| | |
|
AndrewCaseSecondPaper 7 - 28 Jun 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="SecondPaper" |
|---|
Propaganda, Innocence, and the Law | | | Journalists expect themselves to view authority skeptically; while reporters will quote the palaver from official spokesmen, they will rarely stoop themselves to categorizing wartime dead as “innocents” (though “civilians” still usually passes muster). But just as the self-assured volunteer who contributes to a 30,000 word Wikipedia article on a trivial topic unknowingly debases other subjects left to whither as stubs, the choice of coverage by media companies expresses and promotes a bias more insidious than that of the political propaganda machines, because it is not so easy to see, and not so easy to debunk. | |
>
> |
- I must confess that I didn't see your point when you made it and I still don't see it now. The supposed correlation between the length of an article and the importance of its subject is not a Wikipedia standard: you brought it with you as a cultural expectation. It's apparent that in Wikipedia, the length of an article is more likely to correlate with the degree of interest among the demographic base of contributing editors than with the degree of importance attached by anybody other than the editors themselves. Because anyone can edit, anyone who attaches importance to something can attach to the articles about it. Lifetimes pass, habits begin to become universal throughout the Net, and the Wikipedia's eventual successor is simply the Neutral Point of View Version of Everything We Know. But we aren't there now.
| | | A) A simple example
In the period before the 1991 Gulf War, networks were alive with stories of the abuse of the Kurdish minority in northern Iraq. Sadam Hussein was murdering the Kurds, one of many atrocities that television news was pleased to cover. When the war was over and an “autonomous region” was established in Kurdish Iraq, media coverage of the Kurds (still slaughtered wholesale, only now in Turkey instead of Iraq), faded to the back pages of the international sections, when it was presented at all. Most reporting on the Kurdish-Turkish conflict reported that the KLA, freedom fighters against Saddam, were terrorists in Turkey, prompting Steve Tesich to write that “Whether or not your death is newsworthy depends upon who is killing you.” (Arts and Leisure, Tesich). | | | -- AndrewCase - 13 Apr 2009 | |
>
> |
- This is not editing of anyone else, but an essay of your own. (Just seems relevant to point out the failure of collaboration to take hold.) As an essay, it's major problem seems to me to be the weakness of its conclusion: vigorous idea-making and forceful use of language has been going on, and all that's left at the end of the evaporation process is careful lawyerly listening for the dog that didn't bark in the nighttime. Perhaps something more can be made of the situation you've set up: I think that's the best direction of revision.
| | |
| META TOPICMOVED | by="IanSullivan" date="1239805366" from="LawContempSoc.TWikiGuestSecondPaper" to="LawContempSoc.AndrewCaseSecondPaper" |
|---|
|
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |