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The Listening Post

Skewed Guantanamo figures

How the New York Times was wrong-footed by the Pentagon on Guantanamo.

Watch part two 

We start our show this week with the big debate in the US media over what to do about Guantanamo and, more specifically, about what to do with the prisoners – should Barack Obama, the US president, make good on his pledge to shut down the prison early next year?

Recently The New York Times made a splash with a front-page story – leaked from the Pentagon – that said that one in seven prisoners released from  Guantanamo had already returned to “terrorism”.

The figure was then picked up and used by Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, to attack the Obama administration and to wind back the clock on the so-called ‘war on terror’.

Trouble was, the figure was not true. The story should not have been run and, given its well-publicised failings over its reporting on security issues over the past few years, the newspaper should have known better.

In part two, The Listening Post’s Salah Khadr reports on the “phenomenon” of Twitter.

It has been just over two years since the social-networking tool Twitter arrived on mobile phones and computer screens.

Twitter came with a warning – an admission really from its inventors – that even they did not know what it was for.

Two years later, Twitter, which should be just a technological toddler, is experiencing explosive growth – a record 1,300 per cent in February of this year alone – making it second only to Facebook on the social-networking scene.

Twitter is also challenging the news media in its ability to break stories quickly – giving citizen reporting a smart new name – crowd-sourcing journalism.

In this week’s Newsbytes: the Pentagon’s “Graham-Lieberman photo suppression amendment” gets dropped; computer manufacturers in China get told they must install blocking software before the product is sold; a journalist is killed in Somalia, making him the fifth to die in the country this year; Argentina’s president trades media firms’ debts for pro-government advertisements.

Finally, flash mobs were one of those web and text phenomena – a mob of people showing up unannounced somewhere and turning that place into a stage for a one-off performance. Then, as quickly as they show up they are gone, leaving a surprised audience wondering just what happened.

Now flash mobs have been turned into marketing weapons – buzz machines that are aimed at the internet – to create publicity via word of mouth, or mouse. This one was choreographed to publicise a new reality show about the life of MC Hammer – you may remember this hit from the 1990s. A flash mob hits the Sunset Strip in LA – it is our web video of the week.

This episode of The Listening Post aired on Friday, June 12, 2009.