As the post-election crisis lurches on in Zimbabwe, the question on everyone’s mind is “What next?” The ZANU-PF government briefly signalled an interest in a “transitional government of national unity” - headed by President Mugabe, of course, but involving opposition MDC politicians as well. The Herald - a state-owned newspaper which floated that idea of national unity - has changed course and now runs an editorial titled “Unity govt not feasible“. Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga renounced the previous statements about unity and emphasized that ZANU-PF would challenge MDC in a run-off election.

Uncertainty over the future provides great fodder for discussion. At Harvard University in Cambridge MA this evening, a group of very smart Zimbabweans and Zimbabwe-watchers got together to discuss possible scenarios. Brian Chingono, a student at Harvard, offers a frame for the discussions which will be familiar to readers of this blog:
- It’s been almost a month, and no presidential election results have been released
- Robert Mugabe, in power for 28 years, has a history of political violence, dating back to violence against the Ndebele in the 1980s
- Thousands of Zimbabweans have been displaced by post-election violence
- Parlimentary results, which showed a victory for the opposition MDC, are now being “recounted”
- Chinese arms shipments to Zimbabwe raise fears that the denoument to the current situation may be a violent one.
He shows a video report from SkyNews - who have been doing excellent video journalism from within the country - showing violence against MDC supporters, and a system of reports on paper and by SMS that the MDC argues prove that they won the presidential election.

Chaz Maviyane-Davies, an award winning activist graphic designer, is a Zimbabwean exile. In the lead up to the 2002 Presidential election, he ran a series of striking ads, aimed at Zimbabwean voters. His aim, he tells us, was to “raise consciousness about the situation”. He spent 2-3 hours a day on the pieces and distributed them globally via email. While it might have been more effective to distribute the pieces on print, cost made it impossible for Maviyane-Davies - instead, he relied on sending them globally and hoping people would distribute, print and be moved by them. A later project, Portal of Truth, offered stark graphic commentary on the stolen 2002 Zimbabwe elections. His images are a tour of some of the darker moments in Zimbabwean political history, touching on the church’s unwillingness to enter into politics, Zimbabwe’s incursions into the Democratic Republic of Congo, the government’s willingness to print money to contest elections, voter intimidation by the military and efforts to prevent election observers from monitoring elections. Many feature Zimbabwean proverbs: “If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a small room with a mosquito.”

Maviyane-Davies didn’t create images for the 2005 or 2008 elections, but he’s been working on images in the last few weeks, including one for the poster that advertised today’s event, featured above.

My friend and colleage Tawanda Mutasah, the executive director of Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, is asked to address the thorny question, “How has Mugabe managed to stay in power?” He offers two answers - domestic repression, and a pretense of African legitimation. For decades, Mutasah tells us, Mugabe has terrorized voters throughout the country, with particularly severe cases in Midlands and the southwest of the country, to rig elections. While rigging efforts this decade have received more attention, it’s really a very old strategy.

A key date for Zimbabwe was March 2001, when SADC (a regional trade body) agreed to a new set of norms and standards for elections. (Tawanda clarified by email today that the 2001 agreement was by the parliamentary forum of SADC. An agreement in August 2004 by SADC heads of state cemented these changes.) The fact that Zimbabwe signed on to these standards “makes it easier to say the elections have been stolen without people complaining about UK and US influence,” as these are African norms and standards, agreed to by Zim’s neighors.

The real problem, Mutasah explains, is the “joint operations command”, a group of six generals who are functionally in control of the government. “They’ve told Mugabe he can’t reliquish power” because they’re afraid of what will happen when they are no longer in power. They’re (understandably) afraid of being prosecuted for political murders and crimes against humanity.

Mugabe has been a master at leveraging his revolutionary credentials, but Mutasah tells us that “we’re seeing cracks in this pretense. The chink is now clear in Mugabe’s armor.” For years, he’s claimed that all of Africa supports him against the rest of the world and that he’s leading an African revolution. But now the president of Zambia has declared that any country in SADC which allows the Chinese arms shipment to be delivered will be violating SADC election codes. The president of Tanzania, who is currently heading the AU, has described the situation in Zimbabwe as “unacceptable”. President Mbeki of South Africa is looking increasingly isolated.

That said, Mutasah gives us a quick history lesson: in 1971, the Byrd Amendment overturned a ban on US trade with Rhodesia, allowing the US to import minerals despite Ian Smith’s deeply repressive regime. “Mugabe has been aware from long back that the politics of the international community has tended to be fickle, and I dare say, unprincipled.” The hope, today, is that the international community is changing and that it’s not monolithic. There needs to be a movement around global human rights solidarity that marginalizes Mugabe in terms of supporting the rights of poor people in Zimbabwe.

Andrew Meldrum, a journalist for The Guardian and The Economist who lived for years in post-independence Zimbabwe before being imprisoned and deported, sees cause for hope in the current situation. His proximate cause for hope is the international community’s refusal to allow an arms shipment from China to be delivered to Zimbabwe.

The message of this refusal, he tells us, is that Mugabe can’t win at the ballot box - he needs guns. And African leaders are starting to step up and pressure China (against a backdrop of China’s problems with Tibet and Darfur), which appears to have led to China backing down from delivering arms. In the past, Meldrum tells us he advised the US and British government not to condemn the Zimbabwean government because it ends up reinforcing Mugabe’s argument that he’s at war against colonial powers. “But at this point, things are so desperate, all possible criticism should go on.” He suggests that criticism should focus on democracy, the rule of law and human rights - “Who can be against those things?”

He notes that the government’s latest plan (which already appears to be taken off the table) for a national unity government isn’t realistic. “A government of national unity governed by Robert Mugabe is a contradiction in terms.” Mugabe doesn’t behave democratically within his own party. There’s no chance that the opposition - or the international community - will accept that solution.

Dambudzo Muzenda, a blogger and a student at the Kennedy School of Government, sees the recent election as proof positive that the national mood has turned against Mugabe. She believes that the election was “a personal vote against Mugabe and ZANU-PF, and that “people won’t accept a government with Mugabe at the top of the ticket.” Asked about the possibility of a truth and reconcilliation committee, she wonders whether this process will make it harder to oust hardliners, who will be afraid of facing persecution. “If that means trading immunity against justice… I would rather see Mugabe go scott free than see him stay in power and cause so much damage.”

Any conversation about the future of Zimbabwe has to face issues of land distribution. Meldrum unpacks the history of the 1980 Lancaster Agreement, in which the UK agreed to provide fiscal assistance to Zimbabwe to allow for land distribution. “Zimbabwe needed land reform before the seizures. And now it needs it again. No one has benefitted from these seizures.” He believes it will take 15 years, a process that might involve inviting experienced white farmers to bid on large farms and coach black farmers to the point where they’re able to productively take over these farms. Mutasah points out that the UK honored part of the Lancaster agreement, putting up £44m to compensate farmers. Unfortunately, this money rarely made it into farmer’s hands, and farms were given to cronies, not to people who could productively farm them. “Those guys in the upper echelons of the government - each of them owns at least five farms.”

Many of the questions focused on what diaspora Zimbabweans might do to effectively help change. Muzenda points out that roughly a quarter of the nation’s population lives in South Africa. They’re afraid to come out into the streets and protest, as many are in South Africa illegally. But South Africa could negotiate an agreement to allow disaporans to vote, either in an official or an unofficial way. And some activists are organizing protests, like attempts to jam phone lines at ZANU-PF headquarters and at certain ministries and embassies. In a later question, Muzenda is less hopeful, noting that protests within Zimbabwe will likely lead to declaration of martial law. She ends with the hope that Mugabe’s age may become a factor, or that a Jacob Zuma presidency of South Africa would be less forgiving and flexible with Mugabe. Mutasah wonders whether a public statement from Nelson Mandela would help further undercut Mugabe’s anti-colonialist cred and suggests people contact Mandela’s foundation.

An audience member wonders how Mugabe and ZANU-PF managed to allow election results to be published at polling places, which appears to be the key factor in preventing the election from being rigged. Mutasah quotes section and verse: “Section 64-1E is the key provision.” It was added to Zimbabwe election law under pressure from opposition parties. That pressure resulted from international condemnation of violence on March 11, 2007, where government forces broke up a peaceful prayer meeting. The outrage over that violence forced dialog between the government and opposition, and it allowed for a key change in election law.

I asked the panelists how they felt about the issue of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Zimbabwe has an amazing history of forgiveness - Ian Smith, who led the apartheid government, was allowed to live out his days peacefully under the Mugabe government that fought for his ouster. How much forgiveness were panelists willing to offer in exchange for a change of government?

Chingono suggested that Zimbabweans were so desperate for basic human rights and food that they’d be willing to forgive many of the people involved with the government. Mutasah was far more cautious, warning of the dangers of “premature forgiveness”. “We are ready to go beyond the current impasse, but we see deep-seated anger,” connected to the massacre in Matabeleland, the 2000 killed between 2000 and 2002. The important lessons from the South Africa TRC, he tells us, is the importance of forcing people to confess their crimes in a serious, open, contrite way before being granted amnesty. He believes Zimbabwe will need a TRC, perhaps one in which lower-ranking functionaries are prosecuted while leaders are given amnesty, or perhaps vice versa. “In our experience with transitional justice, we’ve discovered that when anger is bottled up, it doesn’t always come up in a civilized way.” The challenge is not just to oust Mugabe - it’s to build a prosperous and stable country after the fact, which involves facing and moving through decades of frustration and anger.

Two bonus readings:

- An amazing post from an anonymous documentary filmmaker in Zimbabwe, unpacking the economics of Zimbabwe under hyperinflation and the people who are benefitting from it.

- Chinese resentment over the China/Zimbabwe arms deal and international press attention to China’s role in Zimbabwe, translated by John Kennedy for Global Voices.

The good news about Global Voices? We do a pretty good job of giving you access to voices you might not otherwise hear from, translating and featuring bloggers from almost two hundred nations.

The bad news? Not everyone has a blog.

Every intelligent interviewer who asks me about Global Voices asks whether the people we feature on the site are a representative sample of the population of the nations we cover. The answer is “nope”. Bloggers aren’t a representative sample in the US, and they’re certainly not “the man on the street” in a country like Benin or Bolivia.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to bloggers. It just means it’s worth realizing that, for the most part, bloggers in developing nations are better educated, more technical and wealthier than most of their compatriots. In some countries, that leads to recognizable bias - bloggers in Venezuela are more likely than the national average to be anti-Chavez; bloggers in Zimbabwe are more likely than the national average to be anti-Mugabe.

But it does present a challenge for us at Global Voices - how do we broaden the group of people around the world who have access to blogs and other tools they can use to share their experiences with a global audience?

With support from the Knight Foundation, we’ve been running a project called Rising Voices, designed to introduce citizen media to a wider audience, giving people who might not have a chance to express themselves online the opportunity, training and access to tools that allow them to raise their voices.

One of the projects we’re supporting in Rising Voices is Voces Bolivianas, an effort by Bolivians both within and outside that country to bridge political divides, begin dialogs and bring different types of people into the online space. Today, the project is holding Bolivian Voices Day, a nationwide effort to train bloggers and bring more people into the conversation.

Project leader Eddie Ávila wrote to the GV team last night, talking about his reasons for starting the project. I thought his words were moving and asked him for his permission to share them. Here’s some of what he said.

It seems like ages ago, when I noticed a trackback on one of my blog posts that led to a site called Global Voices Online. Soon after came an email from David Sasaki, the Latin American editor at the time, inquiring whether I would be interested in representing Bolivia through weekly summary posts. That began my start with Global Voices. That was September 2005.

Little did I think it would lead me to where I am now, namely 12 hours away from the start of Bolivian Voices Day. In eight sites across the country, approximately 100 Bolivians from “underrepresented” groups will take part in a one-day workshop where they will learn how to create a blog, write posts, and most importantly, be part of this local, national and global conversation. In Oruro, a small mining town, teachers from rural schools will come into town to participate. In Tiqiupaya, an even smaller suburb of Cochabamba, members of neighborhood associations have signed up to take part, and in El Alto, a youth group of young men and women, who go to school at night because they work during the day to support their families, are others who will part of this event. These are just a few examples of who will be present tomorrow…

For me, working and moving back here to Bolivia holds special meaning. The decision of my parents to immigrate and remain in the U.S. some 40+ years ago, as you might guess, changed my world forever, but also instilled in me a special responsiblity to “do something” for Bolivia someday. In prior stays in the country, I’ve volunteered at orphanges, gave donations to buy children presents at Christmastime or other worthy deeds, but it never felt right. This project feels right, and even though it is a small drop in the bucket with a country of 9 million in an increasingly polarized society, it is the first step. Creating meaningful interaction with one another regardless of class, ethnicity, geographic location, is just what this country needs…

Good luck, Eddie, and good luck to everyone involved with this project. Can’t wait to hear what Bolivia has to say.

Since Saturday night, I’ve been giving the reload button on my web browser a workout. Like many people around the world, most people in Africa and all people in Zimbabwe, I’m desperate to know how the election turned out. And more than four days after polling closed, it’s still not clear precisely what happened, or precisely what will transpire.

The initial narrative - that MDC won in a landslide and that the election commission was taking time to rig the results in Mugabe’s favor - now looks more complicated. Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a group of NGOs who cooperated to monitor the election, reported that Tsvangarai had the largest plurality of votes, but was likely to be just below the 50% threshhold needed to avoid a run-off. (There are numerous explanations for the disparity between the early and later count. Some argue that it reflects Mugabe’s support in rural areas, where results were reported later. Others, understandably paranoid, point out that the 2002 election was rigged by having a close election, which later swung dramatically for Mugabe. And the truly paranoid believe the Mossad is rigging the election in Mugabe’s favor.)

In the past couple of hours, it’s become clear that ZANU-PF has lost control of Parliament. While this is a dramatic development, it doesn’t shed that much light on the Presidential poll. There appears to be an increasing, rough agreement that Tsvangarai/MDC recieved either just over or just under 50% of votes, while Mugabe/ZANU-PF received somewhere between 41-43%, and the remainder went to Simba Makoni, a former ZANU-PF insider who split with the party.

(Here’s the official projections from ZESN, published on their site on March 31 as a word document:

Presidential Poll Projections – 29 March 2008 Harmonized Elections
Makoni 8.2% 1.1% 7.1 to 9.3
Mugabe 41.8% 2.6% 39.2 to 44.4
Towungana 0.6% 0.1% 0.5 to 0.7
Tsvangirai 49.4% 2.4% 47.0 to 51.8

The first number is the projected share of votes; the second is the margin of error; the third is the 95% confidence interval.)

The storyline yesterday was that Mugabe would step down rather than face potential embarrasment in a second round of polls. This now looks less likely, and there’s been speculation today that, instead, Mugabe will contest the next round, and that the second round may be rigged in his favor.

For some perspectives from the ground, Ndesanjo Macha has a roundup of Zimbabwean blogs titled, “What more must Zimbabweans do?”, quoting from a blog post from activist Bev Clark. The quotes from blogs run through a range of frustrated emotions, suggestions to call the electoral commission and complain, to prepare to take to the streets, to bunker down if the military attempts to enforce continued rule by Mugabe, to flee the the country.

Zimbabwe’s blogs tend to be overwhelmingly anti ZANU-PF. It’s useful to hear some constrasting views, though they require some work to find online. Dumisani Nyoni, an activist working on rural development near Bulawayo, and an occasional blogger, writes from a very different perspective, one more sympathetic to ZANU-PF - his account of the election and the uncertainty around the vote count is worth reading.

It’s likely going to take many more reloads to get a sense of what happened, and what will happen in Zimbabwe. The Election Commission is telling the UN that there might not be a final count until April 11, blaming fuel shortages, paper shortages and the economy for the delays.

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.

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.

Solana Larsen and I had a great time hanging out with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute at Brown University a couple of weeks ago. Chris is the legendary radio host and reporter whose Radio Open Source challenged our conceptions of how a public radio show could work.

Radio Open Source is on hiatus, and Chris is now challenging our idea of what a seminar at Brown should look like. Solana and I showed up, planning on showing a few slides, touring our websites and having a chat with the students. We didn’t expect to be producing a radio show. Chris realized that a seminar could work as radio show simply by putting mikes in front of himself and his guests, then turning to his students as “callers” with questions for the guest speakers. The results are now online, and you can see how we did - basically, Solana and I talk about the theoretical and practical reasons why we’re involved with Global Voices and what it’s possible to learn by paying attention to the wider world.

I’d like to note that Chris and his webfolk managed to find one of the more egregious photos of me ever taken to accompany the piece. (And trust me, most photos of me end up egregious.) I’ve begged him to replace it with something slightly more flattering. That said, the photo of Solana is accurate. She really is that cute.

In glancing in on Solana’s blog, I came across a post I’d otherwise have missed. Our project, Voices Without Votes, is collecting opinions from around the world about the US 2008 elections. Some of these opinions are in the form of blog posts. Others are more creative in nature. Solana features a pair of pro-Obama songs, one Trinidadian, the other Jamaican, in a post on her blog, and wonders when someone will get the bright idea of releasing a CD compilation that starts with will.i.am and features political songs from around the world. It’s a great idea - give us a holler, Obama campaign, and we’d be glad to hook you up.

After loading ninety pages of I Can Has Cheezburger, you may find yourself out of lolcats. Not to worry. Ian McKeller is here to help you.

The LOL feeds page will take an arbitrary RSS feed and apply the headlines to a set of cat photos, taken from the Cute Cats series on flickr. The original application was designed to create better Twitter error pages (which feature cute cats, but are static, which gets frustrating when Twitter goes down half a dozen times in a week.)
What this means is that you can read news headlines from CNN, each one augmenting a cute cat image. Or feed in your own news source and see how your blog looks plastered on cat images.

Actual lolcat from the Global Voices lolcat feed. No cats or Kazakhs were harmed in the making of this image.

I found out about this when reading the notes from a recent meeting of the Global Voices lingua community, the amazing folks who translate content into a dozen other languages so that we’re able to share citizen media with people all over the world. Evidently, the LOLCats version of Global Voices is an action item coming out of a two hour meeting. I don’t know if this is a proposal to localize McKeller’s tool, so we can produce LOLCats in Bangla (one of the tasks I suggested in my Cute Cat Theory talk) or whether it’s simply a proposal that we change the format of Global Voices to all LOLCat.

I could live with that.

I’ve spent much of the last 24 hours with the lovely Solana Larsen, Global Voices’ managing editor. It’s a bit strange to realize that this is only the second time we’ve met face to face - like many of the most important people involved with Global Voices, our relationship is mostly virtual, but it’s never a surprise that it’s great fun to spend time in the same place.

Solana’s been filling me in on some of the going-ons of my GV colleagues, ten of whom recently shared a house in Miami to attend the WeMedia conference. Evidently when you put this many global geeks in the same place, some odd conversations result. For instance, a Bolivian/Bahraini collaboration has led to a new website - LolQats - which promises insightful commentary on Yemen, Somalia and other qat-consuming nations.

It’s not like Solana has any shortage of cool projects to work on. For one thing, she’s the President of the Danish-Puerto Rican Society, an international organization that’s for PuertoDansk people (all ten of them) and for anyone else who is of confusing ethnicity.

Actually, the membership criteria are a bit broader than that. Quoting from the membership page, “It’s a friendship society, which means if you’re friends with a Dane or a Puerto Rican (or any combination thereof) you are eligible.” Based on my friendship with the society president and the odd fact that I routinely get invited to conferences “to provide an African perspective,” I qualify. You probably do, too.

Solana and I were speaking at Chris Lydon’s seminar at Brown University. As of the world’s great radio hosts, it’s only predictable that our class would have to turn into a radio show. Keep your eyes on the Radio Open Source website, where our conversation will be posted sometime soon.

Driving home last night from Boston, I caught a piece on NPR about the problem of distressed properties in the wake of the slump in the US housing market and the sub-prime mortgage crisis. As homeowners discover they can’t pay their mortgages, banks forclose on the properties, and they sit abandoned. Often they become targets for looters, who break in and steal copper plumbing, for vagrants who live in them, or for arsonists. Even if they simply decay, they lower property values for other homeowners in the neighborhood.

Some people are proposing radical solutions to the problem. Barbara Reed is the mother of a firefighter who was crippled while fighting an arson fire in a Buffalo, New York abandoned building. She’s tried to launch a movement called “Take Down a House” (pronounced “Ta-dah!”), which believes that the way forward for that struggling city is to remove abandoned houses and shrink the residential housing stock. Unfortunately, she’s discovering that house removal can cost tens of thousands of dollars, especially if the home contains asbestos - it may cost too much money to shrink Buffalo to the size it really needs to be.

There are abandoned and distressed properties on the web as well. If you’ve ever put up a wiki and failed to garden it, you know what I’m talking about. I used to have a small wiki on this domain that Rachel and I used for grocery lists. (Yes, I realize very little is geekier, but it’s really cool to have your partner create a grocery list on a wiki while you go to the store and access it on your phone.) We forgot about it until a speaker’s agency, looking for my bio, came across it and let me know that it had become a link farm for porn. I thanked the woman who let me know and mentioned that it was supposed to be a shopping list - she pointed out that my wife and I appeared to be shopping for some racy things indeed.

If failing to maintain a wiki is like leaving an abandoned building unlocked and unguarded, there are less dramatic ways to abandon a web property. Run a blog on a platform like MT or Wordpress and let it go dormant, and you more or less guarantee that your property will be invaded - searching for holes in these platforms and using those holes to install linkfarms has become extremely common. The blog may look unharmed by the outside, but there may be vagrant pharma spammers residing somewhere within. As with architecture, there’s a tough balancing act - should you keep the structure alive for historical reasons or tear it down for the community good? I tore down FreeHaoWu.com not too long ago, because it became clear I couldn’t maintain it and it was becoming a spam magnet.

BlogAfrica.com has never quite become a distressed property, but I’ve felt like a slumlord the past few months - yes, it’s got occupants, but the plumbing is backed up and the hallway lights don’t work. The site is running on an old, buggy version of Reblog, and my attempts to upgrade to a new version weren’t successful. A persistent PHP bug meant that all posts were dated January 1, 1970, a true epoch fail. (S’okay if you didn’t get that joke. It probably means you have a life away from the computer screen.) For the last several months, when people have registered blogs with the service, I’ve begged them to register with Afrigator.com, a much better maintained, full-featured blog aggregator.

Fortunately, someone’s taken the property off my hands - the good folks at AllAfrica.com. AllAfrica was the original host for the aggregator - Kwin Kramer and I came up with the idea for BlogAfrica in 2003, and he hosted the first incarnation of the site on AllAfrica, back before there were many open source blog aggregators (or many African blogs.) When he moved from AllAfrica to other technical projects, I moved BlogAfrica over to my own servers, with substantial help from Boris Anthony, thinking that we might merge it with Global Voices. Over time, it’s become clear that the value of Global Voices is our editorial effort, not our reach as an aggregator, and the projects have remained unmerged.

So now AllAfrica is planning to revive the site, upgrading the technology and, I hope, helping integrate African blogs with their brilliant news content. The site will likely be dark for a couple of days during the transition, but I predict it will be back better and stronger than ever before. And it’s less likely that someone will break in and steal the copper plumbing.

I’m in Turkey this week participating in a Berkman conference on internet and democracy - it’s a meeting of activists from almost twenty countries, talking about ways that activists can use the internet to promote democratic movements. Many of the sessions are off the record or under Chatham Rules, to protect the identity of people speaking here. But the first speaker this morning is Sami ben Gharbia, the leader of Global Voices Advocacy and a leading Tunisian free speech advocate, and he’s not exactly a shy guy. :-)

Sami’s presentation is on video advocacy and mashups, with a focus on advocacy in Tunisia. While Sami and other Tunisian activists have worked hard on other free speech campaigns around the world, this presentation focuses specifically on activism in Tunisia, specifically around the legislative and presidential elections of 2004 and the World Summit on Internet and Society in 2005. Sami and other activists were urging a boycott of the 2004 elections, which they expected to be rigged. And they wanted to ensure that the political and internet leaders from around the world who came to Tunisia in 2005 would encounter the Yezzi Fock Ben Ali (Enough is enough, Ben Ali) campaign that they were running.

Sami argues that Tunisia is one of the most successful propoganda machines in the world - despite being a highly repressive nation, it’s rarely criticized by Europe and North America - he believes that Tunisia is viewed as a model for repressive dictatorships. To take on such a propoganda machine, Sami argues that you need to create your own propoganda, including video, which is easy for non-activists to understand and be moved by.

He shows some early videos, often flash animations that have turned into videos distributed on YouTube and DailyMotion. One shows Ben Ali in a washing machine, making the point that a military dictator can’t wash off his military and security background. Another shows reports of human rights organizations about Tunisia and urges Tunisian internet users to “enlarge their vision.”

Several of Sami’s videos use footage of animals. One shows a gorilla looking directly at a camera. Her motions are subtitled and tell the viewer, “I’m a primate, you’re not a primate. You’ve got the power to vote for someone other than Ben Ali.” Another video uses footage of lions chasing and killing a zebra - the point is that manufacturers of filtering and censorship software are chasing down and killing freedom of speech. The film ends with a slide that says, “Smartfilter - your dirty business is killing our freedom of expression”.

A video I’ve written about at length is Astrubal’s remix of the Apple 1984 commercial. Years before American activists remixed the Apple ad to promote Obama over Hillary Clinton, Astrubal used the commercial to protest against Ben Ali’s never-ending presidency. Another video focuses on the 404 error page - a page the Tunisian internet authorities show when a site is blocked, to try to fool users into believing that the internet is experiencing a technical problem, rather than being censored. Sami tells us that “404″ evokes a Peugeot motor car, and offers a video clip from a 1962 commercial parodying these 404 errors.

Much of the Tunisian video activism focuses on humor. Sami points to an article that appeared in Tunisian newspaper La Presse - “the Pravda of Tunisia” - that reported that a city in Italy had named an avenue for Tunisian president Ben Ali. Sami and others researched the street using Google Maps and discovered that the “avenue” was actually a small alley, a dead end, in a tiny village. To show the disparity, they created a video that highlighted the claim in the newspaper and then showed the actual road on an online map.

Google Maps and Google Earth are increasingly popular in Tunisian activism. A new video uses the theme of 1001 Nights and features Ben Ali and his wife on a flying carpet, touring Tunisian presidential palaces via Google Maps. Another video looks at the use of the Tunisian presidential plane. Sami and Astrubal started searching for images of the Tunisian presidential plane on “planespotter” websites - they discovered that the plane had made at least 13 trips outside the country in an interval when onl one official trip had been reported. They used Google Earth to show the thirteen trips and raise the question about who was using the plane and why.

Sami mentions that the video was blocked in Tunisia within five days - the Tunisian authorities blocked DailyMotion, where it had been posted. (Oddly enough, they haven’t blocked either Google Maps or Google Earth.) But Sami had been promoting the video on his blog in Arabic, and Astrubal promoted it on his in French. When Global Voices picked up the story, it became accessible to the Anglophone world as well. Sami credits my blog post on the situation with bringing the story to the attention of Foreign Policy magazine, which has now reported both on the Tunisian activism, and offered advice on how you, too, can become a presidential plane spotter.

One of the questions offered after the talk is whether video advocacy is appropriate for low-bandwidth environments. There’s evidence that videos, once they go viral, are shared even by people who don’t have high bandwdith - Sami has seen some of the videos he’s made being distributed on DVD in Tunisia.