We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Covering the war Surfing the cable TV channels has provided me with a glut of semi-useful information about the unfolding drama in Iraq, but has also astonished me with the wide qualitative differences between the news networks.
The coverage of SkyNews has been head and shoulders better that the rest, as was also the case during the fighting against the Taliban/Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. CNN and ITN are both fair to adequate, and the BBC is hovering between adequate and truly dire, with dreary hackneyed commentary filled with technical errors. Are the BBC incapable of finding a few ex-military people to employ who might know that there is no such thing as an ‘Abrahams’ battle tank?
It is also easy to see the institutional political biases of the different channels: SkyNews has been repeatedly showing an extended clip of bemused Royal Marines in Umm Qasr surrounded by exuberant Iraqi men welcoming them as liberators… I saw one clip of about 6 or 7 seconds long of this on the BBC. Once.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
Over here – Fox gets too preachy, CNN ok for 30 minutes or so. I watched BBC America coverage – it was like listening to the radio, with some pictures
CNN seems to be protest coverage (not the best channel for our soldiers unless we want them to think the whole world hates them).
Fox… depends on who is on…
BBC and the Canadian CBC are good if I want a left view.
Lately – MSNBC is good when I do tune in.
Forget the commentators — the “embedded” journalists and their Dick Tracy communicators are muy slick. I’ve been going back and forth between CNN and Fox, watching it unfold in real time. Granted, in a jerky, five-frames-per-second, green-tinted, lossy mpeg sort of real time, but still…
That was a brilliant idea, whoever came up with it. The journalists — even the CNN ones — are developing Stockholm Syndrome in a big way.
I found Ari Fleischer’s press conference on Friday particularly amusing and irritating at the same time. Several reporters (apparently from TV outlets) kept pressing Fleischer on whether Bush has been watching TV in order to see the images from Baghdad, and implying that Bush somehow couldn’t be ‘in touch’ with the American people if he wasn’t watching the cable networks’ news coverage. (As if Bush even has the time to watch it.) I was getting extremely irritated with their attitude of self-importance until another reporter, presumably from a radio outlet, prefaced her question with a comment that Bush could easily get all the information he needed simply by listening to the radio.
The Abraham is an Israeli super tank; the Father of All Tanks. It’s supposed to be a secret.
You guys need to read andrew sullivan’s blog. The Beeb’s slant isn’t going over well.
And I think it was a beeb reporter who asked a really snarky question to Franks today, insinuating that we’re trying to get them to report all those Iraqi surrenders w/o proof, and if reported that Iraqis were surrendering, more would surrender. A pawn of the US!
I agree that Sky News (as almost always) has been superb. Yes, the BBC is crap but at least you Yanks can console yourselves with the thought that you don’t have to pay for it. Us poor Brits have our pockets picked once a year for over a £100 to pay for all that rubbish – with the threat of a fine or imprisonment if one of their detector vans catch us watching TV with out a licence. How long before Government inspectors strap us to our seats and force us to watch?
I agree that Sky News (as almost always) has been superb. Yes, the BBC is crap but at least you Yanks can console yourselves with the thought that you don’t have to pay for it. Us poor Brits have our pockets picked once a year for over a £100 to pay for all that rubbish – with the threat of a fine or imprisonment if one of their detector vans catch us watching TV with out a licence. How long before Government inspectors strap us to our seats and force us to watch?
I agree that Sky News (as almost always) has been superb. Yes, the BBC is crap but at least you Yanks can console yourselves with the thought that you don’t have to pay for it. Us poor Brits have our pockets picked once a year for over a £100 to pay for all that rubbish – with the threat of a fine or imprisonment if one of their detector vans catch us watching TV with out a licence. How long before Government inspectors strap us to our seats and force us to watch?
Thanks for reiterating that for us David! 🙂
Not really watched too much Sky before, but it is *much* better than the effort from the Beeb. An Abrahams tank? – sheesh!, and the bald guy acting as a coordinator on the BBC is such a sneering git.
Have to agree with the general consensus of the General Franks interview on Friday. The BBC did themselves no favours there.
To our American friends – do not assume they talk for the majority of the British people. They don’t.
Thank you, Tony.
Yanks think of the San Francisco and Los Angeles newspaper and TV reporters at the briefings to represent the Middle Eastern press corps.
I must question the contention that Sky News’s reporting has been all that good. Better than the BBC? Even El Jazeera is better than the BBC: at least it can display its obvious Arab bias without question. Back to Sky, since the war began I’ve spent most of my waking hours with Sky only flippping the switch when Francis’s superficial analysis of the war becomes too much to handle. Seated as he is in a London studio with all the war’s facts and figures (?) at his fingertips he contradicts everything issuing from HQ in Doha. According to him the Big Brass are from another planet and live in some parallel universe! What do they know?
David Chater in Baghdad isn’t much better. Three or four times every hour he tells us, at length, that he has nothing to tell us: or anything he might have, he can’t tell us, in case he’s kicked out like the CNN reps. All this when he is not acting as a front man for the Iraqi regime from the wards of various hospitals and reporting on a hysterical; crowd of Iraqi men shooting up a river bank.
The worst part of the satelite TV reporting is the way they all tend to give air-time to Iraqi diatribes without any analytical follow-up. However, when the coalition spokespeople dare to open their mouths in public the sneers leap to the surface and their every utterance is questioned and blatantly doubted. Saddam must be ecstatic!
The “Abraham” is an Abrams that has been converted for service by Jewish soldiers; it’s an Israeli-modified version. The thermal sleeve around the turret is taken off, and there is an extra disc of armor added to the top of the tank. It has special treads, too: it can stop on a dime, and pick it up. And it has a…. oh, nevermind.