The Real Problem with Twitter

One of the great advantages of social media is the way it has democratised communication.

Not that everyone has an equal voice, but at least these tools are available for everyone to try to get their message across. Unfortunately, we’ve been watching that ideal crumble at Twitter. 

Read the full article at Thompson Reuters Foundation's Context.

How FOX News helped Romney lose

FOX News -- and the conservative commentariat more generally -- helped lose the election for Romney.

Others who assisted his defeat have already been identified (rightly) as "hardliners in the party" or more specifically "misogynist Republicans".

However, we should not forget the likes of FOX News and over-mediatized loony-right personalities who were on TV screens far more than anyone could have ever asked for during the last four years. In classic conflict media fashion, they took it on themselves to whip up the Republican base (in the process confusing it with the Tea Party) and keep them rabidly energized until polling day.

Do social media help make international intervention less likely?

The question may seem a bit counter-intuitive at first. The common, if not yet quite conventional, wisdom is that, the more social media buzz there is around an issue, the more people get engaged in it, and the more popular pressure can be brought to bear on decision makers to take action.

Indeed, that probably works with many topics, including national and international crises. If there’s been a flood or an earthquake, for example, social media can help get the word out, transmitting messages in all formats -- text, audio, stills, video -- through those networks of personal trust that make tools like Facebook and Twitter so effective.

If an aid organisation plays it right, it can no doubt link up with the inevitable outpouring of international sympathy via social media and bring in new individual donations to apply to its work helping the victims. Perhaps it can even corral public pressure and direct it toward governments to get them to announce fresh aid packages in response. That seems reasonably straightforward.

In a conflict, however, things are very different.

Update on social media and public advocacy

About a year ago, I blogged a case study detailing how social media were impacting public advocacy in international affairs. Following a few conversations I’ve had in recent weeks and a few more deep-water dives into the sea of data, it’s time for a brief update and a few additional notes.

To start with, the trend noted in April 2011 continues: people are increasingly finding the International Crisis Group’s online reports and other materials via Facebook and Twitter, and more importantly, they are coming from the very government institutions and international agencies we aim to reach as an advocacy organisation.

Moreover, this is not an isolated phenomenon. I hear from other NGOs and advocacy groups that they see the exact same development: a greater percentage of their target audiences are also accessing their material via social media as opposed to email or media outlets. Disintermediation is very real, yet no sane person would suggest ditching their mass email lists, ignoring Google News or forgetting fundamental media relations.

There are some extra observations, however.

Friends, Followers and Policy Makers

Social Media and High-Level Advocacy in International Affairs

Facebook and Twitter are impacting even the last bastion of the traditional power establishment, the world of international affairs and diplomacy. This is not simply the wishful thinking of some new media guru a few years ahead of the curve. I'm not dreaming about the future; I'm looking at real numbers today. And no, I don't mean the counts of those who have signed up to ambassador X or Y's stream of fairly dull Tweets. "Followers" is vanity, web stats are sanity.

The specific example I'll use to prove my case comes from the International Crisis Group's recent work on Libya, but really I could use just about anything current, as we've had identical lessons from other cases, ever more so as time goes on. The following represents a trend we've seen building over the last two years.

Worrying about Wikileaks

I originally wrote this for my blog at Reuters AlertNet, where it ran on 3 December 2010.

=======

With the number of pages of media commentary about WikiLeaks now possibly exceeding the original 250,000 cables in question, we seem to have almost every possible angle in play. Still, amid all the chatter, one consideration is missing.

Thoughts on the leaked cables themselves have been a mix of amusement, embarrassment, boredom and excitement. Opinions of Julian Assange and his actions have ranged from simplistic tributes to primitive calls for his assassination.

With Media Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

I posted this on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 10 September 2010, following a Florida-based pastor's threats to burn a copy of the Koran. The whole thing was a downward spiral of stupidity: the hateful ignorance of a book-burner, the lunacy of the world media for giving Terry Jones any attention at all, and then, six months later when the act finally happened, the mob violence that killed several UN workers in Afghanistan in some bizarrely conceived retaliation. Altogether, you might call it one of humanity's more embarrassing moments of recent years... But while you may not expect any different from religious extremists, it was the role of the world media that most shocked me. I received some criticism for attacking the media response like this, but I stand by the argument in full: news outlets have power and therefore responsibility.

=======

Looking at the dismal output of the international media in recent days, the only thing one can say is, shame on the lot of you.

The international media has elevated a non-entity lunatic to the heights of worldwide stardom in nanoseconds. Someone with a near-zero base of public support who wants to upset as many people as possible has been given multiple tribunes from which to incite hate and possibly violence.

Every even moderately sane public figure has spoken out against the preacher's intentions -- and with the media pushing the story at full bore, this has meant top-level political leaders, who presumably have better things to do, having to waste time damning the obviously damnable. Are they now expected to do this for every nutter who raises his head?

About the only public figures who didn't take this clear and sensible stand were the editors in newsrooms around the world. Why didn't they dismiss this story out of hand like most of the world managed to?

"But it was a story, so we had to cover it", will be the reply.

Nonsense. You made it a story.

PAX: A New Idea in Conflict Prevention?

Another blog post I wrote for Reuters AlertNet, this 24 May 2010 piece describes a project with some fascinating potential. I've been loosely involved with them as a kind of advisor ever since.

=======

I had a fascinating meeting at Google in London this morning. Attended by some very senior journalists, former top-level government officials, and representatives of NGOs, universities, and think tanks, the three- or four-hour session looked at a proposal for a new way to approach conflict prevention.

Called "PAX", the idea is to gather SMS, images and video from the general public in areas of conflict (in the style of FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi), and combine that with satellite imagery to form a massive open database that could be accessed to help pressure key governments and others into preventative action.

Today's Unknown Dissidents

I originally wrote this for my Reuters AlertNet blog on 28 April 2010.

=======

In the Boston Globe today, columnist Jeff Jacoby asks an interesting question: "Why aren't democratic dissidents as well-known in the free world today as the dissidents who challenged the Soviet empire were in the 1970s and 1980s?" But the answers offered only go part of the way to explaining the phenomenon.

Inevitably, the issue arises of competition for space online: in a 72-zillion-Tweets-per-minute world, today's dissidents "struggle to be heard". It sounds a reasonable argument at first, but it quickly breaks down under analysis.

Without Foreign Coverage, We Miss More Than News

This is a piece I originally wrote for my blog at Reuters AlertNet under the title, "Welcome to a World without Foreign Correspondents" on 21 April 2009. It was then republished in a slightly expanded form by the Christian Science Monitor on 18 May 2009.

=======

For years now, those of us working in and around international media have grown used to hearing about slashed foreign news budgets - an overseas bureau cut here, yet another correspondent post dropped there.

The shrinking of news from the far reaches of the globe is a problem only partially addressed by a few financially constrained news agencies and a couple of hopeful media upstarts with untried business models or limited audiences.

We do not need to wait for something more to hit us over the head to understand the implications of these changes. Two recent situations show us exactly what the world will be like when there are no regular foreign correspondents left.

Media: If You Are Not Covering Sri Lanka Right Now, Why Not?

I posted this on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 21 April 2009.

=======

"A mass slaughter of civilians will take place Tuesday at noon. And everyone knows it." These are the words my colleague used to describe what is happening in Sri Lanka today in his new article for Foreign Policy's online magazine. It is not an exaggeration: what's happening in Sri Lanka is a massacre in progress.

An Overview of Media Development in Post-Conflict Transition

This piece formed the basis of a speech I delivered to a European Union workshop on "the Role of Media in Conflict Prevention" on 3 April 2009. It began as a set of notes I'd been making on the subject for years and is the kind of all-inclusive media development text I'd been wanting to write for some time. Sometimes it's good to have a conference or other event to force you to pull all your thoughts together.

=======

If you look at media-related projects in post-conflict situations in recent decades -- though you can go back much further, of course, as this is not a new field -- there appear to be lots of practical lessons learned, but they often seem specific to one theatre and at best only partially transferable to others.

The good thing is that few can doubt the importance of media development in an overall post-conflict package these days. After the horrific role played by Radio Mille Collines in driving the Rwandan genocide through its hate propaganda, there is a widespread understanding that irresponsible media can help tear apart a fragile society. And after success stories like the UN-sponsored Radio Okapi, which has been helping to foster a feeling of national unity in the shattered Democratic Republic of the Congo, there is a growing awareness that responsible media can help repair and even strengthen a post-conflict society.

The Changing Face of Foreign News Coverage

This piece ran on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 16 March 2009.

=======

While articles about the changing media landscape are these days as common as out-of-work journalists, we have been spoiled over the weekend with some excellent pieces about new media, foreign correspondents, and covering crisis zones.

Anand Giridhardas article in the New York Times, "These Days, No Reporting Behind a Nation's Back" is well worth a read. He starts off noting that, "Foreign correspondents no longer cover one place for the exclusive benefit of readers somewhere else. In the Internet age, we cover each place for the benefit of all places, and the reported-on are among the most avid consumers of what we report."

It's amazing that some people still don't get this.

International Media Response to Indictment of Bashir

This appeared on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 5 March 2009.

=======

If the answer is "six milliseconds", the question surely is, "how long did it take for the Arabic satellite TV channels to jump from coverage of the International Criminal Court's indictment of Sudanese President Bashir to cries about neo-colonialism, Palestine, and the Zionist-Western conspiracy to divide Sudan?"

My colleague, Nadim Hasbani, has a great piece in Al Hayat today, trying to counter this automated response of the Arab world by highlighting how Arab leaders have manipulated the case of Darfur and fallen in line behind Bashir. He delivers a message the Arab public debate desperately needs to incorporate:

If today the ICC has enough evidence to arrest an Arab leader for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur, it is in large part because for the past six years, when those deaths where taking place in Darfur, the international community - including Arab countries - did little to stop him... The problem actually is that Arabs are leaving themselves out of the international justice system. We act as if we were targeted by justice instead of helping to bring about justice, for ourselves as well.

Unfortunately but not surprisingly, Bashir's successful manipulation of Arab public opinion continued today, with the President of Sudan telling the cameras that the ICC was a tool of Israel and the US. Strange that apparently no one in the Arabic media has pointed out that neither country is a signatory to the ICC. In fact, rejection of the ICC is a policy that Israel, the US, and the entire Arab League (apart from Jordan) agree on. Ah, but to reveal that would break the narrative of a Western-Zionist conspiracy, and who in the Arabic media is willing to give up such a perennial favourite?

It wasn't always this way, mind you. Many in the West may be surprised to learn that Al Jazeera was the first international television broadcaster to break the Darfur story back in 2003 -- an explosive scoop that got the Qatari-based station booted from Sudan for a time. They got back in, and they currently have a correspondent in Darfur, but their coverage is now toned down and not victim-focused.

But Arabic channels were not the only ones who forgot the victims yesterday. Following the ICC press conference, BBC World TV incomprehensibly had as one of its first studio guests a Western mouthpiece for the Khartoum regime, moaning about how this was white-man's justice etc. What that particular white man failed to mention was that all of the 300,000 dead and millions displaced in Darfur because of the policies of Bashir's ruling National Congress Party are not white. His logic is that dark-skinned people ought to be left alone to kill other dark-skinned people, and the rest of the world ought to just shut up.

Now, some readers will doubtless think about leaving a comment on this blog saying that BBC World was just trying to offer a balance of views in the interests of journalistic fairness. But it's nonsense to take that approach in such extreme cases like this. Imagine: "Well, we've just heard from a woman who was gang raped, so let's crossover to our studio in London, where we can get a different perspective from our next guest, the director of the pro-rape lobby group..."

Sorry, that's not an acceptable approach, and it's insulting to BBC journalists who have reported from the ground in Darfur over the years and have helped to highlight the crimes committed there. Their work shouldn't be undermined by inviting in some ridiculous and offensive guest running PR for one of the world's most appalling regimes.

In general, however, the English-language media, including the BBC, have been reasonably good on the ICC indictment, with the announcement interrupting normal programming or the issue taking top billing with lots of print articles in the run-up to yesterday. Al Jazeera English ran with the press conference from The Hague for quite a long time, including into the journalists' question period, which was useful, I think, but even more so was their time chart on Darfur on the studio back wall, which gave a great overview of the long-running conflict. Most importantly, the Western media mostly put the victims first, which is what journalism should always keep front and centre in these matters. It was a stark contrast with the Arabic-language channels, which portrayed Bashir as the victim in all this.

Within hours, however, the ICC story started to drop down the priority ladder on some English-language satellite channels, with Gordon Brown's speech to the US Congress dominating in the UK and Clinton's Middle East trip grabbing the most attention in the US.

What happens in the international media next will be interesting. Bashir will no doubt keep calling people into the streets in his support as long as the world's TV cameras are willing to film it. The regime of course makes itself look ridiculous with these media stunts -- do any governments in the world apart from the most authoritarian ones ever organise public demonstrations to prove their popular support in the face of international outrage at their abuses? But the real test is whether the international media, particularly the Arabic-language channels, keep falling for his line or whether they instead keep focused on the real victims here.

BBC Should Overturn Its Refusal to Show Gaza Appeal

This originally ran on my Reuters Alertnet blog on 26 January 2009.

=======

With foot clearly in the crosshairs, the BBC has decided not to broadcast the appeal of the Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC) for humanitarian relief in Gaza. Blocking the umbrella group of 13 aid agencies from the airwaves doesn't make a lot of sense, but it sure is making headlines.

Writing in the Times, Andrew Roberts defends the BBC's decision, because he believes many of the agencies are "anti-Israeli" and "deeply partisan". It's a pretty rough attack on the cream of the British aid community -- the DEC includes ActionAid, the British Red Cross, CAFOD, Care International, Christian Aid, Oxfam and Save the Children, among others. But worse, the author then goes on to reveal his own ideological bias without any attempt at balance whatsoever, undermining his argument immediately: not showing the appeal becomes just as partisan a move as showing it would be.

But has the BBC really got itself caught in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't controversy over the DEC's Gaza appeal? Maybe not. Perhaps they just need to put down the political lens and look at this through a different one.

Does Media Commentary Change Minds?

This ran in my Reuters AlertNet blog in January 2009. I think the date was the 12th, but I'm not 100% sure. The original disappeared in early 2011 unfortunately.

=======

I wonder: am I wasting my time? No, that's not the self-pitying observation of a middle-aged man fast approaching another birthday in a couple days time. I mean, professionally, am I putting too much effort into the wrong things?

In my job, I am supposed to be helping to move the public debate -- or at least elite opinion -- in the direction of policies that will assist in the peaceful resolution of conflicts. In trying to do this, I spend a lot of time writing, editing and placing op-eds and commentary articles in media outlets around the world. Now, I've just read an opinion piece that tells me it might not be worth it.

Killing the Messenger in Asia-Pacific

A quick post from Jakarta on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 15 December 2008.

=======

Here in Jakarta, journalists from across the Asia-Pacific region are gathering to discuss the security issues they face in their reporting. Day one of the International News Safety Institute's (INSI) conference, "Killing the Messenger", has been pretty revealing.

Twitter in Mumbai

I wrote this for my Reuters AlertNet blog on 28 November 2008. When I look back at it now, in April 2011 after having relied on Twitter quite a bit to follow the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, I can say I'm far less sceptical now. And actually, I launched Crisis Group's Twitter feed shortly after my early expressions of doubt. Twitter is a useful source to add to the mix as long as you know how to use it and and understand its limitations.

=======

I will try to make this blog entry 140 characters long, since that is the longest possible message on Twitter, which some are raving about as a source of news during the Mumbai attacks. I'm not exactly convinced. And I'm already over 140 characters.

I am someone who has previously equated "citizen journalism" with "citizen dentistry", so Twitter heads were obviously going to have a hard time convincing me. There have been a few interesting articles trying to make the case with the attacks in Mumbai, however, including one from Mathew Ingram, who boldly claims, "Yes, Twitter is a source of journalism".

Reuters also has had a good piece on "citizen journalism" in the Mumbai case, as does France 24, CNN and others.

I remain sceptical, however. Looking through the Twitter search stream for "Mumbai", I see so much useless information, I quickly get the feeling I am wasting my time. There are some personal notes -- very welcome no doubt if you have family or friends caught up in the madness and would like to know if they're OK, but it's not information that offers anything anyone can act upon.

Witness to Absurdity

Given what I've written about Uzbekistan in recent years -- and assuming the visa-issuing officials in Tashkent have heard of Google -- there was never much chance of me getting into the country under normal circumstances. But an opportunity came in autumn of 2008, when I was able to go as part of an EU-sponsored conference. The experience of visiting Uzbekistan again after five or six years away was welcome yet disturbing. This is the piece I wrote upon return, for Transitions Online on 16 October 2008.

=======

Arriving at Tashkent airport is not a pleasant experience. For foreigners, it means three or four hours in the tumbling scrum of Uzbek customs and immigration, with hundreds of people cramming up against each other to get through the paperwork. It’s not just the chaotic developing world, “this passport control is taking forever” sort of thing, but a literal shoving match for hours on end. It would be hard to imagine anything worse, but then, you don’t really have to: you just have to look at the pitched battle at the passport control booth for Uzbekistan’s own citizens.

No Crisis Like a Financial Crisis

From my Reuters AlertNet blog on 9 October 2008.

=======

So, I might as well just pack up and go on holiday for a few months. With the global financial crisis continuing, no one wants to hear about violent conflict and mass atrocities around the world. Trying to interest the media in these stories -- ie, my job -- is even harder than usual these days.