Not sure how you feel about KONY 2012?

A cross post from Facebook...
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If you have Facebook or Twitter and have been online in the past two days, then chances are you know about KONY 2012. Most probably you saw a few friends sharing the Invisible Children video, and perhaps you even shared it yourself after watching it. This isn't wrong. It was a moving video and it's very, very easy to hit share and feel like you've done a bit of good.

After that, you probably started to see people posting criticisms of the video, particularly of the charity, as well as others criticising the general 'slacktivist' approach of re-posting or retweeting something and feeling like you'd contributed to a cause. Others would have countered this with the fact that at least people are raising awareness, better than nothing, etc etc. And in the end, you, like me, may be a bit confused about whether, in the end, this is a good or bad thing.

What I've realised by reading debates on various friends' walls is that it doesn't really matter. The discussions that need to be had aren't about whether the video is a good or bad, but have to do with why it was so effective, why people have reacted the way they have, and where we can go from there. Here are some thoughts:

What do you know about the ICC?
If you've been spreading the word that Kony is the ICC's most wanted man, have you delved any further? Do you know, for example, that the US (along with Israel and Sudan) have effectively backed out of the ICC and are no longer considered a state party to it? This means that if Kony turned up on US soil, the US wouldn't be obligated to arrest him. If you're American, are you comfortable with this?

Do you know any of the other people or cases that are being investigated by the ICC? Do you know why Sudanese President Omar al Bashir has been indicted, or that Saif Gaddafi is supposed to be transfered there? Do you know that they're about to announce their first verdict next week, in a case related to atrocities in the DRC? Do you need someone to make a video about Thomas Lubanga's crimes to be bothered to find out?

Why is this the first you've heard of it?
The whole point of the video is to raise awareness of Kony's existence to the vast majority of the population who don't know he exists. If you're one of those people, think about why that is. This has been happening for the better part of 20 years. The vast majority of my FB friends are around my age, which means six years ago, when we were 19 or so, you should have become aware of the nightwalkers phenomenon when it featured briefly but prominently in international press. Nightwalkers was the name given to Ugandan kids who walked miles every night to sleep in protected buildings in big cities so that they wouldn't be abducted or killed by Kony and the LRA.

If you missed that then, think of what you're missing now. Do you live in a bubble populated mostly by celeb news and Twitter updates, where the only way anything like this can turn up is if a video goes viral? Now you're aware of Kony, but are you aware of exactly what's going on in Syria? A lot of people jumped on the Egypt bandwagon the day Mubarak stepped down. Do you know or care that Egypt's so called revolutionary democracy is actually still controlled by the military?

When you were in college or university, how many of you took classes where you would learn about situations like this? How many people instead took "History of Alcohol" or some other joke class because they didn't really want to be challenged? Now that you're out of university, what can you do to educate yourself more, or to help younger generations steer themselves toward choices that might mean that they don't hear about atrocities 20 years after they begin, and can take action because they have researched it and want to, not because a video or a wristband told them to?

If you're a teacher...
I know a lot of you are. I don't know what grades you teach or subjects or anything. But if they're of an appropriate age, can you use this to teach your kids about what's happening? About how to think critically when they're confronted with something like this, or about how to make sure that if they want to give to charity they know what they're contributing to? Can you teach them about something else that's happening right now in the world? If you can't, because it doesn't fit in the curriculum, then maybe we need to have a look at why that is.

I don't have any answers, really. All I know is that people seem to want to talk about this right now, and we should capitalise on that to foster broader discussions beyond KONY 2012. Talking about Joseph Kony will not get him arrested; but it can help to educate ourselves and other people about so many other issues, if we're willing to look at why this has exploded the way it has and to seriously look at ourselves and see whether we want to do anything about it or whether we really just wanted to be the first of our friends to hit share.

No News is Good News?

Well. I had been doing pretty well with posting fairly regularly up until the last two months. For a few weeks I was too busy with work and some family stuff to form a coherent opinion on anything, and then for a few weeks I was on holiday and had absolutely no clue what was going on in the world.

It's an odd feeling, being out of the news loop. My last few days in the UK before I headed home were consumed with trying to find the latest news on the London riots, but by the time I was home I had no real desire to follow up. When I was in Canada, I didn't feel adequately submerged in either Canadian or UK news. When NDP leader Jack Layton died, everyone was talking about his last news conference and how frail he looked. But I hadn't seen it, and indeed hadn't paid much attention to Layton since the election, so I didn't feel as connected to the story as everyone else seemed to be.

Equally, I had no real idea what was going on in the UK. Being on holiday, I was more scanning the front page of the BBC News website before starting my day than really poring over the news as I usually do. I was pretty much off Twitter, a regular source of comments and links that indicate what the big story of the day might be. And that was when I was in the civilised world, not at my grandparents' in rural Quebec, where the lack of a computer let alone an internet connection and the recent closure of the only deppanneur in walking distance meant I spent my days blissfully ignorant of anything that wasn't a canoe or a quad bike.

When I got back to London, I tried to catch up on what was going on. What were the big stories that happened between August 10 and August 30? Okay, things seemed to have progressed in Libya, check. There were rumblings of this Nadine Dorries abortion debate, so I was a bit behind on that one. Hurricane in the US. What else? Hmm, well...nothing earth-shattering then, I guess?

It was a nice reminder that sometimes in the little bubbles we build for ourselves - you know, following a bunch of people on Twitter who all talk about the same things, constantly refreshing news pages, having 24-hour news channels on every minute of the day - stories tend to get a bit over-hyped. Sometimes the big news of the day really isn't that big - we'll spend much of the day talking about it, tweeting about it, blogging about it, battling opinions on it...and then forget about it a few days later.

The abortion debate, for example. For days it's all anyone could write about, until eventually the coverage reached the kind of hysterical fever pitch point where you have to sit down and go, really, are we still talking about this? How many times and in how many fora can the same points be made over and over and over, with one side having absolutely no hope of budging the other? If there had been any real chance that the amendment would be passed, that would have been one thing. There would have been some real purpose in getting all worked up, in making sure that everyone's opinions were heard, in lobbying MPs, etc etc etc. But it was never going to come even close to passing, and everyone knew that. The final vote was 368 to 118.

I'm not saying it's pointless to debate anything that we know isn't going to come to pass, but I think that with the combination of the 24 hour news cycle and the blogosphere, where everyone is competing to make sure everyone else knows what they think and knows that they knew some scrap of information first, stories can just get massively blown out of proportion if there's not much else to talk about. And they can keep running for days. With the amendment not even close to passing, the whole thing will now fade away. The big story about that bill will always be the changes to the NHS that some people see as privatisation, and the yet-to-be-seen results of those changes. People will remember the debate as a footnote, another mad Dorries moment and not much else.

So I think I might go into a self-imposed news exile more often, especially when things seem to be getting out of hand with a story that doesn't really seem to be that big of a deal. If I can limit wanting to scream at my computer/TV/newspaper in exasperation to just once or twice a day, it can only be beneficial to my sanity.

On Syria

Lest you think I'm only partial to looking at the mistakes and shortcomings of mainstream media, I want to applaud the work being done in/about Syria.

Most major papers/networks/wires have a correspondent or stringer working in Syria, usually under a false name. These reporters are taking huge risks with their own safety to get information out of the country as government crackdowns become more violent and deadly. The Syrian version of the Arab Spring has more in common with Bahrain and Yemen than Egypt and Tunisia, as Bashar Al Assad's government has indiscriminately killed over 1,100 people, including, purposely, children.

The journalists reporting from Syria are at risk of being beaten, jailed, tortured and even killed if found out. Foreign journalists, who are likely to have big news organisations and national governments behind them, tend to fare better than their Syrian counterparts (well, relatively; I'm sure the time Al Jazeera's Dorothy Parvaz spent in Syrian detention was terrifying, but she was released unharmed. Several Syrian journalists and bloggers have simply disappeared. Similarly, when the four New York Times journalists were held in Libya, they were beaten and threatened, but ultimately freed. Their Libyan driver, Mohamed Shaglouf, is still missing.). Both are to be commended, but it's worth remembering that when all's said and done, the Syrian journalists will still be living there, and will have to deal with the future Syrian state, whatever it may be.

That journalists have continued to be able to get out reports on government atrocities, the refugee flow into Turkey and the deaths of 120 members of the Syrian security forces in Jisr al-Shughour (killed by police or protesters, depending on who you ask), despite a government campaign of misinformation, fear and chipping away at what internet freedom exists, is testament to their courage and ingenuity. So thank you to the foreign and national journalists, bloggers, tweeters and revolution organisers, who are putting themselves in very real danger to keep us informed and spur change in Syria.

And a mention, too, for domestic coverage. I caught then end of an excellent interview on Sky News yesterday afternoon. Colin Brazier was speaking to a Syrian government spokeswoman, whose name I didn't have the sense to write down at the time and now can't find. My favourite bit: after listening to the woman go on about how Syrian forces have never fired on anyone who didn't fire on them first, denying the number of people killed, etc., Brazier said something along the lines of: 'Let me ask you a question probably no one ever has. Suppose you are lying. Suppose you are acting as an apologist for people who are committing crimes that might well be investigated by the International Criminal Court. Does that concern you at all?' Would that all interviews included such difficult and important questions!

On Ken Clarke

This is the second time in the last four days I've felt the need to write about the way rape is treated in the media, but now my responses to two different issues seem so polarised that I'm not sure I'll be able to discuss both without tripping over myself somewhere. And so I'll discuss today's Ken Clarke fiasco and leave my thoughts on the SlutWalk phenomenon for another time.

I don't even know where to begin with today's distortion of Justice Secretary Ken Clarke's interview on BBC 5 live. The audio is here and the transcript here; I beg you to listen/read (preferably listen, so you can hear tone as well) before you read the rest of this or form an opinion on the subject. Immediately after the interview aired, the reports began to come in: that Clarke doesn't think date rape is rape, that Clarke thinks some rape is trivial, that some rapes are not rape at all, that Clarke doesn't believe 'rape is rape'...and then began the flood on Twitter, with people who had clearly not heard the interview or even read a proper news report about it informing their followers that Clarke thinks rape isn't rape if you know the attacker, if you're wearing a short skirt, etc etc etc.

First of all: yes, absolutely, Clarke made some horrible choices in terms of the language he used, and didn't take any opportunity to correct himself. He repeatedly referred to 'serious' rapes, which is what has led a slew of people to accuse him of believing that some rapes are 'trivial' (ie the opposite of serious), or that rape in general is not a serious crime.

But in listening to the interview, it is crystal clear that Clarke is trying to distinguish between what he later calls a 'classic' rape scenario - one person violently pinning down another person and having sex with them against their will (the 5 live discussion is framed exclusively in terms of women victims, though of course men can be and are also victims of rape) - and other crimes that can be classified as rape but aren't in that same way. Actually, Clarke is specifically trying to distinguish between that 'classic' rape and statutory rape, or his example of consensual sex between an 18 year old and a 15 year old. It turns out that, actually, that crime would be a sexual offence with a minor and not classified as rape and so not included in the average sentence Clarke is trying to refute, but that doesn't change the fact that, at the time, Clarke's 'serious' was not a demarcation of some rapes as worthy of our attention and concern and others not, but an attempt to distinguish between the sentences given to violent, repeat offenders and those given in cases of statutory rape. I think Clarke made clear on the show, and then again in later interviews, that he views all cases of rape - sex against someone's will, regardless of the circumstances - as serious crimes.

He alluded to some 'confusion' around date rape when he was a practising lawyer, but unfortunately was never asked to clarify, and nor did he volunteer to. He did say that all date rape cases are different and that some cases of date rape are that 'serious' classic scenario - which is to say, violent, forceful. I would guess that the confusion he speaks of lies in cases where perhaps two people have been out together, are both drunk, and have sex, and where in sober retrospect neither party is sure if consent was given at the time, or whether a person can be capable of giving consent after a certain point of inebriation. I am emphatically not saying that a woman who has been drinking is in any way at all to blame for rape, or was 'asking for it'; a person has a right to say no to sex at any point up to and during the act, and the other person has an obligation to stop. But I think it's disingenious to pretend that society thinks that a man in the 'confusing' date rape scenario above is the same and needs to be treated the same as a predatory rapist (whether a stranger in a park or a colleague in the office) who intentionally commits a pre-meditated and violent rape.

And actually, I don't really want to get into that whole debate, though this blog fairly sums up my thoughts on it (and much more concisely, I might add). My main outrage today was not with people who were unwilling to see that rape is an incredibly complex and nuanced issue and not nearly as black and white as being able to say all rape is exactly the same. My main outrage was with the media and politicians, led by Labour leader Ed Miliband, who were determined to score political points and create a controversy by purposely ignoring the context and meaning of Clarke's words and reducing the interview to a couple of patently false soundbites, which were then repeated and further distorted through other media and Twitter.

Miliband demanded in PMQs that Clarke be sacked by the end of the day for his views on rape. This might have been justifiable if, say, Clarke had actually denied that rape was a serious crime, or actually said that date rape isn't rape, or actually said that some rape isn't really all that serious. But he didn't, and Miliband knew that. I hate to have to agree with David Cameron on anything, but when he accused Miliband of jumping on a bandwagon, he was absolutely correct.

The Telegraph followed with the headline 'Kenneth Clark questions whether date rape is really "rape"'. Er, no, he didn't. A blog on the New Statesman website said that 'a significant amount of people agree with [Clarke]' that there is a 'scale of rape', trotting out as proof a survey showing that 30% of people think that a woman is partially or totally responsible for rape if she is drunk. Except, since Clarke didn't say anything about drunk women asking for it, it was a lie to say that 30% of people agreed with him. Independent columnist Johann Hari, who I normally adore, posted a link to an old article on the prejudices that allow rapists to go free, saying the 'horrible views that Ken Clarke subconsciously revealed about rape are dismayingly common in Britain'. Except none of the views in the article are ones Clarke discussed.

I have no problem with journalists taking a current event and using it as a platform to foster discussion on important topics - and, as I had planned to write about in relation to the SlutWalks, common attitudes toward rape are absolutely something that need to be brought out into the open. But so many journalists and political activists today took the opportunity to purposely ignore Clarke's fundamental point, which was, ironically, that the BBC 5 live presenter Victoria Derbyshire was reducing a political policy covering all crime into a tabloid headline about Clarke reducing rapists' sentences to 15 months. Clarke was trying to clarify facts about the average sentencing (which, granted, he did not do very well at all), and to stop the discussion from becoming hysterical over figures that he believed weren't true.

Any discussions about the pitiful figures for rape reporting and conviction rates, about the way the police and justice systems treat rape victims, about funding for rape crisis centres, about public attitudes toward rape and the idea of victim-blaming and myths about false reporting - all of these and more would have been very valid questions to ask of Clarke and ourselves. There are enough real problems in the way society and the legal system treat rape - there was no need to create a fake hysteria around something that Clarke just clearly does not believe, and I was immensely disappointed in the media today for insisting on perpetuating sensationalist trash.

On 'Super-injunctions'

So I've been trying to figure out which side of the super-injunction debate I'm on. If I had to choose, I'd have to say I'm against them, but I have a lot of reservations about the whole thing, although, to be honest, my issues are mostly with the invasive, celebrity-gossip-obsessed nature of today's media and not really with the injunctions themselves.

Do I think the public has a 'right' to know about celebrities' private lives? Not really, no. I'm not going to fight a freedom of the press/freedom of speech campaign based on my right to know who is cheating on their wife with whom. Those kinds of reports are flavour of the month gossip that people will forget about as soon as the next one comes along, but have lasting impacts on the lives of those involved (will she dump him or won't she? More gossip fodder!), including in many cases children, and it's just not something that I'm comfortable demanding some inviolable right to know.

And for the most part, that's the kind of stories these super-injunctions have allegedly been blocking, according to the recent Twitter 'exposure', if it's to be believed. And if that's all they ever were, I probably wouldn't have a massive problem with them; I know celebrities are in the public eye because they chose to be in some way or another, but I don't think that gives the other six billion of us the right to know every single detail about their private lives. But if the super-injunctions are allowed to continue, it's inevitable that at some point someone (a politician, most likely) will attempt to muzzle something that is in the public interest. And the public interest might include things like extra-marital affairs and naughty pictures if there are allegations that, say, taxpayer money was used to pay for hotel rooms or if a politician were being blackmailed. There is no clear line with these injunctions where we can say these things are definitely okay to keep out of the press in the name of privacy, and these things are not. There will always be a grey area and, as a result, I lean towards not setting a precedent of extremely strict privacy laws that are designed to keep anything and everything secret.

I'm curious to see what impact, if any, today's Max Mosley decision will have on these kinds of stories. Presumably super-injunctions have been brought in cases where celebrities have been informed beforehand in one way or another that their secrets are about to be plastered across the front page of the dailies. But if media now know that they definitely have no obligation to inform people before publishing details of their private lives, how many of them will skip seeking comment or confirmation at the source and just go straight ahead with publishing allegations to avoid the chance of the celebrity seeking a super-injunction? I do worry that the prevalence of injunctions may lead to a more irresponsible press, especially among tabloids who are desperate to get a juicy story out ahead of anyone else.

What I do wish is that there was less 'need' for these injunctions in the first place. The public craving for any scraps of information or photos about actors, models, top athletes and their partners is sickening. The culture of gossip and outright invasiveness that pervades the tabloids, websites and even the broadsheets allows otherwise unremarkable people to become Z-list celebrities because of an affair with an actor and Z-list celebrities a few more moments of fame for the same reason. That these people can sell their stories for so much money is indicative of the fact that the papers know these stories sell - big time. And as long as that's the case, reporters are going to continue to dig for the juicy tell-alls and years-old topless photos with little regard for the privacy of those involved. Unfortunately it's the case that privacy rights are ill-defined and weighed not against the public interest, but against how much money is to be made.

In the end, though, the super-injunctions just seem like a waste of time and resources given the fact that their top-secret contents seem to be fairly common knowledge online. If you want to know which footballer allegedly had an affair with which reality TV star, Google and Twitter can tell you, if one of your friends hasn't already. And even if these allegations haven't been published on the front page of the Sun and the Daily Mail, once everyone thinks they know them, the damage to the reputations of those involved is done, unless someone else comes forward and confesses it was actually them who had the affair. Whether the publication of these details online or in foreign media is right or wrong according to privacy ethics is a bit beside the point; until someone can somehow impose and enforce a worldwide privacy law, banning the UK media from publishing something that is already common knowledge is a bit absurd. And it may be this fact, above all ethical questions, that ends up being the game-changer.

Belated Response

I never did get around to posting after the TUC protest a couple of weeks ago, which means I won't bother saying much about it now since it's all a bit outdated. I did have a look at the coverage on Sunday, and it was pretty much what you'd expect. The more liberal papers tended to run higher numbers of attendees (ranging up to 400,000) and their headlines played down the trouble caused by the more radical elements. The more conservative papers generally went with lower attendance estimates (as low as 200,000) and featured photos and headlines about violence and police more prominently. Headlines aside, though, the things that went on outside of the march - the occupation of Fortnum and Masons, the paintballs thrown at police officers and allegedly tax-dodging businesses on Oxford Street, the vandalism of the Olympic clock in Trafalgar Square - were really the main focus of all coverage. Some better-meaning pieces opened with a paragraph that pointedly recognised the mass of peaceful protesters, but still went on to talk quite a bit more about the rest. But even if 400,000 people are marching peacefully, it's still news if anyone goes and smashes windows and throws paint on Oxford Street, so it's wrong to think that there should somehow be no media coverage just because the protest leaders would rather highlight the peaceful elements.

Yesterday someone posted this article on Twitter, defending the Black Bloc's tactics. While I generally don't agree with it, I do think it makes an important point about the distinction between violence and vandalism. Commentary during and after protests from politicians, police, opponents and peaceful protesters always condemns the 'violence' perpetrated by a few rogue elements. But is breaking shop windows or spraypainting buildings and monuments really violence? If this were an isolated incident on any night of the week, it would just be vandalism, and not noteworthy at all. Of course, there have been incidents of some people attacking police with protest signs, bottles, bricks, etc., and of course this is violence. I just think it's important that we use the right words in the right context.

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The election campaign in Canada is under way, and I'm already annoyed. First, by the jibes being traded on Twitter by Michael Ignatieff and Stephen Harper over the possibility of a one-on-one debate. "You said this but now you've taken it back", "My staff offered this and got no response", blah blah blah. People who are trying to be elected as Prime Minister of a country should not be engaging in petty who said what, schoolyard taunting online. It's pathetic. Second, the condescending campaign sloganing: met with REAL CANADIANS today, repeating RURAL CANADIANS over and over to show they aren't forgotten. It's so transparent and superficial. And I know, I know, it's politics. Sometimes I just hope for something a little better from the people who are supposed to be our nation's great leaders.

Finally, I'd forgotten the most annoying thing of all about election campaigns - my partisan Facebook friends. My newsfeed is basically a list of articles about why Harper or Ignatieff is terrible and will ruin this country (or already has). Worse than these, which are presumably meant to at least educate, are the status updates that don't really mean anything and serve just to shout loudly about who that person is voting for and why everyone else is stupid for not doing so. Urgh. I wish we could have some sort of moratorium on party hacks for the duration of the campaign.

Bits and Bobs

It occurred to me to write about a couple of different things today, and, as I am mostly just ranting anyway, I figured a short bit about each would do. To be fair, they're not really media critiques either.

Japan, Idiots and Facebook

This and this have come to my attention in the last few days. It hardly needs stating that the contents are disgusting, ignorant drivel, but that's not my primary concern. My main concern is that the people who posted those remarks actually believe them, and that they live in an environment/social circle where they felt comfortable posting those sort of thoughts knowing that people would agree with them. And the variety of people, by which I mean the ethnicities and age groups represented, is astounding (caveat: most if not all of them are Americans - I mean the variety of Americans represented). We're not talking about a small number of people in some small town here.

This is, to me, a stunning example of the failure of American education and culture to make its younger generations aware of what has happened in their recent and very recent past. That any American would say 'Remember Pearl Harbor?' and not immediately jump to 'Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki?' is appalling. Part of me thinks that the majority of these people must have gotten their history lesson from the film, which conveniently leaves out the atomic bombs - somehow, if that were the case, you could excuse them for not knowing. But I'm sure this isn't true. I'm sure American children learn about WWII in school, and even a quick Google shows teaching resources available for American teachers on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So are these people being purposely ignorant? And as for the 'Where was Japan during Katrina?' and 'Why does the US help everyone when no one would help us?' comments - the US government records millions of dollars in government, corporate and private donations from Japan for Katrina. I know I can't expect people to research their Facebook statuses, but come on. How well is international aid to America publicised during disasters?

Sexy Science

In an article in today's Times (which is behind a paywall, and, because I'm no longer at work to get behind said paywall, I won't be quoting directly), Sarah Vine criticises BBC's Wonders of the Universe because presenter Brian Cox is, essentially, too good looking to present a science programme. Vine says such programmes should be presented by old men who are too busy being scientists to remember to brush their hair or know what's in fashion. This stance might make a little bit of sense if Cox was just the good looking keyboard player in a 90s pop band that the BBC had recruited to front its programme and not, you know, also a doctor in particle physics who works on the hadron collider.

Cox took exception to Vine's article and suggested (via Twitter) that as wife of Education Secretary Michael Gove, she might consider the impact the programme (and similar ones) have on making science accessible to younger generations and encouraging it in schools. He also criticised her idea that only old men should talk about science, saying those kinds of attitudes are what keeps girls from pursuing careers in science. Vine's response? That if someone could find an ugly scientist who took exception as much as Cox did, she might take the argument seriously. Ridiculous.

PS

Further to yesterday's post, check this out. The tool itself is pretty cool, but Chris Atkins' work brings up some of the same points I was trying to make yesterday:

"But it was Atkins's bogus Facebook campaign calling for the return of the prime minister's new cat, Larry, that has been most successful. Within 24 hours of the site having been created, the Mail ran the story under the heading: "But that's my auntie's cat: Man's claim on 'stray' No 10 ratcatcher (… and there's a Facebook campaign to get him back)." It also appeared in the Metro, under the heading: "Dear David Cameron: You've stolen my aunt's cat, please return him."

But the entirely made up story received most attention on Gaby Logan's BBC 5 Live show, in a light-hearted slot before the 1 o'clock news.. Discussing the story with chief political correspondent John Pienaar, Logan joked that the dispute over ownership of Larry the Downing Street cat was likely to "run and run".

Media and Social Media

I'm slowly and reluctantly coming to terms with the existence of Twitter and the role it has to play in journalism.

Up until a few months ago, I didn't really have a Twitter account. I mean, I did, but I opened it because a particularly funny friend of mine was on Twitter and I wanted to read the things he posted, but his Tweets were protected so I had to get an account to read them. I posted maybe five things in over a year, until I realised everyone at work had it and they started hounding me to use mine. So I've embraced it. And in doing so, I've come to see that it can be a lot more than just another narcissistic forum for people who think everyone cares about what they think a lot more than anyone does.

Since everyone and their dog is now on Twitter, it can be a great resource for finding out about events and stories, for following what's going on as people live-tweet events, and as I hardly feel needs saying at this point, for finding out what's happening in places that are closed to traditional media. This became increasingly obvious as governments took measures against press freedom in Egypt, Bahrain and Libya in recent weeks. It's hard to find fault with using social media in these situations, for organising, for sources, for spreading word between journalists. I would caution, though, about completely overstating the importance of social media in these situations - several journalists who were on the ground in Egypt have since pointed out that when the internet was shut down around January 27, the presence on the street actually increased because people had no way of finding out what was going on and had to head to the streets to find out. But still, it's clear that in places like Libya, where press freedom was non-existent and the regime was doing everything it could to keep journalists out and deny violence against protesters, the fact that people had any way at all to get information to the rest of the world was absolutely crucial to understanding what was happening there.

So in these situations, I can absolutely see the merit of the kind of amalgamation of journalism and social media that we've seen in recent weeks. Where I do have a massive problem with it is in modern more domestic journalism, where getting opinions from Twitter and Facebook has become standard practice, and where posts themselves suddenly become news just because everyone can see them and decide to be outraged. Reporters regularly include 'reaction' from people who purport to care about an event in their stories - that is, they post a couple of choice tweets that come up when you search for the relevant trending topic or hashtag. Is this the same as getting an informed opinion from an expert, as we might have done in the past, or the same as actually attending an event, understanding the atmosphere, and getting an opinion from someone who was there when it happened and is reacting in that context? I don't think it necessarily is. There's no way of verifying sources on Twitter - it's somehow just assumed that anyone posting a comment on something is the same kind of person you might have otherwise sought out for comment in the pre-Twitter days. Likewise, it is now common practice when a person dies to report on what messages 'friends' have posted on their Facebook page. Is this the same as a journalist getting an emotional interview with the person's family or friends at a memorial service?

I also think there's a very real danger of becoming lazy because everything seems to be on hand, and of journalistic laziness being potentially dangerous. An example. When I was in j-school, I got a phone call from a classmate who was then doing some work for a national newspaper. He asked me if I knew a Jason Smith (not his real name), because Jason's last tagged photos on Facebook were in an album of mine. I didn't know him - he was the flatmate of an acquaintance, and had come along to a j-school event I'd organised and subsequently been tagged in the photos by his flatmate. Why? Well it turns out someone with Jason's name, who was or had been studying at our school, who was from Toronto, had just been charged with murdering a disabled woman in Toronto. Jason's Facebook profile fit the bill, and his profile picture was dark, with a baseball hat obscuring his face, so it was hard to tell if he fit the alleged murderer's description. I said I didn't know him, but was pretty sure he was living in Ottawa and not a murderer. When I got home, I had a Facebook message from another reporter, and could see from Jason's profile that some of his other friends had been contacted as well. Of course, it turned out to be a different person with the same name - but how many of Jason's friends were contacted to find out if he had killed someone, and what is the danger there? Were there more safeguards against this kind of mistaken identity when people charged with crimes were tracked down by the details available from police, courts, and public records (date of birth, address, listed phone numbers, etc)?

I guess what I'm really saying is that social media is a great tool for leads, a good source of information when nothing else is available and a dynamic way to see how stories move forward- but it cannot and should not replace real journalism. Research, context and verification have become more important, not less, as so much information is available to media consumers, and it seems to me that these are the first things to go when people start depending on social media for news, and, worse, when journalists start depending on it in lieu of doing the kind of work they have done in the past and should still be doing now.

Media and Protest

I went to a discussion at the Frontline Club last week on whether the mainstream media 'gets' protest and how coverage of protest movements has been affected by social media. The talk had been scheduled ages ago, in the wake of the student protests in the UK over tuition fees and the education maintenance allowance, but since then, Tunisia and Egypt happened, and Bahrain and Libya were on the brink. As a result, the panel included a BBC editor, an Al Jazeera English reporter, the founder of a media website and a student protest organiser. The debate and the questions afterward ended up focusing quite a bit on the role of blogs, Facebook and especially Twitter in organising protests and getting the word out about what's going on.

What I noticed, though, was this. When people talk about the movements in Tunisia and especially Egypt, it is with an air of total hope, pride and agreement. And the mainstream media coverage is in large part responsible for informing that view, for perpetuating it in the way these stories are covered. Aside from a few articles questioning the future of Israeli-Egypt relations should Mubarak's regime fall, there never seemed to be any question in anyone's mind (except Ezra Levant in a February 1 Ottawa Sun piece) as to whether the protests in Egypt were inherently good. Coverage was glowing. Any and all damage or problems were attributed to police, paid Mubarak thugs, unruly elements. Never were the protesters generally described as anything other than great. Which was fine for me, because that happens to gel with my personal view, and I was happy for the Egyptians and Tunisians for what they had done and the future they could now hope for.

But then I thought about what this discussion could have been about if it had happened a month earlier, or if Tunisia and Egypt hadn't happened yet. A discussion about the way the media dealt with the student protests in the UK would not have been this positive. Mainstream coverage of domestic protests almost always focuses on what goes wrong. The biggest stories to come out of the tuition fee protests were the damage at Millbank Tower, the kid who threw the fire extinguisher off the roof of said tower, the attack on Prince Charles and Camilla's car, and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour's son Charlie's various charges for his involvement. There was no talk of revolution. There was no obvious slant to the reporting that said what the students were protesting for was right or wrong, no tone that made them obvious heroes. There were quotes from protest organisers and student leaders condemning the violence and saying it was caused by a small minority, but this didn't translate into the media coverage in the same way it later would for Egypt. Most people would look at the TV coverage or the newspapers the next day and say, "Look at those students destroying everything." There were citizen journalists, bloggers, Twitter users out there during the protests, posting their views on what was happening, reports and pictures of police brutality or peaceful activity. But there was no media embrace of these people, no big fuss about how Twitter was revolutionising the movement, no scramble to identify the most important bloggers/tweeters and make sure we always had their opinion.

And so, why the difference? Before the Q&A part of the Frontline Club event, and right before my phone died and I lost the ability to follow the livetweeting of it, I tweeted, "Different stories here - does msm romanticise protests elsewhere but vilify them at home?" Then, realising where I was, I decided to put the question to the panelists - between a protest leader, a BBC editor, the CEO of a citizen journalist website and an Al Jazeera reporter with experience in the British media, surely there would be some interesting ideas? People asked many questions about the role of social media, all met with long, thoughtful comments from the speakers. Finally, it was my turn, and I asked about the difference in the way international and domestic protest is covered. Does it have to do, I wondered, with political or corporate agendas, with a plurality of views available, with an inability to identify a definite enemy, with having more reporters on the ground and not needing the Twitter view?

And the answer was...nothing. The question was virtually ignored. The moderator, actually, said it was a great question and commented that as a former foreign correspondent, he could attest to the fact that in foreign reporting you are allowed to sort of "take a view" on things, to decide who are the good guys and the bad guys and report from that perspective. He then deferred to the BBC editor, who shook his head and said he had already spoken a lot tonight. The Al Jazeera reporter said that the question didn't really apply to her as Qatar-based AJ doesn't really have any news. And so, in a joke about the lack of anything happening in Doha, the question was lost and the panelists moved on to the next one. I was disappointed. I had really hoped for some answers on this.

When I got home, I saw a tweet from the BBC editor, responding to my last comment, saying "good point". When I asked him for his views again, he said they were "not for public consumption". The next day, I noticed a discussion between the website CEO and someone who had attended - and the CEO commented that he was more interested by my question than the point they were discussing. You know, the question he didn't say one word about at the debate.

In the end, I was left with two questions. One: what are the factors that contribute to such differences in the way protests are covered at home and abroad? I have some ideas, ranging from the fact that the public's a lot less forgiving about damages when it's their own stuff being destroyed, when it's their city up on the TV screen, to political influences in editorial decisions, to snobbery about the role of citizen journalists, to the need to simplify international problems into good guys and bad in a way we can't do here, to the fact that you just can't get everyone behind hating David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the way you can for Hosni Mubarak. And two: why don't journalists want to talk about it?