Group items tagged

"In Biafra in 1968, a generation of children was starving to death. This was a year after oil-rich Biafra had seceded from Nigeria, and, in return, Nigeria had attacked and laid siege to Biafra. Foreign correspondents in the blockaded enclave spotted the first signs of famine that spring, and by early summer there were reports that thousands of the youngest Biafrans were dying each day. Hardly anybody in the rest of the world paid attention until a reporter from the Sun, the London tabloid, visited Biafra with a photographer and encountered the wasting children: eerie, withered little wraiths. The paper ran the pictures alongside harrowing reportage for days on end. Soon, the story got picked up by newspapers all over the world. More photographers made their way to Biafra, and television crews, too. The civil war in Nigeria was the first African war to be televised. Suddenly, Biafra's hunger was one of the defining stories of the age-the graphic suffering of innocents made an inescapable appeal to conscience-and the humanitarian-aid business as we know it today came into being. "

"humanitarian agencies are almost never held to account for doing wrong, even as they do not hesitate to take credit when they do good. What's more, I wrote, the humanitarian claim of political neutrality is a fiction: humanitarian action always has a political consequence, and one cannot deny responsibility for it. My focus was on humanitarian responses to armed conflict (rather than, say, natural disasters, or peace-time economic development) and on how, time and again, aid serves to cater conflicts, or to transform a crisis into the status quo. "

The New Yorker's take on citizen journalism, from August 06.

"William Klein and the Radioactive Fifties,"

"On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development-not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media-usually known, when this argument is made, as "gatekeepers" or "the priesthood"-have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. "Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff-and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession," Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths." The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn't use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is information originally published in other media-everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods-which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don't have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would add