RUTHFULLY YOURS

In today’s environment, it’s easy for the coverage of the inquest into the Lindt Café terrorist attack to be lost in all the other ho-hum reporting of blown up airliners, massacred Syrian Christians and the odd mob that refuses to stand up for a judge after being arrested towing a tinnie to Indonesia.

In other words, in the time it’s taken for the last census to be filed in the national archives and the next one to come around, terrorism has been normalised across Australia and the world.

That’s not a bad effort in just five years.

Unfortunately, the evidence that continues to flow from the Lindt Café inquest shows just how unprepared our military, security and intelligence agencies are for this new version of normality.

Three days ago it was revealed that the lead negotiator at the Lindt Café had only received training in ‘Islam 101’.

This was a nice headline and a quick soundbite. Then this important issue disappeared off the news webpages to be replaced by stories about Johnny Depp.

I guess that also shows the media is entirely unprepared to play its supposedly important role holding the government to account and strengthening our democracy.

Helloooooo? Journalists? Where are you?

There’s a Walkley Award waiting here for someone with the courage to start asking the right people the right questions.

Like this: what exactly makes up the ‘Islam 101’ package presented to military, law enforcement and intelligence officers?

And this: who teaches ‘Islam 101’ to these officers?

Maybe this: do these officers ever get to study ‘Islam 201’?

Or this: are any of the instructors of the ‘Islam 101’ package not pro-Islamic?

Ronen Bergman of Yedioth Ahronot, not a paper favorably disposed to Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, was provided a platform of op-ed space to comment on recent political and military developments in Israel. In his May 21 piece, entitled “Israel’s Army Goes to War with Its Politicians”, a theme most Americans would presume to be a non-democratic step, Bergman justifies the situation by painting Netanyahu and friends as basically the facsists in the matter.

I am not going to fisk the entire article and for most of you who read my blogs, you can easily figure out most of it yourselves. Let me zero in on one example.

Here’s what Bergman wrote:

IN most countries, the political class supervises the defense establishment and restrains its leaders from violating human rights or pursuing dangerous, aggressive policies. In Israel, the opposite is happening. Here, politicians blatantly trample the state’s values and laws and seek belligerent solutions, while the chiefs of the Israel Defense Forces and the heads of the intelligence agencies try to calm and restrain them.

None of this happened.

In fact, the opposite. It was the army brass, headed by the Minister of Defense, who were trampling values and laws and stirring up passions.

Minister Ya’alon and Commander in Chief Gadi Eizenkot illegally prejudged any in-house military investigation and trial in their public declarations. Deputy IDF Commander Yair Golan factually erred in the content of his speech and blatantly lied when he explained he didn’t say what he most certainly did say.

I am not even going to point out that, for the most part, Ya’alon has not been that successful in protecting Israel’s security – and I do not receive Netanyahu of his shared responsibility for this. But the subject is does the IDF have to interfere in the running of the civilian affairs of the country.

Despite the denials, the stories about Facebook’s bias are real. But the bias isn’t there because of the company’s new technology. Facebook is biased because of its reliance on the biased old media.

Facebook’s trending topics wasn’t the automatic system that the company wanted people to think it was. Instead it hired young journalists with new media experience to “curate” its news feed. And plenty of them proved to be biased against conservative news and sources. Meanwhile someone at the top of Facebook’s dysfunctional culture wanted to play up Syria and the Black Lives Matter hate group.

Mark Zuckerberg’s fundamental mistake was recreating the biases and agendas of the old media in a service whose whole reason for existing was to allow users to create their own experience. The big difference between social and search is that social media is supposed to let you be the curator.

But, like Facebook’s trending topics, social curation was another scam. Facebook users don’t really define what they see. It’s defined for them by the company’s agendas. This includes the purely financial. It would be foolish to think that the fortunes that Buzzfeed spends on Facebook advertising don’t impact the placement of its stories by Facebook’s mysterious algorithm. And there is the more complex intersection of politics and branding in an age when business relevance means social relevance.

Twitter piggybacked on the Arab Spring to seem relevant. Facebook has used Black Lives Matter. Social media needs to be associated with political movements to seem more important than it is. Zuckerberg doesn’t want to head up a shinier version of MySpace that was originally set up to rate the attractiveness of Harvard girls. Being socially relevant is better for business. Especially when the business is vapid at its core.

Social media needs social relevance to disguise the narcissism at the center of its appeal.

Finally, a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars is not about to let users define their own experience even if that’s what they signed up to do. Facebook does not empower users. It seeks to shape and control their experience for its own power and profit. Facebook’s news feed is just as curated as its trending topics. The news feed depends more on algorithms, but those are still shaped by agendas even if they aren’t as simple as overworked left-wing journalism majors spitefully purging stories about IRS corruption from the trending topics on the right.

Although feminists have claimed to seek equality – in education, employment, sexual and civil rights – a curious acceptance of patriarchal condescension still meets with their approval and demands. They won the battle to bare their breasts in public since men are entitled to do the same (see the painted topless ladies of Times Square), but when it comes to accepting equal responsibility for the consequences of drunken excess, they plead special protection. On campuses throughout America, women who claim to have been sexually molested while they were blotto are considered victims of a crime, not cooperating partners. Men, on the other hand, are never excused for molesting a woman (anything from a grope to rape) because they were drunk. Title IX and university administrations give women a pass and they willingly accept it.

Similarly, the media has traditionally withheld the names of women who claim to be victims of rape or molestation while they publish the names of men who are accused but have not been tried. Now,, in the strangest extension of this macho protectiveness, both Lincoln Center and the NY Times have admitted that Jed Bernstein, the former president of Lincoln Center, was forced to resign because he had a consensual affair with a woman on his staff, violating the company policy of no dating of subordinates. Mr. Bernstein had promoted this 30-something woman but so had his predecessor – twice. Both Mr. Bernstein and his subordinate were single and the affair was over by the time the relationship came to the attention of the Center’s higher-ups. Nevertheless, Lincoln Center did not divulge the name of the employee in order to “protect” her. Since she consented to flouting company policy, why was she not named and asked to resign as well? Is the assumption that an adult woman capable of performing in a high-powered job is nevertheless helpless to withstand the seduction of her much older employer? Does this sit well with Gloria Steinem? It’s not what Hillary thought of that 21 year old “narcissistic loony toon” who nearly brought down the president.