Link mix-up: Cuckoo accepts 'full responsibility'
A follow-up to my previous post, which won't be of interest to anyone, but which I need to put up in the interests of accountability (mine). I contacted the very helpful Andrea Harris, webmistress of Tim Blair's site, to check the HTML of my comment post there, and she assures me that the two URLs I posted - under the impression they were to two different articles - were identical. So there is no evidence that I ever saw what I thought I saw, and you should disregard everything of a supposedly factual nature that I ever publish again. Even though there is that pesky link on the Australian's website to a article titled Body mix-up: PM accepts 'full responsibility', which just takes you back to the article you're already on, which does not have that title.
In any case, my underlying points about journalistic practice seem unaffected: (1) journalists are dishing up massaged paraphrase-quotes without supplying the raw audio/video backup, or (2) with the bare underlying direct quote, stripped of context which might inconveniently conflict with their constructed meaning. I'm still trying to find a transcript of the original radio interview.
On the underlying question of responsibility, of course Howard is right to claim responsibility for what happens to soldiers in armed conflicts to which he has committed them. But if it turns out that Private Kovco died as a result of an accident, which happens to soldiers back here on their bases in peacetime, does that mean Howard is responsible for those deaths too? Was he responsible for the deaths of those personnel in the Sea King helicopter crash in 2005?
A follow-up to my previous post, which won't be of interest to anyone, but which I need to put up in the interests of accountability (mine). I contacted the very helpful Andrea Harris, webmistress of Tim Blair's site, to check the HTML of my comment post there, and she assures me that the two URLs I posted - under the impression they were to two different articles - were identical. So there is no evidence that I ever saw what I thought I saw, and you should disregard everything of a supposedly factual nature that I ever publish again. Even though there is that pesky link on the Australian's website to a article titled Body mix-up: PM accepts 'full responsibility', which just takes you back to the article you're already on, which does not have that title.
In any case, my underlying points about journalistic practice seem unaffected: (1) journalists are dishing up massaged paraphrase-quotes without supplying the raw audio/video backup, or (2) with the bare underlying direct quote, stripped of context which might inconveniently conflict with their constructed meaning. I'm still trying to find a transcript of the original radio interview.
On the underlying question of responsibility, of course Howard is right to claim responsibility for what happens to soldiers in armed conflicts to which he has committed them. But if it turns out that Private Kovco died as a result of an accident, which happens to soldiers back here on their bases in peacetime, does that mean Howard is responsible for those deaths too? Was he responsible for the deaths of those personnel in the Sea King helicopter crash in 2005?
posted by cuckoo at
12:50 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home