RINTRAH

Posts tagged media

Remember, the public has long been ahead of the media in understanding that news is not as it seems. The defensiveness of journalists to discuss openly the way they work, and the way news is selected has left them behind. For me, the horrific human carnage of the wanton invasion of Iraq was the ‘final straw’ — if one was needed. The invasion caused the deaths of more than a million men, women and children — that’s the figure that comes from the Johns Hopkins University epidemiological survey, the only peer-reviewed study, and it’s higher than the Fordham University estimate of the number of people who died in the Rwanda genocide. The Johns Hopkins work was attacked and ignored by much of the western media, so that most people in the West have no idea of the sheer scale of suffering caused by their governments. According to Dan Rather, the former CBS news anchor I interview in my film, had journalists in the US done their job and challenged the lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, instead of amplifying and echoing them, the invasion may not have happened. So the blood of all those people is on our hands in the media.
John Pilger being interviewed by Karuna John.

Clearly Time Magazine is cynical enough to believe that Americans don’t need to know what’s going on in the rest of the world, or maybe the magazine’s editor thinks that they just don’t care enough to buy an issue with world news on the cover.

Whatever reason, it’s a sad demonstration of the lack of international awareness that middle-Americans possess, and the cyclical to and fro between media and consumer that lets this ignorance perpetuate itself.

paxamericana

Helicopter crashes on Auckland waterfront

The pilot of a helicopter which crashed in central Auckland while installing the Telecom Christmas tree has miraculously escaped without serious injuries.

The accident around 10.30am was seen live on the TVNZ website as it was streaming the event.

Read more…

stuff.co.nz

What happens when journalism is everywhere? By Mathew Ingram When the Arab Spring demonstrations were under way in Egypt’s Tahrir Square and reports were streaming out through Twitter and Facebook and text messages and cellphone videos, it was easy to feel superior to the Egyptian government. How could they not realize that information can no longer be contained by blockades or even internet blackouts when everyone has the power to publish? Now the authorities in New York City and elsewhere have been getting a dose of that medicine, with the “Occupy Wall Street” protests being tweeted and live-streamed in real time. As the Associated Press learned this week to its chagrin, we all have newswires at our disposal now.

What happens when journalism is everywhere?


By 

When the Arab Spring demonstrations were under way in Egypt’s Tahrir Square and reports were streaming out through Twitter and Facebook and text messages and cellphone videos, it was easy to feel superior to the Egyptian government. How could they not realize that information can no longer be contained by blockades or even internet blackouts when everyone has the power to publish? Now the authorities in New York City and elsewhere have been getting a dose of that medicine, with the “Occupy Wall Street” protests being tweeted and live-streamed in real time. As the Associated Press learned this week to its chagrin, we all have newswires at our disposal now.

gigaom.com

Quote and Comment: Fed up with weak reporting on Occupy Wall Street, this guy went down there and did the job himself

jayrosen:

Day 21 Occupy Wall Street October 6 2011 Shankbone 16

See Robert David Graham, Independent reporting of #OccupyWallStreet

By reporting, I mean such things as contacting the park’s owners asking for an official statement. The protesters are occupying Zuccotti Park, owned by the same company (Brookfield Office Properties NYSE:BPO) that owns the adjacent skyscraper. An obvious step would be to contact them asking for a statement, but I could find no journalists that had yet done so. Well, if “journalists” aren’t going to do this, I can do this myself. I sent an email to their VP of Communications. I got a response, which I

The Tablet Revolution and the Future of News - Pew Research See full Infographic. Eighteen months after the introduction of the iPad,11% of U.S. adults now own a tablet computer of some kind. About half (53%) get news on their tablet every day, and they read long articles as well as get headlines. But a majority says they would not be willing to pay for news content on these devices, according to the most detailed study to date of tablet users and how they interact with this new technology.   The study, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in collaboration with The Economist Group, finds that the vast majority of tablet owners-fully 77%-use their tablet every day. They spend an average of about 90 minutes on them.

The Tablet Revolution and the Future of News - Pew Research

See full Infographic.

Eighteen months after the introduction of the iPad,11% of U.S. adults now own a tablet computer of some kind. About half (53%) get news on their tablet every day, and they read long articles as well as get headlines. But a majority says they would not be willing to pay for news content on these devices, according to the most detailed study to date of tablet users and how they interact with this new technology.  

The study, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in collaboration with The Economist Group, finds that the vast majority of tablet owners-fully 77%-use their tablet every day. They spend an average of about 90 minutes on them.

'Wherever there was news, we went': Libya's 'A-Team' fixers on getting the story out - Journalism.co.uk

A sad story about the forgotten underbelly of how our foreign news is assembled.

By Joel Gunter.

In a 2007 survey of journalists in Iraq by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, 57 per cent said that one of their local support staff had been killed in the course of their work. 

The danger for fixers is very real. The recognition, however, is not.

More…

thitime:

José Ferreira ‘Trash Land’

Description smileinyourface

Trash Land is an impressive photo documentary by Portuguese photographer José Ferreiraabout the harsh life of the people that live on ‘Huléne dump’ in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique.

A group of people that can be divided in two groups, a group that is called ‘the garbage collectors’, that consists of around 700 people and ‘the others’, with the first group forming gangs that search for objects of value and trading or selling them in order to earn some money for food, and the second group just depending on the food and left overs they find on the dump.

Find more here.

weareoskar

Tomorrow’s UK front pages. Medieval.

Children will see this at supermarkets and convenience stores tomorrow.

“Violence is an easy option to consider in a war-torn area. When the struggle is very unequal and the less materially well-endowed side holds out and resists, violence can be romanticised and glorified, creating a myth of resistance to an oppressor which becomes portrayed in shades of brutality. Such a depiction essentially turns the tables on the oppressor and their media, dehumanising the oppressor just as the oppressed were dehumanised themselves on the moving screen, on news broadcasts, and through practices of spatial and social control and repression. It is then a small conceptual step to dehumanise civilians and justify the targeting of shopping centres, streets and other areas where the target is a faceless, mythical foe but where the real victims are real people, real children. In other words, the fetishisation of violence by both sides in a conflict ignores the real human biographies touched by that same violence: the lives of innocent bystanders, of civilians, of mothers whose sons will never return and of youths who cannot see any other way out of their dire situation but the way of violence.”

-“Fetishizing Violence, Marginalising the Human Dimension” by Federico Caprotti

waitingonoblivion

Remarks on U.S Assassination of al-Awlaki and Obama’s Foreign Policy | Noam Chomsky

About a week ago, the New York Times had a headline saying “the West Celebrates a Cleric’s Death.” The cleric was Awlaki, killed by a drone. It wasn’t just death; it was assassination—and another step forward in Obama’s global assassination campaign, which actually breaks some new records in international terrorism. Well, it’s not true that everyone in the West celebrated. There were some critics. Almost all of the critics, of whom there weren’t many, criticized the action or qualified it because of the fact that Awlaki was an American citizen. That is, he was a person, unlike suspects who are intentionally murdered or collateral damage, meaning we treat them kind of like the ants we step on when we walk down the street. They’re not American citizens, so they’re unpeople, and therefore they can be freely murdered.

Read more »

Rick Perry officials spark revolt after doctoring environment report

Officials in Rick Perry’s home state of Texas have set off a scientists’ revolt after purging mentions of climate change and sea-level rise from what was supposed to be a landmark environmental report. The scientists said they were disowning the report on the state of Galveston Bay because of political interference and censorship from Perry appointees at the state’s environmental agency.

Read more »

newyorker

Louis Theroux and The Nazis

By Jacob Howard

Theroux’s 2003 documenting of his mingling with US Neo-Nazi elites and their followers makes for yet more compelling and confronting viewing from the intrepid BBC journalist.

The piece’s palpable tension makes it almost unbearable at times, while at others the extreme political and ideological stands made by the show’s subjects would verge on the absurd, if they weren’t so sad.

From the pathetic late life ramblings of the man dubbed “the most dangerous racist in America”, to the tragically bizarre melodies of 12-year-old Nazi-pop folk twins Prussian Blue, the documentary is an important reminder to the power of parental indoctrination, propaganda and peer influence.

It also serves as a warning to those in Western “egalitarian societies” that the battle for multicultural harmony is far from over, and more needs to be done to rid our culture of these crude aberrations and their ugly sentiments.

Australia’s Chief Scientist Rails Against Climate Change Doubters

The timing of Ian Chubb’s comments could not be more perfectly designed, coming the
day before the Australian Parliament looked certain to pass through Labor’s Carbon Tax legislation, which it did earlier today.

Chubb has been a constant loud voice amongst those seeking a more responsible debate about climate change from the mainstream media, since his appointment in April. 

Science was “under siege”, he told a meeting of the National Tertiary Education Union, while ridiculing theories of a “hush-hush” plot in mainstream science.

“(They) would have you believe that climate scientists, whose work supports the evidence that human activity is contributing to climate change, are cheats and frauds and worse,” Professor Chubb said.

More…