Tracking the Voices of Harm
By David Shamah, The
Sticks and stones and guns are known to do
damage, but words are not supposed to hurt us.
Whoever made that one up has not read much history. In
the old days, all it took was a few well-placed words from the priest or the
prince to set off the peasants. They would
invade the Jewish quarter, pillaging, burning and looting, and the Jews would
be left to bury their dead. And eventually, when the Jews were bereft of
possessions and had nothing left for the kings and princes to steal, they would
be booted out of their homes, thanks for the memories now hit the road. A sad
chronicle of church related anti-Semitism can be seen at http://www.
fact-index.com/h/hi/history_of_anti_semitism.html.
Nowadays, it's a bit out of fashion to bash Jews from
the pulpit, but that doesn't meant that aural anti-Semitism is a thing of the
past; in fact, it's far easier to spread the word about Jewish perfidy today
than ever before.
The Internet, of course, is a favorite forum for Jew
and
Most of the incidents discussed on sites like Honestreporting relate to abuses of the written word -
which are bad enough. But words on paper are static we read them and move on.
They stay where they are, and we go on to the next stimulus. If the article we
have read is especially interesting, a good point or quote will stay with us. And
if we read enough articles that make the same point over and over, there's a
good chance that our point of view will be eventually affected due to the
incremental effect of being exposed to those ideas on a regular basis. Reading
a counterbalancing article that corrects the errors or bias in the original
story can go a long way to clearing the air, though.
As history tells us, the spoken word is far more
effective than the written word. If you really want to deliver the goods, as
they say in the speech biz, become an expert at public speaking. A smooth,
effective speaker can raise a crowd's passions and actually will them to
believe something or even do something with far less effort than a writer
would have to expend. To paraphrase the famous idiom, "a sentence spoke by
an effective speaker is worth a thousand (written) words."
And although, as we pointed out, you won't find many raging
anti-Jew speeches being preached from the pulpit today in Western countries
(Muslim countries, of course, are something else altogether), the church podium
is passé as a tool for spreading the anti-Jewish word. Today, there's
something much better talk radio!
With the rise of FM radio in the 1970s in
AM radio station program managers began experimenting
with different formats to win back listeners and keep their jobs. All-news stations,
foreign language formats, even all-kids programming became part of the AM mix.
And in the
Talk is cheap, but it is very influential, and talk
radio reaches millions with its message on a daily basis. It may not seem like
a big deal to us here in
Running a talk show is like running a Web site it
needs fresh content to keep going, and the format usually has the host throwing
out a topic or calling up or bringing in a guest to stimulate discussion. The
guest's job is to get people talking about news issues.
A guest needs to be lively, interesting and well
spoken in order to keep the listeners listening, and it helps if he or she has
a "name" and is well known. And here's where our little talk show problem
comes in: One of the most popular guests on talk shows in the United States on
matters concerning Israel is the anti-Israel and likely anti-Semite Pat
Buchanan, who once called Adolph Hitler "a man of great courage" (http://
www mtsu.edu/~baustin/buchanan. Html).
Lately, Buchanan has been railing against the war in
Now, of course there are plenty of politics to keep
you busy in the rest of this newspaper; folks who read this column are
interested in the computer connection here. Indeed, there is one. If you want
to hear for yourself examples of Pat Buchanan's anti-Israel calumny or,
indeed, if you want to hear a higher quality talk radio program that interests
you you can now use a search engine that will check through voice recordings
of popular public radio programs broadcast in the United States and either
deliver you a transcript or play back a program for you, based on your search
criteria!
The HP Speechbot has nearly
20,000 hours of radio recordings, mostly from talk shows that are broadcast
over public radio and TV in the
If you have ever worked with speech recognition
software, you know the technology is in its childhood - a step above infancy,
but with a long way to go before it's ready for prime time. Indeed, the Web
site warns users that they may not get what they were looking for, given the
inaccuracies of speech recognition. But HP's system
is pretty good, and the site says that it usually gets distinct keywords right
and that terms like names, places, and other proper nouns or specific words
relating to the news (like "terrorism") come up clearly in searches.
I did my own searching, looking for programs where
Pat Buchanan a guest. And indeed I found what I was looking for; I was able to
find Buchanan on programs going back as far as 1996 (the index is updated daily
with each previous day's program content). All the news and commentary I wanted
about
Not that I necessarily liked what I was hearing the
airwaves are just as unfriendly to
The Speechbot engine is
available free at http://speechbot.research.compaq.com
. Requires Realplayer to play audio.
Questions/comments to ds@newzgeek.com