I hate this photo. I hate that this photo continues to be the media’s face of protest, nearly a decade after the Battle in Seattle. I hate that these black bloc anarchists fail to see that their tiny, worthless vandalism effectively neuters the voices of thousands upon thousands of others.
The MSNBC headline: GOP delegates attacked by protesters. It was “a violent counterpoint to an otherwise peaceful anti-war march”, but you don’t hear any more about the peaceful stuff.
There’s a double-blind here, in fact. While the media covers the violence and transgressions of a tiny minority of protesters (see also CNN coverage, Fox News), the peaceful masses are pushed down the page and easily dismissed as a non-story; and deeper still, the efforts of the St Paul police and the FBI to stifle protest with a series of unlawful raids and arrests of protestors goes mostly unexplored, buried in the tenth paragraph of the stories above and told from the police POV.
Glenn Greenwald, always essential reading, has been on this story since the start (in one of the raided houses, proof of FBI involvement; the story develops with a range of photos and video.) While excoriating big media for burying this story, he draws a comparison with China – everyone was ready to look darkly upon the suppression of protest in China, but no-one has much to say about the exact same thing taking place in the US.
This is what corrupt state oppression looks like. This isn’t hypothesising some future dystopia – this is living in one right now, where the biggest and most powerful democracy on the planet can criminalise its citizens as it pleases to stifle dissent during a political campaign. The bleak future has happened, is happening, right now.
Perhaps the stories of those raids resonate with me because down here the trial of the arrestees from New Zealand’s own “terror raids” is quietly moving along, to general apathy. Does anyone take those ominous warnings of terrorseriously any more? I would like to think not, but sadly I think that would be too optimistic.
Category: mediawatch
Sensing Moider
Media7, the neat mediawatching TV show led by Kiwi blog legend Russell Brown, trained its eye on NZ’s crime-‘n-psychics hit, Sensing Murder.
Sensing Murder is one of the (relatively few) things that divides our happy household. The lovely stronger light is fond of the show, while I can’t stand it. I have been enthusiastic about other spooky psychic shows, such as Most Haunted. Heck, I even participated in table tipping with the Most Haunted crew on one occasion. The difference between Sensing Murder and Most Haunted, as Stronger has identified, is the element of exploitation. Sensing Murder revisits recent unsolved violent crimes, talks to all the friends and family of the victims, and films lurid re-enactments of the psychic’s visions of this final demise. It all leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.
And I don’t for a moment think the psychics are convincing. The basic method is that a psychic turns up and is followed around by a film crew as they “feel” their way through the case. The show proudly announces at the beginning, “Only true statements from the psychics are affirmed!”, oblivious to the fact that this process is a cold reader’s dream setup – they throw out guesses, get the right ones confirmed, and discard the wrong ones. (At least, I hope the show is oblivious to this, because otherwise they’re being outright deceptive, and that’s just not on.) I suspect that the psychics are all genuine people who believe in their abilities, and even if they engage in a bit of cheating they’d just rationalise this as “helping things along”.
Anyway, the episode features the show’s producer taking on NZ media satirist Jeremy Wells, who outright calls the psychics “charlatans” who are deluding people for cash. I was interested to hear that the format is an import, but this is the first country where the show became popular – in other markets it has vanished from the airwaves. It’s a good watch if you’re interested in this sort of thing, and can be found on TVNZ OnDemand and YouTube. See also the Media7 blog and Russell’s Hard News blog.
Further reading: Stephen Judd explains why he is offended by the show and the infamous “skeptic becomes believer” episode deconstructed.
Always Been At War With Orewa
Further to the discussion about the film of The Hollow Men, which of course was sparked by former National leader Don Brash’s controversial speech in Orewa in 2004 (it has its own Wikipedia page):
I watched the late news on TV3 tonight. I don’t do this often, so maybe what I noticed is all old news to you, but it caught me by surprise. In the links, the chirpy attractive newsreader blithely described the Orewa speech as “Don Brash’s racist rant” and “an attack on Maori”.
Now, I wasn’t in the country at the time, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t how it was portrayed back then. It caused a massive surge in the polls for Brash and National, putting them right in the electoral game with one decisive play of the race card. It was so mainstream that the government even adopted some of the framing. It definitely was not racist – nor was it an attack on Maori. It was just common sense!
But at some point since 2004, everything changed. Now Orewa is so obviously a racist rant and an attack on Maori that a newsreader used those words in the most casual, unblinking tone. I wonder – is this the liberal media conspiracy, caught on camera at last? Or what?
Drinking Liberally: Nicky Hager
Went along to Drinking Liberally on Thursday night, a packed house (including a couple of MPs) for NZ’s great investigative journalist Nicky Hager. Cal and I were both pretty under the weather so we didn’t stick around afterwards, but it was good to hear him talk.
Hager talked for a while about how he is frustrated by people who say the public is apathetic about politics, saying his experience is that people everywhere, at all levels of society, are interested and have opinions that go beyond pure self-interest. He blames the political process for making people feel excluded and helpless. Crosby-Textor, the “evil agency” employed by National to help with their campaign, were paradigmatic examples of this. They are carefully structuring National’s campaign to shut down anything that is interesting, so people experience the substance of politics as boring and have to focus on personality. The strict insistence on repeating the same statements over and over is rendering the political conversation empty, and that is the cause of perceived public apathy
He spoke mostly about the National opposition and its many sins, because it was a liberal crowd, but made a point of Labour’s failures and wrongdoing as well – he identified Labour’s years of shutting down debate, and (most damningly) its failure to build up a credible liberal community in New Zealand. It held on to power too closely and as a result, now that the wind is coming out of its sails, there’s no support ready to come to its aid.
He made a bunch of other interesting points (noting how fundamentally right-wing NZ is was one of them that struck home to me), but reserved most of his ire for the media, whose reactive press-release driven mode of operation clearly drives him to distraction. While careful not to attack them too overtly (“I have to work in that world”, he said) it was clear that he places huge accountability on the news media for the sad state of political conversation here (and presumably overseas as well). Why, he asked, had no media representative asked John Key if he was employing Crosby Textor? It had been a major issue for his predecessor in the role – and yet not one Kiwi journalist fronted up to Key and asked him if he was taking a different course.
That is why Nicky Hager is so valuable. He’s a legend, in my book. Kudos.
(I’m going to see the movie of his revelatory book on the last National campaign, The Hollow Men, in the film fest. Should be fun. Really should read the book, seeing as I’ve seen Hager talk about it, seen the play of the book, and will shortly see the film of the book…)
Side note: it does puzzle me why the DomPost, among other papers, happily publish ridiculous letters to the editor like today’s asking for Hager to be prosecuted for being in possession of leaked emails. Surely the capital city newspaper doesn’t think reporting on leaked documents is a crime? Why, then, do they allow such attacks to get into print at all? It surprises me.
Those Darn Extremists!
The Sunday Star-Times continues its delicate balance of being 95% useless and 5% exceptional, this time with a followup to the Thompson & Clark (TCIL) spying-on-protesters revelations of a few months back. (You may recall the glee with which I greeted the news that Gavin Clark had been outplayed at his own game by a complete novice.)
This article discusses one of the outputs of TCIL, a monthly report on activist comings and going named “National Extremism”. Of course, it’s just a compilation of public domain knowledge about environmental activists and the like. The example given in the article is hilariously indicative:
One item, for example, says “bio-diesel bus carrying the Be the Change Climate Rescue Tour arrives in Palmerston North fronted by environmental activist and Auckland Save Happy Valley member Jo McVeagh”. The tour, sponsored by Greenpeace, Oxfam and Forest and Bird, “aims to encourage individual New Zealanders throughout the country to make a personal contribution to combating climate change”. This “intelligence”, for which Maf had been paying $1000 per monthly report, was taken straight from a “Be the Change” press release. Thompson and Clark’s contribution was a comment about the bus’s bio-diesel a by-product of meat production “not [being] the smartest of choices for someone like McVeagh who wants to take the moral high ground” (presumably a reference to her assumed vegetarian beliefs).
As ridiculous as this all is, it would be a mistake to dismiss it. The spin the article takes is “look at your tax dollars being wasted”, and it is indeed an example of this, but that’s a sideshow to the real concerns here. What this report shows is the exercise of (capitalist) power to demonise those who are campaigning for a system that values something other than money.
Look at the title of the report for an example: environmental activists are, by definition, “extremists”, and the word “National” suggests how the interests of the coal industry (for example) are conflated with the good of the nation.
It would be unwise to assume that all the customers of this report endorse its aggressive framing of activist elements; I’m sure many, if not most, take it with a generous helping of salt. Nevertheless, they find enough value in it to purchase it, and that framing of ‘national extremism’ pervades the surrounding discourse. (For example, AgResearch and Genesis Energy, as mentioned in the article, put enough stock in TCIL to parrot their prepared lines to the media when questioned over the report.) In a wider context, the TCIL ‘national extremist’ frame is reflected in whole Urewera 8 ‘terrorist cell debacle.
In short, the problem is this: Those in power see those who question their actions as dangerous, not just to the powerful institutions themselves, but to the nation as a whole.
Luckily, New Zealand is small and heavily interconnected. It is hard to effectively demonise an Other when everyone is only a couple degrees of separation apart. The TCIL report reveals part of the hidden discourse of power but also shows how vulnerable it is to ridicule. Heck, our Powerful aren’t even that Powerful. While this problematic tendency has real and horrible consequences (again, look at the Urewera arrestees for an example), I suspect it is not strong enough to truly become widespread in the assumptions of those in positions of power. Other, larger, countries cannot be so confident.
In any case, TCIL are to be condemned, and their reports and the ludicrous framing they perpetuate must be held up for the nonsense they are. These frames don’t just misrepresent their subjects, they pervert the discussion of vital public issues and thereby the functioning of democracy itself. Thompson and Clark are buffoons, but they are buffoons who must be held publicly accountable for the consequences of their foolishness.
(see also No Right Turn on this)
(and also Mundens)
Interview With A Tagger
The public rage over tagging that has been simmering in NZ these past few months has not exactly covered the local media in glory, but the DomPost surprised me with this profile of a tagger. It’s complex and revealing, non-judgmental but certainly making no excuses. The subject of the profile is articulate in some quotes, and quite the opposite of others. It’s by turns baffling and revealing.
Kitchener epitomises all that people detest when they see their city or town defaced by vandals. A seasonal fruit picker currently out of work, he’s a young, bored man with no interests and no ambitions that don’t include spraying paint on someone else’s property…
…He says he understands why people would get upset at being tagged, but he just doesn’t care.
“I definitely wouldn’t like it if it was done to me. But if I thought about that I wouldn’t do it, if I thought about people’s feelings. I’ve never cared what people think of me. If I did I would’ve stopped.”
It’s a great piece of compact profile journalism. It could stand to be several times as long, but I suspect that would only reveal more complications in its subject.
Nice one, Marty Sharpe. Nice one, DomPost.
[mediawatch] Pirates of the Copyright
I was going to skip this but this morning decided, no, I don’t want to. So I rag on another DomPost bit (again with a Greer McDonald byline.)
A regular feature in the Saturday DomPost is “The Insider”, a full-page overview of a major public issue, getting the reader up to speed on what is at stake and what is being said by all parties.
This Saturday, the issue was the copyright act amendment that was recently passed into law. The amendment addresses the digital era, and allows a lot of things that users are doing anyway, such as burning new copies of music for personal use, and getting around artificial access restrictions. However, it isn’t just about allowing things – there are plenty of restrictions made formal here. (The legally keen may want to check out this overview by Canadian copyright law expert Michael Geist.)
It’s an interesting topic. The interaction between new technology and old media distribution methods is contentious. No-one wants creative endeavours to become financially unfeasible, and copyright does tie into this. However, there is a solid argument that copyright’s role in protecting the artist is massively overstated or even just plain wrong. Sophisticated arguments for liberal copyright laws are easy to find, especially online where you can’t throw a virtual stone without hitting someone who follows Cory Doctorow’s take on these matters. (As detailed at uberblog BoingBoing.)
Sadly, this one-pager doesn’t do justice to its subject. Far from it. Just look at the entire list of parties quoted:
- Consumer NZ’s website, pointing out the difficulties of pre-amendment law
- The Internet Society of New Zealand, saying the new law is a “very modest step in the right direction”
- The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry
- The Recording Industry Association of NZ website
- The Motion Picture Association
- The NZ Federation Against Copyright Theft (NZFact)
Incredibly, the Exec Director of NZFact, Tony Eaton, gets about a third of the page to himself, as well as a dramatic boxout saying “What illegal copying is costing each year” (over $200 million, it claims). There is no hint that there is another way of looking at these issues, there is no suggestion that the figures deployed might be crafted to serve the producer’s message, etc etc etc. The bulk of this page is unanswered propaganda. (“Respecting copyright will ensure a vibrant creative economy for New Zealand and a bright future for the next generation of creators.”)
The big photo, of course, shows a teenager downloading some music. The caption is beautiful: “Teenagers downloading music from the Internet are targets of a campaign to have them respect creativity.” Notice the framing, swallowed completely from Eaton’s propaganda? Copyright isn’t about respecting corporate authority, it’s about respecting creativity. That, in fact, is the name of a competition run by NZFact: the “Respecting Creativity” contest.
None of this is new. It is, in fact, depressingly old, and this page is a huge missed opportunity to shed some light and get beyond the corporate spokes-fronts. No comments from musicians and artists, who almost without exception have considered and insightful and often fierce opinions on digital download copyright. (Needless to say, they don’t all agree.) No comments from anyone at all connected with the counter-copyright movement. Heck, even the aforementioned Cory Doctorow devoted space on BoingBoing to the merits of the new NZ law.
I am saddened that the issue page in the DomPost was turned over so thoroughly to the corporate propaganda machine. There are definitely sound arguments for copyright protection and enforcement, but this page doesn’t go near them and doesn’t even seem aware there are arguments against.
Verdict: DomPost = FAIL
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And on the subject of copyright stupidity – when you put a DVD in your DVD player and it forces you, every single time, to sit through a long advertisement against piracy? Well, you know what doesn’t treat you with that kind of disrespect? Pirated DVDs. Just saying.
[mediawatch] Listener calls out the hounds
NZ’s current affairs mag the Listener has got some stick from me in the past for its editorial policies under Pamela Stirling. A new development put the wind up me even further.
A chap named Dave Hansford in the Listener’s Eco column recently featured a piece on the ways in which climate change sceptics can effectively hack the media machine and get far greater coverage than their fringe perspectives deserve, with significant consequences for public understanding of climate change (and, consequently, limiting political will to make necessary changes).
This, naturally, kicked up a stink with the local climate change sceptics; international sceptic honcho Joseph Bast of Chicago was appraised of the situation and, in a letter published in the April 5 issue, demanded Hansford’s silence forevermore on the subject. The following week, the sceptics had their right of reply printed (opposite another article arguing the case for anthropogenic global warming). All par for the course in a magazine that is, as John Drinnan noted in the Herald blog, “no longer part of the movement”.
Then things took a twist. Hansford was booted from the Ecologic column. Local global warming blog Hot Topic noticed this (or was tipped to it), and made a post suspecting that sceptic pressure was responsible for the dumping. Hansford, for his part, came along to comment his own suspicions that this was the case.
You can read that article here, but not at Hot Topic itself, because it’s gone from there. In its place, a note that the article had been taken down thanks to the Listener and “their friends at [local law firm] Bell Gully”, and an obviously lawyer-drafted post apologising and retracting a bunch of stuff, including things that weren’t even alleged in the initial posting.
That’s when it got interesting to lots of people. I don’t think Hansford was booted because of sceptic pressure, or at least not *just* due to sceptic pressure; but Stirling’s response to this relatively innocuous and balanced blog post is startling. Legal blogger Steven Price of Media Law Journal posted about it with a sensible post, the conclusion of which deserves quoting in full:
The proper response would have been a one-line letter politely telling the Listener to sit on its thumb. I doubt that any further action would have been taken. But bloggers, and those who host their blogs, can’t always be that brave. That’s what makes leaning on assertions of legal rights in situations like this reprehensible, I think. I would have been much more persuaded by a thoughtful and factual response from the Listener’s editor on the blog itself setting out the magazine’s version of the story. It would have been much cheaper. And much more in keeping with the Listener’s commitment to open inquiry. And it wouldn’t have produced what’s likely to be an explosion of interest in the criticisms…
So that’s what I’m doing here – adding to the ‘explosion of interest’. Pamela Stirling’s continued dalliance with climate change scepticism is disheartening, but her response (and it is, presumably, her personal response) to this affair has been foolish and vicious and is worthy of condemnation. This is not how things should be done here. Not only that, I’m certain it’s convinced a lot of her critics that she’s guilty.
If you’re a Listener buyer, skip it next week, or the next couple of weeks. Email or ring to say why.
[Hat-tip to Poneke, who has covered this affair pretty damn well.]
Cellphones and Water Drinking
A great example of how media coverage lets us down in the news last week.
On April 1, NZ media pushed hard a story about research showing that mobile phones increase the cancer risk:
The link between mobile phones and brain tumours should “no longer be regarded as a myth” after research suggests high cellphone use could double the risk of brain cancer.
More science on April 4, a Reuters wire that was trumpeted through the NZ media, this time research showing that we don’t actually need to drink all that water:
There is no clear-cut scientific rationale for the average healthy individual to drink a lot of water – and it may be downright harmful – according to two kidney experts.
Both of these entries extensively quote the researchers involved. The cellphone one goes on to quote some other people for extra perspective. Yet these two science stories are not like each other.
The two articles both mention where these scientific reports were published. The water article was published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. The cellphone article was published on “the website brain-surgery.us”. They don’t go any further and acknowledge that their might be a difference between these two venues of publication. Anyone who takes the trouble to click through the links above, however, can instantly see that the water study was published in peer-reviewed scientific journal of long standing, and the cellphone study was published on the author’s personal website without review by anyone at all.
A half-second’s further review of the cellphone study should set off serious alarm bells for anyone with any inkling about communication (like, say, a journalist): it’s written with an abundance of cheap visual rhetoric, the stock-in-trade of the internet hysteric: bolded and colour-coded phrases, massively overlong paragraphs, paranthetical exclamation marks (!) and even SCARE CAPITALS.
These differences seem massive and obvious to me, but this crucial context is completely invisible in the way these stories were reported. This failing becomes shameful when you consider that the subjects of these stories are of significant public interest and likely to inspire behaviour change from some of the audience.
It’s a sad state of affairs, really. I find it hard to blame the journo in the byline of the cellphone scare story, Greer McDonald – a quick google shows she is fresh out of journalism school. It’s editorial that bears the burden of shame here.
And since it’s unrealistic to expect this to change any time soon, if ever: in this age of Google, it’s up to the reader to be their own factchecker. Get into the habit.
Zing!
Letters to the editor are best when you say out loud “ZING!” after you read each one. Try it on these gems from Monday’s DomPost:
“I have begun to notice Young Greens sporting badges stating, “I only date guys/girls that vote Green”. I find this bewildering because I would have thought that judging or having a prejudice against someone based on their political beliefs is against basic human, as well as democratic, rights.” – Oliver Gibbetson, Northland
ZING!
“So, Wellington Mayor Kerry Prendergast isn’t happy about the sum the Government will pay to deal with tagging. Perhaps she might consider topping it up with some of the money spent by the council-owned Art Centre to decorate its car-park walls with graffiti – I mean, street art. Mixed messages, anyone?” – Yvonne Guy, Wellington City
ZING!
Hoo boy, it’s a pleasure to encounter such rapier wit in this day and age.
(Elsewhere on the same page, Dave Hansford of Makara delivers a takedown to the shameful high-profile climate change skeptic piece by the ludicrous Muriel Newman, and the even-more-ludicrous climate change skeptic Vincent Gray does some ZINGing of his own.)