-Caveat Lector- >From San Francisco Bay Guardian www.sfbg.com Truth be told? Are e-mail dispatches from Kosovo compromising the news media's coverage of the war in Yugoslavia? By Brooke Shelby Biggs Big surprise: the mainstream media is screwing up its coverage of the war in Kosovo. In all likelihood what you're probably seeing on your daily newspaper's front page is the strict NATO/U.S. Defense Department party line. That isn't news. It's propaganda. More surprising, though, is the eagerness with which the "alternative press" online is acting as a mouthpiece for "the other side" in the matter: Serbian nationals. We're confronted, often on a daily basis, with voices from within the battle zone "exposing" NATO atrocities against Serbs and debunking reports of ethnic cleansing. When it comes right down to it, these self-appointed Serbian mouthpieces are themselves simply parroting another source of political propaganda, only this time it's Slobodan Milosevic's regime. Even when independent Serb citizens discuss the subject, it's clear they've been influenced by the incessant propagandizing and lack of real information presented by Yugoslavia's state-run media. Online media is drawing the traditional media into the unsettling arena of "he said, she said" as news. There are two factors at work here: the media's penchant for simplifying everything into good guy vs. bad guy, and the paucity of independent journalists in Yugoslavia (most have been expelled or executed). So in place of real reporting, we're offered a flood of unmediated dispatches from nonjournalists often with a personal interest in how the war is fought and how it ends. NPR features the impossibly sympathetic Albanian Kosovar teenager; Salon offers us the self-righteous Serbian citizens (with disclaimer). Wired News publicized the "cyber-monk" of Kosovo. CNN is branding its Kosovo e-mail regurgitation as "In-Depth." This isn't really news, it's hearsay. But because we have no truly reliable sources of news on Kosovo, responsible journalists are looking to the Net to recruit Yugoslavs as amateur correspondents. These people have no ethical mandate to be unbiased any more than the government of Yugoslavia or the U.S. Defense Department does. Journalists clearly hope to uncover some rational, human voice that will make sense of the tragedy in Yugoslavia. We continue to hope that the Internet will be a great tool of the truth rather than a powerful means of disseminating propaganda. But in our search for man-on-the-street analysis, we often further empower the propagandists. We know the reports from NATO, Russia, and Yugoslavia are tainted with misinformation and lies, but we presume the vox populi is independent and objective. Online journalists have fought long and hard to break free of the characterization that we report whatever we hear and throw editorial judgment to the wind. Our critics have said that online news doesn't employ those "gatekeeping" skills critical to good reporting. They claim we tend to mix conjecture and theory with hard news such that it is impossible to tell which is which. We've made it hard on ourselves too: the theory of disintermediation claimed that the Net's purpose was to strip out the middleman (in the case of media, that's often the editor) and create a one-to-one, producer-to-consumer media model. Now we talk about "reintermediation" and call ourselves "filters" rather than "gatekeepers." Still, we have accepted this mantle with the intent to "add value" by weeding out the obtuse and irrelevant and deliver the meaningful and worthwhile. But we fail to do that with these tricky little "straight from the source" features. We remove ourselves journalistically from our duty to analyze and add context to the statements of our sources. We remove ourselves from accountability. And in so doing, we ultimately damage the legitimacy of Internet-borne news. Brooke Shelby Biggs is news editor for the MoJo Wire (Mother Jones magazine online) and a research fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. ILLUSTRATION: CLAUDIA NEWELL return to top | more Net Effects | more Web exclusives | sfbg.com Copyright © 1994-98 San Francisco Bay Guardian. Amazon laughs least Amazon.com wants you to participate in its Web site. But you better figure out what the unwritten rules for doing so are before you do. By Brooke Shelby Biggs Last week I wrote a column describing Amazon.com's customer reviews as an excellent source of amateur humor. Specifically, I referred to several customer reviews of Family Circus cartoonist Bil Keane's book Daddy's Cap Is on Backwards. The reviews were hilarious send-ups of overserious New York Review of Books-style essays, ironically addressing the book's content as deeply culturally significant. Hell, maybe it is. Who am I, or Amazon for that matter, to say? At the very least the spoof reviews were "easter eggs" -- hidden goodies within the site that made users smile. They provided yet another reason to spend half your day surfing Amazon's site. You'd think Amazon would have appreciated the free publicity. Apparently it didn't. It quickly and quietly deleted all customer reviews listed under that title. "When we know a bogus review has been posted, we remove it," Bill Curry, Amazon's director of public relations, told me. One could argue that these reviews were hardly bogus; indeed, in many cases they were more socially insightful and cogent than Keane's books. (Besides, who really needs a review to know whether or not they'd enjoy a Family Circus book?) I asked Curry if that "bogus review" policy was posted anywhere on the site. He directed me to the customer review guidelines, which make no mention whatsoever of the company's policy on fictional or satirical customer reviews. (Or at least they didn't when I spoke with Curry.) In Lev Grossman's Salon article about posing as a reader to post glowing reviews of his own book, he noted with disappointment that it is impossible to do the reverse. He knew this because he had been unable to post a review of a John Updike novel as Updike himself. Updike's close affiliation with Amazon which published his collaborative fiction experiment two years ago is the most obvious explanation for Grossman's failed attempt. Curry was quite happy to tell me that you can't post messages posing as an author. "We have mechanisms in place to prevent it," he said. "Could you explain those 'mechanisms' to me?" I asked. "Nnnnnope." "Why not?" I asked. "We don't want to supply a road map for people so that they can get around it. " I still don't know what the "mechanism" is, but I can tell you this: it doesn't work very well. Despite what Amazon might want you to believe, you can post comments posing as an author without ever having to prove your identity, as evidenced by this "author review" of the deceased Alan Harrington's Immortalist:: The author, Alan Harrington [EMAIL PROTECTED] , March 11, 1999 The Immortalist 30 years later This was written 30 years ago when I was much younger. It's about a future utopia in which death has been conquered by technology. As we approach the millennium, that concept doesn't seem so far out anymore. I hope you enjoy my book. Still, it's clear that Amazon doesn't look favorably on such behavior, regardless of what form it takes and whether or not it's all in the spirit of good fun. "Our customer reviews, along with other features on the site, are intended to do one thing: help our customers discover and find the exact book for them," Curry said. Spend some money or get the hell off the site seems to be the message. That Amazon has an unwritten policy in regard to satirical reader reviews shouldn't surprise us. After all, this is the company that was recently exposed by an enterprising New York Times investigator as selling placement on it's "Bestseller" list. The company reluctantly admitted that the books featured near the top of the list were those of publishers who were willing to pay as much as $10,000 to secure such placement. Amazon generously offered to flag books whose publishers bought them a place on the list. Still, I wonder how a best-seller list that doesn't, in fact, list the most-purchased books, serves Curry's objective to "help the customer discover and find the best book for them." Seems to me it helps the customer discover and buy the best book for Amazon. Also recently called into question are Amazon's "sales rank" numbers. All books on the Amazon.com site are associated with a sales ranking that is featured on the page particular to that book. One might reasonably assume that a halfway decent script would cull a book's total sales on Amazon, compare it to the sales numbers of all of Amazon's books, and calculate an accurate "sales rank". Of course, Amazon boasts more than 2 million available titles, so repeatedly performing calculations like that would probably slow the site down a little. Perhaps that explains why the numbers seem awfully volatile. The New Yorker recently revealed the results of an experiment in which staffers bought one copy of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution, published in 1837, every day for an entire week. The handful of copies they bought resulted in the book's sales rank increasing from #92,010 to #2,619. The book is obscure enough that it seemslikely that no one bought copies of it besides those staffers involved in the experiment. Amazon's big mistake is pissing off its allies. It would have attracted quite a bit less ire for putting its best-seller links up for sale if it had simply disclosed that policy to the public when it decided to do so. And as for satirical reader reviews ... well, they clearly aren't detrimental to the company's reputation or to its business model. This is, after all, the Net. And those who use it for profit would do well to embrace at least a little portion of the anarchic culture that helped them become millionaires. Get with it Amazon. It's about time you developed a sense of humor. ILLUSTRATION: CLAUDIA NEWELL return to top | more Net Effects | more Web exclusives | sfbg.com Copyright © 1994-98 San Francisco Bay Guardian. Comedy is not pretty Amazon.com's reader reviews have become the newest frontier in Internet satire. By Brooke Shelby Biggs Damn, but Netizens are a snarky lot. Since its earliest days, the Web has always been full of "we're smarter than you, and we will now giggle in a self-satisfied manner at your expense as you pretend to get the joke" sites on the Web; the voices behind these sites were mostly those of the highly intelligent, overly educated, and the sometimes less than socialized. Often funny, they quickly became old. But there remain a number of equally clever folks out on the Web with a sophisticated sense of humor who are willing to serve up some biting social commentary with a chuckle chaser. They don't often eagerly brand and sell themselves, so they can sometimes be a little tough to find online. They develop in subversive little colonies in the remote corners of the Web and are a simple curative for those afflicted with the Web's affected. In the past, most sites like these have cropped up in the not-so-sophisticated form of the Ate My Balls, error-message haiku, cool site of the day, and strange filters, and bizarre fictionalizations crazes. Still, it was always the earliest cases that were the most ... memorable. Now, though crass comic efforts still abound, there are others that have grown up and gone cognoscenti. I speak of none other than ... the Amazon customer review. Amazon has long invited authors, publishers, and regular, everyday shmoes like you and I to post our opinions about books, CDs, and videos on its site. These reviews have long been a source of humor, albeit unintentional. Danielle Steel's fans, for example, lend credence to the hypotheses of many a social critic with their simplistic, semiliterate prose: "Definitely touching and unputtable!" says one. "This book brought to light that everyone has their own life to live," writes another. More troubling is the phenomenon of authors logging on to "review" their own books in glowing terms, as did Lev Grossman (without identifying himself, as he confessed recently in Salon) and David Bennehum (who didn't so much review his book as act as publicity liaison). Likewise, it seems it's always a simple matter to find embarrassingly overserious amateur reviews. The example below -- apparently posted in all seriousness -- was culled from a review of Barney and Baby-Bop: Go to School: A reader from Phillipsburg, N.J. The aging process takes us through countless milestones -- not all of which are pleasant. Many of us have to think back 20, 30, 40, or more years to recall one of our most disturbing ones. At this stage a number of us felt trapped and helpless. Some became victims of insomnia or stomach disorders, and probably far more than are willing to admit it now considered packing our bags and making a late night get-away. One might guess from this that the author was reading a Harvard Lampoon parody of the New York Review of Books (not a bad idea). More than a few Amazon lurkers have noted the vast potential for humor in these do-it-yourself reviews, and satire has become as commonplace as critique in the Amazon.com reader reviews. Recently, a spate of hilarious send-ups of stilted literary critiques cropped up under the Amazon title Daddy's Cap Is on Backwards, a collection of Family Circus cartoons by Bil Keane. Some samples: Corey Kosack from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania The exercise of Reason DEPENDS on the individual's choice! Ever since the untimely death of Ayn Rand in 1982, this country has lacked a moral leader, a powerful voice that can rise above the crowd and simply say "Reason is man's only proper judge of values and his only proper guide to action. The proper standard of ethics is: man's survival qua man." At last, that void has been filled. From the moment Jeffy refuses to eat the welfare cheese placed by Mommy in his "mackerooni," we realize that we have embarked on an extraordinary journey, an apocalyptic deathmatch of moral paradigmata from which only one can emerge intact. See Billy nearly starve after being tricked into delivering newspapers whose editorial slant he despises. Feel Dolly's anguish as she invents a new kind of steel with the potential to revolutionize the railroad industry, only to have that breakthrough suppressed by those in power, whose only ambition is to maintain the status quo. Struggle with Mommy over the book's central philosophical question: is breastfeeding P.J. a form of charity or of slavery? In "Daddy's Cap", Bil Keane succeeds where countless others have failed: he provides insightful and philosophically rigorous solutions to the open problems posed in Nicomachean Ethics and in Atlas Shrugged. Only one question remains: are you intellectually honest enough to accept Bil's unflinching portrayal of reality? A frenzied trip, a trick-play on words A special irony in this oeuvre is the running ambiguity twixt hat and head: which in fact is on backwards? You'll be pulling your finger with delight ... A reader from Norman, Oklahoma Hilarious and bracing in its self-examination While the perspective of Keane as crossbreed between new journalist and contemporary social realist finds much support in the text of this novel, delving deeper into its construction reveals a subtext rooted in a much older philosophical vein. The juxtaposition of the notion of "backwardness" and the visuals of mundaneness is an attempt at the deconstruction of Sartre's original project of the systematization of the existentialist movement. While many contend that Sartre's attempt to force the notions of absurdity and being and time into a finite defined system killed the original essence of existentialism, Keane has proven that a self-aware dialectic of the absurd can rekindle the original existential realization that inspired Kierkegaard and his adherents. However, the recurring symbolism of the backward-hat-that-is-not-the-true-backward-hat at times becomes ponderous and loses its impact of absurdity, not unlike the human condition when viewed through lenses of everydayness. Keane needs to expand his symbolic vocabulary if he is to truly express his resolution of Heidegger's dilemma without degenerating into a trivialization of the uniqueness of humanity's temporal experience. A reader from New York City A collection of torrid drawings about childhood and family ...It has always been unclear to me, exactly what Keane as a cartoonist actually thinks. On a recent interview with Vanity Fair magazine, he declined to tell what his sexual preference was. With respect to his privacy, this is typical of Keane. He's a master of moral ambiguity. ... An arguement could be made that nothing is clearly defined; this is exactly why I think satire is a limited genre to work in. With his autobiographical tendencies, Keane compromises satire too. Social realism cannot be blended with satire because it confuses the reader. It just doesn't make sense. I mean, is Keane criticizing bisexuality as immoral or is he just reporting what he's seen? That's unclear.... And this is only the beginning. There are others (although as of this writing, Amazon has cut their number from 24 to 6) each more outrageous than the last. According to a company spokesperson, Amazon does reserve the right to edit customer reviews to remove material that is potentially offensive or obscene. I can imagine it's somebody's job up at the company's Seattle headquarters to run a text search utility over the reviews database every few days, searching for George Carlin's seven dirty words. I checked using HotBot's Supersearch -- which allows you to search for keywords in a specific domain, like amazon.com -- but didn't find any. There's good reason for policies like these. Although the law in this realm is still murky, there is a very real chance that commercial sites could be held liable for libelous or obscene material hosted on their servers. But as any good comedian knows, dirty words are the last bastion of the uncreative. For really fresh, creative comedy, troll the customer reviews in hot pop-culture sections in Amazon. You never know when or where the next great parodist or scam artist might emerge. ILLUSTRATION: CLAUDIA NEWELL return to top | more Net Effects | more Web exclusives | sfbg.com Copyright © 1994-98 San Francisco Bay Guardian. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Huxley + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. 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