Al Jazeera and social change in the Middle East

Broadcast news, whatever its allegiances and whatever platform it uses, has great power to organize the collective mind around ideas, ideals and events. While Twitter, Facebook and other social media have been profiled as part of the coverage of protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Iran, not as much has been said about the role of Al Jazeera. The New York Times yesterday published a fascinating piece on just this subject. From the story:

In many ways, it is Al Jazeera’s moment — not only because of the role it has played, but also because the channel has helped to shape a narrative of popular rage against oppressive American-backed Arab governments (and against Israel) ever since its founding 15 years ago. That narrative has long been implicit in the channel’s heavy emphasis on Arab suffering and political crisis, its screaming-match talk shows, even its sensational news banners and swelling orchestral accompaniments. 

“The notion that there is a common struggle across the Arab world is something Al Jazeera helped create,” said Marc Lynch, a professor of Middle East Studies at George Washington University who has written extensively on the Arab news media. “They did not cause these events, but it’s almost impossible to imagine all this happening without Al Jazeera.”

Read the rest here.

If you want to hear Al Jazeera's coverage, the live English-language stream is here.

LANG likes Facebook, readers not so sure (updated)

Back in October, San Bernardino Sun editor Frank Pine sent around a memo saying the nine papers that make up the Los Angeles Newspaper Group chain would be dropping their Topix commenting system for one that interfaces with Facebook accounts. One of the primary reasons for the change was to chase off trolls, who, shielded by anonymity, often veered in racist invective and personal attack - even when stories had nothing to do with race or a particular person.

The new system requires readers to be logged into Facebook and comments are by default linked to the person's page. This transparency (Facebook's privacy critics might laugh at the word) is supposed to create an environment where comments follow a socially correct etiquette, the argument goes.

The changeover happened on Friday, Dec. 3, with all nine papers publishing an online story describing the system and soliciting feedback. So far, most of the responses have been negative, with readers decrying the loss of anonymity, which they say allows for more honest viewpoints, and criticizing the papers for putting "civility" ahead of free and open debate.

A few readers warned that trolls would simply create fake Facebook accounts and return with the same aggressive madness. Some readers worried about their own privacy, saying they didn't like that comments were automatically posted to their Facebook pages. A few readers said they liked the new system and hoped it would make for more civil discussions.

Change always comes hard in the daily newspaper world. Take away a comic strip and you're likely to swamp every department with cranky phone calls - the kind of reaction news editors would love to come in response to, say, actual news. Still, there are interesting questions surrounding anonymous posts and the question of when an opinion become unacceptable as well as the thought of newspapers aligning themselves with Facebook's private profit machine to promote a kind of civility.

Below, I've rounded up a few of the comments that came in over the weekend.

From an unhappy reader in the Whittier Daily News:

I feel the lack of anonymity restricts the truth, people are more inclined to say what they think when they're not being monitored by a moderator. Sure most of the remarks were rude and bigoted, but some stated hardcore facts and relevance to the post.

A dubious Pasadena Star-News reader:

The anonymous comments were the best part of this paper. 

Compared to the Glendale News Press which requires comments to be approved, Star News had a lively conversation.

1. Why do conversations about the news need to be "civil?"

2. Thanks for defining civility for us all.

Good luck with this.

 An aggressive rejection in the LA Daily News:

I will never participate in your comments again. "Civil" means repression in this context and I will stop reading your FUCKING SWILL. 

 The San Bernardino Sun had a few positive comments, like this one:

I think the new Facebook-based comment feature for The Sun, Daily Facts, and Daily Bulletin is great. The public comment feature on too many online news outlets have been overrun by immature, offensive, and asinine comments from users protected by anonymity.

One Inland Valley Daily Bulletin reader sees a conspiracy:

The Daily Bulletin sold out! This is just a move to protect corrupt politicians and their Shady developer Godfathers. Nothing is worse than when they steal from the tax payers, name libraries after themselves and then have to hear the negative comments of the victimized public. Although alot of mud slinging whent on in the old style of posting, at least it was an open public forum that people could use to express their true sentiments and beliefes , good or bad. This new method of traceable commenting and a lack of true public input will only mean that the cancer of corruption will choke up the wheels of justice and crush the common citizen. Good luck to us all.

The cost of political warfare

Want to know how much money is being spent on that annoying candidate ad? Wesleyan University has a database for that:

Transparency and government responsiveness depend critically on real-time publicly available information disclosing efforts to influence elections. The Wesleyan Media Project tracks and analyzes all broadcast advertisements aired by or on behalf of federal and state election candidates in every media market in the country. Throughout the course of the 2010 election cycle, we will provide real-time information on the extent of corporate and union spending in federal election campaigns across the country, who specifically is doing that spending and which candidates are benefiting.

Four in the morning

1. Wisconsin is set to pass a journalists' shield law. State Journal

2. "Revenue promiscuity" is the new buzz phrase for investigative journalism - but doesn't the number of partners you have, as in other types of promiscuous behavior, increase the risk of something going wrong? Nieman Journalism Lab

3. The Supreme Court overturns a law banning animal cruelty videos on free speech grounds. Wa Po

4. Forbes makes an offer many people can and should refuse. Gawker

Blind justice

The U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 today to indefinitely block cameras from California's Prop. 8 trial, overturning the trial judge's order to allow a limited broadcast of the proceedings. The court's conservatives voted in the majority. LAT

Guardian lets Twitter do the talking

A British law firm today agreed to drop a gag order that had prevented the Guardian newspaper from reporting that a member of the British Parliament had raised questions about a secret report on toxic dumping off the Ivory Coast. The law firm of Carter-Ruck, which represent oil-trading giant Trafigura, had earlier won a secret injunction to stop the paper from exposing a report - possibly this report - that some say addresses whether Trafigura knew about the dumping.

Time magazine and others cited the use of social media tools, most notably Twitter, to sidestep the gag order and make public that Trafigura was likely behind the injunction. But I don't understand why the Guardian agreed to abide by the gag order in the first place. As Stephen Shotnes, a media-law expert with the London firm Simons Muirhead & Burton, told Time magazine: "It's been enshrined in our law for 300 years that there's freedom of reporting of parliamentary proceedings." Shouldn't the paper have broken the gag itself?

Gagging the Guardian

The British government has issued an unusual gag order to prevent the Guardian newspaper from reporting on unknown parliamentary proceedings. The order is so strict that the paper cannot reference the proceedings in any way or even say why the order was issued.

From the Guardian:

The Guardian is prevented from identifying the [member of Parliament] who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

That sounds like a gag order well worth breaking.

Four in the morning

1. Another consequence of cutbacks at newspapers: Fewer papers are spending the time and money to fight for public access to court trials. The story mentions the Riverside Press-Enterprise, which helped set the standard for access to court trials in a pair of cases in the 1980s. NYT

2. One company - and I know there are others - thinks jargon and misdirection are the new news. From the NYT:

...the suburban newspaper is at the vanguard of the industry: reporters at The Journal News don’t work in a newsroom, they are part of an “Information Center”; they don’t cover beats, they cover “topics”; and in a new wrinkle to an old story, the staff was not being laid off, but becoming part of a “comprehensive restructuring plan."

Apparently, you no longer need to leave the newspaper to work in PR. NYT

3. Hard-hitting journalism is expensive: A jury awarded a doctor who was the subject of several articles in the St. Petersburg Times $10 million in a libel lawsuit. Even if the paper wins on appeal, the lawyers have to be paid. St. Petersburg Times

4. The Hartford Courant had some trouble managing both aggregation and attribution - it was taking stories from other papers posted to its website and then putting them in the newspaper under a Courant byline. Courant

Chinese computers unshackled

The Chinese government has delayed indefinitely a requirement that all personal computers sold in the country include special software designed to block pornography and anything else officials deemed unsavory.

From the New York Times:

The filtering software has been the object of furious online debate since the requirement to install it was disclosed. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which licensed the technology from two Chinese developers, says the software automatically blocks Web surfers from seeing “unhealthy Internet content.” Updated lists of banned content are automatically downloaded onto users’ computers from the developers’ servers.

But the software’s current list of banned words, posted online by Chinese hackers, is laced with political topics. Businesses have complained that the software is so poorly designed that it opens computers not just to government snooping, but also to hacker attacks by vandals and criminals.

U.S. official protested the requirement as a violation of free-trade agreements and Chinese retailers had backlogs of pristine PCs.

Palmdale Water District unplugged

Palmdale Water District General Manager Randy Hill recently admonished his employees not to talk to a specific reporter at the Antelope Valley Press - and threatened them with discipline "up to and including termination" if they failed to follow the directive - after the newspaper published a story about the district's financial problems.

Aside from being hamhanded, and a badge of honor for reporter Alisha Semchuck, the general manager's order might violate the law, according to Jim Ewert of the California Newspaper Publishers Association.

From the AV Press:

Targeting a reporter to be singled out is shaky practice [when] viewed through the lens of case law, Ewert said.

"If they're going to provide access to one media source, they must provide to all," Ewert said. "They have to treat all media sources the same." That conclusion falls under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

Asked about it, Hill was quick with an answer.

"It applies to all media," Hill said of his memos. "I just happened to use your name because you've been the problem," he told the Valley Press reporter.

Maybe it's because public water agencies are usually ignored that they get so bent out of shape when they're forced into the light. No matter. Hill has all but guaranteed that the district will face added scrutiny for months to come.

(via CalAware)

Anti-anti-SLAPP legislation in Sacramento

The California Legislature might not be able to fix our multi billion-dollar budget deficit, but a bill authored by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, would prevent courts from imposing debilitating penalties in good-government cases such as the one that saddled open-government activists Rich McKee and CalAware with tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

The legislation would bar government agencies from seeking repayment of attorney fees under the state's anti-SLAPP law when they are sued to produce public documents or to comply with public meeting requirements. Anti-SLAPP allows defendants to collect attorney fees when a court decides a case is without merit.

McKee and CalAware joined a lawsuit brought against Orange Unified School District for alleged violations of public meeting law. They lost the case and the court awarded the district more than $80,000 in attorney fees.

Trial of U.S. journalist under way

Iranian officials revealed today that the trial of American journalist Roxana Saberi, 31, is already a day old. Iran has charged Saberi with being a spy.

From the NYT:

“She is charged with spying for foreigners,” the judiciary official, Alireza Jamshidi, told ISNA, a news agency. “The first session of the trial was held yesterday, and she defended herself for the last time.”

Mr. Jamshidi said the trial was being held behind closed doors because the charges against her were related to national security. “She was spying for America,” he said.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said that the United States is “deeply concerned” about the espionage charges and has asked Iranian diplomats for help in obtaining Ms. Saberi’s immediate release.

In his own words

I asked open-government activist Richard McKee to write a guest column explaining why he stood up in court to defend the public's right to hear what an "oddball" member of the Orange Unified School Board had to say at a public meeting. The court ruled against McKee, saying the school district had a right to censor the oddball, and slapped McKee with an $86,000 fine.

It's a case that should send a chill up every watchdog's spine.

Here's a portion of what he wrote (the entire column is here):

In essence, the court said a government agency can cut out any information from its publications that might cast it’s decisions in a bad light, and the agency can take any action it wants to discourage elected officials from criticizing administrative decisions.

America’s republican form of government – of, by, and for the people – presupposes that the public will be kept informed as to the issues its government faces and retains the right to instruct their representatives as to the best course of action.

When the courts endorse the government’s right to limit or control the information it provides to the public, they allow the government to control the outcome of decision-making (i.e., Iraq has weapons of mass destruction).

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes first described the rational for protections meant to ensure an open marketplace of ideas: “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which [people’s] wishes safely can be carried out.”

By its opinion in Californians Aware v. Orange Unified School District..., the Fourth District Court of Appeals authorized school boards to distribute to the public: state test score summaries absent scores from under-performing schools, tapes of board meetings with all of the negative public comments deleted, and financial reports with evidence of any fraud removed.

The concern here is historically simple. Those holding power don’t always have our best interests at heart; and power is protected by controlling what information is released.

In a public forum, government speech should never trump individual speech rights. And government speech must never include the selective release of information meant to mislead the public.

Click here to read the entire column.

Yelp lawsuit moves forward

A Santa Clara Superior Court judge has ruled that a dentist can move ahead with a libel lawsuit against a family that posted a critical review of the dentist on the website Yelp.