Call me, Joda Ray (@cult.gamut)
6 hours ago
Wednesday, 7 April 2010
Is This the Future of Journalism? Why Wikileaks Matters
This week marked the international coming-out party for a new media organization that could upend the sacred cows of traditional journalism. Wikileaks, an Internet-savvy investigative journalism outfit, released a video showing an American Apache helicopter open fire on a group of men, killing two Reuters employees, along with 10 other people, on July 12, 2007. "There was no threat warranting a hail of 30mm [caliber gunfire] from above," says Anthony Martinez, a former U.S. Army noncommissioned officer who has watched thousands of hours of aerial footage of Iraq. COMMENTS (0) SHARE: Digg Facebook Reddit Bookmark and Share More... The video, seen through the perspective of the Apache gun camera, captures a dark moment in the Iraq war. As the American airmen chuckle over the body count, it also amounts to a damning indictment of war culture. No traditional journalism organization was able to bring it to the public, as these tapes are normally classified; Reuters filed an FOIA request but never received a response. True to its promise to release complete source material, Wikileaks has posted the full 38-minute gun camera video on YouTube. But the focus of its Monday press conference was an annotated, 19-minute edited version, published on the site collateralmurder.com. It opens with a quote from British provocateur-cum-journalist George Orwell: Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind. The video proceeds to transcribe the radio chatter and break down the action with highlights and arrows. A group of men gather in the street; one reporter talks on the phone and another shoulders a camera bag. Seconds later, the pilots, mistaking a camera lens peeking around a corner for an RPG, strafe a cluster of civilians. That is almost forgivable. But events turn from queasy to horrifying when the crew open fire on an unarmed van that has stopped to pick up the journalist left alive. As Wikileaks shows in a closeup, two children sitting in the front seat of the van were struck by the barrage of gunfire. The video was sensational, and it exploded online Monday -- it's since gotten more than 2 million views on YouTube and prompting a follow-up story by the New York Times. Many viewers were undoubtedly encountering Wikileaks for the first time, though the organization was launched in December 2006. The site, which is funded by private donors and does not accept government or corporate funding, encourages would-be whistleblowers to upload incriminating material anonymously on its website. The small editorial staff verifies submitted documents, decrypts or translates them when necessary, and then publishes them in full -- often with commentary. This is not to imply that Wikileaks' editors are merely passive distributors of their sources' information. They cultivate and protect anonymous sources, verifying submitted materials, adding context, and promoting important leaks. In the case of the Iraq gun camera footage, the process began with using volunteers to help decrypt the submitted file. Then they worked with Icelandic journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson to verify the video on the ground in Baghdad. Wikileaks says Hrafnsson found the two children who were injured in the attack, and has posted recent pictures and other documents. The whole story cost the organization about US $50,000, according to Julian Assange, the site's co-founder.
Jonathan Stray @'FP'
What Does Palinspeak Mean?
We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there and understand the contrast. And we talk a lot about, OK, we're confident that we're going to win on Tuesday, so from there, the first 100 days, how are we going to kick in the plan that will get this economy back on the right track and really shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars?
Just forty years ago people would be shocked to read something like this as a public statement from someone even pretending, as Palin pretty much had to have been by the time of this quote, that they were going to be serving in a Presidential Administration.
It’s not quite Bushspeak, which, with the likes of “I know what it’s like to put food on my family,” was replete with flagrantly misplaced words with a frequency that made for guesses, not completely in jest, that he might suffer from a mild form of Wernicke’s aphasia, interfering with matching word shapes to meanings. (Bush the father wasn’t much better in this regard—there just wasn’t an internet to make collecting the slips and spreading them around so easy.)
Rather, Palin is given to meandering phraseology of a kind suggesting someone more commenting on impressions as they enter and leave her head rather than constructing insights about them. Or at least, insights that go beyond the bare-bones essentials of human cognition — an entity (i.e. something) and a predicate (i.e. something about it).
The easy score is to flag this speech style as a sign of moronism. But we have to be careful — there is a glass houses issue here. Before parsing Palinspeak we have to understand the worldwide difference between spoken and written language — and the fact that in highly literate societies, we tend to have idealized visions of how close our speech supposedly is to the written ideal...
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John McWhorter @'The New Republic'
Andrew Sullivan (Daily Dish) - A question for you...
You say you will be "rooting for the tories"...how DO you feel about this?
The music industry is sucking the blood of its main assets: the musicians. Gang Of Four does something about this.
They'll let you, the potential listener, do it instead. Or whatever sick perverted thing you'd feel like doing with your favorite band's blood!
Gang Of Four are set to give away bottles of their own blood in exchange for money contributions to aid the recording of their new album 'Content'.
The post-punk veterans are funding the album through Pledgemusic.com - where users can contribute cash to the process and be rewarded with album-related products, including the vials of blood, in return.
The post-punk veterans are funding the album through Pledgemusic.com - where users can contribute cash to the process and be rewarded with album-related products, including the vials of blood, in return.
Nas Jumps on Gil Scott-Heron Remix
In February, spoken word poet and rap ancestor Gil Scott-Heron released the grizzled return-to-form lament "New York Is Killing Me", off of his Best New Music album I'm New Here.
Now Nas, one of Scott-Heron's greatest descendants, has jumped on the track to add some of his own dizzy, apocalyptic imagery. All in all, Nas uses the track to make a pretty good case for not living in New York.
U.N. Secretary General calls Aral Sea 'shocking disaster'
Once the world's fourth-largest lake, the sea has shrunk by 90 percent since the rivers that feed it were largely diverted in a Soviet project to boost cotton production in the arid region.
The shrunken sea has ruined the once-robust fishing economy and left fishing trawlers stranded in sandy wastelands, leaning over as if they dropped from the air. The sea's evaporation has left layers of highly salted sand, which winds can carry as far away as Scandinavia and Japan, and which plague local people with health troubles.
Ban toured the sea by helicopter as part of a visit to the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia. His trip included a touchdown in Muynak, Uzbekistan, a town once on the shore where a pier stretches eerily over gray desert and camels stand near the hulks of stranded ships.
"On the pier, I wasn't seeing anything, I could see only a graveyard of ships," Ban told reporters after arriving in Nukus, the nearest sizable city and capital of the autonomous Karakalpak region.
"It is clearly one of the worst disasters, environmental disasters of the world. I was so shocked," he said.
The Aral Sea catastrophe is one of Ban's top concerns on his six-day trip through the region and he is calling on the countries' leaders to set aside rivalries to cooperate on repairing some of the damage.
"I urge all the leaders ... to sit down together and try to find the solutions," he said, promising United Nations support.
However, cooperation is hampered by disagreements over who has rights to scarce water and how it should be used.
@'Yahoo News'
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