Gaza and the Battle for Public Opinion

Seventeen days into Operation Cast Lead, Israel and Palestine are engaged in battle both on the ground and online. The Israeli Defense Force is the first national force to launch its own YouTube channel, complete with footage of attacks on Gaza, and the Consulate General of Israel in New York held a press conference in December via Twitter.

The Israeli military spokesman recently called new media a “new war zone” in which the battle over public opinion is a crucial component of military operations.

With that in mind, the Israeli military blocked foreign journalists’ access to Gaza in order to maintain some control over the flow of information out of the conflict zone. A few outlets who already maintained a presence in Gaza, however, have been closely following the conflict. Al Jazeera, the only international news outlet with a presence in Gaza, has been taking particular advantage of the Internet in order to get its news to English-speaking audiences. In addition to the station’s use of Twitter updates and YouTube, Al Jazeera has published an interactive map which tracks bombings, deaths, provision of aid, and other information using the Ushahidi platform. Ushahidi allows users to submit information related to international crises via cell phone or Internet, which is then fact-checked and published to the web.

Israel’s information blockade has also failed to stifle the voices of citizen journalists, and has potentially increased dependence on them. Images, video, and first-hand accounts from Gaza are spreading rapidly on the Internet.

Although web 2.0 and citizen journalism can help amplify aspects of a conflict that otherwise wouldn’t receive attention from the traditional press, the risk of biased or inaccurate information is also extremely high.

Already, video footage has been taken out of context. One video that has been widely circulated online and broadcast on France 2 claimed to depict dead and injured Palestinians in the aftermath of an Israeli bombing. According to the UK’s FirstPost, however, the footage was actually “the aftermath of an accidental explosion of Hamas’s own weaponry at a rally in a Gaza refugee camp in September 2005.”

In a similar vein, the BBC has debunked a video from the IDF’s YouTube channel:

Israel released video of an air attack on 28 December, which appeared to show rockets being loaded onto a lorry. The truck and those close to it were then destroyed by a missile.

This was clear evidence, the Israelis said, of how accurate their strikes were and how well justified…

It turned out, however, that a 55-year-old Gaza resident named Ahmed Sanur, or Samur, claimed that the truck was his and that he and members of his family and his workers were moving oxygen cylinders from his workshop.

But the misinformation, as well as emotion-filled if accurate accounts from bloggers, has effectively polarized the debate.

According to Dev Raj Dahel, head of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Nepal:

In a situation of ongoing conflict, media's role lies in debating impartially about the health of the country and citizens, framing conflicts in a rational manner, offering concrete options rather than just criticism of actors and furnishing practical initiatives to the conflicting parties to resolve the conflict of various kinds—direct, structural, perceptual and latent. Capacity building of journalists on conflict reporting, communication and peace education thus helps to identify and release deep-seated knowledge located within the various sub-systems and systems of society, weigh a range of alternatives and adopt multi-track measures to seek peaceful resolution of conflicts.

A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review critiques the use of social media in the Gaza conflict, questioning in particular whether or not the use of Twitter by the Israeli Consulate is in fact an improvement over a traditional press conference:

…this angle emphasizes the mere fact of democratization over the more salient question of what, exactly, is being democratized… As long as the people answering questions have public relations, rather than public information, as their primary goal, throwing the doors to a press conference open to the general public won’t make the press conference any better. It’ll just make it more crowded.

Followers of the “propaganda war” being waged online may be led to believe that violence is the only option available-both to Palestinians and Israelis-in the debate over Gaza. However, a 2006 report by the United States Institute of Peace found that “for the first time since the start of the peace process, a majority of Palestinians support a compromise settlement that is acceptable to a majority of Israelis.”

What’s been called the “over-democratization” of conflict journalism may be making it more difficult to amplify the moderate voices within the Israeli-Palestinian debate that are calling for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

The use of new media in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict encompasses a number of the ethical questions we often address on this blog: How can an audience verify the accuracy of citizen journalism? Is a certain amount of professional training necessary to produce quality reporting? Should YouTube censor extremely violent and gruesome footage of potential political significance?

It may also emphasize the responsibility of professional news outlets to maintain rigid standards despite an influx of information and amateur competitors. While new technology is making it easier and faster to get more news out to a wider audience, it's no less important for professionals to verify, edit, and contextualize citizen reports in a way that mediates, rather than sensationalizes, conflict.

Blogging the China Earthquake

Chinese citizens have been turning to the Internet for information on loved ones who went missing after an earthquake in Sichuan province took up to 13,000 lives. Twitter, the online tool that allows friends and family members to send short updates to one another via IM, SMS, and social networking sites like Facebook, has helped many Chinese keep each other up-to-date on their safety as well as on news related to the quake.

There's been discussion of Twitters becoming more and more popular as a "platform for serious discourse," used by citizen and professional journalists alike. Twitter apparently broke the news about the earthquake before the earthquake tracking agency, U.S. Geological Survey.

But the influx of information spread via Twitter, as well as YouTube and various blogs, in some cases may be raising more concerns than it's quelling. Many Chinese bloggers are questioning why the government wasn't able to predict the quake and help citizens prepare:

Local media in April noted water suddenly draining from a large pool in Hubei province, east of Sichuan. That report has been snapped up by bloggers looking for natural omens.

Other bloggers have unearthed a statement by a local government bureau in Sichuan, quelling rumours of an earthquake about a week before Monday's disaster.

Some "conspiracies" floating the blogosphere are that the government may have tried to ignore the earthquake out of a "desire for a peaceful Olympics." According to the UK Telegraph:

[Blogger] Shanghaiist posted 90 updates to the story, and started a rumour that the authorities had prior warning of the earthquake which provoked an official rebuke and more chatter across blogs.

The website gathered together material as diverse as reports that spy satellite images of the region were being used in the rescue operation, to the fact that Monday was Buddha's birthday, to a posting about how people killed in the earthquake were "victims of China's economic miracle.

Some have compared the situation to the handling of Hurricane Katrina by New Orleans and the US government. The situation also looks a lot like the 2003 SARS epidemic, when Chinese citizens spread exaggerated accounts of the numbers affected by the disease through SMS, sparking widespread panic and international criticism of the CCP for not better managing the crisis.

Times Online quotes "established journalist" Chang Ping's reaction to the quake:

"...as someone with relatives in the affected area, I could not stop myself from seeking whatever information I could ...”

He added: "The information was clearly unreliable, and it was difficult to tell what was true or false.

"Together it all spoke of a single problem, and that is the people's fierce appetite for information when faced with a public incident."

Most talk about citizen journalism revolves around whether or not it should be considered reliable or professional. On the one hand, this type of panic on the blogosphere could serve to delegitimize the Internet as a news source. But irresponsible blogging could ironically have just as much of a positive impact as the citizen journalists uncovering the truth about the
not-always-transparent Chinese government.

WSJ reports that the state-run Xinhua has "proved surprisingly aggressive at covering the earthquake in Sichuan province" to protect the country's reputation now that they have millions of competing accounts being spread through the Internet:

A regulation promoted as increasing government transparency took effect just two weeks ago. The regulation urges government officials to disclose more information to the public, including "information on the management, usage and distribution of social donations in funds and in kind for emergency and disaster relief."

At the same time, the leash has tightened on the country's news media. Just last August, the government approved a law restricting news outlets in covering natural disasters. The law says that "units and individuals are prohibited from fabricating or spreading false information regarding emergencies and government efforts to cope with emergencies," according to a Xinhua report at the time.

Though the law was aimed more at relative muckrakers, Xinhua was affected too. Yet since the earthquake, it has filed more than 200 reports and updates...

The verdict isn't clear when it comes to Xinhua's performance in covering the disaster. "Are they going to ask deeper questions about possible early warnings?" [David Bandurski, a researcher with the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong] says. "We'll wait and see."

Ethical Blogging vs. Email

We all know what a hassle it is to wade through hundreds of pieces a spam every week in your inbox just to keep up with your legitimate email correspondence. A Wall Street Journal article yesterday titled “Email’s Friendly Fire” has identified “colleague spam,” email from your coworkers who always press the “reply all” button. The article goes on to offer some solutions in the form of email sorting technology such as ClearContext.

Are we witnessing the death of email? Can blogs help out?

I always suspected the day would come when email would begin to die. First, with the wave of spam growing every year, legitimate email gets lost in the tide. There was an excellent article in the New Yorker in August describing this phenomenon called “Damn Spam: The losing war on junk e-mail”:

As the Web evolves into an increasingly essential part of American life, the sheer volume of spam grows exponentially every year, and so, it would appear, do the sophisticated methods used to send it. Nearly two million e-mails are dispatched every second, a hundred and seventy-one billion messages a day. Most of those messages have something to sell.

Second, corporate spam filters aren’t always accurate in identifying which emails are spam and which are not. I have witnessed several cases in which spam filters have gone berserk in the past few weeks inside my office and at the offices of others. The bottom line is: When you hit that “send” button on email, you can’t be so sure the recipient will get it, open it, and read it. Finally, the addressee can always claim, “I never got your email.”

Why not shift the responsibility on the readers by posting everything on blogs? Indeed, as you know, one of the origins of the blog in its current form was from an ah-ha moment: People emailing to one another discovered that the discussion thread amounted to something of value and thought the discussion could be posted publicly. Many corporations are trying out internal blogs as ways to share ideas and innovations, thus reducing the amount of “colleague spam,” I would hope—assuming their idea was more than “Brownies in the kitchen.”

Essentially communication is diversifying at a rapid pace. Chad Lorenz of Slate magazine declared “The Death of Email” just a few weeks ago. We communicators are hedging against the risk that email may not be infallible. Twitter, Facebook, text messaging, and blogs, I would argue amount to a communications potpourri. The great thing about blogs (and Facebook for that matter) is that you can see your post as soon as it goes online. “I didn’t get the message” can be a thing of the past if people trust the integrity of their message to be viewed by the public.

Perhaps a transparent blog posting in lieu of a secretive email message could save people from becoming victims of embarrassing gossip or other affairs. For private matters, it might be best to make a phone call or do what's sometimes called "Facebook in the flesh."