Tag Archives: journalism

When the Second Row Seat to History Ain’t So Hot

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Journalism, Politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

Here’s the inflammatory header, dated June 2, 2013: “Saudi prince rapes, kills Saudi girl.”

Published by the Mehr News Agency out of Tehran, it has been picked up by at least two mainstays of the blogovating anti-Jihad:

Sheikyermami. “Saudi Prince Kidnaps, Rapes and Murders Girl — Dumps Her Body on Street.”  Winds of Jihad, June 2, 2013.

Godlike Productions.  “Saudi prince rapes, kills Saudi girl.”  June 2, 2013.

I learned looking twice at Palestinian olive grove “stories” that one press release may fill a hundred anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist outlets, and when one searches for other reportage or witness showing signs of independence or originality, it may not be there (or that was just my experience).

At such times I wish I had a trustworthy scribbler in position to record pictures and take testimony and tell me, whatever it may have been, “It happened!”

Or it didn’t happen.

Instead, before going bonkers over another barbarism-in-the-kingdom story, I start looking for superficial corroboration, i.e., mention of the same event from multiple sources, preferably disinterested newsy ones.

Trenwith, Courtney.  “Saudi prince denies kidnapping, killing woman.”  Arabian Business.com, May 12, 2013.

The salient features are there — same town, same prince, same murder — but the denial plays in the press in the middle of May, while the Mehr News Agency dateline suggests it took place in the first day or two of June.

From the same source, Arabian Business.com, here’s the play the next day (May 13, 2013): “Police in Saudi Arabia have arrested a man on suspicion of murdering a woman and throwing her corpse out into the street a month ago, English language Saudi Gazette reported.”

Not only has the June 2 dateline on the alleged arrest been turned back to mid-May, but the alleged murder itself has been pushed back to mid-April!

The story continues, “Police said they had arrested a former teacher in connection with the case,” and either for good measure or because it’s true — how is an innocent remote reader to tell? — let’s add, “who had originally been accused by the victim’s family when the missing person’s report was first filed.”

Beneath that report, one reader wrote, “Many commentators accused the prince who proved to be an innocent man, what happened to fairness and integrity among us people . . . .”

The story gets better.

Chasing original cited attribution back to the Saudi Gazette, there’s no listing of the murder — i.e., report of a body dumped in the Al-Samer neighborhood of Jeddah — for mid-April 2013 although the paper runs a pretty good listing from the police blotter.  That doesn’t mean something didn’t happen, but one would think the start of a big story would have left a little trace in the news around the time it took place.

This title appears on May 16: “Revenge motive suspected in woman’s murder” (Abdulrahman Al-Ali, Saudi Gazette).  True, it may not be the same story, but those salient features — murder the babe and dump the body — are in it: “Spokesman for Jeddah police First Lt. Nawwaf Al-Bouq said two Saudi citizens were arrested in Khulais Saturday morning, less than 24 hours after the body was found.”

And later after the perp done the deed: “He then called his brother to help him move the body and dispose of it in Al-Samer neighborhood.”

In conclusion: “Al-Bouq pointed out that there were false reports tying this crime with other incidents. “Such reports are completely untrue and are meant to spread fear and apprehension in society,” said the police spokesman

All of the above, which I think may involve mudslinging from Tehran followed by a response from the Kingdom (backdating those stories?), seems a perfect BackChannels story, especially in light of who is leaning over the rails and most closely following the cockfight in Syria.

Are the lower brethren — my ranks, I guess — of the Fourth Estate curious as regards the validity of the latest outrage to fly across their screens?

Apparently not to those replicating the Mehr source story, e.g., Sharia Unveiled: “Saudi Prince Rapes and Murders Young Girl Then Dumps Her Body on the Street“.

According to what looks like a May 13 update in the Saudi Gazette, “Prince Khalid Bin Saad said on his Twitter account that he did not have anything to do with the woman found dead on the street. He stressed that he will use all legal channels to sue those who spread this rumor.”

*****

Once or twice a week, and I would wish the incident rate much less, a compelling and provocative post on something or other shows up in my Facebook stream, and I am so outraged, which was rather someone’s point in sending the signal, that I share it in the Facebook way before checking it out.  

Then, after the share button has been clicked and conscience plus curiosity get the better of me, I’ll learn the “latest outrage” (that I helped circulate) has been traveling around the web since 2007.

I am so ashamed when I do that!

Truly, I exaggerate but a little for effect: the real feeling is that of being used or “played” by the sender before me and also feeling as a writer irresponsible.

*****

I have called Internet-based witness “The Second Row Seat to History”, since 2006, the year blogging technology became popular (for me, at least) and English-language editions of foreign press started showing up on the web.

I had wanted to see the world.

Now we are down the Information Highway some decades, and those who mean well may have in this maturing environment the challenge of sorting and analyzing a massive flow of information daily: what is it telling us?

It helps to have some themes, and it turns out I like politics and language, also conflict, culture, and psychology, would that the interest today were matched by funding.

It’s also going to help to develop more comprehensive and swift methods for assessing the validity of “secondary source” information while — we know this is coming — developing relationships leading to more democratized, global, high-integrity (clear, accurate, complete) primary reportage, a slow process that as well as a reminder about how money works in the news business and why “Big Media” has gotten that way.

Also: as a blogger, I don’t think I need to work up a newspaper from my desktop: it may be more than enough to “track” stories and themes, aggregate material, learn continuously — I am able to order what I want for the library, usually, and able to read at length, although I think allocating that kind of time would be easier under contract — and analyze events and processes with improving clarity,  comprehension, humanity, and prescience.

# # #

FTAC – A Note On Democracies

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

The audience for this sort of verbose Facebook posting has its concerns focused on Pakistan and its getting its act together.

I’m of the mind that there are no silver bullets in the architecture of governance as regards managing human energy, intelligence, and the myriad cultures and societies that come of both, but many things may work in a good direction, and democracy provides a great gauge of the character of the people (in place and time) and a responsiveness to that character that can be progressive in terms of “Qualities of Living” across a constituency.  Even so, with Germany’s stunningly regressive election of Hitler in mind and so many contemporary “President for Life” in offices worldwide, the People can turn themselves into Lemmings too and from there find themselves captives again to one sort of autocratic nut case or another.

Verbatim From The Awesome Conversation (FTAC):

Democracies only give voters a chance to change the personalities representing them (which leads to the arch saw: “In a democracy, people get the government they deserve”). The participatory format is not the quality of the government created, but it is progressive and responsive by way of the expressed character, needs, and wants of the culture represented.

Power and the powerful ferry a built-in issue with information that is exacerbated by conflict: how much can and should a government or leader share with “the little people”? Add beneath that the slush and sociology of everyday lobbying in other sectors. Constituents of the open societies get some fight-back from a slew of organizations and professionals who for many reasons investigate every inch of the political machinery in sight and then some.

While political candidates play up access and transparency in the process of selling themselves and their programs to voters, the truth is even the most open societies — perhaps the most open societies — are loaded with closed doors. The private side floats on a sea of proprietary information and relationships somewhat nailed down by confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements with associates and staff; the government at the higher levels may similarly share out information for the lay constituent but sewing up the more specialized details and issues in their own circles; and, of course, at the highest levels, a few words in a closed room, bureaucratic back-channels . . . there’s plenty for imagination.

In the U.S., we can vote presidents out of office after their first term, and the system retires them after two terms, but we cannot see but in small fragments the full weight of continuing relationships and prior agreements bearing down on those who assume office or rise to chair critical committees. In essence, for example, the public can “see Libya”, the end of the Qaddafi era, the advent of a proto-democratic society, but it cannot see the CIA, illicit arms deals, the complete social layout of revolutionary militia, etc. — all those items the province of established, specialized, institutionalized government.

In God we may trust, but for government we want as honest, unfettered, and skeptical and dogged a press and research community as can be funded out of private pockets in the general interest.

A dark space by cultural measures may be so either because of the boundaries, limitations, and qualities of the language attending the experience of living within the cultural mind or by way of the qualities of information available and accessible (!) to a culture.  Consciousness of states-of-affairs may involve not only having good data — cogent, valid, reliable — at hand but also having a honed abstract, imaginative, and value-oriented processing facility within the mind, and that too may have a cultural complement.

FTAC – Pakistan – Fast Note – Integrity in Information – Generalists and Governance

11 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Information possessing integrity may be Pakistan’s most critical missing piece between the feudal (and obscure) and modern (and open). Getting there, unfortunately, may involve the good — the most sound, the most righteous — fighting for every inch of carpet pulled back and curtain pulled aside. Some motivation may come from the polls, some from personalities already in place and fed up with some things they may have seen or that are bothering (leveraging) them personally, but however it happens, the bringing of more things to light, factually and in reportage, in information open to challenge and further investigation, may spell an end to many things.

As regards management, I’m inclined to agree with F. as regards the want of “bigger picture” generalists at the helm, but perhaps the “generalists” themselves need to be formed to fit the ends of the meshing of the various moving parts within their assignments. Getting improvements in Qualities of Living — physically / materially ; psychologically / spiritually — have a foundation in spatial relationships, and as much takes some brights to manage or produce or enable a whole and healthier human ecology.

While the flow and sensibility of my prose may be easily approached, such falls also too often into regions of the mind where it is much easier to imagine a better world, provide guidance to it, and avoid looking at those nasty gremlins crawling around the space and known as “facts on the ground”.

“We talked about ways to confront the dangerous conditions facing Pakistani journalists. It was a bad year: Seven journalists would be killed before 2011 concluded, making Pakistan the deadliest nation in the world for the press. The year before, eight had died.” [1]

Pulled from an interview with a Pakistani journalist, Ayesha Haroon, who was to be subdued by cancer, the statement only hints at how bad the record has been for journalists in Pakistan; in fact, according to the Center to Protect Journalists, some 51 journalists have been killed in relation to their work since 1992, and the coverage of politics, war, and crime account for about two-thirds of that grim news. [2]

The latest, Mirza Iqbal Hussain, caught the second bomb in the combined suicide and car bombing of a billiards hall in Quetta.  CPJ lists two other journalists killed in the same incident and one other journalist killed in another incident of similar “double-bombing” kind.

Fifth on CPJ’s list, Rehmatullah Abid seems to have been directly targeted — “Unidentified gunmen on a motorcycle killed Abid in a barber shop in Panjgur District, about 375 miles . . . from Quetta . . . .” — in relation to his reporting on the Balochistan Conflict.

In such ways, I suppose, “dark regions” remain dark.  (In fact, a “dark region” is an information concept: it could be a thug’s backroom in any city as well as a locale distant from consolidated military and police operations.  It could be a bureaucracy too — any place where the cards cannot be turned up by the public’s “trusted others” — journalists, in general; appointed official investigators who enjoy the imprimatur of a free and informed electorate).

Working down CPJ’s list, one finds possible dual or triple motives for the offing of Abdul Haq Baloch: one journalist submits that Baloch had been threatened by a state-sponsored militant army; another route: rebel armies upset about their exploits being ignored (!); and yet another path: a government cover-up involving missing (Baloch) persons.

From a related article:

“The latest victim of the violence against independent media in the area – Abdul Haq Bloch – was the Secretary General of the Khuzdar Press Club. He was a great source of inspiration for his colleagues and his violent murder has affected his community members quite deeply. The intensity of the panic amongst local journalists can be gauged from the fact that many of them decided to leave Khuzdar along with their families soon after the burial of their friend, Abdul Haq Baloch, in the evening of September 30th.” [3]

Intimidation works, unfortunately, and it takes a government — a very good one — to turn around to face criminal violence, investigate it thoroughly and to conclusion, and to mete out to murderers their name and their due.

(I’ve just sent a note to an associate asking about security in regard to covering government agencies and operations in Pakistan.  I’m looking forward to hearing back on that).

Now continuing to crawl down CPJ’s list, I find myself going back to January 2012, more than a year ago, to find a conventional, however, reprehensible listing of a murder.  Of Mukarram Khan Aatif, a Taliban spokesman said the journalist had been warned “a number of times to stop anti-Taliban reporting, but he didn’t do so. He finally met his fate.”

We in the west expect to read that kind of a statement.

It fits with what we know we know.

Two more stops down (the list is teaching me to set aside the Baloch theater as a separate variable associated with the killing of journalists), one finds a murder more associated with mainstream politics: “Shahid Qureshi, who also wrote for The London Postwebsite, told CPJ that he and his brother had received death threats from men who claimed they were from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement political party, or MQM.”  Faisal Qureshi had edited a a web site, The London Post, that was, according to CPJ, “widely recognized as anti-MQM.”

Also possibly more in context with Jihad vs. anti-Jihad thinking, and, finally, possibly involving the state, this lead packages the murder of Saleem Shahzad: “Shahzad, 40, vanished on May 29, after writing about alleged links between Al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s navy.”  Shahzad had also written a book with a dangerous title: Inside the Taliban and Al-Qaeda; and he had complained about receiving threats from intelligence officials.

Cited Reference

1. Dietz, Bob.  “Remembering Ayesha Haroon, editor who embraced facts.”  Committee to Protect Journalist, February 7, 2013.

2. Committee to Protect Journalists.  “51 Journalists Killed in Pakistan since 1992 / Motive Confirmed”.  Current to January 10, 2013 as I type.

3. Capital Talk.  “The tragedy of journalists in Balochistan.”  October 6, 2012.

Blogger Ahmed Meligy Freed

14 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Free Speech, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , ,

The Facebook poster wrote on one of the Meligy’s support sites: “AHMED got released . . . .”

By whom?

From where?

My source says Meligy has no Internet access but his phone has been on . . . .

I don’t like this story.

Of course, I’m happy to hear of a fellow writer’s renewed presence in the world, but this is also signal of the shortcomings of the remote blogger’s “second row seat to history” in journalism: it is a good position from which to provide commentary.

For reporting, it stinks.

# # #

FNS – Free Press (Not) — Syria

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Fast News Share

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Without the freedom to speak free of inhibition, there is no freedom.

One friend was kidnapped; five reporter friends were killed. In November, a car tried to force the vehicle she and her future husband were in off the road. She quit the next day, and has since left Syria for another Arab country.

“If you want freedom and say the regime is non-democratic and dictatorial, dudes, you are doing way worse by killing a journalist who is just doing his job,” she said in an interview Saturday.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-syria-journalists-20130106,0,7786035.story

Be Careful of the Truth – Crucifixion in Yemen Appears True

31 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Yemen

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

On August 22, 2012, I picked up a story making the rounds on Facebook having to do with reporting the emergence of crucifixion in Egypt, and I looked into it (“Be Careful of the Truth — Crucified Christians in Egypt — Not Corroborated”).

A downloaded copy of the photograph accompanying the claim yielded no IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) data, and continued web searching led me to what I considered a reliable debunking.

However, with credit extended to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), not only the picture but a video clip of the same appeared in relation to a spy caught having betrayed an Islamist group in Yemen.

I saw it first here on the Blazing Cat Fur blog, n.d.

And found a listing for something at least like it here:

#3552 – Man Crucified by Al-Qaeda in Yemen – Viewer Discretion Advised
The Internet – August 27, 2012 – 01:14

A subscription is required to view it — same or different, but same category — on the MEMRI site, and I’m looking into that.

The flip with dates (August 22, first round; August 27, posted by MEMRI; by August 30, well along in the anti-Jihad industry) I take as indicative of how information continues to crawl off the street and up to the web from the world’s most remote locales.

In the meantime, the Blogosphere seems to have picked it up and gotten its facts straight — “Sheik Yer Mami” (Winds of Jihad) notes a Jihad source on YouTube as a  primary location (see “Crucifixion in Yemen,” August 30, 2012 for the video plus that detail).

I suspect most believe the “War on Terror” involves neutralizing a number of violent moral entrepreneurs and their networks, but to my mind that’s a small part of a much, much larger story having to do with the development, installation, and continuing support of certain critical and laudable values and virtues worldwide, starting with the definition of “good conscience” (it’s not mapped the same for  everywhere, one reason I’ve launched this blog)) and then the possession by persons and groups of credibility and integrity within themselves and in relation to other persons across a world rapidly integrating its communicating and information resources and content.

War may be called deception; taqiyya may be advised: evil, however, begins with such easily digested lies and the lies to come from having swallowed both.

In war, deception may be a tactic, but wars are about other things — e.g., the possession of resources; the displacement, modification, or termination of cultures and their customs and languages — and “taqiyya”, ever loosely accessed (one well may lie to save life — for the western mind, there’s not much need to put a label on that), seems only to serve to make liars out of people who would otherwise be forthright.

When an overzealous, special interest press chooses to copy a photograph appearing in one context or application in an event alleged to have taken place elsewhere, it corrupts, dishonors, and sabotages itself.

Yesterday in Eritrea; yesterday in Somalia; yesterday in Waziristan; yesterday in Gaza: aggressive spoilers, parties to war, parties to cultural imperialism or annihilation (both) in the name of one cause or another, could, would, and did, with impunity, fabricate stories a very few or none could check.  Their common intention (never mind ends): power through the manipulation of perception in line with  mercenary agendas.

For the more remote regions of our planet, that thing called “yesterday” is closing, swept away by camera phones, tablets with recorders, and the World Wide Web.

It may go shaking its fists.

It may go slowly.

However difficult it may be to see it; however short our lives in comparison to such processes — and this across a frontier unique in recorded history, i.e., a frontier about mind globally — the past that has been past for some time will recede.

“I C U”.

Remember that?

Do.

Be Careful of the Truth — Crucified Christians in Egypt — Not Corroborated

22 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

I’ve pulled directly from my Facebook wall on this.  It’s too long a rant for my “A Little Wisdom” section, which may one day make a fine chapbook, but for any coming aboard the good blogship Backchannels, it’s a fair reflection of how I think:

—–

Be careful of the truth — whatever it may be — and be even more cautious with insinuation and rumor.http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/08/22/jonathan-kay-how-egypts-crucifixion-hoax-became-a-classic-internet-urban-legend/ Those who mislead to lead always lose their followers. It may take a while; the damage done by sewing animus and confusion may be immeasurable; but, God willing, and often proven so, those arrows called “libel” and “slander” have a way of turning around and returning direct to the hearts of their owners.

Within the complexity of what I call the ‘Islamic Small Wars” and in the interface with many traditions, there are two words that may determine how things go: they are “credibility” and “integrity” — and they are ideal. They refer not only to what people may tell others and what others may accept or choose to accept even well aware of their existence as lies, but they are all things said within hearing of God, or, if the reader should not believe, that good sense of better nature one might call “conscience”.

—–

My experience with the habits of the special interest press has not been reassuring.  Horrific political accommodations, limited press access to hot spots, remoteness itself seem to encourage lying, whatever the writer (and publication) can get away with until someone plods through the muck to check it out.

There may be one problem with our heads on this topic: can a way out story — a good conspiracy theory, say, or simply a tree that fell in the forest with one “listener” reporting — be definitively scotched?

Welcome to the land of things left unsaid (so many things, eh?) and things not shown (there were not many people around or no one had a cell phone or no one wanted to take the picture).

Uh huh.

Be wary of tarrying too long long in the Land of Unconfirmed — and impossible to disprove — Possibilities.