Category Mistake at World Press Photo Awards ~ Top Prize Given Not for Photojournalism But for Propaganda

'This could become one of those pictures - and we have maybe just ten in our lifetime - where if somebody says "you know, that picture of a girl...", you know exactly which one they're talking about.' ~ Jury chair David Burnett

'It's an incredibly strong image. It sends out an enormously powerful message to the world, about the 50% of the population that are women, so many of whom still live in miserable conditions, suffering violence. It is strong because the woman looks so dignified, iconic.' ~ Juror Ruth Eichhorn

'It's a terrific picture, a different picture, a frightening picture. It's so much about not just this particular woman, but the state of women in the world.'~ Juror Vince Aletti

'Part of what the World Press Photo contest does is to take pictures to a wider audience, an audience that is going to ask why? And this photo makes people ask "What on earth...?" "What's going on...?" "What has happened...?" For me, this was the picture that asked the most important questions.'~ Juror Aidan Sullivan

The jury decision is in and this picture by Jodi Bieber won the main prize - the World Press Photo of the Year, 2010 - at the World Press Photo awards. You can find the jury member's rationalizations I have lifted above here. The category mistake is that, perhaps despite the photographer's intention*, this image was an integral part of a TIME Magazine propaganda piece last summer. I have defended that claim here repeatedly and will not reiterate my view. What I find especially disturbing here is that the jurors are aiding and abetting the propaganda campaign by de-contextualizing Bieber's photo, presenting it as an iconic representation of the plight of women across the globe. In fact, it was deployed to much different ends, namely in an attempt to shore up support for a brutal decade old war. None of the jurors quoted on the World Press Photo page so much as mention the war or its costs. Shame.

Among the observations that animate my preoccupation with photography is this one from David Levi Strauss: "The first question must always be: Who is using this photograph, and to what end?" That is a question the World Press Photo jury either neglected to ask or asked and then set aside. I am unsure which possibility is worse.
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* Here I am being generous. On the front page Bieber's web site this evening you will find not the simple image but the TIME cover.

Using Aisha ~ Can We Get Beyond Time's Propaganda (Again)

A couple of days go I posted a response to this essay by Susie Linfield in which she agonizes (and I do not mean that in a pejorative sense) about the fate of women in Afghanistan in the event the U.S. were to withdraw from military operations there. Linfield's essay was occasioned by the notorious recent cover of Time magazine, depicting a young woman maimed by Taliban thugs for resisting an arranged marriage. My comments on Linfield was my second post on the matter.

The folks at Time importuned: "What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan?" And their reply was that the Taliban would be unleashed, placing the modest but real gains women have made in Afghanistan at grave risk. In the past couple of days, I've come across a couple of articles [1] [2] in The New York Times that suggest that the problem in Afghanistan is not just the Taliban, but other trends in Islam* as it is institutionalized there, putatively "moderate" or "mainstream" clerics who are more than willing to accommodate fundamentalists. In other words, the claim that we might just stay long enough to quash the Taliban (no minor feat, in itself) seems radically to underestimate the cultural problem. We are not, by military means, going to overturn or reform or whatever a traditional culture.

There are a couple of other matters. In the first place we are talking about a set of practices that we in the west deem 'barbaric' ~ "stoning — along with other traditional penalties like whipping and the amputation of hands." In the second place Afghanistan is hardly the only place where such practices ('stoning' specifically) are indulged ~ "in addition to Iran, they include Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Nigeria." These observations suggest that if we have concerns about human rights generally (you know, protection from 'cruel and unusual punishment') and women's rights specifically (since such punishments for 'sex crimes' tend to be meted out disproportionately to women) we ought to be intervening in those other places.

But let's set such messy, complicating factors** aside and focus exclusively and narrowly on Afghanistan. After all, such rhetorical narrowing is the point among pro-war types striking moralistic stances. Here is one telling passage:

"Perhaps most worrisome were signs of support for the action from mainstream religious authorities in Afghanistan. The head of the Ulema Council in Kunduz Province, Mawlawi Abdul Yaqub, interviewed by telephone, said Monday that stoning to death was the appropriate punishment for an illegal sexual relationship, although he declined to give his view on this particular case. An Ulema Council is a body of Islamic clerics with religious authority in a region.

And less than a week earlier, the national Ulema Council brought together 350 religious scholars in a meeting with government religious officials, who issued a joint statement on Aug. 10 calling for more punishment under Shariah law, apparently referring to stoning, amputations and lashings.

Failure to carry out such “Islamic provisions,” the council statement said, was hindering the peace process and encouraging crime.

The controversy could have implications for efforts by Afghan officials to reconcile with Taliban leaders and draw them into power-sharing talks.

Afghan officials, supported by Western countries, have insisted that Taliban leaders would have to accept the Afghan Constitution, which guarantees women’s rights, and not expect a return to Shariah law."

So, all you pro-war types, what, exactly is the plan here? How long do you think we should we 'stay'? What would you count as 'success'? Uprooting the Taliban? Subverting the other "mainstream" actors who seem to endorse barbaric practices? When we finish in Afghanistan, shall we proceed to Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? (After all the connections between those countries and al-Quaeda are reasonably well documented.) What would count as 'success' there? If we want to pose the question the Time cover presses upon us, why not pose these questions too? The answer is that asking them does not allow us to be quite so moralistic, quite so certain of what we have grounds to do.

Military force is a blunt instrument. It is ill-suited to the task of trying to protect women - or anyone else - in Afghanistan from fundamentalist thugs or those who abet them. I am not sure how better to proceed. But that discussion is hampered by a preoccupation with 'winning' an impossible military mission. And propaganda of the sort that Time has spewed simply obscures that fact. But that, after all, is the point, isn't it?
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* Please Note: The practices under discussion, as the essays in The Times make clear, do not derive from the Koran but from ancillary sources. The extent to which they are "Islamic" is contested.

** We can set aside too the hypocrisy of the U.S. with its official commitment to the death penalty and huge prison population of disproportionately minority and poor men has much claim to be scolding others about barbaric practices. We'll leave aside too the newly found willingness of American administrations to blatantly ignore the principles of international law in the prosecution of the GWOT.

Talkng Back ~ Susie Linfield on Time and Afghanistan

"Bieber’s photograph of Aisha . . . is disgusting. I am very glad that Time ran it." So says Susie Linfield in this pointed essay at Dissent online. As is usual, Linfield offers smart and insightful comments on the fracas surrounding the image. She insists that "the photo, taken by South African photographer Jodi Bieber, did the opposite and is, in a sense, a model of how photography can be used."

Interestingly, though, Linfield doesn't actually discuss the use of the photograph as much as she excoriates "the antiwar Left and . . . feminists" who "[w]ith a couple of notable exceptions," have responded to the Time cover with "a dispiriting lack of appropriately complex thinking, or, one might say, a distressingly reductive reading of events and of what feminism, and leftism, might mean." Since I have already posted on the cover in a highly critical way, I feel as though it is important to engage Linfield. So, here goes.

In the first place there is ample room for agreement:

There were, however, some thoughtful responses to the Time photo and the larger issues it raises. And in this case, thoughtful means uncertain. (Contrary to what readers of this piece might think thus far, I am not an advocate of “staying in Afghanistan.” In fact, I am thoroughly confused about what the “right” thing to do is; the only thing I’m certain of is that there are no good choices—and certainly no unambiguously good choices—on offer.) For some, the agonizing question is how to respond to conflicting demands.

OK. That is a more or less accurate depiction of where I stand. Conflicted. However, nothing Linfield says there is incompatible with the following.

[1] Attributing a significant helping of hypocrisy and disingenuousness to the people at Time. As I noted earlier, to the best of my knowledge the editorial staff there showed scant concern with women's rights when, for instance, the "moderates" in the U.S. Congress negotiated to have the demands of our own fundamentalists (e.g., the Catholic Bishops on abortion rights) incorporated into the health insurance legislation.

Moreover, the notion that this story is not a brief for staying in Afghanistan is simply not credible. Linfield bemoans the fact that the Time story has not generated any debate. But, having read the report, let's be clear that it accords roughly zero attention to any alternative beyond 'stay the course.' If, as Linfield rightly insists, we read the report for evidence of what Afghan women think, why not read it for evidence of what the folks at Time think? Absent an argument to the contrary, it seems entirely appropriate to charge Time with trafficking in propaganda.

[2] Acknowledging that the Taliban are barbaric thugs and that the Afghan people and nearly everyone else would be significantly better off if they could be eliminated. Nothing I've said so far reduces to the position that "the ousting of the Taliban [is] inconsequential, or that a commitment to women’s rights is only a form of hypocrisy." I think ousting the Taliban is quite consequential. But not in the abstract. How many lives - Afghan and American and other - are we willing to expend? What means - torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, imprecise drone attacks - are we willing to use? These are political questions, not as Linfield insists, questions of "conscience." And, beyond a protest about simplistic thinking she offers no answers to them.

On the charge of hypocrisy, let's agree that the matter is best addressed by attributing bad faith not to some indeterminate "we," but to identifiable actors and agencies. When discussing members of the Bush administration, various right-wing war-mongers, and, as I've just suggested, the folks at Time and other bastions of corporate media, I have no problem claiming that the newly discovered commitment to women's rights is "only hypocrisy," false concern trotted out to rationalize a disastrous policy. (By disastrous I mean a policy that has been poorly executed from the start and for which there is no plausible criterion of "success.")

[3] Questioning just what it means to speak, as Linfield does, of "the NATO presence." If this is not to work simply as euphemism for a war prosecuted by American troops, we need to be clear. How many non-American military personnel are in Afghanistan? I don't know but I suspect the answer is someplace in the vicinity of "few." And what about consequences? I recall hearing a report on npr recently that stated that Taliban and other 'insurgents' cause roughly three-quarters of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. American troops and their allies cause the remaining quarter. But, the report went on, many Afghans remain convinced that something like the opposite is the case. If we grant that our campaign in Afghanistan is of a 'hearts and minds' sort, this is troubling. Continued military intervention may simply be a losing strategy on that dimension. I am not certain of that, but absent some evidence to the contrary, it is hard to discount skepticism.

Likewise, Linfield rightly insists that we "at least call barbarism by its right name." OK, let's do. The various tactics I just mentioned - torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, 'collateral damage' caused by drone attacks, and so forth - are barbaric. Agreed? (And recall that I've already conceded that the Taliban and their terrorist tactics are barbaric.) What are the alternatives? Neither the Time piece nor Susie Linfield offer any suggestions. But that is where we ought to be headed - a discussion of how to proceed that does not simply assume that our current policy and tactics will "work" (whatever that means).

[4] Questioning what it is that Afghan women (is that a homogeneous category?) "want"? There is a strange ambiguity in Linfield's essay. On the one hand she thinks we ought to be paying attention to what Afghan women say (at least as the Time folks report that). On the other hand, she dismisses those who are concerned with attributing "agency" to those same women. This ambiguity is perhaps unavoidable. I agree that the downtrodden generally are not going to, without significant aid and support, throw off their oppressors. Conversely, it is unclear that clauses in the constitution alter underlying realities in the hinterlands. And I am not so sanguine that the Time report offers an even-handed assessment of the views that Afghan women articulate. Those views, as I have noted here before, are complex. They are not, in short, determinative. They do not mitigate the uncertainty that Linfield herself feels. To assert otherwise, I think, displays a dismaying level of credulousness.

[5] Recalling that much of the current disaster in Afghanistan is the result (wholly or partly) of U.S. policy. We funded the precursors of the Taliban against the Soviets. And we prosecuted a war in Iraq instead of dealing with the Taliban and their links to al-Qaeda. How confident are we - Linfield, I, others who think the Afghan campaign is a mess - that the folks who brought us those policies can clean up even part of the mess they've made?

Being a progressive or a leftist indeed requires avoiding knee-jerk reactions. The latter, after all, make one a reactionary. Insofar as the Time cover story has prompted debate it has proven valuable. But, I suspect that any such debate has been an unintended consequence. The folks at Time used the cover photo for a quite specific purpose - to shore up support for continued American military intervention. In other words, they are seeking to thwart debate by painting those who criticize the war as fools who are willing to sacrifice women's rights. (How does their report differ from the claims of BushCo to which Linfield refers?) In my view, they have undertaken that task in what I think is a hypocritical way. That brings me round to my initial claim: Time has used photography for propaganda.
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Update: Lest you think I am overly suspicious of the good folks at Time, I recommend this post which not only claims that the CIA has been pushing the "women's rights" angle on defending the Afghan mission, but makes the following point, which should be especially pressing for a news weekly:

It’s worth noting that the Taliban are Sunni, not Shia, and that the US-backed president has enacted a law for the non-Taliban sector of society, rolling back rights for women that were written into the constitution. Before the elections, the Times Online reported that “the United States and Britain [were] opposed to any strong public protest [against the law] because they fear[ed] that speaking out could disrupt [the] election.” The bill was pushed through parliament in February of 2009 and came into effect in July of last year. Afghan women fumed, while US and UK leaders stood by, and where was Time’s cover advocating for women’s rights then? Here are the covers they ran in February 2009.

Update 2: See also this post at Conscientious.

In the "Marketplace of Ideas" Working People Have Been Silenced: Media Bias in Reporting on the Recession

My co-conspirator Susan Orr points out that over at Crooked Timber my friend Henry Farrell has posted on this recent report from the nice folks at the Pew Research Center. Surprise! In their coverage of our "recession" (speaking of euphemisms) the "mainstream media" - more appropriately labeled corporate media - base their reporting overwhelmingly on sources from government and business while systematically ignoring trade unions.

In analyzing sources in stories, however, the fundamental pattern is the same. Those in government, and especially Obama administration staffers, dominated the conversation. Representatives of business and industry came next, followed by academics and independent observers. But the voices of ordinary citizens and people in the workplace trailed behind, appearing in only about one in every five stories.

The president himself or key staffers in the West Wing of the White House were sources in 28% of the stories. Representatives from federal agencies were in 25%. And fully 61% of stories included a government representative of some kind, including those from state and local government.

Representatives of business, those identified as clearly speaking on behalf of the company or corporation, were the next most prominent sources, figuring in about 40% of the stories.

In many of the economic storylines, ordinary citizens and workers were well down the rung of sources. For instance, they were heard in only 8% of the stories gauging the severity and trajectory of the recession, 9% of the stories about the financial sector and 11% of the stories about the stimulus program.

One subset of the American workforce was virtually shut out of the coverage entirely. Representatives of organized labor unions were sources in a mere 2% of all the economy stories studied (stress added).

I must say that this finding is hardly surprising.

War, Propaganda, Censorship: The Military Reveals the Actual Power Relations "Embedded" in Their Relations to With the News Media

Michael Hastings at the ISAF base in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Photograph © Mikhail Galustov for RollingStone/Redux.

In late June Michael Hastings published this story in Rolling Stone. The picture above accompanied that story which cost a high ranking military officer his job and career. I think Hastings was right to publish the story. To the best of my knowledge, while many commentators questioned the 'propriety' of his doing so, none actually contested the details of what he wrote. Well, it turns out that the military apparently doesn't much want Hastings around any more and has canceled his next scheduled "embed" in Afghanistan. You can read the news here at Mother Jones.*

Is there anyone who is really surprised by this? I'd be surprised if there were. Tit-for-tat, and so forth. What is outrageous is not this decision to kick Hastings to the curb. That is simply authoritarian reflex. Predictable. What is outrageous is that the news media has voluntarily embraced the legitimacy of the entire system of "embedded" reporting. Having done that, they really cannot complain that the military unilaterally dictates the rules of engagement. This episode simply reveals in especially stark form the power relations to which the press has acquiesced.

The press should pride itself on being untrustworthy (which is not the same thing as being dishonest, quite the reverse) when it comes to political and military authorities. In the current context the premium seems to be quite the reverse.
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Update (8/6/2010): More here.

TIME & War Propaganda

You will likely have seen the original cover (top) and may be interested in this shameless rationalization TIME printed. The editors insist: "We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground." Right. You ought also to see the second, photo-shopped version (Thanks Stan!) and read the reasoning of the fellow who took license with the original (scroll down the comments). His claim is only modestly less credulous. For some sensible discussion go here.

You might ask: So, you oppose the war? What about the Taliban and women's rights? Good questions. But, yes, I still oppose the war. And my simple, visceral retort is "What about, say, the Catholic church and women's (or children's) rights? What about the medieval attitudes that our own fundamentalists display regarding women's rights?"

My more complicated retort is, "OK, we can agree that the Taliban are fundamentalist thugs. But we are not going to get rid of them in any plausible scenario. And the ineffectual and corrupt Karzi regime is hardly an enlightened replacement. You might say the same of "our" fundamentalist allies in Pakistan. And, oh, by the way, let's have a graphic TIME cover story on the many various families we have bombed into oblivion in predator drone attacks - you know, the people we treat as collateral damage - and then talk support for the war." After all, we are deploying the drones mainly in hopes of avoiding American military casualties! I suppose Afghan lives are not worth quite as much?

This cover story is propaganda, pure and simple. TIME hardly is a font of feminist politics when it comes to our own relatively comfy lives. And, whether they admit it or not, they've adopted a moralistic stance in the service of a losing war.
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P.S.: The cover photo was taken, in the words of the TIME folk, "the distinguished South African photographer Jodi Bieber."

Changing Conventions in War Photography (2)

So, I thought perhaps I was being too hasty in talking about the emergence of a new convention in war photography, one that places a premium on the 'human interest' aspect of American troops. You know, shots of the military personnel being just guys. So I had a quick, admittedly unsystematic look. The top two images below made it into the pictures of the day at the Lens blog at The New York Times last week. The top one, though, I lifted from The Washington Post who had also published it. The rest were easy enough to find on-line. Note - three different agencies, a half dozen different photographers. And we end up with the soldier in tee shirt and shorts, again.

Life in a war zone can mean improvising, including for exercise,
as illustrated by a U.S. soldier from the 1st Squadron, 71st Cavalry
at a forward operating base in Kandahar Province in Afghanistan.
The number of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan is expected to
peak at 150,000 in coming weeks. July 19th, 2010
(Manpreet Romana/agence France-presse Via Getty Images).

A U.S. soldier watches an Afghan movie on TV while relaxing at
Combat Outpost Nolen, an outlying base for the 2nd Brigade of the
101st Airborne Division, in the volatile Arghandab Valley, in Kandahar,
Afghanistan, Wednesday, July 21, 2010. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd).

A United States Marine from Bravo Company of the 1st
Battalion of the 2nd Marines eats watermelon as he rests
following a gunbattle as part of an operation to clear the
area of insurgents near Musa Qaleh, in northern Helmand
Province, southern Afghanistan, Friday, July 23, 2010.
(AP Photo/Kevin Frayer).

U.S Army First Lieutenant Sean Snook from Concord,
Massachusetts, and Alpha Company, 4th Brigade combat
team,1-508, 82nd parachute infantry regiment tees off
at FOB Bullard in Zabul province, southern Afghanistan,
February 12, 2010. (REUTERS/Baz Ratner ).

A U.S. Marine throws a football at Delaram base in
Nimroz province, southern Afghanistan January 24,
2010. (REUTERS/Marko Djurica) January 24, 2010

Spc. James Lollis, right, who was on his way to the gym, and an unidentified
soldier from the 2nd Battalion 12th Infantry take cover as incoming fire
hits inside Command Outpost Michigan at the Pech River Valley
in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, Saturday, Dec. 19, 2009.
(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills).

There are, of course, many, many pictures of American troops, mostly in full combat gear, on patrol - sometimes they are engaged in firefights, sometimes they are menacing Afghans of various descriptions, sometimes they are talking to groups of kids or even kicking a soccer ball with them. These images are familiar enough. So the sorts of images I've lifted here are not exactly crowding out those more 'standard' images. However, with the exception of the occasional photograph of marines mourning the death of a colleague, images of death and destruction - the actual consequences of war for Afghans and the U.S. military - are exceedingly rare. In fact, other than the image of Joshua Bernard that generated so much controversy last fall, I don't recall seeing any. That may not be intended by the photographers who are covering the war, but it surely is politically convenient.

Changing Conventions in War Photography & the Disaster in Afghanistan

U.S. Army soldiers of the 1-320th Alpha Battery, 2nd Brigade of
the 101st Airborne Division, look towards insurgent positions
during a firefight at COP Nolen, in the volatile Arghandab Valley,
Kandahar, Afghanistan, Saturday, July 24, 2010.
(Photograph © AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Over the course of the afternoon I had an interesting and helpful exchange of comments on this earlier post. My interlocutor, photographer Tim Hetherington, has taken exception to the post, interpreting my comments as questioning his integrity. I certainly did not intend the post in any such way and indeed stated as much at the outset. I apologize to Tim if I created that impression.

Having said all that, I thought it might help to depersonalize the disagreement. Let's not talk about Tim's work. My concerns are two. The first is directly political in the pedestrian sense; it centers on whether whether our troops in Afghanistan are serving our national interest. I stand by my judgment that they are not. They are there enacting a misguided policy. We can argue the question, but I am pretty confident about where the preponderance of evidence will fall.

My second concern has more to do with the politics of photography. Here is the nub of the issue: why is it acceptable to depict our military adventures in Afghanistan with images like the one I discuss here, whereas images like the one I discuss here generate an uproar? My concern is that we are witnessing not just the sort of censorship (and accompanying official rationalizations)* of images of war that prevents the media from showing even flag draped coffins being unloaded at military bases, but also the emergence of a parallel convention wherein we will get sanitized views of war dressed up in tee-shirts and boxers as though the soldiers just happened to be camped out there and came under attack totally by surprise. That is what I meant by visual euphemism.

As if on cue, I just found the image above festooned across the top of the home page at Huffington Post accompanying a story on the publication of classified records of the Afghanistan debacle (here and here too). Given the information that was released today, the confidence I noted above is growing.
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* For examples of censorship see, e.g. [1] [2] [3] ...

War Photography as Visual Euphemism?

On a pretty regular basis I receive emails announcing exhibition openings, new books, and so forth. Sometimes I post about the event or appearance, sometimes I don't. Today I received the following from HOST Gallery (London):

"HOST gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition and book launch of Tim Hetherington’s Infidel. 20 September - 15 October 2010. More information below:

Infidel is an intimate portrait of a close band of warriors – a small battalion of US soldiers, posted to an outpost in the remote and dangerous Korengal Valley in North Eastern Afghanistan. Shot over the course of a year, Hetherington’s photographs prove surprisingly tender – arguably the strongest among them a series of the men asleep. This is a body of work as much about camaraderie, love and male vulnerability as it is about the horrors of war. The book’s title ‘Infidel’ is taken from a tattoo the men adopted as a mark of their comradeship. Hetherington’s photographs are sharp, moving and full of humour; they stand as a tribute to a group of men risking their lives in the interest of their own nation, and a provocative contribution the documentation of war in our time.

Please see attached press release and for more information please contact Harry on harry@foto8.com 0207 253 2770."

Let's be clear, Tim Hetherington is a very good photographer. He is no doubt a decent, sincere fellow as well. And the men he has photographed for this project are indeed risking their lives in the name of a national policy. I am not calling into question their motivations - and here I mean both the photographer and the soldiers - for doing what they are doing. I am asking about the consequences of the policy in which they (and we) all are caught up.

Having said those things, it is a considerable stretch - indeed, a stretch that I think cannot be sustained - to claim that these men are "risking their lives in the interest of their own nation." The war in Afghanistan is an ongoing disaster, in large measure because the Bush administration wasted resources and attention in Iraq. But, having inherited a mess, Obama is now prosecuting what is, despite his vigorous denial, a "war of choice." The current administration is asking these young men to risk their lives in the name of a policy that is demonstrably wrongheaded and, in all likelihood, doomed to failure. Neither the fraternity of the soldiers nor Tim Hetherington's images of it do anything to alter that basic reality.

So here is my question: If we can decry the way politicians and the print media consistently trade in (verbal) euphemisms (as I have done here repeatedly) isn't it possible to see the 'human interest' approach to war photography as a form of visual euphemism?

BP & the Photoshop Business

An attentive blogger, John Aravosis, has called out BP for using photo-shopped photos of its 'crisis response center' in an effort to make themselves look . . . what? minimally responsive to the crisis? I've lifted the detail above from the initial post, but it comes from BP's we page. The observation was picked up by The Washington Post here. Wouldn't a more effective PR policy on BP's part be to actually repair the leaking (oh, sorry, the splurging, gushing) well and then get on with the task of trying to remedy the disaster they've created? This makes one wonder how such a half-assed outfit avoided some similar disaster for so long. (According to news reports, of course, they haven't - they've just ignored problems or covered them up.) Whenever I see this sort of bumbling I think . . . 'You couldn't make this stuff up!'

Orwell's Shadow (2) ~ How "Torture" Disappeared From (or, Was Banished By) American Journalism

"Yet the most dangerous side of our new semantic war, our use of the words of power – though it is not a war, since we have largely surrendered – is that it isolates us from our viewers and readers. They are not stupid. They understand words in many cases – I fear – better than we do. History, too. They know that we are drawing our vocabulary from the language of generals and presidents, from the so-called elites, from the arrogance of the Brookings Institute (sic) experts, or those of those of the Rand Corporation. Thus we have become part of this language." ~ Robert Fisk

In my last post (here) I recommended the essay by Robert Fisk on journalism and the language of power from which I've lifted this passage. The "we" and "our" he refers to are journalists. His complaint is that the press (print and broadcast) have embraced the language of the powerful. Sometimes this is because of the putative need to retain "access"; sometimes it reflects the convention of being "fair" or "neutral" or "objective." Either way, capitulating to the powerful and their claims leads, as Fisk indicates, to decidedly partial and political reporting.

As if on cue, yesterday Glenn Greenwald posted on a newly released report on the U.S. media entitled "Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media." The study finds that the four largest circulation national print news outlets - The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today - capitulated more or less completely to the campaign by the Bush Administration to redefine interrogation techniques commonly recognized to be torture as something other than torture. They did so in a sharp break from their own historical practice, reaching back nearly a century, and from their own descriptions of practices in other countries. ("They" torture, "we" don't; we simply rely on "enhanced interrogation techniques.") These outlets, thereby, did not maintain "neutrality" or "objectivity" or "fairness" but actively connived in legitimating the torture policy that the Bush administration implemented.

This is a damning report. We are not talking about the clowns at FOX "News" here. We are talking about the purportedly "liberal" media. Fortunately, as Fisk notes, people are not stupid. They know torture when they see it and can call it by its name.
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P.S.: While I don't want top ring my own bell on this one (too loudly), this is a pattern that I have posted about repeatedly - see here and here and here, for instance.

P.S.(2): You might want to see Andrew Sullivan's post on this, and the reply issued by the lackeys at The New York Times. Why read Pravda, when you can read the American mainstream media.

P.S.(3): Update 7/6/2010 ~ See this follow-up by Glenn Greenwald on the vapid response of editorial higher-ups at The Times.

Orwell's Shadow: Fighting talk: The new propaganda ~ Robert Fisk

Fighting Talk: The New Propaganda
Robert Fisk

The Independent
21 June 2010

Following the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It's Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror...

But I am doing the Israelis an injustice. Their lexicon, and that of the White House – most of the time – and our reporters' lexicon, is the same. Yes, let's be fair to the Israelis. Their lexicon goes like this: Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror.

How many times did I just use the word "terror"? Twenty. But it might as well be 60, or 100, or 1,000, or a million. We are in love with the word, seduced by it, fixated by it, attacked by it, assaulted by it, raped by it, committed to it. It is love and sadism and death in one double syllable, the prime time-theme song, the opening of every television symphony, the headline of every page, a punctuation mark in our journalism, a semicolon, a comma, our most powerful full stop. "Terror, terror, terror, terror". Each repetition justifies its predecessor.

Most of all, it's about the terror of power and the power of terror. Power and terror have become interchangeable. We journalists have let this happen. Our language has become not just a debased ally, but a full verbal partner in the language of governments and armies and generals and weapons. ... more ...

A reader, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, emailed the other day, calling my attention to this essay - both acute and astute - by Robert Fisk in The Independent. I thought I'd pass along his recommendation. Fisk argues, I think persuasively, that the news media - journalists, editors, publishers and producers, networks - are hostage to language and concepts that are peddled for political purposes and that they, the media, are relatively oblivious to the history and purposes of that language and those concepts. If we need always ask 'who is using this photograph and for what purpose,' the same is true too of words. Thanks Stanley!

Yet Another Propagandist at FOX "News"

Since I don't often watch the American version of Pravda, I had no idea who Neil Cavuto is. So I went to the propagandist's own web page and lifted this (slightly modified) copy: it turns out that, over at FOX "News," Neil Cavuto "is Senior Vice President of Business News, while continuing to serve as anchor and managing editor" and where, additionally, "he is responsible for anchoring the daily, one-hour daytime financial program, Your World With Neil Cavuto, (4-5 p.m. ET, Monday through Friday)." Cavuto, I also learned, has been named "the best interviewer in broadcast business news" by The Journalist and Financial Reporter."

If this guy is an award-winning business journalist I really chose the wrong line of work. I watched this interview he did today with Ron Blackwell who is chief economist at the AFL-CIO. The topic was whether government programs had done anything to offset job losses in our current economic disaster. Blackwell was trying to explain that he thought the answer to that question is 'yes.' After blustering, interrupting, and (in the process) demonstrating that he is incapable of grasping basic economic concepts or mathematics, Cavuto asks Blackwell the following question: "Where did you get your degree? A baking school? Where are you cooking up these numbers?" Blackwell replied - while still on the air - in exactly the way one should in the face of an ignorant blow-hard, telling Cavuto: "You're a joker. You're an asshole." Just so.

Chinese Re-Education Camps. Plus, the Olympic Torch Relay Faced Protests in London.

The droplets of news that are coming out of Tibet suggest that protests continue in pockets as does violent repression. At least eight people were reportedly killed in a remote town in Sichuan province Thursday in a protest sparked by an attempt to force monks to participate in an education campaign.

James: Re-education camps are nothing new to dictatorships. Soviet Communist Russia and Nazi Germany were two classic examples of this kind of absurd propaganda. The other major example in history being, of course, Communist China.

One 27 year old monk in Tibet participated in his first party-led education session in 1993. He did not have to sign a denunciation that time but had to condemn the Dalai Lama in front of his fellow monks. "I had to be very active, had to prove I was really patriotic, so I can pass the exam," he said. "In order to stay in the monastery, I did this. I clearly know the other monks did not do this from their hearts, and not me, either."

James: And as hard as it must be verbally utter those words disavowing the Dalai Lama it was their only choice and correct one. It was Right Intention because to say otherwise would likely land this monk in prison were he would be beaten or perhaps killed and perhaps place his family in danger as well. I do not profess to be an expert on the Dalai Lama or speak for His Holiness but I have a feeling that he would rather people swallow their pride and say what the Chinese government officials want to hear than see them suffer for their loyalty to him.
LONDON — Protesters objecting to China’s human rights record clashed with the British police on Sunday as the Olympic torch was carried through London on its way to the summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

James: I am sure that the Chinese government is furious over these protests and demonstrations but they are reaping what they have sown for decades. It is karma catching up with them. I do realize however that most of these party officials don't believe in karma but they can not deny the suffering and problems that can result from the law of cause and effect which is a scientific principle.

And I know that science is something that Communism DOES believe in.

~Peace to all beings (yes, even the Chinese government even though I disagree firmly with many of their actions)~