Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
These are the top three stories at google.news at 3:00 pm on Friday, generated by reader interest.
Wouldn't, like, war in the Caucasus be more important than the other two? Or the attempt to impeach Musharraf? Or the news from Iraq?
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posted by Juan Cole @ 8/08/2008 03:29:00 PM
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Suggested Books about the Middle East
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Awards
Winner, October 5, 2007, Scott Nearing Award for Courageous Scholarship (Awarded by the Graduate Students of the Political Science Department, University of Pennsylvania).
Winner, 2005 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Hunter College.
Winner, 2004 Koufax Award for Best Expert Blog
Winner, 2004 Koufax Award for Best
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11 Comments:
US media chooses its top stories based on human interest, not hard news value. Every small plane crash, bus wreck, alligator attack, gory murder, or sexual intrigue has a better chance of making the top news than an incipient war in Pakistan, a constitutional crisis in Turkey, or new political alighments in the world of international oil suppliers. I continue to look with hope, but every US news outlet is degrading. CNN, despite its past, is particularly vacuous. I have found Yahoo to to be the best for neutrality, responsiveness, and story development/updates, but they have degraded in the past year. It is disgusting and frightening to have to go out of the US to get news. Having compared many outlets for years, it is crystal clear that Americans who rely on traditional news sources are not well enough informed by those sources to make the necessary decisions to vote.
Juan, he who snarks last, snarks best
WASHINGTON - Former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on Friday admitted to an extramarital affair while his wife was battling cancer. He denied fathering the woman's daughter.
Savannah or Marietta Georgia?
Dead right.
The sight of Russian tanks rumbling across the boarder of a neighboring state is chilling.
hahaha! Surely, you jest. This is America. The America that voted for George W Bush...twice. They must have taken one look at the headline and thought, nah, the Russians wouldn't invade OUR Georgia. It must be some other place way over there that I don't care about.
And anyway - I just noticed - the headline starts with the word ANALYSIS, which means that we have to think. Which is, well, hard work.
The cable media networks had the Edwards affair on all day, totally ignoring the Russia/Georgia conflict, and the volatile situation in Pakistan. Way to go media, thanks for keeping your all seeing eye on the real problems lmao!
So as "USA is center of civilization" judging from the point made in above post, Are we living in dark ages?
Anonymous is right. If there were a juvenile sexual angle to the Georgian-Ossetian-Russian conflict then the folks would be paying attention. Most Americans, including the captains of media and their employees prefer stories that involve "forbidden" or unconventional sex. Americans are voyeurs. Geography and politics and history don't interest them much. They prefer their information to be titillating and better yet sexually avant-garde. Boring old battles in the Caucasus between groups they've never heard of are a yawner.
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Apparently, the Georgians are checking out the reacion of the new Russian President D.Medvedev.
It seems that the Romans used the similar concept 'panem et circenses' to keep the crowds interested in entertainment instead of politics. On the other hand this conflict impacts vital Western strategic interest in the Caspean Sea Basin and is far from being a boring old battle. For a starter I recommend the 1996 Heritage Foundation background paper by Ariel Cohen "The New 'Great Game': Oil Politics in the Caucasus and Central Asia". For more recent analysis the John Hopkins Central Asia - Caucasus Institute is helpful. http://www.cacianalyst.org/?q=taxonomy/term/2
The recent attack on the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline that was built to counter the Russian influence might have triggered the war.
For details see this World Bank BIC report http://bicusa.org/en/Article.3867.aspx
Turkish officials initially claimed the explosion resulted from technical failure. Although the cause of the blast is under investigation, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) appears to be behind it. The group’s militant arm, the People’s Defense Force, claimed responsibility on its website, and a Force leader threatened to sabotage BTC last year. The group has also claimed to be behind an attack in March on an Iranian-Turkish gas pipeline.
The BTC agreement stipulates damage unrelated to pipeline operations is the responsibility of the country, giving the Turkish government incentive to prefer a technical problem. However, if PKK reports are true, the pipeline stands in a precarious position. Approximately 1,076 km of the 1,768 km pipeline runs through Turkey, some of it along Kurdish territory. Another 249 km passes through Georgia, where conflicts with Abkhazia and South Ossetia have escalated in recent months. Just a day before the BTC explosion, Georgian separatists threatened to sabotage the pipeline if hostilities continued. Rising tensions between Georgia and its breakaway regions could easily spur attacks on Georgia’s segment of the pipeline as well.
Completed in 2005, BTC cost over $4 billion to construct. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) provided funding, despite civil society concerns. Pipeline construction had adverse effects on minorities, likely escalating existing grievances. The August explosion confirms initial civil society fears and highlights the controversy around BTC. The South Caucasus gas pipeline, which also received EBRD financing, runs through the same route and faces similar risks for sabotage as the BTC pipeline.
On the other hand this conflict impacts vital Western strategic interest in the Caspean Sea Basin and is far from being a boring old battle.
As far as the average American sports fan is concerned that is exactly what they are -- boring old battles half way round the world between groups they've never heard of. Thus the media fascination with the meaningless fact that married man John Edwards had a girlfriend. Edwards' family is affected by that but virtually no one else is. Yet we're getting wall-to-wall reporting on the minutiae of the Edwards family history and that of his girlfriend from the Establishment media. If the so-called news media viewed the Ossetia story as a superior ratings-puller we'd be seeing and hearing full, intensive coverage of that situation. But the executives at the "news" organisations have looked at the dailies and the John Edwards non-story is attracting more viewers and readers and listeners than reports of the fighting and geopolitical implications of what's happening in Georgia. When E! channel type content can be blended with politics it's a magical combination for capturing the public's attention. Sex and sexual indiscretions almost always trump substantive subjects in the popular media. Maybe if the Ossetians could quickly organise a battalion of topless females the war coverage would improve, at least quantitatively.
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Russia-vs-Georgia - New website about conflict
Vote for one of the sides
http://www.russia-vs-georgia.com/
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