The Null Device

Posts matching tags 'journalism'

2015/1/10

The jihadist terrorist raid on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the murder of ten of its staff (including the editor and several renowned cartoonists and columnists), and the subsequent manhunt and police raids have been all over the news for the past few days; the horror that this could happen in the middle of Paris, in a satirical magazine already under police protection, was palpable. I'm not going to recap the details of the events; one can find comprehensive accounts in the press. This post is more about the reaction. (On the events of the day, suffice it to say that my condolences are with the families and loved ones of those who were murdered, and I condemn the criminals who perpetrated these acts; also, the best way to defeat terrorism is to refuse to be terrorised.)

The aftermath of the attacks drew a unified display of solidarity; all over the world—at Paris's Place de la République, at Trafalgar Square, in Martin Place in Sydney (the site of a recent siege by a clown with pretensions of being a jihadist terrorist), and elsewhere, people gathered with candles and signs. (There were some notable exceptions; the authorities in Tehran—totalitarian Islamists, albeit of a form deeply hostile to the Sunni jihadists involved in the attacks—clamped down on protests, presumably afraid that they might turn into an Iranian Spring.) One sign which soon emerged read Je Suis Charlie, a statement of solidarity with the victims. Soon, this sign had spread around the world; banners with it, in Charlie Hebdo's distinct headline typeface, in white on black, made it to T-shirts, banners on official buildings, the pages of newspapers of all stripes, and even Apple's French homepage.

One can understand the sentiment—you have attacked all of us, it says, but we will prevail, and you will not win—though those expressing it might not want to see it tested to its logical conclusion. Charlie Hebdo was not a cuddly, friendly or broadly loved publication; it was satire at its most scabrous, a tourettic court jester speaking truth to power and then dropping his pants and farting in its general direction. Its cartoonists and writers lampooned all targets without fear or favour, often calibrating their attacks to be deliberately, bluntly offensive; the offence, in their case, was part of the message, namely an assertion of the freedom of the secular, democratic Republic. The upshot of this is that a lot of the institutions now claiming to be Charlie look somewhat absurd; newspapers publishing Je Suis Charlie signs but carefully avoiding reprinting the offending cartoons, for example, are not particularly Charlie. Government buildings bearing banners identifying them with a viciously irreverent satirical publication look somewhat ridiculous. As for Apple's claim, one only has to look at its Disneyesque curation of the App Store to answer that question. Had Charlie Hebdo submitted an app containing the sorts of content that is their stock in trade, would Apple have ever approved it? Apple is not Charlie.

But death ennobles; tragic, spectacular death, even more so. In 1997, another death in Paris transformed a ditzy socialite into a saintly, virtuous figure, forever beyond mortal reproach; and now, the same phenomenon threatens to ossify Charlie Hebdo in a similar pristine marble. Though while its editor and cartoonists may be dead, Charlie Hebdo is not dead; the surviving staff have committed to producing an edition next week; money from a variety of sources (among them, Google and the Guardian) will help push the print run, normally around 60,000, to a million. The problem is, what comes after that: neither having been ennobled nor being universally loved is particularly healthy for a satirical publication (readers of a certain age might recall the genteel dotage of the English satirical magazine Punch as an example of this).

Elsewhere: Nick Cohen writes in The Spectator about the truths that ought to be self-evident; and on Twitter, one Dyab Abou Jajah points out an alternative figure to identify with:

I am not Charlie, I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to do so. #JesuisAhmed
Ahmed is Ahmed Merabet, the French police officer who was murdered by the jihadists.

charlie hebdo france journalism satire terrorism 0

2014/3/29

An article enumerating the eight mistakes that rock music critics make:

I’ve made some mistakes along the way. We all have: it’s a learning curve, this rock-writing thing. First we imitate Christgau and Bangs, then we imitate Spin and NME, then we forget what the hell we were trying to do in the first place, then (after several hundred reviews) we find our own voice. Well, some of us do. Some bail out; others turn to writing press kits. Some stalwarts continue hyping, lying, mushmouthing, and being generally annoying. Still, I’d like to say I’ve learned from my mistakes, and that’s the purpose of this column. Here are the Eight Biggest Mistakes That Music Critics Make, intended to supplement Lankford’s own list on how we critics can bring out our inner asshole. And yes, these mistakes: I’ve made them all. In fact (for all you pomo kids out there) I believe on at least two occasions I make the mistake while writing about it, below. Keep your eyes peeled.
This may sound absurd, but writers with Good Taste are inevitably the worst critics. Yes, yes, all critics have “good” taste, or at least they have faith in their own idiosyncratic eardrums. But Good Taste is something different altogether: it’s a combination of middlebrow sentiment, political correctness, multicultural blandness, and moral jitters. Fear of violence and speed and sex and cusswords are somewhere in there, too. Good Taste is what makes a critic love Lauryn Hill but fear Li’l Kim. Good Taste means putting Willie Nelson ahead of David Allen Coe in the country-music canon. The only way to be a truly discerning critic is to brave the elements: slap on albums by ANTiSEEN, Def Squad, Cyndi Lauper, Anal Cunt, Commodores, Star Death, Pink & Brown, Voivod, Johnny Paycheck, Ja Rule, Iron Maiden, Hanson, .38 Special, Blink 182, and see what you like. (Just for the record, I like all of ‘em except Ja Rule and Anal Cunt). Don’t stick to the safe critically received Beck’n'Wilco mulch or you’re gonna dull your ears too fast. Good Taste is for brainless elites. Go for bad taste first, then work your way up.
(Though I emphatically disagree with his dismissal of Yo La Tengo's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out as an "ether-soaked gauzepad"; sure, it's no balls-to-the-wall rock workout, but it is in my opinion among their best albums. Hey, if you want shock and awe, buy a Skrillex album or something.)

culture journalism music rock'n'roll 0

2010/12/10

Pentagon Papers investigative journalist Daniel Ellsberg's letter to Amazon concerning its termination of WikiLeaks' hosting:

I’m disgusted by Amazon’s cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.
For the last several years, I’ve been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That’s over. I have contacted Customer Service to ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.
I'm sure Amazon won't mind. For every liberal they've lost, they will have won several Fox News viewers. They'll just have to stop selling books with long words in them.

censorship journalism wikileaks 0

2010/8/16

Handily printable journalism warning labels, for putting on newspapers with dubious journalism in public places:

dishonesty détournement journalism spin 1

2010/3/20

A study by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism has revealed that more than half of news stories in Australia were spin, driven by public relations. The Murdoch tabloids were the worst, with 70% of stories in the Daily Telegraph being PR-driven, while the Fairfax "quality" papers are as good as it gets; only 42% (only 42%!) of stories in the Sydney Morning Herald were PR-driven.

These statistics probably say as much about the Australian media landscape as anything else. Australia's media is quite homogenised and uncompetitive; a handful of proprietors have the mass media sewn up (there are two newspaper proprietors and about three commercial TV networks). The lack of competition has resulted in low standards of quality; for example, the Fairfax papers (The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald are the biggest ones) are generally regarded to be the "quality" papers, but compared to the British equivalents (such as The Guardian and The Independent), they come out poorly, heavy on the sex, sensationalism and celebrity gossip and light on content and analysis. (The effect gets worse as one moves away from Sydney and Melbourne; for several weeks a few years ago, the most-read story on the front page of Fairfax's Perth paper was "Man gets penis stuck in pasta jar".) Or compare The Australian (Murdoch's "serious" paper in Australia) to its UK equivalent, The Times: The Australian is more nakedly biased.

The Australian press, controlled by an incestuous oligopoly and not subjected to the indignity of competition, has become a stagnant pond. (Australian television, mind you, is much worse.) This is bad news for the kind of discourse required to sustain a mature democracy; a public fed simplified half-truths leavened with gratuitous doses of sensationalism will be in no state to engage on a meaningful level in debate about where their country is heading, leaving all that boring stuff to technocrats and vested interests. The internet provides some competition, but the alarming open-ended censorship firewall plans (all content "refused classification" will be filtered; this includes sites advocating euthanasia, illegal drug use (including offering safety advice) or video games unsuitable for children; the list itself will be a state secret, giving plenty of scope for other sites to be "accidentally" banned if convenient to do so) which look set to become law before the next election, leave a lot of scope for rival sources to be nobbled. (Not surprisingly, the Australian press has been quiet about the plans, echoing the official line that the plans are to "combat paedophilia" and are opposed only by some anarchistic extremists.) As such, it doesn't surprise me if Australia's press oligarchs make the most of their privileged position and cut costs by bulking their papers out with press releases to a greater extent than in more competitive markets.

(via Boing Boing) australia censorship democracy journalism media spin 0

2006/2/2

After 28 years, seminal British chart-pop magazine Smash Hits is closing down, its circulation (and, indeed, relevance) being hit hard by the fact that today's tweens have MySpace and mobile phones and such.

BBC News 24 had an interview with Andy McCluskey of OMD, whom they brought in to their Liverpool studio to ask him about his thoughts on the passing of the magazine which covered his band. He made some interesting points: commenting about the fact that the shiny pop bands of his day differed from today's manufactured pop in that the former wrote their own songs (and the fact that he had manufactured the pop group Atomic Kitten wasn't lost on the presenters), and commenting that, in terms of cultural phenomena, NME now is equivalent to Smash Hits in the 1980s. (I'm not sure about that; I suspect that Smash Hits may have had better writing and been less whorishly boosterist.)

While the Smash Hits magazine closes, XRRF points out that the Smash Hits brand will live on, as owners EMAP do their duties to the shareholders and milk it for all it's worth. We can probably expect a Smash Hits ringtone download service or something.

(Your Humble Narrator vaguely remembers reading a similar-sounding Smash Hits magazine in Australia as a tyke; I don't know whether this was the British publication imported, an Australian franchise produced under license, or a slightly localised edition of the original, with all the British acts that never made it down replaced with Icehouses and Australian Crawls. I think it was one of the two latter ones; I seem to recall there having been a robust debate in the Black Type column about Icehouse frontman Iva Davies' choice of underwear or something similar.)

journalism pop smash hits 4

2003/8/2

Online Journalism Review interviews David Mikkelson of snopes.com, where he talks about his role in debunking the "Hunting for Bambi" hoax, and other things:

We have a section on our site called Lost Legends. We just made up the most outrageous things we could think of, made them out to being true, then put them out there to see if people would suspend their common sense. The most popular one is that we say that Mr. Ed was not a horse [but was a zebra]. We made up that the song "Sing a Song of Sixpence" was actually a song pirates used to recruit each other in the days of Blackbeard. It turns up on the "Urban Legends" show broadcast on a cable channel that it was true. They read it and thought that it was true.

(via TechDirt)

détournement journalism pranks urban legends 0

2003/4/1

Ah yes; controversial Arab independent news service Al Jazeera's English-language web site is up. See it before it gets h4x0r3d.

al-jazeera journalism media 0

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