[WikiEN-l] News agencies are not RSs

[stevertigo]

stevertigo<stvrtg at 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 at 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