BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

May 27, 2003

You want to talk media bias?
: Dateline: Baghdad:

The director-general of the controversial Arab satellite television, Al Jazeera, has been sacked, a spokesman for the channel has confirmed.
His dismissal follows allegations he worked with Saddam Hussein's intelligence services.

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Dialogue
: Pedram replies to my post below replying to his post about Iran, Iraq, Israel, and America. See also the spirited comments in both places.
I won't respond to Pedram's response; it's late and after a heated charity trustees meeting, my brain is done to a crisp.
But I will make one important point and note it well:

Here is a discussion about the hottest hotbed of issues on earth: the Middle East. It comes from an Iranian and an American -- two peoples who have not, let's be honest, trusted each other for decades. The discussion is passionate and pointed and honest.
Yet the discussion is also almost entirely respectful and civilized.
That beats what you'd hear on the street here or there, or on editorial pages across the world, or in the seats of power, or in the U.N. And -- pardon me for turning this into another damned self-referential blog about blogging -- but I think this is to the credit of weblogs as an medium. Weblogs are interactive -- moreso by far than print or broadcast -- but in a more civilized way than, say, forums and that's because we all own and care for our little corners of this world. I have my little plot of media land and I ask you to respect it as you ask me to respect yours. And so what could turn into a flame war -- or, in the real world, a real war -- instead becomes an effort to find some understanding or at least education.
No, weblogs are not going to bring us world peace and harmony. You can put away your tapes of It's a Small, Small World and the Coke song.
But weblogs across the world can create bridges and in this world, that's something.
And that -- to continue my neverending plug -- is why I want to see weblogs in Iraq, so they, too, can build bridges.

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A happy ending
: Will at A Minute Longer reports from a mission to pick up truckloads of mail for our soldiers in Doha. The story has two happy endings -- first, getting past a bureacratic lieutenant and then:

The happy ending came on the drive home. Matt was riding shotgun, and a civilian SUV pulls up alongside us with a female driver and 5 girls, the oldest one around 12 and the youngest maybe 6. Matt is an incorrigible flirt, and those little girls didn’t mind waving and pointing and giggling when he started making funny faces and goofing off. It was the first time I’ve seen anyone local to this place smile, and the fact that the mom driving the SUV slowed down so the kids could play along was a good sign. Maybe the next generation won’t grow up hating Americans, thinking that we’re devils and warmongers. Maybe the next generation will remember that we’ve all got little kids in us, and we’re just looking for a reason to goof-off and play. That the real reason we came over here was so that little kids can be little kids, and grown ups can let their kids grow up safe.

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Women in Iran
: Steppenwolf, an Iranian blogger, gives just three examples of the issues facing women in Iran today.

: Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the Times of London reports:

RELIGIOUS police in part of Pakistan have been granted authority to enforce harsh Islamic laws that have been modelled on those imposed by the Taleban in Afghanistan.
Since a United States-led coalition toppled the Taleban regime, thousands of Islamic fundamentalists have crossed the Afghan border to find refuge in North West Frontier Province in Pakistan.The area, which is under the control of the Islamic alliance, has now begun to look more like Afghanistan under the Taleban than a part of Pakistan.

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The Internet returns to Iraq
: Glenn Reynolds points me to this story about efforts to bring the Internet back to Iraq. Next: Weblogs, lots and lots of weblogs.

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Wieners
: David Weinberger got to Vienna and got the sillies.

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The terrorists are coming! The terrorists are coming!
: Mike Wendland reports today on Priceline founder Jay Walker's brain dingleberry to put web cams on power plants and other criticial facilities so nosy web watchers can keep an eye out for evil masked men approaching to blow them up. Sign up here.
But...
How can you tell on a crappy web cam that somebody's suspicious or merely dressed like a union worker?
And by the time you see this suspicious person and notify somebody, isn't the plant probably already a smoking pile or rubble?
And if the bad guy can find the cam, can't he put bubblegum in the lense or hack it to show old episodes of Gilligan's Island?
And won't authorities be besieged by calls from crackpots like Gladys Kravitz spying on Elizabeth Montgomery? (That's a Bewitched reference, my children.)
This sounds like a remake of the remake of The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!

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The hawks on the net go bomb, bomb, bomb
bomb, bomb, bomb
bomb, bomb, bomb.
The hawks on the net ask what is next?
Let's bomb Ira'an
: That's my contribution to the new Open Brackets song:

The Lefties on the web go yikes, yikes, yikes,
what the f++k;
guilt, guilt, guilt.
The Lefties on the web go yikes, yikes, yikes,
all through the strife.

The browsers on the web say upgrade me,
flash, pop, crash,
404.
The browsers on the web say upgrade me,
Every other day.

And a contribution from a reader there:

The blogs on the web go me, me, me,
My witty remarks,
and my views on tee vee.
The blogs on the web go me, me, me,
the sucking you hear is their vacuum.

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A camera, a blog, and a guy with a story to tell
: See what a guy with a camera can do when he has a web page (and no paper to pay for): Michael Totten gives us a tour of premodern, modern, and postmodern Portland architecture, including the ugliest building he's ever seen (which means he hasn't seen Jersey City).

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All the news that's fit to print about all the news that's fit to print
: Having someone else do your reporting for you -- which is how Rick Bragg wrote a story from a Florida town without spending much time there -- is hardly a new or scandalous behavior in the news biz.
Every reporter you see on TV has a producer doing legwork aplenty -- and often even conducting the interviews (with the TV star edited in later).
The newsmagazines have armies of correspondents getting the facts for the stories written in New York (and whenever an editor wants to know something that's not there, they put a blank in the story -- a "TK" -- that is filled in by a researcher).
What Rick Bragg did was no cause for suspension or the sliming of his career. Says Bragg: "Those things are common at the paper. Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants." And not just at the Times but everywhere in the business.

: If there's justice or taste in the publishing business (you're welcome for the straight line) no one will buy the book written by stinking liar Jayson Blair. It will have absolutely no credibility. But Times-haters will buy it and quote it and so someone will publish it.
Read Howard Kurtz' weekend story about the book proposal to see just how far up the ass a human head can go.

Blair says of Malvo, the alleged triggerman in some of the Washington-area sniper murders last fall: "The moment I began to see parallels between his life and mine was the moment things began falling apart." He writes of "how the frustrations of black men in this world can explode, crescendo into a huge rage that can manifest itself in some odd and sometimes unclear ways."
In the proposal, which was read to The Washington Post by a source not connected to Blair, the 27-year-old admits that he "really screwed up," "distorted the truth" and "embarrassed the New York Times and myself." But the dominant motif is one of anger -- hurling unsubstantiated charges of racism at the paper and promising to reveal the Times's "darkest secrets," which he says, without offering evidence, involve drug parties and one editor's affair with an intern.
Blair casts his story as one of "a young black man" told he would never succeed "by everyone from his white second-grade teacher to his editor at the Times, who rose from the fields and got a place in the master's house and then burned it down the only way he knew how."

He doesn't just play the race card. He plays the race casino. So black rage is an excuse for lying, cheating, sliming, and sleazing (and by extension to Malvo: murder)? No, there's no excuse for what he did. None.

: UPDATE: Late-breaking opinions..... Reading my comments on this post, I have a few responses..... I'm not saying that it's right not to credit stringer and other lowly souls. I'm saying that it is done everywhere and thus it's wrong to treat Bragg as if it is a sudden sin he just invented. It's not. It's standard practice. Whether or not it should be standard practice is an entirely different argument. But it's one in which Bragg should not be caught in the middle.... I need a copy editor to fix that last sentence..... Gawd, I miss writing with dots..... Stop me.....

: And on bylines: As I was saying to Elizabeth Spiers at lunch today... Andnow that she's a hot media property, that's quality name-dropping... Anyway, as I was saying today and now I'm obnoxiously quoting myself.... My own mother used to tell me about stories she'd just read in the Chicago Tribune and I used to have to say, "Yeah, Ma, I know, I wrote that." Reporters' own mothers don't notice their bylines. Thus, nobody else in the world could possibly give a rat's rump about Rick Bragg's byline....

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