Category Archives: Media

On Glenn Greenwald, Israel, and The Godfather III

Media, Politics, , , , , , , , , ,

Over the last several days, I’ve been commenting on the blog Sad Red Earth, run by A. Jay Adler. The post, guest-written by Rob H., that sparked the extensive comments was titled “Glenn Greenwald’s False Accusation Against The New York Times.” In it, Rob accused Glenn Greenwald, a political blogger on Salon.com, of falsely attributing anti-Muslim bias to the New York Times, which ran a headline immediately after the recent Oslo attacks stating, “Powerful Explosions Hit Oslo; Jihadis Claim Responsibility.”

Greenwald wrote that “for much of the day…the featured headline on The New York Times online front page strongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo.” In reality, Rob countered, “the truth turned out to be that the headline he sharply criticized in two columns — over two days — was only online for about two hours, and NOT ‘much of the day.’ I confirmed this with a Senior Editor at The Times by simply sending him an email inquiring about the headline in question.”

First of all, assuming Rob is telling the truth (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), one should give credit where credit is due. Rob was right, and Greenwald was wrong. In fact, not only was he wrong, but his misinformation looks a bit suspicious: it’s difficult to mistake two hours for most of a day without some pretty severe preconceived biases.

The comments section of Rob’s post soon spun off into a million different directions, however, only some of which were related to the original subject. In general, the comments either supported or rebutted one of the following topics:

1) Glenn Greenwald “often makes mistakes and even admits it while declaring he’ll make many more.” He is thus irresponsible and unreliable as a writer/thinker, and is guilty of committing the same journalistic crimes as those he so often pillories.

2) Greenwald’s “worse [sic] trait is that, in Chomsky style, he truly sees the U.S. as nothing but a force of evil in the world, an [sic] also has this nasty little habit of advancing explicitly anti-Semitic arguments.”

3) As A. Jay put it, “Which is it – you want something ‘out of’ our relationship with Israel that you think we don’t get, or you morally can’t ‘stomach’ Israel? You can’t stomach Syria either, but at least you’re not paying for the upset, and that’s bottom line? And there are not other bases upon which to distinguish between then two and upon which to base our relations with them?”

4) The Godfather III. Don’t ask; I’ll explain later on in this post.

Continue reading On Glenn Greenwald, Israel, and The Godfather III →

Bill Keller: Democracy is dangerous. Maybe we should tone it down.

Media, Politics, , , , , , , , , , ,

If nothing else, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller’s resignation from his position to return to writing columns has accomplished this: instead of inferring his stupidity from years of the Grey Lady’s questionable editorial choices, we can now confirm it directly by reading his essays. After vaingloriously confronting Arianna Huffington — including his now-infamous, yet not inaccurate disparagement of her as “the queen of aggregation” — and variously deriding new media as vapid and emotionless, Keller has now set his sights on the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

Whether Keller’s latest column, “Why Tyrants Love the Murdoch Scandal,” was penned out of faux-modesty or genuine concern is at once an academic debate and one for which either answer is equally terrifying. For it is not the motive behind his words, but the fact that they exist at all — and in the pages of the vaunted New York Times, no less — that imbues them with such awesome power.

The first signs of trouble appear immediately. Notice, for example, that signature Kellerism: the cloying way he simultaneously feigns to refrain from, while gleefully leaping into, criticism of an arch-nemesis, News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch. “Nor is this the place to celebrate a rival’s troubles,” he writes, before adding, “True, I did pull from my files and savor the indignant letters we received from News of the World’s top editors last year as we prepared to publish an investigation of the paper’s phone-hacking culture and Scotland Yard’s timidity — work that has been fully vindicated in recent weeks.”

But even such condescension is little more than a distracting aside. His real problem lies in the substance of his column. Keller inexplicably uses the fall from grace (from acceptance? from toleration?) of Murdoch’s News of the World to make a broader point about freedom of the press. Apparently, the police and parliamentary investigation of Murdoch’s publication represents some sort of threat to the democratic principle of free expression. We know this because Keller quotes an anonymous South African friend, who notes that his native country, which is already growing increasingly hostile to an unfettered media presence, may indeed find justification for its repression in the goings-on of the phone-hacking scandal. “‘You can be sure they will use the phone-hacking fallout to help make their case,'” Keller’s bizarrely unnamed friend informs him. “‘Nobody pays much attention to the effect of something like this on little countries like ours.'”

Indeed one doesn’t. And that is precisely because the effect is insignificant, if it exists at all. “Despots love to see a free press behaving badly,” Keller solemnly intones. And yet they seem to do just fine in its absence. There is no more enduring truism of totalitarian states than that they will, and do, seize inspiration for their tyranny in the most absurd places. To censor one’s perfectly legal, and even morally necessary, actions in order to appease the beast beyond our shores is patently insane. Paraphrasing Voltaire, if the phone-hacking scandal did not exist, it would be necessary — for dictators around the world, at least — to invent it. By this logic, perhaps Norway should think twice about imprisoning Anders Behring Breivik, for fear this may inspire crackdowns on political protest in Uganda.

Holding sacred democratic institutions hostage to the whims of dictators would seem to be anathema to the current executive editor of the New York Times, which is why its implied advocacy is so shocking. No one is suggesting — even in Britain, where press restrictions are more in vogue — that a nation should block access to the independent media or prevent it from expressing controversial viewpoints. In fact, Keller admits as much: “I’m not terribly alarmed that either Britain or the United States will significantly roll back the protections that allow us to hold our governments accountable — up to and including the hot scrutiny of stories like the WikiLeaks disclosures.”

What is taking place, however, is the mandatory legal process necessitated by News of the World‘s culture of disdain for the laws of the nation in which it operated. To ignore their incursions would be a far greater abandonment of democratic ideals, and would thus provide correspondingly greater fodder for the consistently bad intentions of undemocratic regimes.

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The Oslo tragedy and media narratives

Media, Politics, Religion, , , , , , ,

The facts of the Oslo bombing and shootings — already being called Norway’s September 11th — are still being discovered, and yet the mass media’s narrative, much like a preemptively written obituary of a public figure, was already neatly in place. Here are a few examples:

Kristian Harpviken, interview in Foreign Policy magazine:

“The only concrete supposition [as to the identity of the attackers] that would emerge in a Norwegian context would be al Qaeda.”

The Wall Street Journal:

“…In jihadist eyes [Norway] will forever remain guilty of being what it is: a liberal nation committed to freedom of speech and conscience, equality between the sexes, representative democracy and every other freedom that still defines the West. For being true to those ideals, Norwegians have now been made to pay a terrible price.” [Note: This quote appeared in the original version of the article, but the WSJ later deleted it along with other modifications, after it became apparent that a non-Muslim, non-al Qaeda-affiliated person was suspected of the crimes.]

Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post:

“This is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists. I spoke to Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute, who has been critical of proposed cuts in defense and of President Obama’s Afghanistan withdrawal plan. ‘There has been a lot of talk over the past few months on how we’ve got al-Qaeda on the run and, compared with what it once was, it’s become a rump organization. But as the attack in Oslo reminds us, there are plenty of al-Qaeda allies still operating. No doubt cutting the head off a snake is important; the problem is, we’re dealing with global nest of snakes.'”

I could continue with additional quotes, but these and other, similar proclamations have already been covered and debunked by the likes of James Fallows at The Atlantic, Benjamin Doherty at Electronic Intifada, and especially Glenn Greenwald on Salon.com.

The point is that, not only is the media’s first instinct to jump to the Islamists-as-terrorists trope, but, as Greenwald helpfully exposes, sometimes the mistaken attribution to Islamic fundamentalists is the only prerequisite for labeling an act as “terrorism” in the first place. Thus, a horrifying act can only be terrorism if it’s committed by a Muslim; conversely, no matter how gruesome the act, it is not terrorism if it’s committed by someone other than a Muslim.

As it turns out, the story is already taking shape quite differently than initially reported. The New York Times’ lead article now states:

The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a man they identified as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian in connection with the bombing of a government building in central Oslo and a shooting attack on a nearby island that together killed at least 92 people.

As stunned Norwegians grappled with the deadliest attack in the country since World War II and a shocking case of homegrown terrorism, a portrait began to emerge of the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, 32. He was described as a religious, gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threat of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration to the cultural and patriotic values of his country.

“We are not sure whether he was alone or had help,” a police official, Roger Andresen, said at a televised news conference. “What we know is that he is right wing and a Christian fundamentalist.”

The enduring tragedy of the Oslo attacks is that the laughable performance of our mainstream media will go undetected and un-criticized by most, because it is far more convenient to stick to an accepted script than to question the prefabricated story-lines we’ve come to expect. The word “terrorism,” when used to such dubious and unproductive ends, has gained precisely the opposite of its original meaning: as my friend Sam described it, “This sort of language quickly becomes bloated beyond its meaning and has the tendency to pervert anything that precedes it or follows it. It is eager and anxious to be helpful but in doing so tries to excuse itself from being complicit with the historicity of the problems it is trying to rectify.”

By jumping to call anything and everything that is perpetrated by Islamists “terrorism” — even when, as in this case, the entire conjecture as to the identity of the participants was incorrect from the start — and refusing to use the same word to describe actions taken by other disaffected groups, we’ve stripped the word of all meaning. “Terrorism,” much like “Hitler” and “Nazi,” has undergone such a grotesque transformation in usage that it’s lost any true power it once had as a descriptor. Unfortunately, it seems very unlikely that anyone in a position of power is likely to notice or care.

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The life and wild times of Thomas Friedman

Humor, Media, Politics, , , , ,

Almost six months ago, I began this blog with an inaugural post making fun of Thomas Friedman. I am neither the first nor the last person to do this, and my mocking was not the funniest on the topic either. But for what it’s worth, I thoroughly enjoyed doing it.

Incidentally, it also wasn’t the last time I’d make fun of him on this very same blog. Yup, you got it: Friedman’s gone and done it again. Now I realize the man doesn’t write his own headlines, but one gets the feeling that whoever does that job for him is mailing it in too. His latest column’s title? “Pay Attention.” (I suppose when you reach the level of inanity that Friedman has, blatant pleas for a captive audience are to be expected.) Somewhere in there is an apt metaphor for the last gasp of fast-declining newspapers. But like Friedman, I’m too lazy to elaborate. Why make logical connections when you can make large, specious leaps instead?

Now if I were Sir Thomas, here is where I’d inadvertently run into a [Singaporean bureaucrat/orphaned Cambodian child/Chinese investment banker/taxi driver from any one of those countries]. He’d casually throw out some inauspicious line, like “The traffic here is bad, but an empty road is worse luck than a traffic jam.” Or, “It may not be perfect, but I love my country.” Or, “Dude, stop dictating crappy metaphors into your iPhone while I’m trying to drive here.” As Mr. Friedman, I’d take it from there, weaving in a completely distended argument that manages to mention clean energy, Chinese high-speed rail, and wi-fi, all within a neat 700-word column (written, of course, in under five minutes).

As it happens, I don’t have to do this for him, since Mr. Friedman has taken care of things all by his lonesome. I could tell from the very start that this latest column was a keeper:

I had some time to kill at the Cairo airport the other day so I rummaged through the “Egyptian Treasures” shop. I didn’t care much for the King Tut paper weights and ashtrays but was intrigued by a stuffed camel, which, if you squeezed its hump, emitted a camel honk. When I turned it over to see where it was manufactured, it read: “Made in China.” Now that they have decided to put former President Hosni Mubarak on trial, I hope Egyptians add to his indictment that he presided for 30 years over a country where nearly half the population lives on $2 day and 20 percent are unemployed while it is importing low-wage manufactured goods — a stuffed camel, no less — from China.

Brilliant! The man managed to squeeze in China, tacky gift shops, airports (Thomas Friedman loves him some airports), and an utterly nonsensical plea to imprison Hosni Mubarak for participating in a little thing called globalization. (Later, the essay even closes with this absolute gem: “This is so much more important than Libya.”)

But Friedman isn’t finished, oh no. Just a bit further down, he ruminates: “If elections for the Parliament are held in September, the only group in Egypt with a real party network ready to roll is the one that has been living underground and is now suddenly legal: the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.”

Heavens to Betsy, no! Anything but that! God forbid a democratic revolution actually results in…democracy. Friedman quotes Mohamed ElBaradei, a (non-Muslim Brotherhood) presidential candidate, warning, “You will have an unrepresentative Parliament writing an unrepresentative Constitution.” (To be clear, ElBaradei’s “unrepresentative Parliament” refers to representatives elected freely by the Egyptian population.) Sadly, it never really dawns on Friedman that perhaps a contender for the presidency may in fact have a vested interest in portraying all rivals as less than desirable.

Towards the end, Friedman lays out his case more succinctly:

Free elections are rare in the Arab world, so when they happen, everybody tries to vote — not only the residents of that country. You can be sure money will flow in here from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to support the Muslim Brotherhood.

America, though, cannot publicly intervene in the Egyptian election debate. It would only undermine the reformers, who have come so far, so fast, on their own and alienate the Egyptian generals. That said, though, it is important that senior U.S. officials engage quietly with the generals and encourage them to take heed of the many Egyptian voices that are raising legitimate concerns about a premature runoff.

For those of you keeping track at home, things Monsieur Thomas is afraid of include: 1) democracy, 2) “everybody [trying] to vote”, and 3) outside campaign contributions — the last of which would never happen in the United States, obviously. In Friedman’s intricate mind (which, not unlike the Internet, also appears to consist of a series of tubes), America cannot intervene in Egyptian democracy. It can only pressure the undemocratic Egyptian military to delay voting so the preferred candidates win. Because if we can’t even pull off a little vote-rigging here and there, what was the point of displacing Mubarak in the first place?

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Why wouldn’t the New York Times promote its own reporting?

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Because editor Bill Keller would rather bury his paper’s own accomplishments than admit that Julian Assange and his organization conduct proper journalism, that’s why. Forbes‘ Andy Greenberg blogged today about the curious absence of Wikileaks reporting in yesterday’s Pulitzer Prize ceremonies:

Continue reading Why wouldn’t the New York Times promote its own reporting? →

Will Ferrell on “The Office:” brief thoughts

Humor, Media, , , , , ,

On the bright side, my worst fears went unrealized. I love Will Ferrell, and I’ve watched — in several cases, multiple times — Old School, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Blades of Glory. Ferrell is phenomenal at what he does, which is to play larger-than-life caricatures whose narrative arcs neatly travel from cocksure/happy-go-lucky man-child to depressive failure to mature survivor, after finally confronting and conquering some innate (and ridiculously obvious to everyone but himself) personality flaw. (This, incidentally, is part of the reason Old School was so hilarious: the flaw, in that case, was his wife. She was properly disposed of in short order.)

The Office wisely sidestepped such theatrics. Ferrell is hardly a man known for his subtleties (his outstanding turn in Stranger than Fiction notwithstanding). And yet it was obvious that a continuation of his one-dimensional film roles, condensed into a twenty-minute teleplay format on a show known more for its situational humor than outsized personalities, simply wouldn’t work.

So the writers went with a subdued version instead. One problem with this approach, however, is that Ferrell’s surprisingly low-key character wasn’t that funny. This is, perhaps, forgivable. Given the fact that we already know he’ll be sticking around for another three episodes, hitting a home run on the opening pitch isn’t mandatory.

But it helps. Far more concerning, however, is the fact that, by attempting to mold Ferrell into a somewhat relatable role, the writers wound up immediately painting him into some contradictory corners. In a sense, Ferrell was too multi-dimensional. How can a guy call an impromptu meeting while receiving a shave at the office from his private barber one moment, and then express his deep insecurities to his predecessor just minutes later? This disconnect between the public and private personas is indeed a significant portion of Michael Scott’s story as well, but in his case the reasons for this were thoughtfully portrayed over the course of years, and dozens of episodes. In the case of Will Ferrell, we immediately gain access to both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and end up (at least somewhat) discounting both.

Regardless of any potential misgivings, I’ll be watching next week’s epsiode anyway. I just hope the writers manage to make Will Ferrell’s character a bit more coherent than they did on the first try.

Mike Huckabee keeps talking himself into a bigger hole

Media, Politics

On the same day that he incorrectly claimed President Obama was raised in Kenya, FOX News personality and sometime presidential candidate Mike Huckabee also committed a Freudian slip that garnered much less public attention but showcased the same befuddling absence of logic. Referencing Natalie Portman’s allusion to impending motherhood at the Oscar ceremonies on Sunday night, Huckabee lamented, “People see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, ‘Hey look, you know, we’re having children, we’re not married, but we’re having these children, and they’re doing just fine.'”

But it was his next comments that made the least sense: “There aren’t really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie. And I think it gives a distorted image…Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that’s the story that we’re not seeing, and it’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out-of-wedlock children.”

For someone occupying the more extreme fringe of the conservative movement, it seems a bit ideologically blasphemous for Huckabee to concede that, without government, disadvantaged children would not only be malnourished but would also not receive health care. Even excluding the very poor families that are eligible for Medicaid, this leaves plenty of financially struggling families, often unemployed due to the recession, who would have no health care at all under the (Republican-approved) old system.

Perhaps Huckabee should really think twice before campaigning for a job that requires a functioning brain, and stick to his day job with his far more lenient employer, where no such requirements are made of its employees.

Reading Glenn Greenwald’s columns is a singularly depressing experience

Media

But this is nearly always because he’s hit the nail directly on the head. Today, in a piece titled “The military/media attacks on the Hastings article,” Greenwald dissects the curious antipathy of mainstream journalists towards a reporter, Michael Hastings, who actually does his job. The job in question is, of course, to hold those in power accountable for their actions and to question their often vague and opaque descriptions of what are often very disturbing actions taken in the name of “national security” or some other (similarly Orwellian) newspeak.

One of my favorite parts of Greenwald’s piece is this passage he borrowed from The Atlantic, which quoted Hastings as follows:

Look, I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising. My views are critical but that shouldn’t be mistaken for hostile – I’m just not a stenographer. There is a body of work that shows how I view these issues but that was hard-earned through experience, not something I learned going to a cocktail party on…K Street. That’s what reporters are supposed to do, report the story.

Strange, isn’t it, that this type of journalism is considered suspect by many prominent reporters? And by strange, I mean very scary.

Al Jazeera and real journalism

Media, Politics

A little addendum to my earlier post on Bill Keller, The New York Times, and real journalism: for a prime example of real media courage, Keller would do well to look to Al Jazeera, which not only was the first major network to cover the Tunisian protests and lend the movement instant worldwide credibility, but has also continued to broadcast in Egypt, despite all attempts to shut it down, block it, and revoke its press credentials.