djalykhan:

MAN-YAK

Lebanese Street Art

My initial goal was to just focus on images of the Arab Spring, but in my research I started finding out early on that the pictures were always tied to some kind of text; be it headlines, captions, or the story/news report itself. The picture was literally the illustration of the text, and to separate it was hard.

So, I switched up my tactics and decided to give a whollistic (whole-istic) approach and examine the whole thing. I also had David Spurr’s book, Rhetoric of Empire, still stuck at the back of my head so I decided to analyze tropes as well. In fact, I think I came up with a new one, that I will explain later on.

The decision to use the Arab Spring was to have this project serve in conjunction with a project for another class, a formal written piece. Since I think in bullet point, segmented sections, I thought Tumblr would serve well as almost a rough drafting phase for it.

Quite honestly, the Arab Spring is interesting to me, both as a Muslim and a self-proclaimed rabble-rouser.

I chose tumblr for a few reasons:

1) I like it.

2) It’s visual + textual.

3) It is a social media, and is also just as much used in the Arab Uprisings as Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook is.

4) It is something new, and I think quite frankly cutting edge, to be allowed the opportunity to make a project, especially for a writing class, using tumblr.

True to tumblr form, I do use some reaction gifs and internet pop-lingo. If you have questions on what they mean, simply ask me during the grading phase or email me.

Unless clearly written out as such, time stamps will be noted between []’s.

I’m going to start right off at the final, deepest, most vile pit of hell that I call Fox News. In my day of this hell, I was bombarded with so many media mishaps and journalistic ethics thrown out the window that I needed to eat sushi and Gatorade to recuperate from the experience. I feel that Fox News’ Gonzo journalism in the form of “talk segments” where they basically pontificate on theory, not really divulging facts or news, is what is the most misleading and dangerous thing that leads to the misinformation and perpetuating tropes.

The one segment from “On the Hunt with Jonathan Hunt” caught my attention was thankfully online, and is above. If you want some laughs and more evidence of bias, you can go read Hunt’s bio here. Pay special attention to “dangerous city of Fallujah”.

I am very familiar with the Syrian incidents, but a friend of mine, Bria Grace, is not. I have decided to do a very simple procedure to better deduce what is it that people are “learning” (I use the term very, very, very sarcastically) from the news reporting from Fox. They are genderqueer, and prefer the pronouns ze/zim/zer so please do not be startled to find it in my upcoming analysis.

I will list some things that Bria has learned (a full list will be included at the end) that specifically prove misinformation and something I recently have concluded from my research that I have entitled “reimagining the Cold War narrative”. This video does both.

My first critique on the video is, firstly, how is discussing if and when America should do a military intervention - specifically a Shock & Awe technique - news? It is not listing facts of what is going on in Syria, it is not talking about Syria except the threat of their military. Instead of news, this really acts as a talk show. It should be labeled as such, but it isn’t, because it is under the guise of “Fox News”.

Secondly, why are we having a military professional talking about “diplomacy”?

Bria Grace 11:45 pm russia and china and cuba and venezuala are bad - against the world

The very beginning, at the start of 0:53, we have the Cold War hosts again: Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuala, and the reimagining of them as “the badies” since they are “firmly on one side against the entire rest of the international community”. Even how the host uses the phrasing “THE Russians” and “THE Chinese” is very accusatory, and othering. They are involved [1:21], but they won’t say how they are involved. Just that they are, and you should trust that opinion.

Also, immediately we are establishing age old motifs of “the West” and the Orient right at 1:57.

Bria Grace 11:48 pm and we need to “take them out” to achieve humanitarian goals

So we need to go to war, and target tanks that are in civilian cities (something they conveniently left out, and simply reported as “active in the rebellion”, 9:06) in in order to achieve humanitarian ideals. So killing = humanitarian. Gotcha’, military professional talking about diplomacy.

They continue to talk about weapons, using big words like MIGs, military arsenal, etc. like they are planning a multi-player session in Call of Duty. This can’t be news, it’s a war strategy discussion. How is pontificating on theory be news?

Bria Grace 11:54 pm as for the issue of giving arms directly to the rebels and letting them fight their own war, that is not a good idea because, as with Libya, you don’t know where the arms will end up

Starting at 4:14, they then enter the discussion of possibility of having the rebellion and Syrian people have their own agency. Immediately that possibility is dismissed, and instead to talk about how Syria is somehow in bed with Iran and we need to keep that as our focus: Syria is bad.

Finally they actually mention a fact about Syria, which is the President’s name [5:54], which has been missing from the conversation until then. Then we see the self-affirming American government by the Colonel’s mention of trying to bring peace to a war-torn nation [6:12].

With the opening up of taking questions from the viewers [6:26], we see further othering by classification with “the Turks”. The Colonel continues to refer to the government of Turkey as “The Turks” and even has to mention that they aren’t in fact Arab [8:22], but serve as a “role model” to certain elements of Muslim Brotherhood (which I assume is the Colonel’s mantle of what Islam is?). Wait, you have to be Arab to be really Muslim? He also apparently calls their government a regime [8:07, even though it is in fact a secular and democratic.

The segment closes with again this idea that Iran-Syria are linked, and that the Iran threat is the real excuse to go to war. This is Bria’s closing thoughts:

Bria Grace 12:41 am from that video, they make it seem like syria is more of a threat on the international stage than to their own people.  one could also infer that syria and iran are in bed together (so to speak) and since iran has been in the news for nuclear arms stuff, that perhaps syria has them too.  syria is also in bed with iraq and al-qaeda (which would mean that al-qaeda had a strong presence in iraq)

This is exactly the information that is being presented and what the majority of individuals learn from these sort of faux-news segments. Are these facts? Are these things really happening? Are they following some sort of code of ethics for journalists? This isn’t even news but they are perpetuating every trope that Spurr talks about, and then some.

Huffington Post (HuffPo as I call it) also has a special Arab Spring tag and frontpage.

Now, I have liked Huffington Post at one point. Which amazes me now, since looking at their non-entertainment pieces (i.e: real news), I have come to the conclusion that HuffPo pretty much lets any Tom, Dick, and Jane write a few paragraphs, slap a photo and a short biographical blurb next to it, and post it up on there. I have read more and a lot better, more neutrally constructed pieces on tumblr than I have on HuffPo. It has turned out that HuffPo is probably the second biggest (with Fox News leading the way) perpetrator of Gonzo journalism. By the end of my one day infiltration of Huffington Post, I was left feeling like this:

Here are three current examples of very problematic pieces.

1) For some reason I have not been able to research well enough into, the Huffington Post linked [evidence here] to a story done on TruTV (once Court TV). This story claims that the Arab Spring was a conspiracy, saying “If the West ever wanted to tell itself a feel good story, this reading of the events of the Arab Spring would be it.” The story is actually an awkward, power-point like slide show of “evidence” and cute little blurbs, depictions of Barack Obama as a SCARY MUSLIM PERSON as evidence, and the Bilderberg group. So we’re positing conspiracy theories as legitimate news, and relevant to the Arab Spring conflict.

2) While I myself am a religious and spiritual person, I was astonished that a very Christian-biased post turned up on the Arab Spring frontpage. It’s headline reads: One Year After Arab Spring, the Middle East Needs Christ’s Message of Peace by

Interestingly enough, the article is all about Israel. Last time I checked, Palestine and Free Palestine movements are older than the actual Arab Spring conflicts, dating at the insertion of a Zionist leadership at the 20’s/30’s [reference: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe, paperback]. Ironically, the thing happening to a very small Christian population is happening also to a much larger Muslim population in Israel. Why the focus on specifically the ‘sad state’ of Christian Israelis-Palestinians, I have no clue. While I hate to reference Wikipedia, it was virtually impossible to find current statistics of religious groups in Israel that isn’t clearly Pro-Israel (in that, I have seen claims that the Muslim population is only 2% and the map doesn’t even show the border of the West Bank and Gaza). According to Wikipedia, the Christian population of Israel is about 2.1%.

Also, the article calls for a more Christian intervention, and a more Christian presence in the Middle East. It also continued to perpetuate this idea that Christians and Muslims have always been in this eternal conflict [see: Clash of Civilizations theory, learned from False Prophets: The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and the Global War on Terror by Richard Bonney], when that fact has been discredited by the very thing the author describes the groups praying in Tahrir Square.

Bonney’s book discusses how Christian dogma has been used to justify the War on Terror, and in larger context any sort of maneuver held in the Middle East or Muslim populations. While Bonney focuses on specifically the right-wing Christians, I feel Stearns falls under that larger ideology that Christ is needed, specifically, in areas with very few Christians or Non-JudeoChristian religions are practiced.

3) I literally don’t understand how this article got put in the Arab Spring tag. It is literally just a long copy pasta post using, yet another tactic in journalism and news coverage I’ve been seeing: the re-imaging of the Cold War narrative. While other authors and news reporters don’t specifically spell out Cold War, this one does. I go into how it is being used in Fox News, but here HuffPo is using it like some odd concern troll for the state of American affairs.

The author, John Feffer, uses a lot of buzzwords like ‘hegemony’, ‘political economy’, ‘economic supremacy’ and the ever popular ‘communism’. The real mystery of this piece is it’s purpose: he is saying democracy will spread and thus blow up in the face of the United States. So wait, Feffer, are you saying democracy is bad? Or is it good that the USA is getting it’s food caught in it’s mouth? Also, why are you giving such a simplistic version of history? Like age old Cold War propaganda, this piece again ignites “concerns” about China and Russia, the ever mysterious Red state.

The author also refuses to directly connect the Arab Spring to any of what he is saying, and instead focuses largely on US foreign relations, China’s growing economy and “threat status” and reiterates Russia’s rival status as well.

And on the third day…[Genesis 1:4] God said, “Let there be light”.

Kidding. On the third day, I weaved through The Guardian.

Like the HuffPo, there is a special Arab Springs tab for the Guardian, which seems to have two names; the url states [bolding mine]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/arab-and-middle-east-protests, while the tab on the home page says “Arab and Middle East unrest”. Hmm, interesting. Perhaps this mix-match is foreboding. The Guardian is “internet famous” for their interactive Arab Spring timeline, which I frequently turn to.

In my time searching on The Guardian, I have found a very strange phenomenon: I would see a horrible headline, and then when I went to click on it, it was a completely less offensive headline with a longer story. This oddity has also spilled over to the interactive timeline in different locations. The above pictured (and can be accessed larger picture 1 and picture 2) are screencaps depicting what I find the most offensive incident of this phenomenon.

While it can’t be seen, my mouse is hovered over the red circled green fist orb that denotes a conflict/protestors. This specific orb is for the red squared piece titled “More unarmed protestors mown down by pro-government gunmen”.

Let me break down what this title creates:

1) there are unarmed protestors.

2) they are mown down. Why would you use such a viscerally graphic word, that is probably really reserved for horror films, to depict a REAL event with REAL people, not actors? “Mown down” creates like an Al Pacino in Scarface image.

3) “pro-government gunmen”. So are the unarmed protestors anti-government? But government is good, so why are they protesting government?

Do you see the scenario being created already?

When one clicks on the fist to view the full article, you are sent to a less offensively titled “Yemeni unarmed protestors killed by loyalist gunmen”. This title selection depicts a far different picture:

1) Yemeni protestors, okay, we have specifics now.

2) They are killed.

3) Loyalist gunmen. So they are loyal to someone, who may be in power.

This scenario is a lot more neutral, and is descriptive without using so many offensive words and creating a (even if unintentionally) very misleading scenario.

To end with, I will share this. By Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Code, specifically their “Minimize Harm” section, I have found that this specific article, as well as the numerous other ones, The Guardian has broken quite a few codes.

Quoting directly from their page (bolded is what they definitely did not do):

— Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
— Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
— Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.
— Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
— Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
— Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects or victims of sex crimes.
— Be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
— Balance a criminal suspect’s fair trial rights with the public’s right to be informed.

First Posted: 02/27/2012 5:46 am Updated: 02/27/2012 9:26 pm

—-Critique by D.W—-

This is the photo posted with the linked article. With these two photos juxtaposed, many would assume that this is possibly one of the people responsible for the said shelling and armed fire. Unless someone pays close attention and hovers over the picture to read the caption, they would not know that this is in fact a rebel-fighter standing watch at a window inside a school in Homs. [see caption: In this Wednesday Feb. 22, 2012 photo, a Syrian rebel aims his rifle inside a classroom at a school in Deir Baalbeh neighborhood in Homs province, Syria. (AP Photo]. 

By putting the headline alongside this photo creates a sort of cognitive dissonance, or confusion. Who’s attacking whom? Is this photo truly representative of the crimes going on in Syria?

While the article is okay, it does try to be a little objective while creating a backdrop of some sort of Cold War showdown.

Feb 28, 2012 - 3:17

Fox News.

warwithinaframe:

Activists paint graffiti on a wall ahead of an anti-government rally in Sanaa February 10, 2012. The writing reads “Yemen” and “My heartbeats remain Yemeni.” Weakened by months of protests against Saleh’s rule, the Yemeni government has lost control of whole chunks of the country, giving southern separatists, northern Shi’ite rebels and Islamist militants a window to further their goals.

Khaled Abdullah

warwithinaframe:

An Egyptian protester throws a tear gas canister back at riot police in Cairo on February 4, 2012. (Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images) #