Charles on… anything that comes along

When I was getting a job on Business magazine, now defunct, I was asked by its editor to name three journalists I admired. One was Jeremy Warner, who at the time was facing jail for not revealing his sources on a story. (He’s still City editor at The Indie.)

Had I known about Seymour Hersh, I’d have nominated him instantly. He found out about and revealed the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize.

He’s the sort of journalist one aspires to be: self-effacing, in that he doesn’t want to be part of the story, he wants to report the story, and he wants to report the stories beneath all the flotsam and jetsam to find what’s really going on. His New Yorker articles are examples of terrific journalism: he talks to people, he doesn’t accept stuff at face value, and he inquires about what’s really happening on the ground.

And of course he revealed what was going on at Abu Ghraib prison. It is and was horrific, and in this clip (requires Real Player) he tells the ACLU there’s worse to come. Such as the video’d sodomy of children imprisoned with their mothers.

I’d bet on his being correct.

Thanks to Neil Mc for the pointer. Hersh starts speaking at 1hr07, and continues to 1hr40 or so. The grisly stuff is at about 1hr31. But listen to it all. Especially if you’re a journalist. And wonder: could I ever have gotten that good?

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Microsoft warns of critical flaws is the latest set of things to download.

Microsoft was - still is - offering a free CD with the updates and patches to XP. Which are current to last October, as I recall.

In the spirit of journalism, around March I rang up the number that used to be on the page to ask if I could get a copy. Not without a Passport account, I was told.

Why do you need a Passport account? I asked. That’s Hotmail and all that sort of thing. I don’t need that. The fella at the other end pondered this some and said he’d find a way around it. I gave him my home address details and he said he’d figure it out.

It’s been a long time, and the CD hasn’t arrived to update the loaner laptop I use to try out Windows stuff. And it’s impossible to download these patches on a standard dialup account.

So exactly why does one need a Passport account to get a free CD update to Windows? It seems tantamount to illegal tying - you only get this service if you buy this unrelated service.

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OK, here’s a pet hate: press releases sent by email from PR agencies (so no clue which company the message relates to) in which the title of the email is “Press release”, the content of the email is “Please see the attached press release” and the attachment is entitled “Press release.doc”.

Could it be a press release, one wonders? How very different from the other 200-odd emails that PR agencies aim at my mailbox each day. Then you have the fun of waiting for the multi-megabyte document to open, usually to display 30 lines of text that could have easily been put in the email, but with a vast and completely unnecessary corporate logo.

You think I’m joking. Ah, I wish I were. I get at least one every day. The crowning glory would be if they had something like those annoying little email buttons that say “The sender of this message wants to know that you received it”. I’m thinking of creating an attachment to reply with, saying “I didn’t read your email. Next time, please put the contents in the email.” Perhaps bulk it out with a huge banner.

Maybe I need to set up an adjunct to Didtheyreadit.com called something like Didyoubothertothinkbeforeyousentitwhetheranyonewouldbeabletoextractthemeaningfromthesubjectlineoftheemail.com. Is the domain available, do you think.?

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