Kristol: Media Overreacting Over Haditha

Alternet.org
June 05, 2006

'The Weekly Standard' editor Bill Kristol berates 'Time' and 'Newsweek' for putting Haditha on both of their covers. Kristol calls the coverage "offensive" and states that there is "too much time focusing on one incident." This statement clearly downplays the fact that the "incident" in question regards U.S. Marines possibly slaughtering innocent civilians.

Kristol also states that "A lot of people who want us to lose in Iraq can barely contain their glee." Obviously Kristol is using "people who want us to lose in Iraq" as a damaging synonym for 'people who want us to withdraw from Iraq.' You really can't draw a parallel between the two.

When host John Scott asks, "Why not find a squad of marines that's done something really great and then put them on the cover?" Kristol replies, "Because that might imply that the war is worth fighting." Or, maybe it's because, in the light of the Haditha massacre, suddenly bombarding the public with positive images of the military is akin to propaganda.

You can't judge the entire military based on the actions of a few. However, by telling the media to sweep the Haditha massacre under a rug and instead focus on the positive actions of other military personnel, Kristol sounds like a conservative spin-doctor intent on keeping public morale high.

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Google This: Algorithmic Oppression

Imagine you've forgotten once again the difference between a gorilla and a chimpanzee, so you do a quick Google image search of “gorilla." But instead of finding images of adorable animals, photos of a Black couple pop up.

Is this just a glitch in the algorithm? Or, is Google an ad company, not an information company, that's replicating the discrimination of the world it operates in? How can this discrimination be addressed and who is accountable for it?

“These platforms are encoded with racism," says UCLA professor and best-selling author of Algorithms of Oppression, Dr. Safiya Noble. “The logic is racist and sexist because it would allow for these kinds of false, misleading, kinds of results to come to the fore…There are unfortunately thousands of examples now of harm that comes from algorithmic discrimination."

On At Liberty this week, Dr. Noble joined us to discuss what she calls “algorithmic oppression," and what needs to be done to end this kind of bias and dismantle systemic racism in software, predictive analytics, search platforms, surveillance systems, and other technologies.

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