I don’t remember any over-weening coverage by big media over the firing squad demise of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu when ” video pictures of their summary trial and execution were shown on television in Romania and around the world”, back in December of 1989.
The images of their dead bodies, riddled with bullets, were broadcast and much of the unrest which continued after their deaths subsided.
So, what’s transpired in the years intervening that has prompted such distress on the part of media for the way that citizens of oppressed nations treat the dearly awaited departure of their not-so-beloved dictators?
Here is Bill Carter in the New York Times, on the hard choices facing their editors, chastising the great unwashed amateurs of the internet for their lack of journalistic… standards…
Confronted with a second, unofficial and more graphic video account of the moments leading up to the execution of Saddam Hussein, and the hanging itself, executives at television news organizations made a series of what one executive, President Steve Capus of NBC News, called “delicate editorial decisions” about what they would put on the air on Saturday night and Sunday to augment the first pictures of the execution.
The new video, almost certainly shot by a cellphone camera by one of the guards or witnesses at the execution, includes exchanges between Mr. Hussein and either the witnesses or guards leading up to the moment when the trapdoor opens and he falls. No national American television organization has thus far allowed the moment of the drop to be shown.
But the same niceties were not observed on numerous Web sites, which have posted the complete video, including the moment that Mr. Hussein, noose around his neck, falls, and a close-up of his face afterward. Some prominent sites, like Google’s video site and the conservative blog Littlegreenfootballs.com, have posted the complete cellphone coverage of the execution, including the moment Mr. Hussein falls from view.
What’s that saying?
“Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to forget to fact-check”.
Little Green Footballs is running slower than a mule on Valium this morning, apparently because of a link in this article at the New York Times that’s sending a deluge of people looking for the cellphone video of Saddam Hussein’s execution: Hard Choices Over Video of Execution.
[…]
In his haste to take a slap at the “conservative” blog LGF for not observing the same “niceties” as mainstream media, New York Times writer Bill Carter failed to notice that the “complete video” is not posted at LGF, and never has been. Elementary fact-checking, anyone? Did Carter even look at our site before writing that, or was he going for the cheap smear based on nothing more than his own fevered imagination?
h/t to Maz2, in the comments.
More – observations on CTV’s Tom Clark editorializing, also in the comments.
“The problem with Marxism, and utopias in general, in that they disregard the immutable rule that, as Bob Lewi explained: “Level playing fields are for those who lack the wit to find one tilted in their favour.”
You’ve got marxists mixed up with rawlsian liberals or some such thing.
exile: You must be the last, lonely (Marxist) eagle.
http://www.amazon.ca/New-Riders-Purple-Sage/dp/B00008QSA7/sr=1-1/qid=1167711862/ref=sr_1_1/702-0235386-6438412?ie=UTF8&s=music
Mark
Ottawa
exile: And you’re surely not on Main Street.
Said the spider to the fly, for those out of their heads.
http://www.chordie.com/chord.pere/www.ultimate-guitar.com/print.php?what=tab&id=408723
Mark
Ottawa
Speaking for myself, Exile, I’ve never called you stupid or anything like that. I’ve offered some gentle criticism, couched in code, so as not to offend those who aren’t interested in Googling the code.
Your conjecture, Exile, “that we ourselves control our economy, our society, our lives, and our government,” suffers a fatal flaw, because “we” don’t control *my* life: I do. The proof is that I can kill myself faster than you can kill me.
You’re relatively new to these parts, Exile, in spite of your recent verbosity, so please allow me to honestly attempt to clue you in. If it is the case that, as you say in response to ET, “I can quite easily assess how much you know about Marxism,” then if you are rational and you know what’s going on behind the scenes here, you would have to conclude that ET knows far more than most people about Marxism, and in general about the relationships between man and the systems and methodologies we attempt.
You’re being a bit of a tsatske, Exile. You can do better than that.
Kate,
Like I said, “exile” better come clean about his identity (is he Maurice Strong?) or you should send him packing. His vile shit is taking up more and more of your bandwith with each putrid dump he takes in the comments.
While it’s certainly not up to me to speak for Kate and her management of her property, Doug, there is at least a degree to which an alternative approach to those for whom quality is less important than quantity is to use them as a foil to otherwise argue what one thinks is important, independent of what the foil is attempting to promote.
This technique was famously argued in the Yes Prime Minister sketch in which Prime Minister Hacker explains to Principal Private Secretary Bernard Wolley about how to deflect and conquer in the answering of a hostile question from the press.
The problem with this approach is, however, that it tends to assist in the general proclivity for human discussions to wander off topic. The trick, as I see it, is for the interlocutors to keep referring the discussion back to the topic, even as they wander.
Which brings us back to the lack of fact-checking referred to in Kate’s original post. Alas, this phenomenon is not limited to the main-stream media, it is normative to the species unless we are deliberately going out of our way to prevent it.
That’s why I provided above the Wikipedia links on left and right anarchism. An enormous amount of the chatter and bickering and lack of signal-to-noise ratio that goes on in the blogosphere, and in the main-stream-media, and in human communications in general is the caused by the use by interlocutors of different meanings for the same word. In the OED, the word “set” has 32 definitions, and “love” has 24. Which one(s) do you mean?
And, of course, there’s a lot of shysters out there too, and we must always be wary of them, as I noted in my “How to Spot a Shyster” post at: sagaciousiconoclast.blogspot.com/2005/10/how-to-spot-shyster.html
Thanks for the laugh Vit, even if I had to ‘google’it.
Who wants to be a chach·ka anyways?
I’m glad you enjoyed that, Glenn. Not to be a pain the tuchus, but actually I think that a period of being a tsatske is part of growing up human, after all, in addition to it’s meanings as a knik-knack and an ornament or trinket, one if it’s definitions is a pretty young girl – which as we all know is a natural temporal perspective that has its limitations.
Eschew escutcheons I say! Long live Bauhaus! All right, all right, it’s time for me to go to bed, I’m bordering on marginally silly (though, you must admit, I still managed to construct a double self-depricating disclaimer in passing).
Happy new year everyone, and as the sun sets slowly in the west, don’t forget these two classic works:
youtube.com/watch?v=amZVqu0XOQM
youtube.com/watch?v=91Bv10YwXSw
Good night.
“After that, I responded to other comments. People frequently do that on this site.”
LOL !!! well exile, been there done that, in fact Ive just about perfected it in that I anticipate the responses most of which are one of:
– change the topic
– revise the question, answer the revised question and then claim they are correct in answering their own rephrased question completely IGNORING the point I make.
– deliberately or sloppily misreading my statements
– and the #1 response: engage in personal attack and insults wasting megabytes in an exercise of waffling and distraction when they have nothing else and cannot argue the facts.
So. . . Does this mean that the NYT has posted the video of Saddam’s execution? After all, they linked to LGF, which linked to Google Video.
Kate, you are so right in pointing out how the Left has grabbed the adjective “Progressive”. It was practically simultaneous with it’s dropping off the Conservative moniker, like they could hardly wait to grab it.
In hindsight, had we known the Left coveted it so much, we should have kept it.
“Progressive” and the Left are not a fit, never will be. File under “oxymoron”.
Exile – stating that you ‘don’t have the time’ or your readers are ‘too ignorant’ to understand you is an unacceptable response in a debate. It’s a cop-out.
Now, the term ‘fallacious’ doesn’t mean ‘true or false’. It means ‘intention to deceive or mislead’. OK? And your arguments are filled with such tactics. And a ‘tactic’ isn’t valid or invalid. The argument is. Check out any basic text on Informal Fallacies of Argumentation.
You don’t believe in a subsistence economy? Heck, it’s not for you to believe in it. Subsistence economies exist; the term is a technical name for a specific type of economy, found in low population, non-industrial societies. Such as hunting and gathering, such as wet or dry horticulture, such as pre-industrial agriculture. It means that the economy is not based around the accumulation of extensive surplus to trade on the market; it means an economy based around direct trade rather than mediated (use of money or x) trade. These economies are capable of supporting only small populations, but, if unstressed, are extremely long term. They have no capacity to adapt. So, whether you believe in them or not, they have been the mainstay of our global population up to the last 300 or so years. OK?
What would you use in lieu of Big Government to enforce ‘no capitalism’ allowed?
What would you put in place of large corporations to carry out large industrial projects?
Oh- and how do you know what texts I’m familiar with re my knowledge of Marxism? I’d really like to know how you can tell all these things about me. That’s a fascinating attribute.
And you weren’t born a Marxist? You learned about Marxism? My dear boy, how do you think our species acquires any knowledge or information except by learning? Did any of us imply that your knowledge base was genetic?
Could you explain how ‘we ourselves’ do not control our economy, our lives, etc, etc..[that’s quite a mixture]..and that, instead, corporations do that?
Actually, I think your knowledge of Marxism is pretty weak; you are speaking only of ‘textbook’ platitudes. But so far, you haven’t been able to move beyond them to debate your opinions, in your own words. You simply insert yet another fallacious tactic, the Appeal to Ignorance, claiming we are too ignorant to understand you. Heh.
Headline games.
Monthly U.S. toll in Iraq at 2-year high
By Solomon Moore, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 30, 2006
[These two paragraphs from the story were buried about 6 paragraphs down.]
The Marine deaths reported Friday brought the number of U.S. military fatalities in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 2,996, icasualties.org said, with 816 of them occurring this year. Last year, 846 American service members died; in 2004, the figure was 848.
The number of U.S. wounded is also down this year — 5,676 compared with 5,947 in 2005 and 8,001 in 2004. It is also worth noting that about 75 per cent of the wounded in Iraq have been returned to duty within 24 hours.
So Why the headline???
Headline says uptick . Story line shows downward trend.
Noticed by RL Goodson === TG
I’d like to thank exile for engaging ET, as there is alot to learn from ET’s posts. (hopefully we’re all learning something *wink* *wink* exile *nudge* *nudge*) All the more entertaining when exile “talks down” to ET about comprehending social and political systems. Wheeee! Good reading regardless of the thread hijack.
Hey Robert – did you kick Ti*Guy from your site?
I see Ti-Guy at a local Saskatoon blog (cathiefromcanada) smelling it up with his idiocy. Bizarrely, Cathie thinks he is A-Ok.