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Tag Archives: media

Also in Media: “Live from the Bully Pulpit: The Abuse of Obligatory Presidential Broadcasts in Latin America” | By Andrés CañizálezCenter for International Media Assistance | May 15, 2017

17 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Journalism

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freedom of speech, information warfare, Latin America, media, political interference in speech, press freedom, South America, state-controlled media

After only a few minutes at the podium, however, the transmission of his speech was interrupted without warning.1 President Maduro had ordered a blanket broadcast across all radio and television stations–what is known in Spanish as a cadena nacional. These presidential broadcasts resemble a US Oval Office address in style, but in Venezuela the law obliges both state‑owned and private media to carry the transmissions, which have lasted as long as eight hours. When Maduro invoked this law to interrupt Torrealba’s speech, Venezuelans had no choice but to listen to Maduro or simply switch off their TVs and radios.

Source: Center for International Media Assistance – 5/15/2017

FTAC: The Yankee Responds

23 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology

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21st Century Feudalism, 21st Century Neo-Feudalism, autocracy, dictatorship, freedom, kleptocracy, media, political malignance, press freedom, Russia, Turkey

Article of Interest: 

https://www.eu-foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/21/analysis-from-the-su-24-crisis-to-the-moscow-ankara-rapprochement-leadership-and-foreign-policy-doctrines/

Passage of Interest: 

From our comparative analysis, it emerges how both Russia and Turkey present astonishing similarities in their leaderships styles. It is important to outline such feature of the nations’ political life because, being both “leader-politics” countries, the style of their leaders influences greatly the shaping of the national political agenda and the strategies used by the states to pursue such agendas.

To sum up, one could say that all the facts taken into account here highlight the presence in both countries totalitarian democracy regime, centred on the figure of the all-powerful leader. None of the leaders actually ever rejected the principles of the pluralistic state. In the official national narrative, both of them could be overthrown by a democratic election. But why should this happen, when they embody the essence of their national identity. Just like Putin is THE Russian man, Erdogan image is moulded on THE Turkish one.


“In the official national narrative, both of them could be overthrown by a democratic election. But why should this happen, when they embody the essence of their national identity. Just like Putin is THE Russian man, Erdogan image is moulded on THE Turkish one.”

Perhaps if each were more secure with such an assertion, the press in each state would be free (it’s an easy look-up as to how they are not) and their political rivals less often inhibited, jailed, muzzled, or murdered.

The truth is each may be wrong about himself (there’s also an interesting psychology at play in their “malignant narcissism” and respective kleptocracies), and that’s why open and vibrant national conversations supported by “fair and free elections” matter in democracies — and not at all in dictatorships.


Additional Reference

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2017/russia

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2017/turkey

https://rsf.org/en/ranking

https://rsf.org/en/russia

https://rsf.org/en/turkey

–33–

Also in Media: “Why We’re Post-Fact” | Peter Pomerantsev | Granta Magazine

21 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by commart in Also in Media

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cultural confusion, disinformation, media, relativism, truth, untruth

As his army blatantly annexed Crimea, Vladimir Putin went on TV and, with a smirk, told the world there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine. He wasn’t lying so much as saying the truth doesn’t matter. And when Donald Trump makes up facts on a whim, claims that he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the Twin Towers coming down, or that the Mexican government purposefully sends ‘bad’ immigrants to the US, when fact-checking agencies rate 78% of his statements untrue but he still becomes a US Presidential candidate – then it appears that facts no longer matter much in the land of the free. When the Brexit campaign announces ‘Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week’ and, on winning the referendum, the claim is shrugged off as a ‘mistake’ by one Brexit leader while another explains it as ‘an aspiration’, then it’s clear we are living in a ‘post-fact’ or ‘post-truth’ world. Not merely a world where politicians and media lie – they have always lied – but one where they don’t care whether they tell the truth or not.

How did we get here?

Read more by Peter Pomerantsev in Granta (July 20, 2016) : Why We’re Post-Fact | Peter Pomerantsev | Granta Magazine

Spoken in Cairo – Heard in Tel Aviv – Activist Ahmed Meligy Slams Anti-Semitic Press

29 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Journalism

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anti-Semitism, media, post-Soviet Era

Posted to YouTube 10/28/2015.


“He was brainwashed and manipulated to the point where he spared no one.  He didn’t spare the wife, he didn’t spare the child, he didn’t spare the rabbi.  He killed the husband, attacked the wife, the child, and the rabbi until the police came and shot him dead.”

Related Online

During the past week terrorist attacks, which had been concentrated in greater Jerusalem, spread to other locations in Israel, including Kiryat Gat in the south, Tel Aviv, Afula in the north, and Gan Shmuel (near Hadera) and Raanana (in the center of the country). The attacks have been carried out by young lone terrorists, most of them from east Jerusalem, and some from Judea and Samaria. There were also two Israeli Arabs (from Nazareth and Um el-Fahm), Palestinians staying in Israel illegally, two women and two children. They were motivated for the most part by the lie spread by the Palestinian media that Israel allegedly threatened Al-Aqsa mosque, as well as by the frustration, desperation and anger of the younger generation. Generally speaking, the terrorists have not been operatives of any established terrorist organization, and the current wave of terrorism has not been directed by any organization, but rather is directly inspired by the intensive incitement accompanying it.

http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/Terrorism/Palestinian/Pages/Wave-of-terror-October-2015.aspx – 10/29/2015.


“The aggressive and growing Israeli attack against our people, land and holy places undermine peace and stability,” Abbas said in a televised speech, according to the official WAFA news agency. “This attack threatens to ignite the fuse of a religious war, which will burn everything — not only in the region (but) perhaps in the entire world.”

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/15/middleeast/israel-palestinian-tensions/ – 10/15/2015.

Political blackmail — intimidation, threat — may be expected from a leader who no longer has anything, not even peace, to offer the people he purports to represent, much less his counterparts in the west.


The centrist leader Yair Lapid, otherwise stridently secular, has found inspiration in Talmudic precepts: “The rabbis teach that if someone comes up against you to kill you, you should kill him first,” he said. “That should be our working model.” He added, “Don’t hesitate. Even at the start of an attack, shooting to kill is correct. If someone is brandishing a knife, shoot him. It’s part of Israel’s deterrence.”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-provoked-palestinian-knife-attacks-in-israel – 10/23/2015.

Related on BackChannels

About a month ago, Russian President Putin’s “Special Representative for the Middle East and Deputy Foreign Minister” Mikhail Bogdanov met with representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and discussed, among other things, the stalled delivery of Russian S-300 missiles to Syria in 2012. Two days ago, the issue resurfaced in the news with the message that the delivery would go through.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/12/02/quote-manipulation-about-the-plo-leader-pacepa-and-rychlak-2013/ – 12/2/2014.

It may not be possible to understand the Middle East Conflict without apprehending the role the Russian Soviet State played in in its development, the promotion of anti-Semitism in the middle east, and the medieval exploitation of language to provoke “the masses” or otherwise rouse the rabble while deeply controlling and plundering the same.  With Putin’s transitioning of the Soviet “systems” into today’s neo-feudal revanch, it remains to be seen whether the same approach to power will revive the ages-old animus or finally leave it, as it should be left, in the past.

Press Integrity

Ahmed Meligy, speaking from the Egyptian historic and national experience, appears to understand the power words may have to sway large swaths of population,  never mind that such words may be untrue.  The medieval world may have found itself unburdened by the spreading of viciously absurd blood libels; this one between appears to deal instead in the more subtle aspects of disingenuous speech: sins of omission (as in the reporting of Israeli arrests but not the conspiracies or crimes that provoked them); emphasis on the death and injury of Palestinian miscreants and de-emphasis on the assaults that drew both an appropriate and narrowed response.

Honest Reporting has made its mission to report and analyze the appearance of anti-Semitic abuse in the press.  In “Journalism Bleeding in the Streets”, published yesterday (10/28/2015), it recognizes in a New York Times story the kind of “framing” better known to ye olden KGB:

You can see what the New York Times is attempting from the headline.

“The Dueling Narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” is an attempt to provide journalistic “balance” on a story where none exists.

We could say a lot about the article, with its lopsided reliance on Palestinian sources and reference to Hanan Ashrawi’s charge that police had planted knives to frame innocent Palestinians (a charge she even admitted she had “no evidence” to back up.)

Isi Liebler (e.g., “Bashing Israel and Journalistic Integrity”, March 11, 2014) has also weighed in on what lies opposite of media propagandizing: integrity.

Addendum

The PLO, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority have for decades used children as fodder to throw rocks, fireworks and explosives at soldiers, as bombers, as lookouts and couriers. Hamas has been even more brazen, publicizing its recruitment of an army of child soldiers. In the current wave of terrorism in Israel and Palestine, we have seen attackers as young as 13 years old.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-child-soldiers-the-horrifying-silence/ – 10/29/2015.


In one of the most shocking examples, the mother of a Palestinian terrorist who was killed during an attack on a Jerusalem bus earlier this month pulled out a knife during a television interview and threatened to follow her son’s example.

“I am concealing this weapon for Israel. Watch out, Israel! Watch out!” exclaimed Umm Muhammad Shamasne while making stabbing gestures in an Oct. 22 interview on the Lebanese Al-Quds TV station.

http://www.investigativeproject.org/5014/palestinian-institutions-continue-vicious# – 10/26/2015.


The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.

“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”

The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”.

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/180400/hamas-killed-160-palestinian-children-to-build-terror-tunnels – 10/13/2013.


During the first three weeks of October 2015, ten Israelis were killed and 112 wounded — eleven of them seriously — in 40 stabbing attacks, four shootings, and five vehicular attacks that took place throughout the country.

On October 23, however, BBC News told its audiences that Israelis are suffering from either a collective psychosis “characterised by delusions of persecution” or “unjustified suspicion and mistrust of other people” — depending on which definition of the word “paranoia” BBC editors intended with their headline that read: “Paranoia deepens wedge between Israelis and Palestinians.”

http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/10/28/bbc-says-israelis-fear-of-terror-attacks-is-paranoia/ – 10/28/2015.


On Phillip Weiss’s contribution to anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist propaganda.

I’ve made an occasional reference to Weiss or the blog he founded, Mondoweiss, since then. Mondweiss is basically one-stop shopping for anti-Israel news. Anything bad that goes on in Israel will be publicized and exaggerated at Mondoweiss. If you want to know the far-left anti-Israel party line on any recent event, Mondoweiss is the place to go.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/04/mondoweiss-is-a-hate-site/ – 5/4/2015

It’s more than possible these days to trace in the English language the intellectual seams of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left, the Left that died a little when the Soviet dissolved and is dying a lot as a feudal revanch as Putin’s buddy Assad drops barrel bombs on all non-combatant Syrians he thinks might oppose his dictatorship.


Kirkpatrick invariably seeks out the same poisonous wells. In the case of this article, these are: Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization in search of funds. Through attempting to interpret the facts about the New Egypt to fit its own theoretical notions of what constitutes the upholding of human rights. It is a private corporation in search of aggression through intervening in internal affairs via the human rights pearly gate. Ignoring that in countries in transition, like Egypt, the collective rights of the populace trump the rights of the individual.

http://tahrirforever.blogspot.com/2015/10/in-fending-off-its-attackers-what-does.html – 10/2/2015.

BackChannels appreciates Dr. El-Ayouti’s piece as not being about Israel but about post-Islamist Egypt under al-Sisi and reporting favoring the Muslim Brotherhood and biased against the modernizing efforts of the central power of the state.

# # #

Link – The Crimean Incursion – How Russians Have Seen It

21 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Journalism, Political Psychology, Russia, Ukraine

≈ Leave a comment

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disinformation, information space, media, propaganda, Russia, RussThink

I was perplexed by how the Russian people could possibly support and not be outraged by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But I live in Denver, and I read mostly U.S. and European newspapers. I wanted to see what was going on in Russia and Ukraine from the Russian perspective, so I went on a seven-day news diet: I watched only Russian TV – Channel One Russia, the state-owned broadcaster, which I hadn’t seen in more than 20 years – and read Pravda, the Russian newspaper whose name means “Truth.” Here is what I learned:

 Katsenelson, Vitaliy.  “Putin’s World: Why Russia’s Showdown with the West Will Worsen.”  Contrarian Edge, November 18, 2014.


Related on BackChannels: Russian Section.

Related Reference

http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/russia-controls-internet/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Russia#Status

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population

# # #

Link – Gaza – Four Boys, A Beach – Staged Murder

15 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by commart in Gaza, Israel, Journalism, Political Psychology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

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forensic analysis, Gaza, Israel, media, Pallywood, propaganda

Do you ever see little boys out jogging? Of course not. They’re following directions. Someone is trying to figure out the best way to exploit them. A Swedish site says that this image was taken the previous day. I don’t believe it. I’m sorry, Palestinians: I no longer believe a single word you say. They’re gamboling unnaturally, they just happen to be the three who were killed, and they’re in the same clothes that they wore when they died.

By the way, the children had to have been unaware of the real plan. They were mercilessly used by murderers.

http://www.thomaswictor.com/was-the-gaza-beach-incident-a-setup/ – 10/1/2014 with updates.

Wictor appears to report his observations and reasoning as he experiences them and as he has enough to package into a post.  In the above, I’ve taken an excerpt from what at the moment is the second piece in a series.  In order, and as an update (October 16, 2014), here is what is online now:

http://www.thomaswictor.com/four-boys-on-the-gaza-beach/ – 9/29/2014.

http://www.thomaswictor.com/was-the-gaza-beach-incident-a-setup/ – 10/1/2014 with updates.

http://www.thomaswictor.com/wall-street-journal-confirms-hamas-beach-operation/ – 10/15/2014.


Propagandists count on three elements for the effectiveness of their work: the show-and-tell of a simple picture and an immediately sensible explanation for it; the impossibility of honest investigation; defeat, fear, intimidation, or laziness within their target audiences.  Against that framework, Thomas Wictor has been quietly analyzing the feed from “Pallywood” — more or less the Hamas Production Company — and how its claims and products have been actually put together.

Central throughout the Islamic Islamic Small Wars: who do you believe?

And why believe whom you might believe?

Fear, intimidation, loyalty, and patronage may be in that decision.

The love of God, of humanity, integrity, and principle may be in it too.

Wictor’s an honest man (we’ve corresponded briefly, and with that and what he does, that’s how I feel).

# # #

FTAC – Note – Media Audience and Moral Entrepreneurship

11 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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casual audience, engaged audience, media, perception, philology, politics, reading

One may differentiate between casual audience comfortable with the world it knows and humanist-intellectual audience with amateur or professional background and buy-in with regard to shaping the next world.

If you are here, you are either between those broad classes or in the latter, and if there’s even just a tiny bit of appropriate education or training back there, then you may be trusted to read critically, to both demand and sift data, to argue about dimensions and variables with a subject of interest, to engage in introspection and reflection as well as judgment, and to think broadly about what would be helpful — anthropologically, ethnographically, evolutionary — in the creation of a greater, more peaceful, more progressive global commune.


The prompt was a piece in Honest Reporting about pandering.

Pandering is a form in lying predicated on the enforcement of loyalty by the panderer.  The seminal fairy tale that is “The Emperor’s New Clothes” applies; it really is not a favor to be told how brave, glorious, and self-sacrificing one is by a personality inclined to sacrifice you in the interest of their own aggrandizement and unbridled glorification.

With the review of media coverage of the latest war in Gaza, the political skewing of the news devolves both to overt Hamas intimidation of the press and the reluctance of the same to either give up a story or taint the same with an acknowledgment of the compromise of their integrity.

Compromised journalism comprises its casual audience.

As suggested at the top of this post, not all audience is casual.  In fact, while a vast global intelligentsia has come into being with the development of the World Wide Web — the numbers may be low but the distribution must certainly be global — a large analytical class has also been present in the world either with partisan loyalties or greater humanist and spiritual motives.  From the “desk analysts” of national security bureaus to the latest in NGO do-gooders, there are plenty of readers who read for data and the arguably most accurate picture they may obtain from the same.  While some things lend themselves to a technocratic objectivity, from conventional defense arrangements to road building coupled with economic development, other themes require a broadened vision of humanity — that “anthropolitical psychology” I’ve mentioned on this blog — and also a world of poetry and consideration for the remaining 7,000 or so living languages in the contemporary human inventory and the cultures and individuals suspended in them in time.

# # #

Link

25 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Free Speech, Islamic Small Wars, Journalism, Political Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

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bias, gaslighting, Hamas, journalism, media, propaganda

Without reporters and cameras there to document the carnage, the blood that Hamas compels Gazans to shed on its behalf would be wasted. Hamas thus needs reporters in Gaza. But the last thing it wants is a press corps reporting both sides of the conflict—documenting not just the result of Israeli airstrikes but also the Hamas rockets and missiles that drew Israeli fire in the first place.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/hamas-s-media-strategy_803523.html – 9/1/2014

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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