The sorry state of journalism- the Weinstein affair

So there's this creep producer who probably engaged in activities most people would describe as "despicable". Let me start by stating this is not about the guy and what he (probably) did. It's about how it's being handled.

The jury is still out (well, it should be; after all the whole issue is pretty new, and we don't have all the information yet), but obviously the mob justice is the best justice; everyone is either condemning him or distancing themselves from him. Fair enough; this is what you get if you're rich and visible, and overstep certain boundaries; suddenly everyone wants to make sure they are not mistaken for your friend. (It's kind of funny that nobody seems to be discussing the systemic abuse of power in the entertainment industry... This is the best opportunity to talk about it, yet it seems like our perp here is made out to be "one bad apple", rather than the norm.)

Anyhow.

Enter: The Guardian.

Obviously we need to know which actresses Tweeted about this issue; it's a fundamental part of the story. After all if we don't hear what Winslet or Nunn has to say in 142 characters, we don't know the basics, do we? Let's repeat the same paragraphs on these people's -often baseless- opinions in every single article we write, so much so that a plagiarism detection program would have a hard time separating them from each other. This is what journalists do, right? The news become irrelevant; what other famous people say becomes the news itself, which is worth repeating almost verbatim in every single article you publish.


The other, even more fundamental part is the constant identity politics. Let's ask 20 male actors who worked with him for their comments. After all since they all have a penis (each, I think), they should be asked. And when they don't respond, let's imply there's something deeper going on there other than people unwilling to get into this cesspit of gossip. But the implication here is that men need to speak up or it means they condone this douche's behaviour. (Which, let me stress, is not unique in the entertainment industry, so nobody should be surprised.)


Interestingly when certain right wingers demand Muslims apologise for acts of terror, suddenly the grouping of people based on one shared feature becomes intolerance and racism by the Guardian, too. (Which is, let's add it.)


It must be really weird trying to figure out how to report on stuff based on identity politics... is the person in question male? Female? White? Black? When does criticising a Jewish person equal anti-antisemitism, and when it isn't? If it's Soros, any criticism is definitely Antisemitism, right? It must be. (Which is not to say the Hungarian government's increasingly hysterical anti-Soros rhetoric is any way justified. It's just not Antisemitic.) When it's about sexual assault, then it becomes tricky, after all it seems like in this case it's fine to put him in pillory; criticising a person does not mean implied hatred of Jews.

European values, West vs East in the EU, and the rank hypocrisy

It is interesting to see the contrast between reports of alleged Hungarian brutality towards migrants (with no actual proof, but in the he-said-she-said game we of course can take anything a migrant or an NGO says on face value), and the way they report on brutality by the cultured and civilised Western European countries.

Let's see...

We all remember when migrants rushed the border at Roszke, and threw stones at the border guards; the response was, not unexpectedly, some water jets to drive them back. The video footage was heavily edited leaving out the attack, and the footage of the poor kid his/her parent was dragging towards the violence, so later the child could be paraded as an innocent victim. The videos usually have shown the water cannon first, then the stone throwing, and the crying children last. (Here's the full video, by the way. You can see a child being dragged towards the tear gas at 1:29...  which makes the whole farce even more comical. Most of the condemning articles you can find in this blog, but here is a collection by a Hungarian news portal.)

International condemnations, talks of overall racism in the whole country; the furore was real. Facts were taken quite liberally, but the whole incident was used to paint the whole country as the racist black sheep of the EU. Even the UN Secretary General had some harsh words.


In contrast, this is how an Italian use of the water cannon was reported upon.

The report is more like a factual description, and the Guardian had no thundering opinion piece on it. It kind of happened, and that was that.


Same thing about alleged violence against migrants/refugees in Hungary.

Apparently guards have been taking selfies with beaten migrants. Proof of any of these are obviously missing (even though these things tend to come out as we have seen with the US soldiers who took selfies in front of corpses they tortured to death), but let's not let facts get in our way.

In contrast, there are just dispassionate descriptions of the horrors if they are perpetrated by Western countries. No broad generalisations, no bleating about "European Values", no finger pointing to the highest level of power; I've yet to see anyone accuse Macron of being a horrible human being because of the well documented brutality of the French police, and the inactivity of the French government to help these people. (Who, let's just mention it, left the migrant processing centers without registering hoping to get through a richer country.)

The point is: Western media, and the Western world in general loves virtue signalling with the Eastern members of the EU. The political elite, the media are blatantly biased. It's not exactly a big revelation, but something that is worth recording.

Racist Hungarians -Discrimination in the EU in 2015 report

Thanks to the media abroad Hungary seems to have acquired quite fame as a nation of the worst racists you can imagine. Articles, comments, reddit posts, google searches- all point to this notoriety, and none of them seem to be bothered by things like facts.

Rising antisemitism threatening all Jews in Hungary? Check. And check. And check. And check. And check. And check. (Again, which country are Jews fleeing from, and asking for special permits to carry weapons? I forgot. Perhaps someone could remind me.) It's so bad, we even need to lie about it to make it look bad.

They hate Muslims, too, of course. Who said they did not?

Racism everywhere? Check. And check.

Bigotry? Of course!

Second most nationalistic country? Check. (Even though the answers made no sense whatsoever: they asked if being born in Hungary was very important to be Hungarian in a country which is surrounded by areas where one third of Hungarians still live. There is something seriously fishy with these results when the most nationalistic Hungarians are the ones who are the most aware of -and most care about- the Hungarian minorities living outside of the country.)

Is the Far Right taking over everything? Do I hear goosestepping blackshirts every day? Check. And check.

Fascists? Of course! Are they downright Nazis? Check. Even their football fans are Nazis? Of course they are!

The question is: how deserved all this? Are Hungarians really just Nazis, waiting to fire up the ovens to destroy anyone who is not like them? (As if in such a mixed nation it makes sense talking about racial purity.)

Well, according to this survey, not very. I might point out that this was done in 2015, at the height of the migrant/refugee crisis.

Here's an imperfect map representation of the results.

As we see Hungarians are not special in any way; they fall into the middle of the pack when it comes to tolerance/intolerance; hardly the country in the brink of a Nazi takeover.


The question rather is: why so many articles pushing distorted half-facts or straight-out lies to support this agenda? Why do they spend so much time and effort to demonise a small, inconsequential country?


I have to say I have no idea. If you know the answer, please let me know.

Migrants, refugees and terrorists - and the short memory of everyone involved

During the height of the migrant/refugee crisis in 2015 many -admittedly right-wing- media outlets and politicians asked the question about how many terrorists are entering Europe with the unchecked flow of people.

Remember the rat cartoon? That is sooo Nazi! (Except it isn't, but don't let a deliberate misinterpretation stand in the way of a good controversy.)

Remember when Hungary tried to enforce the Schengen rules as a border country, and got a shit-ton of flak for that? Just remember the name "Keleti Railway station".

For this they were called Nazis. Yes, I know we don't like Fox News and the Daily Mail; however the whole point of being a rational and liberal person is to actually use, you know, reason instead of labels. Unlike those stupid right wingers who are just putting everything you say into the category of "tree hugging pinko commie", and hence ignore it. No, liberals never would do that.
Ever.

Except they did. Or many of the people who pride themselves as liberals did so. Which is a shame; a shame we would like to quickly forget. They ridiculed, they accused, and they used red herrings so that the actual issue -how many terrorists enter Europe unchecked- was never asked. In fact if you search 2015 articles, you will be reassured, how unlikely it is for terrorists to go through all that suffering just to walk into Europe; after all they can fly, right? (A BBC article talks about Schengen issues pretty eloquently, although appears to avoid some tough questions involving events a couple of months prior...)

After the wave of attacks, of course, the narrative changed; now we can read about how these pesky terrorists used the crowd to mask their presence (just like the rat cartoon suggested), how they abused Europe's naivety to enter and do their shenanigans; but no one in the Guardian, Independent, New York Times, etc. stopped and said: you know, guys? We were wrong. No; what you get is a report on terrorists using the Balkan route to enter Europe, and then an attack on the one politician who dared to mention that it is a very real danger. The terrorist in question came through the Keleti Railway station into the EU I would like to stress. He was helped by well-meaning people (or, being somewhat cynical, people who sought to get political capital out of the situation), who then marched to the Austrian border to demonstrate how evil it is to enforce the law. In other words: terrorist (well, several, as we know) did what those Nazis were warning us they would. Now what? Do we apologise? Or do we keep going on with the offensive?


In fact, they still seem to be very much attacking the one guy who was right in this case. Don't get me wrong; Orban is no saint. He needs to go; this post is not about him. It's just in this one case he was right, and he was right when it mattered- during the height of the crisis, and not in hindsight. Since then his 2015 suggestions of refugee camps outside of Europe (oh, are they hellish? YOU NAZIS!), the protection of borders (I wonder how you do that without fences to force people use the border checkpoints?) -even by the Guardian, and so on have been adopted quickly by the people who called him (and the whole nation of Hungary) a Nazi; and refugees are now called migrants. (It's interesting that even the Guardian changed its tone, and nobody seems to care.)


Yet nobody had the guts to say: you know what? We fucked up. These other guys were right. They just pretend the past did not happen, and by the magic of the media, indeed it has been erased from the history books. And we're not talking about an ancient kingdom's past, or if the Black Prince was indeed such a blood-thirsty tyrant. We're talking about changing what happened two years ago. We're talking about decisions made that cost lives. Could have been some of these events avoided? Who knows? But that does not absolve people who made them, who called others trying to argue for a different approach Nazis, and then now pretend the whole thing did not happen.

It is truly Orwell's worst nightmare coming to life.

Austria and Nazi references

So Christian Kern joined the (short) line of Austrian Chancellors who compared to Hungary's policies to Nazi Germany's, or made references to Nazi Germany in relation to Hungary. He, in this case, mentioned D-Day with relation to infraction procedures about the migrant quotas.

So, let me recap. This is the same country that confesses "European Values" yet builds fences between Schengen countries (OK, they called in a "gate with wings", so that's totally not the same thing), and that uses actual tanks (yes, tanks), on the border of another Schengen country to stop migrants entering. I guess the European Values are fine, when they are pulling shit like this; only the smelly Eastern Europeans aren't allowed to act on their own interests.

Oh well. I guess some are more equal in this wonderful Europe than others.

So what ties together Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the other repressive Arab states?

Well, it's their mutual dislike to Al Jazeera. Somehow Arab despots don't like independent journalism, and since Al Jazeera has angered them constantly, they put Qatar in a blockade -the whole "supporting terrorism" reason is a fig leaf. (And kind of a bold one coming from Saudi Arabia, but there you go. Hypocrisy knows no bounds.)

So what does the "only democracy in the Middle East" announce? Well, they are about to "remove it", of course.

It's always nice to see how democratic principles, such as freedom of speech matter to both repressive kingdoms and so-called democracies. The question remains, though. How democratic can you be when you are afraid of a news agency so much you violate press freedom? What does it say about you that you have something in common with a horrible repressive regime lead by fundamentalist nuts?  And most telling of all: why isn't the whole "Western World" up in arms about it?

Don't let good bigotry to go waste

When is it OK to be bigoted, xenophobic (or racist, although this is a bit of a murky distinction)?

Why, when you're talking about those smelly Eastern (well, Central) Europeans! Just do a quick search on the comment section of any so-called progressive, liberal newspapers, and you will find extremely bigoted views expressed against Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians, all in the name of liberalism, equality, anti-xenophobia and European Values.

Seriously. Just check it out. (Yes, it's only one. You can look for the rest. It's not very difficult.)

Anyhow, enter Mr Frenchman. (If you wanted to know his name, you can find out. He DID say he does not hide behind an anonymity, he DID post his comments under his own name, he IS a journalist, and he DID try to erase all his misdeeds. I find especially the last part repugnant.)

Anyhow. Do a quick read of this reddit post from a black girl asking about Hungary.

Mr High Horse, a self-confessed journalist and teacher assesses that "most of Hungarians ARE racist", and then brings up two unsubstantiated little stories, and a lot of (probably intentionally) misinterpreted things (like a candy called Negro) to support his claim. Let's stop here for a second. Someone, claiming to have journalistic integrity and whatnot, talking from a liberal point of view simply makes a bigoted statement that essentially puts him into the same camp as the people he decries (racists, not Hungarians). Then proceeds to make a couple of off-hand comments, and when he realizes he really, really put his foot in his mouth, he proceeds to erase his comments and delete his account.

I decided to immortalize this little performance as it is very much a representative sample of the treatment of these smelly Eastern Europeans all over the Continent, with the exception that most journalists and politicians are not forced to face a reality check. Well, here's an indication for you what would happen in a larger scale if that was the case.