One of my main reasons for attending Davos was to participate in a session on media criticism titled, provocatively, “We’re News, They’re Propaganda”. When it was originally presented to me, the panel was explicitly about coverage of Iraq, and included representatives of three major global news networks, a journalist from Nepal, a moderator from the BBC and me. The email inviting me to the session made it clear that my role was to be “critic”, a role I would have played whether or not I’d been invited.

With a new focus on propoganda, and the most jingoistic of the three networks dropping out, I wasn’t clear what to expect. The major network representative was replaced by an editor of a newspaper written by the homeless, and the Nepali journalist by a Japanese cartoonist. But we still couldn’t avoid talking about Iraq.

And that was the point of the remarks I’d hoped to make at the session. I took a look at coverage of Iraq, versus coverage of other major world conflicts, during the past year. The conflict in Democratic Republic of Congo, which has claimed, according to IRC, 3.3 million lives, at least 350,000 in combat, merited 77 mentions on all CNN networks over the entire year. And Congo got a lot of attention compared to the bloody conflict in northern Uganda, or the peace process in Burundi – 3 mentions all year long.

Iraq, on the other hand, got 1100 mentions the first week of the war. It’s actually hard to say how many times CNN mentioned Iraq because the Lexis/Nexis search engine returns only 3,000 results per query. I’m estimating 10-12,000 times.

So it surprised me very little when I couldn’t get the major media figures to challenge me on media undercoverage. One of the network news heads said, “Sometimes we make mistakes. Not big ones, but everyday. And we have to make choices.” I took this to mean that it was a conscious choice not to cover the conflicts in Central Africa and to focus on Iraq instead.

But I’ll admit that I was a bit surprised when Iraq swallowed the conversation. As the two networks squared off about their very different approaches to covering the war, any discussion of media fairness, bias and comprehensiveness collapsed into the discussion of whether or not it was morally right to air footage of Bin Laden. Which, I’ll admit, may have been an interesting debate six months ago. But I have a real hard time getting interested in it now.

I just finished reading Janna Levin’s How the Universe Got Its Spots and I’ve got cosmology on the brain. As a result, I’m starting to think of the war in Iraq as a black hole. Perhaps the concentration of media in Iraq became so intense that the very fabric of media was warped by attention density. We reached a media singularity – media focus so overconcentrated that networks literally might have gone out of business had the war been averted – that no other stories could escape.

Once Iraq came up in our session today, the rest of the conversation disappeared, like the spaceship inexorably passing the event horizon. And while I’m sorry we didn’t engage more on why Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and others don’t get well covered, I’m pleased by the irony that this failure itself helped prove my point.

Joi Ito’s decision to blog about the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos has convinced me that it’s not a bad idea to weigh in from this strange and surrreal gathering.

The fun of Davos is the chance to get great one on one time with incredibly smart, interesting people. The drag of Davos is the fact that it’s often difficult to get beyond people’s set “stump speeches”. It’s hard to make it to Davos without being obssessed with one or more topics. Give someone an open forum and they’ll almost inevitably gravitate to their topic of choice, whether or not is has anything to do with the topic at hand. (This morning’s discussion with religious leaders took an odd turn into a discussion of monetary policy as a result…)

So I’m trying to be conscious of my tendency to steer every conversation to developing world issues. I remember university classes that got derailed with young feminists asking “Does that include women?” after any general statement. I’m trying to avoid asking “Does that include Africans?” at every junction.

(The president of Georgia is giving an interview about ten feet away. This sort of thing makes it awfully hard to pay attention…)

But I got frustrated at last night’s dinner on wireless technology. The conversation focused on getting the maximum revenue per user (in the local terminology “RPU”, pronounced “ar-poo” from smartphone users. But, when I did my predictable “What’s the potential for wireless in Africa?” bit, folks chimed in immediately. Most impressively, the cellphone company president chairing the meeting spoke about his initial failure to understand African markets and then talked about the huge success his company is having in half a dozen African nations. We talked afterwards and he’s bullish about some of the information via cellphone projects Geekcorps is working on… as revenue earners for African cellphone companies. Very, very cool.

All of which raises the issue for me: how do we get business in Africa to be a main topic of interest, rather than an afterthought?

Geeks, by defailt, want to talk about the newest, fastest, coolest and smallest. But it turns out that the most interesting stuff may be the cheapest, most useable and most pervasive. And since cellphone penetration in the developed world seems to have hit a plateau, you’d think this would be the main topic on people’s minds, not an afterthought your humble activist blogger would need to tease out…

(Turns out the political advisor to the new Georgian president is a former classmate of mine. As a result, I got to shake the president’s hand. Davos is strange.)