Saturday, March 15, 2014
Journalism for adults!
This brief item on Syria in UK Telegraph is notable in two ways.
(1) It features an actual map of who owns what. This is the first time I've seen a meaningful map in any news coverage since the '50s. (Probably not that long, but it feels that long!) You'd think it would be the other way around, with ubiquitous and easy-to-make digital graphics, but it's not. Journalism has been completely taken over by Who-ists, experts in personality and gossip and fashion. Who-ists are incapable of assembling facts. Back in the '50s most top-level journalists were What-ists, experts in gathering and assembling data. They knew how to use and deploy maps.
(2) The map acknowledges the existence of ethnic groups. Most "news" about the current Arab unrest has been nothing more than verbatim quotes of overmodulated cretins like Kerry and Cameron and Hague, who constantly quack out filthy meaningless verbiage about "democracy" and "sovereignty" and "die-versity". What's really happening in that part of the world, including Crimea, is simply a reassertion of natural ethnic and racial boundaries. The end of WW1, and to a lesser extent the end of WW2, created a huge number of arbitrary and unnatural nation-states, all of which are now dissolving, revealing old natural groups that never disappeared.
¶ 2:50 AM 
