The headline on this article makes it look like the official actually said, “Stop complaining or we release the tapes.”
He did say it and there’s even a film in the works on it.
I’m sorry, but did he actually say anything that constitutes a threat of releasing those videos?
Yes.
There is no need to turn this into a tabloid piece.
Sorry, but that’s off-topic.
What damage is wasting water likely to have in the first place (on a level that it would affect the games or their reputation, at least)? Why would people even want to do it? If this is something that people do at Sochi and that needs to be stopped, surely installing a water meter and recording that would be better evidence? There’s a lot about this story that doesn’t make much sense.
50/50 chance it’s author clarity. Just sayin’
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Perhaps if the headline weren’t such a blatant lie being passed off as truth in what is supposed to be a journalistic setting, we wouldn’t need to discuss Boing Boing’s essential nature. Change the headline to “Russian official admits that they are spying on people in the shower” and you’ve still got a shocking headline…that’s actually true.
Hell, you can even add something about the “implicit possibility of release” instead of making it an “explicit threat of release.”
If you want to be treated like journalists and taken seriously, you need to follow better journalistic standards than Fox News.
I have enormous respect for Boing Boing and Mr. Doctorow and I am truly disappointed to see what is, essentially, muckraking, no matter how deserving of muckraking the target may be.
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Do you know what the word “damning” means? Do the words “the truth is already plenty damning” not constitute a meaningful sentence? I’m utterly at a loss as to how anyone could read that and think “gosh, he must be 100% behind everything Kozak says or does.”
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More lies!
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Very well. I will note in future readings that Boing Boing is not a journalistic website and that, though it comments on the news, is not attempting to represent itself as journalists. I will take what is written here with a grain of salt and read for my amusement only.
We have committed acts of journalism now and again; we just don’t make a habit of it.
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And yet in other contexts you believe that bloggers should be treated as journalists. I’m not sure you can have it both ways.
The context for that comparison is usually free speech, freedom from prior restraint, and press freedom in general. So it’s not to claim that blogging is journalism, but rather to ensure that journalism is recognized and protected as such when bloggers and other “irregulars” do it. But it’s also true that many of those protections should apply also to bloggers (and writers of even fouler ilk) regardless of journalistic intent.
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So, stop reading it like a tabloid piece in a newspaper you own, and maybe try reading it like a joke, told by your host, which you missed the fist couple times through. At least try.
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The quotes are in your imagination. A colon, indicating a syntactical deductive, is in the headline.
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Here is the headline that would not attract negative attention:
“Russian official makes poorly considered joke at expense of hyper-vigilant US media and colleague from PR rushes reporter away just a moment too late.”
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I visited the Soviet Union in February of 1975. The water in our hotel in Kalinin was brown. There was a bug on the wall in my room in Leningrad. So not much has changed since 40 years ago. Except that when I toured all these museums and palaces and cathedrals I never once worried about crime of any kind. And there weren’t any cars so there was never any traffic. Christ. Putin’s so bad it sounds like I’m nostalgic for Brezhnev.
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So, let me get this straight: you are saying that a colon should not be interpreted as introducing a direct quotation, but that the statement of a Russian official referencing the existence of surveillance footage should be interpreted as a threat to release said footage? Pedantic arguments can go both ways.
