Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Lara Logan - I'm not making too much of it
Hot Air's all over Lara Logan for airing Al Qaeda propaganda video without mentioning the source. In the video, Logan interviews a Haifa street "resident" who blames the United States for the fighting there.
While Malkin and Hot Air make much of the fact that the guy wore his headdress "insurgent-style," he's also wearing it "shepherd-boy" style and "day-laborer" style. What I mean is it is very common for Iraqis to wear their headdresses covering their faces, even if it's a 12 year old kid doing nothing but riding a donkey and tending his father's flock of sheep in the countryside.
Don't worry about the bandana.
I'm not even too concerned about her having obtained the video. I think it's obvious that any video showing an Iraqi soldier being kicked around and double-tapped was probably taken by a bad guy. I don't need that explained to me. And Logan could not reasonably have been expected to know that that particular footage had been released already. She's a shoe-leather reporter. She doesn't sit around and watch Al Qaeda websites, I'm sure.
Things get hairier, though, when you consider her failure to note that Al Qaeda is taking credit for the fighting on Haifa Street. I don't think it's unreasonable for her to be aware of the players in the area. And if she was unaware of Al Qaeda taking credit for the fighting specifically, she doesn't have to be as gullible as she was, having clearly omitted information critical to understanding the fighting.
These are venial sins, though, not mortal sins.
I think she's doing the best she can. How she reacts to the controversy in the next few days will reveal much about her professionalism.
Till then, I am cutting some slack.
Paul Friedman, though, the CBS exec who said "I can assure you that [the video] is not from Al Qaeda" is a credulous fool, who is clearly to stupid or naive to know how practitioners of hypermodern warfare leverage a willing media to their purposes. Friedman is seriously overstepping the limits of his knowledge when he assures us the video is not from Al Qaeda. Only an idiot would stake out such a claim - because even if the tape was handed to CBS by a trusted and known source, that tells us nothing about where HE got it from.
Al Qaeda says it's theirs...and they're in more of a position to know than CBS. I wonder if Friedman is the same dolt who told Kim Kommando that her radio show about computers would never work because computers were a passing fad, and the internet was the pet rock of the day - in 1994!!!
That should establish the analytical credentials of CBS right there.
Splash, out
Jason
P.S., I thought the Arabic singing on the Al Qaeda tape was pretty cool. Which goes to show you how starved I am for good music. The crap the record labels are spoonfeeding us via the ClearChannels of the world is - like too much Western music - melodically bankrupt.
While Malkin and Hot Air make much of the fact that the guy wore his headdress "insurgent-style," he's also wearing it "shepherd-boy" style and "day-laborer" style. What I mean is it is very common for Iraqis to wear their headdresses covering their faces, even if it's a 12 year old kid doing nothing but riding a donkey and tending his father's flock of sheep in the countryside.
Don't worry about the bandana.
I'm not even too concerned about her having obtained the video. I think it's obvious that any video showing an Iraqi soldier being kicked around and double-tapped was probably taken by a bad guy. I don't need that explained to me. And Logan could not reasonably have been expected to know that that particular footage had been released already. She's a shoe-leather reporter. She doesn't sit around and watch Al Qaeda websites, I'm sure.
Things get hairier, though, when you consider her failure to note that Al Qaeda is taking credit for the fighting on Haifa Street. I don't think it's unreasonable for her to be aware of the players in the area. And if she was unaware of Al Qaeda taking credit for the fighting specifically, she doesn't have to be as gullible as she was, having clearly omitted information critical to understanding the fighting.
These are venial sins, though, not mortal sins.
I think she's doing the best she can. How she reacts to the controversy in the next few days will reveal much about her professionalism.
Till then, I am cutting some slack.
Paul Friedman, though, the CBS exec who said "I can assure you that [the video] is not from Al Qaeda" is a credulous fool, who is clearly to stupid or naive to know how practitioners of hypermodern warfare leverage a willing media to their purposes. Friedman is seriously overstepping the limits of his knowledge when he assures us the video is not from Al Qaeda. Only an idiot would stake out such a claim - because even if the tape was handed to CBS by a trusted and known source, that tells us nothing about where HE got it from.
Al Qaeda says it's theirs...and they're in more of a position to know than CBS. I wonder if Friedman is the same dolt who told Kim Kommando that her radio show about computers would never work because computers were a passing fad, and the internet was the pet rock of the day - in 1994!!!
That should establish the analytical credentials of CBS right there.
Splash, out
Jason
P.S., I thought the Arabic singing on the Al Qaeda tape was pretty cool. Which goes to show you how starved I am for good music. The crap the record labels are spoonfeeding us via the ClearChannels of the world is - like too much Western music - melodically bankrupt.
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