Ari Explains

One of the things that has become a complete bugaboo is the fairly simple fact that when normal people don't know enough about some issue - eg: all this Trump shit - we go in search of good info, knowing "good" info is not all that easy to find, while an awful lot of truly shitty people are willing to put out all kinds of total bullshit that gets internalized by gullible (but honestly trusting) people who've been sucked in because cynically manipulative assholes feel no compunction about amping up the rage in order to cash in on it - either politically or monetarily, or both.

OK - thus endeth the rant.

Let's go to Ari Melber for a pretty good explainer.

To Look Or Not To Look

Google Search: "shooting victims"

(127,000,000 results)

33 Page Downs later ...

NOTE: You can find the more gruesome pix if you try, and I'll leave you to it. But, as the WaPo article says, be careful what you ask for.

My default position here is that we don't change the law until we change the culture, and we don't change the culture until we've changed enough individual minds.

The actual effects of graphic depictions on the public psyche can get more than a little iffy.

Show what's really happening, and people can be moved to take action. The problem is that you can never be sure which direction that action will be going ...

... because you can't be sure public response isn't going to be cynically manipulated so the action goes in a direction that just ends up making everything worse.

Raw videos of violent incidents in Texas rekindle debate about graphic images

News organizations have long held back from publishing explicit or violent images of death, which are now rapidly disseminated across social media platforms

The shooter who killed eight people outside an outlet mall in Allen, Tex., on May 6 was captured on a dash-cam video as he stood in the middle of a parking lot, methodically murdering people.

The next day, when a driver plowed his SUV into a cluster of men waiting for a bus in Brownsville, Tex., a video showed him speeding into and rolling over so many human beings that the person behind the camera had to pan across nearly a block-long field of mangled bodies, pools of blood and moaning, crying victims to capture the carnage. The driver killed eight people.

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These gruesome videos almost instantly appeared on social media and were viewed millions of times before, in many cases, being taken down. Yet they still appear in countless back alleys of the internet.

The footage made clear that the deaths were horrific and the suffering unspeakable. The emotional power of the images would shake almost any viewer. Their rapid dissemination also rekindled an unsettling debate — one that has lingered since the advent of photography: Why does anyone need to see such images?

Images of violence can inform, titillate, or rally people for or against a political view. Ever since 19th-century photographer Mathew Brady made his pioneering photos of fallen soldiers stacked like firewood on Civil War battlefields, news organizations and now social media platforms have grappled with questions of taste, decency, purpose and power that suffuse decisions about whether to fully portray the price of deadly violence.

Newspaper editors and television news executives have long sought to filter out pictures of explicit violence or bloody injuries that could generate complaints that such graphic imagery is offensive or dehumanizing. But such policies have historically come with exceptions, some of which have galvanized popular sentiments. The widely published photo of the mangled body of the lynched 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 played a key role in building the civil rights movement. And although many news organizations decided in 2004 not to publish explicit photos of torture by U.S. service members at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the images that did circulate widely contributed to a shift in public opinion against the war in Iraq, according to several studies.

More recently, the gruesome video of a police officer killing George Floyd on a Minneapolis street in 2020 was repeatedly published across all manner of media, sparking a mass movement to confront police violence against Black Americans.

Following the killings in Allen and Brownsville, traditional news organizations, including The Washington Post, mostly steered clear of publishing the most grisly images.

“Those were not close calls,” said J. David Ake, director of photography for the Associated Press, which did not use the Texas videos. “We are not casual at all about these decisions, and we do need to strike a balance between telling the truth and being sensitive to the fact that these are people who’ve been through something horrific. But I am going to err on the side of humanity and children.”

But even as news organizations largely showed restraint, the Allen video spread widely on Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and other platforms, shared in part by individuals who expressed anguish at the violence and called for a change in gun policies.

“I thought long and hard about whether to share the horrific video showing the pile of bodies from the mass shooting‚” tweeted Jon Cooper, a Democratic activist and former Suffolk County, N.Y., legislator. He wrote that he decided to post the video, which was then viewed more than a million times, because “maybe — just maybe — people NEED to see this video, so they’ll pressure their elected officials until they TAKE ACTION.”

Others who posted the video used it to make false claims about the shooter, such as the notion that he was a Black supremacist who shouted anti-White slogans before killing his victims.

From government-monitored decisions about showing deaths during World War II to friction over explicit pictures of devastated civilians during the Vietnam War and on to the debate over depictions of mass killing victims in recent years, editors, news consumers, tech companies and relatives of murdered people have made compelling but opposing arguments about how much gore to show.

The dilemma has only grown more complicated in this time of information overload, when more Americans are saying they avoid the news because, as a Reuters Institute study found last year, they feel overwhelmed and the news darkens their mood. And the infinite capacity of the internet has upped the ante for grisly images, making it harder for any single image to provoke the widespread outrage that some believe can translate into positive change.

Recent cutbacks in content moderation teams at companies such as Twitter have also accelerated the spread of disturbing videos, experts said.

“The fact that very graphic images from the shooting in Texas showed up on Twitter is more likely to be content moderation failure than an explicit policy,” said Vivian Schiller, executive director of Aspen Digital and former president of NPR and head of news at Twitter.

Twitter’s media office responded to an emailed request for comment with only a poop emoji, the company’s now-standard response to press inquiries.

Efforts to study whether viewing gruesome images alters popular opinion, changes public policy or affects the behavior of potential killers have generally been unsuccessful, social scientists say.

“There’s never been any solid evidence that publishing more grisly photos of mass shootings would produce a political response,” said Michael Griffin, a professor of media and cultural studies at Macalester College who studies media practices regarding war and conflict. “It’s good for people to be thinking about these questions, but advocates for or against publication are basing their views on their own moral instincts and what they would like to see happen.”

The widely available videos of the two incidents in Texas resurfaced long-standing conflicts over the publication of images of death stemming from wars, terrorist attacks or shootings.

One side argues that widespread dissemination of gruesome images of dead and wounded victims is sensationalistic, emotionally abusive, insensitive to the families of victims and ultimately serves little purpose other than to inure people to horrific violence.

The other side contends that media organizations and online platforms ought not to proclaim themselves arbiters of what the public can see, and should instead deliver the unvarnished truth, either to shock people into political action or simply to allow the public to make its own assessment of how policy decisions play out.

Schiller said news organizations are sometimes right to publish graphic images of mass killings. “Those images are a critical record of both a specific crime but also the horrific and unrelenting crisis of gun violence in the U.S. today,” she said. “Graphic images can drive home the reality of what automatic weapons do to a human body — the literal human carnage.”

It’s not clear, however, that horrific images spur people to protest or action. “Some gruesome images cause public outrage and maybe even government action, but some result in a numbing effect or compassion fatigue,” said Folker Hanusch, a University of Vienna journalism professor who has written extensively about how media outlets report on death. “I’m skeptical that showing such imagery can really result in lasting social change, but it’s still important that journalists show well-chosen moments that convey what really happened.”

Others argue that even though any gory footage taken down by the big tech companies will nonetheless find its way onto many other sites, traditional news organizations and social media companies should still set a standard to signify what is unacceptable fare for a mass audience.

The late writer Tom Wolfe derisively dubbed the gatekeepers of the mainstream media “Victorian gentlemen,” worried about protecting their audience from disturbing images. Throughout the last half-century, media critics have urged editors to give their readers and viewers a more powerful and visceral sense of what gun violence, war and terrorism do to their victims.

Early in the Iraq War, New York columnist Pete Hamill asked why U.S. media were not depicting dead soldiers. “What we get to see is a war filled with wrecked vehicles: taxis, cars, Humvees, tanks, gasoline trucks,” he wrote. “We see almost no wrecked human beings. … In short, we are seeing a war without blood.”

After pictures of abuses at Abu Ghraib appeared, it was “as though, rather suddenly, the gloves have come off, and the war seems less sanitized,” wrote Michael Getler, then the ombudsman at The Post.

Still, news consumers have often made clear that they appreciate restraint. In a 2004 survey, two-thirds of Americans told Pew Research Center that news organizations were right to withhold images of the charred bodies of four U.S. contractors killed in Fallujah, Iraq.

Images of mass shooting victims have been published even less frequently than grisly pictures of war dead, journalism historians have found. “Mass shootings happen to ‘us,’ while war is happening ‘over there,’ to ‘them,’” Griffin said. “So there’s much more resistance to publication of grisly images of mass shootings, much more sensitivity to the feelings” of families of victims.

But despite decades of debate, no consensus has developed about when to use graphic images. “There’s no real pattern, not for war images, not for natural disasters, not for mass shootings,” Hanusch said. “Journalists are very wary of their audience castigating them for publishing images they don’t want to see.”

Ake, the AP photo director, said that over the years, “we probably have loosened our standards when it comes to war images. But at the same time, with school shootings, we might have tightened them a little” to be sensitive to the concerns of parents.

For decades, many argued that decisions to show explicit images of dead and mangled bodies during the Vietnam War helped shift public opinion against the war.

But when social scientists dug into news coverage from that era, they found that pictures of wounded and dead soldiers and civilians appeared only rarely. And in a similar historical survey of coverage of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, images of the dead and wounded made up fewer than 5 percent of news photos, as noted by professors at Arizona State and Rutgers universities.

Some iconic images from the Vietnam War — the running, nude Vietnamese girl who was caught in a napalm attack, for example — gained their full historic import only after the war.

 9-year-old Kim Phuc, center,

after a napalm attack on June 8, 1972

In the digital age, publication decisions by editors and social media managers can sometimes feel less relevant because once images are published somewhere, they spread virtually uncontrollably throughout the world.

“People are just getting a fire hose of feeds on their phones, and it’s decontextualized,” Griffin said. “They don’t even know where the images come from.”

The flood of images, especially on highly visual platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, diminishes the impact of pictures that show what harm people have done to one another, Griffin said, pointing to the example of the photo of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian refugee found washed ashore on a Turkish beach, a powerful and disturbing image from 2017 that many people then compared with iconic pictures from the Vietnam War.

“At the time, people said this is going to be like the napalm girl from Vietnam and really change people’s minds,” Griffin said. “But that didn’t happen. Most people now don’t remember where that was or what it meant.”

Social media companies face pressure to set standards and enforce them either before grisly images are posted or immediately after they surface. With every new viral video from a mass killing, critics blast the social media platforms for being inconsistent or insufficiently rigorous in taking down sensational or grisly images; the companies say they enforce their rules with algorithms that filter out many abuses, with their content moderator staffs and with reports from users.

Soon after the Allen shooting, a Twitter moderator told a user who complained about publication of the gruesome video that the images did not violate the site’s policy on violent content, the BBC reported. But a day later, images of dead bodies at the mall — bloody, crumpled, slumped against a wall — were taken down.

Although the biggest social media platforms eventually removed the video, images of the shooter firing his weapon and photos of the shooter sprawled on his back, apparently already dead, are still widely available, for example on Reddit, which has placed a red “18 NSFW” warning on links to the video, indicating that the images are intended for adults and are “not safe for work.”

A moderator of Reddit’s “r/masskillers” forum told his audience that the platform’s managers had changed their policy, requiring images of dead victims to be removed.

“Previously, only livestreams of shootings and manifestos from the perpetrators were prohibited,” the moderator wrote. Now, “[g]raphic content of victims of mass killings is generally going to be something admins are going to take down, so we’ll have to comply with that.”

The group, which has 147,000 members, focuses on mass killings, but its rules prohibit users from sharing or asking for live streams of shootings or manifestos from shooters.

After the attack in Allen, YouTube “quickly removed violative content … in accordance with our Community Guidelines,” said Jack Malon, a spokesman for the company. In addition, he said, to make sure users find verified information, “our systems are prominently surfacing videos from authoritative sources in search and recommendations.”

At Meta, videos and photos depicting dead bodies outside the mall were removed and “banked,” creating a digital fingerprint that automatically removes the images when someone tries to upload them.

But people often find ways to post such videos even after companies have banned them, and Griffin argued that “you can’t get away anymore with ‘Oh, we took it down quickly,’ because it’s going to spread. There is no easy solution.”

Mourners gather at the makeshift memorial in Allen. Images of the shooter firing his weapon and photos of the shooter sprawled on his back, apparently already dead, are still widely available online. (Jeffrey McWhorter for The Washington Post)
Tech platforms such as Google, Meta and TikTok generally prohibit particularly violent or graphic content. But those companies often make exceptions for newsworthy images, and it can take some time before the platforms decide how to handle a particular set of images.

The companies consider how traditional media organizations are using the footage, how the accounts posting the images are characterizing the events and how other tech platforms are responding, said Katie Harbath, a technology consultant and former public policy director at Meta.

“They’re trying to parse out if somebody is praising the act ... or criticizing it,” she said. “They usually [want to] keep up the content denouncing it, but they don’t want to allow praise. … That starts to get really tricky, especially if you are trying to use automated tools.”

In 2019, Meta, YouTube, Twitter and other platforms were widely criticized for their role in publicizing the mass killing at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The shooter, Brenton Tarrant, had live-streamed the attack on Facebook with a camera affixed to his helmet. Facebook took the video down shortly afterward, but not until it had been viewed thousands of times.

By then, the footage had gone viral, as internet users evaded the platforms’ artificial-intelligence content-moderation systems by making small changes to the images and reposting them.

But just as traditional media outlets find themselves attacked both by those who want grisly images published and those who don’t, so too have tech companies been pummeled both for leaving up and taking down gruesome footage.

In 2021, Twitch, a live-streaming service popular among video game players, faced angry criticism when it suspended an account that rebroadcast video of Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The company takes a zero-tolerance approach to violent content.

“Society’s thought process on what content should be allowed or not allowed is definitely still evolving,” Harbath said.

US Marines - Buna Beach - Papua New Guinea

1942 George Strock

Today's Bizarro Stuff

I don't know why this struck me as odd. I guess maybe because I have this image of a porn website in my head that's basically a bunch of sweaty pervs with a makeshift server farm set up in some abandoned warehouse with a leaky roof and a non-functioning shitter.

When I stop to think about it, I know there's huge money in it, but somehow it just doesn't register that PornHub would have a corporate structure and an org chart that looks a whole lot like any other profitable enterprise.

But what really sticks in my brain is the thought of a porn company trying to do more to be socially conscientious and to keep itself morally fit than way too many banks or oil companies or governments.

To be clear: I'm all for anything that goes on between consenting adults, and makes you feel good. Fake lord knows porn is a mighty fine "self care" tool for when the pressures of surviving here in USAmerica Inc get a little overburdensome.

 

And you can monetize the shit out of it as long as participation is voluntary and as non-exploitative as is possible when we're talking about transactions between people as we struggle with the paradox of wanting anonymity and privacy in a world that runs on interconnectivity and the exchange of information.

And also too: PornHub lost me when they went "a little too corporate" a few years ago, and started removing all the spontaneous homemade stuff in favor of content that's over-staged and poorly produced, even though it has a "better" look to it.

But anyway...

WaPo: (pay wall - because the pimps at Washington Post aren't that much different than the pimps at PornHub?)

Top executives quit Pornhub’s parent company amid more controversy

Two top executives at MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub, have resigned amid allegations that the site does not immediately or sufficiently remove content involving nonconsensual and underage sex.

MindGeek confirmed the departures of CEO Feras Antoon and COO David Tassillo in a statement Tuesday.

“Antoon and Tassillo leave MindGeek’s day-to-day operations after more than a decade in leadership positions with the company,” the company told The Washington Post. “MindGeek’s executive leadership team will run day-to-day operations on an interim basis, with a search underway for replacements.”

News of the departures come about a week after a New Yorker article detailed people’s attempts to get Porhhub to remove sexually explicit content that involved underage and nonconsensual participants. Announcement of the departures is not related to the piece, MindGeek told The Post.

The company said in a statement that it had enacted the most extensive safeguards “in the history of the internet” and that data proves its policies have been effective. The statement cited a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children report showing that Pornhub had few instances of child sexual abuse and that it removed cases of such material “in the shortest amount of time after being notified among all major platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more.”

“The New Yorker had the opportunity to seriously evaluate what works in fighting illegal material on the internet by looking at the facts, comparing the policies of platforms, and studying the results,” MindGeek’s statement said. “Instead, they chose to ignore the fact that MindGeek has more comprehensive and effective policies than any other major platform on the internet, and decided to peddle the same gross mischaracterizations that anti-porn extremists have spewed for decades.”

Alana Evans, president of the Adult Performance Artists Guild, a union for adult performers, said entertainers are stunned by the news of the departures because such resignations typically come as a result of bad press or a scandal.

“The timing is kind of out of the blue,” Evans told The Post, but added that she didn’t think the resignations were tied to the New Yorker piece. MindGeek has fought lawsuits and negative articles in the past, she said.

In December 2020, Mastercard, Visa and Discover blocked customers from using their credit cards on Pornhub’s website after the New York Times published an opinion piece accusing Pornhub of being rife with nonconsensual and child abuse material.

The New Yorker piece, which Evans called “a hit job,” quotes multiple organizations, such as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and Exodus Cry, that have been at the forefront of pushing legislation and corporate decisions that make it hard for sex workers to earn a living.

Sex workers fear OnlyFans decision to ban explicit content will push them further into the shadows

Evans said she is stunned by the exits of the top executives, but noted that their resignations probably will not affect the day-to-day life of performers because people in those positions are already so far removed from the routine of the average performer.

“MindGeek is corporate porn,” she said, naming smaller outlets. “Other owners and CEOs are far more involved in porn and the product.”

What’s mainly on the mind of people in the industry is what is next for MindGeek, especially for Pornhub. Evans noted that the company has an opportunity to place a woman in charge.

MindGeek said it is at the beginning of investing in its “creator-first offerings and additional opportunities for content monetization, with a plan to use resources to make headway in this burgeoning business as the company continues to be a force in digital video and tube sites.”

Moving to models where it can compete with subscriber-based and creator-driven platforms such as Patreon and OnlyFans makes good business sense, according to Evans.

“That’s what’s hot. That’s what people want,” she said, adding that limiting free content is always good for performers because most platforms make money from advertising. “The more free content that is pulled, the more money that we make.”

Green Shoots

Russian Spring is coming.

ПРИБЛИЖАЕТСЯ РУССКАЯ ВЕСНА

Meet Marina Ovsyannikova  (Марина Овсянникова)

What she did:

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/te4ypg/russian_state_tv_broadcast_hijacked_by_an/

Her sign says:

Stop the war

Don't believe the propaganda

You are being lied to here

And she has more to tell us:

Redditt: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/te5mjo/the_anti_war_girls_name_is_marina_asvanjikova_she/

What's happening in Ukraine right now is a crime, and Russia is the aggressor state. The responsibility for this aggression lies on the conscience of a single person, and that person is Vladimir Putin.

My father is Ukrainian, my mother is Russian. They were never enemies. This necklace I'm wearing symbolizes that Russia should immediately stop this fratricidal war, and our brotherly nations will be able to make peace with each other.

Unfortunately for the past years I've been working on Channel 1, spreading Kremlin's propaganda, and I am now terribly ashamed of myself for that. I'm ashamed for allowing myself to speak the lies from the screens of TVs. Ashamed for letting Russian people get zombified.

We stayed silent in 2014, when it all began. We did not go out to protest when Kremlin poisoned Navalny. We just quietly observed this inhumane regime. And now the entire world has turned away from us, and ten generations of our descendants won't be able to wash away the shame of this fratricidal war.

We, the Russian people, are a thinking, smart nation. Only we can stop this madness. Go out and protest. They can't imprison us all.

Today's Daddy State Thing

...is just a variation on the old White Supremacy thing, which of course is almost always at the root of all the racist shit that's been going on in USAmerica Inc for 400 years.

"Power-mad outa-control black man kills innocent patriotic white girl."

Joy Reid and Mary Trump:

Here's a rundown on the film that started it all - including a mention of the first ever Cute Cat video.

Note - the ugly side of American populism has been there forever, and sometimes it manifests itself in cynical efforts to manipulate public opinion by way of products and services available on new media platforms.

And So It Goes

If "Conservatives" would stop acting like a buncha whiny-butt pussies, I'd stop calling them a buncha whiny-butt pussies.

I've called them Rubes for a while now too - which they are, because they continue to demonstrate they are.

See how that works?

Now, I'm not saying I have some kind of perfect record when it comes to bravely confronting things in life. 

To this day, I can't listen to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells (The Exorcist) without having nightmares. And I'm a fucking atheist.

There was also the time I believed that my wife of 28 years (now ex-wife) wasn't taking horizontal mambo lessons from an old high school "acquaintance" on a regular basis.

So I can be a chicken - and a dumbass mired in denial too.

But for the most part, when I'm looking at all this political stuff, I can pick my way through the available data and synthesize a reasonable hypothesis that I can test, to see if it holds up.

There are things you just have to know are bullshit. And it's not something where you have to have a knack for it, or an innate ability to see the truth through an unfiltered mind's eye.

You just have to test it. Question it. Sort it out.

And really, it helps to be possessed of that tiny modicum of common sense that "conservatives" are always bitchin' about how nobody else has.

Anyway.

The Washington Examiner:

Russian intelligence agents spread a false report claiming assassins working for Hillary Clinton killed Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich just days after his murder, according to a new investigation.

The SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, spread a fake intelligence report about Rich on July 13, 2016, three days after he was killed walking home, a federal prosecutor told Yahoo News.

The Russians claimed Rich, a 27-year-old working as a data director for the DNC, was going to alert the FBI to corrupt dealings by Clinton when he was murdered by assassins. Those details then appeared on whatdoesitmean.com, an obscure website that promotes Russian propaganda.

In the next two years, media organizations owned by the Russian government emphasized stories falsely alleging Rich leaked Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange also made false statements about Rich’s death to obscure that the hacked emails came from Russia, special counsel Robert Mueller alleged in his redacted report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll factory that engaged in social media influence operations during the election, aggressively circulated the conspiracy theories, helping to keep the false claims alive.

The conspiracy was also spread by allies of President Trump.


The Examiner isn't what any sentient being would consider "lefty":

And "conservatives" are suckers. They're whiny-butt pussies and rubes and suckers.

No Time To Check Out

There's a bi-partisan, almost universal, condemnation of Press Poodles. Everybody loves to hate "the media". But the reasons people criticize news outlets are important because there are important differences in that criticism.

"Conservatives" like to paint themselves as the true patriots and defenders of Real America, so they shit on the press for always poking holes in their stories and showing up Republicans (mostly) to be hypocrites and pinch-faced blue-nosed puritans who think politics is about ruling the public instead of serving us.

"Liberals" shit on the media for their constant attempts to substitute "balance" for factual analysis in service to profitability - the standard bullshit of scampering back to "Both sides do it" and "Yeah, but the Democrats..."

What's happening with Julian Assange is a weird thing that does not bode well.

I've been very critical of Assange because I think he was played for a stooge by Putin et al. And I think he crossed the line, moving from "the right to publish once something's been leaked" to "let's help the leaker steal a bunch of embarrassing shit that'll make us a pile of money when we publish it".

It can be a really fine line, but there's a line. IMHO, Julian Assange is not a Katherine-Graham-level hero.

However, things have changed a bit now. Cult45 is going after Assange, not for stealing the stuff, but for publishing it. And that's a whole new bag of fuckery.

Rachel (and pay particular attention at about 15:50, when she gets to the part about Austria):

Guardians Of The Truth

That'll put a knot in his knickers

Editor-In-Chief, Time Magazine:

It has long been the first move in the authoritarian playbook: controlling the flow of information and debate that is freedom’s lifeblood. And in 2018, the playbook worked. Today, democracy around the world faces its biggest crisis in decades, its foundations undermined by invective from on high and toxins from below, by new technologies that power ancient impulses, by a poisonous cocktail of strongmen and weakening institutions. From Russia to Riyadh to Silicon Valley, manipulation and abuse of truth is the common thread in so many of this year’s major headlines, an insidious and growing threat to freedom.
- and - 

In its highest forms, influence—the measure that has for nine decades been the focus of TIME’s Person of the Year—derives from courage. Like all human gifts, courage comes to us at varying levels and at varying moments. This year we are recognizing four journalists and one news organization who have paid a terrible price to seize the challenge of this moment: Jamal Khashoggi, Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Md.

They are representative of a broader fight by countless others around the world—as of Dec. 10, at least 52 journalists have been murdered in 2018—who risk all to tell the story of our time.

A Question

Mollie Tibbetts was murdered by an "illegal" and Cult45 started jumping and and down screaming, and otherwise losing their shit over it.

"Immigrant" Celia Barquin Arozamena is murdered by a white American-born guy, and  -

So, my question(s): 

Are we looking for balance here? 

Are we seeing something from the Press Poodles that points a finger at GOP cherry-picking? 

And if either or both of those is the case, what's the fuckin' difference?

Welcome to (hopefully) the height of The Propaganda War.

For what it's worth:

Service

You don't have to wear a uniform and carry a gun to serve your country.

In case you were wondering what that occasionally looks like, here's the front page of The Capital Gazette (Annapolis, MD) the morning after some asshole with a gun and a grudge murdered 5 people because he felt aggrieved, and blamed the newspaper for his troubles.

Fuck yeah they published the next day. The bad shit people do to each other never takes a day off - so the news can't take a day either. Way to go, guys.

I bitch a lot about Press Poodles. I'm not sorry for most of that - sometimes I show my love by poking you with a stick - but that's got nothing to do with what happened yesterday in Annapolis.

Every day we get a new batch of horrors. It's not unreasonable to attribute some of them directly to Cult45, while others have a more tenuous connection.

Sometimes though, out of these horrors, we get a new hero.

Selene San Felice (Capital Gazette survivor) is that hero. Because the truth must be spoken.

Oy

Poe's Law reigns supreme.

Even after I confirmed it at Time's website, I felt compelled to check it - a lot.

The Past Ain't Even The Past Yet

This makes me think she had some real points to make - a lot like the points black folks are still trying to make - but all I really remember about Angela Davis was the feeling that I was supposed to be wary of her - and that whole merry band of "black radicals" out there in California.

Trying to sort through it is complicated, and I have to continue looking back to learn a bit more from that weirdest of weird times we call the 60s, when I was very much just a knuckleheaded teenager, trying to make sense of what I thought I was learning about the world - especially the parts concerning Race Relations and Power and the Politics of Change here in USAmerica Inc - as the world's problems were getting bigger even as the world itself was getting smaller in what seemed like one big fuckin' hurry.

Way too much of "the news" - one of the things I was trying to learn from - way back in the golden age of "honest broadcast journalism" - turned out to be about as slanted and warped back then as I see it now when I consider how the Dis-Infotainment Industry has really kicked it into high gear.

I guess I could ask, "What chance does anybody have?".

But then I'd have to tell you not to bother watching this (even if you've got the 2 hours and 45 minutes to spare):

Now try this one on for size: You can't believe anybody, so you'll have to believe me.

"Post-Truth" is bullshit. I may not have more than a couple of dime's worth of neurons to rub together, but I'm not going along with anybody who tries to tell me there's no way we can ever know what's real and what's not.

12 people have walked on the moon for fuck's sake - and we got them all back so they could tell us about it. We can figure this shit out.

Go Larry Go

hat tip = Talking Points Memo

The Other Awards Season

It's time once again to begin the celebration of all that isn't DumFux News.

Columbia University's DuPont Awards featured PBS and WGBH-Boston and The Seattle Times and several other joints where they look for stuff that matters and try to tell us what's going on.  Pretty much what you'd expect, because in spite of people like me who sit here and bitch about Press Poodles most of the day, it appears there may still be some journalisming going on up in here.

Conspicuous among the winners is Netflix - they put out a feature length documentary about Virunga National Park in Congo and the fight to protect a World Heritage Site from the various assholes who want nothing but power and money.

And of course, conspicuously absent (again) is DumFux News - for the 19th year in a row - which means their record remains unblemished at Oh-fer-19.  Zero. Zip. Zilch.  Nuthin'.  For their entire existence, starting in 1996, they just haven't been able to get over the hump on that whole journalism thing at all.

Things could change of course.  The year is young and filled with possiblities.  But really - what're the odds?

And it's not like there aren't opportunities.

James Beard Foundation (the writer, not the chef)
Anthony Shadid
Polk
Peabody
IWMF (fat chance, Roger)
SPJ
Gannett Foundation
Pulitzer
Pulliam
ASME
Hearst Foundation
(seems like that one oughta be right up Fox's alley seeing as how they share such a rich and proud tradition of war pimping - but anyhoo)

It's a much longer list than that.  I only put up the ones I've heard anything about. And when you add in all the regional outfits - eg: Ancil Payne, Keystone Press; plus all the niche subject stuff like Science and Economics and Foreign Policy, etc - it ain't long before you get a list of awards that makes it seem like the pizza party at the end of your kid's 3rd grade soccer season when everybody gets a trophy no matter what.  

But there's DumFux News - No trophy.  No Certificate of Participation.  No Honorable Mention.  Just some cardboard franchise pizza that's high on calories and low on actual food.  Seems fitting somehow.

I get the feeling they're not really trying.

NPR Awakes

I don't do NPR much anymore because they've been beaten into submission, and they almost always skew to the Both-Sides malarkey.  But when they get one right, I wanna be here to say they got one right.

Give It A Try

Lamenting the dearth of good solid "librul" radio, Driftglass and BlueGal mentioned this on The Professional Left podcast today:

Netroots Radio

The Real News

I'm not nearly as optimistic as Col Wilkerson, as you may notice in the next post down from this one.

Going Out In Style - Updated

She gets all the Style Points available.

And from Crooks and Liars:

Is It Really You, Grandpa?

This is just too weird.  Here's a letter sent to the OpEd page for one of the newspapers in Pueblo Colorado some time in about 1973 - written by my grandfather:

The old duffer's been dead for about 40 years, but reading this makes me think he must've been way ahead of his time cuz he sure sounds like about 80% of the wingnut trolls who show up and leave comments on news sites and Facebook and anywhere you go to try to get something resembling the straight dope on practically anything.

Or maybe he sounds kinda current because a certain mentality just never fucking changes.

An Outrageously Blatant Act Of Journalism

And the name of the rat bastard pinko librul media type who insisted on at least trying to hold this valiantly entrepreneurial job creator accountable for something completely out of his control?  Kallie Cart, WCHS Channel 8 Eyewitness News

I have no idea if Ms Cart has done anything else of note in her career, but when a Press Poodle does anything even close to a decent job of imitating a real reporter, I think it's important to pile on some laurels.

Now, maybe if she took a hard look at the failures of the Regulatory Regime, we'd have something even more worthy of my much-sought-after kudos.  Go get 'em, Kallie.  Keep doin' good.

hat tip = Addicting Info