Re: The Guardian's Summary of Julian Assange's Interview Went Viral and
Without question the article on Assange was the epitomy of "bad journalism", "Fake news" or whatever trending tagline one wishes to assign to biased delivery of, and 24/7 consumption of propaganda ... and, yes, Ben Jacobs, accompanied by thousands of other "journalists", should be hung out to dry by his virtual thumbs. I am extremely grateful to Greenwald for calling this and also assigning proper credit to the original interview. This may be a hope against hope but perhaps it will offer a modicum of relief to the onslaught what we in the States are experiencing ... and certainly what is to come - as the days (daze) of our lives will be scripted by conspiracy theorists and fake news ( we really do need a better term for this. ) What is problematic ( and deeply disturbing to me as I have always reapected Greenwald's views) is his own thinly veiled bias and, perhaps, blindness to some of the more vile and damning aspects Trump's behavior and speech ( as per Assange) by not offering any other critique: > In fact, Assange says Trump ?is part of the wealthy ruling elite of > the United States? who ?is gathering around him a spectrum of other > rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities.? The fact that > Assange sees possibility for exploiting the resulting instability for > positive outcomes, along with being fearful about ?change for the > worse,? makes him exactly like pretty much every political and media > organization that is opportunistically searching for ways to convert > the Trumpian dark cloud into some silver lining I simply don't assume that Trump is "exactly like pretty much every political or media organization" - far from it. Those very assumptions contributed to his rise. With his electoral victory and inauguration, the USA will have lost whatever laminate of democracy - the promise that much of its populace clung to. Within that loss and subsequent vacuum, there is nothing to replace it other than Trump's autocratic reach ... or that of the global oligarchy. Chris # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
The Guardian's Summary of Julian Assange's Interview Went Viral and
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/the-guardians-summary-of-julian-assanges-interview-went-viral-and-was-completely-false/ The Guardian?s Summary of Julian Assange?s Interview Went Viral and Was Completely False Glenn Greenwald December 29 2016, 2:41 p.m. Julian Assange is a deeply polarizing figure. Many admire him and many despise him (into which category one falls in any given year typically depends on [1] one?s feelings about the subject of his most recent publication of leaked documents). But one?s views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article, which is not about Assange. This article, instead, is about a report published this week by the Guardian which recklessly attributed to Assange comments that he did not make. This article is about how those false claims ? fabrications, really ? were spread all over the internet by journalists, causing hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) to consume false news. The purpose of this article is to underscore, yet again, that those who most flamboyantly denounce Fake News, and want Facebook and other tech giants to suppress content in the name of combatting it, are often the most aggressive and self-serving perpetrators of it. One?s views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article because, presumably, everyone agrees that publication of false claims by a media outlet is very bad even when it?s designed to malign someone you hate. Journalistic recklessness does not become noble or tolerable if it serves the right agenda or cause. The only way one?s views of Assange are relevant to this article is if one finds journalistic falsehoods and Fake News objectionable only when deployed against figures one likes. The shoddy and misleading Guardian article, written by Ben Jacobs, was published on December 24. [2] It made two primary claims ? both of which are demonstrably false. The first false claim was hyped in the article?s headline: ?Julian Assange gives guarded praise of Trump and blasts Clinton in interview.? This claim was repeated in the first paragraph of the article: ?Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has offered guarded praise of Donald Trump?.? The second claim was even a worse assault on basic journalism. Jacobs set up this claim by asserting that Assange ?long had a close relationship with the Putin regime.? The only ?evidence? offered for this extraordinary claim was that Assange, in 2012, conducted 8 interviews that were broadcast on RT. [3] With the claimed Assange-Putin alliance implanted, Jacobs then wrote: ?In his interview with la Repubblica, [Assange] said there was no need for WikiLeaks to undertake a whistleblowing role in Russia because of the open and competitive debate he claimed exists there.? The reason these two claims are so significant, so certain to attract massive numbers of clicks and shares, is obvious. They play directly into the biases of Clinton supporters and flatter their central narrative about the election: that Clinton lost because the Kremlin used its agents, such as Assange, to boost Trump and sink Clinton. By design, the article makes it seem as though Assange is heralding Russia as such a free, vibrant and transparent political culture that ? in contrast to the repressive west ? no whistleblowing is needed, all while praising Trump. But none of that actually happened. Those claims are made up. Despite how much online attention it received, Jacobs? Guardian article contained no original reporting. Indeed, it did nothing but purport to summarize the work of an actually diligent journalist: Stefania Maurizi of the Italian daily la Repubblica, who traveled to London and conducted the interview with Assange. Maurizi?s interview was conducted in English, and La Repubblica published the transcript online. [4] Jacobs? ?work? consisted of nothing other than purporting to re-write the parts of that interview he wanted to highlight, so that he and the Guardian could receive the traffic for her work. Ever since the Guardian article was published and went viral, Maurizi has repeatedly objected to the false claims being made about what Assange said in their interview. But while western journalists keep re-tweeting and sharing the Guardian?s second-hand summary of this interview, they completely ignore Maurizi?s protests ? for reasons that are both noxious and revealing. To see how blatantly false is the Guardian?s claims, all one needs to do is compare the Guardian?s claims about what Assange said in the interview to the text of what he actually said. To begin with, Assange did not praise Trump, guardedly or otherwise. He was not asked whether he likes Trump nor did he opine on that. Rather, he was asked what he thought the consequences would be of Trump?s victory (?What about Donald Trump? What is going to happen?. . . What do you think he means??). Speaking predictively, Assange neutrally described what he believed would be the outcome: Hillary Clinton?s election would h
Re: John_Berger (5 November 1926 - 2 January 2017)
... and a rare occasion to see and hear Berger speak - he gave almost no interviews in his later years: http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/062921-000-A/john-berger-oder-die-kunst-des-sehens (luckily, much of this recent German-French documentary is subtitled) -a Am 02.01.17 um 20:53 schrieb Felix Stalder: John Berger is dead. He died today, at the age of 90. Orbits are surely being written right now. However, Sally Potter's birthday thoughts from last November seem a more apt and personal way of remembering. "Ways of Seeing was, together with Robert Hughes' "Shock of the New", one of the first books about art I read as teenager. It stayed with me ever since. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
John_Berger (5 November 1926 - 2 January 2017)
John Berger is dead. He died today, at the age of 90. Orbits are surely being written right now. However, Sally Potter's birthday thoughts from last November seem a more apt and personal way of remembering. "Ways of Seeing was, together with Robert Hughes' "Shock of the New", one of the first books about art I read as teenager. It stayed with me ever since. As if as a testament to his continued relevance, the LA Review of Books published today a long article on his theory of art. > That theory evolved considerably between the 1950s and the 2010s. > Yet two threads hold it together with the tenacity of spider silk: a > critique of the political economy of art and a sophisticated account > of its human value, each rooted in a committed but elastic Marxism. > > A Marxist art criticism of any real subtlety has to be elastic, > because it must deal with a problem Marx himself diagnosed but > failed to solve. Berger puts it like this: > > A question which Marx posed but could not answer: If art in the last > analysis is a superstructure of an economic base, why does its power > to move us endure long after the base has been transformed? Why, > asked Marx, do we still look towards Greek art as an ideal? He began > to answer the question […] and then broke off the manuscript and > was far too occupied ever to return to the question. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-smuggling-operation-john-bergers-theory-of-art/ Felix Artist, visionary and writer - John Berger is undimmed at 90 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/05/john-berger-at-90-ways-of-seeing-sally-potter John Berger is 90. An excellent age. In his presence, however, age seems utterly irrelevant. This is not just because John seems to live in a perpetual present, forever scanning the world around him with as much intensity as he might ever scan the world within – and therefore seems to live without a trace of nostalgia – but also because he is full of excitement and curiosity about the future. The story of my encounters with him begins before I was born. John taught art to my mother. She was a teenager and he was only a few years older. It was probably for no more than a few months, a temporary job in a school in north London. Yet somehow, throughout my childhood, his name floated in my consciousness, conjuring up the image of a dashing young soul, handsome, charming, militant and dedicated to the making of art. At 21, already an inspiring teacher. The next moment that he came sharply into focus for me was with his book – and the television series that it emerged from – Ways of Seeing. His way of expressing ideas – pithy, plain language, bold – and, above all, the ideas themselves that he shaped with such clarity, had the startling effect of feeling both brand new and yet obvious, creating a feeling of recognition. Of course, of course, we all thought; that is how it is; it’s just that we hadn’t found the words for it before. No one had found the words for it before. Some years later, sitting in Tilda Swinton’s bedroom, surrounded by piles of books and clothes – it may have been in the midst of dissection of part of my screenplay for Orlando – she pulled out her copy of Ways of Seeing in order to read out one particular sentence to me. It was a sentence with which I was familiar but which bore repetition. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” I was in the process of looking at her, I was already the eyes of the camera in our collaboration. She was looking at herself being looked at by me. We became conspirators in the conceptual field so neatly laid out by John. Except that I was a woman. After I had finished my journey through the epic process of making Orlando and found myself, to my surprise, wanting to be looked at, as a woman in motion – dancing – I made The Tango Lesson. After its release in France, somewhere near the beginning of a long run in a cinema in Montparnasse, I received, out of the blue, a handwritten letter from John. John Berger had written to me saying that he liked my film. But he didn’t use the word “like”. He used long, flowing sentences and short staccato ones expressing with the utmost generosity and precision the experience he had had while watching the film. If I remember correctly, what struck him in particular was its exploration of the nature of relationship; the intimate space existing in the relatedness of all people and all things, the dance of “I and Thou”. The feeling when receiving and reading his letter was exactly that: it was he who was creating a space, the space of relatedness, in which what I had given out to the world, not knowing where it would land, had landed in him. He had received it. He had thought about it. He had made the effort to pick up his pen and write a letter to me. The film had become a conversation. This was the beginning of a conversation with John that has continued to this day. I still can hardly believe my good fortune that I exist somewh
