All Blog Posts from Public Eye

In light of the anniversary of 9/11, we're getting the usual media commemorations – with William Safire deconstructing the term itself and USA Today accusing us of not really caring about the date anymore. (Was I the only one insulted by that?)

And we also got an update about al Qaeda's new media prowess, courtesy of the Washington Post.

Since 2000, al-Qaeda has run its own media production company, al-Sahab, which means "the clouds" in Arabic, an allusion to the misty mountain peaks of Afghanistan.

Until two years ago, al-Sahab was dependent on broadcasters such as the al-Jazeera satellite television network to air its videos and could distribute only short clips on the Internet. But then it achieved a spectacular breakthrough. Taking advantage of technological advances and bandwidth expansion, it began posting videos directly on the Internet, relying on an anonymous global network of webmasters to shield their electronic tracks.
In 2005, al-Sahab released 16 videos. This year, it has produced four times that number. Quality has improved markedly, with most videos now including subtitles in several languages and sometimes 3-D animation.
"If you want to stop al-Qaeda on the communications front, you should concentrate on their IT manager instead of Osama," said Muhammad Amir Rana, director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, a research group in Lahore, Pakistan, that studies militant groups.

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In light of the anniversary of 9/11, we're getting the usual media commemorations – with William Safire deconstructing the term itself and USA Today accusing us of not really caring about the date anymore. Yeah.

And we also got an update about Al Qaeda's new media prowess, courtesy of the Washington Post.

Since 2000, al-Qaeda has run its own media production company, al-Sahab, which means "the clouds" in Arabic, an allusion to the misty mountain peaks of Afghanistan.

Until two years ago, al-Sahab was dependent on broadcasters such as the al-Jazeera satellite television network to air its videos and could distribute only short clips on the Internet. But then it achieved a spectacular breakthrough. Taking advantage of technological advances and bandwidth expansion, it began posting videos directly on the Internet, relying on an anonymous global network of webmasters to shield their electronic tracks.
In 2005, al-Sahab released 16 videos. This year, it has produced four times that number. Quality has improved markedly, with most videos now including subtitles in several languages and sometimes 3-D animation.
"If you want to stop al-Qaeda on the communications front, you should concentrate on their IT manager instead of Osama," said Muhammad Amir Rana, director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, a research group in Lahore, Pakistan, that studies militant groups.

Read full post…

In today’s New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman takes the media to task for its coverage of Campaign 2008 thus far:

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.
Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night?”

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit … Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”

Even though it’s strident and partisan, Krugman has a point. How many people know about Fred Thompson’s inconsistent views about abortion, against the number of people who know he has a wife who may or not “Work the pole.” Quick show of hands: Anybody out there who doesn’t know which candidate has a costly coif?

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