Posts by Russell Brown
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I sat up watching the news last night and had a look at The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, which opened with O'Reilly bloviating about the evil of the "anti-American, anti-Semitic Al Jazeera" -- backing it up by attributing quotes from people quoted on Al Jazeera to the channel itself. It was unbelievable.
I switched from that complete abandonment of anything resembling a journalistic norm to Jackie Rowland on reporting on Al Jaz from a pro Mubarak rally beginning to boil over. She was apparently -- and justifiably -- fearing for her own life, but she kept talking. It was utterly arresting.
And, of course, the contrast could hardly have been more stark.
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Al Jazeera has a page aggregating real-time tweets from its staff.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to giovanni tiso,
For people who work in media to completely ignore media theory does tend to make their commentary less informed, yes.
Call me a journalist, but that seems less important to me right now than simply trying to get a grasp on the extraordinary reportage flowing out of Egypt, via all the means we've been discussing.
More praise for Al Jazeera -- they handle this stuff so well. Just now on the live stream they re-screened a YouTube clip purporting to depict a makeshift medical centre in Cairo, carefully noting that its source was not verified. They're making extensive use of Twitter, to hear from both their own correspondents and other reporters. It's extraordinary, and I don't think there is any doubt this is shaping international responses on a minute-by-minute basis.
What role the technologies are playing in Egypt itself is, of course, much harder to know.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I think the go-to guy for this one is actually the Harold Innis of Empire and Communications (1950). I have the chances that the journos who are spouting off about the Twitter generation might have read him down as slim to nil.
So clearly any insights or observations they might have in 2011 are invalid. Good to know.
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Egyptian blogger Ali Seif's Twitter stream has been providing an extraordinary and alarming account of events inside Tahrir Square.
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I cannot make a chickpea based dish without wondering how bourgeois it is.
It's way worse if you've bought dried chickpeas and soaked them.
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I'm intrigued that this is right down the bottom of the Guardian's story
Analysts believe that a likely outcome of the crisis is that Mubarak will eventually be persuaded to stand down by his closest advisers, including the army top brass and Suleiman. The US has close links to the Egyptian military.
A back-channel between Washington and Egypt's military leadership would be front-page news if we heard it out of Cablegate. Like this, it seems almost reassuring.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Stephen Judd,
I find it hard to put any other construction on what Campbell said.
Yes, unfortunately.
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I watched this Al Jazeera story on events in Tunisia last week:
I think it puts Facebook et al in the right context. It’s not a “Facebook revolution”, but the tools did make a difference.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
If I was a government and wanted to disconnect the Internet in a hurry, I’d just send troops/police to the Internet exchange and each ISP/telco hub with instructions to shutdown mains, UPS and generators. In NZ, that would be a handful of places (given that the smaller ISPs don’t have full infrastructure).
That would certainly take out most of the NZ internet. There would still be satellite for some. But it didn't need to be quite that heavy in Egypt -- apparently they just voice-called each ISP ordering them to amend their routing tables.