Some light relief.

Social not technological…

[L]ink Pen -

What the future will look like for journalists

How the press responded to the NotW phone-hacking story.

Irish Election coverage of An Bord Snip Nua

Print isn’t dead.

Creative and Innovative. Yes please.

Very lefty but worth watching., if you haven’t yet. It’s 58 minutes long, so have your lunch prepared beforehand. Props to Gav for the link.

–

This one doesn’t quite fit into the usual Irishelection.com remit but I figured there’d be a few of our regular readers interested in it (plus, I’m working for a non-print news organisation at the minute so I’ve no where else to put this).

I’ve just finished a brief interview with Declan Power, a security and defence expert with strong knowledge of the Darfur region. Power is former member of the Irish Defence Forces specially trained in internal security. He was deployed numerous times on overseas operations, mainly in Africa, during the course of his career. He spent three months last year working in the Darfur region as a communications officer with Irish Aid and is on his way back there at present, he is currently in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. Power is also a freelance journalist who has worked with RTÉ, The Irish Daily Star and The Sunday Business Post, amongst others.

Quick background: Yesterday reports emerged that three people were kidnapped from the GOAL compound in Kutum, northern Darfur. John O’Shea of GOAL told The Irish Times that six armed men came to the compound and took three people away, he also said he hoped this was simply a ransom (criminal not political) kidnapping. The three kidnapped were Sharon Commins, a 32 year-old Irish woman from Clontarf, Dublin, Hilda Kawuki an Ugandan national, and an unnamed Sudanese security guard. The security guard was released almost immediately and is now being interviewed by the UN and local police.

The Darfur area has become increasingly dangerous since the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar El Bashir on charges of war crimes in March, El Bashir’s response was to expell 13 humanitarian aid agencies from the country which he accused of spying for the ICC. Four of the agencies were re-admitted earlier this year, though the Sudanese Government denies that, saying the agencies re-admitted were different to the ones expelled. This means there is no group that the international persenct in the area could point the finger at, both pro-government and rebal forces would have a motive. There have been two similar kidnappings of aid workers in recent months, one in March saw the hostages released unharmed several days later, another  in April saw the hostages released three weeks later, again unharmed.

Reuters are reporting that the local rebel militia, The Sudan Liberation Army are denying involvement in the kidnapping and blaming the government-backed Eagles of Bashif. AFP are saying the Sudanese Government are trying to contact the kidnappers.

On The Marian Finuance Show this morning O’Shea described Commins as his former “left-hand woman”. I asked Power who the likely culprits were and, given Commins position, presumably one of seniority in the area, if the hostages were specifically targeted…

The targeting is a possibility. Things are never quite what the seem out here. This doesn’t indicate the usual criminal intent. Though many cases of kidnap attemptout here are disguised as criminal but have a political purpose. Both sides [pro-gov and rebel forces] attempt to masquerade as each other in attacking UN or international staff.

Who are the likely perpetrators? The SLA rebels are denying involvement but several media outlets seem to be inferring that the Eagles of Bashif are the chief suspects…

It’s too early to tell. To be honest a denial means nothing out here. I’m still in Khartoum doing briefings so don’t have the inside track yet, but often times the group that everyone’s pointing at are not the perps. Sometimes it can be govt related or orchestrated. The ICC indictment has lead to many strange activities.

On RTÉ radio this morning John O’Shea said he hoped the department of defence would get involved, what are the possibilities of this happening?

It will be the department of foreign affairs and the UN at the heart of this, highly, highly, unlikely defence will get involved. This is a very sensitive situation, it’ll be guile and negotiations that sort this out, not force.

What kind of conditions are the two hostages likely to be kept in? Is there any precedence for this? Most seem to be released almost immediately…

Yes, immediate release that has mostly been the case in Darfur. I wouldn’t say conditions are great… similar to Darfur in general but I doubt it would be a Hezbollah-like situation – hooded and chained up. My guess is they will be treated well because they are probably part of some internal political machination. The most important thing for them is to keep their psyche intact. It would be interesting to know if GOAL routinely send their staff on personal security and reaction to hostage taking courses.

In certain situations these kidnappings are kept quie to keep the situation localised [huge media coverage increases value of hostage to kidnappers, see kidnapping of David Rohde] do you think GOAL are doing the right thing in splashing this everywhere?

Yes, max publicity, splash it everywhere, what is needed is leverage (with the UN, dept of foreign affairs, African Union etc).

–

As I said, it was brief. I tired to contact GOAL to ask if they routinely sent staff on personal security and reaction to hostage-taking course but couldn’t get through to anyone in their offices – had no time to dig out press officer numbers. In fact, I’m not sure if there is a press officer, O’Shea seems to do much of it himself.

Another report from The Irish Times emerged as I wrote this – mainly quotes from John O’Shea’s appearance on Marian Finuance, see here – note, O’Shea…

… said he could not comment on whether the kidnapping might have been carried out solely for a ransom or for political reasons, as he did not know.

“When no note is left, no words are exchanged, I can’t really be certain of anything other than GOAL have played no political role in our 24 or 25 years in Sudan.”

The agency dealt with people turning up in “desperate need” and helped them, he said.

He said the agency’s clinics, schools and feeding centres had been “open to all”.

In Darfur, he said, it would also be “quite impossible to know what is going on” among the “multitude of warring factions”.

Mr O’Shea said there had been no “ripple” effect following the eviction of 13 aid agencies from Darfur several months ago and Goal had had no problems since.

The area in which it operated was “peaceful” and, to his knowledge, had not been visited by any of the rebel groups.

Mousavi Supporters: ABC News

Some people who read this blog know where I’m working at the minute, it won’t surprise many of those to hear I spent my day trawling the internet for the best content from Iran. There’s a lot of it.

However, people are getting carried away. It’s not a Twitter Revolution, as some people are saying, a revolution maybe, but not one that developed on Twitter – or any other social media platform for that matter.

I was watching Twitter searches for #Iran, #Iranelections, #gr88, ‘Iran’, ‘elections’, ‘riot’, ‘Mousavi’, ‘Ahmadinejad’  and ‘protesters’ non-stop between 11am and 7pm today. 5% of it was coming from informed sources, less than that was coming from plausible eye-witnesses. The signal-to-noise ratio was awful.

Now I understand people were purposefully attempting to disguise original sources to camouflage them from government censors – but on the flipside of that there were also people attempting to appear as eye-witnesses when they quite clearly were not in Tehran, let alone in Iran. They appeared to be doing this simply for the kudos. In a way that’s constructive, but it’s also potentially destructive, which people seem to be ignoring. On the positive side, it keeps the original source under the radar. On the negative side it gives the revolution an amplified impetus in the eyes of the outside world, perhaps one that isn’t reflected on the ground.

Watching Twitter’s trending topics for the last few days would give one the impression that it had been flooded by tweets from protesters on the ground in Tehran. This is not the case, I’d estimate there are more fake eye-witnesses tweeting than actual eye-witnesses. I’d also estimate there are less than ten plausible eye-witnesses still tweeting – at least in English. Yet ‘#Iranelections’ remains the most used phrase on Twitter. As far as I can see that is because tweeters from ‘The West’ are tweeting about what the media are reporting – while the media are reporting very little from the scene, because they’re locked in their apartments. So what’s happening on the ground, while appearing to be covered by an overwhelming veil of ‘citizen journalists’ that supposedly make the area highly transparent, is in fact covered by a veil of people appearing to be citizen journalists who are not in fact on the ground. There’s a lot of Chinese whispering on Iran Purple Monkey Dishwasher, in my opinion.

On top of that, the material on Youtube, Flickr, Twitter and various blogs written in both English and Farsi is insightful but few seem to be considering where it’s coming from, you can’t take it all at face-value, which some media outlets are.

All the online material in English I’ve found is anti-Ahmadinejad. Literally all. This is quite obviously because the supporters of Mousavi are typically young city-dwellers with a grasp of technology, while the pro-government voters are more often rural traditionalists. That, combined with the fact foreign media have been locked into their apartments, means that we in The West are getting very little coherence, balance or context in the media being put in front of us.

While I don’t doubt that there is a massive upsurge in anti-government sentiment in Iran – something I’d largely support in principle – the level of pro-Ahmadinejad support is not being reflected online. And due to the fact that the media’s reports are now based almost solely on the online material freely available (which is being supplied mainly by anti-government activists) – we’re not getting a balanced impression of the events on the ground in the mainstream media either.

While the Youtube videos being broadcast are probably being correctly interpreted (in one instance) as militia shooting on innocent protesters, this cannot be verified and thus the doubt remains. You cannot replace a trusted face that can say “they are the pro-government militia shooting on the anti-gov protesters” with a video that shows a man with a gun on a roof shooting down on a huge group of unarmed people, even if the former is clearly a very reasonable assumption.

But unfortunately that’s what we’re left with at the minute, a large lump of unverifiable material and a locked up group of trusted faces. While I’m very much in favour of the ‘citizen journalist’ idea, at present it’s almost like the amount of unconfirmed sources, more so on Twitter and the blogosphere than Youtube and Flickr – is making it even more difficult to get a clear picture.

A final note: given that all the footage is anti-gov, maybe locking down the mainstream media was the wrong to make from the Iranian government’s point of view. If there is a notable pro-Ahmadinejad movement then MSM may have reported that, tonight were getting none of it.

Pro-Ahmadinejad march: The Toronto Globe and Mail

Anyway, quick [L]Ink Pen…

Can newspapers reassert their dominance?

Are our political institutions fit for purpose?

The University Blog is amazing. Always insightful.

Andrew Spittle is fast becoming one of my favourite online media bloggers. See his most recent post here.

More quality journalism from the Daily Fail.

I said it was a bad move by Netenyahu to go into power with some nutters. See Matthew Yglesias, “what’s Hebrew for Chutzpah?”

I relate to Russell’s state of mind – that’s slightly worrying.

So tired. Will be back in the next few days…