stevertigo<stv...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 1) Rohde's experience in reporting the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims by > > Serbian Christians may have drawn sympathy and support from Muslim > > officials >
George Herbert <george.herb...@gmail.com> Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 9:51 PM, wrote: > The NY Times presumably analyzed that, talked it over with security > professionals in government and private employ, and decided against > it. They have correspondents abroad in danger areas, and have had > them kidnapped before. > > I think they know better than Wikipedians - though I do not presume > they know perfect. > What's would make us "presume" that they know better? In fact your'e comparing the management of a small newspaper to the staff of a very large encyclopedia. It appears that you give great credit to management. > 2) Not publishing the story and then creating an issue after the fact, > makes > > such tactics unlikely to be successful in the future. > > You're assuming that terrorists and professional kidnappers in the > hinterland of Afghanistan have networks that include sophisticated > Wikipedia and web history analysis experts. This is true for some > organizations - but not many. The level of ignorance of advanced > information sources is suprising even among groups that use some > advanced high-tech tools such as websites and encrypted internet > communications. And thus, if they have not the Google, nor the Wikipedia, why then black them out? That this was done in one case does not mean it won't work again. > Most intelligence gathering methods remain useful for quite a while > after they're generally disclosed. [Citation needed] > Government intelligence agency and > military targets harden rapidly, others tend to learn slowly. > Seems this can be abstracted a bit to general social cognition concepts and might remain true. But abstraction will probably reveal different dimensions to the concept that you have perhaps "hardened" into a idea about government intelligence. A near-contradiction of terms, by the way. > 3) Are the participating Western news orgs, just like the previous U.S. > > administration, now to consider Al Jazeera as hostile? Or perhaps as an > > organization that does not follow the same professional standards that > > Western news orgs claim to follow? > > I don't know of anyone who feels Al Jazeera is hostile. The point being that it draws a seriously subjective distinction between certain news orgs and others, in as far as how they deal with extra-journalistic modes of operation that overlap or circumuvent journalism itself. Ostensibly, blacking out reportage of war crimes also "saves lives" too -- not the lives of the people in the conflict, but the lives of the soldiers who happen to be associated with the hellbound jerks who committed the crimes. The continued blackout of Iraq abuse photos qualifies. In reality its a bit subjective. Not that anyone wants to actually see the photos -- its just that censorship of evidence of factual events deviates from our understanding of human history. Just to correct Mark (?) Al Jazeera at first did report it, but then joined the blackout after being contacted by NYT. An archived version of Al Jazeera's story would have sufficed as a source, and bypassed their blackout. This is all trying to deal a bit with Wales' point that if a less illegitimate news source reported it, keeping it under wraps would have been difficult. The real criticism here is not that they made the wrong call, but that they appear to be attributing to their own cunning and skill what better may be attributable to plain good-old good luck. -Stevertigo _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
