The Dumbitude is in the Details

07 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by danielwalldammit in Irritation Meditation, Politics

Tags

Bonnie and Clyde, Fox News, History, Internet, Journalism, Media, Photography, Photos, Twitter

It’s always fascinating to see the slippage commonly coming between a story and its headline, and again between a headline and a social media message about it. The hackwits at Fox News are always happy to provide examples of this sort of thing. Last week I couldn’t help but gripe about their misrepresentation of a major story on twitter. Today, the angle isn’t all that clear, but sloppy slippage is a habit that seems to serve them well.

What got my attention a few minutes ago was this tweet:

So, I see this and I am thinking; Really? I always thought Bonnie and Clyde were in their car when they were shot. Or was that just the movie? No, I’m pretty sure they were in their car. So, when was this? Just before they got in? How long before… No, this says the pic was taken right before they were shot. But…

…and thus I clicked the link (which is admittedly to say that I fricking fell for this click-bait bullshit. Still kicking myself over that.)

So, anyway, and at the expense of providing a link to a common source of right wing propaganda, here is the story.

The opening passages of this story are fascinating in much the same sense that grading a freshman essay is often fascinating. By ‘fascinating’ I of course mean saddening. It’s not just the brief, blurby, writing style that jumps out at me. (Seriously, this is clearly written for people with the attention span of not-even-gerbils.) What really irks with a vengeance here is the complete inability to stick to a consistent account of the story.

Check it out!

Mini-paragraph 2 says the photo was taken ‘days before’ Bonnie and Clyde were shot down. Mini paragraph 3 says ‘shortly before’. I guess ‘days before’ could count as ‘shortly before’, at least if you aren’t paying attention enough to wonder why they are re-framing the time-scale in the very next sentence. Most sensible people would think that was at least a little odd. And most sensible people would think that change of wording does shift the meaning, at least a little bit. Either way, it would certainly be a stretch to say that ‘days before’ counts as ‘right before’ or ‘moments before’, as indicated on the Fox News twitter account.

So why do this? It really doesn’t seem like deliberate spin. It seems more like a short attention span. Perhaps, it’s a habit of a mind accustomed to spinning an inch into a mile every chance it gets. These micro-shifts in meaning can be damned useful if you are spinning a story with a purpose. A mountain is easily reduced to a molehill with a little crafty word choice. The folks at Fox News are well accomplished at this technique. Still, it’s a little odd to see this much slippage crowded into such a small and simple account. The only clear pay-off in this particular instance is the added dramatic value of the click-bait, but even that doesn’t explain the shear quantity of equivocation in the Fox account. The story itself uses two different time-frames, and that shift isn’t explained by the desire to generate click-bait. Neither does the use of two different time-frames on the twitter account. A subtle shift is one thing, but these guys are all over the place. I find myself wondering if they folks can stick to a simple account even when they don’t have an axe to grind on the story.

Seriously, I can’t figure out how this will help to advance the war on the poor. Neither will it enable the Manchurian Man-Child to gin up a war to help keep all our minds off the Mueller investigation. I can’t even tell how this proves Hillary killed Han Solo in the living room with a candle stick. It’s not all that agenda driven. It’s just drivel-driven. it’s also a hell of a way to hack up a simple story.

…idiots!

Ruben Salvadori Breaks an All-Too-Common Frame

17 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by danielwalldammit in Narrative VIolence, Uncommonday

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Conflict, Israel, Jerusalem, Journalism, Photography, Ruben Salvadori, The Fourth Wall, War

Photojournalist Ruben Salvadori started out with the intention of filming riots in East Jerusalem. In time, he came to shift the focus of his own camera to include the photographers around him. The resulting shift in perspective can be quite startling. It’s an ongoing project for Salvadori, and one that certainly seems quite promising.

It isn’t entirely clear to me how Salvadori’s own intervention will play out in the Palestinian crisis. He seems to be suggesting a layer of collusion between the Palestinian protesters and the photographers who cover them, but it isn’t clear that Salvadori means to limit his critique to such a partisan angle. One can as easily address the questions he raises to photojournalists embedded in conventional forces.

The simple inclusion of photographers in the field of vision provides a stark reminder that the images of world conflict do not come to from on high, or even out-of-bounds, but from people who are very much a part of the events they are filming. The stories told in these images are in some sense reflexive, they are also part of the violence itself, but realization of this fact seems to require a little extra work, an effort to shift our attention to this fact. Joshua Oppenheimer’s film, The Act of Killing, helps to reveal that. Salvadori’s project does this as well.

We get a glimpse into the role that media plays on the scene of a conflict every once in awhile. I remember Gerald Vizenor‘s comments about the American Indian Movement helped to break the fourth wall in stories about Wounded Knee and similar events, at least for those who read his works. For many Americans, I suspect the most unexpected (and apparently unwelcome) peek behind the journalistic lens came with the landing of U.S. marines in Mogadishu. The image of combat-ready marines surrounded by photographers caused quite a stir back in the day. I recall quite a few folks lashed out at the photographers for endangering the landing forces with their presence. Few seemed to question the process by which a marine force had come to storm a beach guarded by scores of photographers in the first place.

It’s been some time since that shocking moment when Mogadishu queered the whole subject of war, and it’s good to see someone else tugging at the curtains again. The short clip Salvadori has presently made available (see below) raises more questions than it answers. It will be interesting to see where his project goes.

Jesus H. Attitude-Dancing Christ, MSN News Blurbs Can Be Damned Irritating!

01 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in History, Irritation Meditation, Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Bullshit, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Journalism, MSNBC, News, Skepticism, The Cross

Don’t the folks at MSN know that I’m busy? Don’t they realize I have better things to do than rant about the slippage between their storylines and their headlines? Or is it some kinda clever plot to drive me bonkle-wozzies before the end of summer?

I mean, seriously, take a look at the teaser line for that story on MSN. Isn’t that amazing? No, not Zimmerman, silly, or the guy whose face I deliberately cut in half with the cropping tool (I’m in a bad mood); I mean the lady in the funny hat. Check out the line underneath it.

Seriously?

Somebody has reason to think they actually found a piece of the cross to which our dear and fluffy bamble-hussy was nailed in the way back when. And if that is true, then maybe a few other claims about that old carpenter’s cat might be true too, and damn! If that’s true, I guess I better re-evaluate a few things, not the least of them being the way I talk about our Lord and Savior.

Seriously, …uh oh!

Okay, I know it’s not really alleging proof of a miracle, but what the lie does suggest is that they have serious reason to believe a piece of wood actually dates back to the historical event of Christ’s crucifiction, and THAT would be a Hell of a piece of research to produce. It really would.

But wait a minute, the actual headline on NBC News doesn’t have quite the same force as the front page teaser on MSN. The teaser is just the sort of phrasing you would use to put a claim on the table; the actual headline could as easily be used to suggest you were getting ready to throw the claim in the trash. This whole thing just got less interesting with a single click of the mouse. Still, I wonder what the Hell this is all about.

Guess I’ll have to read the article…

Oh well, it’s right here in the first paragraph.

Turkish archaeologists say they have found a stone chest in a 1,350-year-old church that appears to contain a relic venerated as a piece of Jesus’ cross.

It turns out that what MSNBC meant was little more than that they unearthed a artifact that WAS venerated as a piece of the old bad bark by a particular people in a particular time and place. The rest of the article discusses some of the comments thrown back and forth about such artifacts in centuries past, all of which is actually quite interesting, but what this piece does NOT contain is any reason to believe that it really is a piece of the most famous chunk of wood in human and (Divine) history.

Speaking of Icons, there is definitely an iconic relationship between the marketing of this article and its informative content, one that probably shouldn’t be there. Seriously MSN-NBCNews guys, it’s one thing to tell us about holy relic hyping; it’s quite another to hype a relic yourselves. …or at least those SHOULD be two-different things. The problem is at least partly a matter of slippage between the various stages of publication and promotion, but somewhere in there a potentially interesting story has been transformed into the rhetoric of carnival barking.

So, I guess this isn’t really the journalism-as-apologetics piece that the original teaser seemed to suggest it would be. Don’t get me wrong; this is actually kind of neat – in a perfectly-sober-professional-archaeologist-doing-what-those-guys-do sorta way, maybe even in a cool-find-and-high-fives-all-around-kinda-way, but definitely not in holy-carble-monkeys-you-has-found-the-holy-of-holies kinda way.

…one of these days I’ll go back to using real words in my posts.

But not today.

Today I am just blowing raspberries at the whole damned thing.

Speaking of absolutely bunk, let’s try an online poll. This oughtta be about as meaningful as all the other junk polls you get with news stories. I only regret that it will probably fail to find it’s way into anybodies talking points.

Dammit!

CORRECTION: I took a second look at this and changed a few things (including the title) on accounta I still think it’s June of 2012. Thanks to John for catching my mistake.

CNN Runs an Article on Wikileaks’ Release of Syrian Emails, …Wait a Minute, No it Doesn’t!

05 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Bias, Editing, Journalism, Julian Assange, News, Politics, Syria, Wikileaks

Yes, this is the photo they used as well.

I don’t have a lot to say about this news story, but it’s worth a look. …a look at the three paragraphs that CNN devotes to the stated topic of the article before reverting to a bog-standard narrative about Wikileaks and the legal troubles of Julian Assange.

I suppose we could learn a thing or two about media bias here.

– Perhaps a bit about the limits to the oft-cited left wing bias of the media, which is certainly true for a certain range of issues in the culture wars of the U.S. That bias quickly reverses course when substantial features of the world political economy are at stake. Wikileaks does far too much to threaten those interests.

…which is why the topic makes a much better sex scandal.

– There may also be a lesson in here about the way that news stories get their titles. Seriously, you click on a link to an article entitled; “Wikileaks Releases 2.4 Million Syria emails,” and you get a story about its founder’s legal troubles. It isn’t all that uncommon, and the author may not be at fault. Still someone is responsible for this. Someone chose to run a story under a false flag. And that someone ought to get noogies from his boss every morning for the rest of July.

…unless, it is the boss. Then he gets Indian burns.

– Or perhaps there is a lesson in here about editing? Who knows what interesting information might have been in the original piece. The 3 paragraphs on the initial topic certainly hint at interesting and juicy information, shortly before reverting to old news. I think there is a pretty good chance there was something worth reading in that original story.

…and I wonder if they will ever let us read it?

– And most of all, I suspect what we have here is a story about the economics of news reporting and the growing tendency to regurgitate the same old shit, all the while calling it news. It will take time and work to sort through the Wikileaks material, and it will take some knowledgable folks to do that. Why put out that effort when you could just take some old stuff about a long-running story and slip it under the sexy new title about a genuine news development?

…cut corners much?

But hey, I’m sure that with good sound journalistic practices like this, CNN will quickly put the whole Supreme Court ruling fiasco behind them! And seriously, this may be yet another extension of that story. Is the misleading title an attempt to finesse the issue of time, a means of holding off the story while they look over the material? Possible.

…but still damned foolish.

Please pardon me now. I’m off to see if I can find someone who actually did a story about the Syrian email leaks.