The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 2 Jul 2024The North Korean forces are advancing all over, and this week they take Seoul, the South’s capital city, after just a few days of the war. There is another tragedy for the South when the Han River Bridge is blown while thousands of people are crossing it, resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths. The world responds to the invasion — condemning it everywhere, and the Americans decide to send in ground forces to help the South.
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July 3, 2024
The Korean War Week 002 – The Fall of Seoul – July 2, 1950
The profound, utter, inescapable uselessness of the legacy media
As an early and enthusiastic blog reader and eventually a blog creator, I’ve always sought interesting aspects of stories in the news — even when I disagreed with the source or the presentation, it’s always a good thing to approach any topic “in the round” whenever possible. Getting all your information from one viewpoint or even one source is a good way to gaslight yourself. Once upon a time, while the TV networks tended to be as bland as they could (because going too far toward sensationalism would be a good way to get in bad with the regulators who control your broadcasting privileges), newspapers were not under such strong moderation. You could find very progressive, mildly progressive, centrist, and even mildly conservative voices with relative ease. At least, that’s what a rosy view of media history suggests — I think you have to go back before World War II to find really vigorous debates among the major newspapers.
Here in Canada, the mass media were already overly deferential to the government of the day — unless it was a Conservative government, of course — and after the internet and social media ate all the profit out of their business, they turned as one to the government to bail them out. In return, they became even more deferential to official story lines unless the foreign press forced their collective hand to present a more complete story. Over the last few years, as the surviving mainstream media shed jobs, many journalists have “crossed the lines” and become much more like their distant predecessors in the media: diggers of dirt, tellers of uncomfortable truths, and impartial mockers of government incompetence (Canada’s The Line is an excellent example of this … even when I don’t link to them, I almost always find their articles interesting and informative.)
All that throat-clearing out of the way, here’s Chris Bray asking what you have learned from the mainstream media lately:
When was the last time you read something in the mainstream news media — an op-ed piece, a major revelation that some clever and persistent investigative reporter dug up, a sharp bit of news analysis — that surprised you? When was the last time you read something in the news that changed your understanding of a major issue? When was the last time something in the “news” reframed an issue in your head with an argument you hadn’t anticipated, or with new evidence that you hadn’t heard before? “Man, I’d never thought of it that way,” you say, tossing the New York Times down on the coffee table.
Related, when was the last time a report or a panel discussion on television news surprised you and made you see something differently?
My impression is that the public sphere is now made up almost entirely of people saying things that we already know they’re going to say. “Jennifer Rubin will now analyze the presidential debate.” You don’t need to hear that. There’s no need to listen to any of it, ever. Andrea Mitchell is for [current thing]. Of course she is. If you know what [current thing] is, what’s the point of an Andrea Mitchell?
It’s all so dull.
There are at least a couple hundred prominent media and academic figures in the United States who could die tonight without anyone noticing, as long as there was a tape or a computer program of some kind to go on posting the received wisdom of the day under their names.
Tanks! – Allied tanks of WW2 – Sabaton History 127
Sabaton History
Published Mar 14, 2024Sabaton has written several songs about tanks — the boys are tank CRAZY! Songs like “Ghost Division” or “Panzerkampf” are about the German panzers and even the Soviet ones, but what about those of the Western Allies? Were they any good? And if so, how did they lose the Battle of France?
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