Fake Plastic News

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There's an awful lot of talk about fake news online, a background rumbling that occasionally erupts as indeed it has this week. We have all enjoyed the controversy surrounding the US intelligence dossier that purportedly places the future President of the land of the free and home of the brave in a Moscow hotel room watching gleefully as a number of ladies of dubious reputation perform vengeful lewd acts involving micturating on a bed previously used by the previous President of the LOFTAHOFB.

The fun thing about the story, which is more than likely total bunkum, is how deliciously fun it is. Liberal America would just love to believe it. So would most of us, no?

The trouble is that it's getting very hard indeed to sift the wheat from the chaff. But fake news is nothing new: we've always been rather surrounded by it. Was King Richard III really a vile, drooling hunchback who murdered two little princes? Probably not, but we've been just a tad under 500 years late coming to that conclusion. At the time, the spread of rumour was mostly by word of mouth - Gutenberg had only just invented the printing press and printed his celebrated bible - and so it was word of mouth, together with a wee dose of Shakespearean bile a hundred years later, that was to seal Richard's poor reputation.

Gutenberg's press - and pretty much every innovation in media and communications since - merely accelerated the process.

Richard was just one of a million historic examples of fake news, many of them classic examples of history being written by the victor. Sitting in Dubai, the issue of the Al Qassimi 'pirates' comes to mind - opposed to the invading British, they were quickly labelled brigands and pirates and so, for a good hundred years, the whole area was happily referred to as 'the pirate coast'. My own novels have often played with the idea that my freedom fighter is your terrorist and vice versa.

From Gutenberg to the Internet we see the rapidly evolving role of news media - from the invention of the 'newspaper' through to the era of press barons and the dominance of media by politics and big business. Idealistic journalists have constantly found themselves challenged by repressive forces, from political interference through to commercial censorship, our media has represented a combination of people telling truth to power and power telling lies to people.

We used to depend on those solid journalists and their editors to help us better understand the world around us from an informed viewpoint and we were, up until pretty recently, happy to buy whatever narrative they decided to shape for us. If we suspected any interference behind the scenes, we tended to gloss it over. For our media and governments would never tell us porky pies, would they? Our government, after all, governs in our name, does it not? Represents us? Why, then, would they lie to us?

It's not just governments, of course. Big business loves fake news. Advertising and PR agencies have long placed fake news stories in media. You can spot the weasel words, 'studies say' and 'most folks agree' are just two of many sure-fire signs that studies don't and most folks wouldn't. Palm oil, gun lobbies, Israeli settlers, big pharma selling GMOs to Africa - you name 'em, they've been manipulating news by seeding untruths and obfuscation disguised as surveys, research and expert opinion.

As the Internet has whipped the news cycle into a news cyclone, we have seen the erosion of trust in 'mainstream media' and politics become a dominant force in our society. Last year's two most savage political upsets were arguably driven by public anger and disaffection with politics, following on from the waves of disaffection which washed around the Middle East and made their way to Europe with the riots in Britain and Occupy Wall Street in the US. We've seen growing disaffection with big business, too. That wave of disaffection has moved with blinding speed because of the Great Networks of our age.

In the face of that disaffection, our media has been failing - plummeting revenues and the slow death of print have led to staffing cuts and a growing pressure to keep up with the twin-headed Gorgon of Twitter and Buzzfeed. We need clicks, boys, and we need them fast - realtime if you please.

If you want to see the result of this dual pressure to make old media models perform in the new media age, you only have to wander around the Daily Mail, the world's most popular news website. It's not a terribly edifying experience, especially if you believe (as I do) that we tend to get the media we deserve. The difference between the Mail's mainstream content and the stories in the 'Taboola' tabs is getting frighteningly slim. Real 'news' is starting to mimic fake news.

Making it all worse, alongside these pressures we have the very nature of the Internet. Ubiquitous, always-on, filled with people, animals, trolls and lice and all their spurious motivations and agendas. What would have been irrefutable proof in Richard's day (a letter, say) or Nixon's (a tape, say) is worthless today. We can Photoshop images, edit sounds, manipulate documents and fake testimony.

We can harness the news cycle and network effects to put untrue stuff out there and by the time anyone's got around to saying, 'Wait, what?' it's too late. Site X has run it, sites A-W have picked up from site X in the relentless rush to harvest those early clicks and suddenly the whole Web is full of the Spurious Thing. You can probably correct Site X, but that's about as far as you're going to get in terms of actually slipping a cork in the bottle. By about now you've got yourself a nice little hashtag and you're the talk of the town.

But this all has just democratised demonisation. We've always had fake news. It used to be the preserve of the wealthy, powerful and the victors. Now spotty Herberts in tenement bedrooms can do it. And there are companies out there who are harvesting clicks by the million by intentionally creating alarmist rubbish and pushing it with 'clickbait' headlines. Filtering the truth from the fake these days can be a bewildering game. And most people couldn't be bothered.

Which is, to be honest, a worry...

Shaheen The Camel. A New Gulf News High.

Gulf News is breathlessly presenting the World Cup match winner choices of 'Shaheen', a camel apparently blessed with octopus-like powers of footbally prescience. Or as GN puts it, 'our resident hump-backed football genius."

Shaheen is placed next to two signs, each representing a team about to play. Just in case we forget this is about football, the speculative ungulate has a football tied around its neck. Shaheen then picks a team by attacking one of the two signs, which appears to have been festooned with a sock dipped in the camel equivalent of catnip. Camelnip?

This is the top local story on Gulf News' website today. It confirmed something I have long held dear as a belief. I'll let you guess quite what that is...

Groundhog Day

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's been one of those weeks. First we had the tremor from the Qeshm earthquake and then Google's Driverless Car.

The link?

Well, those few weird moments of seeming terrestrial liquefaction having been enjoyed, I then got to watch Gulf News tweeting that it was going to report on the thing I had just experienced as the rest of Twitter shared its rainbow reaction. As if I'm going to put my life on hold to wait for GN's report. The next day, almost 24 hours after I had watched friends and Twitter in general record their reactions to the event, I get to see news stories about the thing I had lived through the day before.

I had sort of moved on, actually. Including a wander around the internet to research a blog post in which I learned more about the incident and the factors behind it than the Gulf News story - that I hadn't been waiting for, funnily enough - eventually told me. Context and analysis? Don't make me laugh, cocky...

And then yesterday opened with news reports about Google's driverless car, a project most of the people I know had been aware of for some months. Things had moved on and Google had released pictures of its prototype 'level four' car - no steering wheel at all for you, matey. The news online had broken the day before, Google's release went out on the 27th May (Tuesday) and most online outlets led with the story yesterday first thing. So listening to the Business Breakfast on Dubai Eye Radio this morning, it was odd to hear some shouty Americans on Bloomberg being played out. A sort of strange, layered iterative experience - the presenters played a recording of Bloomberg playing a recording of an interview with Sergei Brin.

So I get to hear a recording of a recording of a person talking about the news I knew and saw the day before.

This sort of thing is happening so frequently now, I'm losing track of what day it is. I keep looking to the future only to find mainstream media dragging me back to the past.

Odd.

The Trouble With Labour

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The local partner of the New York Times, which reprints the newspaper for a small and discerning audience in the UAE, chose not to print one issue of the paper this week, Monday's, which carried a report on the labour conditions of the men who built the now completed New York University building in Abu Dhabi.

The article is of course available online for anyone who knows what an Internet is. It's linked here. Buzzfeed, playing Chinese whispers, makes a number of small but critical errors in its coverage of the incident, claiming this is "...the first time UAE authorities had tried to censor an NYT story."

Except it wasn't any 'authority'. The Khaleej Times reprints the NYT and the decision was clearly theirs. The NYT's own letter to subscribers makes it clear that Khaleej Times "deemed it too sensitive". Not the National Media Council, which would have been the censoring body if authority was to come into play.

The move, a muckle-headed one on KT's part if you don't mind me saying so, does the UAE a disservice. The story needed to be aired locally, the attempt to suppress it was clearly futile and did more damage to the country's reputation than letting the piece run would have caused.

I am increasingly frequently enraged by expats acting the censor. They err on the side of caution, fearful for their precious tax-free jobs and then they make fools of us all. We can't talk about that, best avoid this. The whispered, winked conversations are infuriating. It's the politics of the playground, my dad's bigger than yours. "I'm, let us say, close to those in authority and I don't mind telling you this wouldn't play well," says Sam Cheeseman as he stamps his mark on the commentary which actually doesn't 'cross' any 'line' as we know it.

The National Media Council has read, and passed for publication, two of my three serious Middle East based novels. I subsequently chose to take content out because I thought it unnecessarily offensive - my choice and decision entirely and not based on fear of my position here but purely on my judgement of the fine line between what is necessary to make a story 'play' and be realistic and what would annoy or cause offence to my readers. The 'C' word, for instance, I eventually chose not to use because I know women who find it highly offensive and the story lived on just dandy without it. The NMC left it in, I took it out.

The NMC has not asked me to change a word of my books. Not one word. Ever.

Olives - A Violent Romance contains pre-marital sex between Muslims and Christians, Muslims drinking alcohol and other stuff. Beirut - An Explosive Thriller goes way further. There's all sorts of stuff in there, from prostitution to heroin, booze and murder. The NMC didn't bat an eyelid.

Writer friends are sore amazed that books have to be read before being 'passed' as fit for publication, but the NMC is on a journey. When I first dropped wide-eyed onto the tarmac at Dubai International back in 1988, the Ministry Of Information ruled and its rule was indeed heavy-handed. The UAE gets very little credit for how very far it has come in such a relatively short time. Don't forget the UK was still banning and censoring things right up into the 1980s, from Lady Chatterley's Lover to Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax.

So you can stop wagging your finger in this direction, matey.

But the core fact in the NYT story and the spate of others like it that really has me wondering is this, undoubtedly set to be most unpopular, thought. If things are so very bad for labour in the UAE, then why - over fifty years after they started building this place - do the workers still come here?

I appreciate conditions are hard, harsh even. But has anyone done a comparative study of labour conditions in, say, Dhaka compared to here? I'm here because I'm better off than I would be at home. And so's everyone else. That's not a shallow argument or excuse. It's simple, plain fact. Ever since Safa Park was a makeshift shanty town for illegal immigrants (it later shifted to Mamzar), people have flocked to the UAE from the Subcontinent to work. Thousands of them have become millionaires in the UAE - having arrived with nothing.

Does that make it all any better or more admirable? 'Course not. But by living here as expats we condone the practice implicitly, perhaps even complicitly. Labour conditions in the UAE have clearly improved significantly over the years I have been here, but European sensibilities are still offended by the camps and reports of 12 hour workdays, let alone the deaths of men travelling from Umm Al Qawain to Jebel Ali to work.

Then there are the practices of agents and usurious visa salespeople, which have led to the popular phrase 'indentured labour' or, as the NYT weasels, 'resembles indentured servitude'. The gombeen men who prey on the workers are not Emirati, but from the workers' home countries. The, apparently infamous, kafala system applies to all expats in the UAE, it's simply sponsorship. That's what the word means, that's what the system is. Your employer provides your visa, contracts with you to employ you and is essentially in loco parentis, whether you're a labourer or a CEO.

Is it abused by companies? Yes. Widely? Yes. Is enough being done to stamp out the abuse of workers? No. Does suppressing media reporting of it help? No. Do constant skewed reports of labour conditions here by callow Western journalists applying selective sampling to make the story more dramatic and create more appealing headlines help the situation?

I'd argue not, actually. There's a lack of balance in the debate and by neglecting the efforts of the enlightened, you empower the entrenched.

UAE Petrol Retailers Are Breaking The Law It Seems

(Photo credit: 401(K) 2013)

A report in today's Gulf News quotes Omar Bu Shahab, CEO of the Commercial Compliance and Consumer Protection Division (CCCP) in the Department of Economic Development in Dubai as saying that charging 2% fees on credit and debit card transactions is a violation of consumer protection law.

While he was commenting on an attempt by a GEMS school to levy a 2% processing fee on credit and debit card transactions, his clarification also applies to Emarat and EPPCO/ENOC service stations, which charge the fee on credit card transactions for fuel. This surcharge appears to have been the resolution of a spat between the credit card companies and the fuel distributors dating back to 2007 - and the early days of this here very blog. The story from way back then is suitably linked 'ere. Basically, the retailers (not ADNOC, you'll note) have always charged extra for credit card purchases, in violation of the card issuers' agreements and when the card companies kicked off, the retailers just stopped taking credit cards. They've recently started again, but with a Dhs2 'service fee' on any transaction for fuel up to Dhs100. In short, 2%...

“Retailers who are charging extra fees on the credit card or debt card payments are violating the consumer protection law and will be subject to penalties,” Mr Bu Shahab told the newspaper that tells it like it is.*

So it'll be interesting to hear what the petrol companies say when the media come calling, won't it?

*Well, sometimes.

More Sharjah News! The 'Water Tank Cooling Device' Announcement!

It's amazing what you can find living in water tanks. 

Actually this is a lie as this is a fish in Sharjah Aquarium. 

Which is, incidentally, a great day out with the kids.

Oh, the excitement! It's all happening in Sharjah these days - following hot on the heels of this weekend's crackdown on pesky prayer-time parkers, Sharjah Municipality has announced that all property owners in the emirate will be required to install a 'water cooling device' in their water tanks.

If you're not a resident of the UAE, you might not appreciate we all have water tanks (many of us have two to be sure to be sure) on the roofs of our villas and on our apartment blocks. Water is pumped twice daily through the public network, filling these holding tanks from which we then derive our daily supply of water. Although some are plastic, many - especially older - tanks are fibre-glass. Over time, some interesting species of fresh water slugs and other things can be found in tanks which should, ideally, be occasionally flushed just to keep 'em clean.

But this is the first I've ever heard of a 'water cooling device'. Never mind, Gulf News is a real newspaper and will have asked the first question that came to my mind - 'what device?'

Oh.

So whatever the device is to be, we know not. Apparently there'll be a degree of choice, in that water tanks can either have a water cooling device or be shielded from the sun 'especially during the warmer summer months'. The move is to 'address the problem of high temperature of water faced by many residents in Sharjah.'

What problem? It's long been accepted fact that you know summer's arrived when either a) hot water comes out of your cold tap (and you can turn off the immersion to get cold water from your hot tap) or b) Gulf News publishes a photo of a pigeon drinking from a standpipe. When both happen, you know it's gonna be a hot one.

So we don't know what device, when it will be implemented, how it will be implemented, who will be affected, what the application process is or who is going to pay for all this. Whatever all this is.

So much for Rudyard Kipling's 'six honest serving men'.

Gulf News does point out residents can call 993 for more information. I tried just for fun and so you wouldn't have to. I am none the wiser, but have spoken to a number of puzzled-sounding people and been transferred to many, many phone lines that ring out and cut you off.

Meanwhile, we can all enjoy the cooler weather that is upon us and the consequential cool water coming from our water tanks...

Manaa - Abu Dhabi Names And Shames

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Abu Dhabi Quality and Conformity Council has launched a new portal called 'Manaa' which lists the products it has recalled from the Abu Dhabi market because of safety concerns - over 15,000 items have been taken off the shelves in the last year.

The story ran on national news agency WAM and, therefore, in all the papers.

It's a remarkable move in its own quiet little way - it's unusual to see acceptance of a 'name and shame' strategy around here and this website certainly does that. Each nonconformant product is identified with a photograph and its brand name, product number and batch number. Categorised into product types, the archive of recalled products is searchable and a search through the database quickly reveals a number of surprises.

The first surprise is in the electrical appliances category. There's a huge dominance of Chinese products for a start, sort of what you'd expect, but there are also some major brands featured, including Moulinex and Kenwood. Added to that, a number of locally known brands are prominent, too, with multiple product recalls from Elekta, Geepas, Nikai and Aftron. Nearly every supermarket in the country will sell you Oshtraco socket strips and electrical accessories, and yet they've had recalls too. Who knew?

Some of the reasons for recalling products can seem a bit obtuse. The Aftron AFGSM1800 contact grill (sounds more like a mobile to me!) was withdrawn because "The temperature rise beyond the standard limit" and an Elekta fan withdrawn because "Fan blade is accessible with the test finger which may cut the users fingers when running." Another Elekta fan didn't make the grade because "The temperature rose beyond the standard limit of motor winding by resistance method the and ball pressure test of speed selector insulation did not comply."

I'm sure it didn't...

Perhaps amusingly, one of the recalled brands of socket strip was 'Terminator'.

But the real surprise comes when you dig into the archive beyond the electrical appliances and children's toys categories. Because beyond these, the cupboard is bare. Not a thing. All the other categories are empty, including vehicle tires,vehicle parts, containers and packaging, cigarette fuel, lighter, firework and chemicals and cosmetics. Presumably these have yet to be regulated.

The scheme, albeit young, is a good one and great news for consumers. The Council is a relatively new body with a huge job ahead of it - and, from the website, appears to be implementing a rounded standards, regulation and conformity system for product safety. For instance, it only announced its electrical appliances certification initiative in January this year. So we can presumably look forward to the database being further populated as that work continues.

The Council appears to have a remit to cover Abu Dhabi emirate only rather than being a Federal body - however a chat with Abdalla Muami on Twitter clarifies that ADQCC liaises with Federal bodies on non-conforming products, which would mean, presumably, that products Abu Dhabi finds unsafe are withdrawn from all markets.

However, now you can actually check for yourself before buying stuff thanks to the database!

Hamad? Hamad? Who On Earth Is Hamad?

Image via CrunchBase

Yes, the headline on this post does indeed come to you courtesy The Ministry Of Polite Headlines.

The Emirates Identity Authority, or EIDA, has announced a new campaign to 'enhance interaction with customers'. This will no doubt be a source of some considerable glee to many 'customers' who have lacked in some way 'interaction', although I have to say as the whole process has bedded in over the past six years - yes, it has taken that long and yes, they did think it was all going to take six months - there are plenty of points of interaction already.

However, if they see the need to open up another, who am I to complain? After all, I have complained often enough in the past about one-way communications, wilfully obtuse communications and sheer blindingly, infuriatingly mendacious communications. What better than to be answerable to your customers 24x7 at Twitterspeed?

Gulf News carries the story, courtesy of national news agency WAM but labelled as a 'staff report', in which an EIDA official tells them, apparently, the initiative is "in line with Emirates ID’s keenness to consistently communicate with its customers and interact with them through their favourite channels, especially on smart phones and tablets in an innovative way through a cartoon character derived from the UAE heritage."

Hamad is that cartoon character. He comes, apparently, as part of the Emirates ID strategic plan 2010-2013 that aims to enhance customers' satisfaction. He has his own hashtag, #AskHamad, which at the time of writing consisted of two lonely tweets, both carrying a picture of the cartoon character and reading, "Can you guess why I'm here?"

No, Hamad. I have no idea why you're there.

The clincher for me was the fact that Hamad is only going to be there from 12-2pm every Thursday. That's it. You have a two hour window to use the world's biggest always-on real-time communications channel. That's why there are only two lonely tweets there - they haven't opened Hamad for business yet. You wait until Thursday - this baby's gonna trend! Or perhaps not.

Emirates ID already has a Twitter account, @emiratesID_help. Why it needs a two-hour account with a cartoon of a small boy splashed on it, I really don't know.

Anyway, they must know what they're doing. Gulf News tells us Emirates ID won two international awards in social media management last June (the Golden Award for “Best use of social media measurement” and the Sliver Award for “Best use of Communication Management- Public Sector”, says Gulf News.

I have no idea what a sliver award is, but can only assume it's a very small award.

Gay Oman Controversy Spirals Out Of Control

Omani weekly tabloid newspaper The Week appears to be in a great deal of hot water indeed. The paper ran a piece last week on what it was like being gay in Oman which looks to the untutored eye like a well written and balanced feature - if a surprisingly frank and open one. It has resulted in an amazing backlash that has led the paper to issue an unconditional apology on its home page as it faces censure at the highest level and the possibility of action from the country's legislature.

The Oman Journalist's Association has strongly condemned the piece according to Gulf News (which hit a new high today by reporting on a woman who threatened to blow herself up at Dubai's Public Prosecution and failed to mention there was no bomb in her 'bomb belt'*), while also calling for the Ministry of Information to act - and the chairman of the Omani Shura Council, Shaikh Khalid Bin Hilal Bin Naseer Al Maa’wali, has weighed in, promising action by the Council's media committee. In a tweet, as it happens. In fact, in a final confirmation that this is, indeed, a hot story (all today's journalist needs to confirm it's a biggie), the whole thing trended on Twitter.

It's not as if homosexuality in Oman hasn't been aired in public before - the (formerly) excellent Muscat Confidential blog ran a great interview on this very topic back in 2010. Muscat Confidential has in the past been blocked by Omani authorities, but no blocking followed the publication of this post.

But, of course, We Don't Talk About Elephants In This Room and there's clearly a huge difference between a blog post and a tabloid newspaper - and it's worth noting the outrage is clearly community driven, it's not a nanny state government acting against a brave little newspaper. The piece has clearly widely offended Omanis.

The Week's apology neatly paraphrases Father Jack Hackett, but 'the article' - so hot its nature can't even be mentioned in that apology, it seems - lives on. Omani blog Oman Coast has reproduced the piece on those who choose not to reproduce and it's linked here for your elucidation. As Oman Coast says, please read on only if you are a mature reader used to free speech who is not easily shocked or offended.

Meanwhile the messenger, it would appear, has been quite comprehensively shot...

* I suppose in the interest of fairness I should point out that Gulf News has now added the no bomb information to its story online, although not rewritten it in light of the new finding, so the first line still reads, "A mother wearing a belt of explosives who threatened to blow herself up in the Dubai Public Prosecution building has surrendered and has been arrested."

New Zealand Bacteria Scare. What New Zealand Bacteria Scare?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Whenever the role of journalism in the social age is questioned, you get the snap answer that breaking news on Twitter is all very well, but 'proper' journalism gives us context and analysis. It has long been my contention that this is one of those qualitative arguments that points to the inevitability of disintermediation.

This was certainly the first thing that went through what passes for my mind as I read in Gulf News over the weekend that 'New Zealand Products Safe To Consume'. This headline inevitably means there is an issue of some kind with New Zealand products, but in the name of 'context and analysis' we're certainly not going to be told what the issue is, just that it's not an issue.

If I read a headline in Gulf News 'Big Gnarly Sabre Toothed Banjax Not About To Eat You', for instance, I know not to turn around. I'd rather not have to confront my impending messy end.

The scare in question is actually quite old by today's standards, dating back to May of last year in fact, when a dirty pipe in one of Fonterra's plants contaminated a batch of whey protein concentrate used in 'Nutricia Karicare', an infant formula product, as well as other drinks including sports drinks, protein drinks and other beverages. 90% of New Zealand's dairy produce comes from Fonterra, a massive agro-business which accounts for something like 7% of New Zealand's GDP. Imagine the lobbying power!.

For some reason the contamination didn't come to light until March of this year, finally causing China to announce a ban of certain products in early August of New Zealand dairy products. The Chinese are, understandably, somewhat nervous about contaminated dairy products and import something like 80% of their infant formula from New Zealand. Recall products are known to have been shipped to China, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia.

Fonterra's news release on the 'quality issue' makes interesting reading. Eight Fonterra customers had been affected by the 'issue' which 'surfaced' in March but didn't require any action other than 'intensive testing' over the subsequent months until finally, on Wednesday 31st July, a sample tested positive for Clostridium botulinum.

The recall affects some 38 tonnes of whey protein but would appear to have impacted over 2,000 metric tonnes of nutritional products that use the protein product - Fonterra has been pretty cagey about the identities of its customers - and presumably has been depending on the considerable clout it must have in New Zealand to minimise the coverage of a food contamination scare that begs questions about who knew what and when - and how thousands of tonnes of contaminated products can be put on the market but the identities of the companies producing those products be protected.

It all reads a little like the horse meat scare in Europe - one producer's product can contaminate thousands of tonnes of downstream products. There are other whiffs of sulphur around the story, too - scientists questioning how a 'dirty pipe' could have been involved, the timescale of the testing and recall, why expensive tests for Clostridium, not normally required for whey protein products, were being carried out and so on. Fonterra's head of milk products has subsequently resigned.

In any case, New Zealand Government laboratories have now confirmed that the samples tested were not actually contaminated with botulism causing clostridium botulinum but with the just as worrying-sounding but relatively benign Clostridium sporogenes. So that's all okay, then.

All of which has been brilliantly boiled down by Gulf News to a reassuring blue 'don't panic' - in fact there's no problem to the point you don't even need to know what the problem there isn't is.

The UAE Sedition Trial - 94 Accused, 25 Acquitted

(Photo credit: saraab™)

It's in all the papers today, Gulf News in particular devoting an extraordinary amount of extent to its coverage of the verdict against the 94 Emiratis accused of plotting the overthrow of the UAE's government through the activities of an Islamic front organisation accused of having links to the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Islah.

I had a finger waved at me the other day, accusing me of being 'craven' in not joining in the chorus of voices questioning the trial, the treatment of the prisoners and so on. I thought it was quite an extraordinary thing for someone to do - demand that I take a stance on an issue because they had a viewpoint. I didn't see them taking to a blog in their own name to denounce it all. But it's okay for them to expect me to.

Truth be told, I know absolutely nothing about the trial beyond what our papers have told us - and much of that coverage has been through the national newswire of the UAE, WAM. I assume it's all been filtered, because there's no 'alternative voice' out there. Not from the UAE's media and certainly not from international media. Investigative journalism has either failed, been utterly indifferent or decided there's little enough here to investigate. I know very little indeed about the detail of the case as, I suspect, do we all.

Knowing so little, I find it hard to have a polarised opinion. The trial was conducted by a court constituted by the rulers of this country, under the law of the country. You might not like the country or its law, but that's the facts. It's as valid as a verdict handed down in the UK, Ecuador, China, Singapore or France. Different countries have different forms of rule, judicial systems and standards of what I suppose we should call probity. Some are aggressively open (hello, Scandinavia!) and some are aggressively secretive and intrusive (hello, America!). All limit opposition to the incumbent system of governance to the constituted organs of governance. Really. Ask Ed Snowden. That's our world.

The verdict of the court has been reached. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is that. Please do remember to use your real name and email when you use the comments to call me craven...

An Awkward Brush With Ajman's 'Tea Set'

Teapot (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They're all sitting back after consuming their Dhs45 ($1,400) a head Chinese meal and chatting about the roadworks around National Paints. The glittering crowd of red-faced, balding men and their wives, all bleached blonde hair and sun-damaged skin, are sipping 'special tea' from silver-rimmed porcelain cups. The conversation turns to local retailer Spinneys and how they've stopped selling Walkers Cheese and Onion crisps again. The mood turns ugly as someone pipes up, "They never have any bloody fresh cream in, either. We have to go to Mirdiff for that."

I'm undercover, a BBC journalist taking in the seamy side of this secretive emirate, the underbelly of the glittering United Arab Emirates. Just a few minutes away from the  marble malls of Dubai, Ajman is home to a significant population of wealthy expatriates working in the oil, real estate and other industries. Many of them enjoy themselves in the whirl of socialising and conspicuous consumption that has come to characterise expatriate life in the UAE.

It doesn't escape my notice that there's something wrong with the tea. The mens' tea is yellow and foaming while the womens' is white. One has ice in her 'tea' - "Vodka an' tonic, luvvie" she confides in me, sipping her tea with a suggestive wink. The black market booze-up is just one of a number of wilful transgressions of the law that these expats undertake in their everyday lives- seemingly uncaring that one wrong move could have disastrous consequences.

"This place has been here for years. Nobody cares about a few cups of tea," Billy, a construction company executive tells me as he smokes his umpteenth Marlboro. "There's a law about smoking in restaurants, too, but nobody cares about it."

Behind him in the kitchens, Ang Yang Wang labours over a series of sizzling woks. A refugee from Szechuan, she makes a meagre Dhs 8,000 ($45) a month working as a chef in the popular 'China Parlour' restaurant. "I come here for cook these people," she tells me. "They no eat good food, they eat cat."

Puzzled, I leave her to rejoin the party. On their second pot now, the men are laughing loudly. I decide it's time to leave before the scene gets too rowdy and my safety is compromised.

"With inputs from agencies" - More Copy/Paste Gulf News Shenanigans

Gulf News (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News' inside front cover story today (flagged on the front cover) will be familiar to anyone who's been online over the past few days - the gang who ripped off tens of millions of dollars from RAKBank and Bank Muscat and the two alleged gang members who photographed themselves with a pile of cash in their car.

It carries a local byline but signs off with a little tag in italics - with inputs from agencies. So what precisely does that mean? Well, as we've seen before with similar GN stories, it means whole wodges of the report are actually not written by Gulf News at all, but simply copied and pasted from the newswires. I have alluded to this practice before. In the case of this story, "Stolen Gulf cash tipped off the FBI", Gulf News has used the text of a Bloomberg report verbatim - in fact, the story from the words "the digital currency company" to the end is Bloomberg's report. It represents a little under half the entire extent of the story.

Much of the rest of it is mostly rewritten or just plain copied from an Associated Press file:

On two pre-arranged days — once in December and again in February — criminals loaded with the lucrative debit cards and PIN numbers, headed into city streets around the world, racing from one ATM to the next, often taking out the maximum the cash machine would allow in a single transaction: $800. In December, they worked for about 2 1/2 hours, reaping $5 million worldwide in about 4,500 transactions. Two months later, apparently buoyed by their success, they hit the ATMs for 10 hours straight, collecting $40 million in 36,000 transactions.
Associated Press (running as "Bloodless bank heist impressed cybercrime experts" in The Guardian)

On a pre-arranged day in December, criminals loaded with the debit cards and PIN numbers, headed into city streets around the world, racing from one ATM to the next, often taking out the maximum the cash machine would allow in a single transaction: $800. They worked for about 2.5 hours, reaping $5 million worldwide in about 4,500 transactions. In February, the gang hit the ATMs for 10 hours straight, collecting $40 million in 36,000 transactions.
Gulf News, "Stolen Gulf cash tipped off the FBI"

So there we go. A story that happened right under Gulf News' nose, covered by cutting and pasting agency reports and the practice justified by 'with inputs from agencies', when in fairness what it really should say is 'with no real input from Gulf News'.

Arab Media Forum Faces New Media Challenges. Shock Horror.

This is in no way a gratuitous plug for the 'book of the blog,' you understand.

This blog, as readers of Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years will know, started around The Arab Media Forum 2007. This was mere coincidence, not by any means a result of the forum which I have never attended and likely never will attend. In fact, as the first post attests, we were sitting at home eating Lebanese takeaway.

There seems to be even more intense debate at this year's forum (judging from the reports one sees on Twitter) about the 'role of new media' and all that. It's an interesting debate - some may argue taking place a little late in the day - particularly in this region, where reporting is so very dangerous and the conflicts so very real - and, as all conflicts necessarily are - polarised and messy. Making sense of these things is tough, dangerous and hard - journalism, true journalism, is a thankless and wearying job. But some people are just plagued with that need to delve down to uncover the truth and then get it out there into our hands so we can make more informed judgements about the world around us.

Shame there are all too few of these in the Middle East, but that's the breaks.

The Great Debate, of course, has moved on. It's no longer about whether digital media are relevant, but whether traditional media is relevant. You'd hardly have thought that from the Forum, which includes the session, "Digital Media: Authority Without Responsibility". Apart from a few 'digital heads' the debate at the Forum remains principally analogue and although there are nods to a process of transition, there is no sense that this transition could easily well take the form of disintermediation.

The Forum's first session was, in fact, "Conventional Media vs. New Media" - the program outlines the problem as this:

News industry is remarkably challenged by the emerging “new media” platforms. This synthetic prelim produced unprecedented dilemma for traditional journalism and undoubtedly added more complications.

Quite.

Of course, what the debate lacks is a sense of where humanity's eyeballs are going. Are people consuming as much local media as before? Does it carry as much weight with the public? Is the Arab News media seen as credible compared to online and first hand sources? Where are people going for news these days? Gulf News or the Daily Mail Online?

That research could have underpinned a viable and vibrant debate framed by the scale of the challenge facing print media and the practicses of print media journalism. Events in Syria and even the recent Beirut bombing which I posted about at length here, comparing Twitter to a Lorenzian water wheel, have shown that trying to adapt conventional 'big' media reporting to Twitter and YouTube can have disastrous effects - and have arguably eroded the weight we give to mainstream media. Never has there been more need for careful, considered journalism - and never have we seen so little of just that.

Instead, we have the same old ground being gone over - with a distinct under-representation of the 'new media' everyone is so upset about (although nice to see Maha from Google there). Although it's nice for everyone from the region's media to get together for a chat, I can't help but feel the actual eyeballs have, well, moved on...

DysonGate - Are PRs and Journalists Tom And Jerry?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The DysonGate scandal threatens to drive a massive wedge in our local media community. Heads will roll. Words will be written. You heard it here first.

There's nowt so close as love and hate. Public relations people and journalists have a constant, bickering Tom and Jerry relationship that often gives me much gentle amusement. PR people annoy journalists by being incompetent, lazy and slavish to their unreasonable clients. Journalists annoy PR people by being lazy, incompetent and slavish to their unreasonable masters.

Rarely do both sit down and commiserate, although you'd have thought the above was grounds for considerable empathy. Veteran journalist Frank Kane of The National took a pop at hapless PRs sending him awful stories in his column yesterday. It's not unamusing. You could argue he was shooting fish in a barrel - the volume of dire press releases that goes out in the UAE every day is remarkable not only for its volume but its persistence. When you consider the vast majority of these announcements have no hope of achieving any coverage whatsoever, you do wonder why the relentless tide of mindless mush continues.

Kane picks a couple of examples from the bin, the Dyson airblade release being surely the result of an almost manic optimism "No, really, it WILL get coverage. National newspapers LOVE to hear about hand dryer installations. TRUST me on this one, Phil!" He could have gone on at much greater length and easily been a great deal unkinder. I do wonder if Dyson's agency will claim credit for the clip with the client... Or, indeed, tell them a local blogger's nicknamed it DysonGate.

"See? Major media AND blogs! I TOLD you we'd get traction on this one, Phil!"

In a previous life I used to edit a magazine called BBC GulfWide - it was a sort of wrapper of local features around the BBC Middle East listings and I quite enjoyed producing it. Every month I dedicated a double page spread to lampooning the efforts of the local PRs. I was younger, then, and more unkind. Reading back over some of these spots now does make me laugh. But the same releases were going out then, the same idiotic appeals to 'depute a photographer' from my 'esteemed publication' (a phrase Kane picked up on). The same ridiculous releases about something nobody in their right minds other than the people working in that company would care about mixed in with inappropriately targeted product releases. Why did agencies think the BBC listings magazine, a features only title, would cover news releases? Or that we were interested in hair care products?

And why, more to the point, do they still persist in sending out these awful releases today, almost two decades later. Have we really not moved on one iota?

That's a complicated question, actually. It's a mixture of agencies pandering to clients without giving them good advice, clients who believe agencies are there to do what they're told, not consult on the most effective course and media that actually will run this sort of tripe. Because if the standard of local PR can hit Dead Sea  level lows, the standard of journalism can match it metre for metre. I'd probably go for a dig in the ribs and bring the Mariana Trench into it.

I'm going to echo Kane's admirable example and not name names. But the newspaper - the national daily newspaper - that ran a story today about how traffic is slowing down around the new junction in Ajman is only one microscopic example from a rejoinder that could run for thousands of words. Kane, himself brought up in the days of pencil-licking notebook journalism, would recognise the classic 'six questions' structure in the first paragraph of the news piece:

Ajman: Cars approached the newly opened Al Hamidiya interchange with caution on Wednesday morning, slowing down to read the signboards, trying to figure out which way will take them to their desired destination, changing lanes carefully to get on their way.

Or perhaps not. That was the first para of a page lead story, by the way, not a News In Brief. When you add that to the copy/paste hacking, the plagiarism, the fawning to authority and toadying to influence and then throw in a good measure of lack of depth, research, investigative or searching journalism and sprinkle a masala of news wire copy, laziness and verbatim press release you start to comprehend the true worth of the media environment.

Am I tarring all journalists with that brush? Of course not, just as Kane is careful not to tar all PRs with his. But we both know that we're both right and there's too much of what we've both pointed out going on.

Sadly, the truth of the matter is journalists get the PRs they deserve. At least they've stopped complaining that PRs make them lazy, which used to be the case in days of yore...

Sharjah's Speed Radar Shooting Spree

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sharjah police have an unusual case on their hands at the moment - someone's going around shooting out the traffic radars that the UAE's traffic cops are all so inordinately fond of.

While there is much debate about the efficacy of fixed radars in other parts of the world, for instance in the UK, the UAE has festooned its roads with a remarkable number of these snappy little devices, Dubai alone aiming, apparently, at a radar every two kilometres. That's quite a lot of radar and they can be expensive for those not used to cruise control. A colleague of mine with a particularly heavy right foot has paid out fines totalling Dhs 23,000 (About $6,300 to you) in the past, although thankfully she's now got that habit down to a more manageable Dhs 2,000.

There's been a 9% drop in the year on year fatality rate on Dubai's roads, although the accident rate has actually increased by 7% - something the anti-radar lobby would doubtless seize upon like ravening wolves - or Wordpress users finding your Blogger blog has been deleted.

But one chap has come up with his own argument, and it's a compelling one. It's getting expensive for Sharjah's finest, too - so far a total of fourteen radars have been shot along the Mileiha/Madam highway according to a story in Gulf News over the weekend, the latest such incident being last Wednesday. The story carries a pithy quote from Sharjah police:

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

This has been going on for some time, in fact. The first  11 of the Dhs 250,000 ($68,500) devices were shot out early in November, with Gulf News reporting on the incident on the 12th of that month. That story carried a particularly pithy quote from Sharjah police, who said:

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

As if not satisfied with his very expensive shooting spree (he's knocked up quite a tab by now), the vandal struck again in December, taking out a further two radars on the same stretch of road. Sharjah police commented pithily to Gulf News at the time, saying:

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

More cut and paste journalism, then - merely recycling the same old quote every time. At least it's not copied from a blog or another paper this time. But it's still reprehensible and shoddy not least because it misrepresents Sharjah police's reaction to the updated story.

Golly, but it's beginning to feel like Private Eye around here...

Gulf News: Cut And Paste Journalism

English: Close-up image of TN panel display, Dell Mini 9, Magnification - 300 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in October last year, I asked if journalism had perhaps jumped the shark, with a post that compared a Gulf News story on Google's Nexus 7 announcement with some well-known online sources, showing clearly that key elements of the GN story, under a local byline, were cut and paste from web-based sources.

This is not a good thing. The P word, plagiarism, is whispered in decent news rooms because it is considered, quite rightly, to be one of the most egregious forms of deceit in journalism. It's lazy, it misleads readers and it speaks to a lack of professionalism that would, anywhere else in the world, be profoundly unacceptable.

Gulf News' response to the charge was to quietly rewrite the online version of the story to remove the more obvious cut and paste segments and give credit for the quotes the story filched from the New York Times.

This time around, in an article carrying the same byline, they have an even more elegant solution. Don't post the piece ("TVs for every room and budget" - a collection of 'buyer's guide' hints and tips for TV buyers that appears on page E4 of the newspaper's technology supplement) online at all.

It's a compelling lesson on how to write a product buyer's guide feature in the Internet age. Google the topic, pick a few sites that already post buyers' guides, summarise and/or just rephrase what they have to say and there you have it, Robert's your father's brother, one buyers' guide.

Just for good measure, barely even bother rewording some of the more technical stuff. Just slap it into the CMS, bish bash bosh. It's not going online anyway and nobody's going to bother checking to see if you just blagged the copy, are they?


Gulf News
"Since plasma pixels can be almost completely turned off on screen, they are capable of producing really dark blacks which helps improve picture quality."

Digital Trends' TV Buyers' Guide
"Since plasma pixels can be almost completely turned off during dark scenes or portions of the image, they are capable of deeper black levels compared to LCD TVs."

Gulf News
"In passive screens, two images are displayed simultaneously; like in a movie theatre, while polarised glasses filter the correct image to each eye to produce a 3D effect."

Digital Trends TV Buyers' Guide
"...passive 3D is very similar to what you would experience in a movie theater: Two images are displayed simultaneously on the screen, while polarized glasses properly filter the correct image to each eye, producing a 3D effect. "

Gulf News
"In active displays, the glasses use battery-powered LCD lenses to alternately block each eye in sync with the television, alternately showing right- and left-eye images, to create the 3D effect."

Digital Trends' TV Buyers' Guide
"Active 3D glasses use battery-powered LCD lenses to alternately block each eye in sync with a TV alternately showing right- and left-eye images, creating a 3D effect."

Gulf News
"Plasmas use an emissive display technology (self lighting pixels) which means there's no motion lag or lighting inconsistencies and this results in smoother, more accurate motion and better picture detail."

Digital Trends' TV Buyers' Guide
"Plasmas use an emissive display technology (i.e. self-lighting pixels) and color phosphors, which means there’s no motion lag or lighting inconsistencies, unlike their LCD counterparts. The results are smoother, more accurate motion; deeper, more consistent black levels; and better picture detail.

Court Reporting Fun

gavel (Photo credit: SalFalko)

Covering the UAE's law courts must be the most coveted job at all the local papers. It's not only a chance to actually see some action - rather than sit at a desk subbing reports from national news agency WAM - but it also brings a pretty constant slew of oddball cases that range from the delightful to the downright worrying.

One of the many nice things about living in the UAE is that relatively petty crime makes it to the national dailies - whereas in the UK, for instance, anything less than a particularly gruesome and bloody murder would be lucky to make it to the local rag, let alone the nationals. That's not to say crime, including rape and murder, doesn't happen here. It's just that comparatively little of it goes on.

And so in today's paper we have a man jailed for three months for biting another's finger. The act was, apparently, not consensual - the two were involved in a brawl at Dubai's fruit and vegetable market. The biter was ordered to pay Dhs 21,000 compensation and will be deported once he completes his jail sentence.

Another non-consensual act was a man accused of inserting an industrial air line into his colleague's bottom, causing his stomach and face to inflate. Reporting on the story, Gulf News quotes the judge, displaying an admirable grasp of the essentials of the case in front of him, as asking: “Didn’t you put the hosepipe in his backside when the air was puffing out from it?”

Responding, the accused claimed, “I did so but from over his clothes. I did not mean to hurt him because it was supposed to be a joke.”

I'm not sure how it would make your face inflate, but then I lack the required experience of industrial airlines and human physiognomy. The case will come to judgement on January 30th, so I'm sure we'll all find out quite what went on.

But you see my point? These stories aren't relegated to the funny bit just before the sport on the six o'clock news, they're mainstream court reporting - which sort of speaks to the very low crime rate here. It'd be nice to credit the forces of law and order for that, but it's really because we're all on the hog's back - everyone here is better off than they would be at home and so very few are willing to rock the boat. And yes, that even includes the labourers.

In related news, Gulf News managed to repeat yesterday's 'Star Gazing' astrology column in today's paper, too. You'd have thought columnist Shelley Von Strunckel would have seen that coming, wouldn't you? But then it's always been sort of hard predicting what the Gulf News subs will get up to next...

Sharjah Water Disruption - A Lesson In Communication?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Many, many years ago I was on a business trip to Austria when some loon or another decided to dump a dhow-load of dead cows into the Gulf off Sharjah. The resulting flotsam got caught up in the intake of Sharjah's main desalination plant, causing a shutdown and an Emirate-wide water shortage.

I arrived back clutching a couple of bottles of nice German sekt to find our water tanks draining fast. Soon enough, we'd run dry. Three increasingly dirty days later I decided enough was enough and popped to our local 'cold store' where I bought several cases of Masafi. These filled the bath quite nicely, thank you, and we popped a bottle of cold sekt and enjoyed a little taste of the life everyone at home believes for some reason we live every day - we bathed in spring water and drank champagne.

I'd better get the bubbly in, because it's all apparently set to happen again. Khaleej Times broke the story three days ago (Gulf News ran it as a NIB today) - from next week (November 28th to be precise), Sharjah's main desalination plant at Al Layyah will undergo maintenance with six days of 'disruption' to the water supply. Interestingly, the GN story refers to a message  circulated to residents by SEWA (The Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority), which is news to me. It also refers to the 'Al Liya desalination plant', which is one of those problems we face with place names here - the Al Layyah plant, Sharjah's central power station and desalination plant, is located in the Al Layyah area, near Sharjah port. It's also the main centre for bottling Sharjah's Zulal branded water (although there's a new plant in Dhaid which bottles groundwater, thereby confusing anyone who wonders if Zulal is desalinated water or spring water. It's actually both, it would seem!).

Al Layyah is one of (as far as I can find out) four desalination plants in Sharjah - there are also plants in Khor Fakkan, Kalba and Hamriya. The GN piece refers to disruption in "Al Khan, Al Majaz, the Corniche, Khalid Lagoon and other areas", which is typically - and infuriatingly, obtuse. What are those 'other areas'? If last time is anything to go by, pretty much all of Sharjah. Why didn't the papers think to question the announcement and get better quality information into our hands? This type of question is the route to madness, of course. The answer is 'because'.

Of course, the best thing to do is go to SEWA's website which will have all the information concerned consumers will need, won't it? No, of course it won't. It'll have a piece on how SEWA has, apparently, briefed Credit Suisse on its future expansion plans. While I am pleased for both Credit Suisse and SEWA, it's not the information I'm after. The delightfully 1990s retro feel website contains absolutely no reference to the 'planned disruption' at all, in fact.

So all we know is there is to be  'planned disruption', that supply will not be cut off but that we are being urged to stockpile water while we can. Oh, and that "after the completion of the work, water supply would be better than before."

We are all mushrooms.

Update - I didn't think of this at the time of this post, but Sarah did. Of all the times in the year to pick for this 'scheduled disruption', they've picked National Day weekend, a holiday weekend when load on the system is going to go through the roof. Nice...

Has Journalism Jumped The Shark?

Gulf News (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I noticed a story in Gulf News today about Google's cancelled Nexus 7 launch event, which was to have taken place in New York to rival Microsoft's San Francisco Windows Phone 8 event. The gig's been canned because of Hurricane Sandy. The story stood out for me because it was filed under a local byline yet quoted a Forrester Analyst, Sarah Rotman Epps. Epps is a frequently quoted commentator in major US media, so it's quite impressive to find Gulf News quoting her.

In fact,  a quick Google later and we have this story in the New York Times which not only carries Epps' comments but also contains many similar words and phrases to the GN story, which is a summary of the current hotly competitive tablet market. Gulf News doesn't credit the NYT in its story or cite it as the source of Epps' quote.

Google, Apple’s fiercest competitor, recently released its 7-inch Nexus 7 tablet for $200. Amazon recently introduced seven new Kindles, including a 7-inch tablet for $160 and an 8.9-inch tablet for $300. Barnes & Noble’s Nook tablet, which starts at $200, has also sold well. Combined, the three companies have sold about 15 million of these smaller, cheaper tablets, according to estimates by Forrester Research.  
New York Times

Google, Apple’s fiercest competitor, recently released its 7-inch Nexus 7 tablet for $200. And Amazon recently introduced seven new Kindles, including a 7-inch tablet for $160 and an 8.9-inch tablet for $300. Barnes and Noble’s Nook tablet, which starts at $200, has also sold well. Combined, the three companies have sold about 15 million of these smaller, cheaper tablets, according to estimates by Forrester. 
Gulf News

Googling one phrase from the story, which didn't sound very GN 'entrench a 49 per cent share', gets yet more interesting results and another three paragraphs 'lifted' from tech blog Know Your Mobile. The search is here - looky at results one an' two!(This search no longer works - see update below).

But Gulf News is by no means alone in producing stories based on a quick Google, a re-hash of news reports and the odd cut and paste. Just that cursory look into a hooky sounding story in GN shows that chunks of information out there are getting copied and pasted all the time. Why bother hunting down a source to quote when you can just camp select and sling in a sneaky CTRL C CTRL V? Why research a story when you can just mix up some rumours from tech blogs (forgetting to quote them, particularly if they're not particularly authoritative) and have it rehashed and popped into the old CMS in a couple of minutes?

I can remember local journalists complaining that PRs made them lazy by providing them with content on a plate - and my fury that they didn't use press releases as releases were intended to be used - as a source of information from which to build a story rather than as something to run verbatim. Well, now it's not PRs but Google - and as a result original content gives way to cut and paste journalism that masks its sources and gives credence to the incredible. Repeated verbatim, passed on from news source to news source. The same facts, the same truths, parroted without ever going through a filter of reality checking or qualitative assessment.

Welcome to The New Journalism.

Update. Gulf News has reacted to the above post by quietly posting an update of the offending story with the paragraphs referred to above removed and NYT credited for the Rotman Eps quote. The updated story is linked here.