:: Sunday, October 23, 2005 ::

Blogging in A Media Vacuum

Reporters Without Borders offers this freebie handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents in PDF form. As they explain, "Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest." In this article, Reports Without Borders describes North Korea and Turkmenistan as "the world's black holes for news," but also criticizes the United States for its imprisonment of the NYT's Judith Miller.

:: Unknown 1:15 AM | [+] ::
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Josh Rushing Joins Al-Jazeera

Remember Josh Rushing the young military public affairs officer in the documentary Control Room? Soon he'll be reporting for Al-Jazeera. Says Rushing:

What the Marines trained me to do was to represent the best of what America stands for to a foreign audience. That's exactly what I'm going to do.

Critics of Rushing--and they are many and vociferous already--may be surprised to know that President Bush's advisor Karen Hughes recently suggested that the United States needs to learn to communicate more effectively through Al-Jazeera:

As a communicator, first of all, you have to communicate your message through mediums to which people listen. So I think that we clearly need to be more effective about how we communicate on Al Jazeera.

:: Unknown 8:12 PM | [+] ::
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1979

That's the year Paul Thompson's Complete 911 Timeline begins, as the Soviets invade Afghanistan.

Initially not an expert at all, Thompson started compulsively researching the 9/11 terror attacks in order to come to some objectives conclusions around what happened and what lead up to the event. His timeline now includes some 1600+ events, which he compiled painstakingly, initially as a hobby, but eventually including feedback and refinements from people around the world until he has joined the California-based Center for Cooperative Research and has published what is now the most complete account of 9/11 yet. Journalists refer to his timeline as a sort of Terror Bible.

The Center encourages "grassroots participation and collaboration in the documentation of the public historical record using an open-content model." Like Wikipedia, perhaps, only with an extremely detailed focus.

Additionally, this objective of the Center seems particularly admirable, not to mention timely:

The Center for Cooperative Research calls on people to abandon the widely-held assumption that governments can be relied upon to competently monitor the activities of themselves or the entities with which they have close relations. A major goal of this website is to encourage people to play an active role in scrutinizing the activities of all individuals, groups and institutions that wield significant political and economic power. Our position is that the power of oversight should not rest with governments, but with civil society itself.

(Mentioned in Esquire magazine, 12/04, p. 197)

:: Unknown 6:01 PM | [+] ::
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Penny Lepuszewska

Photo by Penny Lepuszewska. See more of her clean, haunting work at her site, Prospect K.

:: Unknown 1:19 PM | [+] ::
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Cartier-Bresson Dies at 95

The New York Times >Henri Cartier-Bresson, arguably the father of photojournalism, died today just short of his 96th birthday. Cartier-Bresson famously spoke of the "decisive moment" in photography. His own photos were among both the most extraordinary and the most familiar of the 20th century.

He was a founder of the world's most presitigous photo agency Magnum Photo, where you can see an extensive gallery of his work.



The Washington Post also features a fine gallery of his portraits.

:: Unknown 8:12 PM | [+] ::
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The Fault, Yes, but the Answer Also

Charlotte radio station WFAE interviewed Bob Edwards today about his new biography of Edward R. Morrow.

During the interview, the station played a quote of Morrow's from a special broadcast of his See It Now program in 1954 in which he spoke out against Senator Joe Mccarthy. The substance of it seems just as relevant now, including the line from Caesar:

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and remember we are not descended from fearful men ... who feared ... to defend causes which were unpopular .... The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay ... and whose fault is that? Not really his; he didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

That particular program won Murrow a Peabody, and it also heralded the end of the "Red Scare."

:: Unknown 5:51 PM | [+] ::
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No Spin?

As the Washington Post reports, late last month, O'Reilly's show accidentally played a quote which said more than the host intended to. Apparently, O'Reilly had only planned to discuss part of the quote by 9/11 commission chairman Thomas Kean--the part which said "there were contacts between Iraq and Saddam Hussein, excuse me, al-Qaeda." Unfortunately, the other half of Kean's quote was played, too:

There is no evidence that we can find whatsoever that Iraq or Saddam Hussein participated in any way in attacks on the United States -- in other words, on 9/11.

It was played, yes, but the whole quote never made it to air on Fox News because O'Reilly complained that it was the wrong quote and retaped his commentary.

By all appearances, Bill O'Reilly wanted to use Kean's legitmate authority to rag against the New York Times' contention that there were no links between Iraq and al Qaeda, but he didn't want the same quote to be aired by that dignitary if the whole thing undermined the Iraq-was-involved-in-911 meme. So he trashed the soundbite and paraphrased the part of Kean's quote that he wanted to use. He selectively edited the quote to push his thesis.

Later on the show, O'Reilly interviewed Georgetown law professor David Cole who called him on the edit. Since the "The O'Reilly Factor" edited out Cole's confrontation, viewers had no idea that his charge was leveled or how O'Reilly reacted to it. All viewers saw was O'Reilly saying, "We make mistakes because we bring in people who are trying to cause trouble. I thought he was a rational person." So O'Reilly can pretend the segment was edited because of something inappropriate the guest did. And he can sound apologetic about it.

The response no one saw: O'Reilly called the Cole an SOB and kicked him off the show mid-interview and told him he wouldn't be invited back.

Bad guest then? No, just O'Reilly getting called on his own spin. Apparently, one of the rules of O'Reilly's No Spin Zone is never call the host on his own spin.

:: Unknown 11:45 AM | [+] ::
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