Media140: Twitter and the Iranian election

A new study of Twitter in the Iranian elections has found that that the use of the social network was greatly exaggerated inside the country. British writer Charles Leadbeater and his team found there were less than 20,000 twitterers with an Iranian address and many of these included foreigners who changed their location to “Tehran” in sympathy with the protesters. The report also found only one third of Iranians have internet access skewed towards the younger and urban opposition supporters. According to Valleywag such a tiny proportion of Iranians on Twitter means any stories about a new movement based on the social network are meaningless.

Yet it is also true to say the 2009 Iranian election was one of the most important moments for Twitter in its short life. NYU Professor Clay Shirky called it “the big one” and the first revolution catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. Leadbeater’s findings appear to dispute the transformation part of Shirky’s statement but the global impact is accurate enough. The US State Department deemed it to be so important, it twisted Twitter’s arm to delay a critical network upgrade in June so it wouldn’t cut daytime services to Iranian disputing the election result.

Introducing the third panel of the media140 conference in Sydney last Thursday, ABC’s Fran Kelly called the election a “watershed moment” for social media. The session was entitled “social media lessons from the Iranian uprising” and featured ABC’s Mark Colvin, Al Jazeera’s head of social media Riyaad Minty, UTS lecturer Tony Maniaty, SBS News Director Paul Cutler and University of Wollongong’s Dr Jason Wilson.

Mark Colvin kicked off the discussion. Colvin was an ABC foreign correspondent and in Iran at the time of the original Islamic Revolution 30 years ago. He said the slogans on the street “Marg Bar Amrika” (Death to America) have now been changed to “Marh Bar Diktator” (Death to the dictator) as protesters turned against their own government.

Colvin said Iran’s so-called Twitter revolution began abroad. Americans angry will the lack of coverage of unfolding events after the disputed election began posting comments using the hashtag #cnnfail. The 24 hour broadcaster had pushed out the official Iranian line that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the election but failed to report on the disputed fairness of the ballot. Iranian authorities expelled the reporters of other broadcasters, such as the BBC for daring to cover the growing unrest on the streets of Tehran. Colvin said that cnnfail became a symbol for what was wrong with old media and Twitter began to take centre stage as people sought out alternative sources of information.

There were a lot of people purporting to give eye-witness accounts. Colvin used his knowledge of Iranian and journalistic nous to verify what was trustworthy and what wasn’t. In Australia and elsewhere he quickly became acknowledged as an expert on the topic. However, he acknowledges “Twitter didn’t really achieve much at all inside Iran.” The Social media buzz gave the protesters a sense that their protest was worth persisting with but it also helped spread rumours, false pictures and inflated protest tallies. Colvin said the revolution was defeated but there were two unexpected benefits: it made the people of Iran human in western eyes and it helped Iranians see that they were not alone. “The pretence [of religious rule] has been stripped away, and part of what did that was created by Twitter, social media, and the world wide web,” he concluded.

Jason Wilson also believes the revolution said more about Twitter than it did about Iran. Wilson said it was amazing to watch how people in Australia and elsewhere discussed the issue and invested emotionally in it, through the medium of Twitter. Wilson said it was an “intense” experience unlike any other he had witnessed in the web2.0 world. But focusing on Twitter alone underestimates the influence of the Iranian blogosphere, he noted. Wilson said the blogs were a crucial space for dissent and debate and responsible for getting the protesters out on the street. Facebook groups and old fashioned word-of-mouth also played a big role.

The Iranian experience also showed some of the potential flaws of Twitter. It was all too easy, said Wilson, to retweet something rather than check out its accuracy. The hype around Twitter also disguises the fact that its effect in Iran was overstated and its user base exclusive. Ahmadinejad’s rural and poor constituency (as subsequently confirmed by Leadbeater et al) are “the last people who are likely to fish up on Twitter” and therefore without a voice in the west. “We need to be reflexive about the nature of [Twitter’s] networks when we think about this platform as a source of information” Wilson concluded.

Media140: Julie Posetti’s Revolution

ABC RN Breakfast presenter Fran Kelly kicked off the second session on Day 1 of Sydney Media140 on the provocative theme of “death or salvation of professional journalism”. Kelly’s panel included fellow Radio National presenter Robyn Williams, Fairfax Digital editor-in-chief Mike Van Niekerk, Crikey editor Jonathan Green and Crikey media writer Margaret Simons. But Kelly’s first guest, and the subject of this post, was the conference’s indefatigable editorial editor Julie Posetti.

(photo by Derek Barry)

Posetti is a journalist and academic based in Canberra with over 20 years experience in the media industry in radio, print and online. Posetti is an avid Twitterer and has been engaged in eight months of active research into how journalists use the tool. Posetti’s theme was It’s a revolution not a war. The name took its cue from earlier speaker Mark Scott’s recent “end of empire” speech aimed at the legacy media barons such as Rupert Murdoch.

Posetti’s argument was there are three crises confronting journalism at the moment: dealing with the effects of new technology, the failure of the economical model and a loss of public trust. She said that the latter crisis is not getting the attention it deserves among all the clutter of the first two crises. Yet it is not difficult to see why the industry might not want to talk about it. News is becoming increasingly tabloid, thrashy and truthier as it seeks ever wider audiences lured by the lowest common denominator. Editors and proprietors know that people love hearing about scandals and outrage, and they will bring it to them if it means having to manufacture them.

But as Posetti notes, there is a nasty side effect to the sensationalism used to sell such news: loss of reputation. Journalists pay the price as much as the media they serve in this interest. The professional consistently ranks low in most trust surveys of occupations. They gradually transform from guardians of the fourth estate into lackeys of corporate media giants prepared to stop at nothing to get their grubby story. Meanwhile the major issues of the day are either incorrectly reported or under-reported or both.

Posetti says that journalists should wake up to this danger. Social media is enabling many new practictioners and many more who fact-check others. If journalists didn’t engage with these new players, they would lack credibility in online communities. Posetti said such credibility was crucial to sustaining what ever model exists when the first two crises are solved.

This means that we need to pay as much attention to the public good function, if not more, than either to the death of newspapers or the lack of profits online. To do this, argues Posetti, journalists must endure with their most sacred functions: “shining a light in dark places; speaking truth to power and doing so without fear or favour, but with a commitment to accuracy, truth & fairness.”

This means having a wider definition what constitutes news reporting and the ditching of the over-blown notion of objectivity. The social age has blurred the line between journalists and citizens. This is particularly true in Twitter with its open discussions and crowd-sourcing of information between all manner of professional and amateur media players. Some of this will be serious, some will be playful (witness how tonight’s #pwnednudierun played out across television, Twitter and Youtube). But whatever it is, it is something to embrace not fear or resist. “It’s vital to accept that this is a revolution, not a war,” said Posetti. “A time for transformation, revitalization [and] reinvention.”

Media140 and Mark Scott

I’ve just finished watching ABC boss Mark Scott display his fine sense of humour for the second time in four days. Tonight I watched his flagship ABC1 channel where Scott was justifiably praising the wonderful Andrew Olle lecture given by Chaser executive producer Julian Morrow. Scott said Morrow and the Chaser team were the reason why the ABC legal team had quadrupled in size. He said Morrow was the reason for his grey hair and letters he gets from Gerard Henderson and also suggested that Morrow could afford a Lachlan Murdoch-like $23 million Sydney mansion if he was prepared to rely on his ABC salary for a thousand years. (photo of Mark Scott at Media140 by Neerav Bhatt)

The self-deprecating wit hides a very sharp brain of a man who is now probably the second most important media player in Australia (behind Lachlan’s Dad). He acknowledged Morrow’s important points about primary and secondary audiences and how the ABC should react to them. He also endorsed Morrow’s points about the importance of new media. The head of Australia’s foremost public broadcaster has used a number of key speeches to throw his weight behind the new media revolution and he was in zealot mode again on home turf at Ultimo on Thursday when he made the keynote speech for day 1 of Media140 Sydney. Scott’s introduction to Twitter is typical of many people’s experience (including my own) with an initial period of scepticism, followed by silence and then eventual acceptance. Scott said he signed up in late 2007 and followed just one person: Ana Marie Cox (the American political blogger who founded Wonkette).

Scott said he quickly became “bored and confused” and his interest in the tool faded away. He quoted co-founder Biz Stone’s statement that “if there were two or three sentences I’d use to describe Twitter, one of them would be ‘I don’t know’”. It wasn’t until February 2009 that he re-engaged with Twitter and “came to understand it”. Scott’s epiphany was due to the Victorian Bushfires emergency. As the scale of the devastation started to emerge on Black Saturday, the ABC local radio station 774 Melbourne’s twitter hashtag became an increasingly vital hub of information using the hashtag #bushfires. Scott praised ABC staffer Wolf Cocklin (@wolfcat) who manned the Twitter feed for three days solid passing information to and from the broadcaster, the CFA, the police and members of the public.

Inspired by WolfCat, Scott returned to Twitter and quickly became enamoured of its possibilities. But while he joked about his assiduous management of the number of his followers, he said Twitter was just a technology and it was communication that counted. He reminded the audience of the famous Henry David Thoreau quote: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

But Scott did have important things to communicate in his speech. He used the occasion to announce two new ABC online initiatives. Firstly he was commissioning 50 digital media producers help local communities to create their own content and secondly was the launch of “ABC widgets” to allow people run broadcaster news feed content from their own blogs and social media pages. As Margaret Simons noted, the issue will be whether commercial media organisations selling ads would also be allowed to use the widgets.

Scott also provided a set of four guidelines for ABC staff using social networks. These were 1) do not mix professional and personal conduct in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute 2) do not undermine work effectiveness 3) do not imply ABC endorse personal views and 4) do not disclose confidential information. The guidelines are straightforward and encourage journalists to engage with social media rather than be afraid of them.

With Murdoch-led paywalls on their way, it is crucial that ABC journalists have the right tools available to them to provide a useful free-to-net alternative for those unable (or unwilling) to afford to buy their news. As the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism notes, social media, blogs and user-generated content are not replacing journalism, but they are creating an important extra layer of information and opinion. Most people are still happy to rely on mainstream news organisations to sort fact from fiction and provide a filtered view. But these people are increasingly engaged by this information, particularly when recommended by friends or other trusted sources. With Mark Scott at the helm, it appears the ABC are well placed to become leaders in this new exciting field.

Initial Thoughts on Media140: Memories of blogging

I’m just back from a Sydney two-day Media140 “news in the age of social media” conference. Due to Internet access issues and the vagaries of battery life, I didn’t get the chance to blog about it in Sydney. The conference generated a lot of discussion and argument (particularly between journalists and “new media” advocates) and I’ll add my take over the next few days. However, I wanted to begin with a comparison that struck me.

It seemed to me that the battles that dominated the backchannels this week reminded me of similar warfare waged two years ago. In September 2007 I attended the first (and to my knowledge, still only,) Australian Blogging Conference in Brisbane. Much of that conference focused on blogs and political reportage. Bloggers and academics lined up on one side of the argument describing how blogs were a crucial part of the public sphere. On the other side professional journalists reminded them that blogging was a practice as well as a platform and their craft skills were still needed to provide proper context to whatever information being made public.

The journalists had good reasons for their turf minding – they feared their role as sense-makers was about to be seriously diminished. Though the GFC was then unheard of, the media industry was already in crisis by 2007. As more and more people abandoned traditional media in favour of more disparate (and sometimes desperate) news sources online, it was becoming increasingly harder to harvest eyeballs for advertisers in sufficient quantities to justify the news expense of big media. That day in Brisbane, the argument raged back and forth over whether blogs would save journalism or walk all over its corpse.

With two years hindsight, it is obvious that blogging will do neither. The platform will continue as a popular venue of long-form thoughts for produsers, some of whom will be professional, some others amateur and more may be a mix of the two. All will likely continue to irk each other. But as the technology has matured, so has the argument. As blogging evolved, much of the heat went out of the battle. While a few journalists remain hostile, most are now either bloggers themselves or else see the blogs less as a threat than part of their arsenal of sources.

That hasn’t meant the journalists’ problems have gone away. On the contrary, journalists are move than ever under threat from corporate shareholder pressure that demands thinner news rooms to cut operating costs. The blogs are still eating away at audience along the long tail. Now more tools under the rubbery banner of “social media” are further muddying the waters. But thanks to the link economy, blogs and the social networks possibly bring as much traffic to old news sites as they take away.

Of the social networks it is Twitter that is now causing the most professional angst. Twitter was a toddler at the time of the 2007 blogging conference and barely merited a mention. But its real time news function would prove irresistible and the subsequent explosion of growth and influence has pushed it to the centre of the argument. Founder Ande Gregson coined the concept of media140 to launch a global discussion on what news in the social age means. I enjoyed the conference and the diverse set of speakers but the name riffing off Twitter’s character limit meant that the impact of Facebook (now 325 million users) did not get the attention it deserves.

But what did come out was the same battle between new and old media along traditional lines but in a new technology. The early adopters and academics showed how Twitter was changing the news landscape. Once again the journalists asserted their right to provide an ethical, informed and contextualised take on the news in the new platform.

It was the 2007 arguments all over again but with a new technology. I suspect the outcome will be similar. The (former) audience will be atomised into dialogues of the deaf and there will be less control and mediation. But journalists will prosper if they engage with Twitter, and carefully curate the data while showing a human and ethical face. Twitter, like the blogs, or Facebook, won’t hasten the demise of traditional media. As the wonderful fake Twitter account @BigHarto (based on News Ltd boss John Hartigan) pointed out late Friday afternoon: “In closing, I’d just like to remind #media140 participants that the future of journalism is whatever I fucking say it is.” This may just be art resembling postmodernism. But it is also a reminder that real media power will not be tossed away lightly.

Nutt decision shows the immaturity of the marijuana debate

Britain’s chief scientist John Beddington has backed Professor David Nutt’s assertion that cannabis is less harmful than alcohol or cigarettes. However Beddington refused to criticise Home Secretary Alan Johnson for sacking Professor Nutt given that “trust had broken down” between the pair. The British government sacked Nutt on the weekend after he argued the reclassification of cannabis as a class-B controlled substance did not make any sense from a medical point of view. However Labour’s authoritarian stance did make sense as a way of counteracting increasingly shrill anti drug headlines in the right-wing Daily Mail newspaper. (photo by thetruthabout)

As Forth says, successive governments have run scared from sections of the popular press that purport to represent the attitudes of the public. The increasingly fraught Brown administration recategorised cannabis last year against the recommendation of its own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). Labour had lessened cannabis from a class-B to a class-C drug in 2004 which reduced sentencing for possession from five to two years. But in 2008 Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said that prevalence of stronger varieties of skunk cannabis required a change of heart “rather than risk the future health of young people”.

The ACMD investigated the so-called skunk scare at the government’s request. It found cannabis was harmful but not serious and it should remain a class-C drug. The study also found a media bias with the press reporting 26 out 28 ecstasy-related deaths while reporting only one aspirin death in 265 and one morphine death in 72. The reporting gives the impression ecstasy is a more dangerous drug than it is. Cannabis was missing from the study because it doesn’t kill anyone.

Labour moved after Nutt went public with his criticisms of the reclassification. Johnson wrote a letter to Nutt on 30 October asking for his immediate resignation. Johnson said Nutt’s recent comments had gone “beyond” the evidence about drug-related harms and amounted to a lobbying for change to government policy. “This goes against the requirements on general standards of public life required by your position,” wrote Johnson. “As chair of the ACMD you cannot avoid appearing to implicate the Council in your comments and therefore undermining its scientific independence.”

But as the British blog Ministry of Truth writes this was completely false. Nutt wasn’t just doing his job to the best of his abilities, he was doing the job that parliament, in the guise of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, had specifically asked him to do – put the country’s drug misuse policies on a sound and consistent scientific footing.

Britain is not alone in its hysterical over-reaction to the dangers of cannabis. The US is just as bad, if not worse. Environmental writer Michael Pollan’s new documentary The Botany of Desire is about four crops – the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato – that Pollan says reflect different aspects of human desire. Pollan’s says people and plants form a reciprocal relationship. We have cultivated the apple because of a desire for sweetness, the tulip for beauty, the marijuana plant for intoxication and the potato for control over our sustenance. But it took him eight years to secure the necessary $1.2 million in funding for the documentary because of the inclusion of marijuana. “We got funding, then we lost it because we wanted to devote a fourth of the program to Michael’s exploration of marijuana,” said the show’s producer.

Yet hemp growing has a long history in the US. In 1619 Virginia’s Jamestown colony ordered all farmers to grow Indian hemp seed. Early drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written hemp and President Washington encouraged farmers to grow it to decrease reliance on imports. A hundred years later, hashish smoking parlours were commonplace in every American city with 500 in New York alone.

The start of marijuana’s downfall was the innocuous sounding publication of the US Agriculture Department’s “Bulletin 404” in 1916.Bulletin 404 hailed hemp hurds as revolutionary new technology for making high-quality paper. The bulletin said an acre of hemp could produce four times as much paper as an acre of trees. It also said it would become cheap once mechanisation reduced the labor intensity of hemp harvesting. Press mogul William Randolph Hearst worked out he had about ten years to make sure hemp did not crush his paper-making empire. His newspaper chain unleashed a massive racist propaganda campaign to demonise cannabis hemp under the more sinister Mexican name of “marihuana”.

The Du Pont chemical company’s suite of synthetics was also threatened by the growth of hemp and had the means to do something about it. Du Pont banker Andrew Mellon was Secretary of the Treasury under President Herbert Hoover. He appointed Harry Anslinger to head the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (FBNDD). Anslinger was America’s first drug tsar and would remain in the role for 31 years and for most of this time his public enemy number 1 was marijuana. Between 1915 and 1933 every US state prohibited distribution for non-medical purposes. In 1937 the US enacted the Marijuana Tax Act despite the protest of doctors. Industrial hemp was criminalised and Du Pont reaped the benefits

US laws became tougher in the fifties leading to a mandatory two to ten year sentence for a first offence of marijuana possession. The 1972 Shafer Commission recommended it should be decriminalised but President Nixon rejected the report as it didn’t suit his “tough on crime” stance. The next decade saw 11 states follow the Shafer recommendations but President Reagan backed tougher “no tolerance” policies in 1986. In 1996 California ignored the national law and allowed for medical marijuana use.

The futility of America’s long-term war on drugs was shown by a 2006 report which showed marijuana was the country’s largest cash crop. The study estimated marijuana production had a value of $35.8 billion exceeding the combined value of corn ($23.3 b) and wheat ($7.5 b). A 2005 study estimated legalised marijuana would save the US $7.7 billion in law enforcement costs and could generate as much as $6.2 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like alcohol or tobacco.

Back in Europe, Portugal has attempted to end the stigma of drug use. In 2001 Portuguese authorities decriminalised personal use and possession of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. The police could no longer arrest anyone for possession. Conservative politicians denounced the decriminalisation as “pure lunacy” which would lead to rampant drug use while others predicted the country would be plagued by drug tourism. However a 2009 study by the Cato Institute has found that Portugal’s drug use has not risen in eight years and in numerous categories is the lowest in Europe. “Before decriminalisation, addicts were afraid to seek treatment because they feared they would be denounced to the police and arrested,” says Manuel Cardoso, deputy director of the Portuguese Institute for Drugs and Drug Addiction. “Now they know they will be treated as patients with a problem and not stigmatised as criminals.

Chemical Hiroshima – 25 years since Union Carbide disaster at Bhopal

Next month is the 25th anniversary of the world’s worst industrial disaster at the Union Carbide pesticide plant near the Madhya Pradesh city of Bhopal in central India. It is a tale of corporate greed and failure of American law that is mostly ignored in the west. While the American setting of 9/11 ensured it would became the mythological event of the millennial generation, about 800 more people died in the 3 December 1984 Bhopal disaster than were killed by the four planes 17 years later on 11 September 2001. And unlike 9/11, the Bhopal death toll kept rising after the first day. Three times more died in the next 72 hours and in the end Indian authorities estimate 17,000 Indians were killed as a result of the Bhopal gas leak. And while Americans argue over what should be done with their Ground Zero, Bhopal residents contend with the effects of their Chemical Hiroshima a generation on, including death, health problems and contaminated groundwater. (photo from Wikimedia commons)

The killer was 42 tonnes of Methyl isocyanate (MIC). MIC is highly flammable and highly toxic chemical used to make rubber. It is so toxic in small measures that scientists recommend it not be more than 2 parts to a million of any solution. 42 tonnes is a large amount. MIC was a crucial interim stage for the plant’s eventual output: an insecticide called carbaryl. At Bhopal over half a million people were exposed to this filthy compound.

The nightshift on 2nd of December 1984 was blissfully unaware of the silent disaster that was unfolding around them. But it was only a matter of time. The pesticide plant three 3kms out of town was old and creaking. The pipes were corroded and Union Carbide cutbacks meant the crews were too overstretched to notice deadly gas had started leaking from an overloaded storage tank. A worker first noticed a problem an hour before midnight and he reported it to management. Nothing else was done about it. As the problem worsened over the next two hours a frightened worker raised the alarm. People were starting to cough and vomit, there were irritated eyes and many felt suffocated. The panicked management team shut the alarm down quickly and sat on the problem for yet another hour before finally sounding the siren to evacuate.

By 2am the vapours had being doing their deadly work for at least three hours. The poison spread rapidly keeping low to the ground. Many died on the spot as they came in contact with the poison. Hundreds more were trampled to death in the rush to flee the contaminated plant. The final death toll is disputed, it is still going on and some say it may be as high as 20,000 people. Another 2,000 animals also perished. Timothy White in Bhopal Express says that half a million citizens would be maimed by the noxious breezes of their Chemical Hiroshima.

Union Carbide did an “investigation” to find out how the gas escaped. They put it down to bad luck or sabotage. Union Carbide blamed its Indian subsidiary for falsifying safety reports and someone had either “inadvertently or deliberately” pumped 600 litres of water into one of the three liquid MIC tanks. The water trigged a heat generating chemical reaction. Chloroform decomposed releasing chloride ions which corroded the stainless steel tank. The tank eventually collapsed under high temperature and pressure, releasing the deadly methyl isocyanate.

Even the company’s admission there were critical violations of safety procedure managed to make the local operation look bad without any sense of responsibility falling on head office. India was predictably outraged with Union Carbide’s whitewashed report. They retaliated by denying Union Carbide investigators access to important documents. India claims workers put only a small amount of excess water into the tanks and some other reason caused the chain reaction. It was the American-design safety system that was flawed.

The result is that Bhopal plant employees still do not know what actually happened to this day. The city is still an environmental disaster area and people are still getting sick. It was Jackson B. Browning, Union Carbide’s vice president for health and environmental affairs who made the truest company statement in the entire disaster. “Now, we can confidently say,” he said smugly after the investigation, “it can’t happen here.” By “here” Browning meant America not India. In the end it was only the fears of the local audience that mattered.

In any case, Browning was probably lying. If the Indian investigators are closer to the truth than Union Carbide then no-one still knows how it happened exactly, and therefore it couldn’t happen “here”. Connecticut-based Union Carbide decided the interests of its shareholders were more important than the people of India when they used the little known common law legal doctrine of forum non conveniens to avoid being sued in the more lucrative American market. The doctrine balances foreign and local factors to determine the right country to host the litigation. The Chief Justice of India said the US was the only hope the victims have, but New York District Court Steve Keenan disagreed and said India was where the witnesses and evidence were and it should host the trial.

Back in India the government lodged a $3.3 billion claim against Union Carbide. But by 1989, Union Carbide had wheedled the Indian lawsuit down to just $470 million. The settlement discharged the company of all future responsibilities and was small compensation for the lives of 17,000 Indian coolies and with over a half million claimants, it amounted to just $550 to each survivor. There have been delays in getting even this pittance distributed with over 80 percent still in the fund in 2006. By that time Union Carbide was under new management. Dow Chemical bought the company for $10 billion in 2001

Anger is still palpable in northern India. Now every 3 December they march through the streets of Bhopal burning an effigy of Warren Anderson. Anderson was Union Carbide’s CEO in 1984. He flew to Bhopal after the accident. Indian authorities detained him and then released him on $2,000 bail. Anderson fled the country never to return. In 1991 a Bhopal judge reinstated criminal charges against him but twelve years later (under G.W. Bush), the U.S. State Department formally denied India’s request for his extradition. Anderson continues to play retirement golf in the Hamptons while India says is an absconder from justice.

But there is an even greater failure of law than Anderson’s lack of punishment. The forum non conveniens doctrine means that American firms will never be held to account when things go wrong overseas. In practice what this means is the problems are buried under the carpet. The practice also means that American firms have a vested interest in moving operations abroad where regulations are lax and they can avoid US tort liability. Dow Chemical probably see no irony in relying on Asia to reverse sliding revenues. Chair and CEO Andrew Liveris says “we remain tightly focused on those factors we can control.” Presumably that means continuing to avoid all legal, ethical and moral responsibility to the horrendous legacy of Bhopal.

Net nudges towards Neutrality

Net Neutrality is one of those phrases that has people automatically come out in palpitations. The very word neutrality reminds us there is a war going on that we haven’t been told about. It is a high-stakes war for control of the Internet that goes to the heart of American divisions about the role of government in society. Net Neutrality is the formal policy which prohbits ISPs from discriminating between websites. It ensures all content on the internet is treated on just terms by the owners of the networks that make up the Net. (photo by roynel.flores)

Idealists say information on the Net should not be controlled by a pricing or access system and it distorts the market place of ideas. According to British journalism writer Charlie Beckett it is an essential part of the Internet political economy. The alternatives are to construct a series of balances to look dangerously like Internet over-regulation or else allow big companies set a price structure that restricts access to markets and denies the public choice and information. As the Internet develops as a global, decentralised network, it challenges national sovereignty over citizens and territory. So solving net neutrality is not just an American issue.

Robert McChesney writes that US neutrality provisions date back to common carriage non-discrimination requirements in the 1934 Communications Act. When the act was changed in 1996, Congress did not explicitly change this requirement. The problem was that the telecommunications and cable giants began rolling out their cable modem services around the same time and saw Net Neutrality as a barrier to profits. They unsuccessfully lobbied the Clinton administration to exempt the Internet from the provision but found the Bush presidency more accommodating.

In 2002, new FCC boss Michael Powell came to the rescue of the cable companies. The FCC redefined cable modem services as “information services” and at one swoop removed it from the provisions of the Act. Consumers and competitors immediately appealed the decision. There followed 3 years of litigation to determine if the FCC had the authority to make the change. That debate ended with the 2005 Brand X case which the divided Supreme Court ruled the FCC indeed had to power to make the change. The FCC then ruled that neither cable nor DSL broadband services would be subject to Net Neutrality.

With hardly any discussion in the media, the FCC’s ruling suddenly meant that 98 percent of the entire US broadband market would be subject to a biased money-driven view of the Internet. The idea was to create a fasttrack environment for companies willing to pay the premium. Those that refused would get “the slow lane, and probably oblivion,” says McChesney. Although the cable companies did not create the Internet, they could now start charging tolls as if they now owned it. Or as Columbia law professor Tim Wu said, “it’s like the Tony Soprano system…a protection racket, and it’s not an economically productive activity”.

The FCC decision brought together a decidedly strange group of bedfellows in opposition. Liberal organisations such as Move.on and ACLU sat side by side with, the Christian Coalition and the National Religious Broadcasters. But it was the new media players such as Google and eBay who got all the media attention and helped the meme spread it was simply a clash of Google versus AT&T.

The public clamour woke up the minority Democrat members of the FCC and they grabbed their chance in 2006 to insist the huge merger of AT&T with BellSouth including Net Neutrality for 2 years. After the Democrat victory of that year’s midterms Senators Byron Morgan (D-ND) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) introduced bipartisan legislation to make Net Neutrality the law of the land. All the Democrat presidential candidates endorsed the bill.

The Morgan-Snowe changes were finally presented as the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 but it remains stalled in Congress. In the meantime the FCC used its powers to allow discrimination and many companies did push back against the data transfers of applications such as Bittorent. The wireless industry began complaining that if they had to stop discriminating it could push them beyond their limited capacity with affect on the cost of data plans and possible bandwidth caps.

Many people have also questioned the government’s ability in an era of rapidly-evolving technology to come up with meaningful regulation was not going to be counter-productive. Opponents also see Net Neutrality as mandating government power over the Internet that will stifle innovation and competition. Nevertheless New Obama-appointee FCC boss Julius Genachowski has signalled his intent to pursue neutrality. That means bringing the broadband and wireless industry back into the fold. In September he said he would adapt the agency’s four 2005 Internet principles (any lawful content, any lawful application, any lawful device, any provider) to prevent ISPs from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management. ISPs would also need to be transparent about network management.

But policy matters move slowly in the FCC. The latest is that Genachowski’s organisation has voted unanimously to begin consideration of the proposed rules. According to Google’s Public Policy Blog that means an official rulemaking proceeding will take place over the next several months. There will also be public workshops and technical advisory discussions, allowing everyone to provide feedback before the Commission adopts a final set of rules. Right-wing demagogues such as Glenn Beck call Net Neutrality “a Marxist Plot” but the reality is, as always, all about naked capitalist greed. Unless every packet of data is neutral, the big telecommunications companies and media corporations will take full control of the Internet.

Stephen Fry, Twitter and the Fifth Estate

The Prince of Twitter dropped a bombshell to his near million followers tonight with his attempted Twitter quitter note. “Think I may have to give up on Twitter. Too much aggression and unkindness around. Pity. Well, it’s been fun” he wrote. Looking back a tweet earlier and there was a more definitive statement. “@brumplum You’ve convinced me. I’m obviously not good enough. I retire from Twitter henceforward. Bye everyone.” @Brumplum was Richard of Birmingham, England. Richard’s blog “Plum’s plums” comes with an adult warning from Google but otherwise unremarkable. Stephen Fry is not mentioned anywhere except in the Twitter stream. (photo adapted from the original by wilsondan)

It would seem that Richard and Fry are unknown to each other. But Brumplum mentioned in passing to another Tweeter that he thought @stephenfry’s tweets were ‘a bit… boring…. (sorry Stephen)”. For some reason this mild rebuke got under Fry’s skin for it caused him to reply to brumplum “whereas yours are so fascinating I can barely contain my fluids.” Two hours later, Fry made his announcement he was quitting.

Pity poor Brumplum. Within minutes of Fry’s announcement, people were flocking to his stream for more information. Once Blumplum was outed as the Fry twitter killer, the Twitterverse was intent on proving Fry right there was too much aggression and unkindness around. “Always nice to forever be known as the idiot who fucked over Fry”, said one person to Brumplum. “Look what you’ve done, meaningless piece of meat!” said another. “i feel i should say something horrible to you for you’re stephen shunning” said a third. And on it went.

But the reality is that if Stephen Fry is going to quit Twitter it won’t be because of the boredom he caused Richard Nobody of Birmingham. Fry is a massive presence on the social network. He on more lists (5,520) than most people have followers. He has 924,300 followers of his own. According to the Telegraph, Twitter has given him extraordinary power. He has used the platform as a bullypulpit on issues from Japanese shark fin fishing, to Westminster press freedoms, to getting a Londoner off death row in China. “On September 16, he demanded that Gordon Brown attend the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen;” said the Telegraph. “On September 21, Mr Brown announced that he would.”

Fry was also instrumental in the Twitter campaign to castigate Jan Moir for her homophobic column about Stephen Gately. In short he is at the centre of most Twitter storms. He more than most understands the tool’s potential to be the mouthpiece of the masses. But to his vast army of followers he is merely a funny and honest person who shared his life on a public social network. And so for all the people who tweeted for blumplum’s head many times more simply wanted to show Fry their support and plead with him to continue tweeting.

Fry gave a sense of how the pressure to perform in the platform may be playing out with a brilliant essay on his own blog a couple of weeks ago. In “Poles, politeness, politics in the age of Twitter” he reflected with scorching honesty on his practice of “tweet first, ask questions later” in the light of the Moir affair. He also noted how an appearance on Polish television went badly wrong when he said something like “let’s not forget which side of the border Auschwitz was on.” It was an insensitive remark which he immediately regretted but the hate mail he got extinguished “any spark of apology”. This only made matters worse and he unreservedly apologised in the blog post.

Fry was finding out the hard way that he was now considered a politician and being treated the way anyone with real power is treated. He was aware of his own influence in the Moir and Trafigura cases and noted “a shift in the very focus of democracy.” The “Twinternet” was become a Fifth Estate he noted (a label previously used to describe blogs) rescuing the media in its battles with the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government. “A pleasant twittery microblogging service that I joined in the spirit of curiosity and fun has emerged as a real force in the land and it is of course fascinating and pleasing to see this,” he admitted.

Fry then attempted to undersell his role. He does NOT wield influence, he contended. He was late on the scene with Moir and Trafigura. There was occasionally better things to do than Twitter. “Contrary to appearances I have another life and do not spend all my time monitoring screens and detecting every twitch on the filament of the web,” he said. Twitter’s name is a clue to its meaning, he said. It is not called “Ponder or Debate”. Yet he also conceded it was a new and potent force in democracy and “a thorn in side of the established order of things”.

And Fry was getting fed up with the centrality of his role in the revolution. “Hundreds of requests pour in every day asking me to use my strange, new-found ability to connect to a lot of people,” he said “It is as if I own a billboard on the busiest road in Britain.” Fry was beginning to sense the paradox. But the closer he gets to the centre of power, the more people paid attention to what he has to say. “Maybe the very fact that I have so many followers now disqualifies me from stating the sort of opinions all others are free to – as if I were a member of the royal family.” Perhaps accepting his now figurehead status, he concluded, “the best I can do is hope for a quiet week ahead.” If he remains quiet in Twitter, it will be his decision.

Australia’s federal parliament should move from Canberra to Sydney

[photo by Sam Ilic] I’m no great fan of the national capital even though I like its architecture. I’ve only been to Canberra a couple of times and the closest I’ve come to staying there was a night across the NSW border in Queanbeyan. I found the capital an elegant but cold and deadly dull place far removed from the mainstream of Australian life. Walter Burley-Griffin’s creation is a work of architectural brilliance but no soul. And in a country with such a dominant coastal culture, Canberra is an inland fish out of water. The site of the nation’s capital arose as a Federation issue and Canberra was the compromise between the then equal cities of Sydney and Melbourne. But in the last 50 years Sydney has outranked its Victorian rival by most major metrics of importance and is Australia’s only truly global city. If we were making the choice of capital today, Sydney would be the obvious choice (and we could get rid of the useless states while we were at it).The only reason it won’t happen is the outcry of Canberrans whose city would suddenly be stripped of importance and relevance. Yesterday Peter Martin blogged about the old Keating and Fraser arguments about Canberra as the Australian national capital. Martin linked to a Laurie Oakes article in which Paul Keating left him in no doubt the capital should be Sydney. Fellow former Prime Minister but notably Melbournian Malcolm Fraser can’t quite bring himself to agree the winner is Sydney. However he did tell the veteran Nine newsman the new parliament house was his worst mistake as Prime Minister.

Oakes agreed with Fraser’s view of architecture but thought Keating was merely “possum-stirring”. According to the Australian Dictionary of Colloquialisms, possum-stirring means to liven things up, create a disturbance; raise issues that others wish left dormant. Oakes was right. These were definitely traits Keating had and there are plenty of plenty who wish the Canberra capital argument remain dormant.

Perhaps not surprisingly most of these people have a strong Canberra connection, including Laurie Oakes himself. Oakes, Nine’s federal political reporter, is not happy about the alternative. He said the main reason Sydney should not be the capital was because access to corruption and lobby groups. “Our federal politicians and senior bureaucrats would all then live among, mix with and be constantly influenced by the same log-rollers, urgers, developers, greedy business people, lobbyists, shysters, corrupters and crims who have made NSW politics such a cesspit,” said Oakes. True, perhaps, but hardly relevant. A mere 300kms of distance is hardly going to stop someone from trying to corrupt a federal politician.

Peter Martin (The Age’s Canberra correspondent) is also in the negative camp and said Keating and Fraser were wrong to call Canberra a mistake. He agrees with another of the capital’s journalists, former Canberra Times editor Jack Waterford who said recently “opposition to shifting the Australian capital to Sydney or Melbourne would be even more fierce today than it was 110 years ago.” But would it? It seems to me that no one really cares outside vested interests in Canberra such as Oakes, Martin and Waterford.

It is not just Paul Keating that thinks Sydney would make a good capital. He made the remark in a 2007 speech when John Howard was still in government. Keating noted that Howard had effectively moved the capital to Sydney anyway and “Canberra had an air of unreality.” His comments were supported by then NSW Premier Morris Iemma and Patricia Forsythe of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce who said Sydney was already nation’s economic, cultural capital and transport hub. “When world leaders come to Australia they come to Sydney,” Forsythe said, “and if they have time they will go to Canberra.”

Ever keen to distinguish himself from the man he followed, Labor PM Kevin Rudd did find time to go to Canberra. His home town Brisbane is too much of an outlying city to host cabinet meetings on a regular basis but it is not hard to imagine the next Sydney Prime Minister – whoever he or she might be, and which ever party he or she represents – going back to the Howard precedent and moving the capital back to the nation’s largest city. And Canberra need no longer be a waste of a good sheep paddock.

Australia is not alone in the misguided notion of quarantining the capital from the largest city. There are 35 such capitals worldwide at the time of writing according to Wikipedia and the list is growing. Abuja (Nigeria) and Astana (Kazakhstan) both became capitals in the 1990s. In 2006 Burma shifted its capital from Rangoon (Yangon) to the remote hillside town of Naypidaw so that its paranoid military rulers would feel more secure. Washington DC and Ottawa are closely related. But the capital Canberra has most in common with is Brasilia which arose from post-war presidential designs to inherit the Brazilian capital from Rio in 1960.

Brasilia turns 50 next April and its 101 year old architect Oscar Niemeyer hopes to be alive to see the anniversary. It is the only 20th century capital that UNESCO has given a heritage listing to and viewed from above, the city has elements that repeat in every building which gives it a formal unity. But not everyone was happy. Brasília was a city built for the car, not the pedestrian. And Simone de Beauvoir complained that the similarity of Brasilia’s partment blocks gave the city “the same air of elegant monotony.”

A similar cool air infects Canberra. Even Canberra supporter Frank Moorhouse says he likes the city and its culture because it has a “Scandinavian aesthetic rather than a Mumbai aesthetic”. But this, like the massive freeways of Brasilia, is a 20th century aesthetic. The museums can stay in Canberra but on environmental grounds alone we should be discussing when the parliament should move closer to the people it serves.

Australian Press Council attacks News Ltd for poor standards

media scrum around Kevin Rudd: Derek Barry

Outgoing Australian Press Council chair Ken McKinnon has used his final annual report (pdf) to blast News Ltd newspapers for poor editorial standards and over-reliance on stories with single sources. McKinnon also took a swipe at the industry for its APC budget cuts and the view that its work could be replaced by the Right to Know Coalition. McKinnon has now finished up after nine years and hands over a reduced council to new chair Julian Disney. Disney will work with a fifteen-member board (down from 22 but more than the 12 the industry wanted) but the fact that funding is still tied to industry approval may mean his independence is undermined.

Margaret Simons in Crikey thinks that this may be the start of a new battle between the industry and its regulatory body. She says the annoyed public committee members chose the “social activist and reforming lawyer” Disney to counteract the arrogance of News Ltd which is pushing the Right to Know Coalition alternative. Simons says the other issue is the power of News Ltd editors. Although these editors understand the business of news, they tend to be arrogant and gung-ho leading to many errors of judgment. “The Press Council is far from perfect,” said Simons. “But how bad does it look for the industry to back away from even its gently-gently approach, while also arguing for reduced government intervention?”

 

This is not the first time that this has happened. The notion of a press council dates back to the American Hutchins Inquiry and British Royal Commissions in the 1940s. These led to the notion of the social responsible press in the US and UK. Similar grumblings in Australia led to a journalists’ code of ethics but media organisations themselves were loath to accept any accountability agencies. Although the unions pushed for a press council, the media proprietors continued support of the long-running Liberal government of the 1950s and 1960s ensured that nothing much got done about it. It wasn’t until 1975 when the Whitlam Government began preparing legislation to create a statutory press council, that the APC was founded grudgingly. The council had owner and union reps but the owners had the majority – and the funding. The Council has no legal authority apart from its own constitution.

News Ltd initially refused to join. In 1979 the APC upheld a complaint against Murdoch because his Adelaide Advertiser was so biased against Labor in the state election that year. But as Julianna Schultz says in Reviving the Fourth Estate, by the mid 1980s they were inside the tent and self-interest ensured the council had acquired the reputation of a defender of fourth estate values. Yet the nature of the APC meant it could never shake off its reputation as an industry lapdog. In 1991 Kerry Packer told parliament the APC was “window dressing”. The union called it the “publishers’ poodle”. And former Sydney Morning Herald editor David Bowman wondered how it could serve the public when it was dominated by the publishers.

Yet as McKinnon’s strong criticism hints and its statement of principles attest, the APC is a watchdog with potential bite. It has two broad principles worth noting. First, it notes, the freedom of the press to publish is the freedom, and right, of the people to be informed. It is an essential feature of a democratic society. Secondly, press freedom is important because of its obligations to the people not the media. Therefore public interest is foremost when dealing with complaints.

In his 1984 text The Media, Keith Windschuttle said there were two reforms that emerge from these principles. Firstly is the need to keep the press honest and maintain standards of accuracy and fairness (something he said the Press Council was set up to achieve). The second is the institutional reform of the media. The 1979 Norris Inquiry into Melbourne’s press (after Murdoch’s failed bid to win the Herald & Weekly Times) found two dangers with the existing media concentration: loss of diversity and too much power in the hands of too few. Norris recommended an independent authority scrutinise media share transactions to prevent further concentration. The Inquiry was a failure in that sense. No such authority was set up and Murdoch eventually got his hands on HWT empire. It was the refusal of the APC to deal with this matter that caused the journalists union (then the AJA) to quit its role on the council in 1987.

They returned 18 years later now rebadged as the MEAA and handed off all journalist complaints to the APC. As union boss Chris Warren said in 2004 “the press council can deliver something we can’t, which is a published correction”. Their return adds to the weight of the APC claim that it represents the entire print industry. But the more regulation-heavy broadcast industry never signed up. The APC is nominally independent and funded out of newspaper profits whereas in broadcasting there are mandatory licencing requirements dished out by ACMA.

But Windschuttle wrote The Media as his personal politics were changing from left to right. In the book he offers the alternative of the laissez faire response to regulation which the proprietors if given the choice would prefer. This is the notion that the press are simply in the business of telling the news and owe nothing to the people which it serves. The APC is pre-disposed towards the market system with its so-called “light touch” regulation. But as media scholar Robert McChesney notes in his book Communication Revolution, no one ever voted for a market-based press subsidised by advertising. Commercialism has gutted journalism in the last two decade. Newspapers remain the most important media for original investigation and reporting. However as Michael Schudson notes, Wall Street’s collective devotion to an informed citizenry is nil and as a result newspapers are going to the wall.

McChesney was talking about the American scene which has no strong public broadcaster as a counterweight but otherwise many of his lessons are transferable to Australia. In McKinnon’s final report, he casts the net far and wide with issues of concern to local media: Internet clean feed, secrecy laws, the right to publish school “league” tables, FOI, the Bill of Rights, privacy, protection of whistleblowers, court reporting, and many others. McKinnon reminds us of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which Australia is a signatory: “Everyone has the right of freedom of opinion and expression”.

McKinnon distils this into a “charter of a free press in Australia”. The people of this country, he says, have a right to freedom of information and access to differing views and opinions. This is a direct attack on News Ltd’s attempt to monopolise news in Australia and a worthy watchdog’s attempt to bite the hand that feeds it. With the even more combative Disney now in the chair, the social justice angle of the APC will only get stronger. At a critical juncture for the media, expect this battle to get a lot more heated.