Russian media and the spy story

It looks like the acerbic Yeltsin years were a rare glimmer of press freedom, as Putin's Russia has descended back into authoritarianism:

On Russia's main national state-run television channels, the spy story led broadcasts only on the first day the news broke. The reports, delivered in a neutral manner, focused on official statements from Russia and the U.S. As both the Kremlin and the White House played down any impact from the scandal on relations, it faded from newscasts in Russia. The reports that did run adopted the ironic tone set by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who joked about the cloak-and-dagger nature of the accusations in a meeting with former President Bill Clinton.

"Americans Don't Understand Who the FBI Has Caught," was the July 1 headline in the official Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper on a story about reports in the U.S. that questioned whether the accused spies had obtained any sensitive information.

Meanwhile, the public apparently has a sustained interest for the story, as the WSJ's chart indicates that online searches about the scandal haven't abated since the story broke a week ago. Broadcast TV is by far the most common source of media in Russia, and the government generally doesn't try to censor smaller news outfits and those existing only online who repeat stories (though it does come after their reporters).

Interestingly enough, Russia Today – the government's English-language channel shown abroad – has maintained focus on the story, which seems like an obvious (but effective) way to portray Russian media and society as open:

One Russian state-run network has stayed with the story: Russia Today, the Kremlin's English-language news channel mainly distributed outside Russia. "Ever since the first reports....this has been the top story on RT," Margarita Simonyan, Russia Today's editor-in-chief, said in an email. "More than 250,000 people have watched RT videos about the spy scandal on YouTube," she said.

No comment

The Wikileaks tragedy of the commons?

A German blog has an interview up with Julian Assange of Wikileaks. The focus is the financial aspect of Wikileaks, including its recent "strike" (see here, at least for now) as a plea for cash. One interesting thing mentioned is that the founders are "refugees from China and other places." Also interesting is that at least one of Wikileaks' five core staff members isn't averse to paying sources (hypothetically, of course – they don't even have enough for servers and staff right now):

Actually we would have no problem giving sources cash. We don’t do that, but for me there is no reason why only the lawyers and the journalists should be compensated for their effort. Somebody is taking the risk to do something and this will end up benefiting the public.

Paying sources is frowned upon in old media, but then again, stodgy old newspapers might not be the best companies for budding new media organizations to emulate. New media darling Gawker (which only "inadvertently" commits acts of journalism) has been toying around with paying sources, though it's not clear how that's worked out.

The article also deals heavily with Julian Assange's idea that Wikileaks' information falls prey to a sort of tragedy of the commons – Wikileaks will publish what its believes is an important but complex document, but no organization will spend the time combing through it, since they anticipate that someone else will beat them to it. As a result, according to Assange, nobody will end up writing about it. But if it's clear that no news organization is going to write about it, doesn't that essentially give whichever one decides to read the document de facto exclusivity? Couldn't the NYT, say, just do research for a month and not tell anyone it was doing it, and then release the synthesis all at once?

It just doesn't seem likely to me that there's a huge problem of news organizations demanding exclusivity in order to even bother reading something that's publicly available – I'll bet that in reality, the information just isn't as important as Wikileaks would like to believe. Unless anyone has a better explanation?

Bloated newspaper articles

Michael Kinsley at the Atlantic has an interesting piece online arguing that newspapers are losing relevance and readers because of their increasingly anachronistic style and conventions, which have become sacrosanct in journalism, but which are about as useful as twenty little pillows on a bed. The whole piece is great and worth reading – I especially like the analyses of random NYT/WaPo quotes – but here's what I'm gonna excerpt:

Quotes from outside experts or observers are also a rich source of unnecessary verbiage in newspaper articles. Another New York Times story from the November 8 front page provides a good example here. It’s about how the crackdown on some Wall Street bonuses may have backfired. Executives were forced to take stock instead of cash, but then the stock went up, damn it. This is an “enterprise” story—one the reporter or an editor came up with, not one dictated by events. And the reporter clearly views the information it contains as falling somewhere between ironic and appalling, which seems about right. But it’s not her job to have a view. In fact, it’s her job to not have a view. Even though it’s her story and her judgment, she must find someone else—an expert or an observer—to repeat and endorse her conclusion. These quotes then magically turn an opinionated story into an objective one.

The Daily Mail: Kim Jong-il is bisexual...O RLY??

So, according to the Daily Mail, Kim Jong-il has bisexual tendencies (emphasis mine):

Kim Jong Il has ruled it with absolute authority since 1994. He was born in the Forties, but his exact birthday is asecret [sic]. He wears platform shoes and a teased hairdo and is reputed to have had a string of lovers, both male and female. His hobby is watching old Hollywood movies including Rambo, Friday The 13th and James Bond.

...and yet, I can't find any other mention of that in any other media source. Not only that, but the Dear Leader supposedly overlooking his second son, Kim Jong-chul, as a successor because he was "too effeminate."

In other words: it looks like the Daily Mail is makin' shit up again.

The Telegraph spouts the Chinese government line on Urumqi Uyghurs

To provide a counterpoint to what I wrote earlier today, Peter Foster at the Telegraph is reporting from Urumqi that the Chinese government's story checks out:

There was a presumption among the foreign media - made from afar as correspondents scrambled to get to Urumqi - that most of the 156 victims of Sunday’s riot were Uighurs. The implication being that they had been killed by security forces - another Tiananmen, if you will.

This never quite stacked up, as very few witnesses reported that the police had opened fire. In fact most reported the use of batons, electric prods and tear gas and other non-lethal methods to disperse the riot.

And why, if security forces had been responsible for the bulk of the deaths, would China be facilitating such unprecedented access to hospitals, holding press conferences (planned for later today) and allowing reporters to tour the city.

There are a couple problems I have with what he is saying. First of all, earlier in the piece he talks about how the Chinese government has "corralled the large international media presence in a single hotel," but that doesn't appear to him to be a sign that the government has something to hide.

But more importantly, where is he getting his information? He repeats some Chinese government numbers – "of 274 patients being treated in the People’s hospital 233 were Han" – but he admits that he got them straight from the government and that he hasn't been able to find any "firm details." Could it be – just maybe – that the "unprecedented access to hospitals" is actually the government trying to...I dunno...hide something?!

And why is there no mention of the president of the World Uyghur Congress' accusation that there are over 500 deaths, mostly Uyghurs? Surely Rebiya Kadeer is not a totally unbiased source, but then again, neither is the Chinese government.

Given that the Christian Science Monitor did a whole story on how difficult sources were to find in Urumqi and how residents and scholars absolutely refused to speak to the foreign press, I'd be curious to know what Peter Foster's secret is to reporting on what the CSM believes is unknowable to Westerners at the moment.

Urumqi death toll may be as high as 500, mostly Uyghurs?

Exiled Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer, accused by Beijing of orchestrating this weekend's violence, says she believes the true death toll is more than 500:

Chinese authorities have accused Kadeer of inciting violence between Muslim Uighurs and ethnic Han Chinese, in which at least 156 people have been killed. The riots broke out Sunday in China's Xinjiang region.

Kadeer disputes the number of fatalities, saying she believes at least 500 people have been killed in the riots.

Interestingly, the AP in this article doesn't mention that the 156 figure comes from the Chinese government, despite mentioning Kadeer's opinion of the purported death toll.

Previous Urumqi riots coverage here, here, and here.

Rebiya Kadeer has a pretty interesting story herself, summarized in this Times of India article:

Kadeer has emerged as a somewhat unlikely foe of China's government. In the 1980s and '90s, she became a symbol of the prosperity that China's newly launched market reforms were creating after decades of Communist poverty. The entrepreneurial mother of 11 built up a successful trading company and was named to a prestigious government advisory body. Government officials often took visitors to the department store she founded in Urumqi to show that Uighurs were also getting rich.

Also, in following with my investigation of who exactly has been the victim of the violence (the Chinese government claims it's mostly innocent Han Chinese, the Uyghurs claim it's their people), that same Times of India article gives Kadeer's opinion:

She said she and her organizations mourn the loss of life of both Uighurs and Han Chinese, but she estimated that more than 90 percent of those killed have been Uighurs.

Anti-Uyghur propaganda from Xinhua

Xinhua, the official Chinese press agency, has a hilarious piece of propaganda up today. In response to the demonstration by Uyghurs in Urumqi that allegedly turned lethal (which I've covered in two posts), Xinhua has some statements supposedly by Uyghurs involved in the violent brawl between Uyghurs and Han Chinese that sparked the protests this weekend in Urumqi. The whole article is pretty funny, but here are some highlights:

"The rioters used our injuries as an excuse for their violence," said Atigul Turdi, 24, who was injured when she was running out of the scene of the fight on June 26 in Xuri toy factory in Shaoguan City, Guangdong. "I firmly opposed the violence in the name of taking revenge for us." [...]

"I believe the government will handle the brawl appropriately," Turdi said. "Why did the rioters destroy our beautiful and peaceful Xinjiang region in such cruel manners?" [...]

Turdi said she would stay in Guangdong to work after recovery. As one of the first workers to arrive at Xuri factory from Shufu County of Xinjiang on May 1 [a big Chinese holiday], she missed the happy days to work with her colleagues harmoniously. [...]

"They have damaged my health and ruined my prospect to find a good job. I have no idea why the rioters claim to be pursuing happiness for us."

This part, though, is the scariest. The Chinese have worked very hard in cultivating the image of Uyghurs as Islamic terrorists, in an attempt to get the US to buy into their oppression of this Muslim people. It's not unlike what Putin did with the Chechens and the Uzbeks did with the Adijan massacre – both quite successfully.

Xinjiang Communist Party of China (CPC) chief Wang Lequan said Monday the riot in Urumqi revealed the violent and terrorist nature of the separatist World Uyghur Congress leader Rebiya Kadeer.

"The riot has destroyed the spiritual support with which the terrorist, separatist and extremist forces cheated the people to participate in the so-called 'Jihad'," Wang said. "The incident also revealed Rebiya's nature of fake human rights, fake democracy, true violence and true terrorism."

Fortunately for the Uyghurs, the West does not appear to be inclined to believe China's accusations of homegrown terrorism among its ethnic minorities (at least not any more). When you accuse the Dalai Lama of suicide bombings, you kind of lose your credibility.

Urumqi update – death toll and media reporting

Yesterday (and throughout the day today) I posted about the unrest in Urumqi, the capital of the Uyghur region of China known as Xinjiang. Since then I've been very interested in the death toll, and the Western media's reporting of it. The Chinese state media continues to claim that over 100 have been killed (156 is the latest figure), although it hasn't specified how many of those were rioters, how many were the victims of rioters, and how many were police. The NYT article says that an American living in Urumqi saw the violence but saw no signs of deaths, and it does seem a bit odd that a protest involving only about 1000 protesters would result in over 100 deaths.

Despite these incongruities, the Western media has generally reported the figure without much qualification, and it figures prominently in headlines and subheads about the event. The Times article does a passable job, reporting the number along with its source (the Chinese government), but doesn't directly address the fact that there isn't much evidence that that many people actually died, and doesn't really discuss who died. The Guardian is completely uncritical, and reports the number as straight fact without even mentioning the source, nevermind that the source has obvious prejudices. The BBC is a little better, reporting the figure uncritically but at least mentioning that it's unclear who died.

The Christian Science Monitor gets the award for most candid coverage, admitting the difficulty in reporting facts right in the headline: "Sources in Urumqi? They’re (very) hard to come by." They also accurately portray the difficulty in teasing out who were the victims and who were the aggressors:

The key question is: Who died? Muslim Uighur demonstrators, cut down by the police, as Uighur exile groups claim? Or innocent Han Chinese bystanders, butchered by a mob of Uighurs, as the government-owned media are making out?

I should mention that the Christian Science Monitor ceased publication of its print edition a couple of months ago, and is now a web-only publication (with the exception of a weekend magazine, I believe). Just keep that in mind when someone tries to tell you that the death of the printed newspaper will spell the end of foreign reporting.

The Seattle PI doesn't seem that dead to me

My work this summer involves an hour or two of scouring the internet for energy-related news articles, and once or twice a week I ask myself the question: was it the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that ceased print publication in March? I had the feeling that it was, but it seemed odd that I was still finding so much news from them – certainly more so than still-printing big city secondary papers papers like the New York Post and the Daily News, and even more than the papers of record in large cities in, say, Texas. I understand that a lot of people lost their jobs and local coverage may have suffered, but at least they cover national news well enough for me to decide that an article or two each week covered whatever energy topic better than any others.

Only a nihilist would oppose a subsidized press

"Only a nihilist would consider it sufficient to rely on profit-seeking commercial interests or philanthropy to educate our youth or defend the nation from attack." — The Nation on news subsidies.

The NYT can't tell socialism from capitalism

The NYT ran an article the other day about the supposed evils of water privatization in Chile, replete with all sorts of boilerplate platitudes against capitalism (“[the] market can regulate for more economic efficiency, but not for more social-economic efficiency”), and it's pretty emblematic of the lazy way in which the Times throws around the words "free market."

The article focuses on a town called Quillagua, which is (apparently) the driest town in the world – which makes you wonder, maybe humans shouldn't actually be living there in the first place?

But anyway, the bizarre thing about the town's history is that there's really not much in it that could be justifiably pinned on the free market. Here're some bits that directly relate to Quillagua:

That prosperity first began to ebb in 1987, when the military government reduced the water to the town by more than two-thirds, said Raul Molina, a geographer at the University of Chile. But the big blows came in 1997 and 2000, when two episodes of contamination ruined the river for crop irrigation or livestock during the critical summer months.

An initial study by a professor concluded that the 1997 contamination had probably come from a copper mine run by Codelco, the state mining giant. The Chilean government then hired German experts, who said the contamination had a natural origin.

Chile’s regional Agriculture and Livestock Service, part of the Ministry of Agriculture, refuted those findings in 2000, saying in a report that people, not nature, were responsible. Heavy metals and other substances associated with mineral processing were found that killed off the river’s shrimp and made the water undrinkable for livestock. (Drinking water for residents had been transported in for decades.)

Codelco, the world’s largest copper miner, rejects any responsibility. Pablo Orozco, a company spokesman, said that the river water had been bad for years, and that heavy rains around the time of the contamination episodes had briefly swelled it, sweeping sediments and other substances into the water.

First of all, the fact that a "military government reduced the water to the town" seems to me like an argument against public stewardship of water, not for. And then there's the doozy about "the state mining giant," which, in addition to being an offender in Chile, is a global giant, presumably doing similar things across the world. Which leaves me wondering why in the hell the Times thinks that (according to the article's title) "Chilean Town Withers in Free Market for Water." Am I missing something, or did the Times just characterize a military government and a state mining company as the free market?!

Unions and total internet privacy, or a newspaper - take your pick

Apparently you can either have unionized labor or a newspaper, but you can't have both. The NYT reports:

No one knows which will be the first big city without a large paper, but there are candidates all across the country. The Hearst Corporation, which owns The Post-Intelligencer, has also threatened to close The San Francisco Chronicle, which lost more than $1 million a week last year, unless it can wring significant savings from the operation.

In a tentative deal reached Tuesday night, the California Media Workers Guild agreed to less vacation time, longer workweeks and more flexibility for The Chronicle to make layoffs without regard to seniority. Union officials say they have been told to expect the elimination of at least 150 guild jobs, almost one-third of the total, and management is still trying to negotiate concessions from the Teamsters union.

Advance Publications said last fall that it might shut down The Star-Ledger, the dominant paper in New Jersey, but a set of cutbacks and union concessions kept the paper alive in much-downsized form.

With all the hand-wringing on the left about the demise of journalism and the abhorrent suggestion that the government subsidize the news, it's amazing that I haven't heard once the suggestion that perhaps newspapers ought to be immune from laws compelling employers to accept unionized employees any more than a free market in labor would demand. In that ridiculous HuffPo piece by Monroe Price, he digs so deep that he suggests that "[making] subscribing to a newspaper tax-deductible" is a serious way to get people to abandon free online media.

Also: it's funny that none of these people bemoaning the death of the media don't see the connection between targeted advertising initiatives like this one by Google and the continued health of online media, which relies heavily on ad revenue. It's an uncomfortable fact for those who like the idea of the internet as a one-way street, but the truth is: what's good for advertisers is good for consumers, in that without the ad revenues, there's nothing to consume.

The Nation's mass transit hypocrisy

I was heartened to see an article about the need for mass transit in the pages of The Nation, though I was severely disappointed by the magazine's own hypocrisy and historical blindness. The article is in all ways a standard left-liberal screed against the car and for mass transit, which is a topic close to my heart, though I'd prefer a more libertarian approach to returning America to its mass transit roots as opposed to the publicly-funded version that The Nation advocates.

The first bit of historical blindness comes at the end of the second paragraph, when The Nation argues for government investment in mass transit on the grounds that it will "strengthen labor, providing a larger base of unionized construction and maintenance jobs." But don't they realize that the demands of organized labor were one of the straws that broke the privately-owned mass transit camel's back during the first half of the twentieth century? Joseph Ragen wrote an excellent essay about how unions in San Francisco demanded that mass transit companies employ two workers per streetcar instead of one, codifying their wishes through a series of legislative acts and even a referendum. Saddled with these additional costs, the streetcar companies could not make a profit, and eventually the lines were paved over to make way for the automobile. Mass transit companies, whether publicly- or privately-owned, cannot shoulder the burden of paying above-market wages and still hope to pose any serious threat to the automobile's dominance.

The second, and perhaps more egregious error, comes a little later, when The Nation lays the blame on every group but itself for the deteriorating state of mass transit in America:

Nonetheless, smart growth and transportation activists still have high hopes that the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress will revitalize mass transit. But institutional stumbling blocks--including generations of federal policy favoring roads and cars; pressure from fiscal conservatives; and the power of auto, oil and highway construction lobbies--may cause them to miss this opportunity.

Smart growth, though not a libertarian movement, has a distinctly libertarian issue at its core: reversing the mandatory low density zoning and parking regulations that afflict almost every city, town, and village in America. But who started the movement for zoning and low-density planning in the first place? Progressives, a group which The Nation fancies itself a member of.

And in fact, a search of The Nation's archives reveals that my suspicions were correct: the magazine was, sure enough, among those who were calling for a de-densification of America, and railing against the inefficiencies of mass transit. From the April 24 issue published in 1920, there's an article entitled "The Lack of Houses: Remedies" in which the author, Arthur Gleason, lays out his policy prescriptions for dealing with what he considered to be a dearth of housing in America. Regarding zoning (which at the time almost always meant separating homes from jobs and decreasing density – anathema to the New Urbanist call for mixed uses and density), Gleason was wholeheartedly in favor of it:

Zoning regulates and limits the height and bulk of buildings, and regulates and determines the area of courts, yards, and other open spaces. It divides the city into districts. It regulates and restricts the location of trades and industries and the location of buildings. It conserves property values, directs building development, is a security against nuissance, a guarantee of stability, and an attraction to capital.

Not only did The Nation circa 1920 abhor density, but it also treated mass transit with disdain, writing that "[s]ubways make a slum out of a suburb." This is typical of Progressives of the era, who saw mass transit as capitalistic and backwards. There was also a tinge of racism to the attitude, as the "slum" was populated largely by Polish, Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants, while the "suburb" contained more acceptable non-immigrant Americans.

The Nation pays lip-service to America's mass transit-laden past, writing that "it predates the automobile," but then conveniently forgets the reasons that mass transit in America ceased to exist. And that's convenient, because the reasons – almost all driven by government intervention against streetcars, subways, and density – were once causes that The Nation championed.

Brits have no love for liberal ex-KGB Russian oligarch

I'm a firm believer in the idea that the neo-KGB and the Russian state have extended their tentacles farther than most people realize (*cough*al-Qaeda*cough*), but the recent outrage in Britain over the Russian oligarch Aleksandr Lebedev's purchase of the Evening Standard is pretty ridiculous in light of his history with media companies. Along with Gorbachev, Lebedev owns 49% of the dissident Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, the last bastion of oppositional print media in an increasingly authoritarian Russia. His company has been a vociferous critic of the Putin administration – at least four of its journalists have been assassinated for their work, and the rest are fearful.

Despite Lebedev's sponsorship of Russia's last remaining major print source of critical news and analysis, Britain's xenophones will not be convinced. Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, prominent media figure at the Sunday Telegraph, can't be bothered to look past Lebedev's KGB pedigree, and thinks "it's one more example that we are no more a serious nation that we allow a serious paper to be taken over in our capital by a Russian oligarch."

Fortunately, not all in the British press have an instinctual repulsion to Lebedev – Luke Harding of the Guardian wrote fondly about Lebedev's sophistication and distinct lack of the typical oligarchical pretensions, as well as less superficial things like his anti-authoritarian streak. But I think that such things border on hagiography, as they ignore an obvious point of contention: the source of Lebedev's wealth. I don't know much specifically about Lebedev, but given what I do know (he was a KGB agent who became very rich in the Great Russian Plunder of the 1990s), it's likely that he's done some things that we in the West would consider outright theft – there was simply no other way to earn the money that he did otherwise.

But it's easy for us to sit hear and judge, when the entire Soviet state was for the taking, and ultimately I think he's probably one of the more honest and liberal of the oligarchs. He hasn't made peace with Putin, risking the fate of fellow politically-motivated über-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and has continued to bankroll the leading voice of Russia's liberal opposition. It's just sad to see that even in Britain, with its open press and history of being the setting of Russian political dramas, people are ignorant enough about the place to insinuate that Aleksandr Lebedev might still be sympathetic to Russia. On the other hand, it's important not to downplay the oligarchs' crimes, while always keeping in mind the institutional incentives that allowed the oligarchs to rise and led to the backlash that has resulted in the creeping re-nationalization of the Russian state.

Privacy and targeted advertising in the age of newspaper bankruptcies

Megan McArdle has an interesting post on the future of the media where she brings up what I think are two very important points.

First (and probably most importantly), she notes the reason why the Internet advertising isn't much more targeted than print advertising:

In theory, the web allows heretofore undreamt of targeting ability. In practice, privacy concerns and fear of regulation have held it back.

This is a very important point about privacy that is often missed in media coverage of privacy legislation and supposed privacy breaches (see: Beacon).

And secondly there's this:

And Felix is right on when he points out that for a long, long time, articles on swinging into spring with patent leather have been subsidizing coverage of less-popular-yet-more-vital topics like foreign policy and the Department of Agriculture. The web is rapidly disaggregating the readers, and hence the subsidy. And that's a big problem for society. One for which so far, no one has proposed any very satisfactory solution.

This answer should be obvious: readers of these "high brow" stories are also wealthier readers, and thus are theoretically worth more to advertisers. Of course, only if the paper (and its advertisers) know where these people live and a little bit more about their preferences can they actually monetize these hits.

So basically, it all boils down to the government giving up its job as privacy monitor, and trusting that its citizens can make appropriate choices about who they give what information. Backlashes against the most egregious offenses ("Your friend Jake just bought X – would you like to purchase this too?") would weed out the obviously undesirable advertising, whereas tacit acceptance would allow the non-offensive type ("Some of your friends have bought X – would you like to purchase this too?") to fund newspapers and other online content.

Not to mention that consumers would likely be pleased to see advertising for things they'd actually buy – what's more annoying and useless than watching ads for things you don't want?

Funny foreign press about Obama's coronation

Not that I looked very hard, but here are two headlines on foreign newspapers' websites about the Obama victory.

Ségolène Royal : "J'ai inspiré Obama et ses équipes nous ont copiés from lemonde.fr; the headline on the (East Coast) evening of January 19.

Translation: "Ségolène Royal: I inspired Obama and his team copied us"

Ségolène Royal was the losing socialist candidate in the 2007 French presidential election, in case you forgot. Here's an excerpt from the first paragraph:

Il a envoyé une équipe à Paris étudier son site Désir d'avenir. "Chez nous ils ont enregistré les idées de 'gagnant-gagnant', de 'citoyen-expert'" Ensuite, M. Obama a adapté sa "démocratie participative" à la mode américaine, "fort différente de l'européenne". Aux Etats-Unis, tout n'est que "communautés" – ethniques, religieuses, culturelles, urbaines, même les quartiers d'habitations s'intitulent "communities". En Europe, on parlerait de collectivités, de mouvements, d'associations, de réseaux. Mais l'idée, dit-elle, lundi 19 janvier, à Washington, est la même : refonder la manière de faire de la politique, la relation entre les élites et le peuple.

My very liberal/bad translation: Barack Obama sent a team to Paris to study Ségolène Royal's campaign site Désir d'avenirs. "When he was here they picked up the ideas of "win-win" and "citizen expert" (???). Then, Obama adapted her "participative democracy" to suit American audiences, "very differently from the European model." In the United States, it's all about "communities" – ethnic, religious, cultural, urban – they even have neighborhoods with "community" in their names. In Europe, we would talk about collectives, movements, associations, and networks. But the idea, Ségolène says on the eve of inauguration in Washington, is the same: to remake politics, and to change the relations between the elites and the common people.

By the way, I think the "citoyen-expert" refers to a sort of Joe the Plumber ethic of deferring to the "peuple," which is a word that (I think?) connotes a sort of populism. This is a great example, though, of typical French bullshit.

Barack Obama a stat o oră în Bucureşti / Noul preşedinte al SUA, care s-a declarat marţi, după jurământ, prieten al tuturor naţiunilor, a stat în Bucureşti o oră, în 2005, când era doar senator de Illinois.

Translation: Barack Obama spent an hour in Bucharest / The new US president, who declared himself on Tuesday, according to his oath, to be a friend of all nations, spent an hour in Bucharest in 2005, when he was just a US senator from Illinois.

This was the most prominent headline at cotidianul.ro, a Romanian newspaper. I probably don't appreciate it enough, but the Romanian media has always struck me as really bad and unprofessional.

Serious journalism: unprofitable, but sustained by the free market

Fun fact about "serious" news magazines in the United States: few of them even pretend to make any profit, and yet all of them are private, free market creations. This applies across the political spectrum, from Rupert Murdoch's neoconservative $1 million-a-year charity project The Weekly Standard to the hard left's bastion The Nation, which is supported by donations has never really made any money in its 140+ year history. Ditto with The National Review and The New Republic. Reason, both the magazine and the foundation, along with a huge swath of the libertarian-oriented intellectual industry, is supported by the über-sugar daddy Koch Family Foundations (aside from the blatant and unhelpful left-wing bias of Source Watch, it is pretty cool). But those magazines are either officially or de facto non-profits – what about those bought with the intention of profitability? Not much success there either – The Atlantic is still unprofitable despite its enviable circulation numbers, and The New Yorker just attained mild profitability after over two decades of losses incurred by the Newhouse family. And The New Yorker's profit is likely due to cross-subsidization by the magazine's cartoon and poster business.

Hamas' war crimes go unreported

Noah Pollak at Commentary says it best:

Allow me to propose a metric for evaluating whether a journalist is behaving responsibly or not: If he reports that Israel bombed a UN school and killed 30 civilians, he is irresponsible. If he reports that Hamas used a UN school as a weapons cache and base of operations for launching mortars at the IDF, and the IDF’s return fire killed the Hamas cell along, tragically, with a yet-unspecified number of civilians, then he is behaving responsibly. If he wishes to be particularly scrupulous, he might additionally note that Hamas had rigged the school with explosives which detonated after the IDF took out the mortar team, killing a large additional number of civilians. And he might add that you can go to the IDF’s Youtube channel to view footage from 2007 of Hamas using the very same school as a mortar-launching base.

HT: Michael Totten.

It takes two to tango/besiege Gaza

Anshel Pfeffer has a take on the Gaza "siege" which, embarrassingly enough, I never considered: Israel cannot unilaterally impose a siege on the Gaza Strip, as it shares a land border with Egypt as well as with Israel.

In all the talk of the siege, blockade and humanitarian disaster of Gaza, one small inconvenient detail almost always goes unmentioned. Gaza has a second border in addition to the one with Israel: a small but potentially useful border with its Arab sister, Egypt. [...]

A well-regulated and secure crossing at Rafah could have solved most of the current problems. It could have let through normal food and medical supplies for the Palestinians, allowed them travel and made a mockery of the claims that Israel and its allies have turned the Strip into a gigantic prison.

But despite signing the Philadelphi Agreement that allowed it to station many more troops in the demilitarised Sinai peninsula, and receiving European assistance to control the border-crossing, Egypt has failed to police it. Instead it sealed the border and forced back Palestinians who tried to break through. This was also a misguided policy on the part of Israel, which urged and supported the Egyptian blockade.