the wall behind the Yabloko spokesman being interview was a large picture of… Che Guevara.
So let me get this straight, some of their activists have a fondness for a mass murdering communist whose ‘philosophy of the wall’ was to simply execute ‘class enemies’, but they are ‘liberal’? Really? How liberal exactly? It reminded me of the commentary during the attempted military coup d’etat against Boris Yeltsin in August 1991 in which a CNN reporter described the orthodox communists in the military attempting to roll back the collapse of the Soviet Empire as ‘right wing’. Well what constitutes ‘left wing’ if being a communist does not? I would say that CNN reporter was just using the term to mean ‘the bad guys’.
Last night, at my own personal blog, I found myself getting really quite exercised about this utterly banal and ignorable headline…
…which I snapped yesterday afternoon. And in a very Samizdata-ish manner, a style that has been eluding me somewhat, of late. So, here is a link to my rant from Samizdata.
I got up at 6 am yesterday, which would be early for most people, and is about the day before yesterday for me, and I spent all of the morning and half the afternoon working extremely hard. Now it is 6 am today. I am up again, and face a similar day. So maybe my rant resistance is, just now, lower than usual. Maybe now, unlike usually, I am angry.
But it was not all rant. I also found myself weaving in my favourite cock-up of the World Cup so far, which was committed last night by an English referee, during the game which saw the Aussies going through to the last sixteen of the competition.
Jim Henson banged out these rather bizarre commercials – featuring a murdering psychopathic Kermit The Frog lookalike and a Cookie Monsteresque grump – before sharpening his act up and creating The Muppets.
See (a lot) more of the series here, and ponder why Wilkins Coffee is not a household name.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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