The New York Review of Books: Goodbye to Newspapers?
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Reviews of "When the Press Fails: Political Power and the New Media from Iraq to Katrina" and "
American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media".
Category Archives: Iraq
Observer: Call to end war signals start of a media battle
"Far more than in the 1960s, the modern American media landscape is divided into warring tribes who seem to spend at least as much time attacking each other as attacking the administration of the day."
Telegraph: BBC ‘risked safety of troops’
"The BBC was accused last night of risking the safety of British forces in Iraq after trawling for information on troop movements in the war-torn country."
Observer: Bid to censor press over prince’s army deployment
"Revelations about the deployment of Prince Harry to a war zone will be censored if the government agrees to a proposal that future information surrounding his military career is covered by a D-notice."
AP: No Photos Allowed After Iraqi Blasts
"The Iraqi government said it decided last weekend to keep photographers and camera crews away from blast sites to prevent them from damaging forensic evidence."
The New York Observer Media Mob: Journal War Correspondents Battle Dow Jones!
War correspondents at the Wall Street Journal aren't happy about the way they are being treated by Dow Jones in their recent contract negotiations...
Hussein’s hanging video and the ‘new media ethic’
The emergence of a cameraphone video showing the execution of Saddam Hussein last week unleashed the usual torrent of stories examining the difficult decisions newspaper and television editors faced programmes should use it. The Guardian and the BBC discussed their decisions on their respective editors’ blogs in the last few days.
But are the dilemmas different online in print or on air? As in this case, a graphic video might already be widely available on video-sharing sites and therefore accessible to anyone with access to a search engine.
Moreover, unlike a newspaper or television programme, a web site can require its readers to click through a warning to gain access to to graphic material. Before it became clear what material would become available, Steve Outing argued there is no question that stills or video of the Hussein hanging should be published online.
On his blog Outing wrote:
To not make them available (with appropriate warnings) just marks you as an anachronistic editor who’s still trying to enforce his/her own sensibilities on a public that no longer needs editors dictating what they do or do not see. The new-media ethic lets news consumers make up their own minds.
Once the the cameraphone video was released, Outing wrote in a second post:
Mainstream news editors can no longer expect to be the sole arbiters of taste when it comes to what the public sees in events like this. The full gruesome reality is available online and likely will be from now on when it comes to big news stories.
This may be true, but something isn’t quite right. Mainstream news sites don’t habitually link to terrorists’ beheading videos just because they are already in the public domain, for example. And the next time this issue arises — as it inevitably will — the footage in question may be far more graphic. On the BBC editors’ blog, for example, commenter Graham Basden wrote:
I spent 30 years in the TV industry as an operator, and my duties often required me to edit out footage deemed too graphic for news viewers. They were sometimes a lot worse than an execution. Not only couldn’t I sleep sometimes for days, I ended up, at 50 years old, a psychiatric patient on a disability pension, never able to work again. I still get nightmares from some of the stuff I was “privileged” to see.
So is there really a different “new media ethic” just because major media no longer have an airtight gatekeeping function over what enters the public realm? Or can editors, while acknowledging the existence of the such material elsewhere, only be responsible for what is (re-)published or linked to on their sites? My guess is that it’s the latter.
See also: Greenslade, Wordblog, and Bobbie Johnson.
Lawyer seeks disclosure of al-Jazeera memo
The lawyer of one of the men accused of violating the Official Secrets Act over the leak of a document allegedly showing that George W. Bush had proposed to bomb the headquarters of al-Jazeera will seek disclosure of the document during the trial.
Former parliamentary researcher Leo O’Connor and former government communications official David Keogh are facing charges over the leak. The trial date was set yesterday with little fanfare. The New York Times today reports:
Neil Clark, a lawyer for Mr. O’Connor, said he was shown the memo for the first time on Tuesday on condition that he discuss it only with his client. But, Mr. Clark said, he would seek the disclosure of the document in court. “I didn’t think there was anything in there that could embarrass the British government,” he said.
Hundreds of bloggers have vowed to defy reporting restrictions by publishing the document if it comes into their possession. So far has not been seen publically. Even the Daily Mirror’s Kevin Maguire, who broke the story, based his account entirely on the recollections of individuals who had seen the document.
Yesterday, we learned that Labour MPs Tony Clarke and Peter Kilfoyle had in October 2004 revealed the contents of the document to a British expatriate in California, John Latham. Although they admit this violation of the Official Secrets Act, they are not facing charges.
‘Human error’ in Army PDF blunder
A US Army enquiry has concluded that human error was to blame for inadvertantly making available redacted sections of the report into the death of Italian agent Nicola Calipari.
In response to the goof, Government Computer News reports that the Army now has a policy of physically redacting classified sections of documents before scanning them for publication online.
Gore-for-porn webmaster arrested
The man behind a website that invited soldiers to post grisly photographs from the warzones in Iraq and Afghanistan in exchange for access to pornography has been arrested in Florida.
Chris Wilson, who runs Nowthatsfuckedup.com, was charged with wholesale distribution of obscene material and a long list of misdemeanors related to individual items on his site.
The charges appear to stem from the sexual content of Wilson’s site, which is hosted in Amsterdam — and not the gory images allegedly posted by soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
(Via Just World News)
Gore-for-porn: blogosphere to MSM and back again
The “pornography for war gore” story that is in the New York Times, Guardian and the London Metro today is an excellent example of a story flowing between the blogosphere and mainstream news outlets.
The story, about soliders apparently trading grisly digital camera snaps of dead Iraqis and Afghans for access to the Amsterdam-based pornographic web site nowthatsfuckedup.com, was first brought to the world’s attention in October, 2004, when the the the sex blog Fleshbot noticed it (thanking “Chris” for the tip). A few days later, the New York Post reported that the Pentagon was investigating the site, which apparently included naked photographs of female American soldiers.
The story disappeared (almost completely) until Italian blogger Staib noticed the site in late August. His post was picked up by the Italian news agency ANSA, whose reports ended up in both major Italian papers, La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera.
German technology news site Heise picked up the story, but strangly, no English-speaking journalists seemed to pick it up, but bloggers like Nur-al-Cubicle, Xer-files (who provided contact details for the site’s owner, Chris Wilson), Sabbah, and Helena Cobban’s Just World News. (I chickened out at the time because I couldn’t confirm it to my satisfaction).
From there, it went to the Online Journalism Review, which fleshed out many new details. This was this was then picked up by the California alternative weekly the East Bay Express and then left wing American magazine The Nation (without much attribution).
AmericaBlog began covering gore-for-porn on Monday.
But news stories often need formally-constituted civil society groups to speak out before they can be framed as a bona fide political conflict. And so, the story finally hit the big time when the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations publically complained to the Pentagon.
What’s surprising about this is that the story was already in the mainstream media in August — albeit in Italian — but it took the intervention of the blogosphere to ensure that it was translated and thereby placed on the news agenda of the English-speaking mass media.
The webmaster, Wilson, told the East Bay Express about the media coverage of his site:
… In the wake of the Post’s stories, Wilson says, he was bombarded with requests for interviews from newspapers and radio stations. Even after he began posting photographs of corpses late last year, media inquiries focused exclusively on his nudie pics. It wasn’t until reporters from the European press contacted him in early September that anyone took notice of Wilson’s snuff-for-porn arrangement with American troops.
“The soldiers thing, I think the Italians picked it up first,” Wilson says. “I’ve done interviews with the Italians, the French, Amsterdam. … They were very critical, saying the US wouldn’t pick it up, because it’s such a sore spot. … It raises too many ethical questions. … I started to laugh, because it’s true.”
Are GIs trading grisly war photos for porn?
The Online Journalism Review’s Mark Glaser reports on a web site that offers soldiers in Iraq access to pornography in exchange for grisly images from the war zone.
I wrote a post about this back on 21 August, but decided not to publish it because I couldn’t substantiate it.
At the time, La Repubblica had reported that an Italian blogger had discovered a web site inviting American troops in Iraq and Afganistan to send pictures of mutilated and bloated corpses in lieu of payment for access to hard-core pornography (translation).
The Italian reports did not name the site, and my e-mailed requests for more information were ignored, so I dropped it.
Oops.
Apparently blogger and journalist Helena Cobban of Just World News did a better job of following up the story. One of her readers translated the Italian post and another identified the site.
Although it’s not certain that the horrific images available on the site were really taken by US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, the US military are now looking into the website, according to Glaser:
I couldn’t verify whether these gory photos were taken recently in Iraq by soldiers. But the U.S. military is currently looking into the site and trying to authenticate the photos — and take appropriate action if soldiers are involved. “We do have people who are specifically looking at that website, and I will talk to my colleagues and my bosses here and get back to you,” said Staff Sgt. Don Dees, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command (CentCom) in Baghdad.
Update: more information is now available.
Rules for military bloggers in Iraq
The U.S. military has established guidelines for soldiers blogging in Iraq, according to MediaBistro, which has obtained a memo on blogging by Lt. Gen. John Vines:
Dated April 6, the four-page memo addresses several controversies that have arisen about soldiers blogging about their time in Iraq, and decrees that soldiers may keep and publish personal online journals as long as they don’t publish “prohibited information,” including classified information, notes on casualties before next-of-kin have been notified, and other information not generally released under a Freedom of Information Act request.
Under a threat of court martial, soldiers must register with their unit commander any blog or unofficial website, including the hosting company, IP address, and the webmaster’s name.
“Risks of the release of information must be weighed against the benefits of publishing to the Internet,” the memo explains.
(via Tyler Harrison)
Site invites GIs to trade grisly war photos for porn
An Italian blogger has discolved a web site that is inviting American troops in Iraq and Afganistan to send pictures of mutilated and bloated corpses in lieu of payment for access to hard-core pornography, La Repubblica reports (translation).
Update: More details are now available.