The First Draft of History: Communication Technology, Conflict and Journalism.

 

Blogs and Citizen Journalism Conflict and New Media Conflict and Media

 

 

 

 

Blogs and Citizen Journalism

 

The real question is whether the proliferation of high speed Internet connections, digital cameras, and user-friendly blog publishing tools can change the game. There are now countless blogs in Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Kurdish, and English -- each with its own unique style and perspective. Peace blogs are becoming more and more prevalent.

Life Must Go On In Sderot and Gaza is a blog written by two anonymous voices for peace, one an Israeli from the city of Sderot, another a Palestinian from the Sajaia refugee camp in Gaza. There is also EMS Peace, a personal blog written by an Australian surfing expat, now a peace activist living in Jaffa. He uses his blog both for his own cathartic release, and to reach out to a small, but growing niche of peace activists in the region.

  

 

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/08/blogs-help-humanize-demystify-life-in-the-middle-east242.html

 

Pretty self- explanatory. A nice look at how blog allow us to see into other worlds relatively unmoderated. One of the things that it points out is how we view places that are often in conflict, or imperiled in some way. Clearly, not every day in Israel or Palenstine is awful for everyone. Or Syria, or Iraq. There is something terrible about only considering the worst of a country, and reducing it to its misery. It takes the complex tapestry that is a culture and reduces it to something lesser, less human.  It reminds of a line from Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, in which she talked about seeing some woman in Serbia or somewhere, tearing at her clothes after the loss of a family member to war. Sontag - and I am retrieving this through the fog of time as I no longer have the book - wrote about how we felt like this woman’s capacity for pain was lesser than ours as she had no reason to expect any different, any respite from her suffering.  I think that the press plays a role in that, viewing another human being as little more than a victim is dehumanizing and dangerous. Blogs do not just reveal the true suffering behind a conflict or a troubled place that can show the beauty too. I remember being in Haiti working with MSF and the head of mission didn't want me to use a lot of my footage because the women in the slums had worn their best dresses to the meeting and, as if nearly always the case, done their hair. They were often laughing. He wanted more grim images, what I refer to as poverty porn. I thought, how could we deal with a people in such a way?  I thought the images were great because people - despite all of their suffering, still had dignity. I marveled at them. I could not bear to efface that. To efface that allows those in a position of privilege to view them as other. and, in the case of Haiti and many other counties that still struggle with their post-colonial identity, that seems just another kind of violence.

 

  http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_n9_v24/ai_12529902/Cnet, October, 232008. . Accessed April 20th, 2009.

 

Overview of the rumor about Steve Jobs' heart attack and the implications of that report on CNN's Ireport.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10058410-93.html

 http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/09/political-fact-check-sites-proliferate-but-can-thwww.gey-break-through-the-muck268.html.

  C

Article looking at the pros and cons of Citizen Journalism, most specifically the idea of truth squads.

 

Orwell's Take on the pamphleteers. Read and substitute the word, Blogger for Pamphleteer.

Retrieved from April 05, 2009. http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100542

British Pamphleteers. Vol. 1. Ed. by George Orwell and Reginald Reynolds. London: Allan Wingate, 1948

 

 

Conflict and New Media

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/jul/11/mondaymediasection.attackonlondon

How the 7/7 attack saw a rise in participatory journalism not inlike seen after 911. Bu the BBC seems to welcome this...the participaotry part, I mean. They ahve generally been leaders in using UGC.

 

 

A web-based reporting tool is allowing Africans caught up in political unrest to report incidents of killing, violence and displacement.

The website is called Ushahidi, which means ''testimony'' in Swahili and was first developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout.

 

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7773648.stm

 

http://www.rbf.org/resources/resources_show.htm?doc_id=502728

 

Julie Salamon . "WAR IN IRAQ: Telling the story." New York Times. April 7th, 2008.

An brief overview of the way tech  has changed things for reporters, nods to the idea that time may be an important part of coverage and that rapid dessimination or information can be hazardous. A great quote follows:

. "Back in the Middle Ages when I covered wars you had reflection time you weren't winging it," said Morley Safer of the "60 Minutes" program on CBS, who covered the Israeli- Egyptian conflict in Suez in 1956 and the Vietnam War in the 1960s. "Now, suddenly you're on, and you have to say something. You can only describe what you can see in the very, very narrow field of vision that you have. They have a hell of a lot more people covering these live wars than we had. But we had time to check things out."

"You're an antidote to the propaganda," said Michael Dobbs of The Washington Post, who was in Belgrade during the NATO air strikes in 1999. "It puts you in a position where you really have to be objective and detached. You're reporting to the country that's waging the war, but reporting among the people who are living in it. "I saw the suffering of Serbian civilians and yet I knew very well the political arguments in favor of the war. I personally couldn't decide between those two things. There are two sides of war, both of which are accurate."\

 

Doug Tsurouka, "Videophones Change Wartime Reporting."  Investor's Business Daily. April 8, 2003

A small and nicely technical explanation of the shifts in the instruments used in the field. Not grand in thought but the price and weight of the videophones tells an important story

 

 

Jeff Kamen,  "CNN's Breakthrough in Baghdad: Live by Satellite (Censored)." Washington Journalism Review, March 1991, 27-29.

A newspaper article about the perception of the first Gulf War as a transparent conflict, based on The CNN type images we say, but looks at the ways in the the press were actually stymied by the military.

 

Rona Kobell. "Weblogs cover the war without mainstream restraints." Baltimore Sun. March, 27, 2003

 

Fantastic examples of how Citjo allows information that I would argue NEEDS to come out, to come out. How can the US know if they truly support their war efforts when the effects of those efforts are concealed and/or effaced. We usually associated Drudge with the Clinton/Lewinsky debacle but in this action, he showed the power and necessity of participatory journalism. (Although, he's been doing this for so long, once might argue he is a kind of MSM. But that's not really true as he isn't sanction, nor cares to be, by anyone but himself. Drudge makes me think of the  great utility of National Enquirer. Scoff if you will but the NE broke (this may not be true anymore) the greatest number of stories of any US paper. The signal to noise ratio wasn't great, but they dared tred where other papers did not, and that brought a lot of stories to the fore that would have never been reported otherwise. Same for Drudge in a way, or the Blogosphere in general.

Most relevant quote: Recently, ABC decided against airing images of Iraqis interviewing American prisoners of war and of the bodies of dead American soldiers that had been broadcast by Arab news outlets, saying that to use the footage would be exploitative. Matt Drudge, the scribe behind the Web site "The Drudge Report," disagreed. He posted the photos from the video feed.

"The families of the murdered U.S. troops have been notified," he wrote. "And if anchormen and others in the media have viewed it, why can't the average citizen?"

 

 

Morgan Strong.  "Portions of the Gulf War Were Brought to You by... the Folks at Hill & Knowlton." TV Guide, February 22, 1991, 11-13.

I wanted to find an article in a non-media or him brow environment that nodded to the construction of the Kuwaiti babies dumped on floor war tales and other, “Fake News,” This was a mainstream as I could find was, to be honest, I was a little shot it appeared there at all. The piece ended with this quote:

None of this is to suggest that the Iraqis did not perpetrate atrocities while occupying Kuwait, nor does it underestimate the difficulties facing the media in obtaining original material under censorship conditions.  However, these examples are but a few of the incidents of outright misinformation that found their way onto the network news.  It is an inescapable fact that much of what Americans saw on their news broadcasts, especially leading up to the Allied offensive against Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, was in large measure the contrivance of a public-relations firm.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/arts/critic-s-notebook-mcluhan-s-messages-echoing-on-iraq.html?pagewanted=1

Looking at the current conflict through the scrim of MM.

 

Most relevant quotes:

 

"There is general confusion as to who is acting and who is watching. And at the crux of the confusion are the traditional eyewitnesses to war, the journalists, ''embedded'' with the troops. Are the television cameras the witnesses to war, or are they part of the weaponry? Or both?

 

 

It's a bit surprising the quote from my presentation in which MM says the Third world War would be a guerilla media war doesn't surface in this article.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conflict and Media

 

 

http://www.newseum.org/warstories/technology/flash.htm

 

This is a nice site, with context, and some viz... I don't know what it's yoked to - but worth a look. I wish it had more links to great context, and sources.

 

 

 

Bill Monroe, "How to Cover War: Forget the Pool." Washington Journalism Review, May 1991, 6.

 

 

American Press Institute Issues Forum Concerning Press Performance in the Persian Gulf War, (transcript) War, the Press, and the First Amendment, Reston, Virginia: A.P.I., March 22, 1991.

 

 

Doug Tsurouka, "Videophones Change Wartime Reporting."  Investor's Business Daily. April 8, 2003

A small and nicely technical explanation of the shifts in the instruments used in the field. Not grand in thought but the price and weight of the videophones tells an important story

 

http://ia311533.us.archive.org/1/items/WWII_News_1940/1940-12-20_BBC_Robin_Duff_Sees_London_Burning.mp3

http://www.stelzriede.com/ms/mus/airraid.mp

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdOb_183d1o&feature=related

http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=zDNJL0mTHWI

 

 

 

 

  Accessed April 20, 2009. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/gulfwar3.htm#_edn1

•      http://www.cd.sc.ehu.es/FileRoom/documents/Cases/185gulfpress.html

 

Limitations of reporters in Gulf War.

 

 Samantha Power. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.  Perennial, NYC. 2002

 

 

This is an amazing book, but a pretty spectacular woman. You might remember her as the advisor to Obama who called Hilary Clinton a, "monster," but she should be best known as the Pulitzer Prize winning author of this book.

 

Power, a former journalist for U.S. News and World Report and the Economist and now the executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights, offers an uncompromising and disturbing examination of 20th-century acts of genocide and U.S responses to them. In clean, unadorned prose, Power revisits the Turkish genocide directed at Armenians in 1915-1916, the Holocaust, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, Iraqi attacks on Kurdish populations, Rwanda, and Bosnian "ethnic cleansing," and in doing so, argues that U.S. intervention has been shamefully inadequate. The emotional force of Power's argument is carried by moving, sometimes almost unbearable stories of the victims and survivors of such brutality. Her analysis of U.S. politics what she casts as the State Department's unwritten rule that nonaction is better than action with a PR backlash; the Pentagon's unwillingness to see a moral imperative; an isolationist right; a suspicious left and a population unconcerned with distant nations aims to show how ingrained inertia is, even as she argues that the U.S. must reevaluate the principles it applies to foreign policy choices. In the face of firsthand accounts of genocide, invocations of geopolitical considerations and studied and repeated refusals to accept the reality of genocidal campaigns simply fail to convince, she insists. But Power also sees signs that the fight against genocide has made progress. Prominent among those who made a difference are Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who invented the word genocide and who lobbied the U.N. to make genocide the subject of an international treaty, and Senator William Proxmire, who for 19 years spoke every day on the floor of the U.S. Senate to urge the U.S. to ratify the U.N. treaty inspired by Lemkin's work. This is a well-researched and powerful study that is both a history and a call to action.

She is the one who first introduced me to the incendiary idea of how the media can be complicit in conflict by adhering to old rules. When the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia, and a dank curtain fell between it and the rest of the world, there were those who made it out but their stories never got the warranted attention because we had only the stories of victim/witnesses. The same was true in Turkey, when the Kurds swelled over the border away from the brutality of the Baathist regime and yet their tales were told because we needed corroboration from the very people who perpetrated the crimes. This is a radical over simplification, and I don't mean to say that fact checking and such isn't important. But there is seldom-independent corroboration in many conflicts. Sometimes you need to get the info out, to begin the process of investigation, not the other way around. I re-read Power's book trying to imagine how many of her stories might have played out had she or the people she was covering had access to UGC  and other instruments of media that are commonplace now, camera phones and the like. I think it could have been transformative.

 

 

 http://books.google.ca/books?id=fpbVH_4iOs8C&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=All+men+are+compelled+to+think+of+all+things,+at+the+same+time,+on+imperfect+information,+and+with+too+little+interval+for+reflection.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=k0V1Mz8QTj&sig=-gjjtB0H9n1bzpH3Qg7doHaOx3U&hl=en&ei=Zj3tSaDXCoigM-6Toe4P&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1