The “unauthorised” documentary about South African president Thabo Mbeki, on which I noted Jean Barker’s column, has finally been screened on the SABC, after more than a year of to-ing and fro-ing.

It is interesting, and does a very good job at recalling much detail that may have been forgotten, or may not have been generally known to those who don’t count biographies among their mandatory daily reading.

It remembers, in former Sunday Times and current City Press editor Mathatha Tsedu’s words, the “Gucci revolutionary”. It sketches the same younger Mbeki whom I remember when I did sound for him at Wits University in (or about) 1991: charming, urbane, moderate, cool. (I doubt he’ll remember me. Since then he saved my neck, and though on that occasion he was equally disarming and impressive, I doubt he’ll remember that either. If I can extract the photo to prove it from my dead camera, I’ll post it.)

Made by Ben Cashdan, Redi Direko and Meril Rasmussen, the film starts on an interesting note: Nelson Mandela warns him, at his election as ANC (and therefore ultimately South Africa’s) president that the temptation to “settle scores” and “marginalise” detractors will attend him who wins the power of office unopposed, as Mbeki did. The camera goes to Mbeki, who doesn’t laugh, but looks askance. Is he rolling his eyes? Why does this paternal lesson need to be delivered in public, from a stage?

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Cartoonist Zapiro recently pictured the South African Broadcasting Corporation as the SANC, reflecting its political control by the ruling African National Congress through its appointees, CEO Dali Mpofu and news director Snuki Zikalala:

Jean Barker, at 24.com Entertainment, writes that often, censorship is more interesting than a film or book itself, “publicising the very film it was intended to make disappear”, and reviews some films that the SABC has declined to show. She recognises that this doesn’t technically amount to “banning”, but that the effect is for practical purposes similar. Hanging her story on Unauthorised: Thabo Mbeki, which the SABC cancelled at the last minute, Barker writes:

“Winners write history,” as the saying goes. And the ANC won the struggle, or the War on Apartheid, at least politically speaking. Now, films like Cry Freedom and Come Back, Africa aren’t rebel yells, they’re a record of our history. And the ANC-aligned SABC is doing its own censorship. While it could be said, correctly in some cases, that they’ve chosen not to show stuff because it’s just bloody boring, sometimes it’s not clear whether it’s really their right to decide for us what’s interesting.

She selects four films, two from the Apartheid era, and two from the ANC era, to illustrate a thought-provoking point.

Here’s a story: “U.S. fire scatters crowd after Afghan bomb: witness.” Sounds serious, doesn’t it? I mean, read the intro:

BATI KOT, Afghanistan (Reuters) - At least one U.S. soldier opened fire to scatter a crowd of civilians and police on Thursday after failed suicide bomb attacks on a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military and witnesses said.

Them US thugs, there they goes again. Indiscriminately killing civilians, just because they panicked. It takes Noor Mohammad Sherzai, the self-serving idiot who wrote the piece, until the sixth paragraph to point out that they were actually two warning shots, not aimed at the crowd, designed to disperse them after one suicide bomber had already failed and a second was thought to be approaching.

Why use the pejorative term “idiot”, or describe said idiot as “self-serving”? Well, besides noting the misleading reporting that once again goes on at Reuters, guess who the “witness” of the headline is?

“I saw the fire brigade vehicle rushing to the area at top speed. Somehow its brakes failed and hit one police vehicle and coalition vehicles, then the Americans started firing,” said Reuters correspondent Noor Mohammad Sherzai.

In Best of the Web Today, James Taranto has a funny response, under the headline The Lone Reuter:
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According to the Times of London, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has “shaken the White House” with a “stinging critique” that includes a claim that it went to war for oil:

However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.

… Britain and America have always insisted the war had nothing to do with oil. Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam’s support for terrorism.

Read other reports about it, however, such as that in the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Post, and it turns out that Greenspan said securing global oil supplies was “not the administration’s motive.”

“I have never heard them basically say, ‘We’ve got to protect the oil supplies of the world,’ but that would have been my motive.”

So it turns out securing oil supplies and thwarting Saddam Hussein’s moves towards the Strait of Hormuz was the reason why Greenspan himself supported the first Iraq War. It turns out that he shared the administration’s view on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes and intentions. It turns out Greenspan’s actual beef with the current administration is big government, not “war for oil”.

It turns out you can’t believe a word the Times of London writes, because the primary purpose of its “news” reporting is bashing Bush. And you know, I actually think they’ll succeed: I’m starting to suspect Bush might not win the 2008 US elections.

We might as well give up, folks. Everything, everywhere, is going to go extinct in the next 10 to 50 years. Really. Would you disbelieve National Geographic, CNN, and Scientific American?

The reason, of course, is that the half of all species that were supposed to be extinct by 2000 flatly refused to do so. Norman Myers, Edward O. Wilson, Paul Ehrlich and Thomas Lovejoy have predicted such catastrophe ever since their hippie heydays. The very same people keep getting quoted as reliable sources and keep making the same predictions. The more they turn out to be false, the more crazy they make them.

The most succinct: Earth ‘will expire by 2050′. Heaven knows why people worry about the climate in 2100. Or have babies. I always knew retirement annuities were a scam.

Just scan the list of extinction headlines on this page. Once you’ve finished laughing, ask yourself: does the media have any credibility on environmental questions at all?

With General David Petraeus poised to deliver a report on progress in the war against insurgents in Iraq, this quotation, courtesy of the Lucianne.com News Forum is apt. It dates to 1863, and comes from General Robert E. Lee of Virginia.

It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers. In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late. Accordingly, I am readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I will, in turn, do my best for the Cause by writing editorials — after the fact.

Also appropriately, Lee did not glorify war: “It is well that war is so terrible — we would grow too fond of it.”

(Hat tip: Trevor Wensley.)

Dan Xavier posted a detailed response to my recent post making fun of Adrian Flanagan, who is attempting to be the first solo sailor to complete a vertical circumnavigation of the globe.

It is a form response he has been posting in response to a blog post written by P.J. Gladnick over at NewsBusters. Gladnick picked up the same story I did, referencing a Moscow News Weekly article headlined Global Warming is Here. The Russian article, dated 16 August 2007, was an Agence France-Presse wire service piece penned by Nick Coleman. It appeared under the headline Drip, drip of global warming spells change in northern Russia, and was published on 25 July 2007 on various alarmist sites, such as stopglobalwarming.org and Terra Daily.

Besides for the general theme that Russia’s northern ice is melting because of climate change, the article contains the line:

Contacted by AFP he [Flanagan] said that the ice looked set to recede at least as far as in 2005, which was a record year.

Gladnick’s article was the “false story” Flanagan linked to on his own blog, explaining:

After a badly written piece for a French news wire service, a false story has started circulating through the Internet.

Gladnick clearly took the AFP report at face value, as I did, and thought the Herald Sun report on his lack of progress to be pretty funny. The AFP’s articles and photographs are usually published on Yahoo! News. The search result that appeared most promising, however, has been removed. This isn’t the first time that an embarrassing AFP item mysteriously vanishes from Yahoo! News. I also have no faith in its ability to get the facts straight when it involves pet advocacy issues such as global warming.

Xavier’s explanation suggests that the AFP is indeed where the false connection with global warming originated, and that neither he nor Flanagan harbour the same faith.

Perhaps I should have guessed that the mainstream media — as opposed to a clearly experienced sailor — would be the gullible party in this story.

In what is perhaps the most shameless column I’ve ever read, Steve Outing advocates media advocacy in trade rag Editor & Publisher. He claims that the alternative to “objectivity” is “truth-telling”. The cause in which he says newspapers should ditch this objectivity? Why, climate change, of course.

I’ve … been thinking about the newspaper industry and global warming. And frankly, I don’t think newspapers are doing enough. Indeed, newspapers’ fabled commitment to “objectivity” has been a detriment to efforts to combat global warming.

The industry still has a lot of power to influence people. How about if newspapers abandon their old way of doing things when it comes to the issue of global warming, and turn their influence to good? It just might be that through this issue alone, newspapers revive themselves to some extent. Editors are shirking their responsibility to improve our world, in my view, so let’s change that.

What follows is a tortuous explanation of how the opposite of objectivity is not subjectivity, as simpletons might think. In fact, it is “truth-telling” and “advocacy.” I kid you not. This isn’t a publication defending its own editorial slant. This is a media trade publication recommending that newspapers in general abandon impartiality, and consider the often complex, often speculative debate on the causes, impact, severity and extent of climate change as settled fact. The issue now, he says, is what newspapers can do.

Outing is apparently unaware of embarrassments such as the Newsweek column that took the original global cooling advocacy mag’s more recent cover story on global warming to pieces as “vast oversimplification of a messy story” and “a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading”. He sustains his argument for some time, before making just a teensy weensy mistake:

Advocacy has gotten a bad name in modern news media. I would argue that climate change is too important of an issue squander the power of the news media. Newspapers can and should not only educate people about what they can do, but pro-actively lead and encourage behavior change. That will mean setting aside a time-honored journalistic practice — for this one vital issue.

If his argument held any water at all, why would newspapers need to “get over objectivity”, but only “for this one vital issue”?

It didn’t take Randall Hoven long to update the list of journalistic frauds, liars, plagiarisers and hoaxters I mentioned a few days ago.

Some lists are more important than others. Randall Hoven has compiled a list, from various sources, of journalists or media houses that have been caught in lies, plagiaries, conflicts of interest, fraud, or explicit bias. It makes for sobering reading.