The absence of reliable and unbiased information about the Israel-Gaza conflict is eerily reminiscent of the information vacuum during the Russia-Georgia Ossetia war (Wikipedia/ Global Voices).
There are many parallels between the two conflicts.
There’s a war between a more powerful country (Russia and Israel) and its weaker neighbor (Georgia and Palestine). The weaker country not only suffers a military defeat, but its communications infrastructure is also hacked (Noah Shachtman and Travis Wentworth). The stronger country denies access to international journalists. That, combined with the absence of a vibrant media ecosystem in the attacked country (Georgia and Palestine), leads to an information vacuum. The bias of the American media towards one of the involved countries (Georgia and Israel) further adds to the confusion.
Due to limited access and the absence of prior reputations, citizen journalists in the attacked countries cannot make their voices heard. And, finally, whatever citizen reporting does come out of the conflict zone can be best characterized as citizen propaganda, designed to add further fuel to the blame game. Ethan Zuckerman points out in the comments that the citizen propaganda in these conflicts even extends to citizen participation in coordinated cyber attacks against websites in the enemy country (Noah Shachtman and Evgeny Morozov).
As a result, we aren’t even able to establish basic facts about the two conflicts. Which of the two countries was the real aggressor? What was the exact scope of citizen casualties? What is the correct point of reference to understand the conflict (Ivan Sigal)?
I have already written about the citizen propaganda in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Today, I found myself following a trail of links on citizen propaganda in the August 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict, a trail that led me to another trail of links on Chinese citizen journalism against the Western media coverage of the March 2008 Lhasa riots (Wikipedia/ Global Voices).
After a fact-finding trip to Georgia, Ivan Sigal talks about the phenomenon of information vertigo –
In an environment where primary sources of information are opaque and of uncertain reliability (and perception is key here), we encounter the phenomenon of information vertigo.
Information vertigo is the sickening feeling you get when you recognize that nothing reported can truly be verified. Mass media, ostensible eyewitness reports, images, video, documents: all blends into a mush of hearsay when root sources of information have been corrupted.
In the absence of a sense of what to trust, we develop a frantic, aggressive assertion toward what we think we know. It is not just citizen propaganda, but an attempt to establish clear positions in a world void of facts.
Citizen media relies on professional journalism and access to official data, as well as online mechanisms such as comments for verification. In the absence of legitimate information sources, it’s difficult to presume that citizen media could or should have filled the gaps.
Evgeny Morozov in openDemocracy says that the absence of citizen journalism from Ossetia isn’t surprising –
A simple truth about modern conflicts is that they tend to occur in places without universal access to internet broadband and the low ratios of iPhones per capita. It would be sublimely naive – and condescending – to expect South Ossetians or Georgians to respond to intense shellfire by taking a crash-course in podcasting, even if they did have electricity and and an internet connection. Tskhinvali and Gori were never going to be hubs of user-generated content from a war-zone.
And yet..some “citizen reports” from Tskhinvali and Gori have emerged despite the technological challenge. This is impressive and welcome, but it comes with a further problem: trust. Most were of poor quality, and many appeared on blogs with no reputation, no previous blogging history (some had been registered only a few days before the war), and carried no identification of a real person with a real name who could claim responsibility for or ownership of them.
In this context, the citizen reports from Gori and Tskhinvali that I had seen triggered more questions than answers.
Onnik Krikorian’s interview of Georgian blogger Giga Paitchadze reveals some of the limitations Evgeny Morozov talks about –
Onnik Krikorian: When the conflict with Russia started, the number of Georgian blogs soon increased. Who are these new bloggers?
Giga Paitchadze: It’s mainly young people aged 20-30 who have constant Internet access at the offices where they work. However, it all started with email lists although a couple of days before the war started — on 5th or 6th August — some people started to set up blogs about the conflict with Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Dozens of new blogs about the war in different languages were set up although I can’t say all were of high quality. As for myself, all I did was collect information and post it to my blog.
Of course, everyone looks at this conflict from only one side only and it’s very difficult to be objective so the blog entries from Georgian bloggers were always against Russia and vice-versa. There weren’t many people who tried to understand or analyze what was happening and why.
Ethan Zuckerman thinks that the biased citizen reporting in the Russia-Georgia conflict is part of the rising phenomenon of citizen propaganda –
Part of the reason this war is such a riddle is that we’ve entered a new phase in contemporary conflict: the world of citizen propaganda.
The conflict in Ossetia is tailor-made for citizen propaganda. Analysts in the US – removed from the conflict both in distance and knowledge – are likely to rely on existing frames that may not represent events well or accurately. Citizens of Russia and Georgia are well aware that international opinion matters in the resolution of these events and turn to citizen media tools to make their cases. Their audiences, perceiving that professional media is biased against their interpretation, may place more credence on “eyewitness accounts” than they would if not already frustrated by mainstream accounts. Reading anything in these circumstances becomes a challenging task, navigating the stated and unstated agendas of anyone who’s speaking, discounting and revaluing all opinions based perceived biases.
Joshua Froust at Columbia Journalism Review believes that the big American blogs were equally biased in their coverage of the conflict –
Much of the commentary on the conflict resolved into very clear partisan lines: Russia on the Left, Georgia on the Right. Rather than providing the clarity, nuance, and honesty that they promise to provide, the big blogs instead retreated to their comfortable and predictable ideological corners. By keeping to their usual haunts, these blogs did their readers a tremendous disservice: they were just as incurious and ideological as they regularly accuse the MSM of being.
Julia Loffe at Columbia Journalism Review suggests that even as Russian bloggers adopted an overtly nationalistic posture, they might have been equally suspicious of Russian and Western propaganda –
Combine a culture already suspicious of all things political with the natural, magnifying outlet of the free-for-all blogosphere, and you get Russian bloggers searching desperately for the necessarily elusive key to the riddle of this war. Obviously, the thinking goes, evidence on the ground is being manipulated for political purposes. Obviously, says the rare Georgian sympathizer, we’re only being shown the wrecked streets and not the rest of the city. Or, says the Russian nationalist, the West wants to minimize the death toll in Tskhinvali so that Saakashvili can escape the war crime charges he so desperately deserves.
It is not, however, a question of looking for the skew-factor of media bias, as it would be in the West. In Russia, the question is more essential: What truth are they trying to hide from us?
Ethan Zuckerman goes on to draw connections between the Russian citizen propaganda during the Otessia conflict and the Chinese citizen propaganda during the Lhasa riots –
Russians aren’t the first to turn to YouTube to make their case for their nation’s actions. During the Lhasa riots, a number of Chinese videographers produced montages explaining their view that Tibet was an inseperable part of China, or challenging what they perceived as Western media bias in coverage of the riots. These videos were in English, intended to persuade a non-Chinese audience to either change their views or acknowledge another point of view. It’s easy to dismiss the presence of such user-generated propaganda as the result of government initiatives like the “fifty cent party” (wumaodang), a team of online commentators paid to put forth pro-Party views on the Chinese internet. But, there’s no indication that efforts like anti-cnn.com or the web videos referenced above are anything other than citizen propaganda.
Evgeny Morozov believes that such incidents of citizen propaganda are rooted in a deep suspicion of the West in general, and Western media in particular –
My biggest problem with Rosen’s optimism is that, when applied in the international context-where “media” are the CNNs and the BBCs of this world, and the public are the Russians and the Chinese angry with their coverage (most often because their governments told them so) – it is not at all clear what those “former audiences” have really morphed into. Rosen is correct: passive they are no more. They-and especially the young people- are all actively producing information on blogs, forums, and comment sections of the sites belonging to some of the most venerable names in the news media. But could it be that the people formerly known as the audience have become the people currently known as the information warriors?
Ethan Zuckerman wonders why such criticism hasn’t been more widely reported in Western media –
The problem with bridgeblogging is that it’s no good to speak if no one is listening. I’m not seeing a lot of traction for this story in Western press thus far – a search on Google News for “china media bias” yields 118 stories, several of which are from English-language publications tightly controlled by the Chinese government, while a search for “china tibet riots” yields over 16,000 recent stories.
Some of the western media outlets picking up the bias story are doing so explicitly to debunk it.
This is a pretty fascinating contrast to the way western media has reported on blog efforts to debunk errors in media stories. While some reporters have complained about the “pajamahadeen“, bloggers have also been lionized for their fact-checking functions. It seems slightly unfair to assume that Chinese bloggers are incapable of the same techniques of press criticism that their western counterparts have pioneered, or that Chinese bloggers can’t be genuinely upset about what they see as unfair Western critique.
Finally, in a New Yorker story on China’s angry youth, Tang Jie, a 28 year old Chinese neo-conservative, wonders who is really brainwashed (via William Moss) –
“Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”
There’s a very thin line between activism and propaganda, so it isn’t surprising that citizen journalism in contemporary conflicts often turns into citizen propaganda.
The question is: if you can’t trust the official version of the story, often delivered through mainstream media, which acts as a mere messenger, and if you cannot trust the grassroots narrative, who do you trust?
The bigger question is: in a world divided by deep pseudo-ideological fault lines (the West vs. the rest, to begin with), who decides what is objective and what isn’t?
Cross-posted at Social Media in Business, Development, and Government.
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