Social Media and Journalism in Iran

Interesting piece by Brian McNair on social media and journalism in post-election Iran:

Current events in Iran exemplify what I called in a 2006 book, ‘cultural chaos’. A ruling authoritarian elite struggles to maintain control of information and political dominance in a world where online media and satellite news threaten to make everything it does visible to a global audience.

Internally, Iran’s protesters Google, Twitter and Facebook around the censorship, countering the propaganda which fills state media coverage and organising their opposition. The oppressive order of Islamic fundamentalism becomes the dynamic chaos of emerging democracy, and culture - communication - is the catalyst for that phase change.

As I write, the outcome of the protests is uncertain. But there is no doubt that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hold on power has never been more fragile. The Iranian state tries to disrupt email and social networking sites. Mobile phone networks are blocked and satellite dishes confiscated, but those attempts merely add more fuel to the story as reported by a globalised, always-on media, stirring up further revulsion and anger at home and abroad.

In this sense, the globalisation of news media, and the explosion of online means of communication which are, by design, very difficult for authoritarian regimes to control or destroy, is a democratising force. It erodes the barriers which those regimes erect around their countries, breaks their quarantine, raises the global political cost of their behaviour. It brings chaos, but in a good way, the way that leads to the birth of something better.

The presence of new kinds of media is not enough in itself to guarantee progressive change, or to create the public mood which demands it. In the case of Iran, the arrival of Barack Obama and his conciliatory overtures appears to have strengthened the opposition. The parlous state of the Iranian economy has been a domestic issue for a long time, and the sheer extremism of Ahmadinejad’s version of Islam can only provoke resistance in a country with Iran’s cosmopolitan history.

But the impact of these underlying factors is amplified by the globalised media, which give them heightened visibility and force. Everything plays out before a global audience, in BBC and CNN bulletins, or on Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera. Iranians themselves, many of them, are part of that audience, and take strength from the knowledge that the eyes of the world are upon them as they fight for personal freedom and human rights.

This is what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago, when Kate Adie and her media colleagues covered first the pro-democacy protests, then the massacre which followed. The Chinese communists won that battle, but they lost the war, and to this day are still shamed by their actions.

The global media were in Eastern Europe in the velvet revolutions, and in Moscow during the failed coup of 1991, lending their publicity to popular uprisings.

But in Iran, two decades on, there is another factor at work. Alongside the professional journalists and foreign correspondents are armies of ordinary people, armed only with mobile phones and digital cameras, Twitter and Skype accounts, Facebook and MySpace profiles.

While John Simpson and the rest are locked in their hotels, effectively prisoners of the regime, young Iranians keep a flow of uncensored news pouring out of the country – citizen journalists if you like. They are connected to the world beyond, in a way that previous generations of protesters have not been.

Brian McNair is Professor of Journalism & Communication at the University of Strathclyde.

Iran: Views in the Western Media

As it appears that the stand off around the disputed Iranian election result could take some time to play itself out, there is the chance to look at how this is being picked up in the Western media.

As Jason Wilson has noted, a dominant motif is that this is the social media or Twitter-driven revolution. Although some of the claims being made appear premature, this is not stopping some overblown claims being made, such as that of Jeff Jarvis that Twitter is "the keystone in the architecture of the new infrastructure of unstoppable freedom of speech and democracy".

And, hey, I thought it was so you could find out about Lindsay Lohan's breasts or where Ashton Kutcher is right now.

But we've been here before. From Rupert Murdoch's claims in the early 1990s that satellite TV could bring down the Chinese government to more recent absurd claims about Twitter triggering the "Moldovan revolution", the idea that media technologies force political regime change has had a run on many occasions and been found wanting. According to his blog, Jarvis is pronouncing the end of dictatorships on Al-Jazeera:

I recorded a Skype video interview for Al Jazeera English that will air at 20000 GMT today and looked at the camera and said, “Despots, beware.” Your days are numbered. This is more than a revolution. It is an evolution in the architecture of speech and freedom.

I am reminded here of this famous warning to sceptics, from the legendary Criswell in 1953:



But Jeff Jarvis is certainly open to the possibilities of people taking matters into their own hands, even if he overstates the global significance of You Tube and Twitter. Not so Seamus Milne in The Guardian, who seems to see the whole thing as an orchestrated campaign by the US and its Western allies against Mahmoud Ahmedinijad.

That is also reflected in the western media, whose cameras focus so lovingly on Tehran's gilded youth and for whom Ahmadinejad is nothing but a Holocaust-denying fanatic. The other Ahmadinejad, who is seen to stand up for the country's independence, expose elite corruption on TV and use Iran's oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority, is largely invisible abroad ... If Ahamdinejad was in fact the winner, then there is an attempted coup going on in Tehran right now, and it is being led by Mousavi and his western-backed supporters.

One consequence of the Bush administration's foreign policy was that it reignited a Cold War world-view on the left, where reflex anti-Americanism and the sense that the US was behind everything would lead to routine support for whoever was opposed to the US and to Western foreign policy. Ahmedinijad is a very unlikely figure for the Western left to align with - his quite vocal anti-Semitism would seem to present at least one obstacle - but "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" mindset can be a hard one to break with.

As I noted in an earlier post, we will never know the actual result of the Iranian election (Ahmedinijad could have actually won), but enough analysis can be done of the official dats to reveal that it is fraudulent, and that is what has been the trigger for the protests. Yes, Teheran is where the mobile phone owning, Internet accessing, Twittering urban middle classes are, but the line that such people are the stooges of U.S. foreign policy is predictable and vacuous. Iranians are quite capable of demanding democratic accountability from their leaders without help from the U.S. State Department.

How reliable is the information from Iran?

Good article from The Guardian about the issues arising about how to determine the reliability of information coming through from Iran via social media sites.

The internet is a brilliant machine for spreading information. Data shoots across the network at the speed of light, passing from one node to another. It's unmotivated by fear or repression or greed, and can shine a torch into the darkest corners to help bring what was hidden to the world.

The uprising in Iran has been a perfect case in point - despite state censorship, the suppression of journalists and the shutdown of communications - the story has been covered from almost every angle: and the internet - as I've written before this week - has played a vital part in getting the information out.

(Some of the public nature of the information has been sparked in part, it seems, by the surprisingly robust design of Twitter and the fact that instant messaging services from Google, Microsoft and AOL have been turned off in Iran as part of US sanctions. Would an uprising have commanded so much of the internet's attention if conversations were happening privately, between Iranians, in Farsi?)

For more read here.

Innovative blogging on the Iranian election

I am pleased to see that Aussie expat Craig Bellamy has put together an as it happens blog on the events in Iran in the aftermath of the disputed elections. I noted yesterday the minute by minute reportage coming from Andrew Sullivan's blog, and The Guardian has put together an excellent news blog on this.

In Australia, the bloggers themselves can be their own worst enemies. In a generally self-congratulatory discussion on Larvatus Prodeo about what a fool Christian Kerr from The Australian was, I put up this post:

Just to take the conversation out of the realms of the Canberra cognoscenti for a moment, I can agree with all of this about the likes of Christian Kerr and David Penberthy BUT…

At the moment I think what is happening in Iran is very interesting. It confirms that social media is not just apolitical fluff and chasing around Ashton Kutcher, but may have a political significance at certain moments. At the same time, I am quite glad that there are “journos as hard men of the streets” like John Simpson, who are employed by places like the BBC, and who have a very clear understanding of how to cover events like those currently happening in places like Teheran.

I’ve been following Andrew Sullivan’s blog, among other things, on this, and his observation on the MSM and the blogosphere and MSM-bashing is interesting in relation to these events:

Some of it is overblown. The NYT’s Lede blog has been outstanding, as I’ve said for the past several days. PBS and NPR are doing important work. Many MSM reporters are risking their lives to report this story from within Iran and we bloggers should honor their courage and work. Most of the photos I’ve published come from Getty and the remarkable Olivier Laban-Mattei. Cable news is useless, but we knew that already. But the future is a fusion of MSM tradition and new media open-source news gathering, aggregating, editing, filtering.

While some responses were well thought through, others were of the stock standard "You can't trust the mainstream media" stuff:

Terry yes, there are plenty of journalists still out there gathering primary data and reporting it, which is what I think we would all like journalists to do. However an increasing number of these ‘news’ stories consist of little more than summaries of what various anonymous people allegedly said, all written to support the journo’s evaluative opinion piece … one usually presented in the context of an argument full of assumptions about causation and implications for a particular interpretation of likely future developments.

Ken Lovell - well said. I also note that these unsourced reports are usually chockablock full of loaded epithets, of which my particular fave is ‘moderate’, closely followed by ‘reformist’. Both are usual in discussions of ‘hot spots’ in foreign correspondentdom and denote, if not actually paid agents of the CIA, at least willing Quislings.

As there is little point in being poster #60 responding to poster #40 responding to poster #25, I thought I'd reiterate a few points about what seems to be happening in Teheran:

1. The West is not behind these protests. Iranians are making their own judgements, and taking matters into their own hands. Barack Obama's foreign policy strategy in the region was premised upon the idea that he would still be dealing with Ahmadinejad after the election, who was the devil they knew. The U.S and others like Britain are basically playing catch up, and decidedly unsure on whether to support the uprising;
2. Blogging, You Tube, Twitter and other social media have been central to getting the messgae out to the wider world. The idea that this is all apolitical fluff that is about following Ashton Kulcher around and "are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism [but] are directives from the Central Software Committee" (to quote a recent pooh-poohing manifesto from the land of Digital Media High Theory) is actually being exposed in a sharp light on the streets of Teheran right now;
3. The mainstream media are not a monolith in relation to these matters. Several people have commented on the appalling lack of coverage on the U.S. cable networks, the BBC has been great, as has The Guardian and the New York Times news blog The Lede. Moral: don't write off media outlets that invest in serious coverage of international affairs. Bloggers are not filling this gap at this stage.
   

Understanding what is happening in Iran

In trying to understand what has happened in Iran since the election results came through, there is a need to avoid two temptations of the Western observer following this through the Western media:

1. The temptation to assume that people in countries where there is anti-Western feeling only vote for leaders who express that feeling because they are manipulated by the media and the government. Not only does this ignore the extent to which manipulation occurs in Western democracies; it also obliterates the significance of the history of colonialism and the manifest inequalities in the global system;
2. The temptation to align with the candidate who people support who seem to be "most like us". This can become particularly easy if they also make use of the Internet, Facebook, My Space, You Tube, Twitter etc. Not surprisingly, this will be the younger middle class.

While both of these are possibilities with the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran this weekend, the extensiveness and spontaneity of the uprisings that have followed suggest that a real fault line has emerged in post-1979 Iranian society, and that the suppression of popular feeling has reached a critical mass.

Soem of the online coverage of this has been excellent. Via Andrew Sullivan's site, there is an analysis of the official figures from Nate Silver that suggests that these figures verge on the completely impossible. Juan Cole points to problems with the assumption that the poor voted for Ahmadinejad, and the vote for Mir-Hossein Mousavi is an urban middle class phenomenon (which has become the quasi-official line). Interesting discussion on this site as well.

Excellent coverage from the BBC and John Simpson in Teheran. Not so CNN which has been attacked for failing to pay attention to the story as it was breaking very publicly and very visibly.

Aside from SBS, the Australian coverage has generally been poor, despite the significant number of Iranians living, working and studying in Australia.