Chris: thanks so much for expending your energies and limited bandwidth on
keeping us informed (and thanks to Richard Bailey for his report as well). I
found your analysis of *media-terrorism* (excerpted here) particularly
helpful and applaud both your own use of the T* word and the work being done
by Dr. Nightengale and others to identify the complex forces fueling such
irresponsible (as you say) journalism as appears to be operating here and on
countless other fronts (Hollywood "reports" on US wartime conditions in Brit
newspapers, e.g.). Assuming the word on her work gets out (ah, there's the
rub), it should go a long way toward countering the disinformation also
irresponsibly disseminated by simple-minded govt/media conspiracy theorists
like Chomsky et al. We are all at the mercy of the media, one way or
another, and that's where the true terror lies (in my humble etc.). Let's
not be gulled into stamping out language instead of the fires lit--and
spread from mind to mind--by the combined forces of media- and
govern-mentality, both motivated by profit of one sort or another. Thanks
again, Chris--looking forward to your next update--Candice



on 1/3/02 5:30 AM, Chris Jones at [log in to unmask] wrote:

> Candice and list,

<snip>

> To finish on the media reporting. Dr Virginia Nightengale, as part of the
> Affect and Communication research group at UWS is doing research into the
> sort of horror and terror style reporting of events such as these fires, for
> example. This sort of reporting far exceeds the actual fear that any
> responsible person need have about the events. What it appears to do is
> terrify the population and work as a sort of social control mechanism which
> as I said above is used opportunistically by governments prior to an election
> campaign. I have yet to see the results of Virginia's research but this
> critique of media coverage which acts to terrorise a population needs to be
> urgently done. It is irresponsible on all sorts of scales. Just a personal
> example. When I got up just after Christmas and watched the Today program on
> morning TV I got the impression that the whole southern side of the Blue
> Mountains was about to be burnt out. Concerned I phoned my friends to see if
> they were okay. For them it was just another day and they were going about
> usual tasks. when I told them what I had heard on the TV they became anxious
> and I more or less had to calm them down and tell them how to prepare should
> the fire come as claimed. As it turned out this report was grossly
> exaggerated and caused distress to my friends and myself which was not
> warranted. This was happening on a mass scale and the distress caused became
> clearly socially irresponsible. Of course, I can't blame the individual
> journalists, knowing how difficult it is to work in journalism in NSW and
> what happens to any journalist who tries to do some investigative reporting.
> The best I can do and media theorists like Virginia can do is get the word
> out that this is happening and to understand how this is happening so as to
> diffuse the opportunistic use of affect that cynical governments are only too
> willing to use.
>
>
>
> On Thursday 03 January 2002 07:54, you wrote:
>> CNN (for what it's worth) just reported that A 9-year-old was among the 21
>> people arrested so far and that police have recovered bombs from the arson
>> sites, which suggests something more than kidstuff and closer to terrorism,
>> assuming it's true--the media everywhere being equally dubious, as far as
>> I'm concerned--Candice