Terrorists vs. Bathtubs
onthemedia.org
onthemedia.org
Brooke Gladstone: Now, let's take today the argument over NSA surveillance.
Where would you come down on this?
Peter Sandman: Well, it would depend on who my client was -
[Brooke laughs]
Brooke Gladstone: [Pause] I can see why you have such a nice apartment.
Peter Sandman: [Laughing]
Brooke Gladstone: Peter, thank you very much.
Peter Sandman: My pleasure.
[1] Edit: to be fair, she does say "That's not true" at the beginning, re the number of murders with hammers.
Let's not assume that a PR consultant (Mr. Sandman) belongs naturally to "the news and the media" without mentioning the much larger question of whether an independent press would be dominated by PR in the first place.
A less... lubricated... venue for this kind of analysis is Jack Schafer's work for Reuters. Schafer has none of the insider status that OTM does.
At least one more time than what you point out, a more significant time really, did one of the participants raise the question of what the truth is too:
"But whether they’re actual stories or fictional stories is really... remains to be determined. But they, they are telling us stories."
But yeah, it was a piece about PR and how it's done.
Peter Sandman is clearly very good at it. I was somewhat surprised to see some hints that he was sympathetic to 'my' side -- he's the one that raised the question of whether the government was telling the truth above. But it also seems he's quite willing to work for whichever 'side' is paying him; I wonder if he ever would turn down a job because he thought he was doing evil, or if he just avoids thinking about which side is actually 'right', or promoting something harmful or helpful to humanity at large.
Gah. Usually I try to be more careful with the throwaway phrases. Thanks for getting my point anyway.
OTM _is_ one of the better programs around, but it is, as the title states, "on" the media. That is, a reflexive looking at the media and how it covers issues.
It's mostly pretty good, though at times Brooke in particular strikes me as rather pointedly naive (with her cred and background, she really shouldn't be). I've got a copy of her comic/book The Influencing Machine, which is also mostly pretty good, though there were multiple occasions I wanted to reach through the page and shake Brooke.
A great example is the weekly radio show CounterSpin[1], from the media watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting).
Thankfully, I don't have to choose, and so can enjoy FAIR's podcast while augmenting it with other sources. Thanks for sharing that; I had no idea they had a podcast.
But NPR has been showing a bias to my mind over the past 15 years or so more of timidity than ideology. There are places it simply won't go, questions it won't ask, and fire to which it blatently refuses to put the feet of recalcitrant, evasive, and often simply lying interview subjects (I witnessed a case of this with the coal industry shill organization "Institute for Energy Research" on the KQED Forum program last week). Perhaps simply asking the same question 2-3 times (and having the other side freely answer the same question) is enough, but I am somewhat fond of the (former, if not current) BBC "hard talk" tactic of asking deliberately pointed questions and highlighting evasions. NPR simply won't go there.
Noam Chomsky has also noted that he's been explicitly censored on multiple occasions (he's also very, very rarely given time on the network's flagship programs).
So, while I catch OTM more often than I do FAIR, I appreciate both views.
And with the Snowden / Greenwald reporting, I've also added The Guardian to my list of must-read news sites.
While NPR is nothing if not mainstream.
http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances
Charles Seife's "Edge" 2013 essay "Capture" http://www.edge.org/response-detail/23674
NPR's cousin PBS here, but I'd argue the same rationale holds: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/05/12118/pbs-killed-wiscons...
But, yes, everyone has an ideology, it is true. Even people on NPR. Even those with the most mainstream ideologies, where you don't even notice it's an ideology because it's just the status quo -- that's an ideology too.
If you think FAIR's analysis is biased by their ideology, that may be. (And to show that about someone requires, well, showing it, not just showing that they have an ideology, as everyone does)
But it seems a semantic stretch to claim they are not 'independent' because they are 'ideologically dependent on the progressive left' -- "ideologically dependent", what does that even mean?
(For what it's worth: that ideology is also my ideology).
And I think most shows on NPR also cater to an audience with a specific ideology, and are less likely to present analyses that challenge that ideology. That ideology in the case of NPR, is just a status quo liberal ideology so mainstream that it appears invisible.
I do agree that FAIR could be less biased in their analytical perspective though, sometimes.
If we restrict to rifles (about 5% of homicides where a firearm is used) and broaden to all blunt instruments, we get the same ballpark, not a clear win for the rifles. I can't find anything that calls out hammers specifically, but lumped in a category with baseball bats and tire irons and golf clubs and 2x4s and wrenches and candlesticks and lead pipes, I'd be amazed to find hammers dominating.
It is certainly a perfectly reasonable position to assert that the number of homicides which used a rifle are low enough that a focus on reducing them is a misguided assignment of priority, even before discussion of particular mechanisms. This happens to be a position I hold.
But you don't get to make a point by making false (and false by an order of magnitude) statements.
In 2002, 451 people were killed and ~2,300 injured in 134 separate terrorist attacks in Israel. From a population of about 7.7 million people.
If that were the U.S., that would be 18,300 deaths annually and close to 95,000 people injured.
Point is, whilst terrorism is designed to affect people psychologically more than the physical effects, you can't simply ignore it. A balanced response is needed and surely that includes some element of intelligence gathering on who is causing these attacks. Where to draw the line is a valid question, but to reject terrorism completely as irrelevant is stupid. People who discuss these issues in terms of absolutes ("we should never give up any freedom") are rarely considering the reality of the situation.
The reason I find this so disturbing is it is exactly the wrong way of approaching the situation. If we say terroism only killed X people so it isn't worth sacrificing these rights, we are saying there is some level of deaths that these rights are worth scarificing for. Personally I feel the balance between privacy and security is one that should be figured out beforehand and not changed in response to events, otherwise people who want to abuse such power will always have an incentive to play up and exagerate how much danger we are in. The rights we have when 1 person dies from terrorism should be the same as when 20,000 people die. But I don't believe that should be the right for every person to keep everything they do private. That just isn't living in reality.
Terrorist is a real term with a globally liquid definition. It makes it very difficult to discuss the topic with any sort of rational discourse.
I've seen so many people labeled as terrorist that never even come close to the "political end" part of the definition. Kids bringing guns to school is not terrorism, but it is a crime, burning crosses in the yards of black families would be.
I don't trust the US or Israel to publish data reflecting acts of actual terrorism, I expect them to bolster their arguments by fabricating this data. Just look at us here in the US. The media and the government have called just about everyone a terrorist that commits a crime and they want to see them treated harshly. I also expect them to use these bolstered numbers to prop-up organizational infrastructure like the NSA and the military-industrial complex.
It's practically impossible to use "terrorism" statistics in any real way for any argument without strict definition of what a terrorist is as put forth by the person making the argument. We can compare gun deaths, we can compare auto deaths, we can compare bathtub falls, but we can't really compare any of that to terrorism statistics.
There are 208 deaths on that list for 2002 from 33 separate suicide bombings. Do you think that is fabricated? Do you think those numbers are bolstered? If that number of people were proportionally killed in the U.S. each year (~8,000) would my point still stand?
but we can't really compare any of that to terrorism statistics.
I agree. That was my point with the 1 or 20,000 deaths comment. But assuming we can compare the numbers, like the author claimed, it still isn't valid. If we can't compare the numbers, the point isn't valid in the first place.
Maybe. We don't know that. We would have to know beyond any doubt how this information is being used. I can imagine it being a tool to play foreign politics; even affects places like Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, where people do die.
> nobody has been killed as a result of NSA surveillance of Americans' communication
Maybe. But its also ironic that being US citizen and living on US soil you are supposed to be protected by the law of the land. If they vacuum everything for 10 years or so, imagine how many people could be found not guilty of robbery, homicides, drug dealing, etc, only if their attorneys would have access to their clients' NSA files. Who knows? Maybe even there is someone recently executed in this country that their NSA chart would have proven they were innocent. That may be over-stretch but you believe noone innocent is doing a lifetime right now because they couldn't prove that they have not been where prosecution claims they were (don't get me even started on "innocent until proven guilty").
It's ironic to talk about chilling effects in the context of NSA surveillance while in the same breath espousing a theory of terrorism that ignores the chilling effects of terrorist acts.
I don't know if "chilling effects" is the right phrase to use either about terrorism or surveillance, or means the same thing in the two cases. The former is about fear. The latter is about encroachment on liberty, or something like that.
Consider the media and government complicity in the south korean myth of "fan death"
On contrast, the chilling effect of surveillance could be physical, not immediately, granted, but potentially large in the long run.