Earlier today, I linked to a Borat-backlash piece in which the “journalist” was whining that he couldn’t get any real journalism out of this move. He couldn’t interview Sacha Baron Cohen except in character, and so he determined that he couldn’t report on the movie—meaning that he couldn’t explain to his readers, with solemn quotes from the creator of the character, what the disturbing Kazakh means: about us Americans, about our culture, etc., etc.

Relax, says Hitchens, who takes issue with a New Statesman review which claims that Sacha Baron Cohen is making fun of grotesque Americans in his movie. [emphasis mine] ***

Among the “cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan” is the discovery that Americans are almost pedantic in their hospitality and politesse. At a formal dinner in Birmingham, Ala., the guests discuss Borat while he’s out of the room—filling a bag with ordure in order to bring it back to the table, as it happens—and agree what a nice young American he might make. …

The concept is essentially the same as the imperishable Black Like Me, which really did get people to say what they privately thought and felt. Kazakh Like Me has been a howling success because it has induced the luckless Kazakh government to make solemn disavowals, as if to dispel mistaken “perceptions” about horse-urine cocktails and the obligatory date rape of sisters. It’s too much like Karen Hughes making nice with audiences of unsmiling Saudis, pleadingly reassuring them that the United States is not one long replay of The Running of the Muslim. But it’s that attitude of painfully maintained open-mindedness and multiculturalism that is really being unmasked and satirized by our man from the ’stan.

Yep.

update November 15:This story turns out to have been total bullshit. Today’s New York Timesreports that Albright, Christopher, and Clinton, among others supposedly not on the list, talked to the ISG.

Quite a list:

1. Amb. Zalmay Khalilzad, perhaps the one U.S. official who has addressed the Iraq debacle with some candor and foresight — and certainly the one official history will look kindly upon.

2. John McCain, Chuck Hagel, and John Kerry, three of the U.S. Senate’s most notable veterans of combat. This one is mind blowing.

3. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, two key architects of the war, one a former dean of one of the most prestigious IR schools in the country.

4. Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher. The views of Team Clinton don’t appear very welcome.

Bush1Clinton5. Henry Kissinger, the dean of the foreign-policy establishment.

6. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The former commanders in chief (one of whom actually won a war and flew 58 combat missions in WWII) remain on the sidelines.

7. Fouad Ajami, Shibley Telhami, Bernard Lewis, Ray Takeyh, Kanan Makiya, and other notable scholars on the Middle East. This commission appears as isolated from the academy as the Bush administration is.

Clerics watch as a nuclear-capable Shahab-3 missile, with a range of 1,200 miles, soars into the Iranian sky in military exercises near Qom

Here’s what Bibi has to say:

Netanyahu, leader of the opposition in Israel’s Knesset, said he had been trying for a decade to warn world leaders that Iran represents the greatest threat not just to Israel but also to Europe and America, “but nobody seems to care very strongly.”

Hitler started a war and then tried to develop an atomic bomb, Netanyahu noted, while Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is building nuclear weapons first and then will start a war, he said.

Unlike 1938 and its aftermath, however, the Jewish people will not be the sacrificial lamb this time, Netanyahu declared.

Netanyahu made this speech in Los Angeles, so he’s not just campaigning (though it could be argued that his entire life is one big campaign). I am not a Netanyahu fan, but I appreciate this particular effort. You can watch it here.

He is not alone in his fears. Ron Rosenbaum, whose book I’ve mentioned before, has been talking about the possibility of a “second Holocaust” for years:

Back in 2002 I initiated a major controversy among Jewish writers by daring to mention the possibility of a “second Holocaust”—-the destruction of the State of Israel, most likely through a nuclear exchange. I quoted Iranian mullah Hashemi Rasfanjani declaring that Iran would not be particularly upset to lose 10 or 15 million people in a nuclear exchange with Israel if it resulted in the extermiation of 5 million Jews there and left a billion or more Muslims alive. Bascially he was saying that there was no deterrence. Many didn’t want to face this, think the unthinkable and whined that one shouldn’t say such things aloud, one shouldn’t think so pessimistically, foolishly boasting of the Israeli nuclear deterrent Rasfanjani’s stance made irrelevant. (You can read about this controversy in the anthology of essays on anti-semitism I edited, Those Who Forget the Past).

Alas a Second Holocaust is now virtually Iranian state policy (although their leader denies the first one).

“Something has changed,” Rosenbaum wrote in his introduction, quoting Paul Berman. And: “Don’t look away,” quoting Samuel G. Freedman.

Yes. Let’s don’t look away.

Al Jazeera English is making its debut, featuring Dave Marash as co-anchor:

photo: Tim Dillon, USA Today

I remember Marash from his WCBS-TV days, when he was co-anchor of the 11:00 p.m. broadcast with Rolland Smith. His trademark was the rolled-up-shirtsleeves look (he didn’t wear a suit jacket). From there he went on to ABC and, eventually, the big time: Nightline. And now he’s about to become the American face of Al Jazeera. Whaddaya know about that?

The inevitable expansion of the Arabic satellite channel that has been a conduit for messages from OBL and Al Qaeda into the American market is sure to cause ripples, and Al Jazeera is also aware that it will be under the microscope:

Says AJI producer Kelly Rockwell, who used to work at CBS and ABC News: “We know there’s going to be scrutiny, so we’re making sure we are as balanced as possible. We’ll have such a global audience that we are going to be criticized, so we are going to be very cautious in our delivery. That has been drilled from Day One.”

Whatever. I am wedded to freedom of speech, and I believe that in these grim times (and not only in these grim times), nothing is more important than communication and dialogue. Plus, I’m pro-infotainment (there’s no stopping that speeding train), so I say: bring it on.

At least one media critic floats the idea that American audiences will be getting a much different version of Al Jazeera than what Arab speakers see:

Harvard media analyst Alex Jones says Arabic Al-Jazeera may “have a blood-and-thunder version for the Arab world and something more like the BBC for the West.”

Great! more “impartial” reporting! But maybe Marc Lynch aka Abu Aardvark, whose blog I enjoy reading for its interesting perspective on the Arab media, will keep us posted about the differences.

For his part, Marash says:

“Even if you think about it in the most adversarial way, you want to know your enemy, and a lot of people consider themselves our enemy, so better we should know what’s on their minds than to pretend it isn’t there.”

Here, I have to agree with him—even if he’s only trying to get us to watch.
Particularly in wartime, and particularly with the kind of enemy we face, it is critical to know your enemy. Especially an enemy that knows us so well.

Beyond that, though, this will be a long-overdue opportunity for American pols and government officials and policy wonks and other talking heads to engage with Al Jazeera, and thus with a worldwide Muslim audience. That is so necessary to our public-diplomacy efforts.

And it would do wonders for our counter-propaganda efforts too. Remember Wafa Sultan’s appearance on Al Jazeera?

Just think of the possibilities!

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller is worried about the long arm of government reaching into the realm of journalism—rightly so: she spent 85 days in jail on principle (so she said, and so, I believe, she did).

Miller said “no one can deny lives haven’t changed since 9/11″ and that national security is a concern, but the federal government has used that fear to justify eavesdropping on phone conversations and tapping into e-mails without warrants and classifying information that once was available to the public.

“More than 15 million documents were classified last year,” she said, explaining that translates into 125 documents a minute. “It’s intimidation by classification.”

And American citizens are paying for it, she said, to the tune of $7.2 billion in fiscal year 2004.

How can an electorate be free and informed if it is denied information? Miller asked. Without a free press, such stories as the torture of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, warrantless wiretapping and CIA prisons in Eastern Europe wouldn’t have been reported, she said.

She also worries—rightly so—that other reporters and their news organizations aren’t quite as upstanding:

Miller said the American media, however, give the federal government reason to doubt its motives and competence each time it is discovered that an article is plagiarized or gossip is reported as fact.

True enough, as far as it goes. So she goes further—and fingers not the honchos at her former paper, who published national-security information that is useful to America’s enemies, but bloggers:

The blurring of entertainment and news and the relaxing of journalistic standards can be seen in online bloggers who are critical of people without giving them an opportunity to respond or who don’t post corrections when they learn that what they have posted is wrong, she said.

“I’m worried about bloggers,” she said. “(A post) starts as a rumor and within 24 hours it’s repeated as fact.”

Ms. Miller, meet the 21st century. And while you’re at it, remember that your old friend Norman Mailer coined exactly the word to describe this phenomenon (in 1973): factoid.

Factoid can refer to a spurious (unverified, incorrect, or invented) “fact” intended to create or prolong public exposure or to manipulate public opinion. It appears in the Oxford English Dictionary ^[1] as “something which becomes accepted as fact, although it may not be true”, namely a speculation or an assumption, The term was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe.^[2] Mailer described a factoid as “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper”, and created the word by combining the word “fact” and the ending “-oid” to mean “like a fact”.^[3]

Few would have anticipated that spreading factoids (i.e.—lies) would become the primary means of entertaining the public during grim times, but there you have it.

Deal with it.

Marie Claire decided to illustrate, via PhotoShop, a feature about ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas. (That’s her head attached to a picture of someone else.)

Drudge implies this is scandalous.

Vargas is said to be “disapppointed” at the decision of Marie Claire’s editors:

“Elizabeth was more than happy to sit for the interview but was disturbed that the magazine would set aside basic journalistic standards to photoshop her head onto a fake image. Vargas did joke that her real baby is cuter, that she is proud to breastfeed her newborn but wouldn’t do it at the anchor desk and that she wouldn’t be caught dead in that ugly gold blouse!”

I say she’s more happy about the attention than she is disturbed about the dumb “illustration.”

Still, best keep an eye on those magazines. Fauxtography isn’t just for Hezbollah propagandists anymore.

Joel Stein of the L.A. Times is annoyed because he didn’t get to be a real journalist while writing a story about the movie Borat, and he thinks every journalist who interviewed Sacha Baron Cohen in character took the easy way out.

But because comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s wild-and-crazy-foreigner-guy character is so amusing, and news is so boring, the “Today” show, Fox News, the Guardian, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Entertainment Weekly, Premiere and most local newspapers are willing to pretend that Borat is a real Kazakh reporter who put out a real documentary.   …

I wrote a three-page story about “Borat” for Time magazine, and my editors chose not to have me talk to Cohen in character. Instead, I asked the director and producer about what “Borat’s” candid camera says about Americans and whether the film is offensive to Jews, Gypsies or Kazakhs. Or to people who prefer not to see movies with human feces in bags.

Stein is upset because his important questions for Cohen didn’t get answered [emphasis mine]:

But the most important question in “Borat” — the one that makes it a cultural turning point — is about whether the act of tricking unsuspecting victims and sharing it with millions of people is cruel or funny. If privacy is a 20th century holdover, do we all deserve to have our inner nature outed by Colbert or “Jackass” or YouTube? The answer to that question about comedy — more than music, MySpace or Paris Hilton — is what cleaves the reality TV generation from their parents. And it’s too bad that Cohen, a Cambridge-educated, traditional, observant Jew, isn’t answering it.

Cohen isn’t answering the question?

Damn right he isn’t answering the question! It’s for him to perform and you, Mr. Stein—and the rest of us—to figure out. That’s why they call it performance art.