World and America watching different wars: CNN vs. Al Jazeera: Seeing is often believing

By Danna Harman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

CAIRO, EGYPT [^]The Hamouda family is gathered around the TV, sipping sugary tea and glued to the pictures of captured US soldiers being interrogated by Iraqis on the popular Qatar-based satellite station Al Jazeera.

"What's your name?" A terrified young female POW is asked. "How old are you?" The camera moves to her feet, which are bloody and bare.

"Yieee!," cheers eldest son Ahmed, knocking over a fake geranium plant as he shoots up from the couch in excitement. "Show it how it is!"

It is not that they are happy to see suffering, says Hellmy, the father, somewhat apologetically, as the camera weaves between several bodies. "But the other side of the story needs to be told."

The gruesome video shown Sunday on Al Jazeera - reaching 35 million Arab-speakers worldwide, including about 20 percent of the Egyptian population - will probably never be seen by the average American TV viewer.

In fact, American audiences are seeing and reading about a different war than the rest of the world. The news coverage in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, reflects and defines the widening perception gap about the motives for this war. Surveys show that an increasing number of Americans believe this is a just war, while most of the world's Arabs and Muslims see it as a war of aggression. Media coverage does not necessarily create these leanings, say analysts, but it works to cement them.

"The difference in coverage between the US and the rest of the world helped contribute to the situation that we're in now,'' says Kim Spencer, president of WorldLink TV, a US satellite channel devoted to airing foreign news. "Americans have been unable to see how they're perceived."

That would be the rub of it, wouldn't it? I hear this jarring bell in my head, like I've heard a version of this story before. And I have. It was in the protestations in the former Soviet Union, protestations perhaps also by ordinary Russians who sometimes met American tourists, who may have claimed that they "did so" have a free press.

As in, the US is the frog in the boiling water. What we see and hear is so tightly controlled by this time that people are turning to the Internet and the foreign press to find out if something different might be going on than what they are told, perhaps the way folks in Hungary turned to Radio Free Europe.

For example, most Americans, watching CNN, Fox, or the US television networks, are not seeing as much coverage of injured Iraqi citizens, or being given more than a glimpse of the antiwar protests now raging in the Muslim world and beyond.

In the Middle East, Europe, and parts of Asia, by comparison, the rapid progress made by US led troops has been played down. And many aspects of the conflict being highlighted in the US - such as the large number of Iraqi troops surrendering, the cooperation between US-led forces and various Gulf states, commentary on America's superior weapons technology, and the human interest angles on soldier life in the desert - are almost totally absent from coverage outside the US.

"Sure, the news we get in the Arab world is slanted," admits Hussein Amin, chair of the department of journalism and mass communication at Cairo's American University. "In the same way the news received in the US is biased."

The view from Europe

Some analysts note that European press ownership is less concentrated than its counterparts in the US, and is seen as providing more perspectives than either the Arab or American outlets. In Frankfurt, for example, readers have access to 16 different German language newspapers - many of which present different vantage points, which makes for a more lively and varied debate.

European journalists also seem to ask different, more skeptical, questions of this war, often being the ones at White House and Pentagon press conferences to ask whether the invasion of Iraq has turned up any of the weapons of mass destruction that used to justify the invasion - even as their American counterparts repeatedly focus on such questions as whether Saddam Hussein is alive or dead.

Media watchers say the European press has tended to be more balanced than the US media in dealing with the war, in part because Europe is so much closer to the Muslim world. John Schmidt, a former reporter for the International Herald Tribune, who has just returned from Europe, notes that in Marseille, France, 30 percent of the population is Muslim. In Berlin, the biggest minority population is the Turks.

The truth is, American journalists don't know how much they embarrass themselves when out in the rest of the world.

An exchange from CNN two nights ago is instructive. Aaron Brown in the middle of the night was talking to a NYTimes reporter at CentCom (CNN & NYTimes have a mutual agreement going on this war, with all their embeds, etc). The NYTimes woman at CentCom (seems like her name was... Jane Somebody?) was talking about the frustrations of working at CentCom, where information was so highly managed. Besides Aaron's somewhat surprise (he didn't say "It is?" but he did act a bit like, "Oh, they wouldn't lie to us there, would they?"), he also asked her what others in the press were saying. She gave him a frank appraisal of what a Lebanon journalist and friend of hers said in flipping around on all the sources they had--and it was clear her friend thought American coverage revealed itself as a propaganda wing for the US government, and at the very least, anything covered by the embeds was compromised.

Aaron was like, "Oh, I get it," but at the same time, he sort of protested, like "what else can we do?"

I'll give Aaron credit. He did cotton on to what the assumption about CNN was, but the pity is that he didn't operate with that basic knowledge set and guard against that judgment by the journalistic peers in the first place and work harder from the beginning to counter it.

"There are really two stories unfolding here, one is the war and its progress and the second one is the progress of world opinion," says Tom Patterson, a media expert at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "That second dimension is there in the American press, but it's clearly way underreported."

For instance, American media outlets may report on the demonstrations in other countries, particularly if there are violent clashes. But they don't devote as many resources to covering in depth the growing anti-American sentiment - even among American allies - or its implications for the future, says Professor Patterson.

[...]

Interest in the war has been so high that Indonesia's TV7 began pirating Al Jazeera's signal shortly before the start of the war. The new station carries the Arab-language broadcast with simultaneous Indonesian translation. Though Al Jazeera is only shown from 10 in the evening until 11 in the morning an official at TV7 says the news department is receiving about 100 calls a day from viewers, up from "almost zero" before the US invasion began.

The news broadcasts in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, have been tamer than the news in the Middle East, focusing on protests against the war at home, with official statements against the war from abroad.

But they have also carried some stories sympathetic to US soldiers, including an interview with Anecita Hudson of Alamogordo, Texas. Mrs. Hudson says her son, 23-year-old Army Specialist Joseph Hudson, was one of the prisoners of war shown on Al Jazeera. She said seeing her son captured was "like a bad dream."

Mrs. Hudson didn't see her son on American news outlets. She spotted him on a Filipino cable channel she subscribes to. She is originally from the Philippines.

If the 1991 Gulf War MADE CNN's name in the world (with the radical presumption, still present from Ted Turner's influence, that journalists would cover news as if they didn't have nationality, even with fighting pool restrictions and bullshit--CNN took a lot of heat back then for showing Baghdad's POV, even in a limited way. A lot of scholarship and analysis has been written about that seminal time).

Will this Iraq war put Al Jazeera on the map in the same way? It surely isn't putting Fox News on the map. What is the compelling "MUST SEE" about Al Jazeera that makes President Bush watch it even as he eschews watching all other news coverage while out at Camp David? Could the first President Bush have done that in the Gulf War? I remember the stories from back in the Gulf War, of Pentagon Briefings and other pressers, where the people being briefed said, "Hey, I saw it on CNN just like you did. I don't have any other information beyond that."

Now they would have to say that about Al Jazeera, wouldn't they?

"War is ugly by nature and we did not create these pictures - we are only there to reflect reality on the ground,"' says Jihad Ali Ballout, Al Jazeera's media relations head. "Truth is sometimes unpleasant and gruesome, and I feel distressed when people ask me to dress it up."

Washington watches Al Jazeera

The Bush administration sees Al Jazeera - the cable news channel made famous for its airing of Osama Bin Laden tapes - as having an anti-American bias. But, since the seven-year-old Al Jazeera has grown from six to 24 hours of daily programming and reaches more than 35 million Arab speakers around the world, including 150,000 in the United States, Washington seems to be attempting to work more closely with the network.

The Pentagon offered Al Jazeera four choice spots for its reporters to be embedded with US military units and assigned it a special media liaison officer and both National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have given extensive interviews to Al Jazeera in recent days. Al-Arabiya and Abu Dhabi, two other 24-hour Arab-language stations, have received similar attention from the administration.

Al Jazeera says that it has two of its correspondents "embedded" with US units - but the units in question are in Kuwait. It has no reporters with US troops directly participating in the invasion. 2:08:54 AM    

More dangerous than I would like to think, as I watched on CNN tonight as air raid sirens went off about 40 km from Erbil.

What Josh is doing is even more sobering to me when I hear that CNN has more than 600 journalists working in the Mideast, covering the Iraq war, but only DOZENS in Kurdistan. Most of the CNN folks are sitting tight in safe places, or places marked safe inside dangerous zones. I will have to quote in here the great post Josh did on the presence of the TV media in Erbil too. It is very funny.

When I think of what the blog idealists promise with grassroots journalism in this social movement, I mostly hear talk talk talk.

They say they scoop traditional media. They say they can blog things live. They show it by blogging their favorite tech conference. Whoo hoo. Here's a clue: it is a very small cadre of journos who actually spend all of their time covering tech conferences. Most of them are busy beating out their stories the hard way.

Oh, and this post of Josh's below, about the exodus from Erbil? I read it on his blog several HOURS before CNN and other sources started filing their stories. I sat down at work that day, read Josh's blog, and then started in on my daily tasks with the tv monitor on near my desk as always. I didn't see this story cross until much later that afternoon.

Not that traditional stories are what Josh's focus is on. He has to file those for money. In this blog, his accounts are personal, immediate. And I just think that is so fucking cool...

Miasma

War Panic in Erbil. Today is the first official day of war panic in Erbil. Yesterday everything looked much like it has since I got here. Today many shops are closed, there are fewer cars in the street and people tell me their neighbors are fleeing the city for towns further towards the Iranian border. My translator's family all left for their hometown of Koy Sanjak, which is closer to the Iraqi lines but which they feel is less of a target. Shopowners are emptying their stores, putting their stuff in more secure locations in case there is looting during the war. Most people... [The Other Side]

1:04:30 AM    

It makes me think about Marshall McLuhan and how the media shapes not only messages but also cultures that spring up, facilitated by such media. More on that below.

Miasma, the pistachio-eater

Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years--What Does That Mean for You?

"So just how big is a petabyte drive and what could you put on it?

One certainty is that you will not fill the space with personal jottings or reading matter. In round numbers, a book is a megabyte. If you read one book a day for every day of your life for 80 years, your personal library will amount to less than 30 gigabytes. Remember a petabyte is 1 million gigabytes so you will still have 999,970 gigabytes left over.

To fill any appreciable fraction of the drive with text you[base ']ll need to acquire a major research library. The Library of Congress would be a good candidate; it is said to hold 24 million volumes, which would take up one-fiftieth of your disk. So you could fit 50 Library of Congresses on your petabyte drive.

OK, I'd accept that as a good start! But soon I'd need more space. [G]

Other kinds of information are bulkier than text. A picture, for example, is worth much more than a thousand words; for high-resolution images a round-number allocation might be 10 megabytes each.

And this is being generous. Most images from a digital camera are one to four megabytes, not 10. How many such pictures can a person look at in a lifetime? I can only guess, but 100 images a day certainly ought to be enough for a family album. After 80 years, that collection of snapshots would add up to 30 terabytes. So your petabyte disk will have 970,000 gigabytes left after a lifetime of high quality photos.

Again, I'd need more time. I'd have plasma screens rotating images on poster-sized screens in every room. By then we would be using wall-sized screens, so eventually I'd want more bandwidth too. I am ever the bandwidth pig, but even more so, for I become a digitally-driven Ansel Adams with an 8x10 view camera if you give me world enough and time.

What about music? MP3 audio files run a megabyte a minute, more or less. At that rate, a lifetime of listening--24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 80 years--would consume 42 terabytes of disk space. So with all your music and pictures for a lifetime you will have 928,000 gigabytes free on your disk.

Surely the revolution in musical tastes, less overdetermined by playlists and rotations and scarcity and monopolies and more by choice will give us all great evolving and self-selected jukeboxes and the entire Library of Congress Library in audio books too. Great works of literature shall be our room wallpaper, as now I am listening to poetry collections from Audible. To each house a closet rack of servers, and to each house a good night!

Not to mention peer-to-peer satellite-fed Net Radio from whatever house may choose to share with the peers it designates, or perhaps those peers who subscribe?

The one kind of content that might possibly overflow a petabyte disk is video. In the format used on DVDs, the data rate is about two gigabytes per hour. Thus the petabyte disk will hold some 500,000 hours worth of movies; if you want to watch them all day and all night without a break for popcorn, they will actually fill up your petabyte drive if you have a lifetime of video on it as it will give you 57 years of video....

Ooh, the bandwidth I could suck with wall-size video. I will soon run out!

Still another nagging question is how anyone will be able to organize and make sense of a personal archive amounting to 1 million gigabytes. Computer file systems and the human interface to them are already creaking under the strain of managing a few gigabytes; using the same tools to index the Library of Congress is unthinkable.

Hardly. We will have advanced home searching systems on par with Google. We will have new interfaces, new GUIs, new navigational metaphors. We will swim in VR and use the multi-layered approach of the software I saw demonstrated once called "Cloud." Oh for the infinite layering!

Perhaps this is the other side of the economic equation: information itself becomes free (or do I mean worthless?), but metadata--the means of organizing information--is priceless.

The notion that we may soon have a surplus of disk capacity is profoundly counterintuitive. A well-known corollary of Parkinson[base ']s Law says that data, like everything else, always expands to fill the volume allotted to it. Shortage of storage space has been a constant of human history; I have never met anyone who had a hard time filling up closets or bookshelves or file cabinets.

But closets and bookshelves and file cabinets don[base ']t double in size every year. Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of the information economy: the products of human creativity grow only arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them increases geometrically. The human imagination can[base ']t keep up." [Mercola.com, via LibraryPlanet.com]

I think she means our brains will explode. Frankly, I can't wait.

"Thus, if we cannot make our sun stand still, then we will make him run." Andrew Marvel, To His Coy Mistress

Miasma
2:29:21 AM    

How can I apply the work context to moblogging? I'm using the term as taking pictures using your mobile phone or mobile camera and posting them to a weblog with a time/date/location/permalink stamp. I guess I'm also making the 3-year leap of assuming video capture where we get snapshots today. Marc Canter comments on responding to Russell's thoughts on moblogging. I agree with everything said so far.

What makes moblogging novel?

1. More opportunistic. Like your mobile phone, you'll have image capture with you 24/7. Snap as opportunity strikes.
2. More ubiquitous. Low cost means everyone will have moblogging devices. Your workforce. Your customers. Your consultants and advisors. Your investors.
3. More real-time. Digital flow-through means that events are captured and published in near-realtime.
4. More collaborative. The ability to swarm on an important or interesting event lets you form a rashomon and blind men with elephant composite view.
5. More organized. The 2004 generation of moblogging gadgets will have the royal trio of ID, date/time, and location. Thumbing a few keywords for topical context feeds search engines.

Enjoy a psychotic split with me. Imagine that you work in ...

MarCom.

With mobile cams and vids you can roll your own ethnographic studies. Watch buyer behavior in real time. Correllate with sales statistics by location.

Help sales teams. Enhance your CRM profiles with photos of major account contacts, meetings, facilities.

Moblog sales and promotional events. Create immediacy, share results, and broaden event reach.

Accounting and Logistics.

Nothing compares to eyeballing where the rubber meets the road. Moblog inventory. Moblog your customer, supplier, and partner operations. When combined with RFID tags, this may be the first time you visualize your supply chain.

Due dilligence? Get more done, faster, when you assess personnel, plant, products, and other assets.  

Operations Analysis and Industrial Engineering.

Document processes, the better to understand them. Photograph bottlenecks and other contraints, the better to fix them.

Record how people really work, the better to help them understand their own processes.

Competitive Analysis.

Shop the competition and share the results before you get back to the office.

You're WalMart investor relations: marshall 10,000 small investors to show the competition all across the country.  

Field Operations.

A field view. Add moblogging to everyone who drives a company van to install, measure, or repair things. Let them document their routes, their visits, the problems they encounter. Makes for better watercooler conversation. Helps the next gal to visit that customer.

Education and Knowledge Sharing.

Informal moblogging can ease personnel transitions. With experience, they can enhance the role of blogs as knowledge repositories.

Project Management.

A picture is worth a thousand GANTT charts. When your projects aren't virtual, moblog your status reports. 

Real world experimentation will prove or disprove these applications. I can't wait to start.  

[a klog apart community]

12:03:01 AM    

Miasma

What an interesting photoblog!.

I love how Kevin puts a group of related photos on his randomentality blog as one post. Each group conveys an idea, an emotion, a sensibility. Often subtle, sometimes poignant. This is thinking visually in a deep, rich, and personal way. It goes beyond iconography. And the collections, posted four or five times a month, reveal something of Kevin's inner life passage.

11:40:25 PM    

Who is eligible? For these awards, a "photoblog" is a webpage with dated entries that has a posts images to their site. Sites that post images infrequently are also eligible, but due to the nature of the awards, they will be at a disadvantage since there are many photo bloggers that post images on a regular if not daily basis. Only sites that post their own original images are eligible to be nominated.

Only sites that have existed during the year 2002 are eligible for the awards. Any sites that have been dicontinued are also eligible, but not photoblogs that have started this year, 2003.
11:31:45 PM    

Miasma

"photographer arrested for taking pictures of president's hotel" [Daypop Top 40]

An amateur photographer named Mike Maginnis was arrested on Tuesday in his home city of Denver - for simply taking pictures of buildings in an area where Vice President Cheney was residing. Maginnis told his story on Wednesday's edition of Off The Hook.

Maginnis's morning commute took him past the Adams Mark Hotel on Court Place. Maginnis, who says he always carried his camera wherever he went, snapped about 30 pictures of the hotel and the surrounding area - which included Denver police, Army rangers, and rooftop snipers. Maginnis, who works in information technology, frequently photographs such subjects as corporate buildings and communications equipment.

The following is Maginnis's account of what transpired:

As he was putting his camera away, Maginnis found himself confronted by a Denver police officer who demanded that he hand over his film and camera. When he refused to give up his Nikon F2, the officer pushed him to the ground and arrested him.

After being brought to the District 1 police station on Decatur Street, Maginnis was made to wait alone in an interrogation room. Two hours later, a Secret Service agent arrived, who identified himself as Special Agent "Willse."

The agent told Maginnis that his "suspicious activities" made him a threat to national security, and that he would be charged as a terrorist under the USA-PATRIOT act. The Secret Service agent tried to make Maginnis admit that he was taking the photographs to analyze weaknesses in the Vice President's security entourage and "cause terror and mayhem."

When Maginnis refused to admit to being any sort of terrorist, the Secret Service agent called him a "raghead collaborator" and a "dirty pinko faggot."

After approximately an hour of interrogation, Maginnis was allowed to make a telephone call. Rather than contacting a lawyer, he called the Denver Post and asked for the news desk. This was immediately overheard by the desk sergeant, who hung up the phone and placed Maginnis in a holding cell.

Three hours later, Maginnis was finally released, but with no explanation. He received no copy of an arrest report, and no receipt for his confiscated possessions. He was told that he would probably not get his camera back, as it was being held as evidence.
2:51:05 AM