the fishing news

What is it about blokes and big fish that generates such passion?

Moac and I were very distressed by a story in the NZ Herald a few days ago.

An exhausted 18-year-old spearfisherman is admiring what could be a record-setting marlin caught after a 150-minute battle off Great Barrier Island.

Nick Dobbyn speared the 213kg blue marlin after he spotted it “tailing along” on the surface of the water last Saturday afternoon.

“I got ready and we got close to it, about 50-60 metres away. I jumped into the water and swam closer to it when I pulled the trigger. That’s when the war started,” Mr Dobbyn said.

[Marlin drags diver for 3km]

“War”? It’s a fucken-fish. OK, so humans have been at “war” with nature for a very long time. I know that, it’s one of the key beliefs I hold as a Marxist. But this is not a post about the dialectic of nature.

What I actually wondered was: “If I had to choose, would this be a news story?”

I could see the news value, but I could also see the “Nah, this is bollix,” point of view.

BBC & Sky say “No appeal” to Gaza victims

The BBC and Sky TV are continuing to hold the line that broadcasting a humanitarian appeal for aid to help rebuild the Gaza Strip would compromise their journalistic credibility and their ability to objectively report on the Middle East conflict.

Overnight (Kiwi time) a group of protestors staged a sit-in at the BBC HQ in London and burned their TV licences. Meanwhile a group of British MPs is backing a motion in the House of Commons that would attempt to force the BBC to broadcast the appeal.

Meanwhile the appeal has already raised in the vicinity of $NZ 1.6 million.

The refusal of Sky to broadcast the appeal makes some sense, it is, after all, owned by Rupert Murdoch who is very pro-Israel and regularly feted by the Zionist lobby in the USA. Sky, like Fox in the US, is still neo-con in outlook and would never compromise Murdoch’s links with Israel.

However, the BBC case is more nuanced and I’m still struggling with the issue of credibility and compromise.

Murdoch – man who owns the news: My Listener review

I’ve just reviewed Michael Wolff’s new book about Rupert Murdoch, The man who owns the news, for The Listener.

The full version is in this week’s (31 Jan-6 Feb) print edition, it will be available online from 14 February.

Here’s a preview:

Media Master

Rupert Murdoch occupies The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch like a ghost inhabits a graveyard. There’s a chill wind, an earthy odour, a whistling that sounds almost human; but there’s little of the corporeal substance of a real, warm, live body.

You get the sense this is how Murdoch likes it. Always a loner, and determinedly shy as a younger man, he is intensely private, even though his life has been front-page news for half a century. In this rendering, by senior Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Wolff, the mogul’s obvious influence and immense power are evident, but the man, Rupert, seems to shimmer and vanish. He does inhabit a secret world.

The book is pegged on Murdoch’s 2007-08 successful campaign to win control of the Wall Street Journal.

So this interview with Wolff on the Wall Street Journal’s Youtube channel is a curious artifact.

Gaza appeal creates row in UK media

The refusal of the BBC and Sky TV to broadcast a charity appeal for victims of  Israeli ground and air attacks in Gaza earlier this month (Jan 2009), is causing outrage in Britain.

Church leaders and MPs have joined in calls for the BBC and Sky TV to join Channels Four and Five in broadcasting the appeal video, produced by the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC).

The whole fracas raises some very interesting questions about the line between news and advertorial and the editorial independence of news organisations reporting on the controversial conflict between Israel and the Hamas organisation, which controls Gaza and has been firing Qassam rockets into Israeli settlements.

The video is available on the Guardian’s website.

The BBC’s Director-General, wearing his “editor-in-chief” hat, argues that broadcasting the appeal would compromise the organisation’s impartiality in the coverage of an ongoing news story. This seems, at face value to be a persuasive argument.

What will happen to APN?

An interesting report in the UK Guardian media pages yesterday (26 Jan) regarding Tony O’Reilly’s troubled Independent News and Media.

INM is a 39% stakeholder in APN, publishers of the New Zealand Herald. This stake was on the market, but INM has announced that it has given up on finding a buyer at the moment because of the shaky gobal financial system.

Globally the INM group is undertaking a series of cost-cutting measures which have already affected APN’s New Zealand titles, including The Listener, the Herald and a range of suburban titles, such as The Aucklander.

According to a statement issued by INM yesterday (26 Jan) the company is committed to shedding “loss-making” assets, but there is no indication of which parts of the company these might be. In Auckland APN staff must be wondering about their fate too. It seems that, for the moment, they’ve had a repreive.

The group’s UK assets, including the Independent, are also in a state of flux as a merry-go-round of moves in the UK newspaper industry continues. A Russian oligarch and former KGB officer, Alexander Lebedev, was able to buy the London Evening Standard newspaper last week for just one pound, which shows just how much of a crisis there is in news media assets.

Perhaps Mr Lebedev’s British staff will have to follow the example of reporters on his Russian paper, Novoya Gazeta,who have taken to carrying guns since a young journalist, Anastasia Baburova, was murdered in Moscow last week (21 Jan).

Anastasia Baburova, a journalist for the investigative newspaper “Novaya Gazeta”, and leading human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov were shot by a lone gunman after a press conference in Moscow given by Markelov, report the Glasnost Defense Foundation (GDF) and other IFEX members.

Markelov represented the family of Kheda Kungayeva, whose murder led to the first prosecution for the killing of a civilian during the Chechen conflict, is believed to have been the main target. He had just publicly denounced at the conference the release of Kungayeva’s murderer from prison.

Baburova, who reported on the conflict in Chechnya as well as on the activities of neo-Nazi groups in Russia, had attended the press conference and was talking to Markelov outside a Moscow metro station when the gunman opened fire. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Baburova was shot in the head as she tried to prevent the killer from escaping and died a few hours later. [IFEX.org]

Newsy.com launch – A Kiwi in “Mizzourah”

While I was in Columbia, Missouri last September I met Charlotte Bellis, a young woman from Christchurch who’s doing a Masters degree in the Missouri School of Journalism.

Mizzou has an impressive set-up including state-of-the-art media labs.  Of course it helps to have deep pockets and wealthy benefactors. The Reynolds Journalism Institute was launched while I was there and I want one.

I also visited a start-up new media organisation with a difference, Newsy.com.

Charlotte has been hired as the “face” of Newsy which promotes itself as “The News With More Views”. The central idea is to provide short video packages on the major news stories of the day, with some analysis built in.

An interesting view of Capa’s falling man

A Chinese-speaking  blogger and photophile , Alex Ng, has linked to my post about the famous Robert Capa photographs of the falling Republican soldier from 1936/37.

I’ve raised the issue of the veracity of the Spanish Civil War image which purports to show a Republican soldier, identified as Federico Borrell Garcia,  at the moment he is hit by a fascist bullet.

I think there are some unresolved issues here, including the ethics of war reporting.

Alex’s original post is in Chinese and the translation machines just make garble of what is no doubt excellent Chinese prose. So, I won’t insult anyone with a machine translation. Suffice to post this interesting photoshop image, which you can argue over.

The post in Chinese is here: Monologue on Photography.  If any one cares to provide a readable translation, I’d be happy to post it.

I’m not sure that this proves anything. As I have written recently, particularly about the Barbican exhibition which finishes this week, the two falling soldier images seem to be of different men – variations in uniform, particularly the leather webbing, seem to suggest that they are not the same person.

A photoshopped composite of two falling soldiers

Facebook and surveillance: “You can leave your hat on.”

The lesson here is when you’re committing a crime, no matter how hot it gets, keep your balaclava on.

Queenstown police nabbed a burglar after posting security camera images on the internet networking site Facebook of him trying to crack a safe.

Police said it was the country’s first such Facebook arrest and they would use the site again to fight crime.

“Facebook was very handy, and it’s a good little tool,” said Senior Sergeant John Fookes. [NZ Herald]

CNN and BBC reporters enter Gaza

CNN reporter Ben Wedeman crossed into Gaza from Egypt.
Defiance amid destruction

RAFAH, Gaza (CNN) — Bloodshed, fear, privation and anger were all clearly visible in Gaza as we finally managed to enter the territory. Unsurprisingly, there were also displays of fist-shaking defiance, but what I had not expected was the high morale.

The BBC’s Christian Fraser is also in Rafah

…on Friday we finally made it into Gaza to see first-hand the destruction.

Rafah has been pounded throughout this conflict, the Israelis dismantling the network of smuggling tunnels that run beneath the border.

But there is plenty more that has been destroyed, too. [BBC]

Why defending the Palestinians is not anti-semitic

In a recent post – my first on the Israeli’s attacks on Gaza – I mentioned my reluctance to get into the debate because of the tendency of defenders of the State (and territorial borders) of Israel to equate any criticism with anti-semitism.

This is just nonsense, but it strikes a chord because the Zionist propaganda machine has done a good job of guilting us into soft-shoeing criticism of Israel lest we be seen to be being racist, or religiously intolerant.

First of all being Jewish is not a racial thing, secondly not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jewish. Third what part of the phrase “war crime” don’t these people understand?

The logic of the “attacking Zionism is anti-semitic” position is that if you are against the existence of Israel as a geographic and political entity in the Middle East you are of the same political ilk as the Nazis.

Bullshit!