Entries Tagged 'video' ↓

Back when we all had a sense of humor about the buffoon George Bush, we greeted that malapropism with the appropriate skepticism.It turns out, though, that PBS has found a way to do just that—increasing its viewership for Frontline, its superb documentary series,*** by streaming it on the Web:

Executives at “Frontline” do not yet know how many people watched their recent four-and-a-half hour documentary, “Bush’s War,” because of PBS’s complicated Nielsen ratings.Online, however, “Bush’s War,” which was produced for the fifth anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq, has set a record, with more than 1.5 million views of all or part of the program, which was streamed in 26 segments.“Frontline” has streamed most of its documentaries free since 2002 (www.pbs.org/frontline), part of an effort to reach younger audiences than typically tune in to PBS. The online viewing to date of “Bush’s War,” which was broadcast in two parts on March 24 and 25, is an estimated “10 times the traffic of a normal show for us,” said Sam Bailey, the program’s director of new media and technology. Viewers are also sticking around much longer than they usually do on the site, typically for 7 to 10 minutes.

Who says that quality doesn’t sell?Think again.————–*** I have long been a devotee of Frontline. I’m on record as saying that I wish all hard-news on TV were done with the depth of Frontline documentaries. But of course I know it can’t and won’t happen.Still: kudos! serious television lives!

They just won’t reject Rudy, goddammit. (He may play the Theme Song from 9/11 everywhere he goes, but they don’t know him like we know him, says New York magazine.)

Enter the Politico: Fuggedabout Rudy! He’ just too liberal for you!

Giuliani-Appointed Judges Tend to Lean to the Left

When Rudy Giuliani faces Republicans concerned about his support of gay rights and legal abortion, he reassures them that he is a conservative on the decisions that matter most.

“I would want judges who are strict constructionists because I am,” he told South Carolina Republicans last month. “Those are the kinds of justices I would appoint — Scalia, Alito and Roberts.”

But most of Giuliani’s judicial appointments during his eight years as mayor of New York were hardly in the model of Chief Justice John Roberts or Samuel Alito — much less aggressive conservatives in the mold of Antonin Scalia.

A Politico review of the 75 judges Giuliani appointed to three of New York state’s lower courts found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than 8 to 1.

Scared yet? Well, McCain just announced. Sorta. In the “newly usual way” (according to the NYT’s Adam Nagourney): on Letterman.

How old school (hat tip: BuzzMachine).

Douglas Farah reports on an uptick in media offerings from al Qaeda, which, like everyone else these days, has to struggle to remain relevant in a merciless 24/7 media environment and with an audience that has the attention span of a flea:

This past week has been interesting for the sudden re-emergence of the high-profile al Qaeda/salafist propaganda machine, showing a broad range of Islamist actions to demonstrate the movement is alive and well, and triumph is inevitable.

We get the publishing [of] a slick web zine, the “Voice of Jihad,” after a two-year hiatus, including directions from Osama bin Laden to attack oil facilities; a Zawahiri interview blasting Bush for fairly current events; the release of videos by al Qaeda in Afghanistan, supposedly showing attacks on Coalition forces; and, as Evan Kohlmann finds new video releases by Al Qaeda in Iraq, including the biographies of foreign troops killed there.

As Farah notes, al Qaeda is focused on media. These recent propaganda efforts are impressive compared to previous grainy videos from the group. This speaks to the group’s determination to communicate and spread its message globally. Which it has so far done quite successfully:

Much of what is said in this recent spate is entirely propaganda, but it cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. It shows those who visit the jihadi sites that the Islamist movement is alive and well, capable of delivering messages and combating the enemy on a sustained basis.

Then Farah veers into my favorite topic—message creation.***

Any insurgent group, fighting in an asymmetrical context for the long term, has to develop a narrative to justify itself, comfort its often-beleaguered members and attract new members. …

In this case the narrative is that Islam is on the rise, the West is in retreat, and that Allah has already granted victory to the faithful. All that is lacking are more willing recruits.

And this is where we move into the counterterrorism territory suggested by both anthropologist David Kilcullen and “Enlightenment fundamentalist” Aayan Hirsi Alik, who have both said that potential jihadis must be turned away by appealing alternatives before they sign on to the extremists’ seductive agenda.
Farah writes:

What must be developed is the counter-narrative, one that resonates, explains the weaknesses and defeats, and can help drive away new recruits.

It is hard, but not impossible. Multiple insurgencies have faced, and suffered from, effective counter-narratives that were culturally appropriate and accessible to the right population.

It is not clear we have a counter-narrative, in part because we still do not agree 1) one who the enemy is and 2) that we really are in a war.

The last point is depressing but true. I want to know more about the counter-narratives Farah is talking about. And I wish I could see evidence that others were paying attention to this subject, of paramount importance.

Meanwhile, tomorrow’s NYTimes leads with a story that says reports of al Qaeda’s death have been greatly exaggerated:

Senior leaders of Al Qaeda operating from Pakistan have re-established significant control over their once battered worldwide terror network and over the past year have set up a band of training camps in the tribal regions near the Afghan border, according to American intelligence and counterterrorism officials.

American officials said there was mounting evidence that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, had been steadily building an operations hub in the mountainous Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan. Until recently, the Bush administration had described Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri as detached from their followers and cut off from operational control of Al Qaeda.

In light of their recent calls on followers to hit oil installations across the world and to be sure to film their actions, I think it’s safe to say they want to put on a really good show.

——–

*** I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Frank Rich (among many others) is wasting his brain cells developing new crackpot conspiracy theories to explain the behavior of Bush & Co.  Today, for example, he writes:

Let’s not forget that the White House’s stunt of repackaging old, fear-inducing news for public consumption has a long track record. Its reason for doing so is always the same: to distract the public from reality that runs counter to the White House’s political interests.

I wish these brilliant analysts would spend just a fraction of their time deconstructing the other characters populating the world stage—you know, the ones who are causing real trouble for us. We need a guide to understanding their behavior, too.

Channel-surfing, I just came upon the propaganda film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West on Fox.

This is the point at which I start to sound a little wobbly about propaganda. Or, more precisely, counter-propaganda. ‘Cause that’s what it is. A very strong dose.

Blech.

update November 15:Fox denies the story. (via TVNewser) We’ll see.

Via Memeorandum:WorldNet Daily reports that Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, the Fox journalists who were kidnapped in Gaza this past summer and forced to convert to Islam on pain of death, were ransomed:

The terror leader, from the Gaza-based Popular Resistance Committees, said his organization’s share of the money was used to purchase weapons, which he said would be utilized “to hit the Zionists.”

He said he expects the payments for Centanni and Wiig’s freedom will encourage Palestinian groups to carry out further kidnappings.

Officials associated with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party and its security organization, the Preventative Security Services, confirmed to WND money was paid for the release of the Fox News reporters.

The world has moved on, but I haven’t. Along with Jill Carroll’s abduction, I consider this incident—the kidnapping, the photo op for Ismail Haniyeh that accompanied the journalists’ release, and the victims’ total silence about their abductors and the sick situation in Gaza after the fact—to be one of the most shameful things that the American media has been involved in since 9/11. (And I include Fox News in this condemnation.)

Corrupt, agenda-laden news organizations regularly hide the truth from the American people about jihadists and Islamists; in exchange for a good story, they give the same jihadists and Islamists an opportunity to make themselves look like heroes on American television. I wrote about this at length here, and nothing has changed in the interim.

Where’s the election where we can throw our disgraceful media bums out?

For the second time in a month, I am surprised by the official reaction of the United States to international incidents—I don’t know what else to call them—that it did not attempt to control.

On October 8, I wrote about the controversy that had erupted over  so-called “insurgent videos” from Iraq that were available on YouTube and Google Video, which were matched by videos posted from our side of the conflict. I noticed the military’s hands-off approach:

Presumably, the military hopes the videos from our guys will also act as “force multipliers” for our side. It’s part of the information war: we can’t afford for that to be asymmetrical. We need to answer fire with fire. And so the gruesome videos appear, until YouTube or Google deems them offensive.

Now comes the insurgent sniper video showing “insurgents” targeting and hitting U.S. troops that was obtained and aired—endlessly, it seems—by CNN. This second incident has caused a much bigger public controversy, with several outraged congressmen writing to Rumsfeld to demand that the videos be taken off YouTube and GoogleVideo.

No response from Rumsfeld yet, as far as I know. The president, however, is playing it cool:

[Rep. Duncan] Hunter said he suspected that CNN’s hunger for ratings might have factored into the decision to air the video.

In their letter to Rumsfeld, the congressmen recommended that “all CNN reporters presently embedded with U.S. soldiers be removed from their embedded positions immediately.”

White House spokesman Tony Snow declined yesterday to second-guess CNN’s decision.

“Those are editorial judgments, and I’m not going to tell you what you do and don’t run,” Snow said at a White House briefing. “This is a free country.”

He said, however, that the president worries that insurgents are providing such images in an effort to break the will of the American people.

“It’s not going to work,” Snow said.

Snow can afford to play it cool while the hotheads in Congress go way over the top and do Bush’s job for him by demanding that the government censor the Internet. Which of course is completely undemocratic and illiberal, not to mention idiotic. However, one idiocy from the shrill right wing doesn’t need to be matched by an idiocy from the shrill left wing. But guess what?

Jeffrey Dvorkin, formerly the ombudsman for NPR and now executive director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists in Washington, thinks that CNN “did an important journalistic job in reporting this.”  Then he generously

said Hunter and others were free to criticize CNN, a frequent target of conservative media critics. But he noted the timing of the complaints: a few weeks before the midterm elections.

The San Diego Union-Tribune helpfully goes on to explain the context:

In recent months, dozens of graphic, insurgent-made videos showing attacks on U.S. troops have been posted on YouTube and other Internet sites.

YouTube has removed many of the tapes due to complaints from users.

But Dvorkin is utterly misleading in his condemnation, because people are specifically condemning a cable news network—which is, presumably, seen by more viewers than are YouTube videos—for airing what they consider a snuff film. And the Union-Tribune is equally misleading in itsreporting, because it fails to draw the distinction between videos posted on YouTube and video aired in heavy rotation on CNN. Unless CNN now plays second fiddle to YouTube in influence. Which the paper ought to report if that’s what it’s suggesting, because it would be kind of mind-blowing.

The hands-off reaction of our government and military is what interests me most about these stories. I wonder if it’s because they know they can’t control the media war (they can only play it) or because they suspect that condemning CNN—or giving any kind of official reaction—would enhance the effectiveness of this kind of terrorist weapon.