I’m in DC for a day and half, invited by a team at the Economist for a discussion of public-private partnerships in supporting technology projects in the developing world. Good stuff, but I suspect I’ve been a lousy guest so far. I spent a good chunk of our dinner, staring at my phone, reloading Google News to check out coverage of the Zimbabwe elections. Discovering that one of the fellow guests was a Zimbabwean, we passed my phone back and forth as the LA Times declared, “Mugabe apparently faces major defeat in Zimbabwe“.

That “apparently” is an important word. Other publications aren’t quite that brave yet in their reporting. Christian Science Monitor has “Zimbabwe Opposition Claims Election Win“, and the New York Times just shifted from “Opposition Claims Win in Zimbabwe on Unofficial Tally” and is now running “Zimbabwe Unofficial Results Disputed“. These unofficial results are based on tallying the results from polling stations around the nation - each station posts its results, and representatives of MDC, the main opposition party, have been summing these totals and claiming near total victory in their strongholds, Bulawayo and Harare, and surprisingly strong showings in rural areas. They’re projecting a first round victory for Morgan Tsvangarai, with no need for a run-off. Independent observers, notably the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, who’ve been trading vote tallies via text messages, echo those predictions.

These results aren’t official, however - the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has said tha they’ll release the official results beginning tomorrow morning. And opposition supporters admit that while they’ve got thorough tallies from urban areas, it takes a longer time to get those rural vote counts… and that rural districts are Mugabe’s stronghold. In other words, the delay in announcing Satuday’s results may be legitimate… or it may reflect attempts to rig the vote, as occurred in 2002, where early totals showed Mugabe losing, and later ones had him magically surging back. Or it could reflect a recognition that this election can’t be rigged and an attempt to let Mugabe step down gracefully. Or it might mean there’s discussion within the military on whether they’ll attempt to prevent Tsvangarai from taking office and keep Mugabe in power.

Elections are ever so much more complicated when the winner doesn’t neccesarily win.

Needless to say, Harare is tense, as people wait and wonder what’s going to happen next. Bev Clark argues that MDC needs to take advantage of this interval and claim victory, making it harder for the government to overturn the results:

Morgan Tsvangirai should be doing victory laps around high density suburbs, inspiring and preparing Zimbabweans for the next round of the fight for democracy. As we all know winning elections in Zimbabwe don’t necessarily mean a transfer of “power”.

So where are the MDC trucks and vans and cars filled with campaign workers roaming the cities hooting up a storm of resistance? They were very active and visible pre-election - now where have they gone?

Enough with Press Conferences for Change; let’s have some open air celebrations.

But you can understand why some people are reluctant to take to the streets. Instead, many appear to be trading gossip and rumors. Ndesanjo Macha has a thorough roundup of voices on the ground and of the stories going back and forth. Mugabe has been reported as fleeing to Mauritius, or possibly to Mozambique. His wife is rumored to have died of a heart attack, which is delaying announcement of results.

What’s really happening on the ground? Hard to know - it’s too late tonight to call friends on the ground, but I hope to get on the phone before the workday starts tomorrow and find out more details. In the meantime, my prayers are with all my friends in Zim that this election proceeds peacefully and brings about the change that the country so deserves.

Alas, dear readers, we’ve moved from the “long speeches on stage” phase of Media Re:public to panel-land. Panels are a great way to put a lot of cool people on stage… which is useful, because it allows you to invite them to the conference and feel honored as attendees. But they’re murder for bloggers. Panelists don’t use slides, they react to time constraints by flitting topic to topic, and you can barely finish looking up one speaker before the next one takes the mic.

But common sense, simple decency and the number of chairs available didn’t prevent the organizers from putting eight panelists on stage for an hourlong discussion titled, “It’s 2013: Do You Know Where Your News Is?” Fortunately, they’ve put everyone’s favorite standup legal philosopher on stage to manage the crowd.

A few observations from the seven of the panelists who I heard:

Jonathan Taplin, a professor at Annenberg, believes that we’re heading towards a world of commercial overload. The struggle over metadata that David Weinberger described may become a struggle over people targetting ads to you. He points to Free411 as a sign of what’s to come - a free 411 service subsidized by making people listen to a 15 second ad. We may be heading towards a two-tiered world, where the rich can avoid advertising. Oddly, he tells us, that his students don’t seem to be worried at all about this - they simply love the fact that services are free.

Jennifer Ferro, the assistant general manager of KCRW, believes it’s the end of radio as we know it… and she feels fine. The radio, she believes, will be less and less relavent, disappearing altogether when good internet access comes to cars. But quality journalism is medium independent, she believes and will survive the change.

Jonathan Krim of WashingtonPost Newsweek International hopes the future holds a shift in what we’re allowed to do as journalists - he’d like to see the rise of “declarative journalism”. Journalists try incredibly hard not to offer a direct opinion - instead, they find someone to say what they want to have said. Krim hopes that a future vision of journalism where journalists can actually say things they know.

Lisa Williams of Placeblogger has a slick technique to avoid the panel’s prohibition on slides - she’s uploaded her eight slides as images in a FLickr set, which she pulls up on the screen. (As such, I actually have a pretty good sense of the points she was trying to make. You see, organizers, slides aren’t inherently evil.)

Lisa tell us that she’s more optimistic than most because she’s never worked for a newspaper - instead, she’s from the tech industry, and sees a world in which “journalism will survive the death or transformation of major institutions.” We need journalism to change because, “problems are distributed and global, and our media is consolidated and local.” For journalism to survive in this new age, journalists need to learn from the tech industry. Newspapers, historically, have made money for polishing and charging for free stuff - public information. Web businesses make money by taking expensive stuff and making it free.

David Cohn, who works with NewAssignment.net and Newstrust.net, reminds us that “journalism is a process, not a product.” As such, he’s frustrated by the opacity of newsrooms - he recently tried to visit the newsroom of the San Francisco Chronicle and was surprised to find it closed to him - why aren’t newsrooms public spaces, more like salons or libraries? And how do we ask for transparecy within these media without access to the process of building media?

Jon Funabiki, a journalism professor at San Francisco University, mentions that he’s got 650 journalism majors, and wonders where they’re all going to find work. He’s encouraged by the large and energetic ethnic media community, which he sees as challenging consolidation of media in areas like San Francisco. Ethic media in the Bay Area includes over 100 papers in more than 25 languages. He points out that communities are ethnic, but also regional and identity-based. This sort of reporting, in the long run, could expand to communities of interests.

My friend and colleage Solana Larsen offers the last “provocation”… and it’s a bit provocative, as she picks on the BBC with Richard Sambrook in the room. She talks about listening to two BBC correspondents talk about a press trip arranged by the Chinese government, and wonders why the BBC thought interviewing a pair of journalists about a newsgathering story was more interesting that talking to Tibetans or other Chinese citizens. Her prediction - in 2013, there will be no more foreign correspondents. “That doesn’t mean that a Brit, an Asian, a Danish- Puertorican can’t write about China - it just means the end of parachute journalism.” Instead, the hope is to hear from people who understand the language, are able to read local newspapers and who can give informed local content and analysis.

Sambrook, ever a gentleman, acknowledges that parachute journalism needs to disappear. But he points out that the BBC has over 400 local correspondents, one of whom might have been a better source for that story than the one Solana heard.

John Kelly, a researcher with Berkman and Columbia University, is one of the founders of Morningside Analytics, a company that’s trying to discover and map connections in the blogosphere and media as a whole. He’s presenting his recent research at the Annenberg/Berman Media Re:public conference.

Before showing some of the quantiative research he’s worked on, Kelly offers some observations that guide his research:

- “Bloggers versus journalists” is just a food fight - they’re all part of one system of communications

- Communications is in a long process of deep evolution, moving from the postal service to telephone to internet. (He notes that very little has been written on social impact of telephones.)

- Blogs are a key to understanding networked social spheres.

- Communications research needs an overhaul, because our current methods misunderstand society.

- We’ve always been a networked society, and now we know it.

With these principles in mind, Kelly shows some of his maps. They’re collections of colored dots, each representing media sources (blogs and mainstream media). Some show clusters of blogs that link to one another. Others show “attention maps” - what sources the bloggers are linking to, representing what they pay attention to. At the center of these attention maps, Kelly tells us, are the New York Times and the Washington Post. Attentive clustering allows Kelly to group together bloggers who share common news sources.

He shows us maps f five different language blogospheres - English, Persian, Russian, Arabic, and Scandinavian (Swedish, Norwegian and Danish). Each has a different shape, a different number of clusters. The Iranian blogosphere, which Kelly has studied closely, has some unusual clusters:
- poetry bloggers
- secular, expatriate reformist bloggers (what most people think of as the Iranian blogosphere)
- the conservative, religious blogosphere, which has clusters around shia sects and youth groups

The clusters in the US blogosphere are, unsurprisingly, quite different. Much of his work has focused on looking at what media liberals and conservatives look at and what terms they use. Both left and right-wing bloggers use the term “wingnut”, for instance, while the right uses the term “moonbat” to describe the wacky left, and the left-wingers don’t really know the term. Tools like a “word radius analysis” look at words that appear within five words of a term like “security” - based on cluster analysis, he determines which terms are used by liberals and conservatives. He concludes that conservatives use more abstract terms to talk about security, while liberals tend to talk in extremely concrete terms when using that word.

Some recent work looks at the speed and persistence of linking to certain media objects. Kelly is interested in questions like, “Was the video of Reverend Wright’s viral, or was it merely salient?” If something was simply salient, it would cause ripples in the communication environment, almost like background radiation. His analysis shows that different types of media have different attention patterns: mainstream news stories tend to peak very quickly, while wikipedia articles are linked over very long periods of time. YouTube videos tend to peak as quickly as mainstream media, with a small exception for videos that truly go viral. Kelly believes it may be more common for videos to be put on YouTube by people attempting to set agendas in mainstream media - they seed YouTube, then point to it as a way of arguing that “the bloggers are talking about a story”, even though they’ve planted the story.

My colleague David Weinberger has been teaching a course at Berkman this semester on the topic, “What’s different about the web?” He answers this question on his first slide of his Media Re:public talk: “No atoms, no centralized control, and everyone’s connected.” But to really understand what changes are brought to us by the web, we need to understand how frames and metaphors are changing.

The metaphor frequently used for the world of information online is “the ecosystem”. David believes this is too comfortable, and reminds us that there are ecosystems that aren’t especially pleasant. (There’s a slide that references insects that support themselves on the vomit of other creatures.) Another metaophor - professionals and amateurs - is too rooted in money and in sports to make David comfortable. And the metaphor of information flow is too abstract and impersonal to explain why people produce and seek news.

David suggests that we wrestle with a difficult metaphor, suggesting that the less comfortable the metaphor, the more likely we are to benefit from it. This metaphor is a metaphor of abundance, a world in which there’s vastly more information than we could ever encounter. We tend to overfocus on the abundance of bad information, he believes, worried that others will “fall for it.” (We’re never worried that we might fall for it.) But is the abundance of bad information really a worry in the world of tremendous abundance?

“The battle over the fron page is an accident of atoms.” When we fight about what news makes it onto the front page, we’re fighting an old fight based on the fact that there’s a limited amount of real estate on a paper page. When we fight over “the Daily Me” (here Weinberger is involing Negroponte, and later Sunstein), we’re ignoring the fact that we all have our personal frontpages: our email inbox. We pay attention to news because we are driven by recommendations from others, both positive and negative. Our inbox doesn’t give us all the good stuff, of course, but it gives us information that’s “good enough”.

“Every tag is a front page. Every tag is a bookshelf.” The front page is metadata - it’s information on what stories are highest priority, which are most important. “In an age of an abundance of good, the struggle is over metadata.” Fortunately, we’re building new tools to handle this metadata. We create tools like tags, seek information through social networks (which offer not personalization, but socialization), and organize information through the (oversold, but fascinating) semantic web.

All these are tools that unsettle knowledge. They’re forcing us to get more comfortable with te fallibility of information. They remind us that information comes from humans, and that we are all inherently fallible. And they’re changing the nature of the public. “We’re all creating our own publics in public.” We’re all questioning what’s data and what’s metadata, what’s information and what’s information on how you interpret information. And that’s an uncomfortable - and therefore likely useful - frame.

Professor Roberto Suro is a veteran print journalist, formerly with the Chicago Sun Times, the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post and other major publications. He’s our resident journalist, asked to frame
journalism’s role in democracy for the Media Re:public conversation.

He reminds us that we should separate journalism’s social role from its business reality. “The decline of journalism as a business is portrayed as decline in social role,” and it’s not clear that that’s true. He also offers a distinction between “participatory journalism” - places where people comment and interact around the news - and “the journalism of participation”, journalism that fosters more effective participation in the civic space.

This latter form of journalism sometimes uses new tools, but can happen in old-fashioned one to many media. “In weighing journalism’s social role, we need to pay more attention to its impact than to its means.” We should ask what are the outcomes of participation in journalism, and whether journalism makes engagement in democracy more representative.

To explain the shifts in our understanding of journalism, Suro invites us to travel backwards to the journalistic feud between Philip Freneau and Benjamin Franklin Bache. The two men edited rival newspapers, which represented the Federalist and Republican parties. The papers “pushed the limits of the technology available in the day, promoting discussion with readers, organizing readers into networks.” The papers had a watchdog role, examning government responses to foreign policy and domestic issues. And they both slung mud, engaging in truly nasty personal attacks against each other.

We’d fire either of these editors immediately for being overly partisan. But it’s worth remembering that their patrons were Madison and Jefferson, on one side, Adams and Hamilton on the other side. Certainly the work these men did was fundamental to the American notion of democracy. And it’s hard to argue with their dedication - when yellow fever struck Philadephia, both men refused to leave the city unless the other left first. They both died, four days apart from one another, from yellow fever.

The debate between the two men was basically a debate about whether the press’s role was to inform the elites, or whether it should inform the broadest swath of citizenry. This debate is with us today - in some ways, it’s the professional versus citizen media debate.

We’re seeing a pivotal moment in the evolution of journalism. There’s a resurgence of partisan news organizations. In Europe, these organizations tend to be explicitly aligned with political parties, which actually helps keep them fairly moderate. It’s more factional in the US, where partisan media tends to cluster at the ends of the political spectrum - they’re capable of criticizing their own movements for being insufficiently conservative or progressive. This leads to a greater polarization in government, and probably to a less effective government. Suro has studied the US debates over immigration closely, and believes that citizen media was effectively used to polarize the debate to the point where compromise and reform was impossible. The new medium doesn’t guarantee more productive debate.

Professor Manuel Castells opens the discussions at Media Re:public by framing the relationship between media and political power. Democracy, he tels is, reflects the values of powers that shape the norms and institutions of society. And power is asserted through two methods - coercion, and through the construction of meaning in the minds of the people. This second power is “the most fundamental form of power, particularly in democracies.” Power relationships, he asserts, are never defined in absolute terms - there’s never absolute power even in dictatorships, because there’s always resistance to domination.

Meaning is constructed in societies via the process of communication, through the “interaction between our neural networks and the networks of communication.” This is a complex process, because people reject information that conflicts with their feelings. Castells sites a study that suggests that we’re four times more likely to accept information that reinforces, instead of challenges, our gut feelings. Politics is now rooted in triggering emotions, in the “evocative power of sounds and images, which trigger reactions that develop into the process of decisionmaking.” George Lakoff’s work on politics and metaphor helps us understand how this works - the power of the metaphor “the war on terror” has shaped the political reactions of the US populus, and helped set the agenda in the media.

“Social movements - which are the major agents of social change - act on the mind, changing the way we think.” The environmental movement has transformed our societies by transforming how we think about sustainability. The women’s movement has changed how we think about patriarchal assumptions. “Power is not just about winning elections, it’s about shaping the way we think about the world.”

This power is asserted in the media, “the intersection between our brains and the multiplicity of brains that constitute our environment.” Politics that doesn’t go through the media “doesn’t exist in the collective mind.” The move into media politics has “almost necessarily led to the politics of scandal.” The leaking of damaging information has become the most powerful weapon for politics in society.

“So, the transformation of the medium is a transformation of the political landscape.” Clearly, there is a transformation taking place, commercially and technologically. Castells refers to “mass self communication”, the experience of individuals broadcasting themselves to a networked environment. He believes that we’ve reached a tipping point in this space, with more than half the world’s populations connected via wireless communications. “This doesn’t mean there’s no digital divide, but means that the mass level reaches the point where it’s a decisive instrument in society.”

Castells reminds us that it’s too simple to believe we simply “oppose corporate mass media with the networks of the little guys.” These networks are also owned by powerful corporations, who are likely to clamp down on what people can do on these networks. “Murdoch - the most visionary guy in this field - knows that you have to transform freedom into a commodity.” The corporate power is counterbalanced by the “endless capacity for hackers and innovators to create more networks of communication.” So the corporate world needs to try new business models, “a new form of articulation between mass communication and mass self-communication.”

He’s most excited about the way these new tools bring “new information, new sounds into the net without corporate censorship - new images, which can participate in the launching of public debates.” He’s less excited by the blogosphere - “which is mainly commentary on what the mass media says” - and more excited by “real citizen media”, by which he means, “anyone with a cellphone anywhere in the world, uploading images to YouTube.” This constant flow of images has only a minimal part that will be relavent politically, but “the law of great numbers means a small proportion will be significant.”

For the next 48 hours, I’m in LA, where it’s sunny, warm and basically impossible to park your car… which is only a problem because you need a car to get anywhere. I think I’d trade 20 farenheight degrees for functional public transit.

I’m at the USC Annenberg Center, attending a conference cohosted by Annenberg and the Berkman Center. The conference is the brainchild of my friend and colleague Persephone Miel, who is managing the Media Re:pubic project, a careful, close look at the benefits and limitations of citizen media.

That’s more or less the subject of this event - a skeptical look at participatory media and its impact on the rest of the media landscape. Ernie Wilson, the new dean of the Annenberg Center, sets the stage by encouraging us to be “extremely positive and extremely skeptical.” He wonders whether we’ve seen evidence yet that social media and related phenomena are leading to the outcomes we care about - more to the point, it’s extremely unclear that increased connectivity correlates to increased democracy. (He references Open Networks, Closed Regimes, a book that looks closely at the affect of internet access on China.)

Wilson invites us to consider four epistemic communities: traditional print media, the emerging digital media community, the public broadcasting community and commercial media. What do each of these communities think about the changes in the media landscape and democracy?

The print journalists, he tells us, argue, “Newspapers are the bedrock of democracy. Newspapers are dying. American democracy is in grave danger.” The digital media folks are a bit more optimistic, pointing out that digital media is creating new ways to connect, making it possible for new forms of democratic relationships to emerge. The public broadcasting folks are insistent that non-commercial media space is essential to democracy’s survival. And the commercial folks often think, “Democracy is a good thing, in principle… but I’m too busy to think about democracy - let me think about what I need to pay attention to,” the need to run a sustainable business.

Wilson tells us that all these views are inaccurate, and that all are right. The challenge we face is figuring out what each of us does about it.

Elspeth Revere is one of the people who needs to figure out what to do about it. She’s the head of the General Program at the MacArthur Foundation, the program that supports media work. Traditionally, MacArthur has funded public media. But the foundation is very interested how digital media has shifted the landscape.

MacArthur has funded research on intellectual property, and has recently focused on “digital natives”, people who understand technologies in a deeper, more fundamental way because they’re literally growing up with them. She and others are studying questions of credibility and believability online, wondering how one decides to seek out believable information online. And MacArthur is fascinated with the idea of individuals as media producers, and questions of who isn’t choosing to produce media.

With Berkman, MacArthur is trying to figure out this new media landscape - Miel’s work on Media Re:Public is funded by MacArthur, and John Palfrey of the Berkman Center notes that it’s very forward-looking for MacArthur to be investigating these questions in public, rather than behind closed foundation doors.

Our “keynote speaker” - or resident provocateur - is Richard Sambrook, the director of BBC’s global news division, responsible for a set of properties which includes BBC’s World Service, probably the world’s most important news broadcaster in terms of pure reach. He’s an excellent blogger, sharing insights gleaned from BBC’s media monitoring services as well as his perspectives on traditional and new media.

Sambrook’s talk is titled, “How Participatory Media Has and Hasn’t Changed the News”, and he begins by rolling the clock back to the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference held by Berkman (organized by Rebecca MacKinnon). He reminds us that Jay Rosen declared, “Blogging versus journalism is over, and the forces of denial are in retreat” - a proof that a good soundbyte never dies. “It’s remarkable how different the world was in 2005″ - since then, we’ve seen social networks have a major impact on the digital world, and seen a text-based web get significantly more dynamic with video and audio.

This change has led to a change in the way of thinking at media companies. “The phase of denial is over - the future is moving online.” There are now over 100 podcasts available on the BBC. There are blogs on the Washington post, though they rarely link out. The Guardian just won an award fo TV journalism. But very little of this innovation is participatory.

That said, there’s great enthusiasm around citizen journalism and user-generated content. “It’s become a marketing tool - you must talk about being open to contributions from the public.” He offers a framework for citizen media:

- Sharing of experience. We’re seeing reports from the ground in Tibet or Burma. This is a pretty old idea, though - news networks have always always interviewed eyewitnesses.

- Sharing opinion. Blogs are very good at this, but mainstream media has been quite poor at incorporating it. It’s actually something mainstream media has done in the past, using phone-ins, but somehow, it hasn’t happened well with blogs.

- Sharing of discovery. News breaks on the net, sometimes, and can be picked up by mainstream media.

- Sharing of expertise, which points to more sophisticated models of networked journalism.

Sambrook reminds us that “participation is a minority sport” - despite excitement over this medium, most people are passive consumers, not participants. He tells us about a BBC project, a river trip in Bangladesh, designed to focus on communities that may be eliminated due to climate change. The stories were translated into 17 languages for broadcast on audio and video. Photos from the trip were seen by at least 50,000 people on Twitter. But only 26 people ended up following the trip via Twitter. This might serve as a reality check for cyberenthusiasts… which include Sambrook, who’s a regular Twitter user.

Part of the problem is figuring out what the right combination of technologies are. He references a Namibian journalist, who helped him understand the relationship between radio and telephones in her country. “The most popular radio program in Namibia are the death notices.” People broadcast news of deaths and funeral announcements, “using the radio like a telephone.” It makes sense, because funerals are the most important social obligations, ways for people to network and build ties with one another.

All media finds itself in a state of revolution right now. You used to be able to sell a record by getting a song on the air, getting a video on MTV, then shipping discs to stores. Now, record companies have to execute 25 steps at the same time - ringtones, downloads, music blogs. “It’s just what happens. And there’s something similar in journalism - it’s fragmenting.”

Providers of journalism are transforming themselves. The Guardan is transforming from a newspaper to a global digital content platform… without really working out the revenue model. The paper’s boss has declared a strategy of “invest… and hope.”

This hope can be in the face of some difficult numbers. A senior manager at the New York Times argues that “demand has never been greater” for quality journalism, pointing to the 17 million people who use the Times website every month. But while NewYorkTimes.com turns a profit of about $100 million a year, it’s nowhere near what’s required to run the Times newsroom.

The BBC is looking for new forms of community involvement, inviting people who watch Newsnight to help set the day’s new agenda. And he’s optimistic that individuals and companies will be “the new creatives” - a group innovating especially around video journalism. The caution is that most of this innovation has been pretty un-newsworthy so far. “There’s Seesmic, a video blogging service, where you can see Loic Le Meur three times a day tell you how wonderful his life is.” The technology is great stuff, but people have to step away from their webcams and into the real world. Once people are streaming video from mobile phones at places where news is taking place, the equation will change radically.

Another form of public participation is likely to be as curators. He points out that DJ’s are now as respected as musicians, choosing the appropriate content for the correct time. This may start hapening on the web as the semantic web becomes a reality, allowing people to find the information they want, when they want it, and remix it into their own curated collections.

He leaves us with a series of questions:
- How do we invite participation so that media becomes more of a public dialog?
- What are the new metrics we use to measure attention in a new media universe?
- Can big media really adjust to this new world of increased acces, new competition and new business models? Can they do it without losing their social purpose?

As Zimbabwe faces a pivotal presidential election on March 29, expect a great deal of conversation about whether polls were free and fair. It may be very difficult to answer that question decisively, as the Zimbabwean government has been extremely restrictive in allowing election monitors into the country. AFP reports that the US and the EU have been denied access as observers; instead, the poll will be monitored by the African Union, SADC (the Southern Africa Development Community), China, Venezuela and Russia. Both SADC and the AU are heavily dominated by South Africa, which controversially pronounced the 2005 parliamentary elections as free and fair, despite widespread reports of human rights abuses.

There are lots of ways to rig an election, and it sure helps to be the incumbent if you’re planning on doing so. Morgan Tsvangarai, the candidate from the opposition MDC party, argues that the government has printed over 9 million ballots, which does seem like a lot for a nation of 5.9 million voters - he believes the excess ballots will be used to stuff ballot boxes. Other forms of rigging may be more subtle. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has recruited 90,000 polling officers, who will oversee voting at polling places. Polling officers are often asked to help illiterate voters cast their votes, which can lead to vote rigging. And the ZEC has primarily recruited schoolteachers - who are government employees - to serve as the polling officers.

The Zimbabwean government is evidently afraid that the US will attempt to monitor the election clandestinely. Government-controlled newspaper The Herald reports:

According to sources who work in the US embassy public affairs section, the embassy had decided to rope in the services of a number of NGOs, institutions and individuals to provide updates on the elections across the country.

Those recruited have also been mandated to provide “data” that will be used in the embassy’s final report on the elections and the briefing it will send back to Washington after the results have been announced for use in post-poll policy formulation. It is also understood that some of these NGOs and individuals volunteered their services when they heard that the US embassy was in the market for proxy observers.

That certainly makes sense. If I were a consular officer with the US state department, I’d be talking to anyone I could to try to get believable elections data. Unfortunately, this is likely to put additional pressure on reporters in Zimbabwe who are attempting to cover events. MISA - the Media Institute of Southern Africa, a leading free-press NGO in Zimbabwe - reports that they, along with several indepedent journalism organizations, are being accused of being “recruited” by the US Embassy. These accusations are based on the fact that MISA representatives attended a meeting in Pretoria on “the state of the media in Zimbabwe and the upcoming elections.” (Indeed, it’s this meeting that the Herald uses as “evidence” that journalists and NGO workers are now working for the US embassy.) These accusations raise the danger level for independent journalists in Zimbabwe, which was already extremely high.

All this is useful context in considering the project that activist organization Sokwanele announced today: a Google maps mashup of election-rigging incidents. Each icon on the map corresponds to a media report of an incident that controvenes SADC standards for a free and fair election. Clicking on an icon will take you to the issue of Sokwanele’s Zimbwbe Elections Watch newsletter, which summarizes media report on the elections, and to a database record, where each instance is coded as to which SADC rules it violates.

The Sokwanele site is very careful to note that these media reports represent a sample of violations of SADC standards. It’s very difficult for journalists to afford to travel to rural areas, so reports of possible rigging in those locations are less likely. And since Zimbabwe’s press climate is quite constrained, it’s likely that many incidents of election fraud will go unreported.

Sokwanele has employed some clever and careful tactics here. Because they’re not accepting reports of election fraud, they’re not reporters so much as aggregators. That may help them steer clear of Zimbabwe’s laws which require journalists to be licensed - were they to attempt a strategy like Ushahidi’s of allowing citizens to report incidents of violence, I suspect they’d be shut down immediately.

Will Sokwanele’s map show us whether the Zimbabwe election was rigged? It’s possible that it already has - the map is filled with incidents of “political cleansing”, violence where people who don’t hold membership cards in ZANU-PF have been chased out. If you can’t safely make it to a polling place, you can’t vote. There are countless reports of failures to register voters, of food being given to government supporters and not to the opposition, of violence from police and troops against citizens.

It’s hard to know what a map like this can do in a situation as volatile as the Zimbabwe elections. Very, very few Zimbabweans can afford to go online and look at the map before casting their votes. And Mugabe’s government is unlikely to be shamed by this thorough cataloging of offenses. But it’s possible that SADC might, and that international attention to the circumstances surrounding the election could make it harder for observers in countries that neighbor Zimbabwe to close their eyes to election rigging.

It’s always encouraging when voices from around the world share your opinions. I’m buoyed by posts on Voices Without Votes that show international support for my presidential candidate of choice, and I’ve been thrilled to see Obama’s brilliant speech on race in America passionately discussed as far away as Brazil and Portugal is inspiring.

But it’s probably more important to be looking for international voices that challenge our preconceptions, rather than reinforcing them. I drove through Northhampton, MA on Sunday, where groups of protesters were spending their Easter flying Tibetan flags and condemning violence in Lhasa. I suspect there were similar groups in other college towns across the nation, and I’d suspect that the vast majority of Americans aware of protests in Tibet view the protesters as heroes and the Chinese troops quelling the riots as the enemy.

I’m not trying to challenge that interpretation - I haven’t followed the story closely enough and, frankly, there’s not enough reporting coming from the ground for anyone to be completely certain about what’s transpired in Tibet. But I think it’s a really good idea for people outside China to be aware of Chinese reactions to events in Tibet.

John Kennedy, Global Voices Chinese language editor, has an amazing report today titled “Bloggers Declare War on Western Media Coverage“. Kennedy points out that Chinese-language media is reporting “the news of Tibetans slicing children’s ears off and burning people alive,” and that many Chinese bloggers believe that coverage on CNN and the BBC has a strong pro-Tibet bias.

Kennedy writes about anti-cnn.com, a new site that identifies CNN as “The World’s Leader of Liars” and offers armchair critiques of CNN stories posted on the web. The site was founded by Rao Jin, a 24-year old entrepreneur in Beijing, who was interviewed by Jill Drew for the Washington Post - he tells her that over 1000 people have written in to the site to point to apparent errors in Western media coverage of Tibet. Many of the critiques focus on images of violence which are reported to be photos of Chinese police in Lhasa - the site’s authors argue that the police in question are Nepali, pointing to their uniforms and skin color. The site’s authors argue that these misidentifications are intentional, part of an agenda on the part of western media:

长期以来，以CNN、BBC为代表的西方某些媒体借新闻自由之名
对广大发展中国家进行了肆无忌惮的污蔑和诋毁
为了达到他们不可告人的目的
他们栽赃陷害、颠倒黑白、混淆是非、无中生有……真是无所不用其极

For a long time now, certain western media best represented by CNN and BBC, in the name of press freedom have been unscrupulously slandering and defaming developing nations. In order to achieve their unspoken goal, they mislead and they ensnare, switching black for white, confusing right and wrong, fabricating…willing to go to any length. (Translation by John Kennedy from Global Voices)

A video, which features many of the same images critiqued on the “anti-cnn” site has been viewed more than 734,000 times since March 19, and generated an animated comment thread of 23,500 posts. It’s beyond me to read all the comments, but I wasn’t seeing a lot of debate in the threads I scanned - mostly a lot of very angry people supporting the video’s authors, criticizing western media and arguing that YouTube was censoring comments. The “anti-cnn” site links to this video and videos on Megavideo.com, as well as a Powerpoint presentation and a PDF file covering much of the same material.

Westerners who are interested in Chinese media are regular visitors to Roland Soong’s remarkable EastSouthNorthWest blog, which translates Chinese media into English and vice versa. Many of his translations today focus on a controversial photo shown on CNN’s website. The photo as it appeared on CNN showed Chinese police in a street; the uncropped version showed Tibetan rioters who appear to be beating someone. It’s not hard to understand why Chinese bloggers believed that CNN had chosen to crop the photo to tell a different story. And CNN’s decision to change to using the uncropped photo without comment has simply angered bloggers further.

Rebecca MacKinnon is all over the story, leading her piece with an amusing story about her former employer. CNN was running a poll asking users whether the Olympics should be boycotted. A popular Chinese blog alerted readers to the poll and offered instructions in Chinese on how to vote “no”. Rebecca guesses that this lobbying effort was successful, as the CNN site later changed their poll to a less controversial question: “What do you think of a website that gives dolls breast implants?”

Rebecca notes that YouTube is apparently unblocked in China at the moment. This helps explain why videos arguing that Tibet is an indivisible part of China (and that the Dalai Lama is funded by the CIA to split Tibet from China) are receiving more than a million views. She sees this as an interesting moment for Chinese censors, who may be recalculating the benefits of blocking content:

Perhaps the Chinese government is feeling a little less worried lately about losing public support? Perhaps they are less worried that people will turn against the Communist Party after reading something in the Western media, now that it is no longer fashionable in many circles to believe what the Western media reports?

What strikes me about these videos is the fact that they’re explicitly for Western audiences, not for Chinese audiences. They make arguments in written English, overlaying captions on maps and screenshots. It’s clear that English isn’t the first language of at least one of the video authors. And the comment threads are largely in English, though it seems likely that many of the commenters are Chinese. I’ve argued previously that language is a pretty good signal of intended audience. Early bridgebloggers wrote in English instead of their first languages in the hopes of reaching a wider audience and, in many cases, influencing perceptions of their home countries. I think these recent sites and videos need to be viewed as another instance of bridgeblogging - using the tools of citizen media to try to connect with audiences in another part of the world.

The problem with bridgeblogging is that it’s no good to speak if no one is listening. I’m not seeing a lot of traction for this story in Western press thus far - a search on Google News for “china media bias” yields 118 stories, several of which are from English-language publications tightly controlled by the Chinese government, while a search for “china tibet riots” yields over 16,000 recent stories.

Some of the western media outlets picking up the bias story are doing so explicitly to debunk it. Michael Bristow’s piece in the BBC is especially interesting. He notes that “Individual Chinese have also vented their anger in internet chatrooms about these so-called biased reports. They have also been contacting foreign journalists directly – sometimes with threatening messages.” At the same time, he argues that “The criticism appears part of a wider campaign by the Chinese government to make sure its version of events in Tibet and elsewhere is the dominant one.” In other words, there may be angry Chinese citizens contacting BBC reporters to complain about their coverage, but they’re being controlled by Chinese state media.

This is a pretty fascinating contrast to the way western media has reported on blog efforts to debunk errors in media stories. While some reporters have complained about the “pajamahadeen“, bloggers have also been lionized for their fact-checking functions. It seems slightly unfair to assume that Chinese bloggers are incapable of the same techniques of press criticism that their western counterparts have pioneered, or that Chinese bloggers can’t be genuinely upset about what they see as unfair Western critique.

Let me once again remind readers (some of whom are already angrily composing comments to me) that I’m not attempting to evaluate the truth claims of these critiques. I’m surprised, however, by how little traction they’re receiving and how quickly they’re being dismissed by some of the reporters who are being criticized. My point is not that Western media is misinterpreting the Tibet situation - it’s a much larger point that people in general are pretty dumb about how people in other parts of the world are seeing events… even when those people are writing in English, telling us precisely how they see the situation.

Please see Global Voices’ special page on the Tibet riots if you’re interested in more viewpoints from China, translated from Chinese blogs.

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