More than just victims

I’ve been trying to keep up with some under-the-radar stories this week, and I found this one about a couple who met while fighting in Syria. (Keep your Rihanna “We Found Love”  jokes to yourselves.)

The wife, Nour al-Hassan, left her Assad-supporting family to fight against the regime and is considered one of her battalion’s best snipers. And the husband…

…Who really cares about the husband after reading about what she’s accomplished?

News stories I’ve read/seen about women in war are generally about how they’re victims. They’re widows, childless mothers, or rape victims. Never fighters or revolutionaries.

Granted, the lack of a female presence in combat could be attributed to the culture. But stories like Nour’s show that women’s roles in conflict are much broader and more diverse than what’s being reported.

The Washington Post and Reuters both wrote about the roles Syrian women have undertaken during the war, and while they’re traditional female roles (taking care of the wounded, providing food and clothing, etc.), they’re not helpless victims. They’re doing something to contribute to a cause they believe in.

I’m not trying to diminish stories covering violence against women. Those are important. So, so important. (Women Under Siege is excellent at that). But what I want from my news is a more nuanced picture of what’s really happening in war zones and I’m not getting that.

Kony 2012

If you’ve wondered what all of this Kony 2012 and #stopkony is about, here’s the video that explains it all:

Produced by the Invisible Children NGO, “KONY 2012 is a film and campaign that aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.”

For the past 26 years, Joseph Kony and the LRA have mutilated, killed, raped women and young girls, and abducted children to serve as soldiers. What really hit home for me was watching Jacob, a young victim of the LRA, say that death would be better than life after witnessing his brother’s murder and realizing that his future was hopeless.

Kony and the LRA have gotten intermittent attention from the media, but this viral campaign (which focuses on the power of the individual) seems like it could have enough oomph to make it as well-known as Sudan.

Learn more about the campaign at kony2012.com

21st Century Journalism’s New Spin on the Three Little Pigs

A very cool commercial from The Guardian about the impact of today’s media. Simply brilliant to use a classic story we all know to show the many hats media outlets wear.

Storifying the White House

The White House certainly hasn’t been shy with using social media to engage with the public. Obama himself has been credited with having the foresight to use social media in his 2008 presidential campaign while the other candidates preferred using …

Kosovo’s ‘rabbit out of a hat’ president

As Tim Judah reports, Kosovo’s new president was plucked out of nowhere. But the rise of Atifte Jahjaga — Kosovo’s first female president — from obscurity to prominence isn’t one of those feel-good underdog tales.

Nieman Lab: There’s still bias against Al Jazeera English

An update to my post about Al Jazeera English and its promoted trending topic on Twitter — Nieman Journalism Lab reported that despite praise for the Qatar-based news network’s coverage of the Egypt uprising, many Americans still question its legitimacy when compared with U.S.-based networks.

Communication Ph.D candidates conducted an experiment where they showed an AJE-produced news clip of the Taliban with the AJE logo to one group and the same news clip re-edited with the CNN International logo to a second group. A third group, the control group, didn’t watch any clips.

They found that:

Watching the AJE clip — branded as AJE — did not seem to have an impact on perceptions of bias; bias ratings were equal between those in the AJE-clip-watching group and the control group.

But in the group that had just watched the clip with fake CNNI branding, participants rated CNNI as less biased than those in the control group.

This suggests that many Americans may be unwilling to change their perceptions of AJE — despite the fact that the same clip, when attributed to CNNI, boosted their impressions of the American network.

The clips are available here. You can also read or download the full report.

In addition, Nieman Lab reported that despite multiple reports of mass opposition to the network, AJE antagonism is relatively minor with most study participants expressing indifference to the network (which shows that people with the most extreme views often are the most heard).

The study results aren’t disappointing. If anything, they’re positive indicators of how far AJE has come in a climate that was strongly anti-Al Jazeera for a good part of a decade. The network received a big boost with American viewers with Egypt, but its coverage wasn’t going to have a breakthrough. Unless the next several stories about the Middle East bring as much fervor as Egypt did, AJE will likely have a slow rise to the top with American audiences — that’s if TimeWarner and Comcast pick it up in the near future.

EJC’s interactive map of European media

If you’re looking for info on a particular European (and Algeria, Egypt, and Turkey) country’s media system, check out the European Journalism Centre’s interactive map.

It rivals BBC News’ country profiles, though not every country featured in the EJC’s map is covered with the same intensity. Bosnia, for example, is missing a description of its traditional media, national media policies, and media organizations (among others). Nonetheless, it’s still a great profile. Bonus points to the EJC for having people who live there or are experts of a country write the profiles.

A problem with NGOs as sources

An interesting post by the Columbia Journalism Review about the tendency of Western journalists to heavily rely on NGOs for information.

Western journalists, for their part, tend to be far too trusting of aid officials, according to veteran Dutch correspondent Linda Polman. In her book The Crisis Caravan, she cites as one example the willingness of journalists to be guided around NGO-run refugee camps without asking tough questions about possible corruption or the need for such facilities. She writes, “Aid organizations are businesses dressed up like Mother Teresa, but that’s not how reporters see them.”

Time constraints and a lack of knowledge are generally the reasons why journalists rely on NGOs for information. With less and less money devoted to investigative journalism at all levels (local, domestic and foreign) and with more and more pressure for journalists to become backpack journalists, it’s obvious that something that has to give.

I’ve already touched on the current lack of area expertise, but it’s becoming more apparent that not specializing in something leads to lackluster journalism. We’ve all seen that recently with the nuclear situation in Japan.

The CJR post focuses more on the issue that NGOs can, and do, inflate numbers or situations for more press and that journalists should be more aware. It’s a great point to make, especially for Africa.

But instead of promoting niche journalism, CJR offers another suggestion:

Even with shrinking resources, journalists can do better than this. For a start, they can stop depending so heavily, and uncritically, on aid organizations for statistics, subjects, stories, and sources. They can also educate themselves on how to find and interpret data available from independent sources. And they can actively seek out stories that deviate from existing story lines.

Good advice, but it’s still a Band-aid solution.

How they covered it: Mubarak’s resignation

I’m always curious to see how newspapers from other countries cover global events. So I checked out homepages of top newspapers and screencapped how they covered Mubarak’s resignation.

I tried to get the biggest papers from every region, though some regions didn’t highlight Egypt prominently or at all. The same goes for some countries. If I left out any papers, it wasn’t on purpose. I picked one paper from one country, but I included three from the United States (just based on the large number of national/international papers) and two from Spain (I liked both El Pais and El Mundo homepages). The screencaps were taken Friday evening, February 11. The homepages are arranged by region.

The Middle East at Large | Al Jazeera & Al Jazeera English

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Egypt | Al Ahram

Al Jazeera paying for your attention with #DemandAlJazeera

Khaled Desouki | AFP/Getty Images

“Almost 50 percent of traffic to our livestream is coming from the US.”

Five years ago, which news outlet would you assume that quote’s from?

I doubt it would have been Al Jazeera. The Arab news network was branded “anti-American” and “the mouthpiece for al-Qaeda” during the Bush Administration. But the protests in Egypt are challenging that, and now Al Jazeera English is cashing in on its rising popularity with its promoted (read: paid) trending topic on Twitter: #DemandAlJazeera

#DemandAlJazeera is exactly what it suggests: Demand your cable/satellite company to carry Al Jazeera English. The NYT says only Washington, D.C., Burlington, Vt., and Toledo, Ohio, currently carry it and there’s many who think Al Jazeera will succeed.

Like what the quote says, Al Jazeera is gaining a massive audience because of its thorough coverage of Egypt. Its success comes from establishing connections before the protests with reporters, producers, camera teams, and a network of bloggers and citizen journalists — something that any  U.S. outlet could do (and did to an extent) with the right allocation of funds.

But how appropriate is it for a news outlet to take advantage of a crisis by plugging itself with a promoted TT? Is it any different from Kenneth Cole’s tweet advertising his spring collection by including the #Cairo hashtag?

Al Jazeera English said it thought about using promoted TTs before but couldn’t decide when would it would be right and what it would promote. Egypt turned out to be an opportune time. The crisis held everyone’s attention, Al Jazeera was the only consistent media there, and its promoted TT was to make sure viewers had access to its coverage (read: product).

Kenneth Cole had a product to sell, saw #Cairo as hugely popular, and decided to cash in. It’s the kind of thing anti-capitalists love to hate.

But the biggest difference is that Al Jazeera’s product is something people really need. It tells more of the story that allows others, including world leaders, to make informed decisions that affect everyone. Kenneth Cole’s product is not. It’s a luxury, not a service.

You also could argue intentions. Al Jazeera English wanted to inform people and ensure they could watch its coverage from their television instead of computer. Kenneth Cole simply wanted to make money, and what better way to do that than use a TT many were sure to watch. But if you’re debating motives, you have to say that Al Jazeera’s wasn’t purely altruistic. If DirecTv, Comcast and Time Warner Cable do pick it up, obviously Al Jazeera will make major bank by entering one of the largest markets in the world.

I’m not entirely comfortable with a news outlet focusing more on business than journalism even though you can’t ignore the business component. It’s far too easy to put money before reporting and we’ve all seen how well news is covered when that happens.

So the question is, just how ethical was Al Jazeera English’s promoted TT?