Sunday, August 13, 2006

We, the fools

I just read this in today's Observer.

"Withing minutes of the airports being closed, angry emails arrived.......... 'Funny how these terrorist "threats" seem to knock other more important stories off the news agenda', railed another."

Titled "Save us from the crackpots who see Zionist conspiracies in everything" by a Nick Cohen, it goes on to state:

"Since modern technology allows every fool with an internet connection to broadcast his or her ravings, I would be making too much of the emails if they didn't exemplify a wider culture of denial."

Ah, the refuge of the journalist without an argument - the ad hominem attack. Call the other party a fool, and label their opinions as mere ravings.

Also, Mr. Cohen probably meant to write "....I would NOT be making too much of the emails.......".

Let's ignore that (possibly Freudian?) slip and remember the remainder of the name-calling. If journalists were obliged to follow certain rules of formal debate which were current during my college days, I imagine many wouldn't have much to say.

Saturday, August 12, 2006

noun; deliberate exaggeration, not meant to be taken literally.

That's how the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the word "hyperbole". Perhaps a suitable word to describe the preamble to a story I read in the tube in yesterday's Metro, reproduced verbatim here.

"The deadliest terror atrocity in history was foiled by British police yesterday. More than 4,000 people could have been killed if bombers had succeeded in blowing up ten flights from the UK to America - a death toll worse than September 11."

When compared with the deaths and depredation from the southern European conquest and pillage of South America, the Holocaust (which, incidentally, according to the OED, refers to the the killing of only one of Roma, Jews, Sinti and homosexuals etc. during World War II - I'd always imagined it covered all the victims of that part of our history) , the bombing of Nagasaki, the rampages of Gengiz Khan, the Vikings, the ancient Persians, the Arabs and Alexander the Great and many other bloody events, it pales into insignificance.

Especially when one remembers that it did not actually occur. So one might imagine the journalist would not have erred by starting his spiel with "The terror atrocity which, had it taken place, would have been the deadliest in history........".

However, when one reads further, one encounters our learned gentleman's yardstick - September 11.
(presumably a reference to the deaths which took place on that day in 2001 in the USA as a result of aircraft hijacking)
So perhaps he means - the deadliest terror atrocity involving aircraft in history.

But Nagasaki was pretty terrifying, wasn't it? As were Serbia/Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Lebanon.

So perhaps the preamble refers to - "what might have been the deadliest terror atrocity involving civilian aircraft.....".

NB: This blog is _about_ journalism. Not directly for op-eds on events. For that, Search The (F) Web, or buy a paper from your local newsagent.

Monday, August 07, 2006

Editing pictures after taking them

I read a story of a photographer working for Reuters who has been accused of "doctoring" an image of a war zone in Lebanon. [1] I would have been suitably shocked, but a photographer friend of mine assures me that photographs are routinely touched up. Pictures of cars, models, food etc.. Of course, adding extra smoke to a bombed building to show more intense destruction is perhaps not cricket.

When I look at pictures from a city devastated by air strikes, and all that can be seen is smoke billowing out amidst rubble, then I doubt if I could tell the difference between the east end of the city and the west. Particular features might be recognisable, like the Eiffel tower in Paris, or the London Eye in London, but apartment blocks have a distressing tendency to look similar. What is such a picture meant to convey - that man-made buildings are in need of repair and there's lots of smoke? The picture in question (from the JP website, attributed to Reuters) might easily belong to a city of an African or Asian country afflicted by civil war, or even the same city ten years earlier. News pictures rarely contain any supporting text which asserts their provenance and their fidelity, unfortunately.

I wish that each picture might have the name of the photographer, location where the picture was taken, a description of the subject or subjects, and date when the picture was taken, and whether there was any modification at all done to the picture (including cropping, colour balancing, sharpening etc.) or not. If this information is not available to the publisher, then this fact too should be mentioned.

With these criteria in mind, I couldn't find a single picture on the handful of news websites I browsed which passed muster. (and I even relaxed the first and last of these)

Before we achieve more transparency concerning the provenance of news-images, an extra plume of smoke, or even two, coming out of an apartment building seem trivial.



[1] http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyID
=2006-08-06T214325Z_01_L06301298_RTRUKOC_0_UK-MIDEAST-REUTERS.xml

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525816599&pagename=
JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Taboo

We live in the free world, or one where we may openly dream, speculate, question, compare, express etc. within certain boundaries of libel, slander, taste and intellectual property. I was amused to read in two different UK newspapers the following phrases over the weekend, relating to the war in Lebanon. Sadly, I did not purchase the periodicals or have the opportunity to make detailed notes at the time so I must paraphrase. The subject, however, is taboo (hence the heading, and the use of blanks).

"We are soon reaching a point where it has become exceedingly difficult to tell people off for making ludicrous comparisons between the _______ and the ________ in after-dinner conversations."

".....there are those who have started to make shameful comparisons between the _______ and the _______"

I shall not fill in the blanks, but it did amuse me that guardians of the truth treat some subjects with kid-gloves, resorting to treating even comparisons with words like "shameful" and "ludicrous". I wonder what words they would use to talk about clueless people being killed, in the first instance, and Stalin style justification for the removal of doctors, in the second? This was just a "comparison". When people start equating the two blanks above (and they already have - to an extent), I wonder if our good journalists will use the words "despicable", "horrendous", "disgusting", or even "abominable".

I, on the other hand, would love them to use the word "untenable", followed by a reason why, in the opinion of the writer, such a comparison does not hold water.

(A tough call indeed, for we are already in the realm of morality, where one opinion is as good as another)
Darwin and the slave

My remarks on the Charles Darwin discussion page on Wikipedia (the English version), referred to in an earlier post, attracted rejoinders and counter-response.


How am I being offensive? I'm asking for people to be treated as human beings and not labelled as colours!

May I respectfully raise two questions:

1. Are we to specify the race of everyone on wikipedia? Or only that of those called "blacks"?

2. What terms are used for describing those who are neither "white" nor "black"?


The gentleman's skin colour might well be perfectly described by the word "black". However, I don't think the word describes the gentleman himself. To repeat, I have no hassle with a person's _race_ being pointed out, where relevant (and it has been highlighted as relevant here). The word "negroid" describes a race; "black" does not.

I believe that words are central to the way we perceive our world in the first place, and (re-)interpret it in the second. My edits were fuelled as a personal campaign against the usage of the words "black", "white" and many such others to refer to human beings. The techincal racial terms are (obviously) fine. Skin may be black! The extension from skin to person is the sort of linguistic short cut which I object to, for it tends to shape how we think - in addition to the far more intuitive flow of our thinking influencing words we choose.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Well, well - if it isn't Potter!

Two days ago I was part of an interesting workshop on the skills of professional presentation. Our instructor explained how we might use emotion as a hook to grab our audience's attention. I was asked to present a mock subject myself highlighting this and other techniques. I was to present Perl - a programming language which is apparently widely used in WWW server side scripts. This what I came up with.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome! Let me begin by writing down on this flip-chart a name.

Harry Potter
(simultaneously writes on flip-chart)
Anyone heard of him? Good, I see all of you have!

Nietzsche
(simultaneously writes on flip-chart)
What about him? I see two raised hands.

Ankh-Morpork
(simultaneously writes on flip-chart)
Anyone familiar with the name? No one?

So, as you can see, we have Harry Potter, the protagonist of the eponymous novels by Ms. Rowling, whom everyone here knows. Friedrich Nietzsche, the freethinker, is known to just two people. And no one here has heard of Ankh-Morpork, a city from the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett, a delightful fantasy writer and cultural-political satirist.

Now, if you wished to learn more about them, or anything else for that matter, how would you go about it?

(audience murmurs - Internet, yahoo, google, wikipedia, WWW, STFW etc.)

Indeed! I too would look them up on the Internet - and 95% of all Internet servers are powered by Perl - which is what I wish to talk to you about today.
"

So began my spiel. I was gratified by the approbation my little attention-grabbing ploy received.

I wonder whether techniques like this form any part of serious journalism? Whether newspaper and online articles are written without any devices of this sort - just plain old truth, and nothing but?

Perhaps I won't answer these questions - the weekend's almost here: I plan to visit family tomorrow, and I'd like to do it in a pleasant state of mind.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

No translation needed

The BBC carried this report on Iraq today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5233660.stm

Abdul Hassan Muhammed, a 62-year-old teacher, told AP: "A big explosion slammed me four metres (12 feet) into a wall. My friends took me to one of their stores, gave me water and asked me to relax... I didn't get my pension."


I wonder if Mr. Muhammed told this to AP in English? Were those his exact words? How sacrosanct are the double quotes in today's journalism? Do they always contain verbatim speech?

I believe that if Mr. Muhammed had indeed spoken in Arabic (which, in Iraq, is as natural as is speaking English in England), and AP translated, this fact should have been mentioned. And if the language of someone who speaks English as a second or third tongue, especially someone who just escaped with his life, isn't grammatically polished enough for the newspaper or TV station - then just use a reported speech summary.

In any case, one may assume that he didn't convert the four metres into
twelve feet whilst speaking to the reporter. Or maybe he did - perhaps he is a stickler for accuracy. But then he got it wrong - it's actually 13.1232 feet.

So in Arabic he actually fell a foot shorter than in English!

That reminds me of a packet of South African instant soup a houseguest once left behind. I chanced upon it on a winter's evening and decided to give it a shot. The instructions were in English and what I presume was Afrikaans (the script was the same, but the words sounded very Dutch). In English it said, "...and boil for 15 mins.".
The equivalent numeral (the only numeral) in the other language was 10.


As far as powdered soup is concerned, this is trivial. In the realms of explosives and journalism - this could cost lives, or worse - the truth, or both.
Lighting candles

In the aftermath of the bomb blasts in Mumbai, India on 11 July 2006, IBN Live (in partnership with CNN) offered users of the WWW to "light" a candle on their webpage.

The original URL was http://clients.ibnlive.com/features/mumatt/index.php

The text read:

"Mumbai came to a shocking standstill on July 11 when serial blasts ripped through its local trains, killing and wounding hundreds. But the city of dreams stood fearless and fighting fit.

Salute Mumbai's never-say-die spirit and Light a Candle for those who succumbed to the blasts or got injured. For every candle you light, CNN-IBN and Channel 7 will donate Re 1 for the relief of the victims.
"

All very well - but they also asked for name, email and phone number.

I wrote a letter to the editor (editor AT ibnlive.com) on 17 July 2006:

_______________start quoted letter_______________

Will I be correct in assuming that the email addresses and phone numbers you solicit during this "candle lighting" will not be used by you to promote your website or for other marketing purposes, or sold (or bartered, leased, donated etc.) to any other third-party organization? I wonder why you request this information (for the apparently randomly generated text image seems to be an effective enough deterrent against automated "candle lighting") and how long you intend to store this information and if you will strive to keep this information private?

> For every candle you light, CNN-IBN and Channel 7 will donate Re 1 for the relief of the victims.

I congratulate you on your humanitarian gesture. May I ask how you intend to pass this money on to the victims? Will you donate to a private charitable organization or organizations, or to the State, or undertake the task of dispensing it yourself?

Thanks for your kind attention.

_______________end of quoted letter_______________


I haven't received any response so far. It's been two weeks.

I wonder if I made a difference.