Category Archives: media control
Mexico student protests cause election stir
Los Angeles Times
May 24, 2012
By Tracy Wilkinson
MEXICO CITY — It’s almost starting to look like a movement. Thousands of university students have poured into the streets of Mexico City for the second time in a week to protest the way the nation’s upcoming presidential election is being run and, more specifically, covered in the Mexican media.
They are especially incensed that victory by Enrique Peña Nieto on July 1 is often portrayed as a fait accompli.
About 15,000 people (by city officials’ count) gathered Wednesday evening at the controversial Pillar of Light monument (seen by many here as a government boondoggle) and marched down the iconic Paseo de la Reforma.
They stopped outside the headquarters of the giant Televisa broadcasting network to demand fairer and more pluralistic TV news. “We are not one, we are not 100. Televisa, count us!” some chanted.
The protesters came from a wide range of universities: public, private; leftist, rightist, Catholic. And while many were decidedly anti-Peña Nieto — a message made clear in banners and signs — their protest appears to go beyond pure partisan politics and represents a broader questioning of Mexico’s status quo.
Television channel and newspaper ownership is concentrated in a few hands in Mexico, and many of the demonstrators believe it is skewed in favor of the Peña Nieto campaign and the return to presidential power of his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The PRI ruled single-handedly for seven decades until being ousted in 2000.
That feeling of being left out, and a general disillusionment with a system long plagued by corruption, had led many of Mexico’s young voters to sit out this campaign. Wednesday’s protest, and another one over the weekend, may not be enough to turn the tide, but the efforts are attracting attention.
“The real miracle is that a complete generation that was condemned to apathy, to only observe, and to individualism, is once again making the nation’s destiny their own,” said Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, who attended Wednesday’s march.
Televisa and other major news organizations have defended their coverage of the campaign, noting that they are required by law to give equal time to candidates.
“I came here to ask for transparency in the media,” said Chloe Nava, a student from the Panamericana University. “It seems we need to rescue that instinct as citizens.”
Full Article Here – http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-election-students-20120525,0,6629519.story?track=rss&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
U.S. ‘info ops’ programs dubious, costly
USA Today
Feb. 29, 2012
By Tom Vanden Brook and Ray Locker
WASHINGTON – As the Pentagon has sought to sell wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to often-hostile populations there, it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on poorly tracked marketing and propaganda campaigns that military leaders like to call “information operations,” the modern equivalent of psychological warfare.
D’oh! Oil industry lobbyists punked by enviro activist (AUDIO)
The Lookout
Dec. 20, 2011
By Zachary Roth
The oil industry spends millions each year to shape its image and shift the public debate in its favor. But amid growing concern over climate change — and over the industry’s clout in Washington — it can sometimes find itself losing control of its message pretty quickly.
That’s what happened earlier this month, when the American Petroleum Institute (API), a powerful Washington-based lobbying organization for oil and gas companies, put out a call for volunteers to appear in an upcoming commercial about domestic energy production — and got more than it bargained for. The ad campaign, scheduled to launch January 1 on CNN and coordinated by the high-priced Edelman PR firm, uses ordinary-looking people, dubbed “Energy Citizens,” to insert a pro-oil and gas message into the 2012 elections.
But one respondent to the casting call, Connor Gibson, turned out not to be quite what the industry was looking for. Unbeknownst to the organizers, Gibson was an activist with the environmental group Greenpeace, and was surreptitiously recording the proceedings — recordings that Greenpeace provided exclusively to Yahoo News.
As the director begins to feed him his lines, Gibson veers radically off script. With the cameras rolling, he assails what he calls the “lies and influence-peddling” of the oil industry. And before being hurriedly shown the door, Gibson derides the Energy Citizens campaign as “an astroturf front group created by the American Petroleum Institute to make it sound like there is citizen support for petroleum in our energy future.”
Awkward.
Before intentionally blowing his cover, Gibson also recorded the organizers themselves saying things they might have preferred to keep private. For instance, at one point, a production staffer says participants will be put in costume, then fed lines by a director. That contrasts with API’s original call for volunteers, obtained by Greenpeace, which promises participants they’ll be able to “express their views” and “have an honest debate.” More important, Greenpeace argues, the scripted nature of the ads undercuts the core message they’re intended to convey: that there’s widespread, authentic, grassroots support for the oil and gas industry.
Full Article Here – http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/d-oh-oil-industry-lobbyists-punked-enviro-activist-143714171.html
Charity president says aid groups are misleading the public on Somalia
Guardian
Sept. 3, 2011
By Tracy McVeigh
The head of an international medical charity has called on aid agencies to stop presenting a misleading picture of the famine in Somalia and admit that helping the worst-affected people is almost impossible.
The international president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Dr Unni Karunakara, returned from Somalia last week and said that, even though there was chronic malnutrition and drought across east Africa, hardly any agencies were able to work inside war-torn Somalia, where the picture was “profoundly distressing”. He condemned other organisations and the media for “glossing over” the reality in order to convince people that simply giving money for food was the answer.
According to Karunakara, agencies have been able to provide medical and nutritional care for tens of thousands in camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, which have been receiving huge numbers of refugees from Somalia. But trying to access those in the “epicentre” of the disaster has been slow and difficult. “We may have to live with the reality that we may never be able to reach the communities most in need of help,” he said.
Karunakara said that the use of phrases such as “famine in the Horn of Africa” or “worst drought in 60 years” obscured the “man-made” factors that had created the crisis and wrongly implied that the solution was simply to find the money to ship enough food to the region.
He described Mogadishu, the Somali capital, as dotted with plastic sheets supported by twigs, sheltering groups of weak and starving people who had walked in from the worst-affected areas in southern and central Somalia. “I met a woman who had left her home with her husband and seven children to walk to Mogadishu and had arrived after five days with only four children,” he said.
“MSF is constantly being forced to make tough choices in deploying or expanding our activities, in sticking to our principles of neutrality with the daily realities of people going without healthcare, without food. Our staff face being shot. But glossing over the man-made causes of hunger and starvation in the region and the great difficulties in addressing them will not help resolve the crisis. Aid agencies are being impeded in the area.
“MSF has been working in Somalia for 20 years, and we know that if we are struggling then others will not be able to work at all. The reality on the ground is that there are serious difficulties that affect our abilities to respond to need.”
Full Article Here – http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/sep/03/charity-aid-groups-misleading-somalia
Syria’s electronic army
Al Jazeera
Aug. 28, 2011
By Jillian C. York
While the battles between the opposition and the Syrian regime are waged on the ground, a different battle is emerging online.
In the midst of a virtual blackout on the city of Hama, citizen videos – often shaky and unverifiable – document the brutality of the Syrian military’s crackdown on the city, ongoing since July 31 – the day before the start of Ramadan – while online campaigns, hosted on Facebook and Twitter, aim to draw attention to events on the ground. The narrative: Syrians are suffering and want the world to take notice.
At the same time, and often on the same networks, a different story can be seen, as Syrians in favour of the Assad regime stake out online ground in attempt to shift the narrative in their favour. And though there are individuals who post supportive sentiments about Assad, the overwhelming majority of pro-regime content online appears well-coordinated; the work of organised groups coming together to support the beleaguered president.
The Syrian electronic army
Tunisia’s Ben Ali promised a more open internet just one day before he was ousted. In Egypt, Mubarak sought a different strategy, shutting down the majority of the internet for a week in the hopes of disabling activist networks. Syria has taken a different approach to the internet altogether, first unblocking popular social networking sites, then throwing support to pro-regime hackers in the hopes of countering opposition forces online.
As Helmi Noman has documented, the Syrian Electronic Army – a cabal of hackers, acknowledged as a positive force by Assad himself in a June 20 speech – has overtaken certain Facebook pages, such as those belonging to French and US presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama, TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey, and the page for ABC News and flooding them with comments like “we love Bashar al-Assad” and “I live in Syria, stop lying, nothing is happening in Syria”.
More recently, the group has targeted the US Department of Treasury, in light of US government plans to impose further sanctions on the Syrian regime.
In addition to flooding Facebook pages, it has coordinated hacking attempts from their own Facebook page, and have defaced or disabled a number of websites. Although Facebook has removed a number of their pages, a quick search of the site brings up numerous new ones, suggesting a strong sense of determination.
Though the “electronic army” doesn’t seem to have much of a presence on Twitter, other groups vie for influence there by flooding popular hashtags with largely irrelevant content, such as photographs of the Syrian landscape, often accompanied by other, unrelated hashtags.
Fighting back
Though the Army seemed to reign in the online domain for more than a month, just as the scales in Syria now seem to be tipping in favour of the opposition, so are they in favour of Syrian digital activists and their supporters.
In early August, the sites of Syrian First Lady Asma Assad and the UAE Embassy in Syria were hacked, for which Anonymous took credit. On August 7, the Syrian Ministry of Defence website was also targeted with an elaborate defacement, featuring the Syrian flag, the symbol of Anonymous, and the following message:
“To the Syrian people: The world stands with you against the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad. Know that time and history are on your side – tyrants use violence because they have nothing else, and the more violent they are, the more fragile they become. We salute your determination to be non-violent in the face of the regime’s brutality, and admire your willingness to pursue justice, not mere revenge. All tyrants will fall, and thanks to your bravery Bashar Al-Assad is next.
“To the Syrian military: You are responsible for protecting the Syrian people, and anyone who orders you to kill women, children, and the elderly deserves to be tried for treason. No outside enemy could do as much damage to Syria as Bashar Al-Assad has done. Defend your country – rise up against the regime! – Anonymous.”
A social media crackdown is the wrong response to riots
Guardian
Aug. 11, 2011
By Jeff Jarvis
The government is contemplating tactics against the UK riots that set dangerous precedents.
In parliament today, prime minister David Cameron said authorities and the industry were looking at “whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality”. Well, at least he did post it as a question of right and wrong.
It would be wrong, sir. Who is to say what communication and content should be banned from whom on what platform? On my BlackBerry? My computer? My telephone? My street corner?
Cameron also said, according to a Guardian tweet, that he would look at asking online services to take down offending photos. Again, who decides that content is offending? If you give authority to government and telco and social companies to censor that, what else can and will they censor?
Beware, sir. If you take these steps, what separates you from the Saudi government demanding the ability to listen to and restrict its BBM networks? What separates you from Arab tyrannies cutting off social communication via Twitter or from China banning it?
This regulatory reflex further exposes the danger of British government thinking it can and should regulate media. Beware, my friends. When anyone’s speech is not free, no one’s speech is free. I refer the honourable gentleman to this . Censorship is not the path to civility. Only speech is.
There is also debate about tactics to restrict anonymity in public. Cameron wants police to have the authority “in certain circumstances” to require face masks to be removed: instead of a burqa ban, a hoodie ban. One MP in the current debate also suggested rioters be sprayed with indelible ink. In addition, Cameron said that CCTV pictures – and, one assumes, pictures on social networks and the afore-derided BBM – would be used to identity and arrest rioters. I understand the motive and goal to control crime. I don’t necessarily oppose the moves, for I argue in Public Parts that what one does in public is public.
But again, be aware of the precedents these actions would set. Be aware how they could be used under other circumstances. In Public Parts, I compare the use of social media to identity Egyptian secret police from ID photos taken from their liberated headquarters with the use of social media to identity protestors in Iran. A tool used for good can be used for bad.
The bottom line of these debated tactics would be this: anonymity would be banned in public; it would require that one be public in public.
Right now, online, we are having many debates about anonymity and identity .
So now we need to look at how the public street in London compares with the public street on the internet, on Facebook, Twitter, BBM, blogs and newspapers. What government does on the streets it could do on the internet, and vice versa. Each is a form of a public.
Full Article Here – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/11/social-media-riots
BREAKING: All Communications Cut to 1.7 Million in Gaza, Including Mobile, Landline and Internet
Daily Kos
Aug. 9, 2011
By David Harris Gershon
Information is difficult to procure at this stage, but initial reports indicate that Israeli bulldozers, possibly by accident, have cut all communication lines connecting Gaza to the world.
The reports, coming in both on Twitter and via Maan, a Palestinian news outlet, seem to confirm that efforts to reach residents in Gaza are unsuccessful.
I am doing my best to confirm this information from sources in Israel and through monitoring of various forums, and will post updates below the fold as they come.
I ask that people not make definite claims in the comments about what has occurred, since this is just breaking and very difficult to sort out.
However, it is potentially a major story, and one that needs to be reported, particularly with the massive protests ongoing in the background.
Full Article Here – http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/09/1005150/-BREAKING:-All-Communications-Cut-to-17-Million-in-Gaza,-Including-Mobile,-Landline-and-Internet?via=siderec
Japan Held Nuclear Data, Leaving Evacuees in Peril
New York Times
Aug. 8, 2011
By NORIMITSU ONISHI and MARTIN FACKLER
FUKUSHIMA, Japan — The day after a giant tsunami set off the continuing disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, thousands of residents at the nearby town of Namie gathered to evacuate.
Given no guidance from Tokyo, town officials led the residents north, believing that winter winds would be blowing south and carrying away any radioactive emissions. For three nights, while hydrogen explosions at four of the reactors spewed radiation into the air, they stayed in a district called Tsushima where the children played outside and some parents used water from a mountain stream to prepare rice.
The winds, in fact, had been blowing directly toward Tsushima — and town officials would learn two months later that a government computer system designed to predict the spread of radioactive releases had been showing just that.
But the forecasts were left unpublicized by bureaucrats in Tokyo, operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism. Japan’s political leaders at first did not know about the system and later played down the data, apparently fearful of having to significantly enlarge the evacuation zone — and acknowledge the accident’s severity.
“From the 12th to the 15th we were in a location with one of the highest levels of radiation,” said Tamotsu Baba, the mayor of Namie, which is about five miles from the nuclear plant. He and thousands from Namie now live in temporary housing in another town, Nihonmatsu. “We are extremely worried about internal exposure to radiation.”
The withholding of information, he said, was akin to “murder.”
In interviews and public statements, some current and former government officials have admitted that Japanese authorities engaged in a pattern of withholding damaging information and denying facts of the nuclear disaster — in order, some of them said, to limit the size of costly and disruptive evacuations in land-scarce Japan and to avoid public questioning of the politically powerful nuclear industry. As the nuclear plant continues to release radiation, some of which has slipped into the nation’s food supply, public anger is growing at what many here see as an official campaign to play down the scope of the accident and the potential health risks.
Seiki Soramoto, a lawmaker and former nuclear engineer to whom Prime Minister Naoto Kan turned for advice during the crisis, blamed the government for withholding forecasts from the computer system, known as the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or Speedi.
“In the end, it was the prime minister’s office that hid the Speedi data,” he said. “Because they didn’t have the knowledge to know what the data meant, and thus they did not know what to say to the public, they thought only of their own safety, and decided it was easier just not to announce it.”
Full Article Here – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/world/asia/09japan.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
