schachterrific!

Weeks after the story of an Israeli attack on UNRWA schools in Gaza made its way around the world, the truth begins to come out that it didn’t quite happen that way.

John Ging, the director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, spoke to the Toronto Globe and Mail last week and agreed that no shell had actually struck the school building. Ging said he had never claimed that the school itself was hit, and he blamed Israel for confusion over where the strike took place.

Shortly after the alleged attack, Ging harshly criticized Israel for firing near the school, saying he had given the exact coordinates of the compound to the IDF and suggesting they had failed to avoid hitting the building.

While admitting that Israeli fire had not hit the school compound, Ging insisted it made little difference.

As the story was spread by UNRWA administrators, staff were told not to speak to the media. Wouldn’t want the facts to come to light, eh?

I’m starting a new section called Trains of Thought. These will be links to a series of articles that I think everyone should read, really do not want to lose, but have no logical reason to bookmark them on my browser. So here, immortalized on the internet (provided the articles themselves are not removed), you and I will be able to find them.

Jews in Genes

Just What is Genetically Coded in the History of Judaism?
Crypto-Supersessionism
Why Can’t Muslims Take a Joke?
Why are there so many Jews in comedy?

Take it or leave it.

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.

Hat tip to my bud, Phil Millman

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.