neojournalismo

The Guardian

[July 9, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

Berlusconi’s ‘gag law’ sparks media strike in Italy: There will be no news in Italy today; or, at least, hardly any. That is not a prediction, but fact: none of the main newspapers are appearing because their reporters and editors are on a 24-hour strike. Today they are due to be joined by radio, TV and some internet journalists. The action is over a parliamentary bill proposing a law that Silvio Berlusconi’s government claims safeguards privacy. Most of Italy’s editors, judges and prosecutors say it is intended to shield politicians, and particularly the prime minister, whose career has been ridden with financial and sexual scandals.

Business Week

[July 4, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

Tyler Brulé, Media Maverick: In part, Brûlé discovered his philosophy while dosed up with morphine in a hospital bed in Afghanistan in 1994. He was 25, a freelance reporter working on an assignment with Médicins Sans Frontières in Kabul, when a jeep in which he was traveling came under machine gun fire. He was shot several times in both arms—his left remains pretty much useless—and, while recovering, had time to contemplate his priorities. He distances himself from hallucinogenic visions of angels bearing style magazines, but suggests that he did, lying there, come to see what mattered most to him. The list included “friends,” “living in a great house,” and “wanting to travel and see the world.” The rest, he would argue, is magazine history.

Der Spiegel

[July 4, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

The Real Reason We Are in Afghanistan: Counter-insurgency is an emotionally appealing theory for us today. Instead of only killing terrorists, it focuses on subjects close to the heart of a humanitarian or a journalist: tackling human rights’ abusers, eliminating corruption, establishing the rule of law, building schools and clinics and, ultimately, creating a legitimate, stable state at peace with itself and its neighbors. Who could be against that?

BBC | Adam Curtis

[July 4, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

BP & The Axis of Evil: BP is accused of destroying the wildlife and coastline of America, but if you look back into history you find that BP did something even worse to America: They gave the world Ayatollah Khomeini. Of course there are many factors that led to the Iranian revolution, but back in 1951 the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company - which would later become BP - and its principal owner the British government, conspired to destroy democracy and install a western-controlled regime in Iran. The resulting anger and the repression that followed was one of the principal causes of the Iranian revolution in 1978/79 - out of which came the Islamist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Rolling Stone

[June 19, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

The Great American Bubble Machine: G oldman wasn’t always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids —just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to smalltime vendors in downtown Manhattan.

Der Spiegel

[June 19, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

Daily life in Iran, one year after the uprising: My week begins before the revolutionary court. I have to defend a woman who is accused of moharebeh or “war against God.” That’s a euphemism our prosecutors use to describe activities critical of the government. Anyone who is found guilty of moharebeh can expect to receive the death penalty. My client is shaking all over when she is brought before the court. The judge seems kind enough, and tries to calm her down. “No one should be afraid of a judge,” he says. But Sainab has every reason to be afraid. Her husband and his cousin were sentenced to death by the same 15th chamber of the court.

The Guardian

[May 23, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

Why are muslims so hyper-sensitive? Ayaan Hirsi Ali enters an apartment in New York followed by a bodyguard. The 40-year-old, who for the last six years has been unable to turn up at a venue without it being checked by security, is a writer, polemicist and critic of Islam. She is also a Somali immigrant, an ex-Muslim, a survivor of child genital mutilation, an exile many times over, a former Dutch MP, a black woman whose language would not, in places, look amiss in a BNP pamphlet, a remarked-upon beauty and a lady-in-peril, identities that lend her as a figurehead to disparate causes and bring on confusion in the people she meets…


Foreign Policy | Morozov

[May 23, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

How to become an internet freedom-warrior: Get seriously worried about the Internets. Surround yourself with social media gurus who don’t know anything about foreign policy but have a gazillion Twitter followers. Try convincing the world that U.S. technology companies are your new ambassadors, out on a noble mission to spread freedom and democracy around the globe (things not to mention: oil, Iraq, Dick Cheney). Send their CEOs to Siberia, have them play beerpong with the locals. Don’t dare mentioning how these very companies abuse freedom and privacy at home, on their own sites. Develop some ambitiously empty buzzword that could make your ridiculous theories sound somewhat convincing (try “21st century statecraft”).


Harper’s

[May 8, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

The End of the Free Market: Globalization has been the dominant driver of international politics and global markets for a generation. But in several countries around the world, we’re now seeing a fast-emerging struggle between free-market liberalism and a new form of capitalism dominated by the state. The collapse of communism didn’t bring about the final victory of free-market capitalism, because it didn’t put an end to authoritarian government.

Spiked

[May 6, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

How ‘Anti-Capitalism’ Undermines a Critical Perspective: Why are the prevailing perceptions of the crisis so superficial and backward? In a nutshell, because ‘anti-capitalist’ values now predominate in Western societies. I put ‘anti-capitalist’ in quote marks because this critique is not in fact against capitalism or the market economy per se; it is really against any form of economy that seeks to promote dynamic growth and development. And it is the old left that has been at the forefront of promoting this perspective. Traditionally, the left has used a crisis to expose the limitations of the market, while the right has usually sought to defend the system. But in the past two decades the left has become anti-development, anti-consumption and misanthropic, which has had the effect of redirecting criticism away from the market itself, and towards blaming humanity in general.

New Statesmen | Slavoj Zizek

[May 2, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

Joe Public V the Volcano: That humankind is becoming a geological agent on earth indicates the beginning of a geological era that some scientists have named the “Anthropocene”: the time of man. Certainly, there are good reasons to surmise that the main cause of the unexpected strength of the devastating earthquake in China in 2008 (if not the earthquake itself) was the construction of the enormous Zipingpu Dam in the region. This created large new artificial reservoirs, and the additional pressure on the surface seems to have influenced the balance of the underground cliffs, thus contributing to the earthquake.

Erroll Morris V Adam Curtis

[May 1, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

It Becomes a Self-Fulfilling Thing: What I’m trying to say to people is: “Look, you do face a terrorist threat, as is obvious from the attacks on America and more recently on my country.  But you’re looking in the wrong place.  You’ve created this sort of phantom enemy, which is a disorganized network.  When in fact what you’re actually facing is an idea that springs up all over the place.”  You’ve created a notional enemy that’s driving you mad looking for it, when in fact, it’s something else entirely.  And that’s when I went back and tried to explain the ideas.  I thought that was much more important for people to understand.  Because when something that doesn’t exist becomes perceived wisdom, people tend to go slightly bonkers.  That’s sort of the mood of our times.  I like the idea of a notional mole, it’s good.  Because no one ever found one, did they?

The Guardian

[May 1, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

Chris Morris - Bin Laden Doesn’t Really Do Jokes: Morris has spent the past five years researching, scripting, shooting and editing a comedy about suicide bombers. He has gone with it, got through it and come out the other side, and if he’s gone mad in the process, it is sometimes hard to tell. In the course of a chaotic three-day spell, I run into the director on several occasions and he’s different every time; by turns bouncy and ebullient, caustic and contemptuous, professional and forthright. At each turn in the conversation, I think I catch glimmers of the myriad media ghouls he once channelled on the likes of Brass Eye and The Day Today. Then again, maybe not. Morris suggests that his days of deconstructing the antics of the fourth estate are now behind him. He has grown up, moved on. Right now, he has other fish to fry.

Jeff Jarvis

[April 25, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

Bizarro Identity: I’m still trying to get my head around Facebook’s moves to become the king of identity online. Hell, if Leo Laporte couldn’t quite figure it out on yesterday’s taping of This Week in Google, then I’m not capable. But here’s where I am. Help me advance this….I think my problem is this: I want the exact opposite of what Facebook did. I want the Bizarro Facebook. Instead of Facebook controlling my identity, I want to be able to control and publish and set access to and rules for the use of my identity online, allowing Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, anyone access to it under my terms.

BBC | Adam Curtis

[April 25, 2010 | Permalink | Comments | ]

The Weird World of Waziristan: We are told that we are fighting to prevent terrorist attacks in Europe and America. But the reality is that the Taliban have no interest in attacking the West. In the public imagination and in much journalism the Taliban are seen as exactly the same as political Islamists such as bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri. The truth is that they are the very opposite of each other. The radical Islamists see themselves as modern revolutionaries. They want to reshape Islam and fuse it with the modern world of science, technology and mass politics to create a new kind of society. The Taliban rose up because they thought the Islamists had failed to do this. And instead the Taliban decided to go back into the past and try and reinvent an old world.