schachterrific!

From trendwatching.com:

Flickr, the photo sharing site, now boasts more than 33 million users, more than 3 billion images, and was handling 3,087(!) new uploads per minute.

Thirteen hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, while 1 billion videos are watched. A day. And that was LAST year.

TripAdvisor.com hosts over 20 million interviews.

It’s interesting to note how some mainstream media organization subtly attempt to spin the news, and instead of factually reporting events, choose to leave out parts of the story, or use a carefully nuanced adjective or adverb to subliminally overlay the story with threads of directed meaning.

Case in point: This morning’s Gaza Conflict news from Reuters and the AP.

Here is the Reuters head and first paragraph:

Israel rebuffs U.N. resolution and pursues Gaza war

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – Israel rejected a U.N. resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza on Friday and, as jets and tanks again pounded the Palestinian enclave, announced no decision on whether to step up its two-week-old war on Hamas guerrillas.

And here is the same story from the Associated Press:

Israel, Hamas defy UN call for cease-fire

By Matti Friedman and Ibrahim Barzak

JERUSALEM – Israeli jets and helicopters bombarded Gaza Friday and Hamas responded with a barrage of rockets on two cities as both sides defied a U.N. call for an immediate cease-fire.

Interesting difference. But, to me, the best part is in the Reuters paragraph. “Israel… announced no decision….” Isn’t that really non-news? When the speed of news becomes insanely frenetic, suddenly, at this moment, having not made a decision is suddenly newsworthy? And if they decide in an hour? Two? A day? Well, then it becomes news.

Spare me the hype.

French public television channel 2 admitted yesterday that they had mistakenly aired photos of of terrorists blowing themselves up in 2005 at the Jabaliya Refugee Camp while claiming it was destruction caused by the Israeli Defense Forces in the current Gaza conflict:

A news editor at France 2 told Le Figaro Tuesday that they had “made a mistake” by airing those pictures, which he said depict events from 2005.

The media monster needs to be fed. The clock is ticking. There is no time to fact-check. There is no time to verify. Feed the monster. Feed the monster. Another example of misinformation (dis-information?) that gets out into the mediaverse, makes its impression, and cannot be called back.

People you need to take a step back and really use your brains instead of digesting any piece of crap fed to you by a stressed out media.

My opinion, take it or leave it.

All my friends already know pretty much where I stand on this. Yet i recently found an article that pretty much says it for me. The John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs of Harvard University runs a blog called Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH). In a recent article entitled “On the Ground in Gaza”, Barry Rubin pretty much covers it:

…many in the West think Israel has some kind of choice in this matter, that diplomacy was an option, that Hamas could be reasoned with. Those people have clearly never heard a Hamas leader speak or read anything on the group’s Arabic-language websites. In a real sense, Hamas is more extreme than Osama bin Laden, who periodically offers his enemy the chance to repent. Hamas’s goal is genocidal.

This has nothing to do with being dovish or hawkish, left or right. For those who are the biggest peaceniks—and this is true in Israel—know that Hamas must be defeated if Israel is ever to make peace with the PA. Even the PA knows it, and that’s what they say in private, no matter what they say in public.

Take it or leave it.

On Dec. 17, 2008, Wayne Smallman, in his tech-oriented blog ‘blahblahtechnology‘ raised an interesting question concerning how important it might be to establish a blogging code of conduct. When you start to consider the ongoing decline of newspapers and the rapid rise of the so-called ‘citizen journalist’, the question takes on a certain urgency.

It appears we live in a society that is rapidly losing the ability to tell apart news from commentary, factual reporting from entertainment. And this type of confusion is a precursor to the corruption of the ability to evaluate and judge the real from the unreal. When opinion can be swayed by unfounded other opinion, then we’ve lost control of our lives and allowed others to control us.

In Rosenberg & Feldman’s “No Time To Think”, CNN/US President Jon Klein referred to the blogosphere, saying, “…there’s much opinion masquerading as fact, and that’s inherently not correctible. There are assertions made all the time on many of the blogs I read that are just interpretations of a smaller set of facts, and how do you possibly correct that? But the people who read them could mistake those opinions as actual truth.”

Smallman’s article is concerned about the impact of a code on the free speech of bloggers. He sees the problem laying at the feet of bloggers; should we self-police? How far does that descend into censorship? But perhaps he is looking in the wrong place. It seems to me pretentious to take on the responsibility of self-censorship; in essence, saying that the populace may just be too stupid to tell the difference between fact and opinion. The truth, as I see it at least, falls squarely with each and every reader.

Granted, there will always be people who will attempt to pass off lies, half-truths and opinions as holy writ. And there will be those who have no fear pointing out that their voice is just one in a crowd, an opinion among many. There is a large chasm between being a journalist and being a writer. If anything, a blogger’s responsibility lies with choosing and identifying which one he or she is.

It’s the responsibility of  ‘citizen reader’ to determine just how truthful that identification is.

Take it or leave it.

Well, being one day in to the new year, the world still insists on trying to rip itself apart at the seams. Well, y’now what? I’m not playing. It’s gonna be a good year. If enough good people hang in and do not let the herd mentality take over, we can wrest control of fate from the psychotics and the doomspeakers. Yeah, I know. It’s gonna take a lot of work. But if we pull together, we can get it done.

That’s what I believe.

Take it or leave it.