I know several people who would like to do away with journalism altogether, or at least minimize it’s relevance as much as possible. If a journalist uncovers something you don’t want to believe, then find an excuse not to, problem solved. Like a born-again Christian views science, large segments of our society (often one in the same) are treating the NYTimes like Darwin, and looking to the heavens for guidance…which of course comes in the form of Karl Rove telling you something you want to hear. Want to believe that we’re days away from defeating the Iraqis who kill our soldiers? Go right ahead. Want to believe that Noah had a pet dinosaur? Go right ahead.
Harpers had something good about journalism in Iraq, specifically what it’s about to be an imbedded journalist:
…She and the other journalists stationed at the base in Tikrit grew cynical about their work and came to believe that they were being used. “Other reporters in Iraq,” she said, “especially local Iraqis [working for Western outlets], were able to get both sides of the story, but we were getting only one side.” During her 45 days in Tikrit, she told me, she didn’t file a single story critical of the American project in Iraq. “There was no balance,” she said. “What we were doing wasn’t real journalism.”
There really is no such thing as objective journalism, no matter how you slice.
And what’s worse is that most issues are far too complex to be easily described in a standard journalistic format.
It’s like when I talk to my father-in-law about why I think our efforts in Iraq are doomed. My belief is that the Sunni-Shia-Kurd situation will prevent any meaningful political gains over there. All of this goes right over the head of my father-in-law… “Shia who?” If it isn’t neatly wrapped up in a 1 minute sound bite it’s not worth understanding. All that silly stuff doesn’t matter, you’re either with us or against us. And besides, “Deal or No Deal” is on, switch the station.
Journalism would be perfectly objective the day we were able to make robots who could do it. The food at McDonalds is as close to ‘not food’ as food could be, but I still eat there when I’m hungry and driving near it.
This attitude that opinion and news reporting are all one in the same doesn’t make sense to me. On the left you have the New York Times…this week a puff piece on Bush’s 60th birthday, no inuendo, no sarcasm, it makes Bush look good. Hillary Clinton’s marriage is on the front page two weeks back, with an article that…well, if it had been written about John McCain and his past marriages, the gauntlet would have been thrown down!!!
The Wall Street Journal – whose editorial page is on some days hard to tell from Investors Business Daily’s – breaks the story about our government monitoring SWIFT transactions on their website almost exactally the same time it went up on the Times, same facts…the Journal’s editorial page vilifies the Times, exposing a stark difference between the opinion and news parts of the organization…
How can the right simply buy in to this when facts like these are COMMON KNOWLEDGE?
Politics IS…what it is.
Politically, something is bad for my interests, so I’ll tear it down. Differentiating between newspapers and their level of allegience to whatever the fuck it is that binds me and whoever’s stumbling down main street in Cincinatti right now, besides indifference…that person is no more alike with me than most Canadians I’d meet on a trip to Montreal.
Laying claim to the gift from God, to be able to view two seemingly identical news stories, and just knowing (IN yer GUT) that one was evil and the other…
That’s 100% grade-A American bullshit right there. And a perfect foil for a time in our history when arabs are wounding and killing more Americans everyday than blacks, hispanics, whites are in the cities whose dark blocks supply junk and coke 24/7…
Shit, in Iraq you can’t even be seen with ICE in some neighborhoods! THEY’LL KILL YOU FOR HAVING ICE!!!
Why are we voluntarily associated with people this stupid?
Pat Robertson appears stupid to most of the people who catch him flipping channels, whereas in IRAQ, that same fucker doesn’t even HAVE a TV show and people swear off ice forever because he said so.
Ridiculous stupidity – – – the region is doomed, the masses are ignorant and more apt to cut your head off than let you get away with enjoying ice in your drink. Or if a woman wanted to walk to the market in 110 degree weather without the black hood over her head.
Let’s just leave these simple folk alone and get back to realizing that everyone in the world cannot be saved from themselves, regardless of how many shells you blast off trying to convince them.
A little story…feeling my Abraham Lincoln coming on…when I was on tour in Colorado following Phil Lesh & Friends, the second leg in Vail, we lucked out on my friends knowing someone whose husband’s company had a suite, lots of people, and some were loaded to the point where I saw two of them babbling nonsence at one another and LAUGHING at one another…needed to go back to the place we were renting across town to get our bags or something and I commented to my friend that having to bear witness to that shit was painfull for my head, that it made me question why I became an eagle scout in the first place
Hmmm…that doesn’t make any sense. Ah, yes, the idiots that were getting on my nerves…my friend agreed, but then handed down some wisdom he’d had handed down to him a while back, that, “it’s their tour too”.
See, that’s how people are able to live near one another and not end up killing each other. They tollerate each other, because if they act out, the cops will come out and it will get bad real quick. Probably end up in the local paper.
In Iraq, 20 people…like a government minister and his 10 bodyguards all kidnapped in broad daylight, never heard from again. Family members make a daily trip to the lost and found section of their local morgue in search of a familiar torso…
That can take place and nobody does shit about it. People quip that “war is hell”…and there IS a war going on over there…bad thing for us is we have nothing to do with it at this point.
Politicians constantly blabber about how “if we left now, it would descend into chaos”…right. Shit, if we left, the IRAQI solders could take over the job of raping and killing innocent people, and OUR soldiers could go back to deciding what tattoo to get next.
So Iraq is worth it at this point, but the New York Times are more to blame for the progress we’ve made in the “war on terror” than the actual people in charge of the damned thing!?!?
Next it’ll be the CEO of Apple blaming the fat content in candy bars for a drop in IPOD sales. Maybe Dave Wandstadt will come out of the woodwork in the next couple days and blame his failure in Miami on the cheerleaders. OJ Simpson will give an interview to Geraldo (who only agrees to it on the condition that OJ hold a knife the entire time and Geraldo be allowed to conduct the interview shirtless) and blame the slump in his acting career on the steroid scandal.
This isn’t whether Hagler beat Sugar Ray…as much as the pundits try to make it seem like it is.
Newspapers don’t send the country’s military somewhere – they don’t decide where to bomb – they have nothing to do with who provides services to soldiers in theatre – and they surely aren’t hearing about gang rapes and mass murders committed by our military and looking the other way.
Blaming the media for the decline on morality in America all you want…Abu Gharib and now this wave after wave of attrocities coming out…THESE are the people we cherish most!
Really makes those Army advertisements on TV ring true, doesn’t it? You know, your average patrol, one thing leads to another, and two sergeants, two PFCs and a specialist are gangraping a woman and killing her children. SERGEANTS!!!! TWO OF THEM!!!!
That’s a broken unit, and symptomatic of something horribly wrong. Ask anyone you know about the backbone of a unit and they’ll tell you it’s the NCOs. Obviously there’s a flaw in the system when something like this happens.
It’s time to admit that we’re in over our head.
The Wall Street Journal – whose editorial page is on some days hard to tell from Investors Business Daily’s – breaks the story about our government monitoring SWIFT transactions on their website almost exactally the same time it went up on the Times, same facts…the Journal’s editorial page vilifies the Times, exposing a stark difference between the opinion and news parts of the organization…
How can the right simply buy in to this when facts like these are COMMON KNOWLEDGE?
You got this wrong again. The government didn’t ask the WSJ not to run the story. They asked the NYT first and then the LAT, both of which chose hatred of George Bush over Amercian security.
The NYT was first and foremost the one who screwed the rest of America so this sorrow for the poor NYT is misplaced. They made their bed, they can sleep in it.
That’s bullshit – the WSJournal editors have set the record straight, and both the Journal and the NYTimes had the scoop and posted it within an hour of one another. The LATimes was hours behind.
Right – I’m not comfortable with the government saying to one news outlet “you can print this story” then to another “please don’t”…that’s too much power for the government to have.
For all the talk of a “free market”, what you’re saying here is that the government should treat certain business favorably…so the WSJournal is OK, but the Times is not…kind of like how Halliburton gets its hands all over whatever it desires.
The “track record” argument you put forth here is understandable if it wasn’t politics that determined who got slammed and who got a free pass. That’s not what America has a press for!
The roll of the press in a free society is not to appease whoever’s in power, but to find things out and keep the public informed. I understand that a lot of people would rather not be informed of anything, but that doesn’t make them any more patriotic than I, someone who DOES like to be informed.
To accept a leader’s politics when they denigrate part of what makes America what it is…that’s dangerous. In Russia and Iran you’ll be put in jail, ‘disappeared’, or worse for writing about something the government doesn’t want out.
I suspect that the right-wing in America today would enjoy those systems more than our own. Afterall, what they’re advicating now…the prosecution of reporters…shit, we might as well scrap the stars and stripes and switch to a red flag!
How does this fit into your logic concerning the cartoons of Muhammad? At that point you were criticizing editors for self-censorship, called them cowardly in deciding not to run the cartoon.
As I see it, the right-wing is a perfect example of the snake eating its own tail at this point in US History. Better to just come out and admit that politics determine 100% of what goes on with all this…because during times like this, Republicans don’t seem to know whether they’re coming or going.
Bad thing this Supreme Court decision…what I just stated in the paragraph has everything to do with why the decision was a blow. Why not come out with an attack on the justices? It was appropriate when Terri Shiavo was braindead, but not when we’re dealing with terrorists?
Politics…boy can it turn power into foolishness!
http://www.swift.com/
Uh oh! RT, you’d better call the FBI (and maybe the CIA and the IRS).
Looks like SWIFT has it’s own website. Now the terrorists will be on to the program for sure. God, how SWIFT just loves to hate America.
Not only that, but on their website for YEARS, they have listed as a selling point that they assist nations in the war on terror.
SWIFT is to international banking what a steering wheel is to a car. I’ve developed applications that pull info from it.
Whatever the WSJournal, NYTimes and LATimes allegedly “broke” by running the story, must have been broken when Bush said it himself about 500 times in 2004.
We’re tracking down their money…WHAT COULD THAT MEAN?
Great! Now our very own president has shown that he too HATES AMERICA (or does he just hate himself?)! AGGGHHH!!!
Do the soldiers who raped and murdered the 14 year old Iraqi girl, and then murdered her family, hate America? BTW, if I was an Iraqi, this event alone would be enough for me fight against occupation forces. There is no protection when your protectors are evil criminals.
I’m beginning to see that we really do have a problem with Americans hating America, starting at the very top. I think you’re on to something RT, you’re a true visionary.
What programming language do you use?
That’s bullshit – the WSJournal editors have set the record straight, and both the Journal and the NYTimes had the scoop and posted it within an hour of one another. The LATimes was hours behind.
The Treasury officials is where I get the story from and they are even preparing a report to the intelligence committee to explain the severity of the damage to Congress. They went to the NYT first and then the LAT and both said screw you. There was no point to go to the WSJ since the other two were fine with aiding the enemy.
American Spectator Article
Maybe I should send them the link to the SWIFT site to help speed up their investigation?
I’m curious to hear exactly what damage they think was done. I have a very hard time believing that big-time financiers of terror (foreign terror that is, not U.S. terror) aren’t in the know about SWIFT and it’s ability to monitor international banking transactions.
So by your logic RT, WSJ was OK in aiding the enemy because the NYT and LAT had already provided similar aid? … “I’m innocent, he was already dead when I shot him officer…”
Yea, that makes zero sense. Not to mention the fact that if something illegal happened, it was a government official who leaked it, not the fault of either Times or the Journal for printing it.
Right, this is the snake eating its own tail. I know it\’d be easier to pretend that a double standard is justified when the government deals with the press. It\’d be perfect for those in charge to simply shut down every source of news or entertainment they didn\’t like…
That\’s not America. If it suddenly was the way things were done in America, then democracy has failed, because your point of view matters more than mine even though we both represent only a single vote.
The right-wing wants too much control over the lives of others. Pretending that a single person was killed or injured because of the SWIFT story is ridiculous.
captain – on the program language, I’m not sure…my job was to identify the procedure for finding the correct SWIFT message, pulling from specific fields, then an application would create output that managers would use for something…
You know…SWIFT is a relatively primitive method, the whole idea of it was to create a system where two banks w/ operators speaking in different languages would be able to send information to one another in the common SWIFT language. I always had a laminated cheat sheet beside me to refer to when I didn’t understand a code showing up on a transaction.
If I were a terrorist, working for this bank…I’ve been going over it in my head for a few days, and having that information is usefull for a lot of people, but how a terrorist would use it is beyond me. Terrorists knowing that we monitor SWIFT…as if, these guys put in a day’s work on the battlefield then head back to their comfortable homes to peek in on their stock portfolios…
Ridiculous. For YEARS I’ve been reading in Harpers, WSJournal, other sources, that the money flowing into these organizations arrives in bags…cash.
How SWIFT could track a bag of cash going from Pakistan to Iraq is beyond me.
Simple fact is, nobody in charge understands how to stop these people. We said we’d ‘smoke them out of their holes’…well, they moved to new holes I guess.
My understanding is that terrorist operations are often funded through black market activities (drugs, slave trade, etc.). Heck, Alaska has a $200 million market for marijuana alone (I’m certainly not making a connection between pot and terrorism). But the reality is that tracking bank transfers isn’t going to put a major dent in terrorist tactics. These same terrorist groups have been dodging modern tracking systems for years.
But I really like RTs sentiment that this is simply a case of good old fashioned animosity towards Americans, by Americans, and for Americans.
The news agencies that reported on the raping and murdering of the 14 year old Iraqi girl must really really hate America. I’ve never hated America as much as I hated it this evening while watching CBS news report on the incident which included 6 U.S. Army personnel. And this is just one single KNOWN event.
As a father of a 3 year old girl this single incident is… there aren’t even words for it. I still have a sick feeling in my stomach. I really want to get in a fight right now. Not a healthy thing.
Two sergeants! After McVeigh the army really turned “no nonsense” when it came to psychopaths, racists and the like. The hands of time have been turned back.
Now more countries have nukes and TWO sergeants in the army are leading a gang rape/mass murder…
Sacrifice to the gods perhaps? What religion were these soldiers? Did they misunderstand the whole ‘right and wrong’ concept, or just those times the holyman was going over executions and forced penetration?
Like any organization and/or profession, the Army has its fair share of psychopaths. Richard Ramirez comtemplated joining the USMC to kill people. He didn’t, instead deciding to get his killing fix by breaking into people’s houses and doing it there.
This is what the recruitment process you, adam, HOAT and I went through was set up to weed out. We had a basic training soldier 86’d for using the word ‘nigger’ when he got angry.
Obviously the standards have gone down.
True. I would think that the army could, and did, weed out freaks better than they do now. All about the bodies and the uniforms they fill…
Supply and demand combined with a “Fuck You, where’s my money?” brand of leadership over a number of years.
The result…gangrape and murder while on the clock.
It’s taboo to criticize the military in public, but I could care less…these crimes are disgusting, and the fact that they’ve been covered up is even worse in some ways.
The lives of those who were raped and murdered don’t mean a lot to our government, that’s obvious.