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Ed Webb

'A mass assassination factory': Inside Israel's calculated bombing of Gaza - 0 views

www.972mag.com/israel-calculated-bombing-gaza

war Israel Palestine israelpalestine bombing AI Hamas crimes warcrimes

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals
  • The investigation by +972 and Local Call is based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions.
  • The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,”
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  • the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed
  • “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,”
  • another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”
  • “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy,” said IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari on Oct. 9.
  • “I remember thinking that it was like if [Palestinian militants] would bomb all the private residences of our families when [Israeli soldiers] go back to sleep at home on the weekend,” one source, who was critical of this practice, recalled.
  • there are “cases in which we shell based on a wide cellular pinpointing of where the target is, killing civilians. This is often done to save time, instead of doing a little more work to get a more accurate pinpointing,”
  • Over 300 families have lost 10 or more family members in Israeli bombings in the past two months — a number that is 15 times higher than the figure from what was previously Israel’s deadliest war on Gaza, in 2014
  • “There is a feeling that senior officials in the army are aware of their failure on October 7, and are busy with the question of how to provide the Israeli public with an image [of victory] that will salvage their reputation.”
  • the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives. Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process.
  • “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so,”
  • at least until the current war, army protocols allowed for attacking power targets only when the buildings were empty of residents at the time of the strike. However, testimonies and videos from Gaza suggest that since October 7, some of these targets have been attacked without prior notice being given to their occupants, killing entire families as a result.
  • As documented by Al Mezan and numerous images coming out of Gaza, Israel bombed the Islamic University of Gaza, the Palestinian Bar Association, a UN building for an educational program for outstanding students, a building belonging to the Palestine Telecommunications Company, the Ministry of National Economy, the Ministry of Culture, roads, and dozens of high-rise buildings and homes — especially in Gaza’s northern neighborhoods.
  • there is ample evidence that, in many cases, none were military or political operatives belonging to Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
  • for the most part, when it comes to power targets, it is clear that the target doesn’t have military value that justifies an attack that would bring down the entire empty building in the middle of a city, with the help of six planes and bombs weighing several tons
  • Although it is unprecedented for the Israeli army to attack more than 1,000 power targets in five days, the idea of causing mass devastation to civilian areas for strategic purposes was formulated in previous military operations in Gaza, honed by the so-called “Dahiya Doctrine” from the Second Lebanon War of 2006.
  • “We are asked to look for high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas,” said one source who took part in previous Israeli offensives in Gaza. “Sometimes it is a militant group’s spokesperson’s office, or a point where operatives meet. I understood that the floor is an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza. That is what they told us. “If they would tell the whole world that the [Islamic Jihad] offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high-rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it,” the source added.
  • Previous operations have also shown how striking these targets is meant not only to harm Palestinian morale, but also to raise the morale inside Israel. Haaretz revealed that during Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit conducted a psy-op against Israeli citizens in order to boost awareness of the IDF’s operations in Gaza and the damage they caused to Palestinians. Soldiers, who used fake social media accounts to conceal the campaign’s origin, uploaded images and clips of the army’s strikes in Gaza to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok in order to demonstrate the army’s prowess to the Israeli public.
  • since October 7, Israel has attacked high-rises with their residents still inside, or without having taken significant steps to evacuate them, leading to many civilian deaths.
  • evidence from Gaza suggests that some high-rises — which we assume to have been power targets — were toppled without prior warning. +972 and Local Call located at least two cases during the current war in which entire residential high-rises were bombed and collapsed without warning, and one case in which, according to the evidence, a high-rise building collapsed on civilians who were inside.
  • According to intelligence sources, Habsora generates, among other things, automatic recommendations for attacking private residences where people suspected of being Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives live. Israel then carries out large-scale assassination operations through the heavy shelling of these residential homes.
  • the Habsora system enables the army to run a “mass assassination factory,” in which the “emphasis is on quantity and not on quality.” A human eye “will go over the targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them.” Since Israel estimates that there are approximately 30,000 Hamas members in Gaza, and they are all marked for death, the number of potential targets is enormous.
  • A senior military official in charge of the target bank told the Jerusalem Post earlier this year that, thanks to the army’s AI systems, for the first time the military can generate new targets at a faster rate than it attacks. Another source said the drive to automatically generate large numbers of targets is a realization of the Dahiya Doctrine.
  • Five different sources confirmed that the number of civilians who may be killed in attacks on private residences is known in advance to Israeli intelligence, and appears clearly in the target file under the category of “collateral damage.” 
  • “That is a lot of houses. Hamas members who don’t really matter for anything live in homes across Gaza. So they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there.”
  • On Oct. 22, the Israeli Air Force bombed the home of the Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnaouq in the city of Deir al-Balah. Ahmed is a close friend and colleague of mine; four years ago, we founded a Hebrew Facebook page called “Across the Wall,” with the aim of bringing Palestinian voices from Gaza to the Israeli public. The strike on Oct. 22 collapsed blocks of concrete onto Ahmed’s entire family, killing his father, brothers, sisters, and all of their children, including babies. Only his 12-year-old niece, Malak, survived and remained in a critical condition, her body covered in burns. A few days later, Malak died. Twenty-one members of Ahmed’s family were killed in total, buried under their home. None of them were militants. The youngest was 2 years old; the oldest, his father, was 75. Ahmed, who is currently living in the UK, is now alone out of his entire family.
  • According to former Israeli intelligence officers, in many cases in which a private residence is bombed, the goal is the “assassination of Hamas or Jihad operatives,” and such targets are attacked when the operative enters the home. Intelligence researchers know if the operative’s family members or neighbors may also die in an attack, and they know how to calculate how many of them may die. Each of the sources said that these are private homes, where in the majority of cases, no military activity is carried out.
  • According to the doctrine — developed by former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who is now a Knesset member and part of the current war cabinet — in a war against guerrilla groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah, Israel must use disproportionate and overwhelming force while targeting civilian and government infrastructure in order to establish deterrence and force the civilian population to pressure the groups to end their attacks. The concept of “power targets” seems to have emanated from this same logic.
  • The bombing of family homes where Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives supposedly live likely became a more concerted IDF policy during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Back then, 606 Palestinians — about a quarter of the civilian deaths during the 51 days of fighting — were members of families whose homes were bombed. A UN report defined it in 2015 as both a potential war crime and “a new pattern” of action that “led to the death of entire families.”
  • according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, by Nov. 29, Israel had killed 50 Palestinian journalists in Gaza, some of them in their homes with their families
  • The intelligence officers interviewed for this article said that the way Hamas designed the tunnel network in Gaza knowingly exploits the civilian population and infrastructure above ground. These claims were also the basis of the media campaign that Israel conducted vis-a-vis the attacks and raids on Al-Shifa Hospital and the tunnels that were discovered under it.
  • Hamas leaders “understand that Israeli harm to civilians gives them legitimacy in fighting.”
  • while it’s hard to imagine now, the idea of dropping a one-ton bomb aimed at killing a Hamas operative yet ending up killing an entire family as “collateral damage” was not always so readily accepted by large swathes of Israeli society. In 2002, for example, the Israeli Air Force bombed the home of Salah Mustafa Muhammad Shehade, then the head of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing. The bomb killed him, his wife Eman, his 14-year-old daughter Laila, and 14 other civilians, including 11 children. The killing caused a public uproar in both Israel and the world, and Israel was accused of committing war crimes.
  • Fifteen years after insisting that the army was taking pains to minimize civilian harm, Gallant, now Defense Minister, has clearly changed his tune. “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,” he said after October 7.
Ed Webb

Common Knowledge : CJR - 0 views

www.cjr.org/...common_knowledge.php

media identity democracy USA cjr analysis socialmedia newspapers journalism politics

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Berelson’s analysis documented what we denizens of the burgeoning ecosystem often shorthanded as “the new media landscape” understand instinctively: that news is much more than information. That it is more, even, than a cultural commodity. Berelson highlighted news’s status as a source both of intimacy and anxiety: news is not only a reflection of the world we live in. It is also a reflection of ourselves.
  • Aren’t consumers better served by many outlets that are specialized than by a few outlets that are generalized? And national news, even in its halcyon days—one thinks of Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America”—was never a paragon of cultural comprehensiveness. Master narratives, the closest we’ve ever gotten to macro-communal news, have been, as well, products of oligarchic exclusivity.
  • consumers are increasingly presented with, and made to choose among, an expanding variety of ever-narrowing news sources
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  • the inconvenience of being challenged in our beliefs.
  • Increasingly, we are able to choose not just which opinions to embrace, but also something more foundational: which facts to know in the first place.
  • a troubling paradox: the democratization of information, it turns out, is in some ways at odds with democracy itself.
  • Where is the middle ground between monopoly and chaos? How do we balance the individually empowering elements of the niche—and the passion and participation they encourage—with news that is empowering in a wider sense of civic life? How do we reconcile the intimacy of news consumption with Berelson’s insight that news is, at is core, a solidarity good? How do we structure a system of news that acts, in varying ways, as democracy’s common denominator?
  • news consumption itself has taken on a quality of itinerancy: audiences, per Pew’s most recent State of the News Media report, now “hunt and gather what they want when they want it, use search to comb among destinations and share what they find through a growing network of social media.” And consumption itself has thus taken on an increasingly self-definitional property: to read The New York Times, or to watch Fox News—or MSNBC—or the NewsHour—or to curate a personalized RSS feed, is, of course, to make not merely a commercial decision. It is also to make a declaration about who you are and how you see the world.
  • There has always been more information in the world than there have been news outlets to convey it; but the explosion of outlets, in particular, means that no longer is slant the key self-definitional distinction in news
  • “The news” itself, as a unitary entity, is no longer something we can take for granted. On the contrary: it is increasingly incoherent—“a mass of niches,” Jeff Jarvis has it. Indeed, the notion of a master narrative itself—the communal melody that, even in its exclusivity, also binds us together in its tunes and tones—is slowly dissolving into white noise.
  • echo chambers—even those that many might think of as ‘the good ones’—have an insularity that impedes broader political and cultural discourse. They distort reality through their very presumption of multiple realities. They assume—and, then, foster—a disconnect between sub-truths and, simply, truth.
  • In And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, Bill Wasik describes the “feedback loop among bloggers and readers,” citing a study finding that 85 percent of blog links led consumers to blogs of the same political bent—“with almost no blog showing any particular respect for any blog on the other side.” In this way, selective exposure becomes a communal activity.
  • “The problem is when extremism emerges from the logic of social interactions”—from, in other words, a system of discourse that allows for self-segregation. And that’s the problem we’re seeing, increasingly, in our journalistic infrastructure. On the one hand, people have access to more dissenting views than ever before; on the other, paradoxically, they are more able to ignore those views than ever before. My reality here. Your reality there.
  • Without “popular information,” we lose not only our baseline of knowledge about the political world, but also our bearings within it. We risk becoming subject, as it were, to subjectivity itself—and ending up with a society, as William James had it, in which “people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
  • That journalism is crucial to modern democracy seems clear; that it is not by any means sufficient to democracy seems equally clear
  • News serves the public not only by feeding it information; it also fosters, in the phrase of the sociologist C. Wright Mills, the “sociological imagination”—the habit of mind required to connect one’s private concerns to the “public issues” that give rise to them. News itself is thus a self-fulfilling prophecy. In learning about our fellow citizens, we come to see their lives as they are: inextricably linked to ours. News begets empathy—and, in that, social capital. Connection is key: as Robert Putnam notes, “a society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital.”
  • Mediated knowledge, in other words, united the country. Not by whitewashing differences among its consumers, but rather by giving those consumers a baseline of shared information and discourse that, eventually, transformed an awkward amalgam of loosely connected states—the experiment—into the United States. The nation.
  • The challenge, as we navigate the chasm between old ways and new, is to find a way to mingle the productive properties of commotion with the enduring value of community.
  • “It is hardly possible,” Mill had it, “to overstate the value in the present state of human improvement of placing people in contact with others dissimilar to themselves, and in contact too with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar.”
  • Ed Webb on 21 Sep 09
     
    Essential reading on media, identity, democracy, community.
Ed Webb

Tunisia's bitter cyberwar - Features - Al Jazeera English - 2 views

english.aljazeera.net/...20111614145839362.html

Tunisia censorship internet twitter socialmedia social media media

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Most international news organisations have no presence in the country (and, some say, a lack of interest in the protests). Media posted online by Tunisian web activists has been some of the only material that has slipped through the blackout, even if their videos and photos haven't generated quite the same enthusiastic coverage by Western media as the Iranian protest movement did in 2009.
  • Several sources Al Jazeera spoke with said that web activists had been receiving anonymous phone calls, warning them to delete critical posts on their Facebook pages or face the consequences.
  • Sami Ben Gharbia, who monitors Tunisia's web censorship for Global Voices, said that Google and Facebook were in no way complicit in the sophisticated phishing technique. The initial signs that something was underway came on Saturday, he said, when the secure https protocol became unavailable in Tunisia. This forced web users to use the non-secure http protocol. The government's internet team then appears to have gone phishing for individuals' usernames and passwords on services including Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo and Hotmail. Web activists and journalists alerted others of the alleged hacking by the government via Twitter, which is not susceptible to the same types of operations. "The goal, amongst others, is to delete the Facebook pages which these people administer," a Tunisian internet professional, who has also been in contact with Anonymous, told Al Jazeera in an emailed interview. The same source, who asked to remain unidentified due to the potential consequences for speaking out, said that in communication with the international group, he had come up with a Greasemonkey script for fireFox internet browsers that deactivated the government's malicious code.
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  • The Committee to Protect Journalists says there is clear proof that the phishing campaign is organised and co-ordinated by the Tunisian government, as did other sources that Al Jazeera spoke with.
  • In the siege against cyber dissidence, Twitter has been a bastion for activists. Because people can access Twitter via clients rather than going through the website itself, many Tunisians can still communicate online. The web-savvy use proxies to browse the other censored sites. Yet even if bloggers manage to maintain their blogging, the censorship deprives them of those readers who do not use proxies. The result is what Ben Gharbia described as the "killing" of the Tunisian blogosphere.  Ben Mhenni said that the government's biggest censorship of webpages en masse happened in April 2010, when more than 100 blogs were blocked, in addition to other websites. She said the hijackings that had taken place in the past week, however, marked the biggest government-organised hacking operation. Most of the pages that had been deleted in recent days were already censored. Amamy said the government's approach to the internet policy is invasive and all-controlling. "Here we don't really have internet, we have a national intranet," he said.
Ed Webb

Tunisians Turn to Social Media, But is it Reliable? : Tunisia Live - News, Economy, Cul... - 3 views

www.tunisia-live.net/...ocial-media-but-is-it-reliable

Tunisia media socialmedia rumors sport Israel art censorship Salafists INRIC

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • “Social media is a positive asset to Tunisian media. It is a source of information for the Tunisian people and the most trusted source of news,” said Hichem Snoussi, a media expert and member of the National Committee of Information and Communication Reform (INRIC). “These sites are the hardest thing for the government to control. Peer-to-peer information sharing destroys the possibility of monopolizing information,” Snoussi continued
  • “These sites can be bought by people who want influence. They can also foster rumors,” he said.
  • “Right after the revolution, media regained the trust of Tunisians. The state television channel got 40% of their audience back but now, it’s losing people’s trust again as the government exerts control over the media once more. It’s an issue of trust. People don’t trust traditional sources of news anymore.”
Ed Webb

Egypt detains man who sent pictures to Jazeera - sources - News - Aswat Masriya - 2 views

en.aswatmasriya.com/...view.aspx

Egypt censorship MB ikhwan jazeera

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • A Cairo prosecutor has ordered the detention of an Egyptian accused of altering photographs before sending them to the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news network and of belonging to a terrorist organisation
  • Hassan El Banna is accused of belonging to a terrorist group, an apparent reference to the Brotherhood, and of doctoring pictures to damage the image of security forces
  • A security source said his movements had been monitored before his arrest and that he had supplied Al Jazeera's Egyptian channel with manipulated photographs, but was not an employee of the channel. A judicial source said he was not a professional photographer and did not officially work for Al Jazeera.
Ed Webb

Arianna Huffington: Virality Uber Alles: What the Fetishization of Social Media Is Cost... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...social-media_b_1333499.html

socialmedia opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The media world's fetishization of social media has reached idol-worshipping proportions. Media conference agendas are filled with panels devoted to social media and how to use social tools to amplify coverage, but you rarely see one discussing what that coverage should actually be about. As Wadah Khanfar, former Director General of Al Jazeera, told our editors when he visited our newsroom last week, "The lack of contextualization and prioritization in the U.S. media makes it harder to know what the most important story is at any given time."
  • locked in the Perpetual Now
  • There's no reason why the notion of the scoop can't be recalibrated to mean not just letting us know 10 seconds before everybody else whom Donald Trump is going to endorse but also giving us more understanding, more clarity, a brighter spotlight on solutions
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  • We're treating virality as a good in and of itself, moving forward for the sake of moving
  • "Twitter's algorithm favors novelty over popularity."
  • there were too many tweets about WikiLeaks, and they were so constant that Twitter started treating WikiLeaks as the new normal
  • as we adopt new and better ways to help people communicate, can we keep asking what is really being communicated? And what's the opportunity cost of what is not being communicated while we're all locked in the perpetual present chasing whatever is trending?
  • "What it means to be social is if you want to talk to me, you have to listen to me as well." A lot of brands want to be social, but they don't want to listen, because much of what they're hearing is quite simply not to their liking, and, just as in relationships in the offline world, engaging with your customers or your readers in a transparent and authentic way is not all sweetness and light. So simply issuing a statement saying you're committed to listening isn't the same thing as listening.
  • Fetishizing "social" has become a major distraction, and we're clearly a country that loves to be distracted. Our job in the media is to use all the social tools at our disposal to tell the stories that matter -- as well as the stories that entertain -- and to keep reminding ourselves that the tools are not the story. When we become too obsessed with our closed, circular Twitter or Facebook ecosystem, we can easily forget that poverty is on the rise, or that downward mobility is trending upward, or that over 5 million people have been without a job for half a year or more, or that millions of homeowners are still underwater. And just as easily, we can ignore all the great instances of compassion, ingenuity, and innovation that are changing lives and communities.
  • conflates the form with the substance
  • new social tools can help us bear witness more powerfully or they can help us be distracted more obsessively
  • humans are really a herd animal and that is what we are doing on these social sites, Herding up
Ed Webb

Reporting on Corruption in Tunisia: The Price Journalists Pay : Nawaat de Tunisie - Tun... - 1 views

nawaat.org/...isia-the-price-journalists-pay

Tunisia censorship journalists corruption

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • as a journalist you have to go to official sources but most of the time they just don’t respond. I have my sources and obtain different information about corruption at the municipal level. I know those who are on the municipal council and sometimes receive information about mismanagement and corruption, but when you ask for information from other sources you get total silence.” He added: “When you write about corruption and you have checked all your facts, the newspaper doesn’t want to publish the story. Recently I did an investigative report on how a leading sports figure is involved in corruption and when I had finished it no Tunisian newspaper would publish it. Unfortunately websites and blogs do not have the same impact on readers. On them we can sometimes post articles on corruption but they do not have the same impact as daily and weekly newspapers.”
  • The pressure exerted by the Tunisian authorities on journalists who attempt to cover corruption has taken its toll. The editor-in-chief of one opposition newspaper said that his newspaper refrained from making accusations of corruption. “We seek compromise within the constraints imposed upon us,” he said, in a clear reference to self-censorship, although he claimed that his newspaper differed from others, which, in return for “financing,” have “changed their tune.” The editor of another opposition newspaper, who is also an MP, said his newspaper does cover corruption and mismanagement. It is possible, he said, that he is given slightly more leeway by the authorities because his political party is legal and therefore has a right to state funding. Nonetheless, his paper is put under significant pressure. Tunisia’s Agency for Exterior Communication controls public advertising – which it apportions only to newspapers it approves of. This translates into considerable financial difficulties for any newspapers that don’t toe the line.
  • authorities employ two broad means to prevent unfavorable news from getting out: Sometimes they employ a legal ruling banning a particular issue or issues; this was the case when his newspaper published details about a court hearing related to social protests in the south of the country, when activists were on trial. On other occasions, the authorities don’t use the law; instead plainclothes police go to the stands and order them not to sell the issue.
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  • While in Tunisia, TMG members also attended a hearing by the appeals court in the southern town of Gafsa, in the case of journalist Fahem Boukadous, who had been charged following his coverage of labour unrest, including demonstrations against corruption, in southern Tunisia. Boukadous had been sentenced to four years in prison for “belonging to a criminal association” and “harming public order.” Boukadous had been hospitalized with breathing problems the day before the hearing. On the day this report was released, the Gafsa court upheld the sentence. Boukadous, a journalist with the Al-Hiwar Al-Tunisi satellite television station, went into hiding in July 2008 after discovering that he was wanted by the Tunisian authorities on charges sparked by his coverage of the demonstrations in Gafsa. He was sentenced to six years in prison in December 2008. Boukadous emerged to challenge the sentence in November 2009 on the basis that he had been tried in absentia. A court overturned the previous ruling, but said that Boukadous would again be tried on the same charges. In January of this year, the journalist was found guilty as charged and sentenced to four years in prison – upheld on 7 July.
  • Although the media is allowed to cover parliamentary debates, those outlets that are allowed in receive instructions about what kind of coverage to provide; Once a fortnight, state TV broadcasts from 9:00 am to 12:00 am questions and answers from parliament, live, but opposition members have to ask their questions after 12:00; Since stateowned media ignore questions asked by opposition MPs, political parties try to disseminate them through their affiliated newspapers or websites. The problem is that through those channels exposure is very limited.
  • Sometimes, people receive text messages warning them of the consequences of buying certain newspapers. Thus, most people who buy such newspapers are those affiliated with the papers’ stands politically. The editor said they have turned to the web in an effort to disseminate information through that route, but when we spoke to him he said the website was blocked.
  • Despite the dangers and claustrophobic environment, a number of independent journalists continue to attempt to carry out their profession. Often, they report on corruption – and the authorities react with redoubled wrath. In fact, it was a satirical mock interview with Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, in which he talks about his alleged nepotism, corruption and repression of political opponents, which renowned critical journalist Taoufik Ben Brik believes earned him a six-month jail sentence on fabricated charges of assaulting a woman in a car park.
Ed Webb

Why Small Payments Won't Save Publishers « Clay Shirky - 0 views

www.shirky.com/...-payments-wont-save-publishers

newspapers journalism publishing future micropayments shirky

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Feb 09 - Cached
  • he media business is being turned upside down by our new freedoms and our new roles. We’re not just readers anymore, or listeners or viewers. We’re not customers and we’re certainly not consumers. We’re users. We don’t consume content, we use it, and mostly what we use it for is to support our conversations with one another, because we’re media outlets now too.
  • superdistribution — content moving from friend to friend through the social network, far from the original source of the story. Superdistribution, despite its unweildy name, matters to users. It matters a lot. It matters so much, in fact, that we will routinely prefer a shareable amateur source to a professional source that requires us to keep the content a secret on pain of lawsuit. (Wikipedia’s historical advantage over Britannica in one sentence.)
  • The internet really is a revolution for the media ecology, and the changes it is forcing on existing models are large. What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather than resuscitating old models for employing publishers; the more time we waste fantasizing about magic solutions for the latter problem, the less time we have to figure out real solutions to the former one.
Ed Webb

Global Voices Gathers Information From Citizens All Over the Globe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...14voices.html

socialmedia media journalism bloggers censorship advocacy

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • “Our job is to curate the conversation that is happening all over the Internet with people who really understand what is going on,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Tokyo bureau chief for CNN who founded Global Voices with Ethan Zuckerman, a technologist and Africa expert, while they were fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “We amplify, contextualize and translate what these conversations are and why they are relevant.”
  • “We don’t parachute in. We are there all the time. “
  • Mr. Sigal said that having editors work with volunteer bloggers brought traditional journalistic values to the operation, like checking facts and sources. “But it is less about a finished story and more about a conversation,” he said. “When we build a story, we include links back to the original sources, so you can follow the story as far down as you want to. We want you to leave our site and go find the original, find more.”
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  • “It turns out that it is much more critical than they had imagined because the other international news sources are being dismantled.”
  • 18-hour days for Ms. Hussaini, whose work is now followed closely on the site and on Twitter by journalists from traditional media organizations, including Andy Carvin of NPR, who has been regularly curating and publishing posts on Twitter, creating a news wire about the unrest in the region for weeks.
  • “The citizen media scene is small in Libya,” Ms. Hussaini said. “We find it very difficult to find voices here and in other places where there is a lot of censorship and a lot of fear from the regime. Bloggers being arrested is a fact of life in some countries.”
  • Global Voices Advocacy is run by Sami Ben Gharbia, a highly respected blogger who is a founder of Nawaat, a blog about Tunisia, and an activist who until recently lived in exile from Tunisia for 13 years.
  • “People are not always interested in knowing what is happening in Yemen,” he said. “We have been waiting for people to pay attention to this corner of the world for a long time, and now we are ready to tell their stories.”
Ed Webb

How social media users are helping NATO fight Gadhafi in Libya « Shabab Libya - 0 views

shabablibya.org/...ng-nato-fight-gadhafi-in-libya

Libya NATO SocialMedia intelligence

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • a committed cadre of social media users who have become, in effect, volunteer intelligence analysts. On Twitter, Facebook and other services, they discuss satellite images, vessel tracking data and the latest gossip from their sources inside the country. In the past few days, NATO officials have acknowledged that social media reports contribute to their targeting process
  • In a press briefing on June 10, Wing Commander Mike Bracken, a NATO spokesman, described the so-called “fusion centre” that pulls together intelligence. “We get information from open sources on the Internet; we get Twitter,” Wing Commander Bracken said. “You name any source of media and our fusion centre will deliver all of that into usable intelligence.” Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, the Canadian who commands the operation, ultimately decides whether to trust what he’s hearing. “He will decide, ‘That is good information and I can act on it,’ ” the spokesman said. “Where it comes from, it’s not relevant to the commander.”
Ed Webb

There's Twitter the company, and twitter the medium | Technology | Los Angeles Times - 0 views

latimesblogs.latimes.com/...theres-twitter.html

twitter antitrust monopoly opensource

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Mar 09 - Cached
  • “It’s a very dangerous network because it’s all centralized,” he said, “not only on a technological level, where it goes through one set of servers — but it also goes through one set of business interests that’s anything but transparent.” Danger may sound a bit overzealous for a Web service that barely existed two years ago, but for a media landscape in the middle of a profound shift, two years can be the span between eras. Twitter is becoming a major source for news, commerce and free expression and, as with a free press itself, defenders don’t want a few profit-motivated individuals making all the decisions about how it should evolve. Like Facebook and YouTube before it, Twitter is now transitioning from a freely available, much-loved Web service to a well-funded business venture looking to cash in on the audience and cachet it built in its freewheeling early days.
  • Both critics have installed their own smaller, open-source micro-messaging systems outside of Twitter’s domain. Laporte calls his the Twit Army. The software they’re using was developed by Evan Prodromou, a developer in Montreal. Prodromou is the force behind Laconica — an open-source, Twitter-like system that anyone can install; hundreds of administrators already have, creating a dispersed, decentralized network of Twitter clones that can all talk to one another. Prodromou compares the state of micro-messaging to the early days of consumer e-mail. In the early 1990s, the e-mail world was dominated by proprietary dial-up entities like CompuServe, MCI and Prodigy. But because those systems were competitive, they didn’t connect to one another, and you could send messages only to people inside your own service. “I couldn’t send you e-mail and you couldn’t send me e-mail,” Prodromou explained. “We were on these separate islands. Making the change to an open standard for Internet e-mail has meant e-mail has become ubiquitous. I think that’s where we’re at now with microblogging.”
  • Ed Webb on 26 Mar 09
     
    Not everyone loves Twitter, even people who use it...
Ed Webb

Fears grow of rift between Saudi king and crown prince | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...own-prince-mohammed-bin-salman

KSA Saudi royal government politics family authoritarianism reform media Egypt Sudan Algeria

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • in late February when the king, 83, visited Egypt and was warned by his advisers he was at risk of a potential move against him, according to a detailed account from a source. His entourage was so alarmed at the possible threat to his authority that a new security team, comprised of more than 30 hand-picked loyalists from the interior ministry, was flown to Egypt to replace the existing team.
  • The friction in the father-son relationship was underlined, the source said, when the prince was not among those sent to welcome the king home.
  • The crown prince, who was designated “deputy king” during the Egypt trip, as is customary, signed off two major personnel changes while the king was away. They included the appointment of a female ambassador to the US, Princess Reema bint Bandar bin Sultan, and that of his full brother, Khalid bin Salman, to the ministry of defence. The latter appointment has further centralised power in one branch of the ruling family.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Royal appointments are almost always announced in the name of the king, but the 23 February decrees were signed by the “deputy king”. One expert said the title of deputy king had not been used in this way for decades.
  • the king and his team learned about the reshuffle via television
  • Supporters of the king have been pushing him to get more involved in decision-making, to prevent the crown prince from taking more power.
  • Prince Mohammed angered people last month when he walked on top of the Kaaba in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam, provoking complaints to the king by some religious scholars that the move had been inappropriate
  • The prince and king have also been at odds on significant foreign policy matters, the source said, including the handling of prisoners of war in Yemen, and the Saudi response to protests in Sudan and Algeria.
  • While the king is not a reformer, he is said to have supported freer coverage of the protests in Algeria in the Saudi press.
Ed Webb

Exclusive: Are U.S. Newspapers Biased Against Palestinians? Analysis of A Hundred Thous... - 0 views

palestinesquare.com/...ed-thousand-headlines-says-yes

media US USA newspapers CNN Palestine Israel israelpalestine analysis statistics

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • A study released last week by 416Labs, a Toronto-based consulting and research firm, supports the view that mainstream U.S. newspapers consistently portray Palestine in a more negative light than Israel, privilege Israeli sources, and omit key facts helpful to understanding the Israeli occupation, including those expressed by Palestinian sources.
  • Since 1967, use of the word “occupation” has declined by 85% in the Israeli dataset of headlines, and by 65% in the Palestinian dataset;Since 1967, mentions of Palestinian refugees have declined by an overall 93%;Israeli sources are nearly 250% more likely to be quoted as Palestinians;The number of headlines centering Israel were published four times more than those centering Palestine;Words connoting violence such as “terror” appear three times as much as the word “occupation” in the Palestinian dataset;Explicit recognition that Israeli settlements and settlers are illegal rarely appears in both datasets;Since 1967, mentions of “East Jerusalem,” distinguishing that part of the city occupied by Israel in 1967 from the rest of the city, appeared only a total of 132 times;The Los Angeles Times has portrayed Palestinians most negatively, followed by The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and lastly The New York Times;Coverage of the conflict has reduced dramatically in the second half of the fifty-year period.
  • in “Permission to Narrate,” Edward Said pointed out that even as Palestinians were supported by the legality, legitimacy, and authority of international law, resolutions, and consensus, which is the case until this day, U.S. policymakers and media outlets simply refused to “make connections, draw conclusions, [and] state the simple facts.” This refusal remains a mainstay of U.S. media and politics, including a rejection of the central truth that the Palestinian narrative “stems directly from the story of their existence in and displacement from Palestine.”
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  • Nearly thirty-five years since Said’s seminal work, the numbers revealed in the study unambiguously support his view with a quantitative edge, showing a consistent and systematic bias against Palestinians. It is consistent because it spans five decades, and systematic because the coverage has repeatedly responded to the need of Israel to justify its occupation as it metastasized over the years. For instance, assessing the frequency of certain words per decade, the study found correlations with the stated policy goals of both Israel and the U.S. There was a similar decline of mentions of the occupation, Palestinian refugees, and East Jerusalem, in addition to the portrayal of Palestinians in a negative light, in line with US-Israeli policy goals.
  • during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, examining only a sliver of the 51-days assault (June 29 and July 10), CNN broadcasted 28 appearances of Israeli public officials and laymen, while granting nearly 40% less appearances to Palestinians officials and laymen, a total of 16 appearances
Ed Webb

The Uncounted - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...asualties-iraq-airstrikes.html

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Our own reporting, conducted over 18 months, shows that the air war has been significantly less precise than the coalition claims. Between April 2016 and June 2017, we visited the sites of nearly 150 airstrikes across northern Iraq, not long after ISIS was evicted from them. We toured the wreckage; we interviewed hundreds of witnesses, survivors, family members, intelligence informants and local officials; we photographed bomb fragments, scoured local news sources, identified ISIS targets in the vicinity and mapped the destruction through satellite imagery. We also visited the American air base in Qatar where the coalition directs the air campaign. There, we were given access to the main operations floor and interviewed senior commanders, intelligence officials, legal advisers and civilian-casualty assessment experts. We provided their analysts with the coordinates and date ranges of every airstrike — 103 in all — in three ISIS-controlled areas and examined their responses. The result is the first systematic, ground-based sample of airstrikes in Iraq since this latest military action began in 2014.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 19 Nov 17
       
      This is what excellent (and expensive) investigative reporting looks like. Essential in democracies that this kind of work be done to hold governments to account.
  • one in five of the coalition strikes we identified resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition
  • a consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate the claims at all
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  • the result simply of flawed or outdated intelligence that conflated civilians with combatants
  • “In the middle of the night,” he wrote, “coalition airplanes targeted two houses occupied by innocent civilians. Is this technology? This barbarian attack cost me the lives of my wife, daughter, brother and nephew.”
  • two direct hits. “O.K., this is my house, and this is Mohannad’s house,” he recalled. “One rocket here, and one rocket there. It was not a mistake.”
  • in 2003, the United States invaded. One night just a few months afterward, the Americans showed up at the Woods and took over a huge abandoned military barracks across the street from Basim’s property. The next morning, they started cutting down trees. “They said, ‘This is for our security,’ ” Basim recalled. “I said, ‘Your security doesn’t mean destruction of the forest.’ ” Walls of concrete and concertina wire started to appear amid the pine and chinar stands.
  • When the Americans withdrew in 2011, Basim felt as if almost everyone he knew harbored grievances toward the occupation.
  • “Radical Islamists grew as a result of this war, and many ideas grew out of this war which we have never seen or heard before,”
  • During the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, war planners began to focus more seriously on condolence payments, seeing them as a way to improve relations with locals and forestall revenge attacks. Soon, American forces were disbursing thousands of dollars yearly to civilians who suffered losses because of combat operations, for everything from property damage to the death of a family member.
  • In 2003, an activist from Northern California named Marla Ruzicka showed up in Baghdad determined to overhaul the system. She founded Civic, now known as the Center for Civilians in Conflict, and collected evidence of civilians killed in American military operations. She discovered not only that there were many more than expected but also that the assistance efforts for survivors were remarkably haphazard and arbitrary. Civic championed the cause in Washington and found an ally in Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont. In 2005, Ruzicka was killed by a suicide blast in Baghdad, but her efforts culminated in legislation that established a fund to provide Iraqi victims of American combat operations with nonmonetary assistance — medical care, home reconstruction — that served, in practice, as compensation.
  • not a single person in Iraq or Syria has received a condolence payment for a civilian death since the war began in 2014. “There really isn’t a process,” a senior Central Command official told us. “It’s not that anyone is against it; it just hasn’t been done, so it’s almost an aspirational requirement.”
  • While assisting civilian victims is no longer a military priority, some authorities appear to remain concerned about retaliation. About a year after the strike on Basim’s house, his cousin Hussain Al-Rizzo, a systems-engineering professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, received a visit from an F.B.I. agent. The agent, he said, asked if the deaths of his relatives in an American airstrike made him in his “heart of hearts sympathize with the bad guys.” Hussain, who has lived in the United States since 1987, was stunned by the question. He said no.
  • Because there was no established mechanism for Iraqi victims to meet American officials, his appointment was at the American Citizen Services section. He pressed against the window and showed the consular officer his dossier. One page contained satellite imagery of the Razzo houses, and others contained before-and-after photos of the destruction. Between them were photos of each victim: Mayada sipping tea, Tuqa in the back yard, Najib in a black-and-white self-portrait and a head shot of Mohannad, an engineering professor, his academic credentials filling the rest of the page. The most important issue, Basim had written, was that his family was now “looked at as members of ISIS” by the Iraqi authorities. This threatened to be a problem, especially after the city’s liberation. The consular officer, who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity, was moved. “I have people coming in every day that lie to me, that come with these sob stories,” the officer remembered telling him, “but I believe you.”
  • when Basim’s case was referred to a military attorney, the attorney replied, “There’s no way to prove that the U.S. was involved.”
  • we wrote to the coalition ourselves, explaining that we were reporters working on an article about Basim. We provided details about his family and his efforts to reach someone in authority and included a link to the YouTube video the coalition posted immediately after the strike. A public-affairs officer responded, “There is nothing in the historical log for 20 SEP 2015,” the date the coalition had assigned to the strike video. Not long after, the video disappeared from the coalition’s YouTube channel. We responded by providing the GPS coordinates of Basim’s home, his emails to the State Department and an archived link to the YouTube video, which unlike the videos on the Pentagon’s website allow for comments underneath — including those that Basim’s family members left nearly a year before.
  • Over the coming weeks, one by one, the coalition began removing all the airstrike videos from YouTube.
  • An alarm blares occasional high-temperature alerts, but the buildings themselves are kept so frigid that aviators sometimes wear extra socks as mittens
  • Most of the civilian deaths acknowledged by the coalition emerge from this internal reporting process. Often, though, watchdogs or journalists bring allegations to the coalition, or officials learn about potential civilian deaths through social media. The coalition ultimately rejects a vast majority of such external reports. It will try to match the incident to a strike in its logs to determine whether it was indeed its aircraft that struck the location in question (the Iraqi Air Force also carries out strikes). If so, it then scours its drone footage, pilot videos, internal records and, when they believe it is warranted, social media and other open-source information for corroborating evidence. Each month, the coalition releases a report listing those allegations deemed credible, dismissing most of them on the grounds that coalition aircraft did not strike in the vicinity or that the reporter failed to provide sufficiently precise information about the time and place of the episode.
  • They speak of every one of the acknowledged deaths as tragic but utterly unavoidable. “We’re not happy with it, and we’re never going to be happy with it,” said Thomas, the Central Command spokesman. “But we’re pretty confident we do the best we can to try to limit these things.”
  • Airwars, a nonprofit based in London that monitors news reports, accounts by nongovernmental organizations, social-media posts and the coalition’s own public statements. Airwars tries to triangulate these sources and grade each allegation from “fair” to “disputed.” As of October, it estimates that up to 3,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in coalition airstrikes — six times as many as the coalition has stated in its public summaries. But Chris Woods, the organization’s director, told us that Airwars itself “may be significantly underreporting deaths in Iraq,” because the local reporting there is weaker than in other countries that Airwars monitors.
  • the coalition, the institution best placed to investigate civilian death claims, does not itself routinely dispatch investigators on the ground, citing access and security concerns, meaning there has not been such a rigorous ground investigation of this air war — or any American-led air campaign — since Human Rights Watch analyzed the civilian toll of the NATO bombing in Kosovo, a conflict that ended in 1999
  • we selected three areas in Nineveh Province, traveling to the location of every airstrike that took place during ISIS control in each — 103 sites in all. These areas encompassed the range of ISIS-controlled settlements in size and population makeup: downtown Shura, a small provincial town that was largely abandoned during periods of heavy fighting; downtown Qaiyara, a suburban municipality; and Aden, a densely packed city neighborhood in eastern Mosul. The sample would arguably provide a conservative estimate of the civilian toll: It did not include western Mosul, which may have suffered the highest number of civilian deaths in the entire war. Nor did it include any strikes conducted after December 2016, when a rule change allowed more ground commanders to call in strikes, possibly contributing to a sharp increase in the death toll.
  • In addition to interviewing hundreds of witnesses, we dug through the debris for bomb fragments, tracked down videos of airstrikes in the area and studied before-and-after satellite imagery. We also obtained and analyzed more than 100 coordinate sets for suspected ISIS sites passed on by intelligence informants. We then mapped each neighborhood door to door, identifying houses where ISIS members were known to have lived and locating ISIS facilities that could be considered legitimate targets. We scoured the wreckage of each strike for materials suggesting an ISIS presence, like weapons, literature and decomposed remains of fighters. We verified every allegation with local administrators, security forces or health officials
  • During the two years that ISIS ruled downtown Qaiyara, an area of about one square mile, there were 40 airstrikes, 13 of which killed 43 civilians — 19 men, eight women and 16 children, ages 14 or younger. In the same period, according to the Iraqi federal police, ISIS executed 18 civilians in downtown Qaiyara
  • in about half of the strikes that killed civilians, we could find no discernible ISIS target nearby
  • By the time the information made its way to the coalition and it decided to act, the mortar had been moved. Such intelligence failures suggest that not all civilian casualties are unavoidable tragedies; some deaths could be prevented if the coalition recognizes its past failures and changes its operating assumptions accordingly. But in the course of our investigation, we found that it seldom did either.
  • On the evening of April 20, 2015, aircraft bombed the station, causing a tremendous explosion that engulfed the street. Muthana Ahmed Tuaama, a university student, told us his brother rushed into the blaze to rescue the wounded, when a second blast shook the facility. “I found my brother at the end of the street,” he said. “I carried him.” Body parts littered the alleyway. “You see those puddles of water,” he said. “It was just like that, but full of blood.” We determined that at least 18 civilians died in this one attack and that many more were grievously wounded. News of the strike was picked up by local bloggers, national Iraqi outlets and ISIS propaganda channels and was submitted as an allegation to the coalition by Airwars. Months later, the coalition announced the results of its investigation, stating that there was “insufficient evidence to find that civilians were harmed in this strike.” Yet even a cursory internet search offers significant evidence that civilians were harmed: We found disturbingly graphic videos of the strike’s aftermath on YouTube, showing blood-soaked toddlers and children with their legs ripped off.
  • Human rights organizations have repeatedly found discrepancies between the dates or locations of strikes and those recorded in the logs. In one instance, the coalition deemed an allegation regarding a strike in the Al-Thani neighborhood of Tabqa, Syria, on Dec. 20, 2016, as “not credible,” explaining that the nearest airstrike was more than a kilometer away. After Human Rights Watch dispatched researchers to the ground and discovered evidence to the contrary, the coalition acknowledged the strike as its own
  • The most common justification the coalition gives when denying civilian casualty allegations is that it has no record of carrying out a strike at the time or area in question. If incomplete accounts like these are standard practice, it calls into question the coalition’s ability to determine whether any strike is its own. Still, even using the most conservative rubric and selecting only those 30 airstrikes the Air Force analysts classified as “probable” coalition airstrikes, we found at least 21 civilians had been killed in six strikes. Expanding to the 65 strikes that fell within 600 meters — for example, the strikes on the home of Inas Hamadi in Qaiyara and the electrical substation in Aden — pushed that figure to at least 54 killed in 15 strikes. No matter which threshold we used, though, the results from our sample were consistent: One of every five airstrikes killed a civilian
  • “We deeply regret this unintentional loss of life in an attempt to defeat Da’esh,” Scrocca wrote, using another term for ISIS. “We are prepared to offer you a monetary expression of our sympathy and regret for this unfortunate incident.” He invited Basim to come to Erbil to discuss the matter. Basim was the first person to receive such an offer, in Iraq or Syria, during the entire anti-ISIS war.
  • “This situation of war,” he continued, “big corporations are behind it.” This is where the real power lay, not with individual Americans. He’d come to believe that his family, along with all Iraqis, had been caught in the grinder of grand forces like oil and empire, and that the only refuge lay in something even grander: faith. He had rediscovered his religion. “There was some bond that grew between me and my God. I thanked him for keeping my son alive. I thanked him that my operation was successful. Now I can walk.”
Ed Webb

Source: Qatari authorities ask 100 Egyptian nationals affiliated to Muslim Brotherhood,... - 0 views

www.madamasr.com/...alafist-front-to-leave-country

Qatar Egypt Turkey Islamists opposition media authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • About 100 Egyptian nationals living in Qatar have been asked by Doha authorities to leave the country within a few weeks time, according to an Egyptian opposition figure based abroad who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity.  The move by Qatar comes after Egypt requested that the figures — all of whom are affiliated with Islamist groups — be delivered to Egyptian authorities, said the source.
  • Qatar has given the Egyptian nationals notice to leave the country amid a diplomatic rapprochement between Doha and Cairo that has blossomed over the past year. 
  • Helping bridge the distance between Doha and Cairo are the increasingly strained relations between the current Egyptian administration and its long-standing Gulf backers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as a number of economic investment opportunities, with potential for Egypt’s need for foreign direct investment to soothe its distressed balance of payments to align with Qatari interest in a number of key strategic economic sectors, including agriculture and telecommunications. 
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Qatari authorities requested 250 Egyptian nationals, including Islamist opposition figure Abdallah al-Sherif, who ran a series of satirical programs on YouTube and Al Jazeera, to leave the country when diplomatic ties were first being established in 2022
  • With Cairo and Ankara establishing closer ties in 2021, the Turkish government instructed opposition media channels broadcasting from Turkish soil to stop criticizing Sisi and his government.
Ed Webb

Denmark's TV2 Uses Assassin's Creed Game Image For Syria Report - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...v2-syria-report_n_2853875.html

games media Syria Denmark television

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 12 Mar 13
     
    Check your sources and always give attribution!
Ed Webb

Twitter and the Anti-Playstation Effect on War Coverage | technosociology - 1 views

technosociology.org/?p=393

journalism media analysis twitter socialmedia andycarvin

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • I’d like to argue that Television functions as a distancing technology while social media works in the opposite direction: through transparency of the process of narrative construction, through immediacy of the intermediaries, through removal of censorship over images and stories (television never shows the truly horrific pictures of war), and through person-to-person interactivity, social media news curation creates a sense of visceral and intimate connectivity, in direct contrast to television, which is explicitly constructed to separate the viewer from the events.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 29 Nov 11
       
      Television as hot medium; social media as cool, demanding engagement? - see McLuhan
  • a very surreal and disorienting experience unless one has been thoroughly conditioned into accepting them as normal. All this positions the anchor between us and the event and signals to the viewer that the event is merely something to be watched, and then you move on.
  • the construction of the role of the anchor or the curator, and the role of content filtering.
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  • his news gathering and curation process is transparent–and that evokes a different level of engagement with the story even if you are only a viewer of the tweet stream and never respond or interact
  • on Twitter curation feeds, we are often in a position to observe the process by which a narrative emerges, trickle by trickle. “Polished” and “final” presentation of news invites passivity and consumption whereas visibility of the news gathering process changes our interaction with it into a “lean-forward” experience. Carvin’s reporting is not infallible–although most of the stories from citizen-media sources often turn out to be fairly accurate, belying the idea that Twitter is a medium in which crazy rumors run amok—but it wears that fallibility on its sleeve and is openly submerged in a self-corrective process in which reports and points-of-view from multiple sources, including citizen and traditional media, are intertwined in an evolving narrative.
  • This visibility of the process is a step in the opposite direction from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s famous assertion that we are increasingly moving towards a “procession of simulacra” in which the simulation (“the news”) increasingly overtakes any notion of the real and breaks the link between representation and the object –often in the form of spectacle–, ultimately erasing the real. Baudrillard famously wrote a series of essays titled “The Gulf War Did Not Happen” – he was not claiming that bombs were not dropped and people killed. Rather, he had argued that, for the Western audiences, the First Gulf war was experienced merely as green flickers on TV screens narrated by familiar anchors and without much connection with actual reality – reality as inhabited by human beings at a human scale.
  • the massive censorship of reality and images of this reality by mainstream news organizations from their inception has been incredibly damaging. It has severed this link of common humanity between people “audiences” in one part of the world and victims in another. This censorship has effectively relegated the status of other humans to that of livestock, whose deaths we also do not encounter except in an unrecognizable format in the supermarket. (And if anyone wants to argue that this is all done to protect children from inadvertent exposure, I’d reply that there are many mechanisms by which this could be done besides constant censorship for everyone.) While I cannot discuss the reasons behind this censorship in one blog post, suffice it to say it ranges from political control to keeping audiences receptive to advertisements.
  • I am not arguing that we would look at hurt children and be unmoved were it not for Carvin’s open display of emotion. I am arguing that traditional news anchors effectively invite us to do just that: to distance ourselves.Humans naturally react to suffering and it takes a very contrived environment to dampen that response.
  • watching Andy Carvin deal with his own vulnerability to imagining children hurt –children just like his– dramatically creates a mechanism in the opposite direction of that created by traditional news.
  • Contrary to assumptions, virtually everyone who does not fall into the rare breed of aggressive psychopaths who kill with ease has to be trained to kill. To the chagrin of military trainers and leaders throughout history, humans have an innate aversion to taking of human life. Untrained soldiers are historically averse to killing the “enemy” even when their life is in direct danger. Most will hide, duck, fire in the air, load and unload their weapons repeatedly, fire over the heads of the “enemy” and take other evasive actions, anything, to avoid killing. For example, in World War II, only about 20 percent of the riflemen were found to actually fire their weapons directly at enemy soldiers.
  • Twitter-curated news often puts us at bayonet distance to others –human, immediate and visceral– while television puts us on a jet flying 20,000 feet above the debris –impersonal, distant and unmoved.
Ed Webb

Qatar blocks English-language website Doha News | Middle East Eye - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...ge-website-doha-news-629222456

Qatar censorship media

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • DohaNews, which was read widely by the English speaking migrant community in Qatar, said in statement on Thursday that it had been "deliberately targeted and blocked by Qatar authorities", and that it had not been told why.
  • The Doha News team said local authorities had not raised any concerns or issued any warnings against them.“Qatar has never been an easy place to report in, but authorities have never stopped us before,’’ Shabina Khatri, executive editor and co-founder of Doha News told Middle East Eye.She added it wasn’t clear whether one of their stories sparked the move, or a series of stories and reporting style.
  • both of Qatar’s internet service providers, Ooredoo and Vodafone, simultaneously blocked the URL.
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  • The prominent website has been operational since 2011, and serves one million users a month out of a 2.6 million population, according to Doha News.
Ed Webb

MENA: A news agency under attack | Egypt Independent - 1 views

www.egyptindependent.com/...ena-news-agency-under-attack-0

propaganda media journalists Egypt

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • The false news of Mubarak's clinical death crowned weeks' worth of controversy surrounding the Middle East News Agency, which has gone from being the official source of news in Egypt to being the topic of news itself.
  • It all began when Editor-in-Chief Adel Abdul Aziz fired his deputy, journalist Raja al-Marghany, for deciding to publish a news story about calls for demonstrations in Tahrir Square. Since then, Marghany has accused MENA of favoring presidential candidate and former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, and sacrificing objectivity to publish Shafiq's propaganda
  • media sources quoted MENA journalists as accusing the chairman of the board and editor-in-chief of "removing journalists opposing Shafiq from the agency."
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  • The ANHRI report stated, "The network has acquired information suggesting that the editor-in-chief of the agency made editorial decisions for the benefit of Shafiq. He exerts professional, moral and material pressures on journalists, at an agency that is funded by the state and taxpayers' money."
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