This interview is entirely about spin. It never once asks what the truth is [1].
Brooke Gladstone: Now, let's take today the argument over NSA surveillance.
Where would you come down on this?
Peter Sandman: Well, it would depend on who my client was -
[Brooke laughs]
Brooke Gladstone: [Pause] I can see why you have such a nice apartment.
Peter Sandman: [Laughing]
Brooke Gladstone: Peter, thank you very much.
Peter Sandman: My pleasure.
Can "journalism" get more oleaginous? Such a program should not be called On The Media, but Of The Media.
[1] Edit: to be fair, she does say "That's not true" at the beginning, re the number of murders with hammers.
Are you a regular listener of On The Media? They don't report the news, they report on how the news is reported. So techniques, trends, and ways that the news and the media, including Mr. Sandman, report news and facts.
I've listened a few times and developed the impression that its main preoccupation is its own insider status. There's no reporting at all in, for example, this piece.
Let's not assume that a PR consultant (Mr. Sandman) belongs naturally to "the news and the media" without mentioning the much larger question of whether an independent press would be dominated by PR in the first place.
You should listen to OTM more. It's media criticism, so what reporting it does will necessarily seem like navel-gazing. But there's been some really great stuff on it.
A less... lubricated... venue for this kind of analysis is Jack Schafer's work for Reuters. Schafer has none of the insider status that OTM does.
At least one more time than what you point out, a more significant time really, did one of the participants raise the question of what the truth is too:
"But whether they’re actual stories or fictional stories is really... remains to be determined. But they, they are telling us stories."
But yeah, it was a piece about PR and how it's done.
Peter Sandman is clearly very good at it. I was somewhat surprised to see some hints that he was sympathetic to 'my' side -- he's the one that raised the question of whether the government was telling the truth above. But it also seems he's quite willing to work for whichever 'side' is paying him; I wonder if he ever would turn down a job because he thought he was doing evil, or if he just avoids thinking about which side is actually 'right', or promoting something harmful or helpful to humanity at large.
The point of this interview was the manipulation of perceptions. Sandman is a guy whose job it is to do just that: manipulate perceptions, without regard for the reality (though if he does his job right, he's not directly lying).
OTM _is_ one of the better programs around, but it is, as the title states, "on" the media. That is, a reflexive looking at the media and how it covers issues.
It's mostly pretty good, though at times Brooke in particular strikes me as rather pointedly naive (with her cred and background, she really shouldn't be). I've got a copy of her comic/book The Influencing Machine, which is also mostly pretty good, though there were multiple occasions I wanted to reach through the page and shake Brooke.
I wouldn't exactly call FAIR "independent". OTM is an NPR show; I suppose it's dependent on NPR member stations or something. FAIR is ideologically dependent on the progressive left. If I have to choose dependencies, I'll go with NPR middle-of-the-roadness.
Thankfully, I don't have to choose, and so can enjoy FAIR's podcast while augmenting it with other sources. Thanks for sharing that; I had no idea they had a podcast.
I'll grant you FAIR's slant (Democracy Now is another independent, though slanted, program I'd recommend).
But NPR has been showing a bias to my mind over the past 15 years or so more of timidity than ideology. There are places it simply won't go, questions it won't ask, and fire to which it blatently refuses to put the feet of recalcitrant, evasive, and often simply lying interview subjects (I witnessed a case of this with the coal industry shill organization "Institute for Energy Research" on the KQED Forum program last week). Perhaps simply asking the same question 2-3 times (and having the other side freely answer the same question) is enough, but I am somewhat fond of the (former, if not current) BBC "hard talk" tactic of asking deliberately pointed questions and highlighting evasions. NPR simply won't go there.
Noam Chomsky has also noted that he's been explicitly censored on multiple occasions (he's also very, very rarely given time on the network's flagship programs).
So, while I catch OTM more often than I do FAIR, I appreciate both views.
And with the Snowden / Greenwald reporting, I've also added The Guardian to my list of must-read news sites.
I don't disagree, but you see how fuzzy a concept "mainstream" is, right? CNN is owned by a massive media conglomerate. NPR isn't. In that sense, NPR is independent. Meanwhile, there's plenty of outsider content to be found under corporate umbrellas, too. The Koch brothers, for instance, fund Cato.
Specific to NPR: it's subject to manipulation by both Congressional funding (little to the organization itself, but about 10% of member stations' operating budgets), and by sponsorship arrangements from major sponsors.
And likewise, how fuzzy a concept 'independent' is, when you start digging into it.
But, yes, everyone has an ideology, it is true. Even people on NPR. Even those with the most mainstream ideologies, where you don't even notice it's an ideology because it's just the status quo -- that's an ideology too.
If you think FAIR's analysis is biased by their ideology, that may be. (And to show that about someone requires, well, showing it, not just showing that they have an ideology, as everyone does)
But it seems a semantic stretch to claim they are not 'independent' because they are 'ideologically dependent on the progressive left' -- "ideologically dependent", what does that even mean?
I think that's probably true, but I'm not sure the language of 'dependency' or 'independent' is the right way to talk about it.
And I think most shows on NPR also cater to an audience with a specific ideology, and are less likely to present analyses that challenge that ideology. That ideology in the case of NPR, is just a status quo liberal ideology so mainstream that it appears invisible.
I do agree that FAIR could be less biased in their analytical perspective though, sometimes.
Loosely put in coder terms, you are interested in pass by value. This article acknowledges that some people pass by value, but instead this article focuses on pass by reference. They aren't saying that no one cares about direct values, they are concentrating on what happens when people use indirection. I.e. this is an article about perception management, not about what the facts are or who is "right" or "truthy".
Indeed. Early is this quote: SENATOR BILL JACKSON: There’s more murders with hammers last year than there was shotguns and pistols and AK-47s.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That’s not true, by the way. They then fail to address the objective truth: There’s more murders with hammers last year than there was [with] AK-47s and all other rifles. There's also more deaths from cars than with shotguns and pistols and AK-47s. He was making a point; rather than addressing the point, the critics drill in to one small verbal error and dismiss the inconvenient objective truth.
"There's more murders with hammers last year than there was shotguns and pistols and AK-47s" is not anywhere close to reality.
If we restrict to rifles (about 5% of homicides where a firearm is used) and broaden to all blunt instruments, we get the same ballpark, not a clear win for the rifles. I can't find anything that calls out hammers specifically, but lumped in a category with baseball bats and tire irons and golf clubs and 2x4s and wrenches and candlesticks and lead pipes, I'd be amazed to find hammers dominating.
It is certainly a perfectly reasonable position to assert that the number of homicides which used a rifle are low enough that a focus on reducing them is a misguided assignment of priority, even before discussion of particular mechanisms. This happens to be a position I hold.
But you don't get to make a point by making false (and false by an order of magnitude) statements.
I forgot about that when I said the program doesn't once ask what the truth is. You may be right that they gave a misleading answer, but at least they (momentarily) brought up the question.
In 2002, 451 people were killed and ~2,300 injured in 134 separate terrorist attacks in Israel. From a population of about 7.7 million people.
If that were the U.S., that would be 18,300 deaths annually and close to 95,000 people injured.
Point is, whilst terrorism is designed to affect people psychologically more than the physical effects, you can't simply ignore it. A balanced response is needed and surely that includes some element of intelligence gathering on who is causing these attacks. Where to draw the line is a valid question, but to reject terrorism completely as irrelevant is stupid. People who discuss these issues in terms of absolutes ("we should never give up any freedom") are rarely considering the reality of the situation.
The reason I find this so disturbing is it is exactly the wrong way of approaching the situation. If we say terroism only killed X people so it isn't worth sacrificing these rights, we are saying there is some level of deaths that these rights are worth scarificing for. Personally I feel the balance between privacy and security is one that should be figured out beforehand and not changed in response to events, otherwise people who want to abuse such power will always have an incentive to play up and exagerate how much danger we are in. The rights we have when 1 person dies from terrorism should be the same as when 20,000 people die. But I don't believe that should be the right for every person to keep everything they do private. That just isn't living in reality.
Part of the problem is that 'terrorist' is an ill defined word. Your stats are couched in rhetoric as a result. Everyone agrees on what a hammer is, or an AK-47, not so true on the term terrorist. Also, that term is used by many factions to describe various oppositional forces. Are those stats lumping together only the US Government's definition of terrorist, or is it a global standard somehow amalgamating all the various and disparate ideas of what a terrorist is? Looking at that link I see we are discussing terrorist as defined by "data from the Israeli foreign ministry." It's a very one-sided data argument.
Terrorist is a real term with a globally liquid definition. It makes it very difficult to discuss the topic with any sort of rational discourse.
I originally used this page http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/victim... and was counting by hand, but it took too long. I didn't count a few that were vague ("stabbing attack" where nobody took credit) but if you read the list for 2002, I'm confident >75% would count by anybody's definition of terrorist attack.
This kind of proves my point. While a stabbing attack is a crime, and a violent one, I would scarcely call it terrorism. If so, then we have to call just about all crimes terrorism. If we do that, then the word simply means criminal and that's no good. A terrorist is not someone who stabs you. In the strictest sense it is someone who commits acts of violence or uses intimidation in an attempt to achieve a political end.
I've seen so many people labeled as terrorist that never even come close to the "political end" part of the definition. Kids bringing guns to school is not terrorism, but it is a crime, burning crosses in the yards of black families would be.
I don't trust the US or Israel to publish data reflecting acts of actual terrorism, I expect them to bolster their arguments by fabricating this data. Just look at us here in the US. The media and the government have called just about everyone a terrorist that commits a crime and they want to see them treated harshly. I also expect them to use these bolstered numbers to prop-up organizational infrastructure like the NSA and the military-industrial complex.
It's practically impossible to use "terrorism" statistics in any real way for any argument without strict definition of what a terrorist is as put forth by the person making the argument. We can compare gun deaths, we can compare auto deaths, we can compare bathtub falls, but we can't really compare any of that to terrorism statistics.
This kind of proves my point. While a stabbing attack is a crime, and a violent one, I would scarcely call it terrorism.
There are 208 deaths on that list for 2002 from 33 separate suicide bombings. Do you think that is fabricated? Do you think those numbers are bolstered? If that number of people were proportionally killed in the U.S. each year (~8,000) would my point still stand?
but we can't really compare any of that to terrorism statistics.
I agree. That was my point with the 1 or 20,000 deaths comment. But assuming we can compare the numbers, like the author claimed, it still isn't valid. If we can't compare the numbers, the point isn't valid in the first place.
Not all direct impact is physical. By design the effect of terrorism is much greater than its direct impact on a single personal physical well being. Comparing it to bathtub deaths is just not apples to apples.
Terrorism only achieves those non-physical effects because of people's misunderstanding of the risks. If people cared about terrorism to a similar degree to which they care about other stuff of similar deadliness, the terror part of terrorism would disappear.
It's so ironic that people compare terrorist deaths to car accidents and bathtub deaths in the same sentence as they talk about the chilling effects of surveillance.
How is that ironic? The first is a rhetorical device for claiming a threat is inflated. The second is about negative consequences of inflating the threat.
I assume rayiner's point was that, as far as we know, nobody has been killed as a result of NSA surveillance of Americans' communication. Maybe a few people have been killed, but surely it's vastly less than the number of bathtub deaths. So by the logic of this inane post, nobody should get too upset about NSA surveillance.
> nobody has been killed as a result of NSA surveillance of Americans' communication
Maybe. We don't know that. We would have to know beyond any doubt how this information is being used. I can imagine it being a tool to play foreign politics; even affects places like Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, where people do die.
> nobody has been killed as a result of NSA surveillance of Americans' communication
Maybe. But its also ironic that being US citizen and living on US soil you are supposed to be protected by the law of the land. If they vacuum everything for 10 years or so, imagine how many people could be found not guilty of robbery, homicides, drug dealing, etc, only if their attorneys would have access to their clients' NSA files. Who knows? Maybe even there is someone recently executed in this country that their NSA chart would have proven they were innocent. That may be over-stretch but you believe noone innocent is doing a lifetime right now because they couldn't prove that they have not been where prosecution claims they were (don't get me even started on "innocent until proven guilty").
The whole point of terrorism is the chilling effects that result. They create a multiplier effect that increases the impact of a relatively few number of deaths.
It's ironic to talk about chilling effects in the context of NSA surveillance while in the same breath espousing a theory of terrorism that ignores the chilling effects of terrorist acts.
I don't know if "chilling effects" is the right phrase to use either about terrorism or surveillance, or means the same thing in the two cases. The former is about fear. The latter is about encroachment on liberty, or something like that.
The US does not have and never has had recurring terrorist events, which is what is needed to inflict the kind of dread you are talking about as a first-order effect. To the extent Americans fear terrorism, it is self-inflicted fear, stemming from media hype and PR for security theatre. The same amount of hype could have us ripping out bathtubs, or being screened for hammer purchases.
But the mental impact comes from perceiving the direct impact on physical well being, incorrectly or otherwise. In other words, if individuals believe (and alieve) that the risk of physical danger is so infinitesimal small, there would be no mental impact too.
On contrast, the chilling effect of surveillance could be physical, not immediately, granted, but potentially large in the long run.
[1] Edit: to be fair, she does say "That's not true" at the beginning, re the number of murders with hammers.