Who needs a free press?
Everybody needs a free press.
There was a weird, semi-celebratory jitter going around the China blogosphere for much of the past two days. Sometime Wednesday, BlogSpot came back from the Net Nanny’s netherworld and into the off-blue light of the free-ish Internet. That we were all jumping for joy is telling: LiveJournal, Xanga, free Wordpress.com blogs, Wikipedia, BBC News too many others to count are still blocked. But at least one came back. And if I had to choose which to unblock, BlogSpot would be it, based solely on numbers.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad when I can read Jottings from the Granite Studio, Teaching Online Journalism and Loughrie Does Korea sans proxy, but it’s a sour joy.
And it didn’t last. Here’s (some of) what I can’t access freely at the moment: My old BlogSpot blog, my Blogger dashboard, Salon.com, the Christian Science Monitor, Howard Owens‘ blog.
It’s stopped being a surprise now. I flip on Tor or go through PK Blogs and deal with the crawling pace of downloads. This is China, as I’m often told, which means stuff doesn’t work like it should.
I’m getting starry-eyed and soap-boxy here, so let me back up. I started thinking about all this again a week ago, reading a post on Mindy McAdams’ blog about Malaysia’s unique ways of keeping the press in line. That’s just traditional outlets, mind you. The goverment doesn’t go after the Internet directly, she wrote. Here’s how it all works:
The government issues and can therefore retract licenses to publish, meaning any story that goes too far could be the last one your newspaper prints. More subtle, perhaps, is the way stepping on powerful toes can keep your children from going to a top university, since the federal government controls all college placements. Amazing? Yes. Read the entire post. Here’s where it gets really interesting:
In a country such as Malaysia, the only freedom of speech to be found in any mass medium is online (there is also an underground network of SMS — because everyone sends text messages all day long, even grandmothers and small children).
Because the government has pledged not to censor or control the Internet — in the interests of attracting Western business and not seeming to be too backward or paternalistic — what is the best way to combat the truths found only on blogs and other online sites?
1. Try to convince everyone that the Internet is full of lies.
2. Try to convince people that there is no way to separate truth from fiction online.
3. Make all bloggers out to be crazy people, unreliable, and certainly never experts.
4. Forbid all journalists to use information found online.
5. Repeat the age-old assurances that the government itself will tell the people everything they need to know.
A thought bubbled up while reading this: If only China were so subtle.
The CCP’s methods for man-handling the press, both traditional and online, at times seem to resemble a myopic Parkinson’s patient trying to play Jenga with a baseball bat. When the Nail House story started to get hot, Beijing just said: “No more.”
The decree was later rescinded, but that’s beside the point. It shouldn’t be Beijing’s decision. If there’s a hopeful side to the story, it’s that Chinese bloggers stepped up and kept the pressure on. The story is still unfolding.
There are few issues about which I could be called a hard-liner. Hell, I wobble on waffles and flip-flop on pancakes. Take away my ability to get and share information, however, and I start to get real black and white on things.
Because it’s not just about my need to gripe, argue, piss, moan, vent, question, insult, inform, allude, inspire, consult and shout real loud. We’re talking about sharing an experience, defining a place and time, documenting history and maybe nudging things around the edges. This is important stuff.
I used to work in a sad little newspaper in Southern California, covering schools that, well, weren’t so prestigious. Some couldn’t get their students to read like they ought to. One district had most of its high school built under questionable legality.
A contractor on that faulty high school once told me, “We don’t want to turn this into a messy public debate.” Strange, I thought, because avoiding public debate had helped get the school into this very mess.
I became a journalist for optimistic reasons. I believed five years ago, and I believe now, that sunshine is the best cure for public ills. Most reporting of quality is not done out of a cynical desire to snipe at the powerful, but out of an affixed belief that those who are informed will be better equipped and inspired to change things for the better.
Take away that constant examination and the rot seeps in. It happens because people can operate without checks. I’ve seen it in Lancaster and the stories keep pouring out of Beijing.
Before I get any more high and mighty on this, it’s worth remembering that China isn’t the only country where information is limited. Try to find a station carrying Al Jazeera’s English news service in America. You can’t.
Like I said: Everybody needs a free press.
March 31st, 2007 at 2:41 am
I’m not sure I get it. The link that you reference to Ms. McAdams, is misleading. When she says that Al Jazeera is blocked, it isn’t really, is it?
In the same way that no satellite or cable network carries extremist nazi proaganda or obscure African languages or even Chinese dialect for that matter given there are something like 400 dialects? I wonder if there’s really a market for it. Al Jazeera after all, does take some fairly extreme positions as well and knowing this, a station must be able to generate sufficient returns to make it worthwhile. Let’s also not forget that Al Jazeera is a state owned news network from a less than democratic country Qatar (albeit friendly to American interests - then again that might not count for much as that’s what they say about Saudi Arabia).
Basically Ms McAdams heaps scorn on an “ultra-conservative media watchdog organization” as being responsible for a letter campaign to prevent Al Jazeera from being seen. If you or I had a dime for every absurd statement that some lobby group or special interest group made (including some of the ones coming from Accuracy in Media or even the Associated Press), we’d easily be able to retire.
I personally treat most accusations of censorship in the US with a degree of skepticism only because of how easy it is now a days for people to reach information through the net. With the loss of trust in mainstream journalism over the past few decades, I think a lot more people are using the net to seek out unfiltered (less filtered) facts/news. There is however a certain irony in watching some people rail on at well attended and favorably covered, rallies and protests about their freedom of speech being muzzled.
If you really want an example of censorship in the west, do check out France: http://faustasblog.com/2007/03/banned-in-france-citizen-journalists.html
I like your blog by the way!
March 31st, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Hey Clement, good to see you on the Wordpress side. There’s a bit more work to be done tidying this site up, but I’m enjoying it more than Blogger already. How are you getting around the Firewall these days, by the way?
As for Al Jazeera, my point (and Mindy’s, I think) is that it has never been given a chance to work in a market setting. I cringe every time an interest group in the US says we should limit the amount of information available to people. Maybe Al Jazeera would fail miserably, but we don’t know, and I think cable networks are being over-cautious and self-censoring. I’m hesitant to put it in the same category with “extremist nazi proaganda or obscure African languages or even Chinese dialect” though.
The French example is a stronger one indeed, and reminds me of another link I should put in, from Global Voices.
Turkey is having trouble with YouTube, as well, as the story says. I had to go through a proxy to get it though, because Global Voices is blocked here, too.
March 31st, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Hi Chris -
The workaround is great using the proxy.pac file for Firefox. The one that goes like this and is linked to in the options settings:
function FindProxyForURL(url,host){
if(dnsDomainIs(host, “.blogspot.com”)){
return “PROXY 72.14.219.190:80″;
}
if(dnsDomainIs(host, “.wordpress.com”)){
return “PROXY 72.232.101.41:80″;
}
}
I think I first read about the blogspot workaround which is in the conditional statement above, from Jottings from the Granite Studio. Let me know if you have any problems getting it.
I find it doesn’t slow down the net at all - or not noticeably anyway. It works for wordpress and blogspot. Based on the code and if you enter in the ip addresses, they seem to work by going through both blogspot and wordpress but using different IP addresses that the censors don’t block so it ought to be just as fast. The other workaround that works quite nicely and that I also use for ones not blocked is RSS feeds. I don’t even bother to go to blogspot for some blogs - you lose formatting of course, but I can live with that. Discovering RSS was quite helpful - I use google’s reader - saves me a huge amount of time.
With respect to Al Jazeera, you may be right that the networks are being overly cautious and maybe even self censoring, but I think there’s a big difference between not being tested by the market (which I understand Al Jazeera is now accessible through the net on a pay per view) and being “blocked” in the words of Mindy - which I think is far stronger and misleading (and like another of her readers I think it disappointingly inaccurate for a professor of journalism).
A dangerous argument though is that we ought to force networks to carry Al Jazeera. Again, bear in mind that Al Jazeera is state owned media. Fox also had big difficulties originally getting on the slate of cable networks that they bought their way in to give incentives for networks to carry them - it was a big deal at the time - it was only after that they did the news network - and given their popularity now relative to CNN, I think it’s clear that there was self censorship by way of the networks that defied market sensibilities. If it’s truly a question of self censorship by networks, the ironic reason maybe that they want to shield themselves from both the loss of revenues and deluge of self expression by interested viewers.
An example might be the dixie chicks. The dixie chicks said something inflammatory in an interview about GWB. As a result there was a backlash of people calling their country stations to stop playing their songs. Clear Channel stopped playing their songs. Dixie Chicks and others claimed it was censorship. But does Clear Channel also have the right of self expression, or don’t their customers also have the same right of self expression? The irony of course was the media made such a big deal of it that they were on the news for a few days straight - making mockery of the word censorship. Boycotts are not, I do not bellieve, censorship.
I don’t know if you’ve been following it, but the LA Times is going through a civil war with each other - publicly sniping and siding with each other in the press, or at least so it appears what with the coverage I’ve read. I think a conservative commentator at Salon.com made the observation something to the effect that there ought to be a right to free speech, but for the press it is a privilege - not a right to be read.
Incidentally, I have been thinking more and more based on what’s happening in France that the right to free speech is more of an American and British value rather than continental Europe where elites maintain far more control for the status quo. Take for example the use of hate laws that is being used to curb criticism of policies in Belgium (to my recollection the US doesn’t have hate laws).
With more blatent politicization of the news these days and obviously slanted against conservatives, in a country that tends conservative, it ought to be no surprise then that readerships and in turn, advertising revenues are falling.
Arguably the biggest threat though to the freedom of the press in the US is the ability of the courts to subpoena journalists for the names of sources - but that is something that large media outlets brought on themselves, and the result of the Plames debacle. Otherwise, I really can’t think of any good examples of censorship in the US, but lots elsewhere in the West. How so little is being discussed in the US over the riots in France is I think a more blatent example of self censorship. According to the BBC - “The police service said the figure of 98 cars burnt was in line with the nightly average before the trouble began on 27 October” (it’s the blurb that’s available from google - I can’t actually access the whole article). That’s not the picture that most people get of Paris - when it comes to political coverage, the press in the US seems to focus on criticizing the current US Administration to the point that some online pundits have said that maybe he should start marketing some of his patriot act policies as being that he’s bringing them more in line with Europe.
OK I admit it that I’m bored on a Saturday night given how much I’ve written but bear with me for one more small point - as to what category Al Jazeera should fall under - here’s an article that details why they are controversial - and how they have both accepted it, and tried to work to reign in overt biases in reporting:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/columnist/mediamix/2004-07-18-media-mix_x.htm
It’s still a relatively new network, I suspect at some point it will get on, but I suspect the BBC also initially had quite a hard time getting on - but only after it gets a bit more polished (given some of the crap that gets attributed to them and to other journalists in general, a little self censorship might not be a bad thing from some media outlets). OK enough of the ranting, time to go enjoy a snack at McDonald’s
April 1st, 2007 at 9:19 am
Wow, Clement - that was a hell of a comment. Twice as long as the original post I think
And Chris, not sure why you haven’t done that hack he mentions above… didn’t you comment on my blog about it? There’s new updated code (at LLW) that includes Wikipedia (and Livejournal, but that seems wonky).
April 1st, 2007 at 8:14 pm
@Humanaught:
I just set up the proxy (I know, I’m probably the last China blogger to do so), and it seems to be working alright, except when FireFox switches proxy options on me for no reason. I don’t know why it’s doing that. The internet is a mountain of frustration for me today.
@Clement:
Wow indeed, lots to go through here.
Re: ClearChannel and the Dixie Chicks. That seemed like such a stupid thing for a radio station to do, but I don’t listen to much country, so maybe I don’t get the audience there. Personally, I try to avoid CC (in the US, anyway) because their stations tend toward the most banal and overplayed crap on the dial, regardless of genre.
I don’t think anybody’s talking about forcing stations to carry Al Jazeera, but I’m surprised no station with a large ME immigrant customer base would choose to carry it. Maybe in Dearborn, MI? Is anyone really going to switch cable providers (assuming there’s an alternative) because the one they have carries AJ?
My big frustration, and the CC example made me think of this, is the idea that someone else gets to choose what I can watch or hear. I disagree on the difference between boycotts and censorship. Customers choosing not to buy the Dixie Chicks or watch AJ is a boycott. Everyone gets to choose to support it or not. If CC boycotts an artist or a cable station cuts off a network—for political reasons, at least—that’s effectively censorship. No I don’t get the choice of whether to support the decision or not, because most likely, I can’t switch cable companies.
The obvious flaw in this is that there are now more options. I get most of my new music online, for free, through podcasts. News comes from everywhere. Given those new options, broadcasters seem daft to try to limit content for such trivial reasons as politics.
OK, what else? I agree on subpoenas being a huge threat to press freedom. Worse than the Plame mess is the Congressmen calling for reporters to be jailed for printing stories like Dana Priest’s CIA prisons story. Frightening.
Re: Europe
I haven’t spent enough time reading non-English papers to comment with any intelligence. The Paris riots are an interesting case study, though. Here’s one of the best stories (a slide show, actually) I’ve seen on it, from the Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/slideshow/page/0,,2044805,00.html
Re: AJ improving and all
I suspect the infusion of talent from more established outlets will help bring standards up. I’d still like to see it now, though, because I just can’t sit through another news cycle of talking heads and over-blown non-stories of the other three 24-hour networks. Some other perspective would be nice.
This is getting to be a very long comment thread.
April 1st, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Funny thing about country music… the first concert I’ve ever attended was last year in my home town. A country show, it was a full house (2000 people), and I have to say that I was the only oriental person there that I could see. Yeah, not many people get country but it’s something that I’ve taken a liking to only in the last few years because it just seems so much happier than most of the stuff out there but my tastes are eclectic…
Anyway, it’s good you point to the congressmen calling for jailing reporters like Dana Priest. I’m not sure which congressmen you talk of (not been able to find any net references), but there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy within the media - and it ties directly to the Plame debacle. Thanks to the media’s push for Robert Novak to be forced to reveal his sources even if it included jailing (in the editorial pages of the New York Times no less), Patrick Fitzgerald had a New York Times reporter jailed for not revealing their sources. The irony is that it was all over nothing - Plame turns out not even to have been undercover when she was outed and the person responsible for the original leak was not even part of the “neo-con cabal” much to the disappointment of many I’m sure.
I think there are two complex points here - the first is the absurdly selective application of journalistic principles and even the dissemination of news and second, a question of whether the media is bound by any measure regarding national secrets and whether the “public’s right to know” extends to everything.
To the first, journalism may not have any times darker than these. Journalists have no one but themselves to blame. It is no secret that journalists tend left - and in this respect, Mindy is certainly not alone in her views, but I would hope you agree that journalists owe a certain degree of accuracy to their statements. I think most people want their news kept factual - but journalists insist on interpreting - and even making stuff up.
No where was this more self evident in the Dan Rather debacle. Dan Rather, an avowed Democrat may have elected GW Bush. In the hours following his 60 minutes report, bloggers began to question the reporting, and it turns out Rather was extraordinarily and quite probably maliciously sloppy.
I’m not sure if you read his blog, but Don Surber does a good job at pointing out some of the biases that reporters have - and to be charitable, I’m not sure many even notice:
http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber
If you still don’t believe me, have a read of http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/ - a Democrat no less who documents yet another media travesty - the unapologetic villication of a few rich/middle class white lacrosse players.
With respect to the second point - the official secrets act. I think it again comes down to a question on some issues whether or not whether one believes there is in fact a “War on Terror”. But let’s frame it in the context of say WWII - where in retrospect, those who supported fascism were clearly on the wrong side of history. If a reporter had found out about VE day before the fact, should he have reported it? Or for that matter, about the bombing run that carried nukes to Japan?
I suspect as reasonable people we can agree that there is a limit to what the public ought to know now, but that at some point information should be made public - this is the basis for why some conservative commentators as best I’ve been able to tell, have called for given the perception that many journalists are more interested in villifying the current US Administration than seeking and reporting on news worthy events (though secret prisons is in fact very news worthy - though what is less reported is how both Clinton and Gore were strong supporters of “extraordinary rendition”). Incidentally, I’m far being smart enough to know where the line falls on official secrets so I’m not going to try.
Back to the difference if one exists between boycotts and censorship. My point was more that if Dixie Chicks were truly being censored, they wouldn’t have been featured in the news so prominently (and it’s not as if anyone was preventing their music from being sold). And these days with so many choices as you note, it’s not like a few decades ago, when there really wasn’t the competition either for news (which I think is scarier given what we know now of journalism), or media in general.
The slippery slope of either calling Dixie Chicks or even AJ censorship is that then does this mean networks or those who control them must give equal time to every tom dick or harry who demands it? There are some other threats to free speech - McCain-Feingold - campaign finance laws and advertising that some have fought to have applied to bloggers (particularly conservative bloggers) and the “fairness doctrine” to reign in conservative radio pundits. Most recently, the Democrats eliminated Fox from broadcasting a live debate in Nevada I think. I am curious if you consider this to be censorship? And we’re not counting Democrats from congressmen and liberal pundits have called for abolishment of Fox (I give credit for Mindy pointing out at least that all news outlets have some level of bias).
Frankly, sometimes I think the best for free speech in the US is for the repeal of the FCC. Grrr… when I started out I intended for just a short comment! I swear! I was going to write a post on my love for McDonald’s before I went to bed.
April 3rd, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Sheesh, man you write a lot. I’m not going to do a point-by-point response because there’s just too much that won’t be resolved in this thread, so here’s what I will say:
First, careful on lumping reporters into some mass conspiracy. Most of those I’ve worked with have their own peculiar politics that don’t fit neatly into a left-right framework. If you’re seeing a liberal tilt, it’s probably your own lens that’s off-center. That’s cool, just don’t go accusing everyone in the press of some half-hatched plan that isn’t there. Anyway, let’s not get into this, because it won’t get anywhere.
I’ll hold my ground on the Dixie Chicks and AJ. In both cases, a few are making a political decision to limit access for many, based on an ideological position. The fact that it’s not as effective because of the Internet and dispersed media make it no less sinister. The Nevada case is a similar story in the same category.
I think that’s all I’ll say for now.
April 5th, 2007 at 5:07 am
[...] a number of bloggers among us dealing with this issue (and writing about it) all the time: Chris at Eyes East, Jeremiah at Granite Studio, Richard at Peking Duck, among many [...]
April 6th, 2007 at 2:15 am
Hi Chris -
I’ve admittedly gotten increasingly jaded in recent years with respect to what’s being reported. I don’t think that there’s a conspiracy per se - but I do think there is a certain level of group think that goes on in journalism with significantly more reporters self-identifying themselves in one direction in ideological terms (as per Pew Survey I think about a year ago - and who was that reporter from NYC who said she didn’t know of a single person who voted republican when Reagan swept to power?).
You’re right though, anecdotes strung together does not a conspiracy nor a generalization make. I agree it’s generally not nearly so black and white, and as a matter of perspective, I’ve seen censorship as a matter of outcome and deliberate intent that I think we’d just have to disagree is the case for both AJ and Dixie Chicks.
Lately I get the sense that there’s too often a double standard being applied when thinking about these issues - like hate laws elsewhere in the world being used to enforce political correctness or some of the same people who worry about free speech are the same ones who ironically shout down those who they don’t agree with particularly at universities… but in the end, I suspect we can at least agree that China’s censors suck more than most! And those additional fixes are fantastic - particularly the one for wikipedia.
April 9th, 2007 at 9:07 am
Interesting post. Its a fascinating subject- being British and living in Britain I can surf the net basically at freedom, its something that I’m normally unconscious off and I wonder whether living somewhere like China would be the only way to understand how much of a benefit it is.
You are by the way an extremely prolific reader, given these limitations!
April 9th, 2007 at 9:57 am
@Clement:
We definitely agree on the proxies. They’re awesome.
@Gracchi:
The Net Nanny’s hijinks definitely makes me appreciate open information. I was strong on free speech before I moved here, and those sentiments have only been reinforced since.
As for my reading list, let’s just say thank the internet gods for proxies and tech-savvy bloggers who share them. And RSS feeds. Bloglines is my new best friend.
April 20th, 2007 at 12:52 am
Blimey, this was a bit of a heavyweight journo discussion, so I’ll disclose first that I’m not a journo and don’t have anything like your insider knowledge.
Ten years ago, I would have been 100% on Chris’ side. While I agree with Clement that lack of market availability is not the same as censorship - and, incidentally, that it is vital to make the moral distinction between these two - it is true that media markets are easily skewed. They don’t necessarily reflect the desires/politics of audiences perfectly, or even very well. So if the two or three major companies that control TV stations in your country happen to decide on a particular slant to the news (not all that unlikely, seeing as they’re all similaraly structured large corporations), then there’s nothing your average punter can do about it.
Now we have the internet running at decent speeds, that argument doesn’t necessarily hold. You can get al-jazeera over the net (along with the Dixie Chicks, fascist stuff and obsure recipes). This is definitely a step forward - the availability problem is effectively solved.
There remains a problem of advertising and accessibility. Newsfeeds that do deals with big portals will be read more. And this is a freaky thing, because it means *purely financial* considerations will affect the structure of the news market - again, major parts of the news market will respond only very indirectly to the desires of consumers.
But this is a nice problem to have. Imagine the look of incomprehension you’d get from a jailed Chinese blogger if you were to grouse to her about al-jazeera being expensive as it’s a netcast, not on cable.
Market bias (or market censorship, if you wanted to give it a more inflammatory name) is real, but it’s a second order problem.
April 21st, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Phil: Well said. Thanks for the three cents. There’s probably a follow-up post coming on all this, as soon as I make some time for it.
June 1st, 2008 at 6:03 pm
I believe that blogspot is being blocked once again - I have a person in China who has been trying to access our blog (hosted on blogspot) where I posted informaton about their business and they cannot access it.