Wednesday, 3 December 2003
Topic: The Media
In the age of transparency who needs newsmen? A curious idea here .
Jeff Jarvis is former TV critic for TV Guide and People, creator of Entertainment Weekly, Sunday Editor of the NY Daily News, and a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner. He is now president and creative director of Advance.net - and this is from his personal site BuzzMachine.comIn this age of transparency - of constant cable news and C-Span's unblinking eye and instant online wire reports and mobile alerts and full transcripts online and more video here and weblog links to coverage everywhere and automated Google news searches and, in sum, the commoditization of news - the role of the newsman has utterly changed ... but that news hasn't caught up to the newsmen yet.
It used to be, we depended on them to tell us what is happening (and some prided themselves on doing it better than others). Those days are over. Toast. "What happened" is the commodity; we can find out what happened anywhere anytime....
We can all see all the news and judge for ourselves what's news and what isn't, what's real and what isn't, what's important and what isn't, and often what's true and what isn't.
Do reporters and editors still have a role in the news we can all see (as opposed to the news they dig up)? Don't know yet, do we?
We don't need to be told what happened? We can all find that out ourselves? We thus actually only need interpretation and "attitude"?
No. It seems to me most people don't do the digging. Most people don't have the time or energy to review the daily facts about the world. CNN will sum it up for them, or if you don't trust CNN, Fox News will. Or TF1 for you folks in Paris, or BBC for you Brits.
What's not in the summary is the problem.
Those of us who blog (an odd verb) do so to flesh out the news with what is overlooked or deemphasized. And no one reads my blog, as far as I can tell. I do it for myself, because much seems to be missing on CNN and Fox.
Were I still part of the workforce I would not have the time. And I'd feel stupid and uninformed, in spite of my twenty-two minutes each evening with CNN or Fox, or with what I hear on NPR riding to work and from work on the freeway, dodging SUV's and slow-poke tourists in rental sedans reading maps.
I don't like feeling stupid. I want to know everything about everything. Yes, a personality disorder....
Topic: Oddities
Cheese as metaphor ...
Click on the link for a rather long review of the fascinating book Camembert: A National Myth by Pierre Boisard, translated by Richard Miller. Say what? Really.
Cheese as metaphor.
Here cheese is discussed, and more importantly the modern world becoming much the same everywhere. That KFC in Hong Kong, that Starbucks in Bali - the implications of globalization are really startling.
The blurb from the Guardian:
Steven Shapin muses on what the transformation of Camembert cheese, from Norman specialty to international supermarket staple, can tell us about authenticity in a globalized world. Steven Shapin, who teaches sociology of science at the University of California, San Diego, was raised on cheese and baloney sandwiches.
Breaking the mould
Monday December 1, 2003, The Guardian (UK)
Camembert: A National Myth by Pierre Boisard, translated by Richard Miller. California, 254 pp., ?19.95, June, 0 520 22550 3
Excerpts, to whet your appetite, so to speak...In 1999, when the French peasant leader Jos? Bov? trashed a McDonald's under construction near Montpellier, so becoming a national and, soon, international resistance hero, one motive for his virtuous vandalism was cheese. The Americans had unilaterally imposed trade restrictions on the excellent local Roquefort, and, if there was going to be no Roquefort in the US, there was no reason to tolerate the "McMerde" double bacon cheeseburger in France.
American multinational muck was malbouffe: bad to eat, bad for the peasant farmers in la France profonde who produced the proper stuff, bad for France. The sentiment was popular, and that's why Bov? spent only six weeks in jail, and why Lionel Jospin called his action "just": the defence of fine French food against American anti-cuisine was recognised as a moral act.
Invited by Ralph Nader later that year to the demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, Bov? underlined the point, smuggling some unpasteurised Roquefort past American customs officers and posing for the cameras eating a Roquefort sandwich in front of a local McDonald's, which was duly vandalised in its turn. "You are what you eat," Bov? said, "where you live and what you do. We are peasants and citizens, not shareholders, not servile slaves at the mercy of agribusiness." The peasant-shepherd - the Ast?rixian champion of local food - has become world-famous, and you can download his dicta in defence of localism from that least local of media, the world wide web.
So here's a way into the tensions and paradoxes of the way we eat now: globalised food has secured its spread across the dietary landscape by managing two tricks at once. First, as it has become globalised, so it has become homogenised: it is the same everywhere, or, more accurately, widely believed to be the same everywhere. The natural home for a McDonald's is the international airport lounge, and the Economist can find no better way of assessing the real value of world currencies than comparing the local price of a Big Mac against a US standard.
Yep, everything is getting to be the same, everywhere. A good thing? Predictability is often good. But there is a problem - ... the homogeneity of the globalised product is necessarily a relative matter, and belief in its stability may not be supported in reality. Though it is evidently a great secret, I'm told that McDonald's buns have a lot more sugar in Britain than they do in the States; there is, of course, no beef (Hindu sensibilities) or pork (Muslim) in the Indian "Maharaja Mac"; the mayonnaise has no egg in it (for vegans); and, when Bov? did his splendid work on the Montpellier McDonald's, the local company representative was at tactical pains to stress difference, assuring the demonstrators that the burgers were an authentically local product, containing only French beef "from the farm".
Second, globalised products such as the Big Mac and Coke have secured their spread across the world by travelling in the special channels carved out by American power, capital and culture. While Big Macs are now everywhere - you can avoid them in Bhutan and Afghanistan, but that's a high price to pay - it would be impossible to explain their global distribution without attending to those channels and to their identification with the powerful idea of America. Just as Ch?teau Lynch-Bages has a Pauillac Appellation d'Origine Contr?l?e, so the Big Mac is AOC USA. You can't account for why so many people throughout the world want to eat it - or, indeed, why so many others use it as a reference for globalised abominations - without understanding their ideas about the place called America.
In these respects Camembert is a lot more like the McMerde burger than you might suppose. ...
Read here the long history of Camembert. The author and a few folks he interviews say the modern industrial product is, frankly, crap.
But it travels well. Foodies should read the whole thing.
Topic: Bush
Schrodinger's Cat, Quantum Mechanics and Symbolic Logic
The philosophic answer to the question of the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction
David Raitt explains it all:
George Bush said some quite interesting things recently at a fund-raiser in New Jersey.Not breaking any ground, Bush highlighted the accomplishments of his administration, saying he had eliminated the terror threat from Afghanistan and weapons of mass destruction from Iraq and ensured that Medicare will remain solvent.
Many commentators seem to be of the opinion that the claim that Bush eliminated WMD's from Iraq is laughable.
Raitt:Yet they fail to grasp the president's deep understanding of modern physics. In fact, prior to the invasion, the weapons both existed and didn't exist simultaneously, not unlike Schrodinger's Cat. The invasion and subsequent search brought in observers and collapsed the wave function to one of non-existence. Thus the President was speaking nothing but the truth.
This kind of misunderestimating one's opponents has really got to stop!
I agree.
Topic: The Media
"If our boss can do it, why can't you network guys do it?"
An interesting post regrading the news media from Rick in Atlanta.
The question "Why don't we ever see Peter Jennings visiting Iraq" may not be burning holes in the brains of the average American viewer, but it seems to be quietly eating its way through the Bush administration. Who knew?
There are those in the White House who have noticed that whenever Jennings visits some city like Atlanta, we then tend to see all sorts of cute stories, many if not most of them positive, that otherwise never would have made network air. So why, the reasoning seems to go, instead of dwelling on all this violence, don't the network anchors visit Iraq and show America the 95% positive and good things going on there?
(Okay, other than the obvious counter argument that the networks have legions of journalists on the ground in Iraq already, might one wonder how positive the Iraqi situation would look if the anchors were required to fly in with lights turned off, as the president did? Just pondering here.)
You can read this with pictures at:
No News Anchors In Iraq Has White House Troubled
Peter Johnson, USA TODAY, updared December 1, 2003As U.S. casualties - 79 in November - and controversy over the war in Iraq mount, why has no network news anchor set foot in Iraq since September, when CBS' Dan Rather last visited?
It is a sore spot between the Bush administration and network news executives. Now that President Bush and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., have made Thanksgiving trips to Iraq, insiders predict networks may return some of their big guns to Iraq in coming weeks to gauge the situation for themselves.
Executives at NBC, ABC and CBS argue that correspondents in Iraq are putting the story in perspective and that millions of Americans who watch everything from NBC's Today to The CBS Evening News to ABC's Nightline are getting an accurate picture.
But the Bush administration says positive stories from Iraq are drowned out by a daily drumbeat of bombings and attacks on U.S. troops. If news divisions sent their anchors to Iraq and let them spend time there, they might report a different - and more positive - story.
Ambassador Paul Bremer, who heads the U.S. rebuilding effort in Iraq, "never misses an opportunity to invite every anchor to come over. It is a staple of every interaction," coalition spokesman Dan Senor says. "Ninety-five percent of this country is returning to normal. In order to capture that story, you have to travel and invest time."
From March through October, ABC, CBS and NBC combined devoted 47 hours, more than one-quarter of their weekday nightly newscasts, to Iraq, network news analyst Andrew Tyndall says. NBC spent 1,037 minutes; ABC, 930; and CBS, 873.
"It's not automatic that anchors should be in Iraq, but it's not out of left field to ask why they are not there," Tyndall says. Almost 30 million viewers get their news each night from the three broadcasts - the biggest source of news in America.
NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw has not been to Iraq since July, but producer Steve Capus says, "I reject the characterization that we only do negative stories." He cites, among others, stories on cement and water treatment plants working again. "Our report runs the gamut: good, bad and otherwise."
And so on, with many quotes from the talking heads...
Topic: Iraq
You sometimes have to choose what your values really are.
It comes down to the issue of what is really more important.
In the past two years, the Department of Defense has discharged thirty-seven linguists from the Defense Language Institute for being gay. Many studied Arabic. At a time of heightened need for intelligence specialists, thirty-seven linguists were judged to be of no use because of their homosexuality.
The Washington Post profiles one.
The Post doesn't discuss the Pentagon abandoning plans to use a group of Sephardic Jews in New York to take up the slack, as that branch of Judaism offers scholars who know Arabic extremely well. In that case the Pentagon denies claims that they are anti-Semitic, saying that they felt using Jewish translators would anger the Arab world. Perhaps so.
The background is this: Historically, military leaders have argued that allowing gays to serve would hurt unit cohesion and recruiting efforts, and infringe on the privacy rights of heterosexuals. In 1993, at the urging of President Clinton, Congress agreed to soften the outright ban on gays in the military with a policy that came to be known as "don't ask, don't tell," which allowed them to serve as long as they kept their sexual orientation secret.
The Defense Language Institute, at the Presidio of Monterey, is the primary foreign-language school for the Department of Defense. For decades, Russian was the dominant language taught. But since Sept. 11, 2001, the size of the Arabic class has soared. Of the roughly 3,800 students enrolled at the DLI, 832 are learning Arabic, 743 Korean, 353 Chinese and 301 Russian, with the remaining students scattered in other languages. ... The DLI estimates the value of its 63-week Arabic language program -- not including room, board and the service member's salary -- at $33,500.
Anyway, this is an interesting read.
How 'Don't Tell' Translates
The Military Needs Linguists, But It Doesn't Want This One
By Anne Hull, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, December 3, 2003; Page A01
From Hull:Historically, military leaders have argued that allowing gays to serve would hurt unit cohesion and recruiting efforts, and infringe on the privacy rights of heterosexuals. In 1993, at the urging of President Clinton, Congress agreed to soften the outright ban on gays in the military with a policy that came to be known as "don't ask, don't tell," which allowed them to serve as long as they kept their sexual orientation secret.
Hull's Example:Cathleen Glover was cleaning the pool at the Sri Lankan ambassador's residence recently when she heard the sound of Arabic drifting through the trees. Glover earned $11 an hour working for a pool-maintenance company, skimming leaves and testing chlorine levels in the backyards of Washington. No one knew about her past. But sometimes the past found her.
Glover recognized the sound instantly. It was the afternoon call to prayer coming from a mosque on Massachusetts Avenue. She held still, picking out familiar words and translating them in her head.
She learned Arabic at the Defense Language Institute (DLI), the military's premier language school, in Monterey, Calif. Her timing as a soldier was fortuitous: Around her graduation last year, a Government Accounting Office study reported that the Army faced a critical shortage of linguists needed to translate intercepts and interrogate suspects in the war on terrorism.
"I was what the country needed," Glover said.
She was, and she wasn't. Glover is gay. She mastered Arabic but couldn't handle living a double life under the military policy known as "don't ask, don't tell." After two years in the Army, Glover, 26, voluntarily wrote a statement acknowledging her homosexuality.
Confronted with a shortage of Arabic interpreters and its policy banning openly gay service members, the Pentagon had a choice to make.
Which is how former Spec. Glover came to be cleaning pools instead of sitting in the desert, translating Arabic for the U.S. government.
The government's position:On average, three or four service members are discharged each day because they are gay. Most are discharged for making statements about their sexuality, and most are younger than twenty-five. The Army says the discharged linguists were casualties of their own failure to meet a known policy. "We have standards," said Harvey Perritt, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va. "We have physical standards, academic standards. There's no difference between administering these standards and administering 'don't ask, don't tell.' The rules are the rules."
Okay, fine.
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