It’s not enough that Donald Trump extorted Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to manufacture dirt on the Bidens if he wanted the military aid he desperately needed to continue to defend eastern Ukraine. To add insult to injury, a bunch of American journalists who know nothing about Ukraine have descended on Kyiv to report on how all this affects the United States, with maybe a little local color and perhaps a misstep from Zelensky.
Christopher Miller, who is based in Ukraine and has been reporting from there for years, has had it with the parachuted-in journalistic troops.
Besides hounding Zelensky, reporters have also bombarded those of us who’ve reported in Ukraine for years. “Hey! Love your Ukraine reporting! Wanna grab a coffee or a drink?” they’ve said — code for “Tell me all your secrets and give me your sources, and I’ll put your $1 Lvivske beer on the company card.” And when we’ve offered contacts — some whose trust we’ve spent years trying to earn — these outsiders have bombarded them with queries too, and often mischaracterized their words, actions that ultimately forced many underground.
The reporters come flying in like flaming meteorites. And they leave with the earth scorched behind them.
Do they even care? That’s not me wondering (although I do wonder); it’s the many Ukrainians whom I see every day asking me for insight into just what the fuck is going on. They’re worried about the picture that reporters and talking heads are painting of their country of 40 million people, which is struggling to root out corruption, trying to jumpstart its economy, and fighting for literal survival in a war fueled by an authoritarian ruler — Russia’s Vladimir Putin — who is hell-bent on seeing it collapse. And a scan of US media suggests their concerns are warranted.
I have great sympathy for this, having been anywhere from annoyed to horrified at articles on Estonia, a place I know quite a bit about that is perhaps even more obscure to American reporters than Ukraine. I’m having a flashback to a New York Times article about Sillamäe, the town where I helped get an enormous tailings pond cleaned up. There were a number of things wrong or questionable about the town and the processing plant that had caused the environmental problems – I don’t recall them all. The most inexcusable error, though, was the claim that the reporter had seen the lights of Narva across the bay from Sillamäe. Nope. No way. He never even looked at a map.
Highway 1 (E20 in Russia) goes more or less straight east to Narva, the town that our newsies like to use as the place that the Russian invasion/ subversion will take place. I disagree with that, but will do so at length some other time.
What probably confused our intrepid reporter was that the lights he saw were from Narva-Jõesuu, which means “the mouth of the Narva River,” which he would have known if he had learned just a little bit of Estonian. (“Is it like Russian?” “No.”)
Narva-Jõesuu is a resort town, and Narva is a typical city. Narva-Jõesuu lost much of its clientele when the border between Estonia and Russia (the Narva River in this area) became less passable. Narva has a couple of cool castles glaring across the river at each other, though.
Anyhoo, take what American reporters write about Ukraine with a grain of salt, and think about the real people who live in Ukraine and are trying to deal with some very difficult issues.
Open thread!
balconesfault
Wonder how many of those “reporters” are right wing funded bloggers out to discover the truths about Biden, crowdstrike, the DNC and the Steele Dossier, etc that the “Fake News” CNN/WaPO/NYT/et al won’t cover.
Kent
And of course….
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/07/ukraine-crisis-put-on-ice-by-trump-staff-busy-working-out-how-to-buy-greenland
StringOnAStick
Lovely photo, Cheryl.
Roger Moore
@balconesfault:
They’re different in degree rather than kind from the MSM. Even though everyone should know the whole thing about Biden is bullshit, the MSM is still going to dig into it because they’ve already accepted the big lie. The only difference is that the right wing bloggers won’t bother looking at what Trump did, while the MSM will put at least some effort into it.
StringOnAStick
@balconesfault: I also wonder who is funding them, but I don’t have to wonder very hard, do I?
Cheryl Rofer
@StringOnAStick: Not mine – from Wikipedia. I’m pretty sure I’ve got a photo of both castles, but it must be one of my unscanned slides.
Betty
Still the Ugly American after all these years.
SFAW
@Kent:
Good Christ, what a bunch of fucking morons. Greenland taking priority over a serious, REAL problem?
I wish that stupid motherfucker would resign already, and his moron VP get raptured, so we can have President Pelosi.
PST
So far from God, so close to Russia.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
I suspect that some of the confused, inadequate Trump response to the impeachment inquiry is caused by the same basic thing. Trump gets everyone chasing the latest crazy idea to cross his mind, and that draws them away from the stuff they really should be paying attention to. This is one of the drawbacks of authoritarian rule: it stunts independent thinking. It’s potentially valuable because it can keep everyone focused on a major goal and prevent them from getting distracted, but it also gives the organization tunnel vision and prevents them from planning for things the leader lacks the foresight to anticipate.
trollhattant
@Cheryl Rofer:
“Unscanned” describes all of my slides and I have storages boxes containing many boxes of slides. Ugh.
trollhattant
@SFAW:
Yup. But we can’t have nice things.
Gravenstone
@SFAW:
Let’s speak to the crux of the problem, shall we? This applies on far, far too many levels these days.
The Moar You Know
@SFAW: It makes far more sense once you realize that control of the soon-to-be-open Arctic Ocean is a top geopolitical priority for Russia, and getting one of the largest holders of Arctic coastal land to give up their claim to it would be a massive boon and set a great precedent for…Vladimir Putin.
Martin
California teen pregnancy rate hits an all time low. We’re not lowest in the nation, but we’re heading that way fast. Half the rate of Texas or Alabama. Abortion rates are falling faster than the national average as well, despite us having ⅓ of the nations abortion providers.
It’s almost as though when you teach kids about sex ed and then give women access to healthcare, they get smarter and more responsible with using it relatively to just hitting them repeatedly with a Jesus stick.
J R in WV
We have had the same sort of thing happen here in WV when news breaks out.
Reporters from “away” fly in, or drive down, and attempt to explain really complex issues that don’t exist where they come from, and which the reporters don’t understand or know anything about in detail.
Then after they file stories for a couple of days, they get the hell out of here, back to NYC, or DC, or where ever it is they came from, never to return until something else breaks out. Whether textbook protests, strikes, industrial accidents, floods, crooked politicians, dirty banks, the list is long and confusing.
So no surprise the same thing happens in distant nations. At least here in WV most people speak something similar to English, although at times local reporters have to interpret rustic local speech for reporters from Britain or EU.
Baud
@Martin:
then it doesn’t count.
Martin
@The Moar You Know:
Ruckus
I worked for years with a man from Estonia. He was in the merchant marine when WWII started and could not get back to see his wife. He jumped ship in Canada and asked for asylum, hoping to get his wife out and join him. But that became harder to impossible. He emigrated to the states and my dad hired him. He was a great machinist and solid guy. Most days he’d eat an onion like an apple at break time. He got remarried, as did his wife from Estonia, they figured it was OK even though they never divorced. They moved on with their lives. One of those people who enter your life and are just there, being human, being good at it and letting you see that life may throw fast balls right at your head, but you can duck and keep moving.
Omnes Omnibus
I am not surprised by this. A lot of American reporters get France, Germany, and the U.K. wrong and they are our closest allies. Hell, reporters from NY and DC get Wisconsin wrong. They aren’t a curious bunch – kind of ironic, isn’t it?
Baud
I think you meant Poor The Ukraine, Cheryl.
Cheryl Rofer
@Baud: Sub-hed on the Miller article:
Baud
Relevant
Baud
@Cheryl Rofer: Ha! I should have clicked through.
Kent
@Omnes Omnibus:
They actually get EVERYTHING wrong. In my former life I worked in the management of big commercial fisheries in Alaska and had many occasions to speak to reporters about various commercial fishing related issues in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska. There was no amount of background information I could ever give them in 15 minutes to make them really understand what was actually going on. The nature of reporting is that you are not an actual expert on the topic. You bounce around doing interviews and have 1 hour to write a story on a topic until you are off to the next completely different story. Yes, there are investigative reporters who dig deep into a subject, and there are specialized beat reporters who cover a single topic for years. But they are both becoming more and more rare.
Jadopine
It’s almost like US reporters don’t care anything about truth or nuance, as long as the paychecks still clear. But that can’t be it, right? I mean, there is no way corporate America would have routed out the passionate truth-seekers and promoted lickspittle sycophants, right?
RIGHT???
Chief Oshkosh
My experience with reporters at the local level, print and TV, is that they’re a bunch of fuck-ups. And this has nothing to do with politics or age or anything I can tell. My experience with them goes back to the late 80s. With one or two exceptions, they get the facts wrong, they rarely know enough to know that they’re wrong, and they sure as shit don’t know the right questions to ask. They are simply fuck-ups when it comes to doing their actual jobs. I know there there are good ones, but man, the vast majority are simply and completely out of their depths if the story is anything beyond a traffic accident. Which they’ll probably get wrong, too.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
This is slightly misleading, because most of those abortion providers are people and organizations that mostly do other stuff but are legally allowed to provide abortion services. California just expanded that by allowing nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, and some physicians assistants to perform medical abortions. Most of them don’t actually perform many abortions, but they are classified as abortion providers because they’re legally allowed to.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattant: I’ve scanned all my slides, I got a slide scanner several years ago. It’s a slow process if done right.
Martin
@Roger Moore: But does that actually matter? Isn’t the goal of ‘readily available and rare’ imply that the end state is a shit-ton of abortion providers not doing abortions because there’s not much demand for them?
A couple blocks from me is a husband and wife pharmacy and clinic (she’s the pharma, he’s the GP). It’s widely understood that they’re a safe place for young women in this area to go for medical advice, birth control, and abortions. How many abortions do they do? Probably very few, but the fact that they’re walking distance for the 40,000 people that live is this neighborhood is a big deal and how it should work for everyone.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: That’s right Baud, the Jebus stick is essential…”Spare the rod…”.
Martin
Also, CA has the lowest maternal mortality rate in the nation. Georgias is 10x higher. TEN! It’s ⅓ lower than even the 2nd best state – MA.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
Yep. One of the things people often say about the news is that you trust it a lot less when they get around to reporting on an issue you personally know well. A wonderful example is the Twitter account @justsaysinmice. It’s an account that exists to publicize reporters who breathlessly report on scientific studies carried out in mice as if they were carried out in humans. Mouse studies are important, but there are a lot of caveats about translating them into humans that are blithely ignored in most media reports.
A lot of this is because most of those “articles” are regurgitated press releases from the institutions that carried out the research, which obviously has an incentive to exaggerate its importance. Sometimes the reporter will add a bit of context or interview an unrelated researcher, but far too often they’re either slightly rewritten or straight copied from the original press release. It’s often clear that the person writing the press release did not bother to read the article they’re describing. I understand the same thing is true of a large fraction of business reporting.
patrick II
The nearly entire emphasis on reporting about the scandal’s impact on America and whether Trump will be impeached or not has been a disgrace. Ukraine has been under Putin’s thumb Corrupting their politics with money and lies, physical intimidation, and Paul Manafort. The people had to openly rebel. Their country has been invaded by Russia, has lost over 10,000 fighters in the war, and continues to try and excise corrupt businessmen and politicians in the face of Russian military and political pressure. Their fight for democracy and freedom in the face of Russian threats has been nothing short of courageous. And then he have a president who is so disassociated from any reality that does not effect the current status of his corrupted snowflake feelings that the Ukrainian people and their lives, well-being, and their brave fight might as well not exist. And the American press is not far behind Trump in its dismissal of anything not affecting the next U.S. election.
Avalune
Due to fonts, the title looked like UkraineL and I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out what ukrainel could mean. Thank goodness it’s Friday.
debbie
@Kent:
They show up looking for the story they’ve already got in their minds.
trollhattan
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
The mid-tier scanners have all disappeared, leaving basic consumer and pro units to choose from. And the software is really clunky, having not been fiddled with for a decade.
I waited too long, should have paid my kid a buck a box to scan them all before she became a teen. What was I thinking?
patrick II
@Martin:
But if you teach kids about sex, they might actually “do it” before getting married. If you keep them ignorant, however, they will never figure it out on their own.
Barbara
@Martin: California set about lowering the maternal mortality rate about five years ago, first by studying the kinds of issues and events that were associated with maternal mortality and then very deliberately going about educating hospitals about best practices. Here is an article about it that is definitely worth a read: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/6/29/15830970/women-health-care-maternal-mortality-rate
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan: I use VueScan, it’s pretty good. This is the scanner I use.
Peale
@Avalune: It fetches ducks and makes pierogis.
dr. luba
@Cheryl Rofer: And it’s Kyiv, not Kiev……. They’ve had almost 30 years to get it right…..
Martin
@trollhattan: Heh. I bought a scanner and paid my daughter to scan and record any information from the back. Good job for a 12 year old. But I paid more than a buck a box. I’ve always paid my kids at least minimum wage.
Amir Khalid
@Roger Moore:
I wonder if Trump ever really took in the Danish PM’s simple and eminently sufficient reason for dismissing his crazy notion: Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders, and isn’t Denmark’s to sell. He probably believes she is as all-powerful in Denmark as he thinks he is in America, and was just being mean.
Martin
@Barbara: Huh, so when you have a problem, you can hand it to experts to study and then implement their recommendations, and then it gets better?
How come nobody told us about this one weird trick?
Amir Khalid
@Martin:
If Trump wants to add a 51st state, he could start with Puerto Rico, where the people are already Americans.
justawriter
Yeah, it sucks. I run a little paper in the bellybutton of the Bakken, the North Dakota oilfield that’s been causing such a fuss for last 10 years. I’ve had reporters from coast to coast and a couple of other countries drop in over the years. They all interview basically the same four or five guys and fly out again. One egregious example was a film crew that wanted the tribal victims service people to give them the names of rape victims to interview and they weren’t polite about it. They were invited to take a long walk on a short pier.
Jay
@The Moar You Know:
Yeah no. The North West Passage is shallow, strewn with low lying islands, reefs, narrow straights, drifting icepack fog and bad weather.
It’s also a dead route for commercial shipping. There is no economic shipping advantage to sticking to sea routes and avoiding overland travel across North America.
The North East Passage, (Russia’s from start to almost finish), cuts 27 days off of shipping from China to Europe, and is deepwater, with few islands, and solves the age old issue of shipping from Europe to Asia and vice versa.
As for resource extraction, timber and minerals out of Siberia are a possibility, sea resources are several decades out due to weather.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: And DC.
chris
Somebody here commented on the shitgibbon’s stance. Someone else on twitter scienced it. NSFL, cannot be unseen.
https://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/1192906636005904384
BC in Illinois
@Omnes Omnibus:
@Kent:
One of the lessons I learned in high school was from a protest (of something) that I was at. The lesson came from when I read the local news report, which had nothing to do with the protest I was at. One of the lessons I learned in my college years was from a man I knew who went to a [church] convention. He said, to a group of us youngsters, “I read a report about the convention in [some newsletter]. That wasn’t the convention I was at. I read another report in [another newsletter]. That wasn’t the convention I was at. Then I read the article in [a third, more obscure paper]. That was the convention that I experienced.”
I should have learned that lesson from my childhood, when we had three daily newspapers at home. But seeing it it person did the trick. It’s not only learning the lesson of being skeptical. It’s the work of tracking down sources you can trust.
Patricia Kayden
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
Build your own with a decent digital camera. With a great camera you can build an incredible one. Helps if you understand a bit of the process. Here is a decent start to the process.
Mary G
The more private equity funds and other right wing outlets buy media outlets the worse news will get. Look at Deadspin. Even big players like the FTFNYT have closed foreign bureaus and cancelled beats.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ruckus: That would be ok for a few slides, but a nightmare with anything more. Here’s one of the slides I scanned.. It was shot on Kodachrome 64 110 size on a cruise on the Rhine in 1979.
moops
@Patricia Kayden:
ugh, apparently the WB name slipped out in a transcript from the house investigation. The Dems dropped the ball.
Jay
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I miss Kodachrome, now of course, like vynel records, it’s coming back in small lots.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Jay: Good luck trying to get it developed.
ETA: You can get a Kodachrome look using Color Lookup Tables with digital shots.
Jay
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Jay: Low bar gets lower
Jay
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
One can still buy darkroom supplies, and there are small niche developers and printers who still do it on the side.
When records died, it became difficult to buy a turntable. Now, there are even cheap ones at Best Buy, etc, and they are much better than even the medium grade turntables we had back in the day.
Amir Khalid
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Do digitak-era photographers know how to use a darkroom, and can they still get darkroom supplies?
trollhattan
@Ruckus: @?BillinGlendaleCA:
Ideally I’d love one that stacked the slides and automagically fed them through without even mounting a few a time in a frame, but I don’t see any such option for consumers. For a chosen few special images a frame mounted in front of a digicam would be fine for me, but the thing is it would be nearly as much work sifting through the boxes to ID and retrieve those special slides to begin with as it would to scan them. (Refuse to even begin discussing negatives.)
It’s fun being a dinosaur!
Jay
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
A bunch of the Kentucky ReThugs are telling Bevin to either prove voter fraud right now, or STFU.
More than one would expect these days.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Jay: I have friends who shoot film, Kodachrome is a very different animal, it’s a proprietary process. The last lab that used it discontinued it’s processing back in 2010. Folk have tried to emulate it, but the results haven’t been great.
Jay
trollhattan
@Jay:
E-6 slide films and processing hang on but Kodachrome, which was unique and took K-14 processing, remains dead as a dead thing. One could home-process E-6 back in the day (using a temperature-controlled water bath for your several chemical steps) but K-14 was strictly a factory affair. IIRC Kodachrome was the first color film considered archival by the Library of Congress. If stored correctly they retain their original colors.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: Yes, the guy who leads the local photography group shoots medium format film(B/W only). Sure, you can go down to Freestyle Camera in Hollywood and get all the supplies(I bought by enlarger there 45 years ago), but not Kodachrome.
chris
Young person today: Kodachrome? You had to wait TWO WEEKS to see your pictures?!!!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@chris: We had one young woman at a shoot saying “I’m not that young, I’ve developed film”.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
There are companies that specialize in scanning people’s slides. They ought to be easier to scan than regular negatives, since they’re already designed to be automatically fed into a machine. I know there are specialized slide scanners out there that can take regular slide carousels.
trollhattan
@Jay:
I get the impression Bevin became as unpopular as his reputation implies. In terms of face-punchability he’s right up there with Gaetz.
Amir Khalid
@Jay:
I don’t know how it is where you are, but over here hi-fi dealers never stopped carrying turntables. Unlike the consumer-audio mass market, audiophiles have never stopped going for analogue audio. Heck, they still prefer the valve sound to that of solid-state gear, even of high-res digital audio.
trollhattan
@chris:
Confess I get a kick out of hipsters in SF and Portland with their ’60s film SLRs and TLRs. No idea what they’re shooting or how they’re processing and/or enlarging. Also a popular model prop is handing him/her an old Leica or Canonet or Yashicamat or somesuch.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: The commercial services have a pretty wide variation in the quality of their work, that’s one of the reasons I decided to to my own(slides and film).
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan: I still have my dad’s Yashicamat.
trollhattan
@Amir Khalid:
“Stereo shops” became audio/video and consumer electronics shops, then got swallowed up by big box retailers like Best Buy, leaving a scant few diehard two-channel audio specialists, but like a proper camera store one had to be willing to drive to another area code or even state to patronize them. That big box places again carry turntables is a medium-size miracle, but they sure as hell can’t set them up or repair them!
trollhattan
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Nice cameras. And who doesn’t love the near-silent “snick” of a leaf shutter?
Jay
@Amir Khalid:
There was a period here when if you wanted Yamaha or Borg????? HiFi gear you went to a high end shop. By the advent of CD’s you could buy good gear at Sears and London Drugs, and most of the “HiFi” shops were either gone, or selling Computers instead.
When CD’s killed albums, well, you pretty much had to go online to find a turntable, and pay through the nose.
Jay
chrisg
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Yup. I gave my bagful of Canon gear to my 20 year old niece. She does very fine B&W landscapes as a hobby. She also gets a new phone every year “because of the camera.”
Ruckus
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Depends of course what you are looking for.
And what equipment you already have.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
There are high end scanners that do what you want. They are not cheap. Really not cheap.
chris
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Comment stuck in moderation for fatfingered nym
Yup. I gave my bagful of Canon gear to my 20 year old niece. She does very fine B&W landscapes as a hobby. She also gets a new phone every year “because of the camera.”
Roger Moore
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
This is a really important general point about digital photography. For technical reasons, digital sensors have much more accurate color than you could get from film. That can be a good thing or a bad thing. Film may have been less accurate, but many people liked the way it represented color. Most digital cameras lean toward clinically accurate colors in their default processing profiles for out-of-camera JPGs, which is a disappointment to the people who liked the look of a particular film stock. OTOH, having a really accurate color in the RAW file means you can get practically any look you want if you apply the right processing parameters, either with an in-camera profile or post processing. Many people who want to print in black and white love digital color because they can effectively apply whatever color contrast filter they want in post, even filters that would never work as a real-world color.
Kent
@trollhattant: I scanned all my slides this summer. I used the Epson V600 which seems to be the best bang for the buck for consumer grade photo scanners these days for about $200.
Epson Perfection V600 Color Photo, Image, Film, Negative & Document Scanner https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002OEBMRU/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_.xGXDb3SM0P44
CatFacts
Could anyone recommend places that would clean/repair old SLR cameras and lenses? I’ve got some late-60s gear from a family member that’s still in working order, but could use a professional cleaning and light seal replacement. I assume I’ll have to ship it somewhere to get it serviced if I want to play hipster and use it.
J R in WV
I have two large totes full of photos (and a few negatives) from my grandma’s farm, these photos go back to pre-WWI vintage, and my cousin loaned them to me to digitize them for posterity.
I got them a couple of months ago.
Last week my cousin’s house burned! So luck was with us, they would have been destroyed that terrible night. He and his dawg got out OK around 1:30 am Tuesday before last. Last email I got he was staying in a Marriott residence hotel, going out to buy socks and underware.
To the point — I have a Canon all in one printer, fax, scanner, which I’m using to digitize the media. Then I use Graphic Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) — which is a free open software project tool, to edit the scanned photos and negatives. These images are way better than the original photos, which were low contrast when produced 80 or 90 years ago.
Even negatives have been processed to produce really good images — even old color negatives have gone from orange weirdness to nice natural looking color images. I have to admit that since my knee blew up last week, I’m way less into working on that project. I got through the smaller box full,, and have just started on the bigger tote full. Of course, I don’t know who many of the people are, but still, very interesting to review these old family images.
The WW I pictures, with trucks wrecked in the roadside ditch, with Sargants standing there angry, are really nice, historic and fascinating. And my grandfather was a blacksmith turned steam engineer mechanic, so there are great pictures of early 20th century heavy equipment too. And a well known mine disaster at granddad’s mine where he was hoist engineer, fortunately not underground at the time of the explosion, which killed dozens of miners from all over Europe.
I still have all my vinyl albums from way back, a B&O turntable and a McIntosh amp, but that old equipment isn’t running right now. We mostly listen to digitized music on a small stereo late at night. I find it easier to fall asleep if I have music to listen to instead of thinking about everything that’s wrong with today — mostly at night we listen to soothing classical music.You can put nearly 10 hours of great music on a CD stored as MP3 format data!