stevertigo<stvrtg(a)gmail.com> wrote:
1) Rohde's
experience in reporting the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims by
Serbian Christians may have drawn sympathy and support from Muslim
officials
George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 9:51 PM,
wrote:
The NY Times presumably analyzed that, talked it over
with security
professionals in government and private employ, and decided against
it. They have correspondents abroad in danger areas, and have had
them kidnapped before.
I think they know better than Wikipedians - though I do not presume
they know perfect.
What's would make us "presume" that they know better? In fact your'e
comparing the management of a small newspaper to the staff of a very large
encyclopedia. It appears that you give great credit to management.
2) Not publishing the story and then creating an issue
after the fact,
makes
such tactics unlikely to be successful in the
future.
You're assuming that terrorists and professional kidnappers in the
hinterland of Afghanistan have networks that include sophisticated
Wikipedia and web history analysis experts. This is true for some
organizations - but not many. The level of ignorance of advanced
information sources is suprising even among groups that use some
advanced high-tech tools such as websites and encrypted internet
communications.
And thus, if they have not the Google, nor the Wikipedia, why then black
them out?
That this was done in one case does not mean it won't work again.
Most intelligence gathering methods remain useful for
quite a while
after they're generally disclosed.
[Citation needed]
Government intelligence agency and
military targets harden rapidly, others tend to learn slowly.
Seems this can be abstracted a bit to general social cognition concepts and
might remain true. But abstraction will probably reveal different dimensions
to the concept that you have perhaps "hardened" into a idea about government
intelligence.
A near-contradiction of terms, by the way.
3) Are the participating Western news orgs, just like
the previous U.S.
administration, now to consider Al Jazeera as
hostile? Or perhaps as an
organization that does not follow the same professional standards that
Western news orgs claim to follow?
I don't know of anyone who feels Al Jazeera is
hostile.
The point being that it draws a seriously subjective distinction between
certain news orgs and others, in as far as how they deal with
extra-journalistic modes of operation that overlap or circumuvent journalism
itself.
Ostensibly, blacking out reportage of war crimes also "saves lives" too --
not the lives of the people in the conflict, but the lives of the soldiers
who happen to be associated with the hellbound jerks who committed the
crimes. The continued blackout of Iraq abuse photos qualifies. In reality
its a bit subjective. Not that anyone wants to actually see the photos --
its just that censorship of evidence of factual events deviates from our
understanding of human history.
Just to correct Mark (?) Al Jazeera at first did report it, but then joined
the blackout after being contacted by NYT. An archived version of Al
Jazeera's story would have sufficed as a source, and bypassed their
blackout. This is all trying to deal a bit with Wales' point that if a less
illegitimate news source reported it, keeping it under wraps would have been
difficult. The real criticism here is not that they made the wrong call, but
that they appear to be attributing to their own cunning and skill what
better may be attributable to plain good-old good luck.
-Stevertigo