Moderate face of Islam…
Looks a hell of a lot like mainstream Nazism doesn’t it?
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My own view is that if we’re not free to say fuck Islam, then we’re not free, period. My apologies to any Canadian diplomats abroad whose lives and property may be endangered by a simple statement of the essential credo of liberalism.
As usual Cosh hits things right on the mark.
If freedom of expression is not freedom to offend then what the hell is it?
Comments are off for this postDangerous bloggers
Thanks to Davids Medienkritiek, Guido has recently stumbled across this latest attack on blogging by a Media representative. Under the banner of “research” one Doctor Thomas Lief, a reporter on the German South Western televison broadcasting system, has declared that “Bloggers are often Narcissistic Egocentrists” . Well, its good to know that we can all be categorised so neatly, presumably the good Reporter/Doctor has a degree and doctorate in Psychology, so will know exactly what he is talking about. Particularly when it comes to pronouncing on the subject of bloggers lack of “journalistic standards and objectivity”.
According to him, journalism is losing its standards and declining in its objectivity because of bloggers. It is we who have undermined the standards, and lack objectivity, being concerned only with promoting our own egos at the expense of truth and fact. Well, I am sure I have a problem answering that, especially since I only took up blogging a couple of years ago, and had been having problems dealing with slewed facts, twisted facts, inaccurate information and plain old fashioned biased reporting for some time before that. Let’s see now, what exactly are these journalistic standards we fail to measure up too …
– doorstepping and staking out celebrities? – publishing apologies for wrongful reporting in small type on the bottom of an inner page when the original story ran front page and banner headline? – presenting selected facts which hype up a story and ignoring the facts which would balance it? – pushing a particular “party line” which happens to be the editors or publishers preferred view at the expense of balance? – sensationalising particular events or crimes which accord with the current PC line of politics and help sell more newspapers? – selective editing of interviews which present a picture different to the one which would have been created if the entire interview was presented unedited and unspun? – setting up honey traps and straight forward entrapment situations to capture embarassing comments from public figures?This sounds very much a case of the pot calling the saucepan a different shade of a dark hew here! The examples given in Medienkritiek and taken from the paper that the interview was given too make very illuminating commentary. OK, the author has selected ones which illustrate just one aspect, the manner in which the US President and the US itself is presented in much of the EU as a dangerous cowboy incapable of behaving rationally. It must also be said that the media, in the form of Hollywood this time, pushed the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 911 as “documentary, which it most categorically is not. Certainly it draws on real people, real dialogue and real events, but it has been re-arranged and edited so cleverly that anyone not on the inside of this story would not appreciate that some of the dialogue the film presents as preceding the Twin Towers incident, is taken from meetings which took place after the event. These are stitched together with cleverly written and entirely fictitious dialogue which creates the appearance of credibility – until it is properly scrutinised and one learns the Michael Moore would sell his soul to the Devil if he thought it would bring down G W Bush and replace him with whichever Democrat candidate he preferred. Who knows, perhaps he already has sold his soul, he certainly won’t be the first, and he is unlikely to be alone.
Guido is certain that the reason that Bloggers are suddenly coming under scrutiny by the media is that they have woken up to the fact that no one accepts their reports as accurate anymore. We all have a bias in some way or another, and it inevitably will come through in the way we see events or interpret reports and conversations, the problem the media face is that they have slanted their reporting to one particular end of the political spectrum for so long, they simply believe that they alone now represent the unbiased centre ground, and the explosion of counter opinion as shown on blogs is unsettling this vision, and causing them to question why the blogs are apparently so far from where they think the political centre is.
It is one of the more amusing things in Guido’s life that once he was considered by his colleagues and political Masters to be to the Far Left of the Kremlin, but is now considered by the same group to be to the Far Right of Genghiz Khan, yet, in fact, he has not changed his political view point at all, but the political world has changed around him. At the end of the day, what concerns him most is that the media should be open, honest, accurate and fair. Far to often public hysteria is whipped up for dishonest motives to promote a particular response from the legislature, or push a particular political philosophy and far too often the public suffer for it in the long term.
If blogging can help to change that, then call me all the names you like Dr Lief, but I’ll keep blogging!
2 commentsCan’t make this up…
Political parties spend a lot of time and money identifying appropriate pieces of music to use as campaign theme tunes.
For a few years, the Liberal Democrats have, tragically, been using New Beginning by appropriately sexed former Boyzone member Stephen Gately. But at a leadership hustings for party donors on Tuesday, it was suggested it should be replaced.
“The three candidates were asked to come up with the best song to use should they win the leadership,” I am told. “Chris Huhne tediously said he’d refer it to a committee. Simon Hughes was all for Tina Turner’s Simply the Best. And poor old Ming Campbell was rather fazed by the question, prompting a heckler to loudly whisper: ‘What about Grandpa, We Love You?’
From today’s Spy.
I think Pet Shop Boys would be more appropriate. Or maybe retitled something like ‘West End Boys’.
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