He Said It Better Than I Could

Found a December 2004 Front Page Magazine interview of Steven Vincent that clearly illustrates the problem with the mainstream media's biased language:

Words matter. Words convey moral clarity. Without moral clarity, we will not succeed in Iraq. That is why the terms the press uses to cover this conflict are so vital. For example, take the word ?guerillas.? As you noted, mainstream media sources like the New York Times often use the terms ?insurgents? or ?guerillas? to describe the Sunni Triangle gunmen, as if these murderous thugs represented a traditional national liberation movement. But when the Times reports on similar groups of masked reactionary killers operating in Latin American countries, they utilize the phrase ?paramilitary death squads.? Same murderers, different designations. Yet of the two, ?insurgents??and especially ?guerillas??has a claim on our sympathies that ?paramilitaries? lacks. This is not semantics: imagine if the media routinely called the Sunni Triangle gunmen ?right wing paramilitary death squads.? Not only would the description be more accurate, but it would offer the American public a clear idea of the enemy in Iraq. And that, in turn, would bolster public attitudes toward the war.
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The most despicable misuse of terminology, however, occurs when Leftists call the Saddamites and foreign jihadists ?the resistance.? What an example of moral inversion! For the fact is, paramilitary death squads are attacking the Iraqi people. And those who oppose the killers--the Iraqi police and National Guardsmen, members of the Allawi government, people like Nour?they are the ?resistance.? They are preventing Islamofascists from seizing Iraq, they are resisting evil men from turning the entire nation into a mass slaughterhouse like we saw in re-liberated Falluja. Anyone who cares about success in our struggle against Islamofascism?or upholds principles of moral clarity and lucid thought?should combat such Orwellian distortions of our language.

Thank you, Steven. We'll miss you.

"And that, in turn, would bolster public attitudes toward the war."

The mainstream media quickly decided that showing footage of people jumping from the burning World Trade Center towers on 9-11 would inflame public opinion, and therefore that footage was never again to be shown. Likewise with the various pictures and videos of terrorists shooting and beheading civilian prisoners. Yet the pictures from Abu Ghraib were plastered all over the airwaves and front pages for weeks on end, and the ACLU sued the Department of Defense to get even more pictures and video released under the Freedom of Information Act.

It seems that only those things that undermine public attitudes toward the war are acceptable "news."

The Best Way to Lie is to Tell Only Half the Truth

In Mainstream news media suffer collateral damage from Iraq war, Ron Hutcheson of Knight Ridder attempts to justify the coverage of the Iraq war by the major news media. I say justify, because that is the overall tone of the article, and of Hutcheson's own wording. (He uses the standard media term "military insurgency" for those who are murdering Coalition troops, Iraqi police and military, and Iraqi civilians, rather than calling them terrorists, which they are. The only "insurgents" in Iraq are the left-over Baathists who are trying to put themselves back in power, and the dupes who follow Sadr and the other "leaders" who want to set themselves up as the next Saddam and don't give a flying shit about Iraq as a nation. According to Iraqi reports, the majority of the terrorists aren't Iraqis, and therefore aren't "insurgents." Nor, as they have no command structure as defined by the Geneva Conventions on Warfare, are they "military." They are terrorists, pure and simple.)

While the article does give time to those who see the current mainstream coverage as overly negative, it gives much more time, and its conclusion, to those who support the coverage as entirely proper.

Media experts note that the journalist's job is to report what's happening and why, not to rally support, and that news judgment requires assessing which facts are most important. If schools are being rebuilt, that's a news story, but if the society they're in is being blown apart by civil war, that's a bigger news story.

"If events go well, that's what you report. If things are going poorly, that's the reality," said GWU professor Livingston, who's lectured at the National War College. "If bombs blow up and bombs kill Marines and kill soldiers, that's an important story, and covering that is not bias."

U.S. journalists will always focus on lost American lives, media experts said, because that's the most direct link between Americans at home and the war overseas.

"That's the nature of journalism. And it's the nature of combat," Wyatt said. "To criticize the media for covering combat in wartime is like criticizing the sun for coming up."

BUT!!! That is not what the criticism is about. The criticism is that the media are using sanitized, PC terminology -- "military insurgency" vs. "terrorists" -- that express an inherent bias on the part of the reporters. The criticism is that only the negative is being shown, and the new schools, local governments, roads, power plants, and all other improvements are being left out. The view of the mainstream media, therefore, is that the bombs and mortars are the entirety of the reality and that things truly are going poorly. Of course, the view from the anti-war segment is that the media is using overly sanitized reporting by not further emphasizing the negative.

In contrast, the view of the troops and NGO workers who have been there and reported their experiences on blogs and small presses, and the view of numerous Iraqi bloggers, is that the bombs and other murders are only part of the reality. The improvements to infrastructure, social integration, government, police, and other movements by Iraq toward full independence and self-sufficiency are the much more important part, and are the majority of the reality.

"War is a complex thing, and you're going to have different realities from different perspectives," said Steven Livingston, an Army veteran and political communication professor at George Washington University in Washington. "What you see depends on where you stand."

Therefore, the media need to find another place to stand and see what is actually going on, before they presume to tell the world that their myopic, sensationalist view is the total reality.

Self-fulfilling E-piracy

Stephen wrote:
"Look at J. K. Rowling. She could have sold thousands, maybe millions of e-copies of the latest Potter, not to mention the earlier volumes, but she's so worried that someone will steal them that she refuses, thus guaranteeing the result she fears."

J. K. Rowling and her publisher refused to release an electronic edition of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, claiming that it would be illegally copied and shared as soon as the first legal electronic copy was purchased. Despite this ... I'll be polite and call it "caution" ... electronic copies began appearing immediately after the book's European release -- some a chapter at a time, as the buyer read the book and scanned it to upload. The first half-dozen or so chapters were available online before the book's release in the US.

Does anyone honestly think internet publicity harmed this book's sales figures? Yeesh! Those who download an illegal copy tend to fall into certain categories: those who are checking out the book to see if it's worth buying (After the gaping plot holes in the last book, I can easily see where some would want reassurance that they wouldn't be getting another turkey); those who wouldn't buy the book anyway because they haven't the money; those who wouldn't buy a legal e-book anyway because they object to the asinine DRM/time limits/other limits that infest the vast majority of e-book releases; and those who wouldn't buy the book anyway because they're just too, too "l337" and only an illegal scan will satisfy their over-inflated egos.

Meanwhile, those who would eagerly buy an electronic edition have been left in the cold ... except for those illegal (usually error-riddled, sometimes malware-infected) scans. Talk about leaving money on the table! Failing to satisfy the demands of a market niche means that someone else will satisfy it.

Electronic editions -- when done right -- have the potential to increase sales of the hardcopy edition. Some readers will get both for convenience: one to read on a device when away from home, and one to stick on the bookshelf, loan to friends, hand to a child, or whatever. Some flat-out prefer an electronic edition for any number of reasons.

Too bad Rowling didn't give more thought to her own words:

Richard wrote:
"This is especially ironic when considered in conjunction with the emphasis she places on the idea that the prophecy only has power because Voldemort gave it power. Voldemort feared the boy the prophecy foretold, and in attempting to get rid of him, created him. JKR feared piracy of her works on the internet . . . . ."