I’m not sure what to think about today’s New York Times story about videos of Americans being attacked and killed in Iraq going onto — and then off of — YouTube. Like Fred Wilson, I believe in free speech and in the notion that more information is always better for democracy than less. On the other hand, I fear that my making these snipers and terrorists video stars, it will only inspire them to kill more; it adds another motive to the crime. And they are video stars already. I was sitting next to Zeyad in a train station this morning (on our way to the Online News Association confab in Washington) and he was surprised that we don’t see these videos; he said they are on Iraqi TV and Al Jazeera every day. If they were seen here, I’m also not sure what the reaction would be. Some would use them to bolster arguments to get out. Others would use them as arguments to fight harder and get these fuckers. In either case, the ones who are being used are the soldiers.
get these fuckers?
Are you kidding?
Remember, we invaded Iraq. We are the offenders here. If someone invaded the US, I’d be an “insurgent” too. I have the guns. Not much of a bomb-maker, but I guess I could learn. I’d kill as many of “them” as possible. Can’t blame them for doing the same to us.
On the other hand, if this were actually a “war,” once again they are fully justified in killing our soldiers. That’s what war is.
Not that you would expect any Republican voters to understand this. They’re too busy pissing their pants because JesusBush tells them to be a-feared of the brown people 6000 miles away.
Problem is, the war ended 3.5 years ago. The easy part was rolling over Iraq with our tanks. There was no Iraqi army.
Now we have an occupation. A badly managed one.
So what do you expect?
(GWB sure knows how to pick on those who can’t defend themselves. Classic bully. No wonder he’s so fond of torture. Frogs, muslims, whetever. Let’s inflict pain for fun!)
Oh boy! A post by Angelos! Let me get out my Moonbat score card.
Let’s see…yada yada yada JesusBush! Check.
Yada yada yada Killing Brown people! Check.
Yada yada yada…aw, shoot! If only you’d included “Amerikkka”, I would have won a free car wash at Mr. Zip.
Try harder next time.
MG, and actual points to make? Any counter-arguments?
I didn’t think so. You wingnuts haven’t aleg to stand on anymore.
Go back to figuring out how to blame all the republican pedophilia on Clinton.
The NYT had a quick turnaround on this “youtube censoring jihadis” story to counter the “youtube censoring anti-jihadis” story from earlier this week. CAIR is apparently using the YouTube flagging process to remove material it finds counter-productive.
I’m not gonna sit here and defend the war, Angelos, and I’m not saying we should have invaded anyone, but if George Bush started murdering and torturing his own people, and another country invaded, I have a feeling you’d be saying that country should “get the fuckers” that support Bush. Am I wrong?
War is pretty hot stuff whether official or not. Here’s the puzzle.
Compare the effect of media on viewers, the broadcast of the Vietnam war versus the Iraq war.
In a republic, for surely we have not elected to live as a democracy, the emperor controls legislature and the press. I was thinking about how I don’t like sports, but everytime I go to a stadium to see the Padres play or a high school football game – I love it. Something get’s twiddled when sports are overcast with “color” commentary, replays emphasize what must be re-examined, and the official stat of the moment all conspire to control how I must see, hear, and feel about – well – reality. Is this a propetyof tv sports broadcastng or is there a vlog opportunity here?
In the Vietnam era, the populace blasted the blessed official media – a well understood property of a democracy. In the Iraq era, the overbearing voices of broadcast, like Fox over news, tell any reasonable citizen to “shut up” – which gets the grin of Napoleon and the ‘yeahs’ of the Napoleonic complex who believe in only themselves absolutely and can no longer see the healthy nature or any value of a conversant body politic.
Probably, BW. OK, so in June of 2003, I would have been happy that the despot running my country was gone. Now, though? When things are actually worse than what they were originally? I’d be killing the occupiers left and right. And trying to get more than 3 hours of electricity a day. And maybe some running water.
But hey, the USofA, in the name of George Dubya Bush, has killed and tortured a shitload of people, mostly innocent ones. I know the wingnuts just can’t process this, or handle the fact that they’ve been proven wrong every step of the way, but things in Afghanistan and Iraq are worse today than they were before, it’s all our doing, and we’re STILL no closer to being safer from terrorism.
And it’s only cost 400 billion to do! Wow. What spectacular failures.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
Notice that nothing was done about Abu Ghraib until the pictures surfaced. Certainly seeing American soldiers shot will turn public opinion against the war faster.
If we are unwilling to let people see what is happening on the ground then does this mean that we are not so sure of the cause they are fighting for?
One of the lessons learned from Vietnam was that views of the war by the public need to be controlled if support is to be maintained (especially in a failing situation). This time the military has not permitted the same degree of coverage.
If the rest of the world sees the images and those in the US don’t than what does that do for our ability to make informed choices?
Robert, the powers that be do not want an informed electorate.
The corporations that own our energy, our media, our medicine, our military, they own America too. They own the Republican Party in its entirety, and a good chunk of the Democrats too.
Our education system is useless by design. Smart ‘merkuns are bad for Republicans, as no right-thinking person could possibly fall for the bullshit and hatred they spew on a daily basis.
Our media is useless by design. And once they destroy net neutrality, a lot of other options will disappear.
Our judicial system is being torn down by design. Ever wonder why Bush never vetoes anything? That would involve political risk. Why veto a popular bill, and risk the embarrassment of being overridden by a supermajority vote, when you can just sign the bill but declare you plan to ignore it anyway? You need a compliant set of judges for that.
Bush-voters don’t want the truth. They need the constant stream of lies, to feel comforted at night. The truth is too scary for them.
Angelos is right! Listen to the man!
I am so embarrassed at your country and wonder why you allow this war against my country to continue. I think it’s a shame that your soldiers are giving their lives — and for what? To bring democracy to Iraq? What a crock! Just look at what Angelos says democracy has done for you — corporations that “own our energy, our media, our medicine, our military, they own America too.”
I think Angelos is on the right track, people. Put yourself in this situation: if people come to your neighborhood and say they’re giving you freedom for the first time, and then you don’t have but three hours of electricity a day, gunfights at night, and then they arrest your cousin because he cut the head off one of their translators (clearly a traitor!), then you, too, would have revenge on these infidels and film their deaths for my Muslim brothers to see.
How dare they invade my country and depose MY president — who got 99 percent of our votes.
How dare they fight foreign fighters from Iran and Syria and Egypt — who only want to help my country better follow Muslim law.
How dare they help train our fathers and brothers as police officers — and indoctrinate them with Western foolishness such as the Miranda rights. And also think they can win us over with electrical plants, schools, etc.
How dare they refuse to give a timeline of their departure, blaming our violence for their reason to remain here. Don’t they understand that our violence is our attempt to get them to leave! How blind can they be?
And yet they spill their blood everyday — mostly due to our clever roadside bombs.
Technically we’re killing fewer of them in recent weeks and killing more of our own people, but that, too, is our attempt to right the wrong that President Bush has done. The people we kill are not innocents because they have not joined our cause to fight the Americans. Until they do, they are traitors, too!
Thank you, Angelos! To borrow your vernacular, somebody in America “gets it.” It is about time.
[...] First there is the video of an Iraqi sniper (caution: this is video contains graphic violence) shooting American Soldiers. This sort of stuff is all over the internet but the New York Times reported on it and the bloggers started responding. Fred Wilson and Jeff Jarvis both commented on it. [...]
The fact is that big media fails to deliver the whole story, just bits and pieces of information that they want us to see, the stuff that makes a good, marketable story around which they can sell advertising. The fact that American soldiers are being attacked and killed in Iraq doesn’t sell corn flakes. Instead, big media gives us the story that they think we want to hear.
With YouTube, we get chunks of information without context. We are free to sample from a large quantity of unsorted data, grabbing a handful of disparate puzzle pieces and attempting to put them together ourselves. While with YouTube might be able to see stuff that big media doesn’t show us, this disected process can only leave us with our imagination to fill in the information gaps, to organize these bits and bytes into a coherent story, a kind of ad hoc newsroom of the mind.
What Jeff doesn’t seem to talk about on Buzzmachine (over the months I’ve been reading) is how both new and old media are unreliable sources of information, that both the real and the virtual newsroom are not lenses, but filters that either intentionally hold back information to craft a coherent story, or atomize the information that we need to construct a semblance of truth.
Because human beings have a hard time dealing with such ambiguity, the only logical future for new media is that it will be subsumed by the old. The media will use its new forms to conform to old media’s storytelling tropes, filtering the real world into digestable stories, narratives, and good vs. evil morality plays. New technology will be grabbed by corporate behemoths who will harness its potential and use it to sell us cornflakes.
[...] Heard about this New York Times story about “Videos showing insurgent attacks against American troops in Iraq … steadily migrated in recent months to popular Internet video-sharing sites, including YouTube and Google Video” via Jeff’s blog entry “War as a reality show“. This is a serious issue that I don’t have an answer for but I think is important enough to think about. Here is an excerpt from NYT, [...]
I just feel for the families, knowing that a video of their loved one being horribly murdered is online somewhere. Maybe we can’t stop some organisation in Iraq putting it on its website. But if I ran YouTube I wouldn’t want to be responsible for making that available. There are some things that really do not need to be seen.
Politics aside: the people who are bent on killing American troops don’t need *further* inspiration. Their desire to attack stems from their own will, not out of some notion of copycat killings based upon what they saw on TV or YouTube.
Politics inclusive: I hate that we sanitize our coverage of war, 9/11, terrorism and the like. But I wouldn’t run snuff films, either.
Ah! Bush’s “daddy” comes through to pull Dubya (and you all) out of the quagmire (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2393750,00.html):
The Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker, the former US secretary of state, is preparing to report after next month’s congressional elections amid signs that sectarian violence and attacks on coalition forces are spiralling out of control. The conflict is claiming the lives of 100 civilians a day and bombings have reached record levels.
The Baker commission has grown increasingly interested in the idea of splitting the Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurdish regions of Iraq as the only alternative to what Baker calls “cutting and running†or “staying the courseâ€.
“The Kurds already effectively have their own area,†said a source close to the group. “The federalisation of Iraq is going to take place one way or another. The challenge for the Iraqis is how to work that through.â€
The only problem? It won’t work!
I’ve been stewing about Jeff’s topic and these posts all weekend. This is a good thread. I think I come down to everything must be available to be seen as it is – beheadings, Beyonce, and sniping. If the weather is bad – we should all see the same thing.
Big Reality TV Shot: Family watching TV shot of twin towers in smoke.
Second Reality TV Shot: Fade from 19 Saudi Arabian hijackers with Osama fade to green flag with the Shahada, or white flag with the Shahada.
(big wind storm)
Third Reality TV Shot: Voice over of Marine author:
The Secret Letter From Iraq
There is another example of media bias that is getting less publicity. Last year the Daily Mirror reported a leaked memo that may have covered a discussion between Blair and Bush about bombing the offices of al-Jazeera. Two people in the UK are being charged under the Official Secrets Act for the leak. Parts of the trial will be in secret. The pre-trial hearing was much better reported in the US media than in the UK. Try searching on “Keogh old bailey” on Google News. Long ago UK print journalists were usually prepared to express opinions about the use of the Official Secrets Act and about trials held in secret. Forms of justice and public information are under challenge from many directions.
Hello,
Just wanted to let you know I linked to your blog in my column on CBSNews.com today. Thanks!
If you want to take a look, here’s the link: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/10/blogophile/main2077011.shtml
Thanks,
Melissa