Not as far as I'd like, but a fair distance made...

[alexpgp]

The items on my todo list for the day got a very good scare, due mostly to my having underestimated the amount of work that would be required to complete work, but there are no show-stoppers hiding in the wings, as far as I can tell.

I am still trying to figure out the most likely explanation for NBC's statement the other night about Soviet Communism being a "pivotal social experiment." The way I figure it, this was likely caused by one of the following reasons:

(a) NBC was told to say that by persons representing—or purporting to represent—the organizers of the Olympics ("nice setup you have here... be a shame if your coverage got "lost" on its way up to the satellite);
(b) NBC admires totalitarian regimes without reservation, and would, if the occasion presented itself, describe Dr. Josef Mengele as a "pivotal medical researcher";
(c) NBC admires only certain totalitarian regimes, and in particular aspires to be worthy of the work Walter Duranty did to win his 1932 Pulitzer Prize.

Have I missed any alternatives?

Apropos of NBC, it apparently also turns out that the NBC correspondent who reported on near-instantaneous hacking of phones and computers in Sochi was nowhere near Sochi when the story was filed, and may have deliberately visited sites known as sources of malware.

Ye gods. And folks wonder why public confidence in the media is a bit... strained?

Cheers...

Comments

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

I hadn't seen that reported about the hacking story. Do you have a convenient link? If I remember correctly, that was reported by one of their better reporters. I saw his story, but I don't remember if he represented the location as Sochi or not.

Ah - I found the pdf on the security expert's report, and at the end he says they were in Moscow. The report makes more sense than the NBC piece, but apparently there was a lot edited out of the video, probably for time constraints. Still I'm disappointed in Engle. He's one of their most knowledgeable reporters, at least on the middle east, as he speaks Arabic.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Oh, it was a pivotal social experiment all right, if you will accept 'pivotal' as meaning 'of significant importance', 'having a notable effect or influence'. Think of all the things that wouldn't have happened, or would have happened differently, if Lenin and the Bolsheviks hadn't succeeded in booting Kerensky and setting up for themselves.

It's a bit bland, and I wonder how they manage to talk around the lumps of cold butter in their mouths, but it's not a grotesquely inappropriate choice of words, to my ear.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

So is that a vote for:

(d) NBC is speaking tongue-in-cheek?