company:the new york times

The New York Times on race and class: What determines social mobility in America? - World Socialist Web Site

▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/04/05/ineq-a05.html

The New York Times on race and class: What determines social mobility in America?

Part one
By Eric London
5 April 2018

This is the first part of a two-part article.

In recent weeks, the New York Times has promoted a new study by researchers from the US Census Bureau, Harvard and Stanford that examines the impact of race and income inequality in the United States over the course of an entire generation. The March 2018 working paper, published by the Equality of Opportunity Project, is titled “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An intergenerational perspective.”

#race #classe #nation#états-unis #mobilité

Israel Kills Palestinians and Western Liberals Shrug. Their Humanitarianism Is a Sham.
▻https://theintercept.com/2018/04/02/israel-killing-palestine-civilian-liberal-humanitarian

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So, where is the outcry from liberal interventionists across the West? Where is BHL, as Palestinians are being shot and wounded in the hundreds in 2018?

Where is the call from former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose 1999 speech in Chicago defending the concept of a “just war” and a “doctrine of the international community” became a key text for liberal interventionists, for a “no-fly” zone over Gaza? Why does a guest speaker at Ariel Sharon’s funeral have nothing to say about the increasing number of Palestinian funerals?

Where is the moral outrage from former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, the famously pro-intervention, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a “A Problem From Hell,” which lamented U.S. inaction in Rwanda, over the sheer number of unarmed Palestinians shot, killed, and injured in recent days? How does she have time to retweet a picture of an elephant and a lion cub, but not to make a statement about the violence in Gaza?

Where is the demand from Canadian academic-turned-politician Michael Ignatieff, who was once one of the loudest voices in favor of the so-called responsibility to protect doctrine, for peacekeeping troops to be deployed to the Occupied Territories?

Where are the righteously angry op-eds from Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, or Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, or David Aaronovitch of The Times of London, demanding concrete action against the human rights abusers of the IDF?

And where is the appeal from former U.S. Secretary of State and arch-interventionist Madeleine Albright for economic and financial sanctions against the state of Israel? For an arms embargo? For travel bans on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Lieberman, and IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot?

Their silence is deafening — and telling. Palestinians, it seems, have been so dehumanized that they don’t deserve a humanitarian intervention

Cambridge Analytica demonstrates that Facebook needs to give researchers more access.
▻https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/cambridge-analytica-demonstrates-that-facebook-needs-to-give-researchers-more

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In a 2013 paper, psychologist Michal Kosinski and collaborators from University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom warned that “the predictability of individual attributes from digital records of behavior may have considerable negative implications,” posing a threat to “well-being, freedom, or even life.” This warning followed their striking findings about how accurately the personal attributes of a person (from political leanings to intelligence to sexual orientation) could be inferred from nothing but their Facebook likes. Kosinski and his colleagues had access to this information through the voluntary participation of the Facebook users by offering them the results of a personality quiz, a method that can drive viral engagement. Of course, one person’s warning may be another’s inspiration.

Kosinski’s original research really was an important scientific finding. The paper has been cited more than 1,000 times and the dataset has spawned many other studies. But the potential uses for it go far beyond academic research. In the past few days, the Guardian and the New York Times have published a number of new stories about Cambridge Analytica, the data mining and analytics firm best known for aiding President Trump’s campaign and the pro-Brexit campaign. This trove of reporting shows how Cambridge Analytica allegedly relied on the psychologist Aleksandr Kogan (who also goes by Aleksandr Spectre), a colleague of the original researchers at Cambridge, to gain access to profiles of around 50 million Facebook users.

According to the Guardian’s and New York Times’ reporting, the data that was used to build these models came from a rough duplicate of that personality quiz method used legitimately for scientific research. Kogan, a lecturer in another department, reportedly approached Kosinski and their Cambridge colleagues in the Psychometric Centre to discuss commercializing the research. To his credit, Kosinski declined. However, Kogan built an app named thisismydigitallife for his own startup, Global Science Research, which collected the same sorts of data. GSR paid Mechanical Turk workers (contrary to the terms of Mechanical Turk) to take a psychological quiz and provide access to their Facebook profiles. In 2014, under the contract with the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, SCL, that data was harvested and used to build a model of 50 million U.S. Facebook users that included allegedly 5,000 data points on each user.

So if the Facebook API allowed Kogan access to this data, what did he do wrong? This is where things get murky, but bear with us. It appears that Kogan deceitfully used his dual roles as a researcher and an entrepreneur to move data between an academic context and a commercial context, although the exact method of it is unclear. The Guardian claims that Kogan “had a licence from Facebook to collect profile data, but it was for research purposes only” and “[Kogan’s] permission from Facebook to harvest profiles in large quantities was specifically restricted to academic use.” Transferring the data this way would already be a violation of the terms of Facebook’s API policies that barred use of the data outside of Facebook for commercial uses, but we are unfamiliar with Facebook offering a “license” or special “permission” for researchers to collect greater amounts of data via the API.

Regardless, it does appear that the amount of data thisismydigitallife was vacuuming up triggered a security review at Facebook and an automatic shutdown of its API access. Relying on Wylie’s narrative, the Guardian claims that Kogan “spoke to an engineer” and resumed access:

“Facebook could see it was happening,” says Wylie. “Their security protocols were triggered because Kogan’s apps were pulling this enormous amount of data, but apparently Kogan told them it was for academic use. So they were like, ‘Fine’.”

Kogan claims that he had a close working relationship with Facebook and that it was familiar with his research agendas and tools.

A great deal of research confirms that most people don’t pay attention to permissions and privacy policies for the apps they download and the services they use—and the notices are often too vague or convoluted to clearly understand anyway. How many Facebook users give third parties access to their profile so that they can get a visualization of the words they use most, or to find out which Star Wars character they are? It isn’t surprising that Kosinski’s original recruitment method—a personality quiz that provided you with a psychological profile of yourself based on a common five-factor model—resulted in more than 50,000 volunteers providing access to their Facebook data. Indeed, Kosinski later co-authored a paper detailing how to use viral marketing techniques to recruit study participants, and he has written about the ethical dynamics of utilizing friend data.

#Facebook #Cambridge_analytica #Recherche

Le Huffington Post a pu se procurer l’enregistrement d’une réunion à portes fermées entre le leader de la rédaction du NYT et des collègues: le premier nommé affirme que le journal “est en faveur du #capitalisme parce qu’il a été le plus grand programme anti-#pauvreté et pourvoyeur de #progrès que nous ayons vu”.....

Q&A Transcript: James Bennet Talks About His Editorial Page With #New_York_Times Staffers | HuffPost
▻https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/james-bennet-new-york-times-transcript_us_5a8ec6d5e4b077f5bfebfac7

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This is a very lightly edited transcript from a December meeting between New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet and a number of Times employees. For more, read our story about the meeting.

I think we are pro-capitalism. The New York Times is in favor of capitalism because it has been the greatest engine of, it’s been the greatest anti-poverty program and engine of progress that we’ve seen.

Via le site FAIR
▻https://fair.org/home/top-nyt-editor-we-are-pro-capitalism-the-times-is-in-favor-of-capitalism

#MSM #journalisme

America’s Real Digital Divide - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/opinion/america-digital-divide.html

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A group of former Facebook and Google employees last week began a campaign to change the tech companies they had a hand in creating. The initiative, called Truth About Tech, aims to push these companies to make their products less addictive for children — and it’s a good start.

But there’s more to the problem. If you think middle-class children are being harmed by too much screen time, just consider how much greater the damage is to minority and disadvantaged kids, who spend much more time in front of screens.

According to a 2011 study by researchers at Northwestern University, minority children watch 50 percent more TV than their white peers, and they use computers for up to one and a half hours longer each day. White children spend eight hours and 36 minutes looking at a screen every day, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, while black and Hispanic children spend 13 hours.

While some parents in more dangerous neighborhoods understandably think that screen time is safer than playing outside, the deleterious effects of too much screen time are abundantly clear. Screen time has a negative effect on children’s ability to understand nonverbal emotional cues; it is linked to higher rates of mental illness, including depression; and it heightens the risk for obesity.

Make no mistake: The real digital divide in this country is not between children who have access to the internet and those who don’t. It’s between children whose parents know that they have to restrict screen time and those whose parents have been sold a bill of goods by schools and politicians that more screens are a key to success. It’s time to let everyone in on the secret.

Un point revue partial et peu argumenté, mais qu’il faut intégrer dans une réflexion plus vaste sur les usages de l’internet en fonction des classes sociales.

#Ecrans #Usage

A Call to Cut Back Online Addictions. Pitted Against Just One More Click. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/us/politics/online-addictions-cut-back-screen-time.html

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At her university in Boras, Sweden, Elin Hedin, 23, stopped using Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Messenger and Instagram. She also tried to limit the amount of time she browsed websites.

In the first week, it felt like a vacation and she slept better. But then, she said, the loneliness kicked in.

“I‘ve often felt isolated, and kind of lonely,” she wrote in an email. “I miss reading about people’s days, seeing what they’re up to on Instagram, reading about their opinions on the latest news, and so on.”

“I guess I’m just used to getting that extra bit of socializing,” she added.

Mr. Newport continues to send messages of daily encouragement to readers who participated in his challenge. It made most realize, he said, how dependent they had become on websites and mobile phone apps.

“Their role in your life has grown without your permission,” he said. “No one had that in mind when they signed up for Facebook to stay in touch with their college roommate.”

A majority of the people who reported back to Mr. Newport with their results in unplugging noted that they had picked up new hobbies: painting, exercise, the opportunity to write a book. They said they also imposed strict guidelines to keep themselves from slipping: Keep the phone charger in another room. Ask the people texting to instead please call. Stop the reflex click to a favorite sports website instead of focusing on work.

#Addiction #Médias_sociaux #Déconnexion

Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious ? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/science/plants-consciousness-anesthesia.html

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“Plants are not just robotic, stimulus-response devices,” said Frantisek Baluska, a plant cell biologist at the University of Bonn in Germany and co-author of the study. “They’re living organisms which have their own problems, maybe something like with humans feeling pain or joy. In order to navigate this complex life, they must have some compass.”

Plants sometimes use that compass to deal with stress, competition or development. They take in information from their environment and produce their own anesthetics like menthol, ethanol and cocaine, similar to how humans release chemicals that dull pain during trauma. These may act within the plant itself or float off in the air to affect neighboring plants.

Our anesthetics work on plants too, the study confirmed, although what exactly they’re working on is unclear.

La question de la complexité des plantes est suffisamment intéressante sans qu’il soit besoin d’y mêler des termes comme « conscience » et de pratiquer l’anthropomorphisme.

#Plantes #Narcose

The Butcher Builders : How Western Journalists Helped Create a Monster in Russia
▻https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/the-butcher-builders-how-western-journalists-helpe.html

Nonobstant le terme de « monstre » pour désigner Poutine,

While all of this was going on, western journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, and other publications, were enamoured with the narrative of capitalism overcoming Communism. The economic reformers—Yeltsin and his administration—were “good,” as Financial Times reporter John Lloyd put it in a retrospective blog post, and their efforts generally successful. This lasted right up until Russia’s ‘98 economic collapse, when their reporting would undergo a major shift in tone.

#MSM #Etats-Unis #Eltsine #Russie

Trump Says Climate Is Both ‘Cooling’ and ‘Heating.’ He’s Only Half Right. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/climate/trump-climate-change.html

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Mr. Morgan: Quick fire: climate change. For you, is it about the science or about the money? The Paris accords.

Mr. Trump: I think it’s about everything and I’m a believer in clean air and clear water.

And later in the interview:

Mr. Trump: I’ll tell you what I believe in. I believe in clean air. I believe in crystal-clear, beautiful water. I believe in just having good cleanliness in all.

[…]

Mr. Morgan: Do you believe in climate change? Do you think it exists?

Mr. Trump: There is a cooling and there is a heating, and I mean, look: It used to not be climate change. It used to be global warming.

Mr. Morgan: Right.

Mr. Trump: Right? That wasn’t working too well, because it was getting too cold all over the place. The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records, O.K., they’re at a record level.

My Life as a New York Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror
▻https://theintercept.com/2018/01/03/my-life-as-a-new-york-times-reporter-in-the-shadow-of-the-war-on-terro

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Très long article de #James_Risen, #journaliste d’investigation du #New_york_Times

My experience with [some] stor[ies] [...] made me much less willing to go along with later government requests to hold or kill stories. And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times, who were still quite willing to cooperate with the government.

[...]

By 2002, I was also starting to clash with the editors over our coverage of the Bush administration’s claims about pre-war intelligence on Iraq. My stories raising questions about the intelligence, particularly the administration’s claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether.

[...]

Meanwhile, #Judy_Miller, an intense reporter who was based in New York but had sources at the highest levels of the Bush administration, was writing story after story that seemed to document the existence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Her stories were helping to set the political agenda in Washington.

[...]

After weeks of reporting in late 2002 and early 2003, I was able to get enough material to start writing stories that revealed that intelligence analysts were skeptical of the Bush administration’s evidence for going to war, particularly the administration’s assertions that there were links between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda.

But after I filed the first story, it sat in the Times computer system for days, then weeks, untouched by editors. I asked several editors about the story’s status, but no one knew.

Finally, the story ran, but it was badly cut and buried deep inside the paper. I wrote another one, and the same thing happened. I tried to write more, but I started to get the message. It seemed to me that the Times didn’t want these stories.

What angered me most was that while they were burying my skeptical stories, the editors were not only giving banner headlines to stories asserting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, they were also demanding that I help match stories from other publications about Iraq’s purported WMD programs. I grew so sick of this that when the Washington Post reported that Iraq had turned over nerve gas to terrorists, I refused to try to match the story. One mid-level editor in the Washington bureau yelled at me for my refusal. He came to my desk carrying a golf club while berating me after I told him that the story was bullshit and I wasn’t going to make any calls on it.

As a small protest, I put a sign on my desk that said, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” It was New York Journal publisher William Randolph Hearst’s supposed line to artist Frederic Remington, whom he had sent to Cuba to illustrate the “crisis” there before the Spanish-American War. I don’t think my editors even noticed the sign.

#manipulation #mensonges #désinformation #MSM

Rallying Cry of Jerusalem May Have Lost Force in Arab World - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/world/middleeast/arabs-jerusalem-trump.html

Avec Moustapha Hamoui comme juge du “monde arabe”....

“ ‘Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine’ joins ‘Palestinian refugees are going back home one day’ in the let’s-hope-it-will-happen-but-it-never-will department,” Mustapha Hamoui, a Lebanese blogger, wrote in a rueful tweet.

For The New York Times, Gauging “The Arab World’s” Reaction to Jerusalem Move Means a Focus on the 1% | The Mideastwire Blog
▻https://mideastwire.wordpress.com/2017/12/07/for-the-new-york-times-gauging-the-arab-worlds-reaction-to-je

This is a deeply problematic article by Anne, Mr. Hubbard and Mr. Walsh. One would have expected that Anne, especially, would have recognized the pitfalls of the approach she co-authors here. A few points, but one initially to keep front and center: we have been and are in the midst of a major series of transitions when it comes to the issue of Palestine. One key trend is towards an ultimate, military engagement or series of engagements as the military-technology matrix is changing and since the peace track has long been shown to be inoperative. Any article that draws much from very initial reactions are missing the larger, structural changes that are underway and that are leading to much more violence. That said:

1) Leading with a Lebanese blogger who has very little engagement with or impact on the issue at hand is simply confounding. Mustapha is a good blogger on Lebanese politics but he has zero impact and relation to the headline that suggests the “Arab World” has lost its voice and impact on Jerusalem.

[...]

As Greenland Melts, Where’s the Water Going? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/climate/greenland-ice-melting.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/12/04/climate/greenland-melting-1512406544587/greenland-melting-1512406544587-facebookJumbo.jpg

Each year, Greenland loses 270 billion tons of ice as the planet warms. New research shows that some of the water may be trapped in the ice sheet, which could change how scientists think about global sea levels.

#climat #image_satellite #cartographie #Groënland #beau

The New York Times and the U.S. Border wall: A love story

The New York Times’ radical reasonableness offers us a clear vision of the ways one can continuously adapt its position to the political context as to be in position of respectful negotiation with the status quo. On Tuesday (November 8, 2017), the newspaper published an article entitled “Eight Ways to Build a Border Wall” that presents the eight prototypes recently built on the southern United States national border which mark the beginning of the construction promised by the current president. The article unapologetically associates veneer drone footage to comparative shots of the prototypes with titles such as “Concrete or No Concrete,” “Opaque or Transparent,” or “Tube or No Tube?” that we would more eagerly associate with a kitchen-customizing multiple-choice form on a home improvement website, than with a serious examination of the political instrumentalization of architecture’s violence. In presenting a wall project it opposed during the 2016 presidential campaign in the sensational form of a commercial brochure with which US citizens are invited to shop, the NYT brings a tremendous legitimacy to this political project. Rather than examining the very ideological and societal axioms of such a project or insisting on the shattering fact that 10,000 people died attempting to cross this border (killed by heat stroke, dehydration, or by US militias), this article instead analyzes exclusively the “how” of the Wall in the usual adjustment to the new status quo.

https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/borderwall1-master768.jpg https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Ronald-Rael-432x411.jpg

#New_York_Times #médias #journalisme #presse #murs #frontières #barrières_frontalières #USA #Etats-Unis

Hitler at Home
▻https://placesjournal.org/article/hitler-at-home

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The Invention of the Private Hitler
The coming out of the Führer’s personal life marked a distinct departure from earlier National Socialist publicity, which had focused on Hitler’s role as agitator of the masses and leader of a militant political movement. In the runoff election, the need to cast a wider net pushed Nazi Party propaganda toward a celebration of their candidate’s personal attributes. Hitler’s youth and dynamism, epitomized by his much-advertised campaign flights across Germany, became a selling point. Against the aura of aristocratic dignity that clung to the remote, eighty-four-year-old Hindenburg, the Nazis offered the modernity and glamour of a candidate who took to the skies to meet face-to-face with the German people. More daringly, Nazi publicists brought Hitler’s private life into the limelight to emphasize his moral and human character and thereby win over the bourgeois voters and women who earlier had overwhelmingly supported Hindenburg.

In those same years, the New York Times Magazine grappled repeatedly with the topic of Hitler’s domesticity, returning time and again to the Obersalzberg. In October 1935 it ran a short but admiring article, “Hitler His Own Architect: He Practices His Art on a Simple Chalet.” Noting Hitler’s early aspirations to become a professional architect, the magazine credited him with the renovations to the house (still minor at that point), which it lauded for its modesty and tastefulness: “Haus Wachenfeld … differs in no way from thousands of other Bavarian chalets except for the enlargements and the fact that it is furnished more simply and in rather better taste than the average home of the Bavarian peasant.” 50

A year and a half later, in May 1937, the magazine featured on its cover a stunning photograph of Berchtesgaden with the tagline: “Where Hitler Dreams and Plans.” Otto Tolischus, the Berlin correspondent who contributed the three-page report, began with a clear-eyed assessment of the significance of Hitler’s mountain residence:

Germany is administered from Berlin, capital of the Third Reich. It is inspired and spurred onward from Munich, capital of the National Socialist movement. But it is ruled from a mountain top — the mountain on which Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler has built himself a lofty country residence where he spends the larger part of his time and to which he always retires to ponder events and to make those fateful decisions that so often startle the world.

Der Berghof, as this residence is now called, is rapidly becoming a place of German destiny.

How Silicon Valley Plans to Conquer the Classroom - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/technology/silicon-valley-baltimore-schools.html?emc=edit_th_20171104&nl=todaysheadlin

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Silicon Valley is going all out to own America’s school computer-and-software market, projected to reach $21 billion in sales by 2020. An industry has grown up around courting public-school decision makers, and tech companies are using a sophisticated playbook to reach them, The New York Times has found in a review of thousands of pages of Baltimore County school documents and in interviews with dozens of school officials, researchers, teachers, tech executives and parents.

Au moins en France, ils n’ont pas ce problème : c’est directement le Ministère de l’Education nationale qui a invité ses cadres aux formations et conseils délivrés par Microsoft...

School leaders have become so central to sales that a few private firms will now, for fees that can climb into the tens of thousands of dollars, arrange meetings for vendors with school officials, on some occasions paying superintendents as consultants. Tech-backed organizations have also flown superintendents to conferences at resorts. And school leaders have evangelized company products to other districts.

These marketing approaches are legal. But there is little rigorous evidence so far to indicate that using computers in class improves educational results. Even so, schools nationwide are convinced enough to have adopted them in hopes of preparing students for the new economy.

Intéressant cette notion de « pharmacy-like » technique de marketing. Il n’y a plus seulement l’industrie du tabac comme modèle de la capacité à créer un foule d’accros.

In some significant ways, the industry’s efforts to push laptops and apps in schools resemble influence techniques pioneered by drug makers. The pharmaceutical industry has long cultivated physicians as experts and financed organizations, like patient advocacy groups, to promote its products.

Studies have found that strategies like these work, and even a free $20 meal from a drug maker can influence a doctor’s prescribing practices. That is one reason the government today maintains a database of drug maker payments, including meals, to many physicians.

Tech companies have not gone as far as drug companies, which have regularly paid doctors to give speeches. But industry practices, like flying school officials to speak at events and taking school leaders to steak and sushi restaurants, merit examination, some experts say.

Several parents said they were troubled by school officials’ getting close to the companies seeking their business. Dr. Cynthia M. Boyd, a practicing geriatrician and professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine with children in district schools, said it reminded her of drug makers’ promoting their medicines in hospitals.

“You don’t have to be paid by Big Pharma, or Big Ed Tech, to be influenced,” Dr. Boyd said. She has raised concerns about the tech initiative at school board meetings.

In Baltimore County and beyond, the digital makeover of America’s schools has spawned a circuit of conferences, funded by Microsoft, Google, Dell and other tech vendors, that lavish attention on tech-friendly educators.

Another way tech companies reach superintendents is to pay private businesses that set up conferences or small-group meetings with them. Superintendents nationwide have attended these events.

One prominent provider is the Education Research and Development Institute, or ERDI, which regularly gathers superintendents and other school leaders for conferences where they can network with companies that sell to schools.

ERDI has offered superintendents $2,000 per conference as participating consultants, according to a Louisiana Board of Ethics filing. And there are other perks.

“Because we are asking for their time and expertise, we commonly offer to pay the cost of their food, transportation and lodging during their participation,” ERDI’s president, David M. Sundstrom, said in an email.

#Education #Edutech #Conflits_intérêt #Pharma_marketing_model

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: This is by far the most Islamophobic disgusting thing the #New_York_Times ever published: if a Muslim is accused of rape, what does this have to do with Islam?
▻http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2017/10/this-is-by-far-most-islamophobic.html

Look at this disgusting headline: “Could this be the Harvey Weinstein of Islam?” What does this have to do about Islam. Now we know that if an individual Muslim commits a terrorist act, his act is blamed on Islam, the religion. But now it got to the point that if an individual Muslim commits a crime of any kind, it will also be blamed on Islam, the religion? David Duke and other Nazi anti-Semites used the Harvey Weinstein scandal to spew their anti-Semitic trash. But the New York Times is doing the same. if someone were to relate the Harvey Weinstein scandal to Judaism it would be seen—and rightly so—as anti-Semitism and the Times would be outraged. But the Times with its long history of bigotry and racism against Arabs and Muslims, found no problem in publishing this headline? I don’t know the person in question and the crime of rape should be investigated but why relate it to 1) Harvey Weinstein? and 2) to Islam? This is a new low for the Times. So if an individual Muslim were to steal, the New York Times will publish a headline about “Theft in Islam”?

My Interview With a Rohingya Refugee: What Do You Say to a Woman Whose Baby Was Thrown Into a Fire? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/insider/my-interview-with-a-rohingya-refugee-what-do-you-say-to-a-woman-whose-baby-

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As I walked out of the refugee camp, my phone rang. The instant I said hello, my wife could hear it in my voice.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I just finished the worst interview of my life,” I said.

I was standing near the border of Myanmar and Bangladesh, where half a million Rohingya people, probably one of the most unwanted ethnic groups on the planet, fled after government massacres in Myanmar. I had just said goodbye to a young woman named Rajuma and watched her — a frail figure in a red veil — disappear into a crowd with one of the most horrible stories I had ever heard.

#rohingya #birmanie

477 Days. 521 Mass Shootings. Zero Action From Congress. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/02/opinion/editorials/mass-shootings-congress.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

#visualisation

Google and Facebook Have Failed Us - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/google-and-facebook-have-failed-us/541794

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2017/10/RTS1ES50/facebook.jpg?1506979559

In the crucial early hours after the Las Vegas mass shooting, it happened again: Hoaxes, completely unverified rumors, failed witch hunts, and blatant falsehoods spread across the internet.

But they did not do so by themselves: They used the infrastructure that Google and Facebook and YouTube have built to achieve wide distribution. These companies are the most powerful information gatekeepers that the world has ever known, and yet they refuse to take responsibility for their active role in damaging the quality of information reaching the public.

Freshness : comme tout vulgaire chasseur de scoop, Google extrait des informations de tendances et de la fraîcheur d’une information... pas étonnant que cela favorise les rumeurs. Depuis le début, on sait que sur internet « la rumeur a fait le tour du monde avant que la vérité n’ait pu chausser ses bottes ».

The note further explained that what shows up in “In the News” derives from the “authoritativeness” of a site as well as the “freshness” of the content on it. And Google acknowledged they’d made a mistake in this case.

The thing is: This is a predictable problem. In fact, there is already a similar example in the extant record. After the Boston bombings, we saw a very similar “misinformation disaster.”

Sur Facebook aussi la seconde dérivée est le moteur de la notoriété.

The problems with surfacing this man’s group to Facebook users is obvious to literally any human. But to Facebook’s algorithms, it’s just a fast-growing group with an engaged community.

Most people who joined the group looking for information presumably don’t know that the founder is notorious for legal and informational hijinks.

Meanwhile, Kevin Roose of The New York Times pointed out that Facebook’s Trending Stories page was surfacing stories about the shooting from Sputnik, a known source of Russian propaganda. Their statement was, like Google’s, designed to minimize what had happened.

“Our Global Security Operations Center spotted these posts this morning and we have removed them. However, their removal was delayed, allowing them to be screen-captured and circulated online,” a spokesperson responded. “We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen in the first place and deeply regret the confusion this caused.”

Mettre des humains dans la machine

There’s no hiding behind algorithms anymore. The problems cannot be minimized. The machines have shown they are not up to the task of dealing with rare, breaking news events, and it is unlikely that they will be in the near future. More humans must be added to the decision-making process, and the sooner the better.

#Google #Facebook #Journalisme #Las_Vegas #Fake_news

Germany’s new Nazis see Israel as role model |

The Electronic Intifada
▻https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/germanys-new-nazis-see-israel-role-model

“Unfortunately, our worst fears have come true,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said of the electoral success in Sunday’s general election of Alternative for Germany.

Known by its German initials AfD, the extreme nationalist party won almost 100 seats in Germany’s lower house.

“A party that tolerates far-right views in its ranks and incites hate against minorities in our country is today not only in almost all state parliaments but also represented in the Bundestag,” Schuster said.

The party is notorious for harboring all manner of racists and extremists, including [apologists for Germany’s war record and Holocaust revisionists.

It was a disaster that Germany’s mainstream politicians saw coming.

Sigmar Gabriel, the country’s foreign minister, warned earlier this month that if AfD scored well at the ballot box, “then we will have real Nazis in the German Reichstag for the first time since the end of World War II.”

Pro-Israel funder backs new Nazis
While Germany needs no lessons in how to be racist, this catastrophe can in part be attributed to leaders in Israel and their fanatical supporters: for years they have made common cause with Europe’s far right, demonizing Muslims as alien invaders who must be rejected and even expelled to maintain a mythical European purity.

It can also be attributed to German leaders who for decades have strengthened this racist Israel by financing Israel’s military occupation and oppression of Palestinians.

What happened in Germany is another facet of the white supremacist-Zionist alliance that has found a home in Donald Trump’s White House.

In the past few weeks, liberal flagships The New York Times and The Washington Post have been hunting for the nonexistent shadows of Russian interference in the German election.

Meanwhile, as Lee Fang reported for The Intercept, the Gatestone Institute, the think tank of major Islamophobia industry funder Nina Rosenwald, was flooding German social media with “a steady flow of inflammatory content about the German election, focused on stoking fears about immigrants and Muslims.”

The Gatestone Institute is chaired by John Bolton, the neoconservative former US diplomat notorious for his hawkish support of the invasion of Iraq.

Gatestone articles making claims about Christianity becoming “extinct” and warning about the construction of mosques in Germany were regularly translated into German and posted by AfD politicians and sympathizers.

Story after story claimed that migrants and refugees were raping German women and bringing dangerous diseases to the country, classic themes of the Nazi propaganda once used to incite genocidal hatred of Jews.

In a tragic irony, Rosenwald’s father, an heir to the Sears department store fortune, used his wealth to help Jewish refugees flee persecution in Europe.

If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/magazine/if-soundcloud-disappears-what-happens-to-its-music-culture.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/08/06/magazine/06ontech1/06ontech1-facebookJumbo.jpg

#soundcloud #archivage

Hated by the Right. Mocked by the Left. Who Wants to Be ‘#Liberal’ Anymore ? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/magazine/hated-by-the-right-mocked-by-the-left-who-wants-to-be-liberal-anymore.html

For the committed leftist, the ‘‘liberal’’ is a weak-minded, market-friendly centrist, wonky and technocratic and condescending to the working class. The liberal is pious about diversity but ready to abandon any belief at the slightest drop in poll numbers — a person who is, as the folk singer Phil Ochs once said, ‘‘10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.’’

Mais le NYT, liberal par excellence, n’est pas tout à fait d’accord, d’où le commentaire de « naked capitalism » :
▻http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/07/links-7617.html

The idea that today, liberals and conservatives are two flavors of neoliberal seems to elude The Grey Lady.

Behind the Media Surge Against Bernie Sanders
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/behind-the-media-surge-against-bernie-sanders

It’s routine for right-wing outlets like Fox to smear progressive activists under the guise of “news” coverage. But why the New York Times? And why the special venom for Bernie Sanders?

After the...

The History of Cartography, the “Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever,” Now Free Online | Open Culture
▻http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/the-history-of-cartography-the-most-ambitious-overview-of-map-making-ev

http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/02224545/history-of-cartography2.png

Worth a quick mention: The University of Chicago Press has made available online — at no cost — the first three volumes of The History of Cartography. Or what Edward Rothstein, of The New York Times, called “the most ambitious overview of map making ever undertaken.” He continues:

People come to know the world the way they come to map it—through their perceptions of how its elements are connected and of how they should move among them. This is precisely what the series is attempting by situating the map at the heart of cultural life and revealing its relationship to society, science, and religion…. It is trying to define a new set of relationships between maps and the physical world that involve more than geometric correspondence. It is in essence a new map of human attempts to chart the world.

#histoire-de_la_cartographie

Barghouti’s N.Y. Times article met by Israeli ritual of diversion and denial -

Comparing article to terror attack and suggesting sanctions against the Times, as Michael Oren did, is more damaging to Israel’s image

Chemi Shalev Apr 19, 2017
read more: ▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.784060

At the end of his opinion piece in the New York Times about the Palestinian prisoners’ strike, Marwan Barghouti was originally described as “a Palestinian leader and parliamentarian.” After 24 hours of outrage and condemnation, an editor’s note conceded that further context was needed, pointing out that Barghouti had been convicted on “five counts of murder and membership in a terrorist organization.” News of the clarification spread like wildfire on social media. It was described in glowing terms as yet another historic victory of good over evil and of the Jewish people over its eternal enemies.
It was another example of the time-tested Israeli ritual of accentuating the insignificant at the expense of the essence, the results of which are well known in advance. First you manufacture righteous indignation over a minor fault in an article or the problematic identity of its writer, then you assault the newspaper or media that publicized it and cast doubt on its motives, then you demand to know how this was even possible and who will pay the price. In this way, the Israeli public is absolved of the need to actually contend with the gist of the article or public utterance, in this case Barghouti’s claims that he was physically tortured, that almost a million Palestinians have been detained over the years, that their conviction rate in the Israeli military court system is absurdly high, whether it’s really wise to hold as many as 6,500 security prisoners in custody at one time and so on.
The guiding principle of this perpetual war waged by Israel and its supporters against the so-called hostile press - to paraphrase a legendary John Cleese episode about a visit by German visitors to Fawlty Towers - is “Don’t mention the occupation!” After one spends so much energy on protestations and exclamations of how unthinkable, how outrageous and how dare they, there’s very little enthusiasm left to consider eternal control over another people or the malignant status quo that many Israelis view as the best of all possible worlds or how is it even possible that someone who is defined by former Israeli Ambassador and current deputy minister Michael Oren as a terrorist and a murderer on a par with Dylann Roof, who killed nine African American worshippers in a church in Charleston, is considered by many people around the world, including those at the New York Times, as an authentic leader whose words should be read and heard.
In an interview with IDF Radio on Tuesday, Oren put the ingenious diversionary strategy on full display. He described Barghouti’s op-ed as nothing less than a “media terror attack.” To this he added a pinch of conspiracy theory with a dash of anti-Semitism by claiming that the Times purposely published Barghouti’s article on Passover, so that Israeli and Jewish leaders wouldn’t have time to react. Then he approvingly cited the wise words of his new oracle, Donald Trump, describing the publication of the article and its content as “fake news.” And for his grand finale, Oren intimated that the proper Zionist response would be to close down the Times’ Israel office, no less.
In this way, anyone who wants to address Barghouti’s claims substantively, even if it’s to criticize them, is seen as collaborating with a terrorist and enabling terror. It’s the same system by which anti-occupation groups such as Breaking the Silence are tarred as traitorous, backstabbing informants so that no one dares consider the actual testimonies they present about the hardships of occupation and the immorality of forcing the IDF to police the West Bank. What’s hilarious, however, is that so many Israelis and Jews are convinced that articles such as the one written by Barghouti, which most readers probably view as yet another tedious polemic about an intractable Middle East conflict, somehow causes more harm to Israel’s image than a senior government official who compares a news article to a terror attack and who recommends closing down the offices of the most widely respected news organization in the world, a la Putin or Erdogan.

#Palestine #Israel #Barghouti