Despite the geekiness of my previous post today, I had to double dip with this: H/T Jeff Emanuel
Despite the geekiness of my previous post today, I had to double dip with this: H/T Jeff Emanuel
The Internets have exploded around Soledad O'Brien's witty yet friendly push-back against numerous interviewees who refuse to be fazed by facts.I don't know about your interpretation of this. But...
The internet has exploded this afternoon with the revelation that Fareed Zakaria (a Harvard Government PhD 1993) apparently plagiarized significant elements of his Time magazine op-ed this week. As...
When Usain competes, U.S. aid plummets. At Andrew Sullivan's Daily Beast, Patrick Appel offers a few hypotheses about why Americans seem to care less about the killing of Sikhs than the killing of...
When delicate political negotiations are needed, perhaps journalists need to get out of the way. Gadi Wolfsfeld’s studies of peace processes have shown how journalistic discretion in Northern Ireland created space for political leaders to make individual compromises. Such compromises would probably each have been unacceptable to their constituencies if lit up by a media spotlight, but only became public once the full package of a peace treaty was reached (Bono had to wait). Past negotiations between Israeli leaders with their Jordanian or Palestinian counterparts have been less successful in...
Aldgate station plan, London undergroundA month into the official inquest into the ‘7/7’ London bombings of July 2005, it is clear that the governmental imperative to arrive at a clear, authoritative and final account of what happened on the day might prove impossible because of the unreliability of human memory. This was an event in which cameraphone footage from the scene was reaching the BBC within 20 minutes of the first of four explosions, and iconic images and memorial rituals were in place within days and weeks. Yet it took police four months to take witness statements and now five...
In Diffused War, Andrew Hoskins and I argued we’ve entered a new paradigm of warfare. The wikileaks stories seem to confirm much of this account. War is mediatized, we wrote, as the institutions of war and those affected by war take a form governed by continual media recording, display and archiving. This creates diffuse causal relations between action and effect, since mediatization can amplify or contain the cognitive and emotional response any action generates in ways not dependent on the initial action itself. Militaries, NGOs, insurgents, journalists – none can predict the outcomes of...
The last few days have seen a fury of debate about Wikileaks’ latest disclosures. To my mind, Wikileaks’ release of the Iraq and earlier Afghanistan documents is a public service—throwing critical light on the way in which America has pursued its wars at ground level. Some have dismissed the documents as nothing “new.” Of course, it is true that we have had information about the wars, human rights violations, and civilian casualties in everyday stories by the media. But much of that, among reporters “embedded” by the military, has been carefully screened. Moreover, what has been...
The New York Times is reporting that ISAF troops are making progress in Kandahar. Credit for progress is given equally to the surge in troops and a new mobile rocket which has "pinpoint accuracy -- like a small cruise missile." While military commanders are cautious, Western and Afghan civilians are saying that Taliban losses have "sapped the momentum the insurgency had in the area."As I am skeptical of some of the spin and zombie reporting which has been generated by the American media in recent months, I thought I would check and see what Afghan news sources are reporting from the areas...
Quoting an anonymous former military intelligence officer, that is how Adam Swerer described the Wikileaks' archive published Sunday in an op-ed earlier this week. Joshua Foust concurred in a PBS essay:If I were a Taliban operative with access to a computer — and lots of them have access to computers — I’d start searching the WikiLeaks data for incident reports near my area of operation to see if I recognized anyone. And then I’d kill whomever I could identify. Those deaths would be directly attributable to WikiLeaks. Even with the names removed from these reports, you know where they...
Many of the Journolist critics have expressed concerns that the listserv's membership -- you had to be political "center to left" to join -- fomented groupthink. Andrew Sullivan's critique is succinct, but he's hardly alone in leveling the charge: "It is this tendency to groupthink and exclusivity that concerns me."Reihan Salam, who was generally sympathetic to Journolist in an on-line piece he wrote last week, has recalibrated his argument to criticize J-list about the alleged groupthink problem: What I meant to say, and evidently didn’t say very effectively, is that JList is inevitable. So...
It is all a matter of how you spin it I guess:1. "Pentagon Report Shows Afghanistan Violence Up 87 Percent, Support for Karzai Low" Fox News, 29 April 2010.2. "Pentagon says Instability has 'Leveled Off'" Washington Post, 29 April 2010.3. "Encouraging trends in Afghanistan despite rise in violence" CNN, 29 April 2010.