Have an ethical holiday

I’m a level 7 aetheist so I don’t get all worked up over Christmas, though my MOAC insists on a tree. After 14 years of marriage, I am happy to indulge. When we first met, she often said “I hate Christmas,” mainly because of unhappy memories. We are happy to hide small gifts under the tree and spend a couple of hours opening them. Mostly they are from the catses and of little value.

So most years we just bunker down, lock the doors and open the champagne. This year, for the first time in Auckland, we are able to get some Queensland banana prawns so an ethicalmartinihouseholdtradition has been reinstated.

However, I do like a summer holiday; “just me and you, for a week or two”.

So before we roast a chicken and open presents, a well deserved break from  all things work-related, including EM. We’re flying out tonight and I won’t be back till early January.

Have a safe and ethical holiday, including a liberal helping of whatever floats your boat.

cheers,

EM

Through a (Media) Lens darkly – Newspeak review part 2

“Not only is journalistic ‘objectivity’
impossible, the attempt to achieve
it is morally abhorrent.”

Newspeak in the 21st Century, p.239.

This deserves some attention and discussion, it’s tempting to just go “Yep,”, but if I sleep on it, I might be more considered in my response. The rest of the book drifts off into a …weird and existential Buddhism, it loses me at that point.

I just needed to put this in as a place-holder. I’m into the last chapter and will come back to this post later.

The first part of the review is posted here.

Another semi-canibalistic hoax? Lima fat gangs

I kid you not, this story appeared this week on the CBS news website. Perhaps they’ve got a nine-year-old kid sitting in the chief reporter’s chair. Anyway, as of today they had not taken this story down.

LIMA, Peru, Nov. 21, 2009

A Peruvian Black Market in Human Fat?

Medical Experts Dispute Lima Police Claims That Gang Murdered Victims, Drained Fat From Bodies to Sell to Cosmetic Makers

Yep, the lead says it all really, but still CBS decided it was worth running this garbage as if it could some how be credible.

It has all the hallmarks of an urban myth and is the same sort of hoax as Baby Herbal Soup (been there, done that, it’s all over).

Graduates take a social media tour – the immediate future of journalism?

Two graduating students from AUT’s journalism programme are traveling up and down (mostly up) New Zealand filing stories, video, photos and blogs for the New Zealand Herald website.

Andrew Hughes and Olivia Wix on tour

Olivia Wix and Andrew Hughes were selected to undertake the three week summer tour with a focus on the job market for young people and graduating students.

This is an interesting experiment for the nzherald.co.nz that involves Andrew and Olivia in doing their own VJ work, tweeting and posting updates to Facebook as well as to the news website.

It’s one of the first serious attempts to harness social networking and social media in the New Zealand news market and I don’t know if it will lead to full-time work for Olivia and Andrew, but it could be a harbinger of how journalism graduates might have to work in the future.

Of course, I don’t want to over-sell it and many of my graduating 2009 class are working already in more traditional journalism jobs in local newspapers up and down the nation; in radio and television newsrooms and in trade and niche publications. Though I have noticed a growing number of online-focused positions becoming available, both within the MSM and in smaller publishing houses.

Stuff.co.nz — the online portal for all of the Fairfax papers in New Zealand is in the process of hiring a social media editor for its Wellington newsroom. This is following the lead of several overseas publications, including the New York Times.

One of my 2009 graduating students, Jess Harkins is campaigning hard for this job. “Good luck, Jess”.

On one level hiring cheap young graduates to travel around the country by bus to file quick stories might be seen as a cynical marketing ploy to scrabble back some of the Gen Y audience that has all but deserted newspapers in favour of social media. However,  but you could also defend it as a smart move that not only opens up this demographic and reaches out to them in their own space and language, but one that also creates opportunities for new story ideas, sources and leads to find their way into the news mix.

You can follow Andrew and Olivia from their first Herald story, but also on Twitter and Facebook.

Newspeak in the 21st century – Media Lens and angry analysis

I’m currently reading a great book on the British media by the two guys behind Media Lens, David Edwards and David Cromwell.

Newspeak in the 21st Century is an angry, but analytical, and very damning report about the state of the British media and the soft-left, liberal veneer that coats the ugly conservative heart of the mainstream press and, it has to be said, the BBC.

The take-away message and one that I’m going to come back to in some detail when I’ve finished the book and have the time to write a good review is a simple one that’s going to offend some people, perhaps even some of my friends, but it has to be said.

Journalists like to invoke the mantra and the ideal belief that their job is to serve the public interest and that they best do this by holding the powerful to account. However, despite the best intentions of the best and the brightest, this rarely, if ever, really happens.

It is a powerful myth that liberal news outlets like The Guardian and the BBC are fighting the establishment. They’re not. Rather, the establishment media is all about propping up the establishment and propogating the lies that keep the system going. Like the lie that Israel is under attack and only acts in self-defence; or like the lie that Iraq had WMDs.

Newspeak in the 21st Century makes this very clear through a thorough content analysis of many of the key stories of the past 10 years or so; from the NATO bombing of Serbia in retaliation for alleged human rights abuses in Kosovo; through the whole lying and deceitful charade of the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to Israel’s continuing aggression in Gaza to the beat up of Iranian nuclear weapons programmes.

The unfortunate truth is that the news media is complicit in keeping the truth from us, rather than exposing the lies at the heart of the system.

Two brief quotes for now:

Journalists have been demonising other countries for so long, it seems they cannot stop. Always it is the 1930s; always Hitler is plotting our destruction always we need to recoil in fear, disgust and horror. Is this the real world? Or is it journalism as pathology? (p.160)

This is the perfect link between Newspeak in the 21st Century and Orwell’s 1984.

For the mainstream media, an opinion barely exists if it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter if it is not voiced by people who matter. The full range of opinion, then, represents the full range of power. In that sense the mainstream media is balanced. (p.161)

Finally, Edwards and Cromwell talk about “state capitalism” and they don’t mean Russia and the USSR pre-1989. They’re talking about the system we inhabit today as a global economy. I will return to this as well, because I think they’re right about that too.

Philosophers and journalists – unlikely bedfellows? Bourdieu in the house!

[Thanks Jess for the link]

An interesting, if a little obtuse piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week about the fractious relationship between philosophy and journalism. I was struck most immediately by this paragraph, which IMHO sums up the situation reasonably well:

Still, broadly speaking, we need philosophers who understand how epistemology and the establishment of truth claims function in the real world outside seminars and journals—the role of recognized authorities, of decision, of conscious intersubjective setting of standards. And we need journalists who scrutinize and question not just government officials, PR releases, and leaked documents, but their own preconceptions about every aspect of their business. We need journalists who think about how many examples are required to assert a generalization, what the role of the press ought to be in the state, how the boundaries of words are fixed or indeterminate in Wittgensteinian ways, and how their daily practice does or does not resemble art or science.

Carlin Romano, We need ‘Philosophy of Journalism’

There’s another key statement in Carlin’s piece that I also identify with quite strongly. Here he’s talking about the insoluble and necessary link between journalistic and philosophical modes of thinking:

I’ve always insisted to the philosophy students that journalistic thinking enhances philosophical work by connecting it to a less artificial method of establishing truth claims than exists in philosophical literature. I’ve always stressed to journalism students that a philosophical angle of mind—strictness in relating evidence and argument to claims, respectful skepticism toward tradition and belief, sensitivity to tautology, synoptic judgment—makes one a better reporter.

There is no doubt for me that journalism is — at it’s core — an intellectual pursuit that has a high public interest attached to it. There is a necessary couplet between journalism as a practice and theories of democratic public discourse. It is an imperfect linkage — one that’s distorted by the ideological contortions of logic necessary to justify capitalism as a social formation and the dismal science of economics as some sort of rational explanation for human behaviour and human nature (both of which I utterly reject).

This is a long post, so you might want to print it off and read at your leisure. I am keen to discuss Carlin Romano’s timely essay, but also to further explore my own thinking in relation to what I regard as a core philosophical approach to journalism scholarship — the use of the dialectic as an organising and analytical tool to understand the social relations of news production in the widest sense.

Picking on Robert Capa – why now George?

Conservative US columnist George  F Will is syndicated from the Washington Post to lots of other newspapers and online portals. In a column this week George (belatedly) stumbles upon the news that a Spanish historian has demonstrated that Robert Capa’s famous “falling man”, or “falling soldier” or “death of a Republican” photograph from the Spanish Civil War is probably fake.

of course, news from nowhere (ie: anywhere outside the US) does tend to circulate slowly in the American media, but I can’t believe that George F Will was really just scratching around for a space filler when he happened on the Capa story and decided it would be a good shovel for bashing “leftists” over the head.

His audience certainly caught the dog-whistle implications over at the Houston Chronicle – obviously not a bastion of liberal journalistic values. I would think that a similar audience is probably regularly reading Mr Will’s missives at RealClearPolitics too. where it appeared under the astonishingly original headline A picture can lie. I’m not sure about the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, no comments have been posted there yet.

Anyway, the DTH does provide a link to George’s email, so I’ve sent him a note asking where he got the inspiration from to write this column, how much he gets paid for recycling this stuff and if he actually knows the name of the “Spanish professor” who has worked so hard to debunk the Capa “falling soldier” myth.

But, perhaps he doesn’t care, because the purpose of the column is really for Mr Will to fume at the awful leftists and postmodernists who have been defending Capa’s reputation:

Capa was a man of the left and “Falling Soldier” helped to alarm the world about fascism rampant. But noble purposes do not validate misrepresentations. Richard Whelan, Capa’s biographer, calls it “trivializing” to insist on knowing whether this photo actually shows a soldier mortally wounded. Whelan says “the picture’s greatness actually lies in its symbolic implications, not in its literal accuracy.”

Rubbish. The picture’s greatness evaporates if its veracity is fictitious.

You see, this was a news story four months ago in July when professor Susperregui actually released the details of his study:

At any rate, that’s where it stood until this July, when the ICP gallery show of This Is War! opened in Spain. With that came articles in Spanish newspapers and then British newspapers (summarized on the Web in the States here and on the BBC Web site here), revealing research by José Manuel Susperregui showing the picture was not taken at Cerro Muriano but Espejo, even farther from the front than previously thought. “Capa photographed his soldier at a location where there was no fighting,” the Spanish paper El Periodico said. It “demonstrates that the death was not real.”

Bruce Young, National Press Photographer’s Association

I had seen the Capa/Taro exhibition, This Is War! in London and basically outlined the exact same arguments in a blogpost  dated 1st November. So Mr Will is a year late on this one. The story was in the New York Times on 17 August this year, and you can read it in The cave of  Montesinos.

Updating #media140 day two under way

An update from the Media140 conference in Sydney where I’ve been for the past two days.

Interesting ideas and discussion and for me very pleasing to see that some journalists and media organisations  actually get “it”, without going overboard to claim that journalism is dead – but doesn’t know it’s a corpse – in the way that many social media evangelists twitter on about.

This is just a holding post with some highlights and a link to Jay Rosen’s speaking notes.

Jay Rosen is a professor at NYU and one of the world’s leading social media evangelists (IMHO). He’s just about to start on a feed via Skype, so I’ll be back with a review when he’s finished.

Rebooting the News System in the Age of Social Media

Here are the ten key ideas I plan to share with the Media140/Sydney conference underway right now in Sydney, Australia. I will be speaking to the conference via Skype in a few hours.  The theme of the event is “the future of journalism in the social media age.”  These ten Twitter-able ideas are my contribution to that puzzle.

1. Audience atomization has been overcome. (Link)

2. Open systems don’t work like closed systems. (Link)

3. The sources go direct.  (Dave Winer)

4. When the people formerly known as the audience use the press tools they have to inform one another— that’s citizen journalism. (Link)

5. “There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” (Clay Shirky)

6. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” (Jeff Jarvis)

7. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” (John Wanamaker)

8. “Here’s where we’re coming from’ is more likely to be trusted than the View from Nowhere. (Link)

9. The hybrid forms will be the strongest forms. (Link)

10. “My readers know more than I do.” (Dan Gillmor)

Bonus notion: You gotta grok it before you can rock it. (Link)

 

Media140  Blog – background on conference & upcoming events

Mark Colvin’s speech about Twitter and Iran

ABC News report

Barry Saunders’ blog on Malcolm Turnbull’s presentation

Some interesting thoughts on social media for legacy giants

I’m at #media140 in Sydney, the keynote this morning was ABC managing director Mark Scott. He outlined some interesting innovations for legacy media wanting to get on the Twitterverse bandwagon.

 

He started with the 4Ts: Telegraph, Telephone, Typewriter, Twitter. An interesting geneaology of communications technologies.

Scott noted that the 4Ts have always been about short, sharp reports of breaking news; particularly the generation of good headlines. He talked about how the ABC is moving quickly to embrace social media with the appointment of a coordinator of social media to formalise the ABC’s presence across all social networking sites.

The ABC is also today releasing its guidelines for staff using social media. The four guiding principles are really about brand protection and like the NYT are designed not to give guidance for journalists using social media as  tool, but more about social media as a distribution network:

1. Don’t mix professional and personal social media views in a way that will bring the ABC into disrepute
2. Don’t undermine your effectiveness as work
3. Don’t imply ABC endorsement for personal views
4. Do not disclose confidential information

Nothing here about journalistic ethics.

Scott made a good point about sharing information and allowing audiences to distribute ABC content. Setting up a number of widgets for people to embed on Facebook and blogs etc is obviously good business sense.

The ABC’s also launching ABC Open as a “digital town square” and part of this is training UGC providers in 50 locations to generate content.

This is the pro-am model and as Scott mentioned there has to be journalistic leadership, but also recognising that the audience is often closer to the story – at least in the initial stages.

The catchphrases are collaboration; conversation, communication and partnerships.

More later when I’ve had time to digest this and get my hands on some more notes.

Julie Posetti also argued that this is a revolution, not a war, but no doubt there will be casualties.

Michael Laws – self-praising dribblejaws

Thanks to Jess for alerting me to this.

Whanganui Mayor and inveterate loudmouth bully Michael Laws is at it again. This time he’s outrageously demanding the the “underclass” be sterilised.

This was the kind of ethnic cleansing policy followed by the Nazis in the 1930s and look where that got us. It’s also a popular battle cry amongst modern fascists of the BNP and White Power varieties.

But who is Laws speaking for? He as asked to define underclass by a Dominion Post reporter and this was his reply:

“A group of people who have no stake in our society, who are certainly welfare dependent, who have alcohol and drug problems and usually are criminals or consort with criminals.”

This to me could just as easily describe a bunch of Auckland property developers, wastrel socialites and finance company executives.

I’ve always felt that there’s a huge conflict of interest between Laws’ role as mayor of a major New Zealand city and his constant yabbering on the radio and in the Sunday papers.

Take this gem – Laws explaining why there are so few female executives:

Because feminism has allowed us to have our cake and eat it too. We get the sassy, sexually liberated sheilas who fulfil body and mind. But they also pull the ambition pin when their hormones kick in and they want kids.

And men do know women’s guilty secret. That they like being maternal, no matter how many letters after their name.

Why it’s great to be a guy [like Michael Laws]

Though, I do like this piece of honest self-reflction from the dribblejaws enthusiast:

READERS WILL appreciate that I’m not a particularly “deep” person. I am my gender, and despite the occasional philosopher or mystic, we males are a superficial lot. Which explains the eternal attraction of the bimbo with boobs.

Organ strife dead wrong

In this piece, about why it’s right to be an organ donor, Laws calls Maori party co-leader Tariana Turia a “racist” and then gets onto one of his favourite hobby-horses “special treatment” for Maori and Pasifika communities:

Cultural silliness from Maori and Pacific Island folk, that there’s something inherently righteous about going to the grave with all your God-given bits. And yet they are first in the queue to accept organs when required.

And the dog-whistle one-liner that follows like a stinking turd of a punchline:

There must be times when New Zealanders get bold enough to challenge the superstitious or silly excesses of other cultures.

That’s right Maori  and Pacific Island “folk” [condescending ass] you are NOT New Zealanders. Go figure, you were here first and whupped whitey’s ass in a war, but you are not of this place. And Laws thinks Ms Turia is a racist. This really is the spotless white kettle calling the pot “brown”.

Laws is the champion of not heeding his own advice. This from a recent column:

ALL MEN have fantasies. I’d like to write “all men and women”, but I’m being PC this week. I am excluding any satire/humour/mocking of any group that is not white, middle-aged, male and middle-class.

Behind every weak man is a successful Amazon

What a [Rodney] Hide this man’s got. First, his columns are rarely funny and there’s no discernable satire. and Laws is the first to attack the wobbly concept of “PC” – notice it’s our enemies, not our friends who refer to us this way. This is one of those dreadul “Shit, I’ve got a deadline and nothing to write about” columns where the panic-stricken writer falls back on family and friends and mocks loved ones. A crime against column-writing and a waste of space in any newspaper.

Another such effort surfaced around the annual boobs-on-bikes parade when Laws sought intellectual justification for his sordid pervy peculiarities:

It is sleazy, noisy and attracts every adolescent oink within 50km. But, gee, it’s fun. Heterosexual men love it because it allows a man to do what a man does best - to ogle the unobtainable.

Boobs

Even when he’s praising a woman – his choices are pretty feral – he can’t resist the ogle factor:

I’VE NEVER known what to make of Christine Rankin. She is not simply a polarising personality (thus drawing my instant empathy), but she has this unique style. All legs and cleavage.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate legs and cleavage: dear Lord, I’m a middle-aged heterosexual male. Appreciation is about all you get to do. And there are obviously some men in the public service who got to perv at much closer proximity.

Christine Rankin’s a champion

That’s enough. I could go on, but the truth this Michael Laws has not contributed anything to the advancement of Kiwi culture through his columns. He’s a loud-mouth who delights in offending. I suppose you could argue he’s the consumate “shock-jock”, others might say he’s a simple wanker.

It’s time to retire Mike, you’re boring us to tears.