The sample blog that started this:
Nov. 9, 5:10 p.m.
While everyone else is writing about how Judy Miller finally got canned -- a retirement is a stage of her career? Come on! -- I wanted to confess I was misguided in an earlier column.
I was misguided because it turns out there are fresh crops of reporters in Iraq, or at least a handful of new reporters; we still haven't heard about them.
The Institute of War and Peace Reporting has been training reporters inside Baghdad. In one article by Duraed Selman, we see hope for the newspaper business in Iraq:
Shops are now printing books, pamphlets and newspapers prohibited under the old government. In the old days, just asking about banned materials could have led to imprisonment or even a death sentence.
Under Saddam, the few newspapers that were published looked like “dead corpses” when readers browsed through them, according to one printer.
Today, 150 newspapers published throughout the country are feeding print-shop businesses. In Baghdad alone, there are 80 titles with a combined daily circulation of 200,000. The smallest publish 3,000-4,500 copies a day, selling for 180 dinars (around 13 US cents). The best-known and most widespread newspapers have circulations of 15,000-35,000.
“A door that we didn’t even dream of opened,” said Suhad Abdul-Munim, owner of the Multaqa print shop in Baghdad.
This story doesn't explicitly say, but it's a fair bet that many of these newspapers are less about news and more about opinion, or propaganda.
Either way, it's a remarkable resurgence and outpouring of expression in a nation that for decades had known none. The creation and success of a "free press" -- even if freedom may mean excesses of rumors or wildly uninformed opinion -- is a big step.
One site lists dozens of Iraqi newspaper Web sites. I picked one at random, finding IraqWorld.net. My Arabic is incredibly worse than my Portuguese, so the language didn't help me. Two images seemed to carry much meaning:
Between these two, we see a broad range of opinion.
Via Global NewsBank, a subscription service, I found an Oct. 31 story via the "Inter Press Service," which is also a subscription service. Elisa Marincola reports:
Empowering communication by people in developing countries is the best way to promote awareness on the needs of those regions worldwide, Jo Weir from the Reuters Foundation said. Reuters, together with the Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development (Com Plus), a network of global media committed to communication of MDG issues, is supporting the creation of a national news agency in Iraq with correspondents in all the provinces, she said.
New media is also emerging in Afghanistan. Shahir Zarine from the Afghan Killid Media Group said his group set up by Development and Humanitarian Services for Afghanistan (DHSA), an Afghanistan-based non-governmental organization, is now publishing a weekly magazine that sells 15,000 copies. The group also runs a weekly newspaper , a monthly cultural journal, a radio station, a communication and advertising agency and a national distribution network of magazines and newspapers .
"We can play a crucial role in building democracy through educating the citizens, because it is easier for us than the international media to speak to the Afghan people," Zarine said. "The international community ignores the real situation of Afghanistan, and this could take us back to the past."
The story continues with efforts to create broader media organizations:
Lamis Andoni from Al Jazeera said that because of the channel's commitment to development and human rights, "many journalists and supporters of Al Jazeera are now imprisoned, for example in Spain and Iraq , but also in Arab countries."
Al Jazeera is looking for partnership with other media to give voice to the weak against the powerful "who want to impose their agenda on the global media."
But having more media channels is not by itself enough, said Roberto Morrione, director of the Italian public news channel Rainews24. "If we want to become a factor in development, we must put the events in their context, and try to show their effects." Rainews24, he said, is in contact with media, NGOs and local communities around the world to receive information "through the eyes of the actors."
Sweeping efforts to bring larger, more-informed changes to more parts of the world? We can only hope. Even better would be an overall push for an intellectual society that isn't closed off. I was reminded of something from Thomas Friedman's latest book, which I found repeated in an
earlier column:According to the 2003 Arab Human Development Report, between 1980 and 1999 the nine leading Arab economies registered 370 patents (in the US) for new inventions. Patents are a good measure of a society's education quality, entrepreneurship, rule of law and innovation. During that same 20-year period, South Korea registered 16,328 patents for inventions. You don't run into a lot of South Koreans who want to be martyrs.
Maybe a free press can help illustrate the divides and create a drive to improve.
You may return to Judith Miller now.
Nov. 6, 9:23 a.m.Debates about journalistic objectivity are common, because problems with "telling every side" often lure the media into bad, dark places. It's easy to find alternatives,
such as that of Jay Rosen, who argued for a simple standard: "people who know what they’re talking about (good) vs. people who don’t (bad)."
A "WorldNetDaily Exclusive" article on oil reserves certainly fails that mark, and may point to a failure of journalistic objectivity. Let's take a closer look.
The article upholds as a valid source Craig Smith, described as the best-selling author of "Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil." Surprise surprise! WorldNetDaily's affiliates at WND.com are the publishers of the book. That's not disclosed in the story. And we quickly find WND.com also offers books on the conspiracies against free college thought, Internet journalists, and "the relentless myth of Darwinism." The oil book's other author is Jerome Corsi, known for his work on the Swift Boat veterans' attacks on John Kerry, "Unfit for Command."
So WorldNetDaily isn't a particularly mainstream site, and has a clear but unstated economic interest. Yet the source of the "exclusive" story is an appearance on CNBC's Squawk Box. (You would think an "exclusive" story would be something available exclusively to the reporter, rather nearly anyone with cable TV, but, hey.)
If the comments are accurately quoted on WorldNetDaily, Smith probably is either A) a horrible public speaker or B) a guy that should have been screened from media appearances, particularly for an investing show.
His basic argument is oil is not generated through fossils. It's generated somewhere in the earth and is slung outward. I'm not a geologist or chemical engineer, so I'm not going to touch those comments. But let's look at some of his others:
Why would the oil companies be committing 55 billion dollars to harvesting the gulf [of Mexico] if, in fact, there's not enough oil there? I mean, it just wouldn't make sense mathematically.
Probably because the ability to manufacture a limited run of an expensive product in the face of high demand is valuable economically. This is from an
investing show?
I think that America needs to lead the charge in embracing the technology in getting out there and finding these proven reserves that are out there … bringing them to market and bringing this price into a reasonable area where we can continue to see the synchronization of global growth that we have experienced for the last 20 years.
Ah, yes. We need to find proven reserves that are out there, which is much better than not finding unproven non-reserves that are not out there.
Wait.
What?
If you have to find it, it's not a proven reserve.
We believe that the earth is creating oil as we speak and that with technological advances and the ability to put human resources together with natural resources, and the wonderful capital markets we have here in America, we can get all the oil we need for dozens, if not hundreds of years to come.
As someone else
pointed out, that's a sizable margin of error.
This last sentence alone speaks to an enormous problem in Smith's argument and thus his credibility. Even if oil is being produced by the earth's rotation, it presumably only comes out at a certain rate. Mr. Smith suggests that people may run out of oil in "dozens" of years. So if Mr. Smith warns the oil supply is insufficient to keep up with the demand, why did he publish a book with a subtitle of "The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil"? The simple fact that we will not be able to get all the oil we need means scarcity will be a reality, not a myth.
A full transcript of the debate is here.
WorldNetDaily has been criticized before. Perhaps readers might get the idea they shouldn't turn to WorldNetDaily as their sole news source. More importantly, what should you think of investing advice from CNBC, which introduced such discussion from Smith into its forums?
Perhaps we ought to reconsider the value of any financial advice from CNBC, which, after all, suggests people should take investment advice from a screaming guy heaving furniture around.
Nov. 5, 2:10 p.m.Courtesy of entries in Fark.com, we have new challenges to the definition of political expression.
Jack Handey, the mythical and somehow mystical philosopher featured in Saturday Night Live's "Deep Thoughts With Jack Handey," once opined on his idea of expression:
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
But in the last few days, political speech has certainly moved from true speech to T&A. Let's start with the T, via the
San Francisco Chronicle:
A federal judge denied on Friday a request from a group of Mendocino women who wanted to protest topless on the grounds of the state Capitol.
U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell said the group made no compelling argument that showing their breasts constitutes free speech.
"Being topless is not inherently expressive" speech, Burrell said. The group, Breasts Not Bombs, had scheduled a protest for noon Monday. The California Highway Patrol threatened to arrest anyone who went topless.
The judge's decision was not exactly received with a round of applause by all concerned. From the
rest of the story:
Sherry Glaser, a leader of the group, said the protest may take place without bare breasts.
"All we really have is the power of ourselves," she said. "Our bodies bring attention."
...
The First Amendment protects their right to protest bare breasted, the group argued. "The very act is a dynamic and fully expressive statement worthy of constitutional protection," their brief asserts.
The proposed demonstration at the California capitol was
not the first protest (link not safe for work) for the group. Nor is either the judge's nor the attorney general's opposition unprecedented. Via the
Grouchy Old Cripple blog:
This is indecent. Before clicking on the link, ask yourself if you really want to see some really ugly boobage. No way would any of these make it to Saturday Boobage. Think of my Republican Women Versus Dimocrat Women post. These are the Dimocrat Women. Think of Andrea Dworkin naked. Make sure you have a barfbag handy.
You also have a fine example of irony: The ugly woman with the awful breasts holding up a sign that says War is Indecent. The Left has really lost it!
What we see here is a post from a right-winger who had, prior to his discovery of Breasts Not Bombs, had already begun political comparisons based entirely on body parts.
This suggests that Breasts Not Bombs' objective of using body parts for political protest was neither unprecedented nor unexpected by its opposition, which already begun independent comparisons. This is clearly a case where the definition of the parts also matches the definition of the sum of the parts, where people may stereotype solely on a piece of the whole. There's nothing quite like openness.
Given that both the liberals and conservatives seem willing to use body parts to define their arguments, perspectives and the nature of the argument itself, certainly those body parts are being accepted as free speech.
Within the original San Francisco Chronicle story we see why the state opposed the Breasts Not Bombs demonstration:
"The state Capitol is a destination for California residents and tourists from around the world. Hundreds of California schoolchildren visit on a daily basis. They often enjoy their lunch on the west steps of the Capitol," the lawyers for the attorney general's office wrote."What visitors to the Capitol do not and cannot expect is to see topless adults and children engaged in public nudity under the guise of political protest."
Let's break this argument down some, however.
Expectations are just that; no one has any guarantee their expectations will be met. I might expect that American soldiers will be killed only in justified, winnable conflicts. I'm not seeing that now. There's no guarantee anyone's expectations will be kept. So let's dispense with the expectation argument.
People may enjoy their lunches in many places. Perhaps, warned adequately, they could enjoy their lunches elsewhere. There are plenty of justified precedents for offensive speech in sensitive areas, including a neo-Nazi protest in a city home to an unusual number people who lost relatives in the Holocaust. As offended as they were, they still had warning of the protests and could have stayed away.(Protesters often outnumber the scumbags at these things, and sometimes even behave worse. In one notable October case, violence started with the protesters.)
Back to this point: No one is guaranteed a quiet peaceful lunch in a particular place at a particular point. So, let's dispense with that argument.
I think the attorney general is left with a single plausible argument, namely, that of schoolchildren being present. Let's explore that a little further.
As the satire newspaper The Onion seemed to suggest, not every display of a breast is going to force children into therapy.
In fact, some research suggests thousands of lives could be saved if more children were better exposed to breasts. And not every culture believes bare breasts are offensive.
Still, can an argument be made that children should be kept away from bare breasts? Former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh did just that. Yet plenty of these "schoolchildren" actively seek out bare breasts, if the market for content-filtering software is any judge. And those filters introduce other problems.
But let's assume that not all children need to learn everything possible about breasts on every field trip. Protests are often routed toward nearby, or not-so-nearby, "protest zones." I suspect Breasts Not Bombs would have been willing to place sufficient signage to warn people away from the protest.
Alternately, children could probably be routed way from a protest in certain areas. Page five of the guidelines for teachers says "Please call the State Capitol Museum to find out the most current location of the
school entrance." So clearly, children have entered the California Capitol from numerous ways, and that location moves frequently enough that no one wants to keep updating the teachers' guide. It just doesn't sound like that big of a deal.
Isn't free speech worth a little hassle?
(Side note: Breasts Not Bombs apparently maintains a blog, which is now down for maintenance. It may not be safe for work.)
The second part of the free speech T&A equation comes from where the American First Amendment doesn't apply. I'm referring to this story from New Zealand. Some of the same arguments for body-part sacredness would be made for the buttocks as for the breasts. Yet this argument seems so clear cut in this instance -- over students' mooning administrators to protest significant increases in college fees -- I'm going to simply paste the picture here. You can gouge out your eyeballs if you so desire.
Courtesy of stuff.co.nz:
That's certainly one of those situations where a photo is worth far more than a thousand words. I think the picture and the caption say even more than the story. The caption: "BOTTOM LINE: This cheeky protest failed to make an impression on Victoria University council secretary Christine Turner as students took action yesterday in the face of fees rising by hundreds of dollars next year. KENT BLECHYNDEN/Dominion Post"
Because I can't top the beginning of this blog entry, I think I've just about reached the bottom of it.
Nov. 4, 12:56 a.m.Blogging seems a bit odd, but at least it's something I can do when I'm not quite ready to sleep.
So, here I was, exploring a new format of writing that's new to me, when I stumbled upon an interesting account of a kind of reporting that is utterly foreign.
I know not "Uruknet," other than remembering that, in the days before the Internet, I used to see a guy in the bulletin boards running around as Gilgamesh of Uruk, one of the legendary figures around what is now Iraq. And it is Iraq, via Uruknet, that now gives us an incredibly odd perspective on what it's like to work as a reporter in Iraq, where a few minutes may mean life or death.
Ten minutes. Just ten minutes. Not long enough to get the quick oil change in your car. Not long enough to fully hard-boil an egg. Heck, it's not even enough time for Viagra to kick in.
Yet Tom Engelhardt and Michael Schwartz found one British newspaper reporter brave enough to venture outside the Green Zone gives himself just 10 minutes to get an interview. After that, said veteran reporter Robert Fisk, it's just not safe.
How not safe?
"A few weeks ago, I went to see a man whose son was killed by the Americans, and I was in his house for five minutes before armed men turned up in the street outside.
"He had to go and reason with them not to take me away. And this was an ordinary Baghdad suburb, not the Sunni Triangle or Fallujah.
"It has got to the stage where, for example, when I went to have a look at the scene of a huge bomb in a bus station, I jumped out of the car and took two pictures before I was surrounded by a crowd of enraged Iraqis.
"I jumped back in the car and fled. I call that ‘mouse journalism' — and that's all we can do now.
It's hard to think about how, well,
foreign the situation in Iraq is, particularly as I blog wearing a towel, with a sleeping Shih Tzu on another chair beside me. My major worry for the night was debating whether I should take the glass beer bottle into the shower with me. And yet I can write this safely now. Writing in Iraq is a considerably different experience
The danger to reporters in Iraq is notable for plenty of reasons. It certainly suggests that at least some of the reporters there are incredibly dedicated to their job.
It suggests that reporters, or possibly Westerners, are decidedly not appreciated by a significant portion of the population.
It suggests that most any reporting in Iraq can be a challenge: As we found out a couple of weeks ago, the hotels hosting plenty of reporters were targeted by truck bombs, with the truck bombs coming through the same square in which the statue of Saddam Hussein was famously toppled.
What does this all mean? Well, it turns out even non-Western reporters or media workers are at risk. More than a year ago, Omar Kamal, a translator for Time Magazine, was killed after being shot four times. The magazine's workers had been threatened previously. Let's say this again: Kamal wasn't himself a reporter; he wasn't American. Kamal was even a veteran of the Iraqi military. And he was still executed.
He was the father of a 4-year-old boy.
There is, it would seem, much danger for reporters of all nationalities in Iraq.
We hear much about how the Iraqi military and police forces are being reconstituted so that they may take over the security of the nation. We hear little about how the Iraqi media is being taught independence and aggressiveness, or how Iraqi reporters may be able to work safely in their nation.
We still hear about how Iraq is destined to become a democracy, or something like a democracy. Among the many dangers to Iraqi democracy is the potential lack of a working, effective, critical watchdog media.
I'll never forget hearing a veteran reporter by the name of Mike Lyons describe the investigative process. He had this ... just ... delicate phrasing notable for its subtleties. Somehow, that phrase seems to summarize the value of a strong press in a democratic society far better than any writings by America's "Founding Fathers," Supreme Court Justices or Nobel Peace Prize Winners. Let me let Mr. Lyons explain:
"Reporters shine a light on things, and some things don't like light."Cockroaches, mostly."
Amen, Mike. Assalamu alaikum, Omar. And come home safe, Robert.
Nov. 3, 5:14 p.m.Ahh, there's nothing like fall, when the leaves begin to change and the media swarms over flu-shot shortage stories.
MSN's Health and Fitness section offered a stunningly incomplete and misdirected story on preventing the spread of illnesses at work.
While most reporters would consider this a fairly generic, throw-away seasonal story, reporter Rich Maloof blew it off so badly he ignored some of the largest facts in the seasonal staple. Perhaps most notable is the one "extra" tip he included.
Thrown into the mix of "No-nonsense tips" is this zinger: "During flu season, never let anyone lick your keyboard."
Maloof somehow succeeds in raising a preventive solution to a problem most people likely never encounter.
We're left only to face a couple of possibilities:
The staff at MSN lick each others' keyboards regularly, in the manner of an odd bunch. That's a polite way of saying they're nucking futs;
Maloof believes many people eat at their work desks, which in time would leave a tasty smorgasboard of last week's tuna sandwich on rye and last month's pretzels, fit for a friendly colleague's quick lapping;
Work desks are phenomenally unsanitary. Perhaps Maloof knows this, and acknowledges that, by licking keyboards in the off-season, people may build up their immune systems to ward off flu-like illnesses. The risk-benefit ratio, however, may be too poor during the flu season;
or, more likely, the story and the reporting simply suck.
It's perhaps too easy to linger on this idea of licked keyboards. It's too easy a target, for one, much like the Department of Homeland Security's idea that you should duct-tape yourself in your bathroom if you're afraid someone might have opened anthrax nearby. At least someone noticed that people tend to need a little oxygen on occassion. (Heck, I'll admit I'm addicted to the stuff and will go through fatal withdrawal if anyone pulls me off of it.)
So, anyway, the low-lying fruit is easy to harvest from the MSN story. Sadly, the reporter also missed some other important, important, important points.
The story never mentions that most people who "have the flu" simply don't. If you're sick with a mere flu-like illness, no flu shot in the world will help you. It also neglects the idea that half of people that transmit the flu virus don't show any symptoms.
The story treats flu shots as the most important preventative measure. Are flu shots useful? Certainly. Yet they often only offer partial or no protection, because each year's flu shot is comprised of three strains, picked well before the season began. If the wrong strain of influenza makes the rounds, you're going to have a tough time.
What's really missing from the story is the push for the basic preventative measure that hospitals have been emphasizing, emphasizing and emphasizing again to their employees: Wash your hands. Wash them often. It's just that simple. Soap is fine, as are the alcohol rubs that get only a token mention from Maloof. Handwashing does appear in the list of ideas, but only as the second-to-the-last, just above the tidbit about licking keyboards.
Hand washing is a cornerstone of infection control.
Heck, the CDC believes in this so much it even dedicated a significant part of its Web site to the effort: www.cdc.gov/handhygiene. The Atlanta folks even offer posters, for people who still haven't gotten the idea. The posters sell in 10 packs. If you take nothing else from this post -- other than the ideas that most people don't lick keyboards, but licking other people's keyboards may not be all that bad for your health -- take this:
