Remembering a war reporter

[saxitoxin]

But say what you will about her, Marie Colvin's reporting denounced, unstintingly, Assad's regime

Then she wasn't a journalist, she was a propagandist.

A journalist's job is to provide objective, neutral-toned reports and let the citizen make a rational, informed choice.

A propagandist's job is to denounce the government's enemies and rally public opinion behind its goals (military intervention, AKA "war").

All of you bleeding hearts spouting from your Ivory Towers about the tyranny of the rebels or the Assad regime need to wake up. This is the Middle East that we're talking about, a place where you have to win or you die. Has Assad massacred civilians? Yup... But if he hadn't and if he doesn't continue they're gonna slit his throat along with his kids, his British wife who will probably be brutalized *ahem* first, and the rest of the Alawi minority.

I don't like Assad, and I'll be pleased to see him fall as it's going to damage the Iranian grip on the region, but at least I can see that his tyranny is a matter of survival.

While I do like President Assad and disagree with the background details in your post, I still agree with the general theme of your point.

Mrs. Assad and all of her children will absolutely be raped to death if the insurgents succeed. Even before the NATO-endorsed Aleppo suicide bombing that blew the heads off 23 small Syrian children, we had many reports of the religious nutjobs that comprise the insurgency doing similar things to members of Syria's Alawi, Druze and Christian minorities. If the Baath Party goes you will see a broken, failed state arise run by Taliban-like zealots, just as happened in Afghanistan and just as is happening in Libya. But, of course, that serves the west's goal of perpetual war because then it can go in to "fix" the problem they themselves created (a la Afghanistan).

A regime ensures its permanency by creating a permanent State of Emergency (see: Reichstag fire, 1931).

[GabonX]

But say what you will about her, Marie Colvin's reporting denounced, unstintingly, Assad's regime

Then she wasn't a journalist, she was a propagandist.

A journalist's job is to provide objective, neutral-toned reports and let the citizen make a rational, informed choice.

A propagandist's job is to denounce the government's enemies and rally public opinion behind its goals (military intervention, AKA "war").

All of you bleeding hearts spouting from your Ivory Towers about the tyranny of the rebels or the Assad regime need to wake up. This is the Middle East that we're talking about, a place where you have to win or you die. Has Assad massacred civilians? Yup... But if he hadn't and if he doesn't continue they're gonna slit his throat along with his kids, his British wife who will probably be brutalized *ahem* first, and the rest of the Alawi minority.

I don't like Assad, and I'll be pleased to see him fall as it's going to damage the Iranian grip on the region, but at least I can see that his tyranny is a matter of survival.

While I do like President Assad and disagree with the background details in your post, I still agree with the general theme of your point.

Mrs. Assad and all of her children will absolutely be raped to death if the insurgents succeed. Even before the NATO-endorsed Aleppo suicide bombing that blew the heads off 23 small Syrian children, we had many reports of the religious nutjobs that comprise the insurgency doing similar things to members of Syria's Alawi, Druze and Christian minorities. If the Baath Party goes you will see a broken, failed state arise run by Taliban-like zealots, just as happened in Afghanistan and just as is happening in Libya.

It's also what's happening in Egypt, though I realize it's unlikely that you would admit that considering your hatred of Israel and how you seem to support most things you perceive as damaging to the Israelis.

[Symmetry]

I really don't know if any of you followed any of her reports over the years, but Marie Colvin was killed in Syria a few days ago.

NYTimes

Worth a look if you get the chance.

Also, RIP award winning French photographer Remi Ochlik who was killed in the same incident.

Well said.

[heavycola]

But say what you will about her, Marie Colvin's reporting denounced, unstintingly, Assad's regime

Then she wasn't a journalist, she was a propagandist.

A journalist's job is to provide objective, neutral-toned reports and let the citizen make a rational, informed choice.

A propagandist's job is to denounce the government's enemies and rally public opinion behind its goals (military intervention, AKA "war").

My poor choice of words doesn't make her a propagandist. It's a ridiculous thing to say. I don't even know what you're arguing about.

[saxitoxin]

But say what you will about her, Marie Colvin's reporting denounced, unstintingly, Assad's regime

Then she wasn't a journalist, she was a propagandist.

A journalist's job is to provide objective, neutral-toned reports and let the citizen make a rational, informed choice.

A propagandist's job is to denounce the government's enemies and rally public opinion behind its goals (military intervention, AKA "war").

My poor choice of words doesn't make her a propagandist. It's a ridiculous thing to say.

Nope, you were right the first time. No take-backs or do-overs allowed. Her "reporting denounced, unstintingly, Assad." IOW, she was not a journalist but a PR rep for the military industrial complex.

Her job was to whip the public into war hysteria and make people think aligning with the "youth pro-democracy activists" who blew the heads and limbs off 23 small Syrian children at Aleppo or who tortured and decapitated an Alawi family last weekend would be morally good. Her job was to make black seem white, up seem down, wrong seem right. Just like the people who made Libya, Iraq, Serbia, Vietnam, Malvinas, Grenada, Suez and Afghanistan palatable to a large enough segment of the population that those campaigns were politically doable. No different than reporters who regurgitated the WMD line or who claimed that "400,000 Kosovars" had been ethnically cleansed (both facts we now know were patently false). Just like the BBC who - at the height of protests - reported "Ceauşescu forces" had killed "60,000 Romanians" in 1989 (we now know a maximum of 600 died in civil stability operations against rioters who were using firearms ... a number that includes police and military).

The lies are always the same, and yet people keep buying them.

[saxitoxin]

The western media produces films like V for Vendetta, Children of Men and so forth - fictional storylines about brutal regimes that pack people into theaters to cheer the underdog heroes.

Then, the next day, the same media begin framing a real-life event in cinematic terms - showing the black and white struggle of a young, courageous, outnumbered but ingeniously innovative David taking on an old, stodgy, semi-illiterate, Goliath. People clamor to be proxied into the action by asking their governments to gallop to the rescue, thereby legitimizing the war that everyone wanted. It's brainwashing on a scale that's never before existed in human history.

Forgive me if I don't join everyone in the state-endorsed ritual grieving.

[saxitoxin]

Peaceful Youth Pro-Democracy Activists "Chopping People Into Pieces"

RT in Damascus managed to contact an eyewitness in Homs, who says self-proclaimed revolutionaries are killing civilians in the streets. Galina says leaving home is out of the question, as snipers “can shoot you in the back.”

“They kill both young and old. They steal people from their homes and chop them into pieces, put them in plastic bags and throw them out.”

She claims rumors are spreading of gunmen from France, Lebanon and Tunisia killing Syrians.

“They mostly kill Christians here,” she says.

http://rt.com/news/syrian-witness-repor ... rimes-639/

[BigBallinStalin]

NY Times had a piece about a guy who ran from Syria because he says the resistance fighters were killing civilians. (This was... Feb. 29th).

Then the author discards that refugee's testimony as propaganda and then proceeds in spouting his own propaganda.


Working in that field would make my head spin.

[saxitoxin]

NY Times had a piece about a guy who ran from Syria because he says the resistance fighters were killing civilians. (This was... Feb. 29th).

Then the author discards that refugee's testimony as propaganda and then proceeds in spouting his own propaganda.

Working in that field would make my head spin.

Most hilariously, CNN ran a story the other day about someone who left a 1% tip at a restaurant for a waitress and then wrote "get a real job!" on the receipt. Their report was based off a blog a CNN editor came across online. It turned out it was all a joke and CNN had to retract their report. - http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/trending-no ... 27093.html

Yet, they (CNN has no reporters on the ground in Syria) continue to report blogs and YouTube videos as absolute fact with regard to Syria. They repeatedly quote "officials at the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights." The average observer hears that and imagines some kind of lofty organization that knows what it's talking about or at least a group that professional journalists at CNN have taken time to vet.

The "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights" has a staff of 2 people working out of the directors living room in London. One of the two people is an Englishwoman who has never even set foot inside Syria. Their website has banner ads for mail order brides. - http://www.syriahr.net/ It's partially financed by the brother of Hafez al-Assad who was kicked out of Syria in 2000 after attempting a military coup.

[BigBallinStalin]

And it's amazing how most people evaluate the facts in a news report.


<extends out arms, palms facing upward, shrugs>

[heavycola]

And it's amazing how most people evaluate the facts in a news report.


<extends out arms, palms facing upward, shrugs>

The outputs from news sources generally is deteriorating in quality and accuracy. Advertising revenues are diluted because there are more outlets, whether on TV or in print or, most damagingly, online. So newspapers and TV news orgs have been firing people all over the place for the past few years. Add to this the fact that any blog can report on stories in real time, scooping the dailies, and there is extra pressure on the big guys to rush stories out without checking them as fully as they should.

So yeah, news reports can't be taken at face value. And there has never been any such thing as objectivity in journalism.

And yes the situation in Syria is vastly complicated and i don't claim to understand it. But the point of this thread was that a foreign correspondent has been killed, possibly intentionally, while doing her job. And her job was to report what she saw. Whatever you think abut her conclusions, without people like colvin and remi ochlik - and Tim Hetherington, the british photographer killed in Lybia, and anna politskovskaya, two more who come immediately to mind - the rest of us are even more in the dark, and politicians and others in power can scheme and lie and kill with even less impunity.

So we mark their passing not out of hypocrisy, but because most of us acknowledge that they take huge risks to keep the rest of us informed. Rather, that is, than shill for shady industrialists. Because that is just fucking mental.

[saxitoxin]

And it's amazing how most people evaluate the facts in a news report.


<extends out arms, palms facing upward, shrugs>

The outputs from news sources generally is deteriorating in quality and accuracy. Advertising revenues are diluted because there are more outlets, whether on TV or in print or, most damagingly, online. So newspapers and TV news orgs have been firing people all over the place for the past few years. Add to this the fact that any blog can report on stories in real time, scooping the dailies, and there is extra pressure on the big guys to rush stories out without checking them as fully as they should.

So yeah, news reports can't be taken at face value. And there has never been any such thing as objectivity in journalism.

And yes the situation in Syria is vastly complicated and i don't claim to understand it. But the point of this thread was that a foreign correspondent has been killed, possibly intentionally, while doing her job. And her job was to report what she saw. Whatever you think abut her conclusions, without people like colvin and remi ochlik - and Tim Hetherington, the british photographer killed in Lybia, and anna politskovskaya, two more who come immediately to mind - the rest of us are even more in the dark, and politicians and others in power can scheme and lie and kill with even less impunity.

So we mark their passing not out of hypocrisy, but because most of us acknowledge that they take huge risks to keep the rest of us informed. Rather, that is, than shill for shady industrialists. Because that is just fucking mental.

LMAO, who do you think will benefit from the drums of war these so-called "journalists" are beating?





They were just trying to keep us informed of the news ...

[BigBallinStalin]

And it's amazing how most people evaluate the facts in a news report.


<extends out arms, palms facing upward, shrugs>

The outputs from news sources generally is deteriorating in quality and accuracy. Advertising revenues are diluted because there are more outlets, whether on TV or in print or, most damagingly, online. So newspapers and TV news orgs have been firing people all over the place for the past few years. Add to this the fact that any blog can report on stories in real time, scooping the dailies, and there is extra pressure on the big guys to rush stories out without checking them as fully as they should.

So yeah, news reports can't be taken at face value. And there has never been any such thing as objectivity in journalism.

And yes the situation in Syria is vastly complicated and i don't claim to understand it. But the point of this thread was that a foreign correspondent has been killed, possibly intentionally, while doing her job. And her job was to report what she saw. Whatever you think abut her conclusions, without people like colvin and remi ochlik - and Tim Hetherington, the british photographer killed in Lybia, and anna politskovskaya, two more who come immediately to mind - the rest of us are even more in the dark, and politicians and others in power can scheme and lie and kill with even less impunity.

So we mark their passing not out of hypocrisy, but because most of us acknowledge that they take huge risks to keep the rest of us informed. Rather, that is, than shill for shady industrialists. Because that is just fucking mental.

I appreciate your responses ITT, heavycola; however, this is where we differ in opinion: I think you and the OP are overly glorifying her presence in that area.

Her presence, along with the Western reporters, is not solely responsible for the burden of informing us. As you said, new businesses with new capital structures are out-competing the lesser efficient mainstream ones. (It's a matter of time until a very efficient website (like cracked.com) will focus solely on collecting foreign policy issues from other sources like blogs, independent reporters, non-Western reporters, etc. and then distribute them via the Internet to the homes of whoever demands it).

She isn't only taking huge risks in order to keep us informed because there are already other substitutes for her and for Western reporters. (Al-Jazeera is providing the same information as she transmits, but they use different sources). So, there must be other reasons why she was there.

Profit-seeking incentives induce reporters and their employers to send them wherever. Her profit is monetary and non-monetary (I assume she doesn't work for free, so she is *gasp* motivated by money like everyone else). Her reasons for going are many, but she chose them out of her perceived self-interests, which includes some balance between private and social interests.

There's nothing spectacular about that; she is just one of many (accidental?) fatalities in a workplace. She is a failed investment, and another unfortunate person who failed to overcome certain obstacles. This is tragic, but this happens all the time and everywhere, but in relatively less exciting places. Businesses fail, people lose jobs, someone got crushed by a garbage truck somewhere "in the line of duty."

Therefore, there is not much to glorify or praise here.


Honestly, I feel more for the civilians of Syrian, and how they get unfortunately crushed between the Syrian Army and the insurgents. Compare that to the death of Western reporter? ehhh... I can't shed any tears. If anything, I'd like the refugees of Syria to move in the US, but that's another debate.

[heavycola]

And it's amazing how most people evaluate the facts in a news report.


<extends out arms, palms facing upward, shrugs>

The outputs from news sources generally is deteriorating in quality and accuracy. Advertising revenues are diluted because there are more outlets, whether on TV or in print or, most damagingly, online. So newspapers and TV news orgs have been firing people all over the place for the past few years. Add to this the fact that any blog can report on stories in real time, scooping the dailies, and there is extra pressure on the big guys to rush stories out without checking them as fully as they should.

So yeah, news reports can't be taken at face value. And there has never been any such thing as objectivity in journalism.

And yes the situation in Syria is vastly complicated and i don't claim to understand it. But the point of this thread was that a foreign correspondent has been killed, possibly intentionally, while doing her job. And her job was to report what she saw. Whatever you think abut her conclusions, without people like colvin and remi ochlik - and Tim Hetherington, the british photographer killed in Lybia, and anna politskovskaya, two more who come immediately to mind - the rest of us are even more in the dark, and politicians and others in power can scheme and lie and kill with even less impunity.

So we mark their passing not out of hypocrisy, but because most of us acknowledge that they take huge risks to keep the rest of us informed. Rather, that is, than shill for shady industrialists. Because that is just fucking mental.

I appreciate your responses ITT, heavycola; however, this is where we differ in opinion: I think you and the OP are overly glorifying her presence in that area.

Her presence, along with the Western reporters, is not solely responsible for the burden of informing us. As you said, new businesses with new capital structures are out-competing the lesser efficient mainstream ones. (It's a matter of time until a very efficient website (like cracked.com) will focus solely on collecting foreign policy issues from other sources like blogs, independent reporters, non-Western reporters, etc. and then distribute them via the Internet to the homes of whoever demands it).

She isn't only taking huge risks in order to keep us informed because there are already other substitutes for her and for Western reporters. (Al-Jazeera is providing the same information as she transmits, but they use different sources). So, there must be other reasons why she was there.

Profit-seeking incentives induce reporters and their employers to send them wherever. Her profit is monetary and non-monetary (I assume she doesn't work for free, so she is *gasp* motivated by money like everyone else). Her reasons for going are many, but she chose them out of her perceived self-interests, which includes some balance between private and social interests.

There's nothing spectacular about that; she is just one of many (accidental?) fatalities in a workplace. She is a failed investment, and another unfortunate person who failed to overcome certain obstacles. This is tragic, but this happens all the time and everywhere, but in relatively less exciting places. Businesses fail, people lose jobs, someone got crushed by a garbage truck somewhere "in the line of duty."

Therefore, there is not much to glorify or praise here.


Honestly, I feel more for the civilians of Syrian, and how they get unfortunately crushed between the Syrian Army and the insurgents. Compare that to the death of Western reporter? ehhh... I can't shed any tears. If anything, I'd like the refugees of Syria to move in the US, but that's another debate.

I don't really disagree with most of this, and Colvin's life was certainly not worth more than a syrian civilian's. Not a jot. And in fact, as you point out, she put herself in harm's way; the folk caught in the middle are just that. She's inarguably partly culpable for her own death.
But my point about dead journalists wasn't about glorification. Where do you want your information to come from? There's a great bit in the recentish documentary about the NYT - Page One, it's called - where their media correspondent is at a debate about the future of journalism alongside some new media types. One of the latter is from one of the news aggregator websites you allude to; the NYT dude says something like, 'here's the [news aggregator site] front page in a world without traditional media', and of course he holds up a page full of huge holes.
This is about established news-gathering institutions, and about the alternatives. Without the former, and without their network of bureaux and professional reporters and contacts around the world, where do we get our information? In this case, it would be unfiltered straight from the Syrian government or from the opposition. Journalists and their newspapers might be motivated by glory, money, shifting copies or even *gasp* a sense of duty - afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, as someone rather melodramatically put it - but shills? Equating the work of tim hetherington or colvin or politskoskaya with tokyo rose is just trolling - especially when so much good work has been done by western journalists exposing western atrocities. See the picture of Comical Ali speaking into microphones above: there's the alternative.

The information we receive shapes the opinions we hold. It is most often distorted and misrepresented up in between first-hand experience and our eyes/ears, but I want that source to be a reporter, not a politician or a military spokesperson. Every dead correspondent and photojournalist dilutes the strength and quality of that information. That's why this is a Bad Thing.

[saxitoxin]

In this case, it would be unfiltered straight the Syrian government or from the opposition.

That's what we're getting now, as previously discussed.

Every dead correspondent and photojournalist dilutes the strength and quality of that information.

No correspondents or photo-journalists died. PR agents and propagandists died. That's still certainly tragic but on an individual, rather than societal, level.

Reminds me of another recent "human tragedy caught on camera by brave photojournalists [which coincidentally aligned with NATO foreign policy objectives]", Georgia 2008 ... (image is of Reuters-hired actors staging a death scene for "photojournalist" David Mdzinarishvili, who in 2012 can be found in the Middle East plying his craft for Reuters to tell a tale of the cartoonishly brutal Syrian "regime" [Reuters reserves the word "government" for NATO-approved states like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain - unapproved states are governed by "regimes" - that selective language choice is not an attempt to use persuasive verbiage, of course, this is all very neutral, straight-down-the-middle reporting LMAO])

[BigBallinStalin]

@heavycola:


Much of your complaint about the alternatives is what we already have. In a sense, it's already infected the Western mainstream media, which is why I disagree with that guy's straw man argument about those collection websites. Also, I find non-Western alternatives like Al-Jazeera English to be on par with the mainstream in terms of credibility--except for their "coverage" on Qatar.

Anyway, that guy is assuming that his news agency is a more worthy source mainly because he deems his own articles as worthy. Why support the competition? He implies that he knows what's best for others, which is a claim I can't swallow. Over time, I'm speculating that the collection websites will differentiate their aggregated sources and provide information to more specific target markets, thus expanding the range in quality and subject matter of information.

So, if the mainstream media are out (which I highly doubt), we'll still have good alternatives.

For example, a blog's credibility comes from its posters. Marginalrevolution.com is a great blog site on economics, and no mainstream media business model was required.

[heavycola]

Two arguments at once! it's a CC gangbang

@heavycola:

Anyway, that guy is assuming that his news agency is a more worthy source mainly because he deems his own articles as worthy. Why support the competition? He implies that he knows what's best for others, which is a claim I can't swallow. Over time, I'm speculating that the collection websites will differentiate their aggregated sources and provide information to more specific target markets, thus expanding the range in quality and subject matter of information.

So, if the mainstream media are out (which I highly doubt), we'll still have good alternatives.

For example, a blog's credibility comes from its posters. Marginalrevolution.com is a great blog site on economics, and no mainstream media business model was required.

No, his point was that without news gatherers there is no news to aggregate. The NYT (in this case) is not a more worthy source - it IS a source. Blog posts are opinion. Blogs don't have stringers, fact checkers, editors, international networks. Good journalism - and I am admittedly an optimist here - is an attempt to filter out opinion and conjecture. It's never entirely successful, but the distinction exists, and it's an important one, and it is in danger of disappearing.

Every dead correspondent and photojournalist dilutes the strength and quality of that information.

No correspondents or photo-journalists died. PR agents and propagandists died. That's still certainly tragic but on an individual, rather than societal, level.

Ochlik and Hetherington were freelancers. Check out Hetherington's photographs in particular, then try the 'propagandist' bullshit. He also co-directed Restrepo, which isn't really anything even the slightest tiny bit like propaganda.

Reminds me of another recent "human tragedy caught on camera by brave photojournalists [which coincidentally aligned with NATO foreign policy objectives]", Georgia 2008 ... (image is of Reuters-hired actors staging a death scene for "photojournalist" David Mdzinarishvili, who in 2012 can be found in the Middle East plying his craft for Reuters to tell a tale of the cartoonishly brutal Syrian "regime" [Reuters reserves the word "government" for NATO-approved states like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain - unapproved states are governed by "regimes" - that selective language choice is not an attempt to use persuasive verbiage, of course, this is all very neutral, straight-down-the-middle reporting LMAO])

Yeah that was a bad episode, and it's not the only example of photographers in disaster zones either manipulating the scenery or of their images being manipulated (the now iconic image by dorothea lange of the 'depression-era mother' springs to mind). That does not implicate every reporter working in warzones across the world, obviously, because that would be a facile and childish thing to do. Why does what happened in Homs remind you of a notorious episode from a few years ago? By 'reminds me' you mean 'offers me a chance to reinforce my own prejudices', apparently. 'Neutral, straight-down-the-middle reporting' - your words, never mine.

[saxitoxin]

Two arguments at once! it's a CC gangbang

@heavycola:

Anyway, that guy is assuming that his news agency is a more worthy source mainly because he deems his own articles as worthy. Why support the competition? He implies that he knows what's best for others, which is a claim I can't swallow. Over time, I'm speculating that the collection websites will differentiate their aggregated sources and provide information to more specific target markets, thus expanding the range in quality and subject matter of information.

So, if the mainstream media are out (which I highly doubt), we'll still have good alternatives.

For example, a blog's credibility comes from its posters. Marginalrevolution.com is a great blog site on economics, and no mainstream media business model was required.

No, his point was that without news gatherers there is no news to aggregate. The NYT (in this case) is not a more worthy source - it IS a source. Blog posts are opinion. Blogs don't have stringers, fact checkers, editors, international networks. Good journalism - and I am admittedly an optimist here - is an attempt to filter out opinion and conjecture. It's never entirely successful, but the distinction exists, and it's an important one, and it is in danger of disappearing.

Every dead correspondent and photojournalist dilutes the strength and quality of that information.

No correspondents or photo-journalists died. PR agents and propagandists died. That's still certainly tragic but on an individual, rather than societal, level.

Ochlik and Hetherington were freelancers. Check out Hetherington's photographs in particular, then try the 'propagandist' bullshit. He also co-directed Restrepo, which isn't really anything even the slightest tiny bit like propaganda.

Reminds me of another recent "human tragedy caught on camera by brave photojournalists [which coincidentally aligned with NATO foreign policy objectives]", Georgia 2008 ... (image is of Reuters-hired actors staging a death scene for "photojournalist" David Mdzinarishvili, who in 2012 can be found in the Middle East plying his craft for Reuters to tell a tale of the cartoonishly brutal Syrian "regime" [Reuters reserves the word "government" for NATO-approved states like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain - unapproved states are governed by "regimes" - that selective language choice is not an attempt to use persuasive verbiage, of course, this is all very neutral, straight-down-the-middle reporting LMAO])

Yeah that was a bad episode, and it's not the only example of photographers in disaster zones either manipulating the scenery or of their images being manipulated (the now iconic image by dorothea lange of the 'depression-era mother' springs to mind). That does not implicate every reporter working in warzones across the world, obviously, because that would be a facile and childish thing to do. Why does what happened in Homs remind you of a notorious episode from a few years ago? By 'reminds me' you mean 'offers me a chance to reinforce my own prejudices', apparently. 'Neutral, straight-down-the-middle reporting' - your words, never mine.

LOL ... always an "isolated incident" ... 10,000 "isolated incidents" ... we have independent press and all that shit blah blah blah ...

[BigBallinStalin]

Two arguments at once! it's a CC gangbang

@heavycola:

Anyway, that guy is assuming that his news agency is a more worthy source mainly because he deems his own articles as worthy. Why support the competition? He implies that he knows what's best for others, which is a claim I can't swallow. Over time, I'm speculating that the collection websites will differentiate their aggregated sources and provide information to more specific target markets, thus expanding the range in quality and subject matter of information.

So, if the mainstream media are out (which I highly doubt), we'll still have good alternatives.

For example, a blog's credibility comes from its posters. Marginalrevolution.com is a great blog site on economics, and no mainstream media business model was required.

No, his point was that without news gatherers there is no news to aggregate. The NYT (in this case) is not a more worthy source - it IS a source. Blog posts are opinion. Blogs don't have stringers, fact checkers, editors, international networks. Good journalism - and I am admittedly an optimist here - is an attempt to filter out opinion and conjecture. It's never entirely successful, but the distinction exists, and it's an important one, and it is in danger of disappearing.

I don't see how the demand for on-the-ground informers/reporters would disappear without that guy and his obsolete business model. The NYT gets their news from people who ask questions and go places. Without places like NYT, it's not like the people who can ask questions and go places would suddenly disappear. There's profits to be earned from "exploiting" that line of work.

[heavycola]

Two arguments at once! it's a CC gangbang

@heavycola:

Anyway, that guy is assuming that his news agency is a more worthy source mainly because he deems his own articles as worthy. Why support the competition? He implies that he knows what's best for others, which is a claim I can't swallow. Over time, I'm speculating that the collection websites will differentiate their aggregated sources and provide information to more specific target markets, thus expanding the range in quality and subject matter of information.

So, if the mainstream media are out (which I highly doubt), we'll still have good alternatives.

For example, a blog's credibility comes from its posters. Marginalrevolution.com is a great blog site on economics, and no mainstream media business model was required.

No, his point was that without news gatherers there is no news to aggregate. The NYT (in this case) is not a more worthy source - it IS a source. Blog posts are opinion. Blogs don't have stringers, fact checkers, editors, international networks. Good journalism - and I am admittedly an optimist here - is an attempt to filter out opinion and conjecture. It's never entirely successful, but the distinction exists, and it's an important one, and it is in danger of disappearing.

I don't see how the demand for on-the-ground informers/reporters would disappear without that guy and his obsolete business model. The NYT gets their news from people who ask questions and go places. Without places like NYT, it's not like the people who can ask questions and go places would suddenly disappear. There's profits to be earned from "exploiting" that line of work.

if it's an obsolete business model, where are the profits to be made? The NYT made a net loss of $39 million last financial year. I know most broadsheets in the UK are hemorrhaging money. Yes the demand will still exist, but who's going to pay for it? A phone call to a government press office can be made cheaply from any blogger's bedroom. But reporting on the ground, from inside a warzone, demands time and resources and local contacts and money.
Colvin's last report from Homs is behind the Times' firewall but it's probably around elsewhere now... it's a powerful piece of reportage, and it is about the harm being done to civilians by the war and the harsh conditions inside the town. Reporting, in other words, that IMO would have been impossible without the resources she had. According to one obit, she once left a satellite phone on overnight, costing her employer $25,000 - how many bloggers could take that hit?
She was a pretty extraordinary woman actually - had her left eye taken out by shrapnel while reporting on the civil war (sorry, furthering the interests of the NWO elite) in Sri Lanka, then only had local anaesthesia so she could report on the operation. And then she carried on reporting from warzones. (She must have been a very highly paid PR agent).

LOL ... always an "isolated incident" ... 10,000 "isolated incidents" ... we have independent press and all that shit blah blah blah ...

This, despite my acknowledgements that it wasn't an isolated incident, and that there is no such thing as press neutrality? I'm glad you agree.

[Symmetry]

Two arguments at once! it's a CC gangbang

@heavycola:

Anyway, that guy is assuming that his news agency is a more worthy source mainly because he deems his own articles as worthy. Why support the competition? He implies that he knows what's best for others, which is a claim I can't swallow. Over time, I'm speculating that the collection websites will differentiate their aggregated sources and provide information to more specific target markets, thus expanding the range in quality and subject matter of information.

So, if the mainstream media are out (which I highly doubt), we'll still have good alternatives.

For example, a blog's credibility comes from its posters. Marginalrevolution.com is a great blog site on economics, and no mainstream media business model was required.

No, his point was that without news gatherers there is no news to aggregate. The NYT (in this case) is not a more worthy source - it IS a source. Blog posts are opinion. Blogs don't have stringers, fact checkers, editors, international networks. Good journalism - and I am admittedly an optimist here - is an attempt to filter out opinion and conjecture. It's never entirely successful, but the distinction exists, and it's an important one, and it is in danger of disappearing.

I don't see how the demand for on-the-ground informers/reporters would disappear without that guy and his obsolete business model. The NYT gets their news from people who ask questions and go places. Without places like NYT, it's not like the people who can ask questions and go places would suddenly disappear. There's profits to be earned from "exploiting" that line of work.

if it's an obsolete business model, where are the profits to be made? The NYT made a net loss of $39 million last financial year. I know most broadsheets in the UK are hemorrhaging money. Yes the demand will still exist, but who's going to pay for it? A phone call to a government press office can be made cheaply from any blogger's bedroom. But reporting on the ground, from inside a warzone, demands time and resources and local contacts and money.
Colvin's last report from Homs is behind the Times' firewall but it's probably around elsewhere now... it's a powerful piece of reportage, and it is about the harm being done to civilians by the war and the harsh conditions inside the town. Reporting, in other words, that IMO would have been impossible without the resources she had. According to one obit, she once left a satellite phone on overnight, costing her employer $25,000 - how many bloggers could take that hit?
She was a pretty extraordinary woman actually - had her left eye taken out by shrapnel while reporting on the civil war (sorry, furthering the interests of the NWO elite) in Sri Lanka, then only had local anaesthesia so she could report on the operation. And then she carried on reporting from warzones. (She must have been a very highly paid PR agent).

LOL ... always an "isolated incident" ... 10,000 "isolated incidents" ... we have independent press and all that shit blah blah blah ...

This, despite my acknowledgements that it wasn't an isolated incident, and that there is no such thing as press neutrality? I'm glad you agree.

She was very much a remarkable woman, and it's worth looking at her work if peeps haven't seen it.

[saxitoxin]

This, despite my acknowledgements that it wasn't an isolated incident, and that there is no such thing as press neutrality?

LMAO, I don't even know what you're trying to communicate here.

She was very much a remarkable woman, and it's worth looking at her work if peeps haven't seen it.

Why don't you post some links to her Non-Syria reporting so we can objectively judge how "remarkable" she was instead of expecting us to simply join in the state-ordered ritual mourning because the noise machine of Rupert Murdoch - Marie Colvin's employer - has convinced us all we should?

I would like help to understand why the U.S. regime gleefully chases Julian Assange across the world, uses the Espionage Act to jail whistleblowers, imposes "accidental" "collateral damage" on Russian/Chinese reporters, why the UK regime bans Press TV from public broadcast in Britain, joins in the persecution of Assange, sends armed police to raid media outlets, but then both engage in solemn, public remembrances of this one reporter on the other hand. Why do corporation- and defence-industry- backed regimes fall over themselves expressing their love for this reporter but despise with unabashed hatred certain others?

The best award a journalist can receive is to be hated by elite and corrupt powers, not loved and lionized by them. Most good war reporters die anonymously, unremembered, without being privileged to receive a eulogy from this guy while en route to play the back 9 at St. Andrew's ...

[heavycola]

This, despite my acknowledgements that it wasn't an isolated incident, and that there is no such thing as press neutrality?

LMAO, I don't even know what you're trying to communicate here.

Really? it was a response to what you wrote. Your 'blah blah blah' about 'isolated incidents' and 'independent reporting' suggested that was what you were arguing against. I had just stated that it wasn't an isolated incident and have said several times that press neutrality doesn't exist. Is that any clearer?

Yes the owner of the Sunday Times is a rich, powerful and utterly corrupt man. But to suggest that every journalist on a Newscorp broadsheet is therefore somehow nothing more than a spreader of elite-sanctioned propaganda (designed to, what, help war profiteers?? I can't believe i'm typing that, it's so ridiculous) is pretty naive.
As is, incidentally, announcing that anyone who respects the work of journalists like Colvin is not thinking for themselves and marks her death only because rupert murdoch tells them to. It's so mental it's not even impolite.

The best award a journalist can receive is to be hated by elite and corrupt powers, not loved and lionized by them.

Agreed, but that depends who the journalist is exposing. Of course, as a war reporter, Colvin wouldn't have covered domestic politics, so what's to hate? Unless of course when you say 'corrupt powers' you are talking about Assad - in which case yes, I agree. He probably wasn't too fond.

[saxitoxin]

that depends who the journalist is exposing

LMAO, the west's integrated corporate-fascist media-state really has you strung up good! You're just like those obedient little Berliners who read with horror the reports of brave journalists about all the atrocities the Czechoslovak government had been committing against the innocent Sudetans. "Remarkable journalists" who "denounced, unstintingly, Hácha's regime."

[heavycola]

that depends who the journalist is exposing

LMAO, the west's integrated corporate-fascist media-state really has you strung up good! You're just like those obedient little Berliners who read with horror the reports of brave journalists about all the atrocities the Czechoslovak government had been committing against the innocent Sudetans. "Remarkable journalists" who "denounced, unstintingly, Hácha's regime."

Absolutely. I'm a mindless zombie, herded gratefully from received opinion to received opinion by murdoch and the rest of the illuminati, while you alone know the TRUTH. And there was me thinking all the CC tinfoil hatters had fucked off to their bunkers.

Not sure who you were citing in those quotation marks, though. Looks like a mix of things I said and things you have made up combined to make some sort of straw man point. Using fabricated quotes to advance your own agenda - the corporate-fascist media-state would be proud of you.

Also, Godwin.