There were big anti-terror/pro-democracy demonstrations in Baghdad today. Glenn Reynolds points out they were noticed grudgingly, when at all, by the ‘professional’ ‘media’. A few years ago this would have meant the story didn’t exist.
Times change.
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December 12th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Greg Dyke, the BBC director general, attacked American reporting of the war in Iraq and derided news organisations that were prepared to bang the drum for one side or the other. Mr Dyke, who was speaking after collecting an honorary award at the International Emmys in New York on Monday night, said the Iraq coverage illustrated the difference between the BBC and US networks:
He cited research showing that of 840 experts interviewed on US news outlets during the war only four opposed the conflict. Yes, unlike the BBC that has accomplished what we would call a pervasive bias, an affliction where the reporters cannot even tell just how loudly they are banging the drum for one side. This is the news outlet that regarded the Iraqi Minister of Information a source on a par with the Command Centre. Oh, and whose reporters kept insisting that there are not US troops in Baghdad when the rest of the world were watching their tanks moving down the streets of central Baghdad. I came across an interesting report by River Path Associates that looks at the BBC Reporters’ Log and examines evidence of bias in the BBC’s reporting during the Iraq conflict. They chose the Reporters’ Log since it is immediate and reflects assumptions of the reporters themselves. (I would argue that the more pronounced bias was at the editorial level, it was interesting that some reporters who posted to the Reporters’ Log complained that their raw reporting was given a rather different spin by editors in the UK.) The report analyses all 1343 posts to the BBC Reporters’ Log. The majority of posts contained factual statements or accounts of reporters’ personal experiences. Others discussed strategy, Coalition and Iraqi claims, and the progress of the war. The authors focused on these latter posts, allocating them to 8 different categories:
They concluded, among other things, that: A quantitative analysis of entries in the Reporter’s Log indicates that most reports are factual in nature, and do not contain comment or speculation on the nature and progress of the war.
There you have it. And for more juicy evidence there is, of course, Biased BBC, which, by the way, has also something to say about Mr. Dykes arrogant comments about the US media. November 26th, 2003 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
I received an email from Dave Winer who is fighting a battle for an Internet free from interference from Big Media pointing to a post on Harvard Law School blog*. Here is the message:
Although I could not give a flying f*** about political campaigns and presidential elections, I am very much concerned about the Internet remaining free from political intereference. Dave Winer is correct in drawing attention to this pointing out how the symbiotic relationship between politicians and the media can spell danger for Internet as we know it today. Quite apart from the argument about the impact of pundit blogs on political discourse in the traditional media, Internet is undeniably changing balance of power in many areas in ways mostly unpalatable to politicians and the established media. *There is a disclaimer that points out that he is speaking for himself and not on behalf of Harvard Law School or the Berkman Center for the Internet & Society. November 17th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
The BBC has appointed a “Middle East policeman” to oversee its coverage of the region amid mounting allegations of anti-Israeli bias. Malcolm Balen, a former editor of the Nine O’Clock News, has been recruited in an attempt to improve the corporation’s reporting of the Middle East and its relationship with the main political players. Mr Balen, who left the BBC three years ago, will work full-time with the official title of “senior editorial adviser”. Another way to describe this is the expression ‘putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound’. Yeah, that will fix it. November 11th, 2003 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
An article in today’s Fox News contains an interesting numerical statement, one of those ‘gee whiz’ comparisons we so often see:
There is just one problem: their math is wrong. There are 5,280 feet in a mile; and 12 inches in a foot. Since Fox is an American news outlet, the paper size can be assumed as 8.5×11 inches. So we have, using the archaic system of measurements based on lengths of a long dead English Monarch’s appendages: 9.5 miles x 5,280 feet/mile x 12 inches/foot = 601,920 inches. If we take ‘end to end’ literally, we get: 601,920 inches / 11 inches/sheet = 54,720 sheets. This falls a few short of millions. Oh well… let’s try again. We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and line the pages up side by side instead of end to end: 601,920 inches / 8.5 inches/sheet = 70,814 sheets. Either there are only .07 million pages or someone can’t handle simple math. Any engineer who grew up using a Pickett (sliderule) would have immediately seen the unreasonableness of the statement. November 4th, 2003 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
During the Gulf War of 1991, media reporting went something like this: About a month of showing pictures, entirely controlled by the US military, of Allied airplanes flying over Iraq, followed by the announcement by General Schwarzkopf that the war was over and we had won. Although they had their suspicions, none of the journalists, all kept behind the lines in Riyadh, knew that Allied troops had crossed the border into Iraq until three days after the ground offensive had started, the Republican Guard in Kuwait had been virtually destroyed, and Schwarzkopf announced victory. This severely limited the opportunity for the media to criticise the conduct of the ground war. The above is a simplification, but it covers in essence the way the media war was fought in 1991 – by the journalists out there, by the military out there, and as it was seen by everyone else on their TVs. Naturally, the military regarded this as a great success. Equally naturally, the media regarded it as a disaster. The viewing public generally seemed satisfied, bar a few dedicated peaceniks, who wanted pictures of military screw-ups. Two factors therefore set the context for the reporting of Gulf War 2003. First, the media were determined not to allow the military to keep them away from ‘the story’, the way they were kept away in 1991. → Continue reading: The media in the Gulf September 26th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Most people have an implicit, nebulous, and generally unthought through understanding of the media and what their job is. It has to do something with getting the facts and reporting the truth or at least the reality to the best of their abilities. The media is a sort of civilian intelligence agency. This is how the military, in particular, view them and when the media are not reporting the facts, they are seen as failing in their job. The media do not see their job in this light at all. Their job is to find and sell stories. Of course, these should not be completely divorced from the facts, but facts are merely the raw materials of the stories. More importantly, the media do not feel obliged to report all the facts, especially in a place like Iraq, where there is either very intense competition among reporters and therefore not much time to investigate the story in detail. Alternatively, the interest is fading a bit, so it is not worth investing the time. Either way, the result is the same. What has become obvious to me while in Basra and helped me understand the media better is that they have now decided what their story is in Iraq. They have signed up this story as their product before they even arrive. They are not there to research ‘the facts’ – they are merely looking to illustrate their story. → Continue reading: The media story September 25th, 2003 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Samizdata.net often makes references to the importance of the ‘meta-context’ in explaining and determining events around us. A question to consider: What would happen if the mainstream media were somehow forced to refer to Saddam’s old regime by its own official title, which is The Arab National Socialist Party or Arab NAZI Party? What a thought… September 25th, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have just heard a reporter on the BBC ‘Newsnight’ show describe the European Common Agricultural Policy as an expensive ‘boondoggle’. I cannot recall ever having heard that term used in the mainstream British press before. Is that a first? September 22nd, 2003 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
There’s an article in today’s New York Times, an article about another article, in Homes & Gardens. But follow that Homes & Gardens link and you won’t find any mention of this article, because it was published in 1938 and was about Adolf Hitler’s “Bavarian retreat”.
Now this episode could be turned into yet another intellectual property comment fest, and if that’s what people want, fine, go ahead. But what interests me is the ineptness of the commercial Homes & Gardens response, their woeful neglect of a major business opportunity. An honest response from them about their reluctance to get involved in political judgements of the many and varied political people whose houses they have featured in their pages over the decades, and about all the other famous (and infamous) people whose homes they’ve written about over the years, together with a website pointing us all to their archives, might surely have served their commercial purposes far better, I would have thought. This might have morphed into a discussion of the comparably fabulous pads occupied by other famous monster-criminal-dictators (including some featured in Homes & Gardens, of the exact degree of opulence/disgustingness of the homes of the Russian and Chinese Communist apparatchiks, but of their far greater reluctance (when compared to openly inegalitarian despots like Hitler) to reveal their living arrangements to the world, in the pages of such publications as Homes & Gardens. There might also have been some quite admiring further thoughts on the nice way that Hitler had arranged matters for himself, from the domestic point of view, the way the design of the house made maximum use of the view of the mountains, etc., etc. It does sound like a really nice place. Such a discussion could surely have been combined with a robust defence by Homes & Gardens of their intellectual property rights under existing law, and in a way that might have been to their further commercial advantage. They might have simply reprinted the entire piece in a current issue, together with their current comments about it. But no. Down go the shutters. And an opportunity to bring Homes & Gardens to the non-contemptuous attention of a whole new generation of readers, instead of to its contemptuous attention, is missed. Or is about to be missed. → Continue reading: Hitler’s home in Homes & Gardens September 21st, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Given the trademark timorousness of the British Conservative Party, I must grudgingly concede that this is something of a brave pronouncement by their standards:
Why ‘halved’? Who does that help? What does that achieve? Why not scrap the iniquitous television tax altogether? ‘Half’ indeed. Pah! Presumably they don’t feel quite bold enough to go the whole hog. I see an upside and a downside here. The upside is that I think this is the first time that the BBC’s looting rights have been publicly challenged in the mainstream. That’s a start. But it is only a start. The downside is that the Conservatives cannot be entirely trusted to see through even this lily-livered compromise. All it takes is a Guardian op-ed denouncing them as rabid fascists for them to drop the idea like a hot brick and run away. Even if that were not the case, the Conservatives actually have to be back in power in order to effect their semi-decent idea and the prospects of that happening are looking dimmer by the day. ‘Auntie’ is still a long way from threatened. September 21st, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The latest Free Life Commentary is the occasional essay series written and e-published by the Libertarian Alliance’s Sean Gabb. In the latest, number 112, he descibes how he yesterday spent An Afternoon with Tony Martin:
And so should you, by reading the whole thing. Sean took photographs of the event, or persuaded others to take photos in those cases where he was a photographee. Sean, to those who have known him at all long, looks impressively slim, while Tony Martin looks pleasingly plump despite his ordeal by injustice, and subsequently by celebrity. The piece may be about a rather doleful subject, namely injustice and official stupidity. Nevertheless I found that reading it made me feel quite cheerful – cheerful that such men as Tony Martin exist, cheerful that I have a friend like Sean Gabb who is prepared to go to all that trouble just to lend him moral support and then to write about it, and cheerful that I now have the chance to give the whole event another little boost, thanks to Samizdata. September 19th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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