Baby herbal soup — A professor of philosophy fooled by the hoax

Important update

On 14 July Professor Thomas removed his post citing the Seoul Times, after I wrote to him pointing out that the baby herbal soup meme is a hoax.

I’d like to thank Professor Thomas for acting promptly on this matter.

EM
——————————————————-

I really thought that the whole “baby herbal soup” hoax had been put to death. I haven’t had to come back to this racist Internet meme for sometime, but unfortunately, I have discovered a rather alarming version of the story being repeated and used by a professor of philosophy from a respected American university.

Yes, that’s right, a professor of philosophy is relying on the fake and highly racist story that Chinese people eat aborted fetuses to make an argument about the morality of abortion.

According to his CV, Professor Laurence Thomas has been a tenured professor at Syracuse University since 1989. Indeed he is listed as faculty on the University website.

Professor Laurence Thomas has linked to the discredited Seoul Times article — only one version of the so-called “news” report — in order to attack what he dismissively describes as the “liberal” view of abortion.

Here’s just a small sample from this 2009 blog post:

Professor Laurence Thomas, Syracuse University

Animal flesh is eaten all the time; and since the human fetus is claimed by liberals not to be a person, then why cannot it not be eaten as a form of animal flesh? My raising this question is not an indication of my having become a morally demented individual.

Rather, I have raised the question because precisely what has been reported in the Seoul Times (9 June 2009) is that in China the human fetus is being served as a form of nourishment. The article claims that in China baby herbal soup is held to “increase overall health and stamina and the power of sexual performance in particular”.

Now, the observation that I wish to make is the liberals on abortion are in no position to criticize the practice in China of consuming the human fetus for food. Why? Because liberals on abortion insist that the fetus does not constitute a human being, and so has no moral standing at all as a human being. By this line of reasoning, eating a human fetus can be no more morally objectionable than eating dog or snake or horse or snails.

 

Professor Thomas has included one of the notorious images that often accompany the retelling of the hoax. I have pointed out before that these images are the work of Chinese performance artist Zhu Yu and are not evidence that Chinese people prepare and consume “baby herbal soup”.

I have posted a full list or URLs to previous Ethical Martini posts on this topic, you can read all about it there.

I have written to Professor Thomas asking that he either take down the post, or at least edit it to acknowledge that the Seoul Times story and other so-called “evidence” of the practice of eating babies are false and malicious.

If you visit the Moral Health blog where Professor Thomas writes his argument you will instantly see why it is important that this hoax be exposed at every opportunity. Idiots and racists of low intelligence (two overlapping but separate groups of dribblejaws and willful fools) jump on these expressions of the hoax to spout all kinds of filth about Chinese people.

 

 

Dear Professor Thomas,
I am writing in relation to a post you wrote on a blog called Moral Health

Real Baby Soup in China: Extending the Liberal View on Abortion?

The post uses an article from the Seoul Times as the basis for a long treatise on abortion and the “eating” of a human fetus.
While I have no quibble with you having strong views about abortion — indeed I hold similarly strong views myself on abortion and a number of topics — I do take issue with you using as your main source material a purported news article from an online source that has little or no credibility.

Your article generated a lot of responses and continues to garner hits and views. Indeed I was drawn to your post by a ping back to my own blog.
I believe that you should take down this post, or at least make several large edits to clarify the real situation.
The “baby herbal soup” meme is an internet hoax and as a professor of philosophy, I am sure you would not want to base an argument on a false premise.

I have been chasing down this internet hoax myself for the past six or more years and there is no credible source for the outrageous and frankly racist claim that Chinese people consume aborted fetuses.
You can follow my research and discussion from the following URLs.
https://ethicalmartini.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/baby-herbal-soup/
https://ethicalmartini.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/baby-herbal-soup-update/
https://ethicalmartini.wordpress.com/tag/baby-herbal-soup/
https://ethicalmartini.wordpress.com/2011/04/02/april-fools-continue-to-poison-the-web-baby-herbal-soup-redux/
https://ethicalmartini.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/baby-herbal-soup-the-internet-for-sick-fcks/

It would be helpful if you, as a respected academic, would join me in condemning this cruel hoax and you can start by examining the post you wrote and, as I suggest, take it down or edit it to acknowledge the hoax.

I hope you can find the time to respond to me, unlike the editors of the Seoul Times whose only response when I wrote to them was abuse.

Best wishes
Martin

I await Professor Thomas’ response. If you wish to join my call for Professor Thomas to take down or amend this blog post, you can contact him yourself via the following links:

Email: lthomas@maxwell.syr.edu
College of  Arts & Sciences,
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY 13244
Phone: 315-443-5824
Phone: 315-443-2245

2011 – just like 1984: social media and social control

I’ve had a good holiday and now I’m back in the tower and it’s a grey, rainy and windy lunchtime in Auckland. I can see the groundworks of our new building from here and the miserable weather is not affecting the builders. They’re out there sinking pillars into the ground for the foundations.

There are 10 cranes currently deployed and half-a-dozen trucks. I won’t bother with a photo today, but later this week, I’ll take a couple.

Thanks to my mate Gary in London, I have just this morning come to grips once again with Ethical Martini.

A lot’s happened over the antipodean summer, floods of “biblical” proportions that some take to be a sign; northern Africa is hotting up with protests; wild weather closing aiports across the US and Europe and this all on the back of an amazing flow of unrest across Europe throughout 2010. Maybe there’s something going on.

It seems that the security services seem to think so.

There’s an amazing story out of the UK about police infiltration of the British Greens. It’s a mind-boggling plot and a sinister reminder that we do indeed live in a surveillance society.

Simon Jenkins writes in the Guardian that a secret and semi-private police security unit [APCO] is infiltrating political groups and acting as agents provocateur:

A culture of perpetual fear has become so ingrained in government that nobody dares question any spending to which the word security can be attached. Last month these same agencies gave Britons their annual Christmas present, a day of planted headlines screaming, “al-Qaida threat to Christmas shopping”. It capped a year of “cuts threat to child protection” and “cuts threat to Olympic safety”. The only consequence of the Christmas stories would have been to scare people off going shopping. They must cost London shops millions in lost or deflected sales.

It seems this elite group is beyond any judicial or political control and runs as a semi-autonomous business. Isn’t this how death squads operate?

It trades on its own account, generating revenue by selling data from the police national computer for £70 an item (cost of retrieval, 60p). It owns an estate of 80 flats in central London.

This is amazing, privately on-selling data on protesters and others at a huge mark-up and then investing that money in illegal spying operations against activists. What a great business model — the surveillance economy — in full-swing.

The other story of note that Gary alerted me to is the US government demanding access to an Icelandic politician’s Twitter account to assist its investigation of Wikileaks.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an MP for the Movement in Iceland, revealed last week that the US justice department had asked Twitter to hand over her information. The US authorities are trying to build a criminal case against the website after its huge leaks of classified US information.

“[It is] very serious that a foreign state, the United States, demands such personal information of an Icelandic person, an elected official,” the interior minister, Ogmundur Jonasson, told Icelandic broadcaster RUV. “This is even more serious when put [in] perspective and concerns freedom of speech and people’s freedom in general,” he added.

The article by Dominic Rushe of the Guardian, also raises concerns that the Justice department might also be seeking information from Google, Facebook and other social networking sites to rope in Wikileaks’ contributors and supporters.

The surveillance power of social networks is now being exposed. I’ve long felt that this issue was under reported and not really taken seriously by proponents of social media evangelism.

These technologies can be easily turned into tools of social control and that’s what seems to be happening. We’ve been aware of it in China for some time and thankfully Chinese activists and pro-democracy groups are finding their way around some of the blocks.

It is the telescreen from 1984. Orwell foresaw the two-way nature of these applications and how they could be used to ferret out dissidents and to quash unrest.

Winston is painfully aware of the telescreen, which is both a receiver and transmitter at the same time. It incessantly relays messages from the Party and simultaneously allows the dreaded “thought police” to tune into the activities of any individual at any given time. The administration is divided among four Ministries- the Ministry of Truth, which deals with news, entertainment, education and fine arts, the Ministry of Love which maintains law and order, the Ministry of Peace which wages war and the Ministry of Plenty which handles economic affairs. The very vocabulary of the people was under Party Control; a system called “newspeak” was encouraged. One of the most dreaded words in the arsenal of Newspeak was the most heinous offence according to the Party – that of “thoughtcrime” which was sure to be punished by the Thought police. [summary from the Literature Network]

‘Thoughtcrime’, we commit it every day. Social networks are the new telescreen and in this case Western governments and many others I’m sure, are actively gathering data from social media to use for political and security means.

How long before we’re all branded as potential terror suspects?

So, I’m really grateful that Wikileaks is around and that Gary sent me another great piece about how Wikileaks is being slandered and subject to a constant, well-funded black-ops propaganda campaign by the US and other governments.

Glenn Greenwald’s piece in Salon canvases a range of important issues here, including freedom of speech and the hypocrisy of the US government over its treatment of Wikileaks and the newspapers that published extracts from the cables.

More importantly perhaps, Greenwald makes the point that it is the nature of the relationship between Wikileaks and its newspaper and media partners which really tells the story:

…there is a full-scale government/media campaign to demonize the group through outright fiction of the type that sold the nation on Iraq’s WMD stockpiles and Al Qaeda alliance.  The undeniable truth from the start is that, with very few exceptions, WikiLeaks has only been publishing those cables which its newspaper partners first publish (and WikiLeaks thereafter publishes the cables with the redactions applied by those papers).  This judicious editorial process — in which WikiLeaks largely relies on the editorial judgment of these newspapers for what to release — was detailed more than a month ago by the Associated Press.

This is fascinating and I’ve not seen it explained anywhere else. It is a great move on Wikileaks’ part and shows a level of integrity that the MSM does not often apply, as Greenwald points out in relation to the Guardian‘s own treatment of this story.

The Orwellian undertones that link these three recent events are clear enough; the question is what do we do about it?

I’m certainly going to be mulling on this over the next few months and it’s a theme I will return to over the year.

For now though, if you still need a bit of holiday mood as you ease into the year, or if you’re cut off by wild weather, snow, floods or other natural disasters, you might contemplate a bit of reading.

May I suggest two downloadable and free sci-fi novels by Cory Doctorow.

These two books capture the mood I was trying to invoke here. The dialectic between pessimism and optimism in relation to the political realities of earth circa the ‘new 20s’

Little Brother [download for free]

For the win [download for free]

Little Brother is a great story of surveillance and resistance against ‘homeland security’; For the win is about how we might make revolution today.

Both are excellent.

News 2.0 : journalism, wikileaks and beyond the fourth estate

It’s not every day that you attend a book launch. It’s a once-or-twice moment to launch a book you’ve actually written.

Today, 16 December 2010 on a pissing-down evening in Auckland is one of those moments for me.

Today is roughly – give or take a week here and there – also an anniversary of sorts. In January 2007 I started here and this is the end of my fourth year at AUT.

More of that later, but first I should probably think about answering the inevitable question I will be asked about the book: “Do you think journalism can survive the Internet?”

So far I’ve usually responded with a qualified “Yes.” Almost a “Yes, but…”

As The Beat tell us: “It’s cards on the table time.”

My considered, thoughtful answer now is: “Journalism must survive.”

The bigger issues are really What? How and Why?

What sort of journalism will survive, or thrive on the Internet?

How will it survive – what changes will finally shape the journalism of the immediate, proximate and distant futures?

And finally: Why should journalism survive when it seemingly has low levels of public trust and it is economically in trouble?

Journalism is too important for the social fabric and the public sphere to be allowed to disappear, because of the Internet, or in spite of it.

The demand for journalism is strong — all sorts of news and news-like information is consumed around the clock by audiences around the world and across many platforms.

It seems obvious that news is a human need. The circulation of news and information is crucial to so much of our daily life; from simple things like weather forecasts and news headlines to more complex decision-influencing interactions with media: taste recommendations, tribal and communal affiliations, social, cultural and political allegiances.

In short, news and journalism contribute to our global world view. Many of these insights, reports and analyses might be partial. Some will appear biased or advocacy-based rather than ‘news’ and some will make our blood boil; but they inform, educate and entertain.

Journalism and journalists have a proud history of – under the right circumstances – speaking truth to power. At the same time, it is criticised for being too close to power. There’s a contradiction in that couplet. This fault line is expressed in many ways:

• journalists and news represent the fourth estate, based on bourgeois ideals of freedom of expression, rights and democratic representation
• the Internet represents a new ‘fifth estate’ or sorts that is more democratic, or at least should be outside of traditional media structures and systems of control
• the news industry is the free market of ideas where the value of an idea can be measured by commercial success
• #wikileaks is the new journalism – or a threat to national security
• easy access to user-generated content means that the MSM is becoming irrelevant in many peoples’ lives
• social media and digital technologies will kill newspapers sooner rather than later and television eventually
• journalism is a mirror reflecting society back to itself
• journalists and news cannot be trusted to always tell the unvarnished truth
• news is compromised by ideological values that support the status quo
• twitter beats the MSM for speed, but has a low signal to noise ratio
• journalists are caught in an ethical minefield because of the contradictions
• the spin doctors are in control – journalism is just churnalism
• commercial speech is chewing up the space free speech used to occupy in the public sphere
• which business model is going to work best?

Funnily enough, enough of these common sense insights are true – or, put another way – there’s enough partial truth in these ideas to formulate a greater understanding.

I try to capture some of this in News 2.0 and argue that journalism can survive the Internet. More precisely journalism and the Internet will get on just fine. What’s less clear for me at the moment is the future of professional journalism versus amateur or alternative models; the stability of the industrial news model; and what Rupert Murdoch might do next if and/or when the paywalls fail or succeed.

I am encouraged by experiments in crowd-sourcing and collaborations.

I believe in and will fight for good investigative journalism

I want to encourage greater democratic input to news and journalism and to empower the people we formerly called the audience.

I also want to celebrate and invigorate the fighting, democratic and committed journalism of my heroes, past and present.

I actually got to celebrate my book moment in a different way earlier today. I had a long chat with National Radio’s Mediawatch producer Colin Peacock about #twitdef, which I covered recently. You might recall the incident when a senior News Ltd editor threatened to sue a hackademic blogger reporting on a journalism education conference in Sydney.

Twitdef and The Australian

A week in the Twitterverse

#posettigate as it became known in tweets raised interesting questions about tweeting and blogging and when someone might be considered to be a journalist and able to claim privilege for fair reporting of someone else’s potentially damaging comments.

Did it count in Julie Posetti’s favour that she has been a serious MSM journalist and can claim an understanding of the rules? Did Julie in fact stop being a journalist when she became a full-time educator and academic? She may well argue that she hasn’t given up journalism and I would be among many journalism educators that feel the same way.

Journalists are people like us – trained, schooled in newsrooms, perhaps even university-educated; but at heart a reporter, a ‘newshound’.

Most of us hackademics like to think we still think like hard-nosed journalists; we still have some good news instincts and we ‘get’ journalism.

But we also bring something else to the mix; a fresh(ish) and more distanced, nuanced perspective. We don’t just ‘do’ journalism, or ‘teach’ it; we think it and analyse is and many of us question it too. To some extent, we are now outside journalism, but looking intently inwards.

For the most part our intentions are honourable.

We love journalism and we actually like lots of actual journalists.

We love news and believe in its powers for both good and evil

But do we really know what journalism is today?

This is the question at the heart of the contradictions I’ve been talking about.

You will notice now that I haven’t defined journalism really. Except towards the end where I describe people like me.

I am acutely aware that this is only one definition today.

Seismic shifts in technology and in the social relations of news production have rattled the foundations of the fourth estate and wikileaks is just another example of ongoing after-shocks.

I end my book by arguing we have to move beyond the fourth estate conception of journalism and news in order to save both as areas of professional and intellectual practice.

I’ve begun to look to Gramsci and the history of public intellectuals for some possible clues.

But that’s a project for next time.

A quick update on my movements

I am at the Journalism Education Association (Australia) conference for the rest of this week.

I’m doing a presentation about a postgraduate teaching and learning project called Values Exchange.

VX is the brainchild of my AUT Colleague Professor David Seedhouse. It is a multipurpose collective tool of critical analysis, discussion and reflection. It is eminently suited to a study of ethics and philosophy.

David and I have developed a journalism-friendly version of the tool – with some gentle tweaking of the back end. It now also has a robust reporting system built-in that allows users to examine each discussion in detail.

One of the VX journalism ethics case studies

This online case study-based analysis and blog site proved very popular and effective.

It ran for the first time is 2010 with 33 postgrad students in journalism, public relations and communication studies in the School of Communication Studies at AUT University.

I taught this paper with my colleague Dr Allison Oosterman in 1st semester.

Values Exchanged – JEAA presentation @slideshare

News 2.0 set to launch.

The other news is that News 2.0: Can journalism survive the Internet? is available in small numbers. The bulk order is now shipping from the publisher.

You can see the table of contents and order a copy from Allen & Unwin.

The launch will be at JEAA on Thursday 25 November at a 10.00am morning tea. If you are in Sydney, I’m sure you can find the venue at UTS.

Alan Knight, professor of journalism at UTS will do the honours at the launch and he has written the first review at his Online Journalism blog. We recorded a brief interview as well. I’m sure you can hear me sipping my way through a Sunday evening steady-reckoner,  nibbling on cocktail onions and olives.

Alan said very nice things about the book

Hirst’s new book, News 2.0, asks whether journalism can survive the internet? His brief is broad and his arguments impeccable. But ultimately he provides only qualified answers.

 

News 2.0 Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Convergence, journalism + News 2.0
Chapter 2: Why is journalism in crisis?
Chapter 3: Globalisation and the crisis in journalism
Chapter 4: The end of the mainstream?
Chapter 5: Is this the end of journalism?
Chapter 6: Journalism in the age of YouTube
Chapter 7: We’re all journalists now. Or are we?
Chapter 8: Never mind the quality, feel the rush!
Chapter 9: Networks, Indymedia and the journalism field
Chapter 10: Who pays the messenger(s)?
Chapter 11: Can journalism survive the Internet?

Not all bloggers still live with mum…blogging is not (citizen) journalism

So much has been happening with Henrygate over the past week or so that I missed this outrageous speech by the BBC’s senior reporter Andrew Marr:

“A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people,” he told the Cheltenham Literary Festival. “OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk”.

Who’dathunk Whaleoil (not that he’s a drunk) would have such a following in ‘Ol Blighty?

Is that a cauliflower you're wearing Mr Marr?

Sure the slightly seedy, bald[ing], cauliflower-nosed older gentleman that is Andrew Marr is entitled to his jaundiced view of bloggers, but in terms of over-generalising and stereotyping, his comment is A-grade nonsense.

A number of others have pointed this out, suggesting that criticising bloggers is soooo 2005, for example.

And Roy Greenslade writes that that Marr’s rant against ranting is nothing more than the ranting of an angry ranter and very one-dimensional. It’s also important to emphasise, as Krishnan Guru Murthy does, the two-way nature of media now – the news conversation – that blogging allows. It is also fairly common today that  many MSM journalists also blog

However, what Marr’s critics seem to have missed is his more casual association of blogging with so-called ‘citizen journalism: “Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all.”

Well that might be the case, but to conflate blogging with an ill-defined notion of citizen journalism is lazy and inadequate.

In News 2.0 I have intiated a discussion of citizen journalism that argues that it is often used without any real definitional rigour – despite the now famous aphorism from NYU’s Jay Rosen that citizen journalism is the people formerly known as the audience armed with digital cameras and wifi.

It’s a cool idea and snappy, but Rosen’s casual definition is not enough. I think citizen journalism is a sub-category of what I call user-generated news-like content (UGNC). Citizen journalism has to be motivated by and driven by the word ‘citizen’ – that is there is some underlying purpose of citizenship attached to the news-like content. It also has to have a journalistic form.

I don’tjust mean an inverted pyramid, but it has to look like and smell like news.

Yes, the news form is shifting and the lines of the reportorial community are blurring, but there is still some point to putting boundaries around the production of information for public consumption that has the form of news and/or journalism.

User-generated news-like content is broader than poiltically-informed citizen journalism and encompasses eye-witness video or still images that are tweeted (Janis Krums’ Hudson river twitpics for example, or even video from the 2009 Iranian elections). But it is not journalism in this eyewitness form, it is unprocessed news-like information, but it has not undergone any of the formal labour that turn into a journalistic product and therefore ‘news’.

The famous Janis Krums tweet about the Hudson river plane crash

What Janis Krums did is not journalism, not even citizen journalism; it is a tweet from a digitally-enabled eye-witness.

It is, at best what we might call ‘accidental journalism’.

This information is not ‘news’ when Janis Krums tweets it; it is only news when it begins to circulate through news channels.

And it’s true that the number and type of news channels is expanding. News is now available via all forms of social media and casual UGNC can be circulated outside of established news channels, but we should not mix up these forms.

It seems to me that we too often do conflate eye-witness, accidental journalism and UGNC with citizen journalism. I also disagree with Marr’s dismissive view of these alternative forms of UGNC:

“…the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.

“It is fantastic at times but it is not going to replace journalism.” [Andrew Marr’s speech]

WhatMarr does here is mix up UGNC and blogging with this loosely-defined category of citizen journalism, and while it might serve his argument, it does not add to or clarify any real debate about what’s going on.

We have to separate these forms of UGNC  into analytically sound and clear definitional categories in order to fully explain and understand what’s happening to journalism today. It’s true that these forms won’t replace journalism, as Marr suggests, but they may well be incorporated, monetized, commercialised and de-radicalised.

Citizen journalism is important, in its political form it represents a challenge to the status quo and to the dominance of the MSM. As Chris Atton and James Hamilton point out in their book Alternative Journalism, much of citizen journalism is motivated by a distrust of the MSM and is in opposition to the values of the mainstream.

I have already critically reviewed Alternative Journalism, so won’t go over all the arguments again here, but one quote from my previous post on this topic is worth mentioning:

It seems that alternative modes of address in journalism – radical, questioning journalism – have had little, if any, real impact on capitalist hegemony. Of course they have, at least around the margins. Today we see further attempts at incorporation, as Atton and Hamilton point out – blogs are now mainstream and embedded in most commercial news websites.

[EM What is alternative journalism? July 13, 2009]

The key point is that blogs are now fairly mainstream. So too is user-generated news-like content. As I point out in News 2.0, the true inheritors of the Indymedia model of D-I-Y reportage are now outlets such as CNN’s iReport, or the bloggy-news aggregator/comment sites like Huffington Post or The Daily Beast. These sites are not established as a form of citizen journalism, they are commercial, reliant on aggregation from the MSM and on well-known middle-of-the-road celebrities from the established commentariat. What’s alternative about that?

The industrial-media-complex is not going to lie down and let citizen journalism, UGNC or ‘alternative’ journalism  amortize the eyeballs without a fight. As Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and other bloggy-news sites show, there is still an income stream to be had from monetizing the clickstream.

Perhaps this is best exemplified by rumours of a possible merger between the Daily Beast and the almost dead MSM brand Newsweek.

Media capital knows that to survive it must adapt, beg, borrow and steal and why not start by trading on the business models of successful online brands. As David Carr blogged earlier this week, the divide between mainstream news outlets, bloggy-news and broadcasting is breaking down:

More and more, the dichotomy between mainstream media and digital media is a false one. Formerly clear bright lines are being erased all over the place. Open up Gawker, CNN, NPR and The Wall Street Journal on an iPad and tell me without looking at the name which is a blog, a television brand, a radio network, a newspaper. They all have text, links, video and pictures. The new frame around content is changing how people see and interact with the picture in the middle.

[A vanishing journalistic divide, NYT October 10. 2010]

But it would be a mistake to confuse this with ‘citizen journalism’, or even ‘alternative journalism’. In fact it is the process of combined and uneven development in capitalism at work. The digital dialectic which sees the powerful media capitalists colonizing what used to be an alternative and liminal space in pursuit of surplus value and profits.

For the MSM moving into blogging, bloggy-news and online branding is just good business.

BTW: News 2.0 is at the printers and will be available in about 4-6 weeks. Don’t worry, you won’t miss it; I’ll be hawing it like mad.

Conceptually Mr Slater, you’re done like a large oily whale

I have some personal sympathy for WhaleOil, he’s a fellow blogger and despite his sometimes wild and blunt accusations, he is doing what he believes in. I disagree profoundly with his right-wing politics, but I hate to see someone prosecuted for their opinions.

Having said that, I’m not at all surprised that Cameron Slater was today found guilty on eight charges of breaching suppression orders. He knows he did it; we know he did it and now Judge David Harvey in the Auckland District Court has found the police case proven and fined Cameron just under $8000.

He might call it a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket, but it’s nonetheless a hefty whack of cash.

While the guilty verdict is not surprising, what might be more curious is the reasoning and the implications in Judge Harvey’s decision.

For now I want to draw your attention to this paragraph:

Conceptually a blog is no different from any other form of mass media communication especially since it involves the internet which anyone who has an internet connection is able to access. It fulfils the concept of publishing and publication. It makes information available to a wider audience. That is why people blog. Although a blog may be no more than a personal diary or may contain expressions of opinion it is no different from a private citizen who gives an account together with his or her opinion of a court case including the name of a person who is subject to an order under s. 140 and posts it into private letterboxes or pastes it up on a billboard for all to see. It is publication. It is made to a wide audience. It goes beyond a private conversation over the telephone or, a coffee table or at a dinner party. It is the mass media element that accompanies the internet that places the blog within the same conceptual framework as any other form of mass media publication. Even if the blog were to be accessible by means of subscription with a login and a password it could well in my view be subject to the same constraints.

The idea that a blog is ‘conceptually’ ‘no different’ from ‘any other form of mass media communication’ is interesting and probably true on some levels. But on other, fundamental levels, it is very much ‘old media’ thinking.

Blogs are definitely not the same conceptually as the mass media – at least that is the view of the digital utopians and spruikers. It is certainly a live debate and it’s not settled yet.

Blogs were established as an alternative and counter to what many saw as the conservatism and ideological straight jacket that envelops the mainstream news system; so one could argue that conceptually they are very different beasts.

Take this alternative conception as one example. It’s from New York professor of media Clay Shirky. He’s a spruiker and I don’t always agree with him, but this is a good statement of the differences in conceptualising of blogs and other user-generated media:

[The] ability to speak publicly and to pool our capabilities is so different from what we’re used to that we have to rethink the basic concept of meda: its not just something we consume, it’s something we use.. As a result, many of our previously stable concepts about media are now coming unglued.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age. New York: The Penguin Press. Clay‘s blogs

I know Cameron Slater sees himself on the front lines of those ungluing these previously stable concepts, but I’m not sure he’s on the right track here.

The key element in today’s decision is that for all intents and purposes blogs and bloggers are subject to the same legal constraints as the MSM – at least when it comes to issues such as what’s in the Crimes Act. Name suppression is covered by s139 and s140 of the Act and in Cameron’s case have been held to be absolutely applicable.

I’m not sure any other decision was really possible in this case. If you want to act like the media and have your say then I suppose to some degree you have to play by the rules. The judgment probably puts a little more pressure on the government to respond to the Law Commission report on regulation of the Internet, but it is not IMHO really out of the park in terms of reasonableness (based on what the law actually  is).

Judge Harvey obviously takes his role very seriously; he’s delivered a 70 page judgment that is going to take some careful analysis over the next few days and weeks.

You can view the judgment Police v Slater on Scribd

It is probably too early to tell, but today’s judgment could perhaps have a chilling effect on whatever passes for freedom of expression in the blogosphere; or it could just add the the vast piles of paper and PDFs in circulation.

There’s a good summary of the judge’s comments in court today on Stuff.co.nz and a later story from the NZ Herald which suggests Slater may appeal on the advice of his lawyer.

This line from Judge Harvey is also significant, in relation to Slater’s claim that the server for his blog is in the USA:

publication of information takes place where the material is downloaded and comprehended

This seems straightforward and it is consistent with the landmark case in this area; the famous Joe Guttnick decision in the Victorian Supreme Court and on appeal to the Australian High Court. In fact, Judge Harvey referred directly to this judgment in his ruling. He went on to write:

The reality of the situation therefore is that Mr Slater’s blog is available free of charge to internet users in New Zealand who may and do access it from time to time and therefore publication takes place in New Zealand.

Fair cop, I’d say…unfortunately for Mr Slater. He may appeal, but that could be costly too.

Slater’s defence seemed to rely on semantics to some degree, but when it comes down to a legal argument based on dictionary definitions (no matter how varied), it’s not much of an argument. In this case a report or an account was held to be any form or narrative and commentary or opinion, not necessarily a direct report of events in court.

Without wishing to engage in a battle of the Dictionaries, the online version of the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary gives the noun account as its 16th meaning. A particular statement or narrative of an event or thing; a relation, report, or description and report.

The erudite Judge Harvey seems to have one the battle of the dictionaries, after all, it is his courtroom: No trumping the judge!

The Judge also made an interesting aside in relation to the Bill of Rights and limitations to the freedom of expression. It should come as no surprise that there are limits to freedom of expression and that not breaching suppression orders is one of them:

My conclusion is that the limitation is indeed justified. It is quite clear both from a reading of the Bill of Rights Act, the authorities that have been cited and indeed the underlying provisions of the International Convention on Civil and Political rights that the rights are not absolute and are subject to restrictions based on other rights which must be taken into account.

Yep, that’s what the legal system’s for. It’s a system and therefore it has checks and balances and always a loophole that allows the system to protect itself from unreasonable challenges based on vague documents and sentiments like a Bill of Rights.

Finally, what about the idea that Whaleoil is a crusader for the rights of victims? This notion is based on the premise that the suppression laws to which he objects are themselves misguided or wrong. According to this logic, Cameron Slater is a crusader using civil disobedience against an unjust law (see comment from Chris Gale below).

But, are the suppression laws actually unjust? Do they really ‘protect’ criminals? Well no, they don’t. Under s139 suppression is related to the protection of victims of sexual crimes, there are other provisions under s140 about hardship and justice.

The idea that the laws protect criminals only exists within the context of punishment as revenge and is a form of vigilantism that is misguided and ultimately dangerous. The ‘stupidity of the horde’ is one way of looking at it. It is populist and dangerous and ultimately a threat to democracy, not a path to righteous peoples’ power.

When is a citizen not a journalist? Court decision clear on blogger

Oh poor neglected blog. I haven’t updated EM for a week or so. I think my writing juices were used up in the final push to get the News 2.0 manuscript off to the publisher. It’s gone and this weekend I thought, “toe in the water Marty.”

And this bit of news is too “good” to miss out on. A court in New Jersey has made a landmark decision that may well help us to better define the concept of citizen journalist.

In a decision that attempts to better define who is protected by New Jersey’s shield law, the court said Shellee Hale’s writings about Too Much Media LLC, which supplies software to online pornography websites, amounted to nothing more than a letter-to-the-editor in a newspaper.

[Blogger not pro]

Well, well. I wonder what NYU professor journalism Jay Rosen – famously the author of the quip about the people formerly known as audience will say about this?

When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.

[Jay Rosen, PressThink]

In News 2.0 I actually go to some length to nail down the whole Cit J thing because I believe that the term is tossed around without any really solid definition beyond what Jay Rosen has offered. I contrast that view with the idea that to be a citizen journalist, one has to actually be engaged in an act of politically or ideologically-motivated citizenship.

Otherwise, you might really only be an amateur, an eye-witness or an accidental reporter. My take is that all of those categories – including citizen journalists – can be better understood as sub-categories of what I am calling “user-generated news-like content”.

Of course, you’ll have to read the book to get the full account of this. I’m sure Allen & Unwin would not want me to give it all away here – tempted as I am.

The legal fight over who is and who isn’t a journalist is an aspect of the techno-legal time gap. That unresolved contradiction between the technology – the means of journalistic production – and the social relations of production – in this case the legal framework of shield laws designed to protect “journalists” from forced disclosure of sources, etc.

The New Jersey decision goes to some length to create a working definition of a journalist that I think is very interesting and reflects some of the arguments I use in News 2.0 about the economic relationship that journalists are engaged in – a relationship of salary or other payment for their work.

Hale, a former Microsoft employee and a mother of five from Washington state, contended she was acting as a journalist when she posted comments to a message board about a security breach at TMM and allegations that its owners had threatened her. She argued the postings were part of her research into a larger story about the online pornography industry.

TMM sued for damages, claiming Hale was not working as a journalist and was not covered by the shield law, which protects journalists from revealing their sources.

In an age where technology has far outpaced the law, courts have conceded there has been no clear decision on whether writings on the internet, particularly by bloggers, are protected by the First Amendment or New Jersey’s shield law.

Maybe the court’s got this wrong and I am sure there will be some who think I’m an old Trot with too much invested in political economy.

I think I’m right on this issue. Some background in my review of Atton & Hamilton Alternative Journalism

Wikileaks – an enemy of the State, just like Little Brother

The semi-underground Wikileaks site has become a news story in the last 48 hours thanks to the disturbing video of two Reuters staffers being gunned down in Baghdad in 2007.

Last year the site was named as the Amnesty International new media site of the year.

The April 2010 video released by Wikileaks [available at EM here] shows a group of Iraqis walking in a neighbourhood where the American military was staging a large “counter-insurgency” operation.

The Reuters men were there to cover the story on the ground. Unfortunately two trigger-happy Apache pilots mistook a telephoto lens for an AK47 and opened fire. Twelve people were killed, two children were wounded.

Wikileaks used a crowd source of hackers to decode the encryption on the Apache “gun camera” footage that was leaked to them by whistleblowers.

Now the US military and its Washington think-tank apologists are trying to hose down the story and imply that the Apache pilots were only doing their jobs.

No surprises there; but I didn’t know that in 2008 the American military machine has also listed Wikileaks as an enemy of the State.

This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN) 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks. “The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to WikiLeaks.org cannot be ruled out”. It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses “trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers”, the report recommends “The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the WikiLeaks.org Web site”. [the document is no longer available at Wikileaks]

This is bizarre and shows just how twisted the whole concept of “homeland security” is. It reminds me of the plot in a great Cory Doctorow novel I’m reading at the moment: Little Brother.

In this book, the hero Marcus Yarrow faces down the Department of Homeland Security after a terrorist bomb destroys the Oakland Bay bridge in San Francisco. The DHS locks down the city and ups the surveillance in school classrooms, on the street and via electronic devices so that everyone is under their gaze 24/7 (almost).

Yarrow is a 17 year-old school kid who’s into online gaming and computer coding. After his illegal detention by DHS agents, Marcus and his friends organise a jamming campaign using darknet software that plays on the Xbox.

In an interesting twist, Marcus and his family seek the help of a dead trees “investigative journalist” to expose the DHS clampdown on civil liberties.

I find this interesting because it possibly shows the limits of social media in terms of making a really big story public and driving public opinion.

It’s probably also a comment on the age gap. Yarrow’s father is old school so doesn’t understand the jamming culture of his kid.

I haven’t quite finished Little Brother yet; but I can’t wait to get home and read the last 80 pages.

You should get hold of a copy; it’s an interesting book and an important statement about how Homeland Security has become a war against the American people. You can also check out a fan page for the book on Facebook.

Writer, blogger and cool geek Cory Doctorow

Doctorow is behind the technology and culture blog Boing Boing and I like him even more now that he’s just published an anti iPad manifesto.

In particular there’s this biting swipe at the dead tree media:

I think that the press has been all over the iPad because Apple puts on a good show, and because everyone in journalism-land is looking for a daddy figure who’ll promise them that their audience will go back to paying for their stuff.

The parallels between the military’s attitude to Wikileaks and the DHS crackdown on civil liberties is eirie.

Whale-watching: gathering storm clouds?

I’m a bit under-capacitated at the moment, here’s today’s links with brief comments.

JamesMurray’s blog at TV3, sustains an argument that the method not the purpose is the problem with Whale’s crusade:

To some degree Whaleoil has a point – name suppression laws, which were last reviewed in 1985, are hideously out-of-date in a society where we can all become publishers of content at the push of a button.

And it seems distasteful, at the very least, that a well-known entertainer should receive permanent name suppression for a sexual assault where revealing his identity might harm his career in a disproportionate manner.

This is not a luxury that would be afforded to someone not in the public eye. It is a double standard that needs to be rectified. There may be an argument that we need to protect celebrities or other well known people from undue media scrutiny in cases like these, but that argument is squashed by the need for a justice system that treats each man as an equal.

My problem with Whaleoil is not his idea but his method.

Views on news: Coward’s way

The question is just how out-of-date are suppression rules? I don’t think we can assume they don’t apply to bloggers as well as MSM publishing ventures.

Second, the rules talk about hardship to victims of crime (including the perps) and the Law Commission’s recommendations include amending this to undue hardship”. One could argue that loss of income is hardship.

Third, why are we so caught up on revenge and the punishment of shame?

The Dom Post‘s editorial has a bit both ways:

Slater is on a mission. He has said, outside the courtroom, that he believes everyone should be equal before the law, that celebrities and the wealthy have their identities suppressed more often and more easily than do ordinary Kiwis, and that the law needs changing.

The Dominion Post agrees. But there are better ways to lobby for a more open court system than by putting at risk the future of a teenage girl.

At times of egregious breach, the solicitor-general has been keen to go after those in the mainstream media who have broken suppression orders or otherwise committed contempt of court.

Either everyone who breaches this law is prosecuted, or no-one is. And were the latter to become the reality, those sections of the Criminal Justice Act pertaining to suppression orders need to be repealed.

Dom Post: …take notice

Media law academic Steve Price provides some welcome legal context:

Why are they picking on Mr Oil? Well, whereas the media pay lip service to the suppression orders and laws, Mr Oil rather thumbs his nose at them. Also, I’m guessing the police may well be using Mr Oil as a test case to send a message to others. I don’t like that practice much, but again, they’re within their rights, and it’s no defence for Mr Oil to complain that he’s been singled out. The Solicitor-General has done that with contempt prosecutions fairly regularly…

For those who think it’s discriminatory to give suppression orders to celebrities but not oiks like us, consider this: if you got prosecuted for weeing behind a pub, the media wouldn’t be interested. If it was an All Black, it would be front-page news. Those are the effects of a judge opting not to impose a name suppression order. Isn’t there a decent argument that that would be discriminatory too, and that name suppression merely irons out the discrepancy? (Not saying I buy that entirely, just that the issue’s a bit more complicated than some people suggest.)

Media Law Journal: Whale of a campaign

There was another name suppressed today. The alleged cop-shooter on attempted murder charges in Manukau District Court.

There may be a gathering storm…

When the Police charged me to “set an exam­ple” they picked the wrong per­son. If they wanted a sac­ri­fi­cial lamb they should have picked a lefty, they would have lain down and said fuck me in the arse because I like it and I’ll say sorry after­wards and pay a fine, I should have been more sub­servient, and doff their caps to the estab­lish­ment as they left court. But then lefty weak­lings never test the edge unless it is in favour of peo­ple like Pol Pot or Hamas.

Whaleoil: Sanctimonious, unctous twat alert.

A pithy and pungent attack on Whale’s political foes and those who question his purpose.

Mr Slater isn’t prepared to allow the process of legislative reform take its course. You see, he already knows what needs done, and knows that he is just the person to bring about these needed changes. So he’s started “outing” the names of individuals where these have been suppressed by the courts, on the basis that people want to know them and so he’ll tell them. And anyway, why should criminal scum get to hide from the righteous wrath of the mobilised mob?

Pundit: Wonky jihad #2.

An object of Whale’s substantial scorn, but raising serious issues about suppression & blogger “justice”

Cameron will find out in due course, whether or not that is seen to identify the ex-MP with name supression, but if they do prosecute the Whale, the question has to be asked whether newspapers should be charged also?

The man’s name was suppressed when he appeared in the Nelson District Court on Thursday.

A Sunday newspaper published details about the man, which Slater said had narrowed the field of possible accused to three.

He wanted to clarify who the accused was so the other two men were not unfairly accused.

Now I am not gunning for the Herald on Sunday. But I would say that far more people worked out from their story, who the accussed is, than the handful of people who were capable of working out the code Cameron had used, and reverse engineering it into hexadecimal and finally the  alphabet.

Kiwiblog: Who made it easier?

Has the HoS breached?

I don’t believe that Cameron Slater is giving power to the victims in these cases, nor do I believe that is his intention, although it might be a justification he is using now. I think he is trying to build power for himself. And that’s a cynical abuse of very real situtations for actual real people.

The hand mirror:  Cameron Slater please stop.

Victims of sexual violence could be the losers here

Prick seems to think he could put this child’s identity into the public arena with his stupid coded message and get away with it. (Don’t fool yourselves, pathetic righties. The identity of the alleged assailant will have identified the victim to those who know them). He actually said the Police should have better things to do than nab him for his blatant, unrepentant crime. He thinks he has the right to add to the suffering of sex victims to get himself some more airtime. (Congrats, btw, to news outlets that are refusing to name his blog and its URL).

The Standard: Scumbag Slater.

Dishing & taking the shitstorm, vitriol all’round

We think that Whale is bloody brave, but in this incident the victim could be a family member and if that is the case we can see some justification for suppression.

However, we have also read the post of Lisa Lewis today, who writes about being abused at a young age and wished that at the time the name of the perpetrator was made public.

Its clear to see that this debate will continue for some time and its a hot issue – Gotcha – Whales website has crashed and our site is getting many hits searching for anything we have published on the MP who is alleged to have been charged with sex offences.

RoarPrwan: Whale’s dork.

Fence-sitting, fame by association

Lets put that into perspective for a minute.

If every blogger in New Zealand posted the man’s identity in the headline of a post, and nothing else on the post. Would that breach suppression? Would the Police charge every blogger who posted his name in the headline and nothing else in the post?

Because if even 20 blogs did it that is an awful lot of police work required.

Where is the link?

That link would be formed by the MSM who post their own stories such as this one.

In isolation Whaleoil’s post meant absolutely nothing. Others have simply decoded it and then wrote their own stories in relation to linking it back to the details released at the weekend. Some haven’t even bothered to decode it at all and have just jumped up and down saying Whaleoil has breached the suppression order.

Cactus Kate: You can’t suppress a whale

An offshore perspective.

Whale is unrepentant and determined to continue making his points. He’s inviting legal retaliation and seems to be relishing the fight.

Thanks to his binary code stunt, it seems many more people are aware of the identity of the former MP who’s now an alledged sex offender.

The issues are becoming a little clearer and it seems that a perceived double standard is at the centre…

Do high-profile defendants get preferential treatment in name suppression?

Can a blogger be charged/convicted for a breach in the same way as the MSM?

How will the government react to the pressure for change & what will happen to the Law Cnnission report?

Whale-watching: Always take the weather (with you)

I really don’t know why Cameron Slater (aka Whaleoil) wants to take on the NZ legal system, but my advice to the balls out blogger comes in two parts:

1. Shut-up
2. Get a good lawyer

?The first part is easy. Cameron, no matter how much you believe in your anti-name suppression crusade, you are making things worse for yourself by tricks like this:

Police will investigate a blogger for revealing the identity of a former politician accused of an indecent assault on a 13-year-old girl.

Cameron Slater yesterday outed the former MP from the top of the South Island by naming him in a binary code on his blog.

[NZ Herald, 12.01.10]

In a post yesterday Whaleoil said the binary code doesn’t breach name suppression orders:

1. Firstly I did not defy name sup­pres­sion laws. I cat­e­gor­i­cally deny I did any such thing. I sim­ply posted some Binary Code with a Base64 Title. None of which iden­ti­fies by name, address or occu­pa­tion “in any account or report relat­ing to any proceedings”
2. The “binary code which, when con­verted”, does NOT reveals the iden­tity of a defendant.

The link in 2. is to a TV3 piece that claims the code does reveal details likely to identify someone subject to name suppression

When converted, the computer coding in today’s post reveals the name of a national figure charged with the indecent assault of a girl aged between 12 and 16.

3news.co.nz had the code analysed by one of our programmers, who confirmed it indeed does reveal the name of the accused and his former role.

Court documents show it is alleged the man touched the girl’s breasts and genitals on December 30, 2009.

[Blogger investigated

Mocks suppression laws]

I don’t know if the code does or doesn’t translate, but both Fairfax and TV3 are reporting that they cracked it.

There’s more coded text on Whaleoil’s blog and I sadly think that this cat&mouse game is a sign that something is wrong.

It seems clear to me that Mr Slater needs some solid and effective legal advice. Maybe he’s getting it and he knows what he’s doing. Or it’s Don Quixote territory.

I’m also not sure Cameron is all that clear about his own motives. He seems naively surprised that his actions have attracted police and media attention.

Slater said he had received many supportive messages from victims of sexual abuse, saying they wished they were able to name their abusers.

And he said he did not name the former politician to attract publicity.

“People say that I’m publicity-seeking but I’m not,” Slater said.

“I didn’t seek for the police to charge me and I didn’t seek for you guys to publish about it.”

[NZ Herald, 12.01.10]

I don’t know what he expected then.  Of course there’s interest. After Cameron’s 1st legal outing last week, any further development was always going to get attention.

The root cause of this binary charade is that Cameron Slater doesn’t like the legal niceties that allow some defendants and convicted criminals to have their identity suppressed by the courts. He has repeatedly said so on his blog. This recent example pretty much sums up Whaleoil’s position:

All the hush-hush that comes with name sup­pres­sion in cases like this [sexual assault of a minor] is sup­posed to be for the ben­e­fit of the vic­tim. the thing is no-one ever asks a vic­tim what they think about it usu­ally because they are too young at the time. This allows the kiddy-fiddlers to get way with it for so long.

Right now one of the cases that I am alleged to have named both the vic­tim and the accused (”The Olympian”) and the case of the “Come­dian”, both of these fel­lows have been ordered to stay away from the com­plainant and in one case ordered to stay away from young chil­dren. The ex-MP with name sup­pres­sion is in the same boat. The thing is this. If we can’t be allowed to know who it is that should stay away from var­i­ous sit­u­a­tions or peo­ple then how can they be reported for breach­ing the court instruc­tion because we aren’t allowed to know who they are in the first place. There­fore we run a real risk of there being more vic­tims, espe­cially as they are all out on bail. If they were known then they would effec­tively be under house arrest as they sure as hell wouldn’t show their faces anywhere.

[Gotcha 12/01/10]

There might seem some logic here, but it is fatally flawed. In these cases, there is an accused and these person’s have a right to the presumption of innocence until the legal system says otherwise. I think the cops have got it right on this one.

“Clearly it attacks the very heart of our criminal justice system in a number of ways; that a person is entitled to presumption of innocence until the opposite is proven, the right to a fair trial, and in this case the breach of that order has the potential to identify the victim – the very reason the order was imposed.”

Mr Winter said he would be liaising with police in Auckland over the previous breaches as well as speaking to a crown solicitor and the judge who issued the suppression order.

“He’s certainly testing the boundaries of the law which doesn’t adequately cover the use or abuse of the internet, so there’s grey areas in both domestic and international law,” he said.

[Nelson Bays police area commander Detective Inspector John Winter @ Stuff.co.nz]

When media outlets get involved in trying cases before the courts they overstep the mark. We call it “trial by media”.

It is not up to Cameron Slater, the Weekend Truth, or anyone else ; either private individual, or media outlet, to prejudge the issues in these cases.

I wrote last week on the emotional pull of vigilantism in sex cases, we clearly see that here.

Bloggers and tabloid media want to be judge, jury and executioner.

I have more to say on this but I’m painfully pecking with one hand due to a large cast on my left arm. More later.