> .. 1975, when the Portuguese revolution and the fate of the Portuguese colonies was a matter of great concern in the West, the New York Times index has six full columns of citations to Timor. In 1976, when Indonesian troops were carrying out a major massacre, coverage dropped to less than half a column. For 1977, when the massacre advanced to a point that some feel amounts to genocide, there are five lines.. about refugees in Portugal.. coverage of #EastTimor is a flat zero. #PEHR #Chomsky
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A1979 book by Chomsky and Herman has me thinking "training data" bias for "SALAMI" AI... Scraped text was probably written by NYT mass-media readers and not by Amnesty Internatonal Report readers... Talk about Bias!!
> The trial of a single Soviet dissident, Anatol Shcharansky, received more newspaper space in 1978 than the several thousand official murders in Latin America during the same year, not to speak of the vast number of lesser events such as tortures and massive dispossession.
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> ... on a petition.. by 94 members of the #AustralianParliament “charging atrocities by Indonesian troops” and asking Mr. Carter “to comment publicly on the situation in #EastTimor”... 9 lines was evidently considered too much for a topic of such meager interest. The story did not make it to the #NewYorkTimesIndex because it was deleted from the #LateCityEdition, which is the newspaper of record for microfilm..
#PresidentCarter #JimmyCarter
#CarterAndHumanRIghts #PEHR
#PEHR1
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> .. “the massive use of extrajudicial execution continued unchecked and actually widened following the virtual elimination of the organized guerrillas by 1968.”.. AI reports allege.. political murder and “disappearances”.. . In February, 1978.. 113 cases .. [over] the last quarter of 1977. There was “considerable evidence,.. that the highest levels of government tacitly condoned the continuing abductions and murders, especially of peasant farmers and.. urban poor.”
#AIReports #Chomsky 🧵
> The AI reports have been covered in the U.S. press; the December, 1976 document is reported in the New York Times (12 December 1976), and the 1978 update merited 12 lines on p. 14 (23 February 1978). It was mentioned again in a story on the presidential elections (Alan Riding, 9 March 1978), which reported that “most Guatemalans seem surprisingly indifferent about the outcome.”
#TrainingDataBias #ChomskyAndHerman #NYTbias
#NewspaperSpace