Life after Libby: Patrick Fitzgerald will start prosecuting his next high profile case in a few weeks time, that of Conrad Black. Patricia Best had dinner with the embattled media tycoon and godfather of Canadian conservatism and notes that 'Crossharbour' is in very good spirits:

He also vows revenge and has a very clear plan on how he will exact it. He will, he says to me as he says to everyone, “almost certainly” be cleared of the charges, the word “almost” incorporating judicious amounts of humility and conviction. In the scenario he paints, once he is found not guilty, he plans to sue everyone who defamed him in the past few years in an international spray of libel notices that will demand millions and millions of dollars in damages.

“They will not be able to endure as philosophically as I have the gauntlet they have put me through,” he said to me at dinner last June and has been saying to many others since.

He's probably correct about sensing the poise of those he expects to sue if exonerated. Expect a lot media focus and celebrity positioning as the trial starts in the weeks ahead.

Harm de Blij, an American of Dutch extraction, has authored some 30 books, was the Geography Editor on ABC’s "Good Morning America" and joined NBC News in 1996 as Geography Analyst, appearing mostly on MSNBC. At the moment he is the John A. Hannah Professor at Michigan State University and most recently author of the book Why Geography Matters. Michael van der Galien at TMV has interviewed him in two installments, here and here. De Blij manages to cover most of the world and produces some worthwhile thoughts, the most notable being this one:

My personal view is that if the world can live with a Pakistani nuclear bomb it may have to learn to live with an Iranian one. On the other hand it would be better not to have to live with a leader as undiplomatic (shall we say) as Ahmadinejad.

A bleak prospect? Consider another dark scenario, De Blij's take on Russia:

Unless Russian leaders find ways to stem the tide of depopulation and migration, Russia may become ungovernable; it is vast and vulnerable despite its energy assets and weaponry. It remains essentially landlocked and its high-latitude situation constitutes a disadvantage despite global warming. Russia needs an industrial base, a balanced economy, a mature polity – and that will take time. My guess is that Russia’s weaknesses will lead to the loss of its Far Eastern frontier to China even as it tries to regain “superpower” status in the west.

Do read both interviews.

At NRO and the discrepancy between questions from al-Jazeera and Voice of America. Truly stunning.

Here is what I wrote about the media and OJ Simpson a year ago:

Ten years have passed. Simpson still hasn’t completed his mission to find the real killers and instead he has reappeared in California this week to market his celebrity, which amazingly is still intact for some. The failure to produce a just verdict will continue to cast a dark shadow of embarrassment and regret that even the civil trial couldn’t eradicate. And the media? They’re probably more sensation and celebrity driven than ever before, but it’s doubtful if the mindless celebration of popularity would ever embrace an icon like Simpson again.

Well, the state of the media is such that some didn't even hesitate to try and blatantly resurrect Simpson himself. It must have been another period of grief and anguish for the Goldman and Brown families, in what News Corp. now admits was an ill-considered project.

Andrew Sullivan notes the tension between markets and integrity:

With free markets comes great freedom but also some responsibility: to publish books worth publishing, to air TV shows actually worth airing, to care about content as well as ratings and sales. Those criteria are distinguishable from what the market will reward. That distinction has been lost in many places. It is not a criticism of the market; it is merely a reminder that markets also require integrity among those who work in them. That point deserves recovering.

There are no signs that the mindless celebration of stardom and the pursuit to make money off it have ended with this affair. The market continues to be too rewarding a place for this sort of work, but it is nevertheless good to see that a pre-market moral test still exists although Fox needed some outside pressure to diss Judith Regan's tasteless project.

Apparently not according to the Indigo book chain:

Charges that Indigo is "boycotting" Mark Steyn's book, America Alone, are ludicrous. Mr. Steyn's book was for sale at Indigo's channels in September of this year and it promptly sold out. Indeed we should have purchased more initially but the moment we realized the error, we immediately placed a reorder for several thousand more books. As of this moment, we, as well as most other book retailers in Canada, are still awaiting new copies from the publisher, which we are told will arrive in mid-November.

There will always be a whiff of suspicion when it comes to the apparent clash between Steynesque theories about modern history and Canada's media barons. But for now, the issue is settled. (hat tip: Glenn).

The week of free speech continues. Here is the case of Salah Choudhury, a Bangladeshi journalist who may face the death penalty in his home country for his opinions:

The case of the outspoken Bangladeshi journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, now on trial facing a trumped-up charge of treason with a possible death penalty, is another important challenge of this sort. Bangladesh is generally considered a relatively "moderate" Muslim country, but it is also one in which radical Islamist parties and movements are gaining increasing influence. One sign of these tendencies is the increasingly precarious position of independent journalists, epitomized by the treatment of Choudhury. He has faced years of persecution, including physical attacks and death threats as well as criminal prosecution, for his 'crimes' of criticizing Islamist radicalism and advocating reconciliation with Christians, Jews, and Israel.

More details - and suggestions on how to support Choudhury - on Jeff Weintraub's weblog, here.

So, Canada’s largest book retail chain, which by the way pratically owned a monopoly before it failed to eject Amazon.ca from its home turf, has effectively decided to ban Mark Steyn’s latest book, America Alone. You can check their site and it indeed indicates “Temporarily Unavailable to Order” and the number ‘0’ comes up a little too frequently when you try to figure out its in-store availability in a number of locations.

Suppression of free speech? Or is Heather Reisman, the chain's proprietor, exercising her basic right to economic freedom and store her shelves selectively? Sure, there is no law compelling her to put Steyn there, but her moral obligation as Canada’s largest book retailer to do so with any current bestseller in North America is obvious. Her actions fall exactly into what I yesterday called the ‘sophistication and stealth’ with which ‘debates are framed’. Few will notice it and even fewer will probably attempt to use regular media outlets to openly challenge the retail polices at Indigo-Chapters. It is hard to have a decent and informed debate when its boundaries are arbitrarily set by self-appointed media elites.

The chain’s mean-spirited attempts to ban Amazon from the Canadian market are testament to Reisman’s dated view of the new media world and her inability to artificially insulate Canada from it. The latest chapter - no pun intended - is evidence that nothing has really changed at her own Indigo-Chapters book empire.

Steyn, the cultural pessimist is however the optimist when he looks at the attempts to suppress him: it may yet sell him more books. You can order the book here, in Canada here and of course in Steyn's own little bookshop. Enjoy.

NOTE: John Hawkins has excerpted the most salient quotes from the book, here. I will, once I have read it, add my review in due course.

RELATED: There was a time when we had high hopes for Reisman ... but even then, skepticism ruled the day.

One of the core themes in all my writings about the Theo van Gogh murder has been that the mainstream media in most of the world was not well equipped to understand the complexities of Dutch society and the peculiar dynamics that led up to Theo’s murder two years ago this week. It requires knowledge and context and only now are journalistic efforts about the Dutch and their immigration woes starting to acknowledge that. The boilerplate “the Dutch were tolerant, immigrants Muslims moved in, a murder happened, and now tolerance is over and the Dutch have turned right” is not an adequate way to analyze the deep social and political rifts that have captured the small nation. For that you need someone with a deeper understanding of the situation and in Ian Buruma, a Dutch-English writer who spent most of his adult life away from The Netherlands, have we found someone who could probably be trusted with the task to write a book about the Van Gogh murder. His Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance is the result, and it is an excellent and riveting read.

Buruma doesn’t disappoint, putting even a mixture of shame and recognition on my face when he writes that the Dutch are a little too complacent, too smug, something that turns into absolute panic and manifest surprise when that feeling of smugness is challenged by the outside world. The best example of which is their national sport, soccer, where the Dutch have an ingrained sense that they’re the best but when they lose they scream out, “How come? We were the best!”. And this of course applies equally to the unfolding immigration farce and the ensuing murder which ended the much vaunted Dutch idyll. "Did we really deserve this? How come, we tried to be so nice, can anyone possibly explain this?" It is this lack of understanding and failure to accept basic realities as they are, which constitute a terrible default in the Dutch character and Buruma addresses it head on.

And not only that. He digs deep into the Dutch psyche, most notably the contentious relationship the present Dutch have with their chequered past role during World War II, which is a recurring theme around which much of the narrative is built. It is vital in understanding why immigrants have been treated the way they have and it is equally forceful in revealing how references to those years can have a devastating impact on the present day political debate. Buruma no doubt delves into his own vault of youthful experiences, but updates them with interviews, meetings and site visits during his stay in The Netherlands and so turns his book into a fairly comprehensive socio-political case study. From that perspective it would have been nice to have a thicker volume than the 265 pages that we eventually got, but in the end the book needs to be pumped into a mass marketing channel too I guess.

There has been a fair bit of criticism for Buruma, most notably that he failed to take a clear moral stance and was not sufficiently judgmental in taking sides in the conflict between free societies and nascent Islamism. To be frank, I was relieved to for once have a book in my hands that did not do that. Buruma is clear enough in what he thinks about jihadism, and instead gives us equal access to the Dutch and Moroccan cultures, and more specifically to Theo van Gogh’s life and Mohammed Bouyeri’s life. The only point where I do part ways with Buruma is his less than generous description of Pim Fortuyn whom he describes as 'pandering in nostalgia', even going as far as comparing the murdered professor-politician to the late Princess Diana. It’s a criticism often heard from those that do not entirely accept the intellectual underpinnings of Fortuyn’s political platform. The back to basics part is often mistakenly interpreted as a desperate “please take us back to the 1950s” call.

But the events that triggered Van Gogh’s murder are well-described. The total religious-cultural separation and potential for disaster, become very clear when Van Gogh and friends had organized a debate with the European-Arab League, led by Abou Jahjah. The latter refused to debate when he learned that Van Gogh was to be the moderator and walked out of the studio with his bodyguards. A debate followed outside the studio where young Moroccans shouted insults to Van Gogh who brushed them off with the usual crass Dutch humor along the lines of “if Allah protects you, why do you need bodyguards?”. It prompted one of his friends to say “It was then, that I realized how deeply they hated him. For us, it was just a game, a debating game. For them it was deadly serious”

That in a nutshell describes the incredible distance that even Theo van Gogh never fully understood. In a way he made exactly the same mistake as his fellow countrymen that were diametrically opposed to him when it came to dealing with immigrants. They advocated respect, political correctness and a far different approach to the issue, but they also failed to see that the mechanics of the debate were never about economics or culture. It was religion and a pretty stern and narrow approach to that, something the increasingly secular Dutch had long forgotten.

In the end of the book Buruma tries to explore ways where tolerance could neutralize the perils of radical Islam and hopes that religion can ultimately become the subject of reasoned debate, even for Muslims. This quote from the writer makes it clear where the boundaries between the Koran and fundamentalism are:

“Revolutionary Islam is linked to the Koran, to be sure, just as Stalinism and Maoism were linked to Das Kapital, but to explain the horrors of China’s man made famines or the Soviet Gulag solely by inviting the writings of Karl Marx would be to miss the main point”

Yes, correct, but this conclusion can also be explained in another direction by arguing that however well-meaning the basic tenets of Islam are, they have the potential to be turned around into a deadly totalitarian ideology. Theo van Gogh in his own distinctive way was not given to this type of socio-political analysis, but instinctively understood the dangers of history in the making. Yet at the heart he remained a Dutchman, a little too complacent and somewhat oblivious of the immediate perils. One can only imagine the panic he must have felt when he was butchered to death on an Amsterdam street.

Others Reviewing
Claire Berlinski - Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world in the Globe and Mail
Bruce Bawer – When Worlds Collide in The Boston Globe
Eric Weinberger – The Perils of Going Dutch for the Wilson Quarterly
Theodore Dalrymple - The Avant-Garde of the Apocalypse in City Journal
Brendan Kiley - Bicycle Drive-Bys in The Stranger
Matt Steinglass - Murder in Amsterdam in Salon
And our friend Tigerhawk, who is still reading the book

Michael Yon, who has been an excellent reporter on the War in Iraq, writes a searing indictment in the Weekly Standard about how the US Military is throttling media access:

I believe now as I did then: The government of the United States has no right to send our people off to war and keep secret that which it has no plausible military reason to keep secret. After all, American blood and treasure is being spent. Americans should know how our soldiers are doing, and what they are doing while wearing our flag. The government has no right to withhold information or to deny access to our combat forces just because that information might anger, frighten, or disturb us.

By allowing only a trickle of news to come out of Iraq, when all involved parties know the flow could be more robust, the Pentagon is doing just that.

I suggest that you read the whole thing.

Reporters Without Borders has released its annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index, and you can find the rankings here. The nature of the annual effort is probably not entirely unbiased when you start reading the accompanying notes:

The United States (53rd) has fallen nine places since last year, after being in 17th position in the first year of the Index, in 2002. Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of “national security” to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his “war on terrorism.” The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism.

Canada however is commended by Reporters Without Borders and ends up as number 18 on the list which is remarkable as nowhere is there a mention of the Juliet O'Neill affair, the Ottawa Citizen journalist whose house was raided a few years ago and who was effectively silenced by the state. Even though the courts quashed the law that enabled the search warrants last Friday, O'Neill's journey has been a dark one:

Ms. O'Neill has never been charged, but the Crown had held out the possibility that charges could yet be laid against her. That evaporated with yesterday's ruling.

Ms. O'Neill, who called the ruling "a powerful statement against the criminalization of communication," was delighted, but not quite ready to celebrate yesterday.

"I feel like I've been holding my breath for two and a half years and I can finally exhale," she said. "But I won't until I hear the minister of justice say the Crown will not appeal this ruling."

But to give credit where it is due, Denmark got mentioned:

Denmark (19th) dropped from joint first place because of serious threats against the authors of the Mohammed cartoons published there in autumn 2005. For the first time in recent years in a country that is very observant of civil liberties, journalists had to have police protection due to threats against them because of their work.

Next week, when we commemorate the second anniversary of Theo van Gogh's death, Peaktalk will focus almost exclusively on the freedom of the press and free speech at large. Both of these have come under increasing pressure in recent years and Reporters Without Borders - whatever its biases - is right in relentlessly pursuing the basic right to disseminate and have access to information, in freedom.

Contrary to expectations, the French courts have ruled against Philippe Karsenty. More details from Richard Landes and PJM.

UPDATE: Richard Landes fisks commentary form French weekly L'Express about the ruling. Key excerpt:

Note that L’Express didn’t cover this trial in September, hasn’t whispered a word of the issues in previous issues, but now shows it’s fully aware of the press coverage. Karsenty said to me that if he loses it will be all over the papers; if he wins it will be a paragraph on page 18.

Richard Landes is preparing himself for another trip to Paris where he will testify at one of the Al Durah trials. He has written a very useful primer for TNR about how French TV fudged Al Durah's death. It is a must-read as it not only summarizes the entire affair, it more importantly spells out how such media manipluation is hardly innocent and can have deadly consequences. And yes, the stage is Europe:

Three court trials, then--in which France2 seeks to bury any serious assessment of their coverage--are also trials of France's ability to defend her republican values against an Islamist onslaught that it seems ill-equipped to resist. And, as France goes, so goes Europe. (Would France have it any other way?)

Of course, I will link to the various updates that Richard will no doubt provide in the weeks ahead.

RELATED: A Reuters cameraman was arrested in Israel for inciting rock attacks.

The Armenian Genocide is now a full-fledged news story. Last week in The Netherlands, this week in France and now Turkey itself gets its nose rubbed into its own dark past with the award of the2006 Nobel Price for Literature to Orhan Pamuk. History, free speech and European politics all condensed into one.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Is this the Nobel committee's way of atoning for some of the more controversial and politically motivated prizes it has handed out in the recent past? A balancing act perhaps?

Martin 'Sol' Solomon of Solomonia runs an excellent weblog and often finds stuff that somehow gets missed by the well frequented blogs. For instance, you owe it to yourself to take a look at the No Excuses For Terror documentary (which I found via Sol), made by a British left-wing documentary maker who considers how the anti-Israel views of the far-left and far-right have influenced mainstream media reporting.

While many were cheering its rocky start and predicting its early demise, few were willing to acknowledge its potential and eventual success. Since I know a thing or two about early stage ventures I was confident that persistence and trial-and-error would at some point yield results for Pajamas Media. That is also Michael Malone's take at ABC News Silicon Insider:

That's why, longtime readers of this column will remember, I cheered the arrival of Pajamas Media, the first real aggregator of the blogosphere.

Pajamas got off to a shaky start — stumbling just enough to satisfy those who had predicted it to fail but eventually finding its legs.

Now that the mainstream media have moved on to other stories, Pajamas is pulling in hundreds of thousands of readers each day, all drawn to its attractive mix of stories, viewpoints and, increasingly, videos.

Right now, especially on the big international stories, nobody covers events from more perspectives and with greater nuance than Pajamas Media.

More endorsements to come, no doubt.

Richard Landes was one of the first to meticulously analyze media bias and manipulation and he has just written a comprehensive and must read essay-post on this week’s Reutersgate. It needs to be read in its entirety to be really appreciated, but as a teaser here is one of the better excerpts which essentially explains why Pallywood is, well, Pallywood:

The media and the liberal establishment more broadly, have taken even-handedness to an extreme. If you criticize one side, you criticize the other; if you talk about Muslim religious extremism, you talk about Jewish religious extremism. This attitude is widespread among liberal Zionists, whose almost totemic phrase is, “we too…” Again, such an approach is generous and can lead to reconciliation. But if it doesn’t work that way, it’s important to call a moratorium on such moral pretenses: Jewish religious extremism is not in the same league, nay the same universe as that of Islamic Jihad.

Even-handedness plays a big role in the shutting down of information favorable to the Israelis. One of the more common refrains I heard for MSM folks when I offered them Pallywood and al Durah: “We couldn’t do it just on that.” “Why not?” “We’d have to do something on ways the Israelis manipulate the news.” People often urge me to put up something about Israelis doing some Pallywood-like stunts as a way to show “objectivity and balance” at Second Draft. My answer: When I have a real example.

And while we are at it, more real-life examples come pouring in, here is the most recent one.

It took a day or so, but the story of altered war photos published by Reuters – sourced from freelancer Adnan Hajj whose work is now purged by the news organization – is now getting traction in the mainstream media. I have very little to add to this other than expressing some relief that longtime suspicions about Reuters’ biased reporting can now can be substantiated with some tangible evidence. And although Reuters will try and shift the blame to the various sources it uses in aggregating the news, it has to be very clear that any major news organization like Reuterscan expect to be held to a very high standard of integrity. Even simple negligence can be taken to imply gross negligence or willful manipulation of the facts and Reuters will have to work very hard at recovering from the extensive damage that this affair has inflicted upon its credibility.

The Pajamas team has a comprehensive round-up of the whole affair here and it includes an 18 minute video from my friend Richard Landes about how reports from especially the Middle East are often engineered in order to get a certain point of view across. Remember that the negative attitudes towards Israel and the endless replay of the ‘disproportionate use of force’ argument are fed and being kept alive and kicking by this kind of newsroom manipulation.

UPDATE: Some useful insights from Dan Drezner.

I've argued before that vulgarity on TV or radio tends to be subject to a self-correcting mechanism. Call it humanity's inborn tendency to act decent.

The FCC does not believe that such a mechanism exists, on the contrary, it considers itself to be the ultimate arbiter of good taste. And we're not even talking vulgarity here, no the extreme measures of censorship have resulted in outlawing that very innocuous, every day term: bullshit. Too much for Jeff Jarvis who is mighty angry.

Jonathan Schlein attended an interesting luncheon with Hendrik Hertzberg, former TNR editor and speechwriter for Jimmy Carter. Especially Hertzberg's take on Hillary is worth your while.

Absent a well-organized and electable right-of-center opposition, Canadians relied to a certain extent on the media to formulate and disseminate a conservative voice. That voice was, until a few years ago, personified by the National Post and its owner Lord Black. Many therefore lamented that Black sold the paper following a very well publicized rift with Canada’s Prime-Minister and Black abandoning his Canadian citizenship to take up a seat in the House of Lords. I have linked before to Black’s articulate farewell-to-Canada speech; it is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to get a better understanding of where things have gone off-track for Canada. Judging from their gloating following his recent tribulations, the Globe and Mail has splashed the affair on its front pages for a few days now; Black has remained a scourge for the left in this country. Colby Cosh has a very good analysis of why things may not be as bad as they seem for Black, but his followers are concerned over his ability to retain business and thus editorial control over his other conservative papers. If Colby is right that may be false alarm, but it again highlights that those in a position of having considerable media influence should tread carefully in their business dealings and personal affairs (Limbaugh, Bennett). Although it may be a pyrrhic victory, the left in Canada is having, shortly after the Martin coronation, a blast this week no doubt convincing many on both sides of the political equation, “see, you can’t trust ‘em, those capitalists!”

Walking past the newsstand yesterday the following headlines caught my attention:

Globe and Mail: “Bush won’t bend on Iraq”
National Post: “Help me rebuild Iraq: Bush”

The problem is that the Globe and Mail is the dominant newspaper here, propagating Canadian values and left-of-center wisdom. The National Post, despite Conrad Black sadly abandoning the paper and Mark Steyn’s departure, continues to provide a bit of independent thinking in the torrent of politically correct value dispensing that is prevalent here. And hey, they signed on a great blogger as a regular columnist: Colby Cosh.

The Hong Kong government is delaying the introduction of new security laws until September with no fixed timetable attached to it, reports the International Herald Tribune today. Again this is a major victory for pro-democracy forces in Hong Kong but what caught my eye though is this paragraph in the same article:

Also hanging over the democracy movement here is the experience of student demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, whose protests spanned seven weeks. Chinese troops ended up scattering the demonstrators with tanks and gunfire.

Scattering demonstrators? How about killing, maiming and wounding? Although precise numbers have never been confirmed we know that hundreds died during those fateful days in Beijing. Yes, if you really want to stretch the meaning of the word scattering you could say that ‘killing’ is a form of ‘scattering’ but that is a pretty bizarre interpretation and it sounds to me that the IHT is very careful in how it reports on China. A little too careful I’d say. In any case the article goes on to discus Blair’s visit to Hong Kong yesterday:

Blair praised the peacefulness of the July 1 march, but also said he believed the Chinese leadership was dedicated to Hong Kong's constitutional development and stability.

Some in the pro-democracy camp in Hong Kong voiced their disappointment over the relative mild words from Blair and had expected stronger pro-democracy language from him. Well, Blair acted wisely in this case as the both Hong Kong and Beijing governments have suffered a defeat of historical proportions and there’s no need to rub that in further, attractive though that may sound. Both levels of government lost face in a spectacular way and now is the time to slowly capitalize on the gains the pro-democracy demonstrators have made. The international community, and in particular Britain as a signatory to the Sino-British Joint Declaration, should carefully cajole the process ensuring that it will not fly off the rails with disastrous results, which is what happened in mainland China in 1989.

Talking about octogenarians, here’s one that I really like and who always has something interesting to say: Walter Cronkite. Walter in an interview yesterday on “embedded correspondents”:

What we didn't -- my gosh, of all of the important -- important events of our time, when the president orders the American boys and girls into action somewhere, there's no more serious time for us to be shut out of all information. We're not only entitled to know what our boys and girls do in our name, it's our duty to what boys and girls are doing in our name in case of what they are doing in our name is not what we want them to do. We should have a voice in them.

It was of course not hard for Peter Arnett to find new employment given his impeccable anti-war credentials. After signing up with the Daily Mirror, the British anti-war tabloid, he has now added VTM, a Belgian TV-station to his list of engagements. It is probably only a matter of time before he will be picking up assignments for French and German media outlets. From CNN to VTM, Arnett is setting new standards for pursuing a career in TV-journalism.

Just as I had inserted some comments on the role of the media in my last post on 'hate', I came across another astonishing piece of our media at work. Peter Arnett was kind enough to clarify where he stands in this conflict by giving a helping hand to the Iraqi Ministry of Information. Beyond belief.

Andrew Sullivan has for quite a while been reporting on how the BBC, Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation as he calls it, is reporting the war. In fact Andrew has been on the BBC's case for months now and with good reason. I will not go into the details of the discussion but it is interesting to note that many of my friends and relatives back in Europe see the BBC as the model for unbiased and independent reporting. In the same breath they will add that they need to get their news from the BBC as they consider CNN to be a mouthpiece of the Bush administration. Well, there you go, it all depends on where you live I guess.