Sunday, June 26, 2005
EXPECTATIONS EXCEEDED
“We strive to exceed the expectations our readers, advertisers and viewers have of us,” claim the publishers of the Melbourne Age. And they have! Here’s Age editor Andrew Jaspan mourning freed hostage Douglas Wood’s insensitivity:
“I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood’s use of the a—-hole word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought through and I think demeans the man and is one of the reasons why people are slightly sceptical of his motives and everything else.
“The issue really is largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive.”
Politenessman Jaspan believes hostages should be sensitive to murderers. He thinks someone held captive and beaten by extortionists and killers ought show some respect. And how, precisely, does Wood’s use of the term call into question “his motives”, whatever Jaspan imagines those to be?
Andrew Jaspan is a moral vacuum who should be fired. Or, alternatively, kidnapped and kicked in the head; if the little bastard complained about it afterwards, well, that would merely make us sceptical. Send letters-to-the-editor here. Cancel subscriptions here (if you haven’t already). Find Jaspan a new job back in England here. Meanwhile, yet more awful insensitivity is on display:
A hostage held alongside Australian Douglas Wood in Iraq has hired bounty hunters to track down his former captors, promising to eliminate them one by one.
Swede Ulf Hjertstrom, who was held for several weeks with Mr Wood in Baghdad, was released by his kidnappers on May 30 ...
Now, he wants to find those responsible.
“I have now put some people to work to find these bastards,” he told the Ten Network today.
“I invested about $50,000 so far and we will get them one by one.”
How dreadfully coarse.
UPDATE. Hjertstrom’s pledge came during a satellite interview joined by Wood. Ten News just played a further extract:
Hjertstrom: “I invested about $50,000 so far and we will get them one by one.”
Wood: “The sooner the better!”
Hjertstrom: “These scum should be put out of business.”
Will the insensitivity never end?
“I BELIEVE IN DEATH”
Would-be Palestinian suicide bomber Wafa Samir al-Biss:
“My dream was to be a martyr. I believe in death. Today I wanted to blow myself up in a hospital, maybe even in the one in which I was treated. But since lots of Arabs come to be treated there, I decided I would go to another, maybe the Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. I wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews …’‘
Wafa, whose 20-pound bomb failed to detonate during a suicide mission on June 21, attended an Israeli hospital six months earlier. She was treated by Israelis after burning herself in a kitchen accident.
Asked whether she had considered the consequences of her planned attack, that it might have now precluded access to Israel for Palestinian patients who meant no harm and needed special medical treatment that could be achieved only here, she answered: “So what?”
LGF has pictures of the madwoman’s despair upon realising she’s too stupid even to blow herself up.
Saturday, June 25, 2005
THREE FACTS ASSERTED
Editorial in the New York Times:
To have the sober conversation about the war in Iraq that America badly needs, it is vital to acknowledge three facts:
The war has nothing to do with Sept. 11.
I don’t think we need bother with the other two.
UPDATE. Osama bin Laden in his 1998 fatwa calling for the killing of Americans:
No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone.
All three are about Iraq. Via reader Heather.
UPDATE II: “You have to be worried when a guy with too much mascara and a snake wrapped around his neck has a keener grasp of basic new millennium geopolitics than so many leading lights of the Democratic Party.” And the New York Times.
NEW READERS REQUIRED
Popular anti-Bush (but pro-forces) site bartcop.com used to run a prominent daily body count of US troops killed in Iraq. It’s now been reduced to a mere link. The publisher explains:
Since feedback tells me a clear majority of bartcop.com readers believe our soldiers are “no different” than the scumbag 9-11 hijackers, I felt uncomfortable counting the who sacrificed their lives for their country, as tho they got what was coming to them.
Imagine running a site that attracts a “clear majority” of people who think like that. And imagine how heartbreaking it must be when they’re from your side.
BANGLADESHI HONDA VICTIM OF SAVAGE OCEANS
Australian media space-filler Richard Neville transcribes the voices in his head:
Right now, villages in Bangladesh are disappearing into the sea. The warming of the Indian ocean intensifies drought in southern Africa. Low lying Pacific islands are starting to sink. Everyone knows this, because the ice caps are melting on the evening news.
Those low-lying islands are sinking, Richard? Guess we should investigate some kind of undersea subsidence problem instead of this “global warming” nonsense everyone is talking about. Richard presents photographic proof of the crisis in Bangladesh:
In Richard’s world, motorcycles float.
(Via Tex)
BURQA QUEEN
Burqas? Bring ‘em on, I say:
Via Tom Pechinski and Amsterdam blogger Arjan Dasselaar, who reports:
OK, they just went too far.
Immigrants in Rotterdam have demanded that a statue of a woman with uncovered breasts be removed.
Their wish was granted.
UPDATE. Carl H. asks: “Is it haram to check out the stems on that tomato?”
UNFRIENDLY AUSTRALIA
In Brisbane:
American students are quitting Queensland universities in the face of hate attacks by Australians angry at US President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.
One university has launched an investigation into claims an American student returned to the US after suffering six months of abuse at a residential college in Brisbane.
And in Sydney:
Asian tourists are being forced to pay $25 to walk on Bondi Beach and $10 a pop to take photos of the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Unscrupulous practices by shonky tour operators, detected in an investigation by The Sunday Telegraph, also include locking tourists in duty-free stores until they spend a designated amount, confiscating their passports, and putting them up at substandard motels in the suburbs.
Time for some national head-tilting.
UPDATE. The tilting begins.
BOB THE BUILDER
After ordering his goons to demolish thousands of houses, the Idiot King of Zimbabwe has now ordered his goons to build thousands of new houses.
Zimbabwean goons must be so confused.
OFFICIAL STATE NEWSPAPER
Not many Victorians buy The Age. But soon they’ll all be funding it:
Monday will see the launch of a new section in The Age: Creative Media, we think. The section, the brainchild of editor Andrew Jaspan, has been on and off so many times we wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t come out. But the idea is to cover media, advertising and the arts and to promote Melbourne as a centre of creativity. It grew out of a dinner last year held by the Committee for Melbourne, and is supported by advertising from the Victorian Government.
Various ethical issues are raised by this. Let’s see The Age’s Media Blog fearlessly address them.
Friday, June 24, 2005
FACTS IN ON FACT-CHECKER
Miranda Devine’s Sun-Herald column last week featured a quote from Silent Spring author Rachel Carson:
“We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides,” wrote Carson, “but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.”
This excited Professor John Quiggin, who had issues with the whole piece. His main concern, however, was that quote:
More seriously, she recycles an unsourced and obviously fabricated quote imputed to Rachel Carson ...
As Quiggin himself notes—while maintaining that the entire quote is “unsourced and obviously fabricated”—the second half of the quote is accurately taken from Silent Spring. But the first line, about eliminating malarial mosquitoes ... where did that come from? Quiggin’s view:
Clearly we’re seeing the usual game of quote fabrication here, with the line about malarial mosquitos inserted into an unobjectionable statement of the desirability of what’s generally called integrated pest management as opposed to indiscriminate use of pesticides. Devine has been too lazy to check her third-hand or fourth-hand sources, and no doubt her editors won’t bother pulling her up.
Tim Lambert then joined the fray, noting that the apparent source for the quote was a piece by Keith Lockitch at FrontPage. Wrote Lambert:
It looks like Devine is the one that fabricated the quote. The version at Front Page doesn’t have quote marks around the first part of the statement, so the author is passing it off as a paraphrase. Devine seems to be the one who added the quote marks.
Quiggin agreed:
Devine has actually taken the critical step in the fabrication herself.
And the Professor didn’t stop there. “This obviously bogus quote,” he declared, “is worse than anything I can recall seeing.” (Quiggin wasn’t nearly as outraged when lefty Phillip Adams was caught fabricating several quotes in a single column: “My guess is that this is sloppiness rather than deliberate distortion.”) Commenters at Quiggin’s piled on. Here’s Katz:
Miranda Devine was caught red-handed falsifying a quote. Let’s be clear about this: Devine’s falsification wasn’t the product of laziness. Neither was it the product of recklessness. No, it arose from a deliberate design to traduce and to assassinate the reputation of a Rachel Carson, a person who can no longer defend herself or her own reputation. If Miranda Devine had any respect for her putative profession as an opinion shaper, she’d resign. But we all know that Miranda Devine will not resign, because the truth means nothing to Miranda Devine. Miranda Devine has no shame.
And Katz again:
The fact is that Miranda Devine moved those quotation marks deliberately, knowingly and with malice aforethought.
Katz, Quiggin, and Lambert are wrong. Devine didn’t fabricate the quote. Her source was a Melbourne Age piece by Lockitch, published on January 29 and not available online, in which a sub-editor appears to have made the crucial alteration:
Carson wrote: “We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.”
Devine’s crime? Trusting the Melbourne Age. Quiggin has since posted a climb-down, in the form of an over-the-fold update:
Miranda Devine has written, indicating that she will correct the spurious Carson quote, and saying that she took the quote from a republication of the Lockitch article in The Age, where it appeared as she quoted it. So it looks as though this bogus quote evolved, rather than being consciously fabricated.
And that’s it, at least so far. No apology. No direct withdrawal of his knee-jerk assumption that “Devine has actually taken the critical step in the fabrication herself.” No revision of his view that the quote was “worse than anything I can recall.” As Quiggin fan Katz might say: No shame.
UPDATE. It’s interesting that Quiggin attacks Devine for being “too lazy to check her third-hand or fourth-hand sources”, seeing as he didn’t check many sources himself before rushing to an unequivocal condemnation (“Devine has actually taken the critical step in the fabrication herself”). Quiggin is a Fairfax columnist (with the Australian Financial Review) and, one assumes, can gain access to the internal Fairfax library. Or he could simply have emailed Devine and asked about the quote. Instead, he’s relied on some shabby Googling and Tim Lambert—a combination that will always land you in trouble. J.F. Beck has more on the DDT dispute, plus alarming eyeball news. Best wishes to your boy, J.F.
UPDATE II. Quiggin adds:
It was a mistake on my part to draw the conclusion that Miranda Devine was responsible for adding the quote marks, since I should have considered the possibility of an intermediate republication or reproduction of the quote. I apologise for this.
UPDATE III. And Miranda Devine writes:
Last week I inadvertently misquoted Rachel Carson by repeating a mistake from The Age of January 29. In an article by Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Institute, Carson was quoted: “We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.”
But in Lockitch’s original, published in FrontPage Magazine, the quote was part paraphrase: “We should seek, Carson wrote, not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead, ‘a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves’. ” Apologies.
Thursday, June 23, 2005
AWARD-WINNING JOURNALISM
Scroll waaaaaaay down at this link and a shocking fact will be revealed—somehow Matt Welch and me have won a journalism prize. Proud victor Matt emails: “If anything beats working for free, it’s getting an award for it that comes without any cash value!” Here’s Matt with the imposing plaque of triumphancy.
INSIDE WORD
A former employee at China’s Foreign Ministry writes to Tim Dunlop on the matter of Chinese diplomat and asylum seeker Chen Longyin.
VOTE 4!
This poll needs fixin’.
(Via reader Kev M.)
“IT IS TIME”
The President has gone fission:
George Bush has made the first visit to a nuclear plant by a US president in 26 years and declared: “It is time for this country to start building nuclear power plants again.”
UPDATE. Murph asks: “I wonder how the moonbats will reconcile that one with the allegation that Bush is an oil spiv.”
OPERATION SLASH ‘N’ BURN
Fairfax, publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age, would appreciate your advice:
Fairfax’s new chief operating officer Brian Evans has given his management team until next Thursday to come up with ways to save the publisher $100 million.