There are differences in opinion in the government over whether package tours to the Mt. Kumgang resort in North Korea, a cash cow Pyongyang wants to revive, fall under UN sanctions. Asked about these concerns on Thursday, one ranking official said, "The matter is relevant to UN Security Council resolution 1874." The resolution, adopted after North Korea's nuclear and missile tests this spring, aims at preventing Pyongyang from obtaining cash for developing weapons of mass destruction.
Unification Ministry spokesman Chun Hae-sung said payment in kind rather than cash "can be studied when the two Koreas discuss resuming the tour program." But Foreign Ministry spokesman Moon Tae-young told a regular briefing session, "It's the government's judgment that the tour programs to Mt. Kumgang are not subject to sanctions under Security Council Resolution 1874."
But a Cheong Wa Dae official denied there were differences of opinion. "There is consensus not only between the unification and foreign ministries but also between Seoul and Washington that the Mt. Kumgang tours themselves do not violate the UN Security Council resolution." He would not be drawn, however, on the cash payments the North has so far extracted per tourist. "It's necessary for the Unification Ministry, which has to negotiate with the North, to raise the matter." North Korea had earned over US$500 million in cash from the tour program over 10 years until it was suspended after the shooting death of a South Korean tourist there in July last year.
The ranking official said the government is willing to accept a formal North Korean proposal if it makes it. A security official said, "No change in payment for the tour program has been raised as a new condition for resuming the program, but there is a need for transparency in light of the Security Council resolution."
Hyundai Asan, the North Korea tourism arm of the Hyundai Group, has made monthly payments to an overseas account designated by the North's Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, which charges $50-$80 per tourist. The government is reportedly reviewing ways of preventing the money from going into North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's private pockets or being used for military purposes. One option would be making the payments into an account that can only be used to import food, while another would be payment in goods.
But the chances that the North would accept those options are slim. In a statement Wednesday, the Asia-Pacific Peace Committee called non-cash payments "ludicrous," adding, " Nowhere in the world do tourists pay for their tours with goods." Nor would it make much sense for the government to interfere in what is essentially a private contract between Hyundai Asan and the Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, while settlements in goods would be difficult because market prices of commodities like rice and petroleum fluctuate daily, a government source said. "I don't think North Korea is going to accept a change in method of payment," he said.
Posted by: Steve White ||
11/28/2009 00:00 ||
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Muslim piracy was important in motivating the growth of the seeds of the US Navy and Marines. Old Ironsides saw first action against them, and the Marine Hymn references them ("shores of Tripoli." Would the US independence have survived the War of 1812 without the Barbary Wars? Who knows.
The two recent events most important to America's future had nothing to do with health care or the economy. They had everything to do with our ability -- more accurately, our willingness -- to defend ourselves from enemies that want us dead.
The two recent events most important to America's future had nothing to do with health care or the economy. They had everything to do with our ability -- more accurately, our willingness -- to defend ourselves from enemies that want us dead.
And they both beg the question: what are we doing to ourselves?'
Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan's alleged massacre of 14 people (13 adults and an unborn baby) was bad enough; Senator Joe Lieberman rightly labeled it "the worst terrorist attack since September eleventh." What made the attack worse was its preventability.
Hasan left marker after marker, indicator after indicator, that he was a sympathizer of radical Islamism. The intercepted e-mails between Hasan and radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who pronounced the accused gunman a "hero" for his actions. The lecture to medical colleagues that non-believers in Islam should have their throats cut and boiling oil poured down their throats. Even the business cards declaring himself to be an "SoA" -- Soldier of Islam. The Army knew all this and more....yet allowed Hasan to stay, defying common sense. The prospect of removing a Muslim from the ranks was apparently deemed a greater threat to the Army's image than retaining a powder keg just waiting to explode. The virus of political correctness, hatched in the fetid fever swamps of Harvard Yard and Cal-Berkeley in the mid-1980s, has metastasized into a beast that is eating us from within.
The madness continued after the murder spree. In an incomprehensible display of tone-deafness, top Army General George Casey said as bad as the shootings were, "...if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse." Worse, General? Worse than 14 people murdered? Worse than 31 others whose wounds may affect the rest of their lives?
The gravestones of every Fort Hood victim should be engraved with the following: "died of political correctness."
On the heels of the Hasan debacle came the Obama Administration's outrageous decision to grant 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged conspirators the full rights and benefits of a civilian trial.
Set aside the lunacy of allowing people who have already -- proudly -- admitted their guilt in the worst attack on American soil. Forget the absurdity of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder declaring Mohammed et al. guilty while simultaneously promising a "fair trial" will be rendered.
What many people fear -- and fully expect -- is that KSM et al will ultimately not be the ones on trial. Just as OJ Simpson's trial morphed into a judgment of the Los Angeles Police Department, the terrorists' proceedings will become a circus maximus whose focus will be George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, the Patriot Act, the Guantanamo Bay detention center, "extreme rendition," the entire war on terrorism. That's what the Angry Left has wanted for years. Thank to its agents in power -- beginning with Obama and Holder but certainly not ending with them -- that's what it's going to get. The uproarious, happy sound in the distance is our enemies laughing themselves into a frenzy at our national security death wish.
Since 2003, we've heard that America's methods in fighting radical Islamism have simply "created more terrorists." How many terrorists will be inspired by watching KSM and friends spew their anti-American hatred on a worldwide platform -- courtesy of the American taxpayer? How many new agents of terror will that create?
Our enemies no longer have to plot grandiose attacks against America. We're doing the work for them, and they barely have to lift a finger.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/28/2009 00:00 ||
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Lets be clear, we aren't doing this to ourselves, Obama, Pelosi, Reid and the ultra left are doing this to us. Elected through an elegant scheme of vague centrist promises and emotional pap, and capitalizing on 8 years of Hollywood and MSM demonization of Bush, we have the most extreme leftist in our history leading the nation, or at least controlling the federal government and all of the mechanisms of power. And, seeing the nation awakening, they are in a rush to create more power over our lives, via cap and trade and healthcare. The question is, how much damage care they doing, how many laws, rules and agencies are they creating, how many leftist judges are they installing, and how many leftist civil-servants are they salting away for careers in the goverment? Can we control this before the nation runs off the social and fiscal cliff, whose edge is very, very, close? Another year of these grim times and tyrannical actions by goverment, and random, white-hot angry violence will break out, coming from those who never knew want before, or faced the humiliation of total poverty. Hard, dangerous times loom if we don't stop this train wreck in 2010 elections!
#2
Far bigger threats are a) the importation of an underclass of 11 million semi-literates or illiterates from Mexico, and b) multi-trillion dollar unfunded liabilities across almost every level of government in the US.
I don't see either party doing anything meaningful about these two slow-motion mass destruction tendencies.
2010 won't change anything. We need a new political class in this country.
As I was dithering about the yard this weekend trying to get a handle on the various chores I had to do, I began to debate with myself whether it was finally time to clean up all the leaves that had accumulated.
The trees looked bare, but the least little wind tended to blow in the leaves from the unkempt conservation area next door. I knew I had to make a decision, but all the variables of my leaf question were not known.
As autumn gains in strength and the days grow shorter, time seems to compress and ordinary decisions take on urgency not had before. So in this season of health care bills and continuous economic distress, with falling poll numbers and nit picking from the likes of former Vice President Dick Cheney, President Barack Obama faces not an ordinary decision but what may be the most extraordinarily important question of his presidency; whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
Let's be fair. As with most of the colossal problems facing Obama, the war in Afghanistan was not of his own making, but as Commander in Chief of our nation's armed forces it falls to Obama to make the best of this war which started in October 2001. The war's stated goal at the time was to find and bring to justice the Al-Qaeda planners of the 9/11 attack on America and to remove the Taliban regime which had given Al-Qaeda a safe haven.
To date, Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden is still free and the Taliban are in the midst of a resurgence in power. In November 2007, the London-based International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) estimated that the Taliban maintained a permanent presence in 54 percent of Afghanistan and continued to exert influence on regions outside the central government's sphere of control, predominantly in southern and eastern provinces. By December 2008, the Taliban had expanded its sphere of influence to 72 percent of the country.
Politically speaking, President Obama has already come to "own" the Afghanistan war because he campaigned on a commitment to end the neglect of the war and as president has said, "Now I can articulate some very clear, minimal goals in Afghanistan, and that is that we make sure that its not a safe haven for al-Qaida, they are not able to launch attacks of the sort that happened on 9/11 against the American homeland or American interest. How we achieve that initial goal, what kinds of strategies and tactics we need to put in place, I don't think that we've thought it through...."
In addition, Obama hand-picked his commander in Afghanistan, appointing General Stanley McChrystal in June of 2009. Unfortunately for the President, the general's request in September for 30,000 to 40,000 additional troops was leaked and the president has since faced mounting criticism about taking what some critics see as an inordinate length of time to make his decision regarding the troop request. Dick Cheney in one interview has called Obama's decision-making process "dithering." One might ask Cheney what he calls his and President Bush's own efforts in Afghanistan the last eight years.
Having already sent an additional 22,000 troops at the start of his presidency, Obama has brought the current level of US forces there to about 68,000. If he agrees with his top general, US forces will exceed 100,000 which combined with the NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) would yield an armed presence of well over 140,000.
History has shown time and time again that insurgencies can be impossible to suppress. Like leaves blowing in from another yard this insurgency in Afghanistan is fueled by extremists coming over from neighboring Pakistan. Fraud in the recent election in Afghanistan has shown that we don't have even a viable central government there to build upon.
Incidents of Afghanistani forces turning and attacking allied forces indicate that even Afghanis trained by western forces cannot be wholly trusted. The history of Afghanistan shows that even the most powerful nations on the earth (the Soviet Union, the British Empire) and countless lesser invaders were no match for a combination of religious tribal culture protected by harsh mountainous landscapes.
With only bad choices available, one cannot fault Obama for taking his time on Afghanistan. With so many unknown variables, including waning popular support here at home, and awareness that allied-caused civilian deaths are fueling the insurgency, and a growing national debt, the United States just may not be prepared for the long, hard slog that the war in Afghanistan represents.
On this Thanksgiving we may not be thankful for a clear mission in Afghanistan, but we can be thankful for a president that understands this reality and is willing to "dither" over the most important decision one can imagine. How refreshing considering the last rush to war that buried us in Iraq.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/28/2009 00:00 ||
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"one cannot fault Obama for taking his time on Afghanistan"
I fault him. We are not the Russians, the Mongols, or the British Empire.
These decisions you make before you take office - especially with the data available to the public.
Let the professionals handle it for you. McCrystal is far from incompetent and you appointed him to handle it, so let him handle it.
The spring offensive is just around the bend. Armies don't just hop into a plane and deploy. It takes months.
40,000 is the minimum we want on the ground there, were you a real Commander in Chief, you would give him the 60,000 we really wanted and would have done so in short order.
Huh? Drivel. The war stated well before but was clearly driven home on 11 September 2001. The Authorization to Use Force, aka Declaration of War, was passed a few days later. Note well subparagraph 2(b)(1) refers to the War Powers Resolution. Attacks on our embassies in Africa and the USS Cole predate 2001, but the likes of this writer just can't see through their own hand wringing to face it. There was no rush, but a long ramp up with continuous acts by the other guy that culminated in a response.
#4
You can also fault the Joker for shamelessly trumping up his support for the "good" war in Afghanistan during the campaign as a way of establishing some foreign-policy cred with non-wacko Dem primary voters.
The man pretended to be in favor of pursuing victory there as a way of balancing his calls for retreat from Iraq within 10 months.
Obama is as shameless as they come, and deserves all the grief that AfPak will send his administration's way.
Can this marriage be saved? The union of junk scientists, on the prowl for government handouts to pay for their computer games, and eager politicians sniffing an enormous new source of tax revenue was a match made in a dark alley. The always gullible mainstream media was the guest at the wedding, and everybody won. Only the public was duped.
The global warming scam is in trouble because neither the globe nor the thermometer will cooperate. Congress is trying to decide whether to believe its own eyes or the hustlers who have been forced to change the name of the scam - we're supposed to call it "climate change" now. The marketing men hired by Al Gore to "re-brand" the scam looked for inspiration to the country philosopher who observed that "if you've got one foot in the fire and the other foot in a bucket of ice, on average you're warm." The term "climate change" strikes a fraudulent average that can be applied to ice storms, heat waves, hurricanes and floods. Since the climate changes constantly, the new "brand" ought to last awhile.
Skepticism, once the mark of the ethical scientist, has been cast aside by the global warmists who behave like high priests, rigging the debate by protecting their doctrinal certitude that humans, who have been here a few hundred thousand years, provoke changes in the weather - sometimes warmer, sometimes cooler - which have been going on over a few billion years. (An imaginative, clever lawyer might find a high priest to sue for violating the religious freedom clause in the First Amendment.)
Some of the scientists have begun to speak up, unable any longer to keep their silence. They argue that the global-warming scam is self-perpetuating, that critics and their criticism are not only pushed to the sidelines, but face ex-communication from the Church of Global Warming. Theirs is a tough pope.
The church is rattled by the embarrassing disclosure of certain e-mail messages between prominent global-warming scientists, revealing what was suspected but not proved before, that skeptics of the theory are systematically ignored and shunned. This is accomplished by manipulation of "peer review," that skeptics should not be listened to if their criticism is not published, after review by peers, in an approved scientific journal. Any journal brave enough to publish a skeptical scientist is to be shunned as well.
In one e-mail, marked "highly confidential," Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, an early British center for climate research, wrote to Professor Michael Mann at Penn State that it was important to keep skeptical science out of the report of the International Panel on Climate Change, which will be big stuff next month in Copenhagen. Professor Mann, in his e-mail, said that he and a colleague "will keep [skeptics] out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is." Professor Mann argues that the revealing e-mail messages are merely part of the "vigorous debate" necessary to suppress debate. George Orwell lives.
The revelations of academic travesty have panicked the priests of the Church of Global Warming and friends and followers. The Washington Post, which built its reputation on leaked (or "stolen") documents, prissily refers to the e-mail messages as "stolen e-mails" that prove nothing more than that suppressing debate must be done more discreetly. What panics the congregation is that this breaks just before the big Copenhagen warmfest.
President Obama, who earlier didn't want anything to distract attention from his Nobel Peace Prize and said he would pass up Copenhagen to get on to Oslo, now intends to drop in on Copenhagen. The sudden discovery of room on his calendar was obviously the result of the revelations of scientific chicanery. Not only that, he'll get to make not one but two speeches in Scandinavia, though it's not clear what, beyond a nice speech, he can promise the Copenhagen congregation, since global-warming legislation is stalled, probably permanently, in the Senate. Not even the Democrats want to go home next year to explain why they voted to wreck health care and impose an enormously expensive cap-and-trade on U.S. industry, all in a single year. All the president can do is promise. But he does have experience in making promises.
A series of articles in the Lancet, the prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal, suggests what's next on the global-warming agenda. Altering the weather is good for you. If you get rid of your car and walk to work, you might lose a pound or two. If you quit eating meat the ranchers would raise fewer cows, reducing bovine flatulence. Flatulence is a constant in the Church of Global Warming.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/28/2009 00:00 ||
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This is disappointing. I'm a member of the least served constichuency is this entire mess. A warming denialist - who none-the-less want's it to happen against all hope. Tomatoes... year around. That's all I'm saying.
Posted by: Perry Stanford White ||
11/28/2009 13:08 Comments ||
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Canadians look forward to global warming ten months a year and spends the other two wondering who stole the ice on the hockey rink.
As usual its a very good read, this time he drops a bag of hammers political correctness :
"Hateful words" can lead to "unspeakable crimes." The problem with this line is that it's ahistorical twaddle, as I've pointed out. Read it all.
#1
By now, investigators would have a complete record of his phone/email contacts, etc, and of his internet searches. There will be red-flags. The question is: will Justice follow the "lone madman" line? All the more important that the FBI be apolitical.
Posted by: Slath Prince of the Poles1925 ||
11/28/2009 15:45 Comments ||
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They're waiting for the decision from the White House.
Like the nearby Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Newseum -- Washington's museum dedicated to journalism -- displays dinosaurs. On a long wall near the entrance, the front pages of newspapers from around the country are electronically posted each morning -- the artifacts of a declining industry. Inside, the high-tech exhibits are nostalgic for a lower-tech time when banner headlines and network news summarized the emotions and exposed the scandals of the nation. Lindbergh Lands Safely. One Small Step. Nixon Resigns. Cronkite removes his glasses to announce President Kennedy's death at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time. News still happens every day. Really. Some people, probably not as many as in the days of my youth, are still interested in it.
Behind a long rack of preserved, historic front pages, there is a kind of journalistic mausoleum, displaying the departed. The Ann Arbor News, closed July 23 after 174 years in print. The Rocky Mountain News, taken at age 150. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which passed quietly into the Internet. The New York Sun died -- for the second time -- last year. But the New York World has been dead for years, and the Mirror crashed a long time ago. The Herald and the Tribune became the Herald-Tribune, and I think it's also gone the way of the diplodocus. The Washington Star, with its interesting daily collection of shrdlus, is a fond memory, but we now have the Times and the Examiner, both of which are better papers, if not quite so original when it comes to spelling. Newspapers used to be fairly ephemeral, easy to start up, but most of them not all that robust. They were kinda like web sites are today.
What difference does this make? For many conservatives, the "mainstream media" is an epithet. Didn't the Internet expose the lies of Dan Rather? Many on the left also shed few tears, preferring to consume their partisanship raw in the new media. I thought we were talking about newspapers, but I guess we can discuss news in general. Rather was symptomatic of news' decline, but there are lots of less well-known examples within the print world and probably lots in the broadcast world I either can't recall or never heard about in the first place.
But a visit to the Newseum is a reminder that what is passing is not only a business but also a profession -- the journalistic tradition of nonpartisan objectivity. I love jazz. Sometimes I like 20s jazz, which is kind of raw, almost primal. The 30s were kind of when jazz hit its pace, Crosby's youth, Al Bowlly's heyday, the early years of everybody from Benny Goodman to Vera Lynn. It reached its full flower in the 1940s, and then kind of died with Glen Miller. Post-1945 there were fewer and fewer performers and performances that I considered enjoyable: Frank Sinatra kind of hit his stride, but he didn't bring the bands with him. In place of the happy and sophisticated music of the Dorsey Brothers we saw the genre split into multiple streams, all of which I consider sterile and uninteresting. I went to a jazz concert this summer and left early. It was derivative, a pale cross between Charlie Parker and Dave Brubeck, and nothing at all like Ella Fitzgerald in her Miss Otis Regrets prime, and nowhere near as much fun as Bix Beiderbecke or Paul Whiteman.
I feel much the same about news, probably because I subsconsciously bought into the Ben Hecht version of the news business. We used to have "reporters," where now we have "journalists." People used to go into the business who could write. Now it's a career path, with journalism or communications majors and I suppose to become an editor you've got to have a master's degree from a good (Columbia School of Journalism) school. There are more credentials and less talent involved -- a dozen Michael Oleskers for every Gregory Kane. The politicization comes from the liberal arts schools who crank these nonentities out. They suck up the leftism along with their freshman writing assignments. Ernie Pyle or Damon Runyon or Dickie Chappell or Walter Winchell aren't the models, but Woodward & Bernstein and, behind them, John Reed and Walter Durante.
Journalists, God knows, didn't always live up to that tradition. But they generally accepted it, and they felt shamed when their biases or inaccuracies were exposed. The profession had rules about facts and sources and editors who enforced standards. We've seen that evaporate pretty steadily since the Woodward & Bernstein days.
At its best, the profession of journalism has involved a spirit of public service and adventure -- reporting from a bomber during a raid in World War II, or exposing the suffering of Sudan or Appalachia, or rushing to the site of the World Trade Center moments after the buildings fell. I'm not sure about the suffering of Sudan -- I can remember the suffering of Somalia, with the images of the little kiddies eating glop with flies crawling over them. That got us signed up for a humanitarian mission, which pointed out (rather pointedly, y'might say) that Somalia's poverty was based in its exploitation by its warlords and its holy men. That led us to Blackhawk Down just as surely as the sinking of the Maine led us to San Juan Hill and "You may fire when ready, Gridley."
I can vaguely remember the Appalachia stories. I think they pointed out the existence of Appalachia and its backwoods population. Duly reminded, John Kennedy bought all the votes in West Virginia at $7 apiece. I can also remember the West Virginia Hillbilly, which has probably gone the way by now of the passenger pigeon or the New York Record, having enormous editorial fun with the mechanics of it all.
By these standards, the changes we see in the media are also a decline. Most cable news networks have forsaken objectivity entirely and produce little actual news, since makeup for guests is cheaper than reporting. I watch Fox News. Several years ago the networks first went from the John Cameron Swayze of my youth to Huntley-Brinkley's attempt at objectivity to Walter Cronkeit's post-Tet partisanship. From there they went to "infotainment" and I quit watching entirely.
Then came CNN, which was really pretty good when it started out. Its heyday was Gulf War I, despite Peter Arnett. News has now moved entirely from the networks to cable. MSNBC's excruciating to watch. CNN and its family are pretty bad, though better than MSNBC. When I went to Costa Rica they were all that was available and it wasn't a pretty sight. I watched a lot of movies with the kids.
Fox has news through the day, until 5 pm, when Glen Beck -- an opinion show -- comes on. He's followed by news until 8 pm, when O'Reilly begins the opinon hours and I devote my time to the Burg. He's followed by Hannity's opinion, then by Greta's lurid crime tales. But Fox presents a lot of news and it blocs its opinion hours together.
Most Internet sites display an endless hunger to comment and little appetite for verification. Kind of like what newspapers and broadcast news have become.
Free markets, it turns out, often make poor fact-checkers, instead feeding the fantasies of conspiracy theorists from "birthers" to Sept. 11, 2001, "truthers." Also debunking them. It was free-market Charles Johnson who debunked Dan Rather, not the editorial staff of See BS. We haven't tolerated conspiracy theorists here, either, though I think we should allow Illuminati and Bilderbergers and the Legitimate Heir of France just on GPs.
Unlike the news organizations with their fact checkers, we're pretty short with the proponents of Global Warming/Climate Change/Nuclear Winter/Silent Spring/Whatever's coming next.
Online news organizations present a full lunch counter, an overloaded groaning board, with news all over the place, along with healthy doses of opinion, all intersperse with hyperlinks that will eventually lead back to the original source. When you don't find those hyperlinks you're looking at either live reporting, occasionally an emailed press release, or somebody's opinion.
Bloggers in repressive countries often show great courage, but few American bloggers have the resources or inclination to report from war zones, famines and genocides. We don't have to take a back seat to any other country, not even the repressive ones. Bill Roggio, Michael Yon, a bunch of other guys, all do yeoman's work. I'd call the other guys lesser lights, but some of them are just as good reporters without the marketing luck. The kiddies at Iran va Jahan, on the other hands, are consistently either wrong or exaggerated, so often that I think they're actually gray propaganda and don't use them as a source anymore. You can tell a good reporter (not so much a journalist) by his product. Roggio and Yon are good, the New York Times' Dexter Filkin is good, CNN's Nic Robertson's not, Seymour Hersch is worse. Quod erat, as they say, demonstandrum, which is Latin for approximately "by their works so shall ye know them."
The democratization of the media -- really its fragmentation -- has encouraged ideological polarization. There used to be a certain sameness to the news bidnid. It wasn't the uniformity of unfettered truth.
Princeton University professor Paul Starr traced this process recently in the Columbia Journalism Review. Right. The Columbia Journalism Review. Brethren and Sistern, I rest my case.
After the captive audience for network news was released by cable, many Americans did not turn to other sources of news. They turned to entertainment. The viewers who remained were more political and more partisan. "As Walter Cronkite prospered in the old environment," says Starr, "Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann thrive in the new one. As the diminished public for journalism becomes more partisan, journalism itself is likely to shift further in that direction." If O'Reilly had Olbermann's viewership and Olbermann had O'Reilly's I'll betcha there wouldn't be a problem with that. But most of the news-viewing eyeballs are watching Fox News with me. They have more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. And the viewers are watching for the same reason I am.
The nation's consistently somewhere around 50-50 when it comes to voting, but the ratio's more lop-sided when it comes to watching the news. The same people who're decrying the politicization of the news are the ones who're bitching about losing the talk radio ear war -- Limbaugh remains, Air America is either dead or on a real long IV.
Cable and the Internet now allow Americans, if they choose, to get their information entirely from sources that agree with them -- sources that reinforce and exaggerate their political predispositions. And the numbers say that most of the people who're getting the news that agrees with them are headed toward Fox.
And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting. Drudge aggregates his news and sends link after link to the guys who do the costly newsgathering and investigative reporting. Likewise Lucianne. Likewise AOL, Yahoo, and Google News, with varying degrees of success.
Rantburg gives the link, but we also preserve most of the text of articles, the originals of which often die after a few days. Our links are also more likley to point to a foreign news source.
The links from all of us aggregators are still getting sent back to the sources, who should really be happy for the traffic. They'd rather have paid readers, but that's not going to happen anytime soon and I hope never, so they'll have to settle for the advertising clicks.
The old-media dinosaurs remain the basis for the entire media food chain. About a third to half of it here, I'd guess. The foreign old media dinosaurs are our favored sources, which is why we're often a day or two ahead of the papers on WoT news.
But newspapers are expected to provide their content free on the Internet. A recent poll found that 80 percent of Americans refuse to pay for Internet content. There is no economic model that will allow newspapers to keep producing content they don't charge for, while Internet sites repackage and sell content they don't pay to produce. I can think of several approaches that would produce a revenue stream. We rely on advertising here, which now sucks -- but I don't research new ad sources -- and on contributions, which have been declining for the past year or so.
But newspapers used to be connected to AP, AFP, Reuters, and UPI by teletype, from whence stories would be collected and set. Pictures were transmitted by photofax. They paid a monthly or quarterly subscription rate. Agencies could now send their stories via email to paid subscribers, photos attached, ready for dropping into templates for publication. I get press releases and opinion pieces like that now, by the way, to include most of the opinon page of the Washington Examiner.
Rather than bitching about blogs, why not produce a product tailored for blogs? Perhaps that could include edited and fact-checked stories at a subscription price. Getting the news out before everyone else used to be known, correct me if I'm wrong, as a "scoop," and was considered a good thing. And it's the lack of editing and fact-checking that guys like the writer bitch about when denigrating us news aggregators.
I dislike media bias as much as the next conservative. But I don't believe that journalistic objectivity is a fraud. I was a journalist for a time, at a once-great, now-diminished newsmagazine. I've seen good men and women work according to a set of professional standards I respect -- standards that serve the public. Professional journalism is not like the buggy-whip industry, outdated by economic progress, to be mourned but not missed. This profession has a social value that is currently not reflected in its market value. Its social value is produced by its practitioners and that value's been declining. Witness the near unanimity of "journalists" who've lined up behind Global Warming/Climate Change/Nuclear Winter/Silent Spring/Whatever comes next. If you don't have a nose for actual news don't go sullying the profession the Elder Hearst used to pursue.
What is to be done? A lot of good people are working on it. But if you currently have newsprint on your hands, thank you. I subscribe to the Baltimore Sun, a formerly great paper that's not afflicted by journalism. I have it delivered every day but Sunday. I spend my weekends refinishing furniture, y'see. I need that newsprint.
I get my actual news from Rantburg.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/28/2009 00:00 ||
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Far too kind to journalism. What happened was journalists realized by controlling the discussion, they could control society, and they set about doing exactly that. They filled universities with idealogues and set about making new journalists come into the field with pre-built biases, and the idea that they should practice these biases in their work to "improve" (control) society.
Now they've gotten so far out of touch nobody believes them any more, and now they're dying. They'd rather die than go back to the old mold of journalism where they report and you decide.
#3
We used to have "reporters," where now we have "journalists."
FredMan scoops. 9.88.
Sometimes I think when FredMan wasn't flying in the non-Tune, speaking the classic languages, he was a real reporter. Ima curious about that. Ima typesetter by 1st trade.
Posted by: Perry Stanford White ||
11/28/2009 7:37 Comments ||
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#4
And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting.
This is one of the sillier bit of this lament.
Way back in the early 80s I read that something like 90 percent of news published in newspapers originated in institutions, which release the news for free. Government, corporations et cetera.
Intellectual theft my ass.
Now takes very little effort to go to an institution's website to get the news and then develop a story using other sources if you want to localize. And newspapers hate that yet they refuse to admit it preferring to toss about charges of IP theft.
This idea that professional news must be published with fact checkers and layers of staff started towards then window with the advent of the Internet, and with the CRU scandal, it is trying to grab on to the ledge to keep from going down.
Allow me to step on those fingers:
Journalism is fragmented because frankly it stopped serving the people. A person now can report business news the same way with the same quality as large institutions and do so with little effort and little expense, thanks to the internet.
Newspapers suffer from an institutional malady. I don't have a term for the sickness, but someone probably does. The theory is that institutions reach the end of their usefulness when they reach a certain, larger size, and their custodians often are forced to make a decision: do we continue to grow and become even more inefficient and ineffective, or do we change, reduce our size and maintain or increase the quality of our output, and thus its value?
News organizations haven't even reach the conclusions that even news institutions no longer scale well, and whining about it in your product doesn't make the coming decisions any easier.
Some friendly advice to Mr. Gerson:
It's time to come to Jesus, way past time, in fact. I appreciate that Mommy is no longer here to daub your tears and kiss and hug you, but it is time to cowboy up, and face the facts.
#5
As I explain to my daughter, quite a lot of businesses are not what they seem. Newspapers aren't in the business of selling a news product. They are in the business of getting maximum exposure for advertisements. For years, news papers enjoyed monopoly profits in their market segments for ads, both geographic and vertical.
The Internet broke those monopoly profits from 2 directions. By providing cheaper and faster access to advertisers and and by proving a better source of news to news consumers.
'Journalists' received some of the rent from those monopoly profits.
#6
The democratization of the media -- really its fragmentation -- has encouraged ideological polarization.
Got that backwards, I suspect. The world does not revolve around the media's description of it.
The media is really a symptom reflection of its culture. There was a real consensus in the country from 1936 to 1980. But that consensus has broken down and a new one is being constructed. It's messy work.
#7
Slow death but not necessarily sad. It is not sad because many of these news sources stopped providing the news long ago. They basically became shills for liberal causes and for the Democratic party [I guess I repeated myself]. They transferred "Opinion" to the front page and called it "News." They abdicated their role as the reporter of facts.
#8
Most Internet sites display an endless hunger to comment and little appetite for verification.
he's on to me. damn
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/28/2009 10:58 Comments ||
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#9
And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft.
Pretty much sums up MSM as the sockpuppets, of one party and special interest groups, that simply repackage talking points or papers of their favor. There is no 'intellect' to steal. When you bury ACORN criminal activity, when you cover for pseudo scientists pushing fraud, when you look the other way when members of the inner party do something you pillar for days when its done by someone in the outer party, and the only place to find the real dirt is on the internet, your 'profession' is lower than that of the first profession.
The old print media has simply reverted to its roots, partisan broadsheets. It's off springs of the other media form are just the same.
#12
I can't say it any better than this guy (commenter "Novaculus", excerpted from the WaPo article's comments section):
I scour the internet for news and take nothing at face value. Typically I am fully aware of developing stories 24 to 48 hours before heavily spun versions appear in the dinosaur media. Unless, of course, like Climategate or the ACORN scandal, they are suppressed completely.
Don't blame the internet and bloggers, you flaming hypocrite. The blame is absolutely your own, and your projection of blame and childish whining moves me not at all. You soiled your own bed, and you deserve to sleep in it.
Posted by: Ricky bin Ricardo (Abu Babaloo) ||
11/28/2009 16:44 Comments ||
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#14
At its best, the profession of journalism has involved a spirit of public service and adventure -- reporting from a bomber during a raid in World War II, or exposing the suffering of Sudan or Appalachia, or rushing to the site of the World Trade Center moments after the buildings fell.
And at its worst, it decided what the public should see ("no WTC jumpers"), or publishes press releases provided by advocacy groups as hard-news, or flat out ignores or distorts issues.
Meh. I get the paper, but it's mostly so my 'dawg' has something to retrieve.
#15
One of the problems I see with the media isn't just a lack of fact-checking and verifiction. Its the outright misdirections and (I'll say it) lies by the media.
Take for example the Beslan 'incident' a few years ago. Even while it was happening and it was 'known' that the perps were, to a person, Islamic extreamists the media did everything they can to avoid calling them that - or even terrorists. They were called 'hostage takers' and 'gangsters' - anything except what they actually were - Islamic terrorists.
Look at the example of the Acorn sting. The mainstream media totally ignored what might have been the biggest political story of the year. Its not that they were 'ignorant' of it -- oh they knew full well about it. Its that they deliberately choose of their own free will to ignore the story - in order to advance their agenda and their political allies. The only network to carry the story was Fox - and for they the White House attempted to castrate them.
But a story about Palin's grandson's father's mother being into drugs - that gets top billings.
And what about ClimateGate and the details of Obamacare.
No the Mainstream Media is guilty of both Failure and Treason. Failure to do their job without bias or slant - both by ignorance and by design. And Treason to the unique and special role they are supposed to play in our democracy.
And people are catching on. The last election sesion they didn't even bother to wipe their mouths after their glowing Obama interviews.
That is why 'Journalism' is dying. And good riddance. People are not as stupid as they think. Extinction is a perfectly natural process.
The announcement that Oprah's ending her show after 25 years came as no surprise. In fact, I have been expecting this sort of announcement since Oprah took the stage with Barack Obama to announce her support for his presidential run.
During her first of many stump speeches in Manchester, I heard the crowd chant Oprah! Oprah, and listened to her give a well-crafted speech. I also noticed a transformation in her voice and delivery. She sounded more like a pastor giving a fiery sermon, closer to Reverend Wright, than a professional talk show host. She seemed to revel in the moment and the difference in reception that comes with political power. I couldn't help but think of Oprah's career and what was left for her to do that she hasn't already done.
She became the country's first Black Billionaire, she has maintained the crown of Queen Of Daytime for the last 23 years, she's built schools in Africa and convinced Americans to read whatever book she suggests, no matter how ridiculous. She even started her own magazine appropriately called "O" during a time when the printed magazine market was being pummeled by digital delivery via the Internet, and it has somehow succeeded.
So, what's left for her to do? What could possibly feed an ego of that size? It's an ego that insists she appear on every cover of her magazine and claims that her readers insisted on it. Egos are a funny things because they actually have an appetite, so when I read that she's ending her run in 2011 as the Queen Of Daytime, I realized that she most likely isn't abandoning the single largest source of food for her internal animal but, in fact, would use it to catapult herself in a position that her money and power could never buy: Vice President of the United States. More at the link if you can stomach it.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Like the nearby Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Newseum -- Washington's museum dedicated to journalism -- displays dinosaurs. On a long wall near the entrance, the front pages of newspapers from around the country are electronically posted each morning -- the artifacts of a declining industry. Inside, the high-tech exhibits are nostalgic for a lower-tech time when banner headlines and network news summarized the emotions and exposed the scandals of the nation. Lindbergh Lands Safely. One Small Step. Nixon Resigns. Cronkite removes his glasses to announce President Kennedy's death at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time. 
