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]
The spoof post below about how the wretched Tory leader ‘Dave’ Cameron might react to the case for abolishing inheritance tax – a thoroughly good idea – prompted some commentators to wonder about the UK media. It reminded me of an old quote attributed to the late British broadcaster, Brian Redhead, who is supposed to have said (I paraphrase):
“The Times is read by people who run the country. The Daily Telegraph is read by people who fear we are being run by the French; the Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country, while the Daily Mirror is read by people who delusionally think they run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Sun is read by people who do not care who runs the country so long as she has very large tits.”
Julie Burchill is a person about whom I oscillate between revulsion and admiration but she is in good form at the moment. In an article called Bleeding-heart ignoramuses, she ridicules the British media establishments anti-Jewish diatribes and the plain stupidity of some people’s analysis of the region. In the later category she points at an article by Matthew Parris that could well be the most poorly thought out “what Israel must do” article by someone who presumably does not want the extermination of all Jews in that country. The money quote being where he suggests that in order to be ‘loved’ by international opinion, Israel must return to its pre-1967 borders… and this at a time when the existing borders scant enough protection from long range attack. Parris writes:
That settlement has to be a return to her pre-1967 boundaries. Precisely because Israel is by no means forced to make so generous a move, the international support (even love) this would generate would secure her future permanently. It would bring her back within the pale.
So presumably if only Israel would place itself at the mercy of its sworn enemies, that magnificent body of strength and moral rectitude ‘the international community’ would make everything alright… after all, what is the value of mere survival if Kofi Anan, Jacques Chirac and several thousand Guardian readers in Islington think poorly of you? To which Burchill aptly replies:
Personally, I’d far prefer the Jews to be angry, aggressive and alive than meek, mild and dead – and that’s what makes me and a minority like me feel so much like strangers in our own country, now more than ever. I’ve always loved being a hack, but now even that feels weird, as though I’m living among a bunch of snatched-body zombies who look like journalists but believe and say the most inhuman, evil things.
Indeed. When Burchill is right, damn is she right.
There have already been a couple of Samizdata quotes of the day, the first officially labelled thus, and the second an SQOTD in all but title. Had there been no such copying and pasting postings so far today, then I would have put up a quote from this (“MSM sacrifices itself for Hezbollah”), such as, for instance, this:
The MSM usually claims that it is better than the blogosphere because it can filter and detect fraud. The Lebanon conflict shows that claim to be a flat out lie. The MSM may possibly speak truth to power but it seems keen to speak falsehood to the rest of us and to support the terrorists. I assume MSM support of the terrorists is based on the idea that idividual journalists may die or lose access to “scoops” unless they uncritically regurgitate terrorist propaganda, whereas they see no downside to criticising Israel or the USA becuase these countries have a tradition of press freedom. Unfortunately that analysis seems to be at the usual level of MSM strategic thought – poor. In the short term they are correct. In the long term they are as wrong as it is possible to be. Aside from state supported outlets such as the BBC the MSM depends on advertising revenue to survive and that revenue is roughly proportional to the audience size. If the MSM are shown to be puppets and liars then they will lose audience (which they are) and hence lose money. Eventually they will be out of a job. And even the BBC will feel the chill wind of financial cuts if it loses credibility – there is no reason to assume that the next UK government will not force the BBC to wean itself from the license fee and even less reason to assume that once weaned it will not see a drastic downsizing.
Meryl Yourish thinks this means that the terrorists are winning the propaganda war, to me it seems more likely that they are helping the MSM destroy itself. It really seems to me that Lebanon is going to be the place where the MSM collectively martyred itself, fighting for the cause of an Iranian backed terror group that seeks the utter destruction of Israel and the imposition of Sharia law and press censorship that would be antithetical to the MSM itself.
The German magazine ZAPP has a video of Green Helmet, whose name has been revealed as Salam Daher, taken in Qana when it was bombed ten years ago. He oversees a dead boy being put into an ambulance. The sequence is not good enough. He gives stage directions. The boy is taken out again, transferred pointlessly to another stretcher, put back in the ambulance. Daher makes sure there is a clear field of view for the camera and the blanket over the boy is pulled back so that his face can be seen.
EU Referendum promises to provide an analysis soon. This should be worth reading, as it was EU Referendum’s Richard North who first noted Daher’s surprising prominence If you care to you can also read a translation of an article from Stern magazine saying that the whole thing is just a bizarre conspiracy theory.
The picture from 1996 briefly shown on the left of the Zapp footage shows Daher holding up a dead baby dressed in blue. The baby’s head is blurred, and that is not surprising. Zapp’s picture was taken within minutes of this one showing that the baby’s head had been blown up. (Needless to say, this is a disturbing image.) That picture is fairly famous – for instance it appears as the fourth picture down in this series of pictures from the “Main Gallery Of Zionist Massacres” of a website called “Resistance.” It was also, I seem to recall, at one time the cover picture for Warblogger Watch (http://warbloggerwatch.blogspot.com, although if you try the link it is immediately covered up by sex adverts.) Daher has had a successful career.
The dead children from both 1996 and 2006 were really dead. Almost certainly they were really killed by Israeli munitions – although I have no doubt Hizb’Allah reassigns casualties from “friendly fire” whenever it gets the chance, let us not pretend that in what I take to be a worldwide war our side will not also kill innocents. The much mocked defence that an image is “fake but accurate” does have some validity.
However from now on it will be impossible to forget that these famous images tell not one but at least three stories. The dead child. The man holding him. The man behind the camera.
In her ill-judged attack on global capitalism, Naomi Klein decried the phenomenon of the corporate logo. One of the sillinesses of this is that logos and brands are essentially bound up with the reputation of a firm. A firm that has a strong brand, a strong reputation for honesty, quality and high service may have taken years, decades even, to aquire it. It can take only days to lose such a reputation through stupidity or dishonesty. That is why reputation is a protection for the consumer. Statists who imagine that we need all manner of regulations to protect consumers against shysters routinely forget this point. A firm that wants to make a whacking great profit is unlikely to deliberately harm or even kill, its customers. Self-interest dictates that a firm that wants to make money over the long term will work like hell to ensure its reputation is deserved. (It may be debateable whether limited liability either enhances or weakens this process, but I have not the time to explore that here).
I got thinking along these lines following the recent mess that has unfolded at Reuters, thanks entirely to sharp-eyed bloggers spotting something funny about photographs. Reuters is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, news service in the world. It both provides information directly to clients such as traders via its screens, offering real-time news alerts, and also wholesale news, providing text and photographs to newspapers and broadcasters. The company – founded by central European aristocrat Baron Julius Reuter – has employed some of the bravest and sharpest journalists in the business, not to mention folk who went on to forge careers in television like Sandy Gall or even thriller writers like Frederick Forsyth and Ian Fleming.
So what has happened over the photo scandal has the whiff of tragedy as well as farce. Its reputation has been badly damaged by the photo scandal. My sources at the firm realise that the situation cannot be shrugged off and it appears this will not happen. Good. The organisation deserves credit for immediately axing the jerk who doctored photographs to make a situation look more exciting and therefore marketable than it was. The whole back-catalogue of this person’s work has been taken down. Reuter’s head of editorial, David Schlesinger – no stranger to speaking his mind about matters – is certainly like to crack the whip, although I am not yet aware that senior managers’ heads may roll because of what has happened. (Stay tuned).
It is a shame in some ways since the company has been recovering financially over the past couple of years. Reuters’ profitability was hammered after the end of the dotcom boom in 2000. Bloated and complacent after the boom years in foreign exchange and equity markets during the 80s and 90s, Reuters’ lost ground to firms like Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s snazzy news and bond-dealing boxes and add-on features enticed away thousands of clients. And yet under new CEO Tom Glocer, the company started to fight back, halting the exodus of clients, simplifying its product range. It left its old HQ in Fleet Street and moved to a gleaming new office in Canary Wharf.
To fight back from this, senior management must show no mercy if there are further signs of this sort of nonsense. If they do not take a hard line, one can be sure business rivals like Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal will be ready to pounce.
Accompanying earlier posts here and here, another example of some Reuters truthmaking has been exposed by the blogosphere – and guess which side of the conflict is being targeted by Reuters’ dodgy Adobe warriors? The shot and caption in question can be found here. The caption reads
An Israeli F-16 warplane fires missiles during an air strike on Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon, August 2, 2006.
Looks plausible enough to an untrained eye such as my own, however Reuters again underestimates the superior intellectual firepower ranged against it in the Blogosphere, which has exposed the “missiles” as the guided-missile countermeasure known as chaff. The fact that two of the three rounds visible are copies of the single chaff release adds to the visual fiction. The link posted above debunking the Reuters image has a lot more detail.
We are starting to see the full extent of entrenched dishonesty in the Reuters newsroom, and it is astonishing that the people working for this once-venerable institution think they can get away with such crude deception. Did they think people with far, far greater expertise than these hacks would not notice? Reuters needs to get its house in order expeditiously, otherwise its supersession is assured.
Drinking from Home posts two Reuters pictures (CORRECTION: one Reuters picture and one AP) of a woman lamenting the destruction of her home by the Israelis. Different dates, different homes, same woman.
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’
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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