Re: Ex-President for Sale

On Mar 19, 2:49 pm, "KarenElizabeth" <karenelizabe...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Mar 19, 9:42 am, "Q" <quond...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:> On Mar 19, 12:49 am, "DoD" <navyd...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
SNIP
Aren't you really asking whether I agree with him? Because I don't
know enough about the Palarabs to agree or not.

If you don't know anything about the Palarabs, then why comment on Carter?

I wasn't commenting on Carter. I was asking questions about him.
There's a difference, although not too many SCJMers are aware of that.

Certainly when you first came to the group, your comments could be
seen as legitimate questions relating to the Carter book.

Really?

They certainly *could* have been seen that way -- but in fact, they
weren't.

They drew fire from the Everybody Club from Day One.


But there
came a point when that was no longer the case. At the start, you were
asked if you had read the existing mainstream media and otehr stories
relating to the book, and you indicated that you had, but had rejected
them out of hand. My timing may be a bit off, but I believe that
means that you rejected out of hand all complaints about the use and
mislabeling of the Ross maps. You've never explained why. In the
following two months, there have been numerous citations to errors in
Carter's book (the Camera list was presented in January), as well as
sources indicating that Carter was anti-Semitic well before
publication of his book.

Aside from the book you cited, and the allegation that Carter accepted
money from Arab donors, no such sources were presented.


You've again dismissed all of these out of
hand,

The early sources -- those cited by the person who first resigned from
the Carter Center board -- were nit-picky, IMO. In any case, not a
justification for calling Carter an antisemite.

And what were all of those Jewish people even doing serving on the
Carter Center board -- if Carter was already this great big well -
known antisemite?


or indicated that you simply don't have time to consider them,

I have explained why I don't have time at the moment to research
David's list.

I am not obligated to do it at all, you know. And there is little
incentive to do it, since I am convinced that whatever I write will
be misread and misrepresented.

Maybe I am more serious about how I assess information than you are,
or than others in this newsgroup are. In any case, I prefer not to
give opinions about stuff I don't know about.


while continuing your mantra of *no one has yet shown me anything
wrong with the book or Carter* At some point, it became legitimate to
state that people have provided the evidence, and your placing
blinders on yourself is a sufficient showing of your own positions and
beliefs.


Evidence from blogs is not evidence. Evidence from blogs is h.s.



I don't think the ganging up by the Camera page writers is fair.

What is not being fair about pointing out deficiencies?

Sometimes, "pointing out deficiencies" really means grousing because
the thesis of a story is different from what somebody would prefer it
to be.

I don't see how that is quite true.

Erlanger is writing about real social problems, and while Camera would
rather pretend they don't exist,

Where do you get that? Camera knows they exist, everyone knows that they
exist. The question is why they exist, and that is where Erlanger was not
forthcoming totally.

SNIP

But this is exactly what you've been asking us to do all along. Show
you errors. Show you bias. But when David does, then its just
grousing, or gangin up on.

Do you think errors are the same as bias?

FWW, I don't find the Erlanger story particularly anti-Semitic.

That's good.

It
exhibits a deplorable one-sidedness, particularly in its reference to
the beach incident last summer. But to my mind at least, anti-Israeli
bent of a story doesn't always spell anti-Semitism.

For some people, it does. That's the main thing I've learned since
I've begun reading this group.

It is symptomatic of one of my bigger problems with the NYTImes --
what it chooses, and does not choose -- to cover.

Every paper has that problem. And papers that are not the Times --
but wish to be -- decline to cover local news, which is their remit --
or should be.


When a very small
number of Jews decide that the drinking water in NYC is not kosher, or
burn their Indian wigs, the NYT covers it, including photos. A non-
Jewish friend calls it the *make the Jews look stupid story of the
day*

They cover human interest stories from all sectors -- not enough of
them, IMO.. Would you have them suppress the ones that are about
Jews?

When, for example, Arab youth place a bomb at the door of a
synagogue in Riverdale (in 2000), OTOH, there's virtually no coverage
and (IIRC), no story at all on the trial or verdict. It sometimes
appears to me that the NYT has borrowed Jann Wenner's take on its
motto -- all the news that fits.

That was Mad Magazine's take before it was Wenner's.

The Times is a paper put out by a giant bureaucracy, and its
shortcomings are going to reflect that. But that doesn't make it
antisemitic, does it?.

Consider another NYT story about Tuvia Grossman. At worst that
one was antisemitic,

There's no way it was antisemitic. It was careless and it an example
of what happens when papers rely on freelance photographers who
haven't correctly identified the people in their pictures. The Times
has its own photographers, but this photo was an AP photo, and the
story -- even though it appeared in the Times -- may well have been an
AP story as well.

But, but, aren't you the same Quond who rather imperiously informed me
that newspapers do a stellar job of fact-checking.

They do. But they don't catch everything because they are not perfect
-- like the brilliant people who post to this newsgroup. I find
mistakes in major papers all the time, and when I phone them in, they
get corrected.


That
notwithstanding their extremely tight deadlines relating to ongong
events, no editor would ever -- ever - allow an item to go to print
unless s/he was absolutely, positively convinced of its accuracy.

I think that's true. An editor has a lot to lose when stories need to
be corrected. Records are kept of which reporters' stories tend to
contain the most errata. And these statistics are indeed invoked at
raise- and promotion time.


This item, OTOH, seems to me to be patently false. The police
officer's stick does not appear to be bloody. Worse yet, there's a
*gas station* in the background. What level of fact checking would be
required to indicate that there is no gas station oh the Temple
Mount? The best you could say of this is shoddy.

It was careless. They corrected it. Several times. I think that was
an appropriate show of remorse. I don't think it was caused by
antisemitism. I think it was caused by the Times getting stuck with a
picture that was not what it purported to be. That happens with
papers, and sometimes editors get fired because of it.

But the error is compounded by the refusal to admit error. Well aware
of what the photo actually showed, the Times still tried to avoid it.

They published the correction. And after that, they corrected the
correction.

Only when pushed did it admit error.

I don't know that they were "pushed." I think that's a tendentious
way of describing the error correction process. It was brought to
their attention, and they did the appropriate thing. That's the way
the process generally works.

SNIP> > Have you ever read honestreporting.com on the NY Times?

I don't read it, no. Blogs that bash newspapers give me a headache.
Most of them are crap, written by people who failed to get jobs at the
papers they have chosen as their targets.

Now I'm really getting dizzy. First its how well the newspapers fact
check, but can't be expected to notice what is a facially apparent
problem with a photo.

What is "facially apparent?" Or is it a typo?

Now its that notwithstanding literally MONTHS
of your stating that nothing anyone here says about Carter can be
trusted because we haven't read hos book (although people have read
critiques of his work, studied lists of his errors, studied his
history, etc).

That's not a good or reliable way to "know" about a book. When you
were in college , did you "read" books by only reading about them?


NOW, OTOH, its Ok for you to reject everything that
cites like Honest Reporting say WITHOUT EVEN READING THEM.

You know what? It's okay for me to do anything I like because this is
an informal discussion -- and not a trial of some kind. I don't
choose to waste my time with paranoia about how the New York Times is
antisemitic -- because it used "militance" where it might have said
"terrorism" instead. I don't think it's reasonable to condemn a
paper because it doesn't happen to buy into the Israelcentric notions
of people with the "my country, right or wrong" attitude that I'm
seeing here.

And why,
we ask. Because they are *written by people who failed to get jobs at
the papers ...* (presumably unlike *fine reporters* like Jayson
Blair). What basis do you have for this?

I'm am not going to research it now, if that's what you're asking of
me, but nit-picking the Times is a favorite sport among bottom-tier
journalists.

And people who have actually been out there getting the stories resent
being pot-shotted and second-guessed by bloggers with nothing better
to do.

The times regulary
does dishonest things... here is just one example.
SNIP
Different papers will sometimes have variations on quotes because the
reporters at the news conferences are relying on their notes, rather
than tape recordings. Perhaps it was the Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz
that got it wrong. In any case, the NY Times version was clearly a
paraphrase -- rather than a direct quote -- so choosing the less
extreme, emotive word is acceptable.

No, its not. This is a war of rhetoric. The PalArabs attempt to give
legitimacy to their cause, and to their actions, by cloking them in
acceptable terms like *militancy* Its not terrorism to walk into a
Passover seder to and blow up people who are peacefully assembled; its
*militancy* Its not terrorism to walk into a pizza shop, search for
tables with a lot of kids, lean down for best effect, then blow
yourself up, taking with you people whose only crime is apparently
wanting to have a slice; that's militancy. Stating that Israeli
officials would use that term to describe terrorist acts is indeed
changing the entire gist of the comment.

The Times was discussing a comment made about Jenin. It's just too
bad about you and David if they didn't use the exact, precise words
you two would have preferred.

SNIP> > I'm not surprised
that the person you mention thinks the Times alters photographs,
however.

I mentioned that the idea was being tossed around. Now you are
misrepresenting what I said.

No. I read her post. She said she thought the Times picture had been
photoshopped. Again, it was not one of the Times's own pictures, it
was purchased from Getty, which weakens its provenance. But why would
the Times or anybody else photoshop that picture? What does the
theoretically photoshopped picture show that the original would not
have shown? If anything, the picture was cropped and then enlarged.

Actually, she wondered if it had been, and stated that she hated to
sound like a conspircacy website.

LOL. As she likes to say, I'm wiping the coffee off my screen.

While I don't think the photo was
substantially altered in this case, I see her point. Look at the leg
of the boy. The light appears to come from a source that would not
be available in the photo. His shoe appears too much in focus given
the background focus. Even the sling he's using in lit by an ethereal
light. Fabulous photo, assuming its real.

Sure, but what difference does it make? Does it alter the story?
Does it make the boy with the rock more sympathetic? I mean, what
would be the point of risking getting caught photoshopping a news
picture, when there is no net gain.


Why photoshop? To create that fabulous photo that doesn't really
exist. To show the boy against a ravaged and burning background that
didn't really exist. to get rid of elements that wouldn't support the
story that you're teling, or that would merely be distracting. Or any
one of a thousand more reasons.

Magazines sometimes do that, but newspapers tend not to. I'd say
"absolutely don't" but I'm sure you can find an instance where that
supposedly happened in one of the blogs you get your "information"
from.

Perhaps you have already noticed it, but the NY Times runs very good
pictures. Upgrading the quality of the photography seems to have been
a major priority for them, ever since they began using color. They
don't need to alter pictures because they have many great pictures to
choose from on most days.

At any place I've ever worked, altering a photo would get a person
fired.

SNIP

Don't most readers of SCJM prefer to think for

themselves?

I would assume so, at least my favorite reads here seem to be very
thoughtful.

Nevermind. Don't answer that. -- Q

So do you think that everyone here follows some sort of script or
something?

Quite a few people seem to respond to issues in a knee-jerk sort of
way -- that's not exactly like having a script, which suggests that
somebody is telling them what to write. .

I think that the positions a lot of people take are predictable based
on my knowledge of them. But I only see one knee jerking in the group
right now.

If you are speaking of me, I'd say you need to get yourself better
glasses. -- Q

Karen Elizabeth

.

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