RConversation

My chat with Anti-CNN.com

On Monday afternoon I did an online chat with these patriotic young people who run Anti-CNN, a website launched in the wake of the Tibetan unrest and crackdown last year by a group of young Chinese who felt that the Western media was presenting a distorted and inaccurate picture of China. They invited me to do the online chat after I interviewed Anti-CNN founder Rao Jin this past Saturday as part of my book research (more on that interview in a later post). My writings and talks have been a topic of discussion on the Anti-CNN website in the past, and given that I once reported for CNN in Beijing, it was not surprising that they were rather keen to offer me to up to their community.

Despite their website's unfriendly name, I found the founder Rao Jin and his core group of volunteers to be polite, friendly, smart, and professional, while also very passionate about their point of view. They're keen that the outside world not view them as brainwashed government agents. They want the world to understand that they're doing this of their own volition because they love their country and want their fellow citizens to think more critically about global media. The site is financed by Rao Jin's internet company. He insists that they take no government money.

The site has evolved from its CNN-bashing origins last year into a more general forum for media criticism - focused primarily on Western media. They do not, however, subject the Chinese media to the same kind of critical treatment. As Rao Jin said to me: "Our aim is not to challenge the government. We want to create a good space, a good platform where more people have a chance to participate in discussion. If the platform ceases to exist, then there are no voices at all, so first we have to guarantee its survival."

Moderator "Leslie" Liu Jing asked questions submitted in advance by members of the Anti-CNN community. Our conversation was videotaped. Meanwhile, as I answered, two volunteers summarized my answers in real time and posted them into the Anti-CNN forum. This morning I read through the whole thing. As one might expect with any "live-blogged" conversation, some details and nuances of what I said were lost, and sometimes the live-bloggers misunderstood what I was talking about. For instance, I referred to U.S. media coverage of Abu Ghraib as one example of how the interests of the U.S. media and government often do not coincide; the live-blogger typed it up in English as "Albert Grey," which I'm sure was an honest mistake. All in all, they did their best to record the substance of what I was saying. That is, with the exception of a couple of things that were completely omitted.

When I was asked to give examples of reasons why foreign reporters often don't trust what the Chinese government says, I cited my own experiences in which government officials lied about disaster casualties, and about the fate of people who I knew had been jailed. Those two examples were included. I also cited the fact that - while the exact number of deaths in the June 4th 1989 killing of protesters may be subject to dispute, it's a fact that the government refuses to acknowledge the deaths of many people who I know for a fact were killed - because I've spoken to the relatives of those people, who have proof that those individuals existed, and when and how they were killed. I said the fact that the government won't acknowledge their deaths amounts to refusing to acknowledge these people existed. This was not typed into the forum discussion. In response to a question I also discussed the imprisonment of AIDS activist Hu Jia, but no sign of that exchange appears in the forum, either.

After we finished, I was told that the videotape would have to be edited before they can post it online, because some of the content was too sensitive and would cause trouble for their website. I made an audio recording of the whole exchange. It is completely unedited. You can listen to it or download it here:

Due to time constraints, I'm not able to offer a full transcript and full English translation today. In future I may try to find somebody to help me out with that. Meanwhile, here is my summary of a few highlights:

The chat session opened with a question about Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's press conference at the closing of the National People's conference. In the press conference he criticized the Dalai Lama, among many other things he said. A community member wanted to know why the Western media seemed to de-emphasize that part of the press conference, focusing on other content instead. I said I wasn't at the press conference and wasn't in China when it happened, and didn't see the full transcript of the press conference, thus I don't remember precisely what Wen said about the Dalai Lama. However if Wen's remarks were substantively similar to things he has said in the past about the Dalai Lama, or a repetition of previous statements by the Chinese government or Xinhua News Agency, the Western media would not have considered it "news" because it wasn't "new."

Liu Jing then asked me why the Western media gave less attention to Chinese student demonstrators who came out in support for the Chinese Olympic torch relay than to the pro-Tibet independence demonstrations. I said that part of the reason has to do with the fact that the Western media tends to pay more attention to people claiming to be wronged or oppressed, and generally gives less airtime to people representing or supporting power-holders. I did also acknowledge that Westerners generally don't understand the patriotism of today's Chinese students abroad, the reasons for their patriotism, and the extent to which it's genuinely heartfelt.

The next question, from a community member, was whether Americans ever wondered why pro-Tibetan independence protestors appeared at the torch relay. I explained that Americans expect that protesters will appear at events involving a major world power, its leaders, or something representing that country's power. I said that if the Olympics had been held in the U.S. last year and Americans were going around the world doing a torch relay, no doubt all kinds of people would be showing up in protest. China is a world power now, so Chinese people are going to have to get used to seeing people around the world protesting against what China represents. It's part of life as a global power. It's not going to stop and you've got to learn to live with it. That said, I did agree that accosting the wheelchair-bound handicapped Chinese athlete in Paris was a very bad move on the part of the protesters. It showed the protesters' complete lack of understanding (or lack of interest) in how Chinese people viewed their protests.

There were a lot of questions about how CNN operates, how it gets its information, and the extent to which media all over the world, including in the West, is manipulated by political and market forces. I talked about how commercial pressures create media bias which can have a political result - because media outlets looking to boost ratings and circulation are sometimes concerned about reporting too many things that make viewers angry and unhappy, prompting them to change the channel or cancel their subscription. I also talked about how it's an undeniable fact that war is good for the news business, and good for many individual journalists' careers, and that this aspect of mainstream journalism has always made me feel uncomfortable. (I've written about some of these things here and here (PDF).) I also talked about commercial astroturfing, as well as blogging by campaign employees - or by blogger "consultants" - which is increasingly part of any Western politician's campaign strategy. My interviewer tried to get me to say that these things are the same thing as the censorship and manipulation that happens in China. I said it's not the same. But at the same time, anybody who is consuming any news from anywhere should not trust it until that news organization or blogger earns their trust. And there are plenty of reasons in any country not to trust any given news source completely.

I also made the point that while the Chinese media has evolved and grown more sophisticated over the past couple decades, and while the Internet has created a very wide space for discourse and debate than ever existed in the past, the information environment is still very skewed. Chinese investigative journalists have told me about numerous stories their editors won't allow them to publish. This includes the poisoned milk powder story which a Chinese journalist had been ready to break last spring, but was not allowed to do so - with the result that thousands more babies were sickened, their parents unaware of the danger when they might have been informed. Voices critical of central government policies are censored much more heavily on the Internet than voices of patriotic young people like the Anti-CNN, community. This results in a skewed information environment, reinforcing itself in a positive feedback loop.

My moderator said that China's censorship system is a national reality and she believes it's necessary for national stability.

I was asked about my 2003 interview with the Dalai Lama. I described how he said he was concerned about human rights abuses in Tibet, and that he was not seeking independence, but rather autonomy. That he wanted to be able to negotiate with the Chinese government about this. Liu Jing asked me whether I had asked the Dalai Lama why he wanted to return to Tibet and "become Tibet's chief slave owner." I said that the Dalai Lama's point was not to return Tibet to exactly what it was like in feudal times. The point was to give today's Tibetans more say in their own affairs, and that his idea was to return as a religious leader, not a political leader.

I did not get into a debate with them about historical facts surrounding China's sovereignty over Tibet, as that would have made it impossible to talk about anything else. It was very clear that the folks at Anti-CNN have decided what the facts are, and what they believe the correct version of history is, and that a shared view about these facts is a strong underpinning of the Anti-CNN community. I did suggest that aside from arguing with Westerners about Tibet, perhaps they should do more to engage with Tibetan people, and that the problems in Tibet will only be resolved if more Chinese and Tibetan people engage with one another and try to work out solutions. Liu Jing told me that she has been to Tibet and that in her experience all the Tibetan people she has interacted with say they are grateful for the development that the Chinese government has brought to them. She thinks that Westerners don't understand the real views of real Tibetan people. Reading through the comments posted by community members during and after the chat, it's clear that many community members don't think there's a problem in Tibet itself; they appear to believe that the whole problem is caused by the exile community and by Westerners who are enamored of the Dalai Lama, interfering in China's internal affairs.

My purpose in doing this interview was primarily to understand the Anti-CNN community better as part of my book research. Communities of enthusiastic, patriotic young people like the Anti-CNN volunteers are part and parcel of the phenomenon I call cyber-tarianism.

It will be very interesting to see how the Anti-CNN website continues to evolve. Rao Jin has plans to develop an English-language platform - with a less provocative, more friendly name - through which his community can engage in dialogue and debate with the English-speaking world. I think it's great that they're looking to expand their dialogue and engage with the world. It's important that the outside world understand that China's patriotic youth, like young Republicans or young Tories, feel that they are acting on their own belief systems and get angry when characterized as brainwashed puppets. It will be fascinating to see how the outside world reacts to these efforts, and how the Anti-CNN website administrators handle conversations that foreigners want to have with them involving events, people, or points of view that Chinese websites are generally required to censor in order to avoid being shut down.

Media as Global Diplomat? Join a live webcast & chat on Tuesday

President Obama says he intends to listen to others as he formulates U.S. foreign policy. I've proposed that as part of his China policy,  the Obama administration should use the Internet to engage in conversation with the Chinese people, not just its leaders and elites.  What do you think? How should the Obama administration engage with the world in the Internet age? How should public diplomacy be upgraded?  How can the U.S. government stop lecturing and start having a conversation?

An event on Tuesday morning in Washington D.C. (Tuesday evening Asia time) called Media as Global Diplomat, organized by the U.S. Institute of Peace, will explore "how the United States can best use media to reinvigorate its public diplomacy strategy and international influence in order to strengthen efforts to build a more peaceful world."

It's unclear to me whether they really just want to explore how to use digital media to get the world to like the U.S. better - or whether they're truly open to a paradigm shift: moving from broadcast "messaging" mode to conversation mode, in which the U.S. would be listening and learning as much as informing others.

Join me to find out. Watch the live webcast and join a live chat here. I will be live-blogging the event here on this blog. Sign up via the box on the left to receive a reminder before the event begins. Global Voices Executive Director Ivan Sigal will be online to moderate and follow the live chat, bringing your views and questions from the live chatroom into the event. That way, we hope the conversation can be expanded beyond the room to include everybody watching and reacting remotely.

Naturally, if you have views in advance that they'd like to express, please post them in the comments section of this post.

Looking at the program, my initial reaction is that the only panelists who might be considered "new media" people are Google's Andrew McLaughlin and Mika Salmi of MTV's Digital Networks. And they work for huge Internet and media companies. No citizen media or grassroots voices are speaking on the panels at all.  Lots of "old media" and/or establishment foreign policy elites. Will there really be any new ideas coming from this crowd? Hard to know. Maybe you can help thorough your remote participation?

Below is the full program and schedule, taken from here.

Challenge
We are in a disruptive period in media, the result of an explosion in digital distribution, social networking, and user generated content. And with disruption comes opportunity. This summit, moderated by Ted Koppel and entitled Media as Global Diplomat, is a forum to ask key public and private sector leaders how the United States can best use media to reinvigorate its public diplomacy strategy and international influence in order to strengthen efforts to build a more peaceful world.

Agenda [All times EST]

(9:00 a.m.) Welcome and Framing the Day
Sheldon Himelfarb, Associate Vice President, Center of Innovation for Media, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, U.S. Institute of Peace

Hosts Remarks
Ambassador Richard Solomon, President, U.S. Institute of Peace
Sally Jo Fifer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Independent Television Service

Media & Public Diplomacy: The Challenge at Hand
Ted Koppel will address the dramatically changing global media landscape and its implications for public diplomacy and peacebuilding.
 
(9:30 a.m.) Public Diplomacy 2.0: Rethinking Official Media
In this new era of digital distribution, social networking, and user generated content, what is the role of government-funded media in bolstering America’s global influence and ability to manage conflict? This panel will discuss where traditional strategies for media-based public diplomacy are effective and where they need to change.

Panelists:

• Kathy Bushkin Calvin - Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, The United Nations Foundation; Former President, AOL Time Warner Foundation
• Ambassador Edward Djerejian- Founding Director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
• Abderrahim Foukara- Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief, Al Jazeera International
• Ambassador James Glassman - Former Under Secretary of State Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, U.S. Department of State
• Andrew McLaughlin - Director of Global Public Policy and Government Affairs, Google
• James Zogby - Founder and President, Arab American Institute

(11:15 a.m.) The Global Media Marketplace
What is the responsibility of free market commercial media to serve the greater public good in the global media age? This panel will consider the role of “unintended” stereotypes in shaping the image of the US abroad and the perils of uninformed citizens at home due to declining news coverage of international events.

Panelists:

• Edward Borgerding - Chief Executive Officer, Abu Dhabi Media Company
• Carol Giacomo -  Editorial Board Member, The New York Times
• Mika Salmi -  President of Global Digital Media of MTV Networks
• Smita Singh - Director, Global Development Program, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
• Sydney Suissa - Executive Vice President of Content, National Geographic Channels International

(12:30 p.m.) Lunch

(1:15 p.m.) Special Screening: Waltz With Bashir
Ari Folman's animated documentary on the horrors of the 1982 Lebanon War. Academy Award nominee and winner of 2009 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. Waltz With Bashir is part of the ITVS International initiative and will be introduced by introduced by Calvin Sims, Program Officer, Media Arts & Culture, Ford Foundation.

(2:45 p.m.) Independent Documentary and Participatory Media
In discussing the film, this panel will consider the potential of film and video to connect people around the world and transform conflict. How can this powerful content be deployed as part of a more effective US public diplomacy strategy?

Panelists:

• Tamara Gould - Vice President of Distribution, Independent Television Service
• Yvette Alberdingk Thijm - Executive Director, Witness

Correcting CNN.com's impressionistic Q&A

I've been busy this weekend so it was 1am on Monday morning when I finally looked at the CNN.com "Q&A" interview with me, titled Analyst: China Internet move part of global trend - CNN.com posted at 5:41p.m. EST Saturday January 10. I was interviewed on Friday afternoon Hong Kong/Beijing time.

According to the text, I said that Hong Kong and China are separate countries. (I wouldn't say that even when drunk!) It also had me making claims such as there's no evidence that technology used to censor sexual content is used to censor political content. It distorted and misconstrued my explanations about how censorship works. Among other things. Plus it made me seem grammatically illiterate and incoherent. Oh, and names of organizations and their URL's were wrong.

The story, posted as a Q&A interview, was done in such a way that would lead most readers to think that it's a transcript, or maybe a heavily edited transcript of a recorded interview. It was actually a liberal paraphrasing, based on the interviewer's (mis)understanding of what I said and an extrapolation of inadequate notes.

Fortunately I was able to contact a CNN.com editor who agreed to make corrections. Since a lot of what I originally said to the interviewer was badly misconstrued and there was no recording of the original interview let alone full transcript, we ended up just deleting the misconstrued sentences rather than rewriting the whole thing. So if you looked at the story a few hours ago and notice that the current version seems quite different, that's why.

The cause of the mess-up was an under-supervised and under-edited intern. I hope people won't hold it against the intern in question, many interns are just learning and don't know any better. We have all been inexperienced and in need of close supervision at some point in our lives. I feel badly that her mistake has become so public. However I find it necessary to write about this for two reasons:

First, a lot of people saw the original version between the time it was published and the time it was corrected.  I want to call as much attention as possible to the fact that it's been corrected so that people out there don't think I actually believe China and Hong Kong are separate countries, among other things. It's damaging to my professional credibility.

Second, this incident is instructive for the anti-CNN people out there who believe CNN is at the forefront of a vast Western media conspiracy against China. It's not.

A lot of errors happen because editors and reporters are under pressure to churn out volumes material on short deadline with inadequate staff and funding. There is often an over-reliance on interns and lack of staff to supervise them properly. As a result, on American cable and satellite TV news outlets (I don't want to speak for other countries' TV broadcasters or for print or radio organizations without first-hand experience of them), major mistakes get made by people whose work should have been checked before going out. Photos get cropped for websites without adequate thought. Agency material gets mis-labeled as being from one country when it was actually from another. Names of leaders get mixed up. Things get mis-translated. Errors go on air or get published online before somebody notices. It happens all the time. Believe me. Ask anybody who has worked in the business. I even know of one instance in which video of Michael Jackson the pop star was erroneously put in a report involving a NATO general by the same name - a video editor was under time pressure and followed written instructions without thinking about the report's substance at all.

There's a reason why people say that news is like a sausage factory: knowing too much about how your sausage gets made makes you squeamish about consuming it.

Weng'an riots, push-up protests, fifty-cent party, astroturf...head spinning yet?

The most common method used by academics to map or track what bloggers are talking about in various countries is by counting the use of various keywords and putting them into categories, then figuring out how the various conversations - tagged by subject matter - seem to cluster.  The Chinese Internet presents a special problem for this kind of research, because in order to avoid censorship, people frequently talk about one thing when all their peers know they're talking about something completely different. 

Take, for example, Chinese bloggers' recent obsession with pushups: People created a  website and a forum dedicated to pushups; somebody photoshopped a naked man doing pushups at various famous Chinese tourist sites; people created all kinds of flash mashups celebrating pushups... huh? 

What these people are actually doing is expressing their frustration about the fact that many BBS forum conversations and blog posts talking about the recent Weng'an riots were censored. For very detailed coverage and translations of a variety of media reports, see Roland Soong's blog. In a nutshell, a young girl turned up drowned in the river in Weng'an county, Guizhou province. Family members suspected foul play and word quickly spread that the girl, Li Shufen, had been raped and murdered by boys who were probably related to people in the Public Security Bureau - resulting in protests by 30,000 people and the burning of the local police station. Three autopies were performed on the girl in which the coroner declared no foul play, but locals didn't believe it. It remains unclear what really happened, but at any rate four local officials have been sacked for "severe malfeasance." Li Shufen's godfather was also arrested for inciting riots and spreading rumors on the Internet. So where do the push-ups come in? There were three young people with Li Shufen when she died, and according to the police interrogation report they say that she committed suicide suddenly while one of the boys was doing push-ups on the bridge.

In the wake of the riots, Internet chatrooms and forums have been heavily censoring discussions about Wengan. Some bloggers came up with a clever online tool to convert text from left-to right sideways (as modern Chinese is written) into right-to-left vertical (as classical Chinese was written) - in an effort to get around keyword censors. But it was still difficult to hold in-depth exchanges discussing all the ins and outs of Li Shufen's death and reasons for the Weng'an unrest. So people just gave up and started joking about pushups instead...calling on their friends to write about pushups as a kind of protest.

A number of people have written very insightfully on this incident, including Roland and Jonathan Ansfeld. The Wall Street Journal declared the sacking of four officials and calls for more media transparency a victory for China's bloggers. However, from what I can tell it seems like Chinese journalists may be the bigger winners from this whole incident.

I'm in the middle of conducting a fairly extensive research project on how Chinese blog hosting services censor their users. My team and I are posting a variety of content on 16 different blog services and documenting what gets censored, by whom, and how. I'll be writing up the overall findings for an academic paper later on. But meanwhile as I come up with interesting findings I'm sharing them along the way and am interested in people's feedback. Over the past week I posted two items about the Weng'an riots on 16 different Chinese blogging systems, plus one item about how the term "push-up" has become a censored word. Both of the Weng'an articles were censored by the same six blog hosts included in the tests: Baidu, iFeng (run by Phoenix TV), Netease, Tianya, Yahoo China, and MySpace. The latter two are American Internet brands. Tianya receives investment from Google. So far, none of the other ten services have taken down the Weng'an related posts I published - I'm not going to name those ten here because I'm concerned that the 6 might use this information to get the 10 in trouble with authorities, as is known to happen.

Four blogging services also censored the "push-up" post: iFeng, Netease, Tianya, and MySpace. On the right is what happens if you try to write about Weng'an on Tianya (click to enlarge).

On Netease, you can save the post privately, but when anybody else (who isn't logged in as the author) tries to view the post, only an error message appears, see screenshot at left (click to enlarge).

Now here's the really interesting part: while it's impossible for a citizen-blogger to write about Weng'an or push-ups on a Netease blog, the Netease news portal has extensive coverage of the Weng'an situation, including this long article about why one of the boys with Li Shufen was doing pushups on the bridge when she allegedly jumped into the river.

Similarly, when I tried to post about Weng'an or push-ups on iFeng, the blog hosting service run by the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV (aimed mainly at a Chinese mainlander audicence), the post is censored. Yet the iFeng news portal has a whole special coverage page about Weng'an.

"Weng'an" and "push-up" are NOT being blocked by the "great firewall" - I mean specifically the filtering mechanism that causes your browser to turn up an error message if you try to visit a site showing the offending words.  If you search "Weng'an" and "push-up" in Google.cn, Baidu, and Yahoo China you'll get lots of results - albeit with reports overseas dissident and human rights websites taken out.

This is quite different than the way the Yilishen incident was handled last fall - when large numbers of people protested about having been gypped in a pyramid scheme. If you scroll down to the bottom of my post written at the time, you'll see screenshots of Baidu, Google.cn, and Yahoo China, all of which gave ZERO results for searches on "Yilishen." Very little reporting about Yilishen appeared in the Chinese domestic media.

Today, Chinese journalists are being allowed all over the Weng'an story. Roland Soong just translated a long investigative article published by Southern Weekend late last week, and the respected Caijing - famous for pushing the edges - has its own special report section on Weng'an.

So what's going on here? Why do some web service companies ban blogs from talking about Weng'an while at the same time running extensive news coverage about it? We'll have to see whether this pattern holds in future, but if it does, that would point to a growing sophistication in the Chinese government's strategy for managing online media - both professional and amateur. The strategy would appear to be: give the professionals more rope to report while censoring the amateurs more heavily.  Let Chinese people searching on the internet for information about unrest incidents read about them primarily from the state-sanctioned media, not from bloggers repeating things they got from chatrooms repeating things that people heard on the street.

You then combine this with what Paul Denlinger calls the Chinese government's astroturfing strategy, with a few hundred thousand web commentators who are paid to write pro-government comments on blogs and in chatrooms. These people are known as the "fifty-cent party" because at least some of them get paid 50 Chinese cents per post. My colleague David Bandurski describes the system in detail in the latest issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He describes how the rage of Chinese cyber-nationalists against CNN's Jack Cafferty was fueled by 50-cent party postings.

Put all of these things together and once again, it's clear that there's a lot more than censorship going on: in addition to censorship there's information management, message management, and "astroturfing." At last month's Chinese Internet Research Conference, Chinese journalist and academic Li Yonggang talked about how we should view the Chinese government's efforts to control or manage the internet like a water management system. Roland Soong picked up on that idea in a recent analysis in which he compares the government's online information management strategy to hydrological engineering:

Yes, HYDROLOGICAL ENGINEERING!  Many of the current crop of central government leaders are technocrats with engineering background.  As such, they must understand that public opinion is water that can carry the ship as well as turn it over.  The point about hydrological engineering is not to build dams to hold the water back because there will be a catastrophic dam break one day that might bring down the entire system.  Instead, the point should be about controlling and redirecting the awesome power of nature in less harmful ways down selected channels.

In the case of the Weng'an mass incident, the major portals were deleting the related posts as quickly as possible.  At Tianya Forum, it was estimated that a Weng'an-related post has an average lifetime of 15 seconds before being deleted by the administrators.  That was supposed to be a record speed.  The same thing was happening at Sina.com, Sohu.com, Baidu, etc.  So this was building massive dams all over the map which builds up a tremendous pressure.  Where was the pressure release point?  You may be amazed that it was over at the Xinhua Forum.  The webmasters posted the official Xinhua news story on the forum.  That does not help in itself because Chinese netizens think that this Xinhua story was vague and misleading.  However, the webmasters allowed the comments to run freely.  This meant that the Xinhua posts became the meeting points of all those who want to talk about the Weng'an incident but could not do so elsewhere.  Although that post did not contain any news information (such as photos and videos), it was a place for people to vent their outrage.  As a result, Xinhua got a record-setting number of visitors who were very appreciative.  Is this the plan for the future?  You'll find out at the next mass incident (and there will be many).

The system continues to learn and evolve. The immediate beneficiaries are likely to be Chinese journalists, who have been chafing at their short leash for quite a long time now. Giving journalists a longer leash results in more credible, complex reporting while at the same time the propaganda authorities can still exert some control to prevent certain things from being reported. Independent bloggers like Zola who traveled down to Weng'an, who are not being paid by a news organization, are much harder to control by means other than direct censorship, blocking, and when necessary physical threats (as Zola experienced last Fall). If there's a news blackout on something, bloggers can become a vital conduit for information about what's going on. But when there is a decent quantity of professional news reporting on an event or issue, the role of the blogger as citizen reporter is weakened unless they have some truly unique material or insights. It's very difficult for a blogger like Zola traveling down to Weng'an to compete with a seasoned investigative reporter from Caijing or Southern Weekend: the reporters get interviews with many of the principal actors in a situation, as well as all the relevant officials, while a blogger like Zola only gets to talk to townspeople who have lots of opinions but little first-hand knowledge.

The Internet buzz about Weng'an led to public outrage, which in turn created pressure for the government to clean house in Weng'an and open up the story to greater media coverage. But the outcome may not be increased power or respect for China's bloggers. And just because the journalists get a longer leash doesn't mean that the Chinese information environment won't still be heavily manipulated. As we know in the U.S., you can even call yourself a "free press" and still be manipulated by your government. We're starting to see early signs that China's Internet and media regulators are becoming a bit less Leninist in their techniques and a little more Rovian. 

Good luck with the WaPo, Marcus!

Marcus Brauchli, who I first ran into on a boat going down the Yangtze doing a story about the Three Gorges Dam, and who threw some rather good parties in Shanghai in the late 90s (including a pajama party in the Peace Hotel), is now editor of the Washington Post.

The NYT writes that "at age 47, he is young enough to remain in place for many years..."

...assuming the WaPo survives for many years... 

As the news of his appointment broke today, online journalism guru Mindy McAdams posted 10 "simple facts" about the survival of journalism:

   1. Newspapers did NOT make a huge mistake by giving the content away for free. Duh, look at the Internet. Everything except the porn and the dating services is free.
   2. Journalism CAN be done, and done well, without newspapers. It’s okay if you love newspapers, but they’re really expensive to produce and the audience is abandoning them, as are the advertisers, so it doesn’t help us much to go on talking about newspapers.
   3. Journalism costs a lot of money to do (and especially if it’s done well), because it requires dedicated people. So we can’t pretend that the work will get done for free. It will not.
   4. Citizens and amateurs and well-meaning whistle-blowers, etc., etc., will sometimes commit wonderful acts of journalism. But they will NOT do so reliably, day in and day out, and there aren’t enough of them with the interest, free time, and goodwill to do everything journalists have been doing for about 400 years.
   5. Newspapers were a nice business. Publishers could make the product insanely cheap (remember the penny press), and the advertising would cover the expenses, plus generate fantastic profits. However, this is clearly over. It’s done. It worked for a long time, but now, like trans-Atlantic leisure travel in big passengers ships, it will never work again.
   6. No one today goes to one spot online as the trusted information source. People don’t even go to five or six. Everyone goes to dozens, hundreds — more. A subscription scheme is therefore not workable.
   7. Future generations will not read newspapers. Ever.
   8. Journalism is vital to a democratic system of government, because without independent busybodies (yes, journalists) sticking their nose into everything, governments and large corporations can cheat, oppress, and starve people. (Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen famously said there has never been a famine in a democratic country because the news about food shortages or distribution failures cannot be hidden and suppressed.)
   9. The business model to sustain journalism in the 21st century has not been seen yet.
  10. Newspaper companies, in particular, seem unlikely to blaze the trail toward a viable business model for journalism.

I agree with all these points.  I don't care whether newspapers survive. I do care that journalism survives - and I don't believe the two are equal. Clearly many people disagree.

It will be interesting to see whether Marcus spends his time fighting for a newspaper's survival or if he focuses on reinventing journalism for the 21st Century - and on finding a business model which likely won't involve selling lots of bundles of paper.

I don't envy him at all.  It's much easier pontificating from where I sit in academia, playing around with my nonprofit citizen media organization.

(Clarification since somebody asked: Nothing seedy about the Shanghai pj party - it was an elegant soiree...lots of people in Shanghai wear pj's in public in the summertime, so "come in your pajamas" was shall we say a party theme.)

On the Media interview: corporate responsibility and the Internet

An interview with me, talking about the role of multinational companies in Chinese Internet censorship, followed by a great exchange with Danwei.org's Jeremy Goldkorn, aired on On The Media last Friday. I was traveling and so I've only just listened to it. It's online here:

You can read the transcript here, I won't cut-and-paste the whole thing. Everything I say there, I've written on this blog somewhere before. But it was a good opportunity to sum things up succintly. (Also note: my collgeagues Qian Gang and David Bandurski said brilliant things in a previous OTM show here and here.)

Somebody called "super88" left this comment:

"American companies make the calculation..." Goes beyond that -- the very idea of firewalls, filters, tracking, and most other ways of technologically restricting or monitoring the Internet were peddled and still are from the Free World to the, er, less free (no offense, China!)!

China's governmental wants and needs are absolute market makers for Seimens, MSFT, Google, ATT -- and zillions of niche firms, many in Cali. And also a big thanks to Stanford, CalTech, MIT, the Fulbright Committee and the other institutions hived around China's best and brightest, some of whom are now experts in not expanding but killing free thought and discussion.

We can't blame the companies -- dollars are neither clean or dirty once spent again -- but I point this out to remind us that we cannot either rely on them to "do the right thing," or "do no evil" without making our own voices heard, via our representatives, our letters and/or our dollars.

That is absolutely true. If users act like they don't care very much, companies will tend to assume there's nothing wrong. Not just in China, but anywhere they operate. As I pointed out in the interview, this is a global problem.

Companies are pushed not only by governments, but also by other powerful corporate interests that are trying to impose their interests, unreasonably, on others. We've got both in the United States. Just read how a Judge threw YouTube users to the wolves, deciding that protecting Viacom's intellecual property is more important than users' reasonable expectation of privacy and free speech. Nor can Americans count on our elected representatives to protect us from illegal government snooping unless we yell a lot louder than we have done until now.

We can craft all kinds of global corporate codes of conduct, but unless users get more vocal and educate themselves better about how Internet and telecom services use their personal data and manipulate information at government behest, it will be hard to prevent a global race to the bottom.

 

Anti-CNN and the Tibet information war

Today for some unknown length of time, CNN.com was running a "quickvote" poll asking readers to vote "yes" or "no" to the question: "Should the Olympics in China be boycotted?" CNN.com is not my regular source of global news, and when I do read it I check their RSS feed not the website, so I found out about their online poll from this post on the Chinese tech site DoNews, which reposted an item from the blog dengjin.com. The blogger instructs readers how to vote "no" and urges them to do so in large numbers:

The blog post was published some point today, and DoNews republished it at around 5pm Beijing/Hong Kong time. I checked the CNN.com website at 10:30pm Hong Kong time and found they've replaced that poll with this thing:

OK... right. [UPDATE 9am Weds HKT: somebody has accused me of implying that the poll was hacked. That's not what I meant. The point is that CNN.com replaced the poll quickly after Chinese netizens started all voting "no" in big numbers...or perhaps somebody complained.]

It's well known by now that Chinese cyberspace for the past several days has been seething with anger against CNN and most Western media for what many Chinese netizens feel is blatant anti-China bias. If you haven't seen the anti-CNN website check it out. (The Washington post interviewed the site's founder here.)

The anger against CNN started after Chinese netizens discovered that CNN.com had cropped out a group of Tibetan rioters, who appear to be beating somebody up, from the original AFP/Getty Images photo. On the left is the cropped photo, on the right is the original image that Chinese netizens located on the internet:

As Roland Soong points out, CNN.com has quietly gone and replaced the photo in the original story with a new version that includes the mob violence in the background. But of course the old version still lives in the Google cache.  He writes: "This is a self-inflicted wound.  If CNN believed that it was right in the first place, then it should have stuck to that position.  Instead, it surrendered quietly.  Not only did this not appease the Chinese netizens, it only made it worse." Roland also links to this forum thread discussing the whole thing, in which one netizen announces that the new "hip phrase" of 2008 is: "做人不能太CNN a person should not be too CNN."  As Roland puts it: "This means that a person should not be too shameless and oblivious to the truth." Roland also quotes from an Associated Press article which reports:

CNN's bureau in Beijing has been deluged in recent days by a barrage of harassing phone calls and faxes that accuse the organization of unfair coverage. An e-mail to United Nations-based reporters purportedly from China's U.N. mission sent an Internet link to a 15-minute state television program showing Tibetans attacking Chinese in Lhasa.

A slideshow posted on YouTube accused CNN, Germany's Der Spiegel and other media of cropping pictures to show Chinese military while screening out Tibetan rioters, or putting pictures of Indian and Nepalese police wrestling Tibetan protesters with captions about China's crackdown.

Though of uncertain origin, the piece at least had official blessing, with excerpts appearing on the official English-language China Daily and on state TV.

Many of the examples of Western media anti-China bias posted at anti-cnn.com hone in on a series of agency photos that ran in various Western news outlets which were mislabeled as Chinese police arresting Tibetan protesters, when they are actually Nepalese or Indian police arresting exiled Tibetan protesters. Roland has been tirelessly documenting the conversation about the Tibet riots taking place on the Chinese Internet. He points out that RTL news in Germany has apologized for mis-reporting Nepali police violence as Chinese police violence, and that German station NTV is reviewing its coverage after similar mistakes appeared in their broadcasts. Also be sure to read Roland's post When Helping Becomes Hurting to see how Western protests are playing not only in China but amongst many Chinese around the world, who have unfettered access to Western media from outside the "Great Firewall."

Meanwhile with videos such as "Riot in Tibet: True face of Western media" and "Tibet Was, Is and Always Will be a Part of China" getting over 700 thousand and a million views, respectively, at the time of this writing, YouTube has been unblocked in China, though as the Shanghaiist points out access can be shaky at times. The BBC English-language website is also generally unblocked.

Perhaps the Chinese government is feeling a little less worried lately about losing public support? Perhaps they are less worried that people will turn against the Communist Party after reading something in the Western media, now that it is no longer fashionable in many circles to believe what the Western media reports?

It is also worth pointing out that alternative views - though not as loud - do exist in Chinese cyberspace. Lian Yue wrote the other day that the only way to prevent more violence is to allow the press to freely report in Tibet. Memedia also points out that some Chinese netizens have been spreading some fake news themselves - such as this blog post claiming that there was recently a Tibetan terrorist bombing in Chengdu, but using victim photos from a 2005 incident in Fuzhou. The Memedia editors observe that the Tibet issue has become like the South China Photographs incident: "An issue that originally is seen through simple logic, but through the course of debating it people start considering much deeper questions."

Hopefully most of China's netizens will draw the obvious conclusion: that in the end you shouldn't trust any information source - Western or Chinese, professional or amateur, digital or analog - until and unless they have earned your trust.

Addendum: Somebody e-mailed me this report from the Toronto Star containing chilling eyewitness accounts from Canadian tourists who were in Lhasa for the worst of the violence.

Tudou shutdown reports: What's going on?

Late last week, several reports appeared on the Chinese internet claiming that Tudou, one of China's biggest YouTube clones, was ordered to shut down by the State Administration for Radio Film and Television. (See good roundups on the situation on Danwei, Poynter, and CNet among others.) This shutdown news - or rumor, if you will - came on the heels of a reported partnership between CCTV.com, Tudou and Myspace China to "provide an online platform for Olympics viewers to interact with athletes and each other." On Thursday folks over at Marbridge Consulting confirmed the shutdown order via their official sources, posting this report:

Sources say that the direct cause of the breakdown between Tudou and CCTV.com is the Shutdown Order Regarding Punishment of Tudou for Illegal Online Video Broadcasting issued by the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) to Shanghai broadcasting authorities on February 24.

The order states that Tudou is suspected of transmitting pornographic and other clearly proscribed content, and of continuing to be lax in its monitoring of content following the promulgation of SARFT's new regulations on online broadcasting. Tudou was ordered to shut down for an unlimited duration to reorganize its content. On February 26, word of the order, which had circulated throughout all levels of the broadcasting authorities, reached CCTV. An inside source revealed that Wang Wenbin, head of CCTV.com, saw the letter on that day - one day before the CCTV.com, MySpace China, and Tudou press conference. The next day Tudou CEO Wang Wei's speech was dropped from the press conference, and media at the press conference were told not to report this.

When contacted, Tudou's public relations department said that they had not received a Shutdown Order targeted at the company.

Editor's note: In a telephone interview with Marbridge, relevant authorities confirmed that such an injunction had been issued against Tudou. However, no confirmation was given concerning the details outlined in the article above. A check of Tudou's site (www.tudou.com) as of the close of business today found it still functioning normally.

Tudou continues to function normally as of this writing. On Saturday Steve Shwankert reported for PC World (via the Washington Post) that rumors about Tudou's closing "appear unfounded."

Kaiser Kuo cites sources who think that Tudou may be getting its hand slapped for not taking new online video regulations that went into effect on January 31st seriously enough. This is despite reports in early February that existing video websites would be "grandfathered in" to the new regulatory system. Kaiser writes:

Other industry insiders have intimated to me that Tudou had been somewhat cavalier in pursuing compliance with the new SARFT/MII regulations on Internet audio and video broadcast, but when the date of implementation, January 31, passed without incident, and when SARFT clarified the regulations in a statement the following week suggesting that non-compliant sites would be given a period to resolve problems and restructure so as to be compliant and would be permitted to apply for a proper license, most industry insiders believed the worst was probably over. However, in conversations with highly-placed industry insiders earlier this week, this reporter was given strong indications that another shoe was yet to fall. Without mentioning Tudou.com by name, these insiders intimated that a “black list” was making the rounds and some form of punishment would be meted out.

It smells as though some kind of substantial power struggle must be going on for control of online content, broadcast content, and beyond... resulting in all kinds of mixed signals. Don't forget that some members of the Chinese media openly opposed the new SARFT regulations. Perhaps certain parts of the Chinese media are being used as proxies - or are maybe even taking sides - in this battle? If the shutdown order was indeed issued (which seems very likely) and Tudou is ignoring it, they must have some strong backing in the bureaucracy somewhere to push back against SARFT, no?

I've heard all kinds of strange and wild rumors from various people over the past few months, including one especially wild rumor claiming that there are arguments being made in some quarters to abolish SARFT altogether...  or that there is likely to be some kind of major reorganization of the various regulatory bodies that regulate and control entertainment and news content. But who knows. Often times such rumors reflect wishful thinking of certain players within the bureaucracy and nothing much more. The tea leaf reading continues. But if anybody out there has any concrete information to add to this mystery, it sure would be great to know about it.

Hong Kong District Council Elections: Check out our student coverage!

(Photo by Andy Ho)

  My students are posting stories in the run-up to Hong Kong's District Council Elections on Sunday. They'll be covering events on election day and day after as well. Check it out at Hong Kong Stories.

Please give them your feedback in the comments section if you'd like.

World Journalism Educator Confab: A Rookie's Thoughts

As the only person at my little journalism center teaching anything related to the Internet, life can get lonely and it's easy to feel isolated since my colleagues (who are wonderful people otherwise) have little exposure to most of what I'm trying to teach and there is nobody else on campus to ask for advice on what works and what doesn't in the context of a hands-on online journalism skills class. Plus there is no standard curriculum or agreement about how to teach online journalism anyway, because the field is still very new and technology changes so fast. For this reason, I found attending the First World Journalism Education Congress especially useful, if not therapeutic. (Although I'm sorry, somebody has got to help them do a better website next time...)

Despite the conference's 1990's-style web presence which did not bode well, I was able to network with some of the more respected and innovative teachers in the field of online journalism, like Guy Berger of South Africa (a former political prisoner, journalist, and more recently the force behind Highway Africa), Rosental Alves of UT Austin (a transplanted Brazilian and force behind the International Symposium of Online Journalism), Jonathan Hewett of London's City University, Pascal Guenee of l'Institut Pratique de Journalisme, Elen Hume, founder of the innovative New England Ethnic Newswire, and many others. We exchanged some really interesting ideas which will help me a lot in future semesters. Talking to them also helped me come to terms with the fact that experimentation and uncertainty are simply going to be a fact of life for any online journalism instructor who is trying to prepare students for the future of journalism instead of what journalism used to be back in our various heydays - or even last year.

In a small group session to discuss reforming the curriculum for the digital age, and later on his blog, Guy pointed out the main problem we face: "What many j-teachers don’t realise is that their current work amounts in effect to imparting media history."

The main thing that many journalism schools have problems dealing with is that technology has caused professionals to lose control over the means of media production. The public at large can now participate in journalism. People who are not professional journalists working full-time for news organizations will continue to produce media and commit acts of journalism in growing numbers no matter what "we" think of the quality or reliability of their work, and no matter whether "we" think that what "they" are doing is a "good thing" or not. Amateurs are competing with professionals for attention. That doesn't mean there won't be a role and a value for professionals. Recent surveys discussed at the World Editors Forum indicate that the public will probably continue to value many things about professional journalism (as long as we don't disintegrate into completely valuless pablum about pseudo-starlets, which is also possible). But no matter what, non-professional journalism is going to be a fact of life in the media ecosystem from now on and we'd better get used to it.

I've always been pretty open about the fact that I came to my teaching position with a history of strong skepticism about the utility of j-schools in the first place.  I came away from the WJEC believing that journalism education actually can have a useful role to play, but we need to re-configure our mandate to be more consistent with today's realities.

First, I assume we agree that the ultimate point of journalism is to serve and inform the public discourse so that citizens can make informed decisions about how to live their lives, to spend their money, and to determine who can be trusted to represent their interests.
(If you think the purpose of journalism is to keep a government in power or maximize profit for shareholders, you won't agree with anything I have to say. Don't waste your time. Bye!)

If we agree with the above purpose of journalism, we should also assume that the goal of journalism education should be to help improve the skills, knowledge, and ethical standards of all people who are participating in the journalistic process and working to inform the public discourse. In fact, the conference issued a Declaration of Principles of Journalism Education, in which the preamble states:

"Journalism should serve the public in many important ways, but it can only do so if its practitioners have mastered an increasingly complex body of knowledge and specialized skills. Above all, to be a responsible journalist must involve an informed ethical commitment to the public.  This commitment must include an understanding of and deep appreciation for the role that journalism plays in the formation, enhancement and perpetuation of an informed society."

What neither the declaration nor the conference fully acknowledged was the extent to which,  in this day and age, "practitioners" of journalism are not only professional journalists but potentially all other members of the public.

The principles take a step in this direction with item number five: "Journalism educators have an important outreach mission to promote media literacy among the public generally and within their academic institutions specifically." But that does not go far enough in embracing public media literacy as what I believe should be an absolutely core mission.  Without broadening our mandate to include all people who may potentially create media and commit journalism, we can continue to generate jobs for ourselves and (fingers crossed) an acceptable number of students. But I don't see how we will continue to serve the public interest very well. We will be neglecting an important opportunity to help strengthen and improve our democracies - rather than watch them be eroded away (or in some countries, denied us entirely) thanks to apathy, infotainment, propaganda, herd mentalities, and spin.

As Jay Rosen wrote back in 2005, journalism is no longer just a "profession;" it has also become a "practice" in which we all participate. Blog-father Dave Winer has argued that we should stop trying to teach journalism as a specialized trade at all, and instead teach it as a required course for everybody. "It's too late to be training new journalists in the classic mode," he wrote. "Instead, journalism should become a required course, one or two semesters for every graduate."

Dave and I differ about whether professional journalists have a future at all - I think they still do as long as they're willing to evolve and adapt -  but I agree with him that basic journalism concepts, skills, and media literacy need to be a core competency for all educated citizens.

I would also argue that introducing these skills and concepts at the college level is way too late - given that many kids now are blogging from the middle of primary school onwards. Media literacy and basic concepts of journalism - along with the rights and responsibilities (like do no harm) that go along with media creation - really need to start being introduced in grade school. Journalism schools could play a major role in helping to shape a new media literacy curriculum - and in teaching primary and high school teachers about journalism and how to teach it themselves.

If J-schools were looking for a good raison d'etre, that seems like a real one to me. But it requires a lot of work - well outside everybody's present comfort zones.

Are we up for it? Do we have the cojones? Or are we really just in this for the tenure track, regular schedules and long summer holidays?