Tag Archives: reporting

A Note on Integrity in the Press

12 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Free Speech, Journalism, Middle East, Politics, Russia, Syria

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“Born liars.  Shameless liars.  You cannot embarrass them.”

The subjects of my friend’s recent Skype-enabled rant: Al Jazeera, China Today, and Russia Today (RT).

The basis aside from what he’s been reading:

Al Jazeera – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar.

Owned!

China Today – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

China Today (Chinese: 今日中国; pinyin: Jīnrì Zhōngguó), formerly titled China Reconstructs (Chinese: 中国建设;pinyin: Zhōngguó Jiànshè), is a monthly magazine founded in 1949 by Soong Ching-ling in association with Israel Epstein. It is published in Chinese L anguage, English, Spanish, French, Arabic, German and Turkish, and is intended to promote a positive view of the People’s Republic of China and its government to people outside of China.

I haven’t yet done the reading, but let’s call it the “Face of the Nation”, a portal with a role to play, and, at that, a role of immense importance, more so to the People’s Republic of China than to the international reader.

RT (TV network) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It is registered as an autonomous non-profit organization[2][3] funded by the federal budget of Russiathrough the Federal Agency on Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation.[4][5]

Basically, RT would seem the Russian “Radio Free America” or U.S. Information Agency — it was born with obligations and today has impressive reach.

What the world on the World Wide Web needs now, of course, might be a few international media assembly giants of trustworthy record.

One exists already.

He may be called the International Reader.

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Whether owned by capitalists or communists, private parties or states, complicated boards of directors — we should take a side trip to Time Warner to look at how that works, and with such as Kingdom Holdings in an influential position — the guts and substance of a news organization resides in its journalists and in the humanity, independence, and integrity they bring to their work.

Some may be aware of their career options and who is sitting in the board room; some on the happy-face beat may be naturally inclined to write always “the best truth possible”; some in their early years may have latched on to the thought that “information is power” so how much cooler would it be to have “power over information” and write to an agenda?

This morning, one of my Facebook buddies asked me to prove Syria launched attacks with chemical weapons because the German intelligence services suggested some disconnects.  I countered with Obama’s more specific mention of 11 neighborhoods attacked and communication intercepts of high-level Syrian chatter over the results and, admitted, my trump card: complete trust in Israeli intelligence reporting.  If any entity on earth has a premium stake in displaying, promoting, and valuing integrity, it’s that bunch.

Even if recordings of intercepts were furnished by governments and published on the Internet, there would be some readers who would claim that as much could have been put together in a recording studio.

I’ll leave those people alone.

Others, perhaps less troubled, seem quick to buy “Rebels Admit Responsibility for Chemical Weapons Attack: Militants tell AP reporter they mishandled Saudi-supplied chemical weapons, causing accident.”

And articles like it reported out in an odd assortment of left and right — but not middle — oriented publications, from Mint to The Blaze (and between: Global Research, Godlike Productions, Missing Peace, Prison Planet, Activist Post, etc.).

Free Cow has gone to the trouble of debunking “Syrian rebels admit to AP reporter they mishandled the chemical weapons given by Saudi Arabia”, while I’ve merely suggested that the one claim that ‘the rebels done it’ seemed supported by two plants: 1) the claim that some kind of toxic chemicals handling accident took place and 2) a video, and a lot of stills from it, allegedly involving a rebel launch crew plus rocket technology plus a matched launching platform on wheels (that too — one claim: two elaborate stories — I mentioned to the Facebook buddy).

What is it with some readers that they will devour such contraptions — and with some writers that they will invent or promote them?

Better yet: what is it with some leaders that they believe that controlling people starts with controlling their information environment — and that they have the muscle in money and thugs to do it?

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“Follow the BBC,” said my Skype friend.  “At least they try to tell the truth.”

I don’t know about that, but at least the Wikipedia entry has been clever about the organization:

Its main responsibility is to provide impartial public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man.

Impartial!

Fair enough.

BBC one hour ago: BBC News – Assad sets out his terms for chemical weapons convention.

So the rebels didn’t have them after all?

😉

I think I’ll take a look at what Reuters has today on Syria.

Well look at this: Putin wrong to blame Syria rebels for chemical attack, Pentagon says | Reuters 9/12/2013.

Additional Reference

Flacking for Dictators in the 21st Century | Freedom House 3/13/2012

Also Mentioned

Fact-Based, In-Depth News | Al Jazeera America

China General Information, China Information, the People’s Republic of China

RT

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Qatar – Syria – Keep Watch

30 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Journalism, Middle East, Politics, Qatar, Regions, Syria

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The missiles, American officials warned, could one day be used by terrorist groups, some of them affiliated with Al Qaeda, to shoot down civilian aircraft.

But one country ignored this admonition: Qatar, the tiny, oil- and gas-rich emirate that has made itself the indispensable nation to rebel forces battling calcified Arab governments and that has been shipping arms to the Syrian rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad since 2011.

Mazzetti, Mark, C. J. Chivers, and Eric Schmitt.  “Taking Outside Role in Syria, Qatar Funnels Arms to Rebels.”  The New York Times, June 29, 2013.

It’s mighty social of President Obama to allow others to strut their hour upon the global stage, which it appears Qatar may be doing as promotes a Sunni front in Syria by proxy.

As modern and shiny as Qatari money has made Qatar, onlookers may not be so certain about its mercenaries and their ability to restrain themselves.  The alleged murder of Roula Adnan last week adds its bit of opprobrious behavior to the eating-the-heart video that went viral earlier in the month.  I’ve hedged with “alleged” as the news reached me by way of Pakistan and involved as source a Syrian nationalist outlet given to headers like, “US Citizens Kill Deputy Head of Ministry of Education in Aleppo.”

We’re not going to have two essential empirical truths in a world integrating within the communal mind of the World Wide Web: whatever Qatar has enabled, even if spun over-the-top with canards out of the political playbooks of bomb throwers of the 1970s, what happened to Roula Adnan (and her neighbors) will come out.

And just before coming after Roula, the same “rebels”, the ones that the MSM is romanticizing broke into another home. They carried a man from Khalil family to the street and shot his hands and feet. Then they beaten up his wife and daughter, right in front of the neighbors. The terrorists wanted Syrians to witness the crime; they wanna scare us into submission.

As it does always, the fog of war will lift — but these days, it’s likely the curtains masking behind-the-scenes deals, wherever they have taken place, will be drawn back too.

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Be Careful of the Truth – Crucifixion in Yemen Appears True

31 Friday Aug 2012

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

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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.