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Looking for Unbiased War News?
AlexisKai asks: "With the forecast for tomorrow being sunny with a 90% chance of airstrikes, the US government will be clamping down on unpatriotic stories and the rest will be self-censored by the major media anyway. Where are Slashdot readers planning to look for reliable, disinterested reports as events in Iraq unfold?"
It might be worth while to try checking google news since they pull from many different sites. This seems like best choice.
the best source I've been able to find is Guerrilla News Network (gnn.tv)
Canada is not participating in the attack against Iraq and therefore any news reported out of Canada will be unbiased. CBC is the Canadian government owned national broadcaster. Click here for a direct link.
I read em all and then believe 1% of all of what I read. I love the BBC, the Brits are always interesting, polite, and just damn cool.
Zed's dead baby. Zed's dead.
The sooner you realize that all media is slanted, intentionally or otherwise, the sooner you'll accept that fact and move on. Its just how the nature of media (ALL media, not just news) is.
My advice? Get your news from a variety of different sources, and then check on who THEIR sources are. At least then you'll be somewhat more informed than the average (dumb) Joe who recites facts (or "facts" if we're talking about Fox) without knowing anything about the situation.
The best you can ask for is a reasonably eclectic set of news sources, from which you can, hopefully, synthesize a picture with a reasonably low signal-to-noise ratio. -- rather like the work they do with long baseline radio telescope arrays.
(One thing I like about news sources like the "Marxist Workers Journal" is that it's pretty easy to see where their bias lies. Newspapers like The National Post, on the other hand, tend to have reporters and editors who are reasonably good at hiding their bias. This requires a bit more effort on the part of the sceptical reader).
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
I recommend looking to The Onion. It is, after all, America's Finest News Source.
In all seriousness, I shall probably be checking the BBC's web site regularly (News Ticker (Win32) | RSS), as well as buying a decent newspaper for greater depth and insight.
Of course, for those committed to both sides of the argument, I recommend visiting Al-Jazeera with the use of a Arabic-English translator. Apparently, Al-Jazeera will soon be launching an English language service (e.g. the end of March).
In a past life I was one of the guys who tested these puppies (Shrikes, HARMS, Cruise Missles, Mavericks, Smart Bomb guidance systems, etc.) at China Lake NWC. For Shrikes and HARMS we would setup dozens of "threat" simulators, each with slightly different modulation (CW, PRF, PW, jitter, spread codes, etc.) to simulate particular makes and models of radar, and each at different location to simulate real life deployment. You don't want to be near any source that is on a target signal profile list. One of my other duties included measuring the distance between the boresite and the missle's impact crater after a test. Often enough my simulators were damaged or destroyed by inert warheads alone :-). Let's just say the 100-hour 1st Gulf War wasn't much of a surprise - China Lake has geography a lot like Kuwait and Iraq.
It's certainly possible to discriminate targets well enough to avoid targetting TV satellite uplinks. It's even possible that journalist's military-supplied uplinks are provided with known spread code signals that are put on an avoid list. A warning and insistence on "equipment registration" may be CYA - unless they know the equipment's signature, there's still a small chance of a "mishap". However, unless they choose to target TV stations it would still probably be pretty safe (How many TV broadcasters does Iraq really have? Ah, maybe one? Compared to simply being shot by accident?) The spectral signatures of analog or digital TV are pretty different from radar (even spread spectrum radar).
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Despite my experience with this stuff, I'm still against this war and the facile justifications pathetically provided for it. If you don't see a patriot described above, you need to get your head examined!
This war is about extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the entire world and Manifest Destiny as a world hyperpower. It's spelled out on the PNAC web site. Note the founders include Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other major hawks in the Bush Adminstration. Also note that the entire obsession with regime change and axis of evil predates 9-11 back to when Clinton was approached by PNAC with essentially the same Iraq/Axis of Evil plan. Clinton rejected it. Bush has embraced it. Linkage between Al Qaida and Iraq? Machiavelian fiction, nothing more. Weapons of Mass Destruction (worked on those too ;-| )? Doesn't add up in the context of post-War Iraqi infrastructure and economics, and especially not with forged documentery evidence provided by the US and UK intelligence agencies.
Creating a hegemon might not even seem so bad if you happen to be an American, but this type of foreign policy is certain to be mirrored in domestic policy: the beginning is Patriot I, Patriot II, TIA, CAPP and other recent laws and proposals.
For those who have read Linked, consider what a Bose-Einstein condensation of a geopolitical social network is in comparison to what it is for an economic social network. Consider that one of the desires of PNAC is to assure that the relationship between the US and each other country shall be stronger than the relationships between any pair of countries. What social network topology is that? Can you say: "All Roads Lead to Washington".
There are many active and reserve duty officers with similar concerns. I recently gave a speech about this subject where an officer I know, who is now serving in the Middle East, was in attendence. I was concerned about his reaction - these are scary ideas most people would prefer to ignore - but he approached me after the speech and was my stron