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).

The fat criminals story is datelined Lima and in the fine print at the bottom of the screen it’s sourced to Associated Press. Surely there’s got to be some skepticism in the newsroom. Even so, the copy screams “whack job”:

A spokesperson for the Criminal Police told a news conference in Lima that the criminal organization which trafficked human fat had been disbanded.

Pictures from a Peruvian police handout video showed police in Huanuco province leading suspects to the spot where they allegedly buried their victims, and unearthing and measuring buried remains.

AP Television cannot independently verify the content of the Peruvian police video or the authenticity of these claims made by Peruvian police.

Julio Castro, Dean of Peru’s Medical College said that human fat had some medical purposes.

“It can be used in implants, but the fat implanted must be that of the same person undergoing the procedure,” he added.

A professor of plastic surgery at the University of Virginia medical school was skeptical when told about the Peruvian ring.

He said he could not see why there would be a black market for fat because in most countries fat can be obtained so readily and in such amounts from people who are willing and ready to donate it.

The major sources quoted in the story  cast doubt on the substance (fat) of the police claims.

My favourite comment comes from this chatroom thread

…if human fat is so valuable, then America could be the world’s biggest supplier — we have the largest supply of this natural resource, and it’s renewable!

Now if we could just refine it into engine fuel . . .

thanks to Jeffrey at The Marmot’s Hole

Yeah, so much for peak oil, some overweight Americans could get healthy and save the planet, one kilojoule at a time. Apparently Peruvian “intermediaries” in Lima were paying up to $US 60,000 a gallon for the human fat.

However, I’m not so sure this could be right. If you read this alleged gang member’s account of how the fat is rendered, it would be well and truly rotten before you could collect anywhere near a gallon.

What an efficient and hygenic way to remove fat from someone. Why would you bother?

While the source here is listed as “suntimes.com”, which is the Chicago Sun Times, I actually downloaded this piece from the citizen journalism “experiment” site NowPublic, which should also be much more careful about its sources and just rehashing agency wire copy.

The story also appeared in the Jakarta Globe, the BBC and on CNN. The CNN story is interesting because some enterprising reporter (possibly an 11-year-old) obviously knows that you have to move a story on if you want to get on in journalism. So this is what they were able to add to the mix:

The suspects told authorities they were paid $15,000 for a liter (about 1 quart) of human fat.

Officials did not disclose what possible use laboratories could have for the human fat, but fat can be a component of cosmetics and is used in reconstructive or cosmetic surgery. The use of human fat for any purpose is extremely rare, however, physicians say.

According to a criminal complaint [police prosecutor] Sanz Quiroz filed November 18, officials discovered on September 22 a small container containing a fat-like substance that had been stored at the Bella Durmiente bus station in Lima, Peru’s capital.

On November 3, the complaint says, suspect Serapio Marcos Veramendi Principe was arrested after he retrieved three bottles from the Estrella Polar bus station. The bottles contained a substance authorities believe is human fat, the complaint says. Lab tests are being performed to determine what the substance is.

That’s all good stuff. A named official source saying it’s a “fat-like” substance and a confession from “suspects”:

Sanz Quiroz acknowledged the uniqueness of the allegations.

“We are not making this up,” he said. “They have confessed to this. That’s what’s coming out now.”

One of the suspects told officials he had been committing the murders for five years.

But then, the CNN story gets really weird, and it again takes on the mysterious qualities of a hoax or urban myth:

Sanz Quiroz referred to the suspects as “brujos,” the Spanish word for witches. He noted that the suspects are part of an Andean mountain culture that believes bodies can be used to ward off evil and prevent disasters.

For example, he said, bodies are often buried at the entrances to mine shafts and bridges in the belief they will keep the structures from collapsing.

Authorities are calling the suspects “pishtacos,” which are Andean mythological creatures.

In his 1996 book “Death in the Andes,” Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa mentions pishtacos extensively, saying they are half-white ghouls who live in caves, lurk along dark isolated roads and suck the fat out of anyone careless enough to travel Andean roads at night. Andean myth holds that the fat is used to make soaps, lubricants, healing potions and cosmetic creams.

So, we have a half-plausible story that uses official sources to back-up what seem, at first glance, to be wildly implausible claims. Then we have an historical reference — albeit to the fictional work of a novelist — that seems to confirm some truth in the story and give in a frisson of extra-weird and then the kicker in the tail of the CNN story — a link to the Nazi Holocaust. Sheeeeeeyyyyyiiiiittt, this has gotta be real!

New York dermatologist Barry Goldman said he had never heard of human fat being sold on the black market.

“The idea that anybody would use an injectable where you didn’t know where it came from would be laughable if it weren’t unethical and potentially dangerous,” he said.

Still, the notion of black market human fat seemed possible to him.

“They steal kidneys, so why not this?” he asked. “It is sick, but in the Holocaust they did use skin for lamps.”

Here it is, affirmation by reference to even more historical and mysterious precedents. You know, the one about waking up in a strange, seedy hotel in an ice bath with painful stitches across your abdomen. Organ harvesting is a $75 million dollar industry worldwide (Yeah, right).

And human skin lamps? Yep, every decent Nazi had one in his or her front room right from the late 1930s until the allies liberated Berlin.

Why do I think this is an urban myth? Well, for a start it’s already made it onto the aggregators. forums and other lower-order internet hangs where these things gestate. Also, it is alleged to have happened deep in the Amazon jungle, so the area’s relatively inaccessible and finally, it is in an area where people regularly disappear because of the cocaine trade.

To me that’s a more likely explanation for any murders that might have been committed and it also explains the existence of the “rudimentary labs” that the police say they found.

In the BBC video report — which certainly gives the story some credibility — the footage was shot by the police and the only source is a cop spokesman. That’s not journalism is sensationalist and gruesome stenography.

To be sure, I don’t know if this is an urban myth, but I think so and I’m willing to bet a litre or two of my own fat on that. You can even come ’round and extract it with a hot candle if you like, though give me $15,000 and I’ll liposuction it into a champagne bottle for you.

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.

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.

[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.

Carlin’s essay is timely because of the contemporaneous crisis in both journalism and the news industry. At conference after conference over the past two years these themes have been dominant. So far, no lasting, sustainable or even solid answers have been put forward; there’s a lot of scrambling about and some good experimental work being done, but to some extent it is excavating only a few layers down from the surface. There are few real attempts to overturn a flawed epistemology, or to construct a new paradigm for journalism scholarship. That’s where the real intersection of journalism and philosophy must lie.

The real question must be: How do we construct a new paradigm; a new philosophical foundation for the study and the practice of journalism? Obviously, teaching some aspects of history, sociology, economics, political economy, cultural and media studies, law and ethics provides some intellectual props to claim a kind of inter-disciplinary “philosophy” of journalism. But, it is not enough to pull together elements from different parts of the academy; there is a burning need for journalists and journalism scholars to solve their own problems. As a doctor of journalism I believe whole-heartedly in the adage: “Physician heal thyself!”

Where I do beg to differ is with Carlin’s prescription for what might be in a course of philosophy for journalism students. His outlined curriculum  doesn’t really seem all that exciting or different and much of it is really a course in ethics, rather than broader philosophical questions:

So I constructed a basic course that examines journalism in the light of philosophical thinking in epistemology, political theory, ethics, and aesthetics, mixing philosophical and journalistic materials and vocabularies. In Part 1, we scrutinize “truth,” “objectivity,” and “fact.” In Part 2, we explore how journalism might fit classic modern theories of the state, including that tradition from Locke to Rawls that largely ignores the “Fourth Estate.” In Part 3, we ponder how what practitioners call “journalistic ethics” fits with broader moral theories such as utilitarianism. In Part 4, we investigate whether journalism can be art or science without overstepping its conceptual bounds. The guiding principle was a variant of Browning: One’s reach should exceed one’s grasp, or what’s a syllabus for?

Most of this – certainly parts 1-3 are consistently taught in most journalism ethics courses in some form or another. My ethics text, Journalism Ethics: Arguments & Cases (co-authored with Professor Roger Patching of Bond University) is founded on these topics and it takes basically a philosophical approach. Arguments & Cases also examines the premise of Part 4 as well; particularly in terms of the problematic construction of journalism as a profession.

So, while I have no real argument with the suggestion that journalism education should have a philosophical component, I do question two aspects:

• Should ‘philosophy of journalism’ be taught by philosophers or doctors of journalism?

I have no hesitation in suggesting that the best people to teach this stuff are the qualified former practitioners who have had time to reflect on their own practice and to absorb some of the best thinking. I don’t necessarily agree that classically-trained philosophers are the best to do this important work. In my experience those outside the community of journalistic practice bring too many intellectual prejudices and pre-c0nceptions to the table.

• What philosophical ideas, approaches and theories are of most value in a journalism curriculum?

Here’s a first take on a ‘Baker’s Dozen’: some quick notes on what I think should be included in any philosophy of journalism discourse:

1. Critical thinking skills: The most important item in a journalist’s toolkit is a functioning and lively brain.
2. Political economy of news production: This is a neglected, but powerful intellectual tradition in journalism studies with real global significance and explanatory power.
3. A critique of professionalism and the sociology of journalism as a form of labour. On any consistent political economy model of journalism it is not a profession — because of the relationship between media labour and media capital. But journalists occupy a contradictory class location which we call “professionalism”.
4. The role of journalists as the “quotidian intellectual” – the intellectual of the everyday and the populariser of arcane ideas (including philosophy): Journalists play a significant role in the explanation of the everyday and the circulation of ideological memes of power, control and resistance.
5. The dialectic of journalism: Moving on from Merrill’s important work on this topic to clearly articulate a material dialectic of journalism that accounts for social relations of news production and the power of social forces (re-focusing on Raymond Williams for example)
6. Critique of the Fourth Estate model: the Fourth Estate is a bastion of bourgeois philosophy — a world view that supports the inequality of class relations in capitalist society. How do we move beyond it?
7. Journalism of engagement: the stand-off observer, versus the committed and activist journalist.
8. The heroes of journalism: Who are they and why? This relates neatly to the previous point. For example John Pilger, Martha Gelhorn, etc, including modern writers and journalists from Hunter Thompson to Robert Fisk.
9. Digital dilemmas: the role of “citizen journalism” (and a solid definition); the tensions between journalism and social media. This would cover the techno-legal and techno-ethical time gap and critique digital determinism as an explanatory method for the current malaise in journalism and the news industry.
10. Ethics: objectivity, balance and bias. Despite 20 years of critical discussion and attempts to bury the curse of objectivity, this debate is not yet resolved and needs to be fully addressed in any philosophical discussion of journalism. The answers are, IMHO, related to the dialectic and particularly the material dialectic that drives social formations in their interactions with the real (natural) world.
11. Ethics: What is the continued relevance of 18th and 19th century philosophers? Seriously, the world is not the 19th century any more and the continued valorisation of Locke, Hume, Mill (both of them), etc is boring, pointless and out-of-date. What the fcuk is a “Wittgenstinian way” of looking at language in the news and why is it still relevant?
12. The epistemology of truth and the relativity of postmodernism: There is a need to actually take on critically all ideas associated with postmodernism and the cultural studies approach to journalism and media studies. This is related to my point about materialist dialectics.If there is a definitive and objective version of truth, it is found in the materiality of social relation and in society’s relationship with the physical world; it is not found in relative perceptions of the truth that have any sort of equal validity.
13. The power and politics of journalism: This has to be more than looking descriptively at the relationship between journalism and the State. it has to unpick and critique this relationship through framing and discourse analysis; political economy etc. The relationship between journalism and centres of political, economic and social power is a key issue for the philosophy of journalism, but it is a material, not an ideal question. The relationship is grounded in political economy and existing/flawed social institutions. To fully explore this we have to start from a very basic question: What is the real nature of democracy and why is it flawed in practice?

There’s perhaps other stuff too to go into this list, but I always have a penchant for the symmetry of 13 items in a list; it gives you more room than in a “Top 10″ and it’s not “round” like a straight dozen. Also, it gives you a good outline for a semester’s worth of study – given that most academic terms are around 12-15 weeks in duration. But again, this is no more than a list of topics to be discussed. What is needed at this point is some organising principle(s) that can unite these problems and issues, or at least suggest a cogent and more philosophical approach.

Some might react by just poking a bit more of the old-school theory in here; a bit more Wittgenstien, perhaps some existentialism, or more on deontology and teleology. That’s what I’ve done in the past, but in rethinking my approach to teaching a course on journalism law and ethics at AUT next year, I have finally realised that I need to move away from this model and go where my instincts have always led me — towards a more holistic approach based on a coherent philosophical approach — the materialist dialectic.

Faultines, philosophy and the material dialectic

In relation to my “9″ above — Digital dilemmas, I rather like this observation from Carlin, which echoes some of my own thinking about those who “breathlessly” imagine a brave new world of social media sans journalists:

We still need our colleges and universities to provide a more classical, full-bloodedly philosophical approach to journalism. If that’s to happen, the welcome move by august universities and media-minded foundations to rethink and reshape journalism education must resist its own faddishness and lack of vision. Too many foundations and universities breathlessly fasten on the bells and whistles of new technology, as if tweets shall save us all, rather than attending to longstanding gaps in journalism education.

But what is a “more classical, full-bloodedly philosophical approach to journalism”? As Carlin suggests at an earlier point in his essay, classical philosophy in the academy is moribund. Carlin writes that philosophy as a discipline is overcome by “historic insularity and inflexibility” and that it “remains less diverse and intellectually adventurous than any of the other humanities”. As I’ve suggested, to fall back on Locke and the bourgeois philosophers would be a huge and limiting mistake. Rather than reproduce these (now ancient) memes, we need to thoroughly critique them and put in their place some new and original thinking.

I always return to the dialectic in these circumstances and I am currently in the process of revising and extending my use of the concept in News 2.0: Can journalism survive the Internet? I have been working on this now for some 12 years, perhaps even a little longer and I’m confident that I’m making some headway.

I’ve touched on the dialectic in journalism as a foundation theoretical/philosophical device  in both Arguments and Cases and Broadcast to Narrowcast. I use it often to talk about “fault lines”, “gaps”, “continua” (continuums?), combined and uneven development and the key contradictions — such as between public and private interests in the news media. It is also a useful way of dealing with technology, without falling back onto determinist arguments.

The foundation document for my work in this area is still John Merrill’s The Dialectic in Journalism. Merrill is an American of libertarian persuasion and his use of the dialectic really begins and ends with Hegel, but this book is perhaps still one of the most philosophical texts about journalism. Merrill is right to speak of “antinomes” in journalism which are really antagonistic couplets; such as “freedom” and “responsibility”, which exist as competing organising principles within the epistemology of journalism.

However, in a materialist sense they are more than just clashing ideals, they are manifest in the social relations that pertain to the organisation of journalism as a labour process and as a set of cultural practices with some significance in bourgeois-liberal social formations.

In other words, not only do “freedom” and “responsibility” clash inside the heads of journalists faced with dilemmas of ethical decision-making; they are also manifest institutionally, economically and politically and embody a range of concrete and unequal power relationships that determine what Bourdieu calls the journalistic field***.

The same is true of the “public” and the “private”, which are not only antinomes (clashing theses) in relation to “public interest” and the ethico-legal paradox of “privacy”, but also in relation to the central economic contradiction expressed in the news commodity form between use value (public interest) and exchange value (expressed in money), which is a private concern within a capitalist political economy.

But this viewpoint is not readily available to an idealistic accounting of the dialectic; it is really only revealed – philosophically speaking – when meshed with materialism and theories of the field:

The field of journalism has a particularity: It is much more dependent on the external forces than any other field of cultural production, such as the field of mathematics, the field of literature, the field of judiciary, the field of science and so forth. It directly depends on the demands of actors outside of the journalistic fields. It is more dependent on the sanction of market and to popularity, probably, than the field of politics. (Bourdieu 1996: 61)

The sanctions of the market are not central to an idealistic account, which sees the issue only in terms of a moot philosophical internal dialogue within the journalist’s brain. It is, however, a concrete and very real situation in which the materiality of social relations — as relations of unequal power between social actors — are very important:

Journalists—I should say the field of journalism—owe their importance in the social world to the fact that they actually monopolize the instruments of production and diffusion of information to a large degree, and through instruments, they also monopolize the access of ordinary people as well as other cultural producers including servants, artists and writers to what was once called “public space”, that is, the ground of diffusion. (Bourdieu 1996: 52)

Thus the monopoly of the instruments of journalistic production (the boundaries of the professional reportorial community) creates the social power of journalists and journalism. But obviously, we have to account for the fact that this monopoly is now breaking down thanks to the rise of what I call “user-generated news-like content”, which includes citizen journalism, blogs, and some social media functions. Thus the dialectic becomes instantly important: How can we understand the shifting balance of power and the dynamic of changing social relations of news production without first understanding the process of combined and uneven development that creates contradictions within the field?

In this case of course, one aspect of the dialectic (as a constellation of social forces acting on each other [combined and uneven development]) is obviously the technologies and platforms that create the social conditions for user-generated content to become influential and to have social power that tends to breakdown the traditional journalistic monopoly over the means of production.

There’s  a further contradiction here too that both field theory and the dialectic of journalism can usefully address: the monopoly over the means of journalistic production (even if under threat/pressure from UGC and social media) is actually shared (unequally) between media practitioners (labourers) and media capital (which owns the actual means of production in a Marxist schema).

The analytical tools to address, understand and move beyond this are not present in formal and traditional philosophy which, IMHO, is no more than a rehashing of bourgeois ideology and apologetics. This inability to move beyond the power relations pertaining to the field of academic philosophy is one reason why it is so rigid, hidebound and unable to meet the tasks set by the digital contradictions of the twenty-first century.

I have no real issue with Carlin’s prescription that “every journalism student” should undertake several courses in journalism theory. Carlin’s suggestions are eminently sensible and go some way to engaging with my Baker’s Dozen:

Every journalism student should be required to take a course in journalism history. It’s essential for young journalists to understand how our peculiar institution developed, and that it is not a natural kind—it can be changed and reformed. Every journalism student should also be required to take a course in “Comparative Journalism,” a flagrant lacuna in the field, to understand that the American model and its issues, which predominate in all American journalism programs, is not the world. Most important, every journalism student should be required to take a course in “Philosophy of Journalism,” to develop the intellectual instincts and reflexes that will make the approach to truth of both practices a permanent part of his or her intellectual makeup.

Now we’ve moved on from one paper to possibly three; maybe they should be sequential through three years of an undergraduate programme. But at the grad school level, if you’re trying to teach non-journalists enough of the basics (from reporting, to shorthand to digital production techniques and some legal/ethical principles) where do you find the room for three philosophy papers?

The problem that I wrestle with in the face of such obviously sensible advice is what do we leave out, or replace? More importantly, at an institutional level I struggle to convince some of my non-journalism colleagues that we need to be given the curriculum space and resources to develop papers in history, comparative journalism and philosophy. Each university school of communication studies and/or journalism is different, but in each case other academics (from various communication disciplines) and administrators are unwilling to make the bold moves that will actually generate the potential for a better journalism curriculum.

You see, there’s even a dialectic in play here — the process of combined and uneven curriculum development, linked to the intertia of the academic field and its inherent resistance to change that might threaten entrenched interests. The third leg of this “triadic movement” as Merrill calls it, is the reluctance of industry to challenge its own preconceptions about what makes a good journalism education.

Why do some senior editors and industry officials continue to priviledge shorthand over philosophy? I think I know the answers, but I am not prepared to commit them to published form; let’s just say, perhaps some old inky-fingered hacks just don’t get it.

*** I am currently revising the manuscript for News 2.0 and it contains a significant section outlining my approach to Bourdieu and field theory. In general I can say that I think it is important and worthy of serious study. It perhaps comes closest to developing the outlines of a new paradigm and epistemology for journalism scholarship. The following would certainly be on my list of recommended reading for anyone serious about this topic:

Benson and Neveu (2004) : Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field

Pierre Bourdieu (1996): On Television and Journalism

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.

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.

Mark Colvin’s speech about Twitter and Iran

ABC News report

Barry Saunders’ blog on Malcolm Turnbull’s presentation

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.

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.

Two brief comments this morning about the Sunday news agenda.

Firstly, why is stuff.co.nz featuring two stories designed to get a rise out of Sunday morning male readers?

One is an inadvertent advert for Penthouse magazine and the other an advertisment for the Gold Coast SuperGP motor racing dressed up as a soft(core) news story.

The news value in these items is miniscule to non-existent. Only one has a local angle (the woman is a Kiwi, but appeared in the “Aussie Babes” pages of the magazine), but the “wow” factor is high — both feature prominent images of scantily-clad young women.

Don’t believe me that they’re adverts? Gentlemen start your engines; ladies, I’m sorry, but trust me, this is for research purposes only:

Topless teacher on Penthouse website
Miss SuperGP Gold Coast golden girl

EM tries to be a family-friendly blog (sometimes), so I’m not linking to the images, anyone over the age of 10 can imagine them from the suggestive headlines.

But this one from nzherald.co.nz is perhaps the most tittylating: Dominatrix tells of ‘bad feelings’

Phhhwhhhoaaaarrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Alas, it too is no more than an advertisment – this time for Metro magazine.

Second point: After all the fuss about British Nationalist Party goon Nick Griffith’s appearance on the BBC, why is stuff.co.nz giving space to our local Nazis?

Far-right leader Kyle Chapman returns

Go figure, it must a slow news day [Labour day long-weekend in Aotearoa]  and sex sells.

Take your pick of editor’s cliched responses; I’m going back to bed.

Actually, I’m not: I’m going whale watching on Hauraki Gulf.

In the meantime, “no platform for fascists”

In science and science fiction there’s a moment when it all goes to custard for the human race. It’s the singularity – often defined as the time when machines begin to out think humans.

We’re not there yet and I’m comfortable with predictions that it might happen 200 years after my demise. But you can never really trust futurist predictions.

We’ve already got smart(ish) bots hurtling around the interWebs chewing up data and spitting it out again in a clickable and commercial form, so I’m not too sanguine about what’s gong on in the DARP labs and other murky salons where “mad” scientists and uber-smart geeks tend to gather.

Anyway, there is evidence of not-so-smart machines out there already aggregating, redacting and posting prose that fills the holes between advertising links on some remote outposts of the blogosphere.

Take, for example, Biginfo, the website with the unbeatable cyber-catchline: “All of your info, on one page”.

Isn’t that the holy grail of the Internet? Isn’t this slogan the absolute bottom-line misison statement for Google?

We won’t need humans any more if Biginfo succeeds.

I  know about Biginfo because the site has linked to a post here at Ethical Martini. As you do, I went to check out why the site was linking and pushing some traffic my way.

This is what I found:

What is More Ethical Blogs or News Media?

20 October, 2009 (15:10) | News And Society | By: admin

// your advertisement goes here

We are chance more and more that readers conceive the aggregation contained in Blogs is more trusty than the indicant programme media. (I don’t conceive a candid comparability between the electronic media and Blogs makes such sense, so my comparability is direct: cursive touchable vs. cursive material.) While I encounter this agitate in ‘believability’ to be somewhat surprising, I staleness adjudge that I don’t conceive I personally undergo anybody that reads the production without a nagging distrustfulness and a taste of doubt. Even more, I move to be astonished at the ontogeny sort of grouping I undergo that do not modify pain to feature the newspaper.

The long post goes on in this vein for some depth. Here’s another of my favourite paras:

I module substance digit appearance on the supply of blogs vs. newspapers. A blogger, aforementioned me, is attractive the instance to indite most an supply that I poverty to indite most and that I see passionately about. Question: so, what most the mortal of ethics? Answer: I do not hit a deadline, I hit no application that is biased, and I modify intend to indite my possess headline!

I am willing to believe that this is a machine-translation of something written in another language (possibly Chinese?) by a blogger or someone and that in it’s original iteration it makes great sense. Also, if it had been translated by a moderately proficient human it would probably also be readable and cogent.

Are we redundant? Should we retreat and leave the web to dribblejaws who find it a convenient medium to feed their conspiracy theories and ugly prejudice?

I certainly hope not, continue reading if you’d like to know more about the singularity.

Convergence culture—a moment of singularity?

Welcome to the brave first decade of the twenty-first century, a decade which will destroy more science fiction futures than any ten year span that preceded it.

Charles Stross, Toast

In an introduction to Toast, his collection of short stories, science fiction writer Charles Stross writes that a “fogbank of accelerating change” seems to “swallow our proximate future”. He also writes that the pace of change in the period from the late 1960s to the present has been faster than at any other time in history. He adds that today “if anything, it’s accelerating” and that technological change is “one-way”. There’s no going back. Stross speculates, as sci-fi writers are encouraged to do, that the world may be heading towards what mathematician and computer scientist Vernor Vinge describes as a “singularity”. He writes: “At the singularity, the rate of change of technology becomes infinite; we can’t predict what lies beyond it” (Stross, 2003, p. 13). For cultural studies theorist Henry Jenkins, this singularity—the birth of convergence culture—is defined by the clash of old and new, particularly in terms of media forms and media platforms. “Contradictions, confusions, and multiple perspectives should be anticipated at a moment of transition where one media paradigm is dying and another is being born”.

In his 2004 novel Singularity Sky, Stross uses the character of Burya Rubenstein—revolutionary leader and journalist—to further define the singularity as “a historical cusp at which the rate of change goes exponential…the suddenly molten fabric of a society held too close to the blowtorch of progress”. For Stross one aspect of a technological singularity is the point at which computer intelligence begins to out think the human brain. According to computing and robotics professors cited by Stross, that juncture is about 25 years away (2035) and “we cannot possibly know what life will be like” once artificial intelligence (AI) gets beyond our ability to control it. To be honest, I’m not sure if Stross is right; there’s no doubt that scientists are working on the concept of artificial intelligence, but can they produce a super-computer with thinking abilities that would be as incomprehensible to us, “as ours are to a dog or a cat”?

We will find out soon enough; but the point here is that I think that Stross is right about the rest of the singularity thesis. This disorienting dialectic (the individual against the world) appears to be predicated on technological change that is constant and seems to be speeding up, following Moore’s law of computing power doubling every 18 months. It is also clear that we are no longer analogue, we are digital and the convergence of computing and communication technologies is almost complete. In that sense perhaps we have already experienced a mini-singularity in terms of technology. Machines are getting smarter, but perhaps not quite in the semi-human AI way. Not yet, anyway.

We’ve been digital now for long enough for it to have far-reaching and non-reversible effects on our lives, the ways we work and relax and many of our cultural norms. We are already talking on a daily basis about the new social values of digital “cyberculture” in terms that media scholar Mark Deuze (2006, p. 63) describes as “an expression of an increasingly individualized society in a globalized world”. News organisations were among the first to embrace convergence, mainly for reasons of business economics, but as Australian journalism scholar Stephen Quinn (2005) observed, it also established a new dialectic—between the commercial expectations of the news capitalists and the aspirations of working journalists. Only one thing was ever certain as convergence culture grew organically from the digital revolution: as Charles Stross writes in Toast: “The future is not going to be like the past any more—not even the near future.”

This is already evident in popular culture, as media sociologists Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis noted; ideas, products, trends, styles and social mores appear to “accelerate their way from the fringe to the mainstream with increasing speed” (2003, p. 7). Media scholar Naren Chitty describes the impact of globalisation on the news media in similar terms. He says that the global and the local are now intimately intertwined in the global economy and through globalising cultural linkages: “Globalization has made the local explode in the global and the global implode on the local” (Chitty, 2000, p. 14). The impact on the global media has also been profound. The managing director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Mark Scott, noted this in his 2009 La Trobe University annual media studies address. Scott said that the media is in a state of “transition and turmoil” and on a “revolutionary road” that has turned the old certainties of the media industry on their head (Scott, 2009):

Daily, doomsayers beat the drums for newspapers, free‐to‐air television, regional media and investigative journalism.

Mark Scott, La Trobe speech 2009

Mark Scott also mentioned the global recession as a major factor in the decline of media advertising revenues and bottoming share prices. The global downturn, he argued, is having “profound effects” on the global business of news and media. The shift has been so sudden and the fall so steep that Scott did not appear hopeful of a significant recovery any time soon. “Executives, particularly those in the newspaper business, wonder whether the good times will ever come back”. Perhaps, at one level, it’s too late because cyberculture turns the mediasphere on its head. It seems there’s no escaping what Deuze refers to as “an emerging value system and set of expectations as particularly expressed in the activities of news and information media makers and users online” (2006, p. 63).

In Burya Rubenstein’s terms, we could argue that globalisation and, more importantly, the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 has “ripped up social systems and economies and ways of thought like an artillery barrage”, a “hard take-off singularity” (Stross, 2004, p. 163). When globalisation and economic crisis is combined with the mini-singularity of digital technologies, we experience the resulting state of profound change as chaos and flux. As Stross has another character say to Burya Rubenstein at a critical point in Singularity Sky: “Talk you of tradition in middle of singularity.”

Well, actually: “Yes!” We have to talk of tradition, because the present and the future, are products of historical events and forces; the basic elements of convergence culture have been present in our world for most of the twentieth century—the telephone, the television and (in the last 80 years at least) the computer. So we should not be surprised by the strength of convergence culture, it is the culmination of historically situated processes that have percolated through the filter of combined and uneven development for nearly a century. It is an uneven process in that there is not one form of digital culture that sits snugly across all social formations, nor across all individuals and groups within one particular social formation.

We are all familiar with the term digital divide that signifies those with good access to the Internet and other digital technologies on one side and those with little or no access on the other. According to global statistics for Internet penetration, as of June 2008 less than a quarter of the world’s population has access to the web. The highest penetrations are North America (73 per cent) and Europe (51 per cent); the lowest Africa at 6.7 per cent (Internet World Stats, 2009). As Deuze reminds us there is no linear progression from analogue to digital, nor is digital culture necessarily an improvement on the analogue past.

American media scholar Robert McChesney also talks in terms that resemble Stross’ “singularity”; he argues that globally the communication industry, journalism and even the very democratic fabric of society has reached a “critical juncture”. This juncture—to some degree a product of the “communication and information revolution”—has a number of possible outcomes. Either, McChesney argues (2007, p. 1), it can be “a glorious new chapter in our history”, or “we may speak of it despondently, measuring what we have lost”, or “we may end up somewhere in between”. For some it’s a bright future of “life-streaming”, the practice of uploading everything you see and do to a social networking site to share with the world; for others it is a bleak future of surveillance and a total lack of privacy. There will also be economic winners and losers, for this the nature of global capitalism.

We can never know the future with any certainty and according to a former director of The Institute for the Future, Roy Amara, we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. This has become known as Amara’s Law and it reflects the dialectic of tensions and contradictions that run through our understanding of digital technologies: what Deuze (2006, p. 66) calls the “scrambled, manipulated, and converged” mediasphere. It is reasonable to assume that we have, perhaps, passed through a technological and economic singularity in the era of digital globalisation.

We are no longer living in an analogue world; though present social systems do retain elements of the analogue. Our digital world is still emergent—it is not yet fully-formed—but we can be certain that the digital dominates and that there’s no turning back the clock. As another utopian visionary wrote 150 years ago:

“All that is established melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man [sic] is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind,” (The Communist Manifesto).