Bloggasm

Ever since Al Jazeera English launched not long ago, I’ve heard a number of interviews with western journalists who have worked for the company. Almost every single one has shed new insight into the Middle East, highlighting often arcane cultural understandings with the people who live there.

There has been a general push-back against Al Jazeera and its English station since its creation, to the extent that it’s having a hard time finding a venue in the US. This is sad considering that Al Jazeera English could bridge the cultural divide between western and Arab media.

Let’s face it. Western journalists not only experience culture shock when covering the Middle East, they’re also largely dependent on the US military outfits with whom they embed. Al Jazeera English has a number of western journalists who collaborate with their Arab counterparts. They’re able to utilize resources and cultural context in ways that US outlets could only dream of.

I think it’s high time that western news companies begin syndicating at least some of their content. Yes, I think some of the criticisms launched against Al Jazeera are valid, but it seems silly to throw the baby out with the bathwater by not utilizing their expertise, especially as the US continues to get more mired down in foreign policy dealing with the Middle East.

The weekend is so close I can taste it. Despite the fact that I did almost no internet surfing today, I somehow have managed to amass quite a number of links. I must have been a web junkie yesterday. Here is some media-related news for your amusement:

1. Apparently back in 2006, Senator Joe Lieberman accused his Democratic challenger Ned Lamont of hacking his website. Well, it turns out the FBI has known for almost two years that this claim was complete BS.

2. A NY Times reporter embedded in Iraq gives his first-hand account of what it’s like to be held up at the purgatory-like checkpoints and the paranoia that journalists over there face every day.

3. Want to hear something bizarre? Rush Limbaugh’s fans listen to his ads more often than they listen to him. Of course, sometimes they’re doing both at the same time, since talk radio hosts often do mini-infomercials themselves. Does anybody else find it funny when they do this? It’s hilarious to hear Limbaugh puff up his manly war chest during his show, only to become a company’s bitch two minutes later so he can shill for its product.

4. Is it wrong to get off on pornography that uses the Holocaust for titillation? “In early-1960s Israel pornographic, possibly anti-Semitic novels that detailed sensational tales of the torture and rape of male concentration camp prisoners by curvaceous female Nazi guards rapidly rose from marginal pulp reading to mass-market popularity.”

5. Possibly some good news. Bilal Hussein, the AP photographer who was detained and held without charges by the US government for two years, may soon be released. An Iraqi judicial committee made the order. Predictably, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin isn’t happy after she spent so much time being used as a propaganda mouthpiece to try to frame him as a terrorist in the public eye. Malkin should really deduce that when the military resorts to anonymously feeding information to a right-wing hack, they really don’t have a leg to stand on.

6. Not long ago I went off on a rant about how PR people are terrible at their jobs, and based it on my own experience dealing with them. Since writing that post, for some reason my dealings with PR people have improved greatly. I don’t know if it’s because they read the post or because I’m starting to attract a higher caliber of marketers. Media Shift talks about the Web 2.0 version of a press release and how journalists and bloggers are becoming unneeded now that PR newswires can shoot your press release directly into Google News and other news aggregators like Techmeme.

I’m certainly not the first one to ask this question: If either Obama or Clinton had claimed — on four separate occasions — that Shiite-led Iran was taking in and training Sunni-led Al Qaeda, wouldn’t it be played out over and over on an endless loop in mainstream media outlets?

Yet when McCain does this, not only does the media barely cover it, the reporters start making excuses for him when they do mention it. This is absolutely sickening, especially as the press — who don’t even try to hide the fact that they’ve been courting McCain — paints him as a foreign policy expert.

Apparently Helen Thomas said this during a January 4 round-table discussion:

Not everyone is thrilled about how new technology has changed the way news is reported. Long-time White House Press Corp member and columnist for Hearst newspapers Helen Thomas is one of those unhappy. She blames bloggers for contributing to the “deterioration” of journalism that led to the Iraq war.

“What I really worry about is that I think the bloggers and everyone, everyone with a laptop thinks they’re journalists,” Thomas said. “And, they certainly don’t have our standards. They don’t have our ethics, and so forth. There’s a deterioration,” she continued. “Reporters laid down on the job in the run up to this [the Iraq] war.”

Um, Helen? Did you get confused and start to think that it’s Opposite Day? Bloggers weren’t even that influential in 2002 and 2003 during the lead-up to the Iraq War. Though if it helps you sleep better at night, then by all means; keep dreaming.

Related posts:
1. Buy comment spam
2. How journalists mindlessly repeat claims from government officials

In light of the news that the New York Times decided to hire Bill Kristol as a columnist, I realized that his profession is one of the few out there where not only do you not get punished for being wrong, you actually get rewarded. Seriously, if a plumber were to make as many errors in his profession as Kristol did in his predictions about WMD’s and terrorist threats in Iraq (not to mention his predictions about Iran’s nuclear weapon powers), that plumber would be out of a job.

For several months, The New Republic has been publishing gruesome accounts from an anonymous soldier in Iraq. Now they’re coming under fire because doubts have been raised about the factual accuracy of his/her claims. The magazine’s editor says that he’s looking into the matter.

Glenn Greenwald and others have noticed that in the past few weeks, more and more journalists have begun to refer to Iraq insurgents as “al-Qaida,” despite the fact that Qaida only makes up a small minority of the fighters in that country. He notes the correlation between rhetoric from top government officials who use the term switch and the sudden term switch in newspaper accounts. He makes a good case, I think, that journalists aren’t writing with a critical eye. I’m surprised that fact checkers at the New York Times allowed such blatant unfounded facts to be printed on the front page.