Adventures of a Gonzo Journalist
From May 18 to May 25, I hosted the Twitter account @WeAreDisabled. Similar to other group accounts like @sweden or @realscientists, this Twitter passes from person to person with the only common theme being disability.
The account admins created a Storify of all my tweets, but below I’ll link to my main threads so you can click through and read them if you like.
First I introduced myself:
Posted in Archive, Journalism, and MintPress News
George Ciccariello-Maher, a professor at Drexel University, is facing death threats after a series of satirical tweets about “white genocide,” a concept invented by white supremacists.
The university is also facing criticism for its refusal to wholeheartedly support the free speech rights of its employee in the midst of an onslaught of complaints driven, in part, by far-right news outlets like Breitbart.
“All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide,” Ciccariello-Maher tweeted on Saturday, according to a report published Monday by The Philadelphia Inquirer. A second tweet created on Sunday read: “To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed.”
Ciccariello-Maher teaches in Drexel’s Department of History and Politics. According to his university bio, he often appears in the media to comment on “social movements, particularly in Latin America” and also frequently writes about “race, racism, prisons and policing in the U.S. and internationally.”
Posted in Journalism, and MintPress News
On Thanksgiving, The Washington Post published a widely shared — and widely criticized — report accusing a host of media organizations of spreading Russian propaganda, despite little evidence to support the claims.
In the Nov. 24 article, Craig Timberg, the Post’s national technology reporter, cited the work of “experts” who accuse hundreds of news outlets, including MintPress News, of broadcasting “fake news” as part of “a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy.”
While the story quickly spread to other mainstream media outlets, from USA Today to The Daily Beast, many media analysts were quick to criticize the report and its sources. On Monday, Matt Taibbi called the piece “shameful” and “disgusting” in Rolling Stone. On Saturday, Ben Norton and Glenn Greenwald, writing for The Intercept, accused the Post of “disgracefully” promoting a “McCarthyite blacklist.”
“The article is rife with obviously reckless and unproven allegations, and fundamentally shaped by shoddy, slothful journalistic tactics,” the pair wrote.
Posted in Journalism, and MintPress News
When a rocket operated by space startup SpaceX burned up on the launch pad, it was a setback to the prospects of commercial space travel, as well as efforts by Facebook to control the online experiences of millions of rural internet users.
Facebook’s project, Internet.org, is described by founder Mark Zuckerberg in charitable terms, but critics have accused it of spreading “techno-colonialism.”
The Sept. 1 fire in Cape Canaveral, Florida, destroyed a $200 million satellite owned by SpaceCom, an Israeli communications satellite firm, and co-leased by Facebook. The satellite, Amos-6, was built by Israel Aerospace Industries, a government-owned aviation and aerospace manufacturer.
Facebook’s partnership with SpaceCom is another sign of the corporation’s deepening ties with Israel. In June, Facebook appointed Jordana Cutler, a close advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as head of policy and communications at Facebook’s Israeli office.
Posted in Journalism, and MintPress News
I covered the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia for MintPress News, where I was disturbed to discover that journalists’ cell-phone signals were routinely jammed at protests near the convention’s security fence. The jamming, which was experienced by both mainstream and independent journalists, was especially clear on the night Pres. Barack Obama spoke.
Posted in Journalism, MintPress News, and Occupy Wall Street
Technology developed to jam cellphones during the Iraq War may be getting deployed against journalists reporting on protests against the political establishment in the United States.
While police and government surveillance of protests, including monitoring of cellphone use, is well-documented, efforts to block signals at protests remains an oft-repeated, but never proven, rumor.
It may be impossible to definitively prove that authorities are using cellphone “jamming” technology, but journalists working with both mainstream and independent media reported unusual difficulties accessing the internet during recent protests at the gates of the Democratic National Convention, consistent with the effects this very real technology could have.
