These are some of the things that have caught my attention lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news business, but then so’s life:
- CitJ that works? Ukraine’s Highway to profitability | Window on the Media — The quality of Highway’s content comes in part from the number of professional journalists who write on the site. 25% of users are professional journalists:
Journalism students, looking for experience and visibility for their starting career,
Bored journalists, who want to publish on a topic different from their beat, and
Leftovers, when a journalist has some material that didn’t make it to the print version (interviews bits, for instance).
Highway resembles a social network for journalists on some aspects. Users share contacts on the site, especially freelancers wishing to write for foreign outlets. Serhiy and his team try to hide this fact away from general users, lest it scares non-journalists off. - I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq — washingtonpost.com — “We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.”
- Reporting War – why do they do it? | Charlie Beckett — Vaughan Smith: “Journalism provides good information so that many people can make a decision that will be better than one decision.”
The purpose of the journalist to inform has been subjugated by the financially strapped media outlets struggling for commercial success. “We’ve forgotten that we’re supposed to educate and inform.” For Smith the BBC has become a populist outlet competing for the audience of commercial organizations.”
- Britain’s neo-liberal state | open Democracy — Magnificent, baroque madness from open Democracy: “New Labour concentrated yet more power in a joint executive premiership of Blair and Brown, eviscerated the Cabinet as well as the Commons and the Lords and made Britain a bouncer for the Washington Consensus.
To achieve this, back in London the autonomy and self-belief of the old civil-service establishment had to be broken, so as to seize the traditional delights of its formally unaccountable power while disgorging the restraints of its informal and once tenacious gentlemanly codes. A new culture evolved, to replace the central processes of British government, with a different set of unelected advisers, businesspeople and a new class of what Colin Leys has called “entrepreneurs of the state”, sitting in the fulcrum of power making decisions which were often without due process or proper consideration.” - One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex | NYTimes.com — Many retired officers hold a perch in the world of military contracting, but General McCaffrey is among a select few who also command platforms in the news media and as government advisers on military matters. These overlapping roles offer them an array of opportunities to advance policy goals as well as business objectives. But with their business ties left undisclosed, it can be difficult for policy makers and the public to fully understand their interests.
- Study’s Claim on ‘Myth’ of Obama’s Small Donor Base Challenged | E&P — “The Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) study asserting that Barack Obama actually raised most of his campaign money from “larger” not “small” donors has gained wide, approving, coverage in recent days, from, among others, USA Today, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and countless web sites. Almost inevitably such accounts have held a headline referring to the “myth” of Obama riding a wave of small donations to victory. The study’s author himself uses it.
But the “myth” is actually in the spinning of the report, including by its author, Michael Malbin, a former speechwriter for Dick Cheney, when he was Pentagon chief, and a resident fellow at The American Enterprise Institute from 1977 to 1986.
As usual in these cases, it’s not that the numbers are wrong, it’s the analysis and how the interpretation is being played by the media. Because, buried in the report, are all the figures and arguments for showing that the CFI’s “myth” is actually a myth.”
- Press and Psy Ops to merge at NATO Afghan HQ: sources | Reuters — NATO policy recognizes there is an inherent clash of interests between its public affairs offices, whose job it is to issue press releases and answer media questions, and that of Information Operations and Psy Ops.
Information Operations advises on information designed to affect the will of the enemy, while Psy Ops includes so-called “black operations,” or outright deception.
While Public Affairs and Information Operations, PA and Info Ops in military jargon, “are separate, but related functions,” according to the official NATO policy document on public affairs, “PA is not an Info Ops discipline.”