Monthly Archives: March 2015

Pulitzer Centre Guests

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Above are two images from projects by two Michigan alums, Jens Erik Gould and David Rochkind for the Pulitzer Centre.   They will talk to our class on Tuesday about these projects – respectively on TB funding in Vietnam and HIV in Honduras.  You may also want to look at Jens’ Bravery Tapes on the Huffington Post, which combines journalism, music and film.

ASSIGNMENT FOR THURSDAY:

Watch: The Islamic State (Vice)

Read: Everything You Need to Know about the Deadly Extremist Group Ravaging Iraq and Syria (Buzzfeed)

The Surreal infographics ISIS is producing, translated (Vox)

The Ukraine Crisis Explained in GIFS and Indepth Policy Papers (Clickhole)

Assignment: Write a 500-word piece analyzing one piece of coverage on your country by the non-traditional web-based media (ie Buzzfeed, Vox, Salon, Huffington Post, Vice etc).   How different is it from traditional media coverage? How effective is it? Do the same rules regarding impartiality apply for web-based media as for traditional media?

Robert Nickelsberg: On Capturing Afghanistan

For all who couldn’t make it out Monday afternoon to hear veteran photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg speak, here’s a quick synopsis and some thoughts about the talk (This is Yardain btw, filling in a blog post because my in-class presentation was cancelled).

Nickelsberg first covered Afghanistan for Time Magazine in 1988, when he grabbed a job opening at the New Delhi bureau. Since then, he’s traveled to the country over 50 times, documenting the rise and fall of the Soviets, the rise and fall of the Taliban, and US invasion, among other things.

A young Nickelsberg in Guatemala City in 1982.

Nickelsberg spent the majority of his presentation moving chronologically from ’88 to the present day,  painting a picture — or rather, expounding on already snapped pictures — of a war-torn region and its various groups, both native and foreign, fighting for power.

There were a lot of interesting facts and tidbits Nickelsberg touched on, and since Prof. Lim was kind enough to film the presentation, I transcribed a few of my favorites below:

On why photographers are cooler than writers (jk):

“You don’t get pictures by being behind the writer. And the writers can always push the photographers forward and say ‘tell us what it looks like up there’ and they hide. But that’s just the nature of the profession. It’s not a note of bravery or being crazy. It is where the pictures are.”

On the forgotten difficulties of the pre-digital era:

“I worked for a weekly so I had to get film out by Wednesday so it traveled Thursday to Europe, Thursday to Friday to New York, went straight to the lab and that was deadline for Time magazine, Friday night … And it was not simple and some the gray hair is not just from missing flights, but from trying to get my film onboard, and not get stolen or lost.”

On why the 9/11 plot wasn’t foiled:

“One thing to keep in mind is the United States closed its embassy on January 20th, 1989 and didn’t reopen it until December 17th, 2001. The United States had no embassy there, no representative, nobody picking up information … this was one of the most serious blunders that you can relate all the way back and forward to now into Iraq and Syria. We had no presence.”

And here’s his book!

ISIS Plays Nice: The Softer Side

Thanks to all who made it to Monday’s talk.   I’ve put videos of the first hour of it into Ctools, the third section is uploading at a glacial pace.

A few extra notes:  Brookings has just published a twitter census of Isis accounts.  Here’s just one chart:

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Brookings Institution

 

This Newsweek piece analysed some the study:

The authors discovered that supporters retweet content sent by others within the network as a way to counteract the high number of Twitter suspensions of key influencers.

“Part of the reason it is so effective is because it is organic, it’s from the audience that it is going after,” said Shahed Amanullah, a former senior adviser at the State Department. “These young people understand youth frustration, they understand the fascination with violence, they understand that imagery and graphics that you see in Hollywood will attract these people.”

My favourite quote, that sums it all up, “The kumbaya message does not fly through the Internet the way a beheading video does.”

But it’s clear that ISIS suspensions are bothering ISIS, who have threatened Twitter founder and employees.   An ISIS ‘hit-list’ of US military culled from social media sites could also change the online behaviour of active military members, according to NBC news, which writes:

In response, they [the Defence department] advised the service members to stay off social media or limit their use of it.

The Defense Department has already gone to considerable lengths to educate service members on the risks of using social media, from posting geotagged photographs to writing about one’s whereabouts. Its recommendations — deactivate location data, don’t talk about coming travel, don’t accept friend requests from anyone you don’t trust — are similar to those that security experts advise for just about everyone, but with the stakes potentially higher.
Finally, this fascinating Vocativ piece looks at ISIS propaganda in a more nuanced way, finding the messages it sends to people in ISIS areas is quite different.

About 45 percent of ISIS propaganda centers on its efforts to build and sustain the caliphate. Along with roadworks and local infrastructure, there’s messaging on traffic police, charity work, judicial systems, hospitals and agricultural projects…..“It’s really striking, the fact that a lot of the ISIS propaganda is their utopia narrative,” said Charlie Winter, a researcher at Quilliam, a London-based thinktank.

Interestingly, what we see is a small slice of ISIS’s public relations effort.

Vocativ

Vocativ

A Distant War

 

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IMPORTANT NOTE: Our class will be on Monday next week at 4pm in Mason Hall Room 3356.   The photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg will talk about his time in Afghanistan, and his book A Distant War. Here’s a review of it by none other than Dexter Filkins:

[Since 1979], the Soviets retreated, in 1989, ushering in an epoch of civil war that helped to bring the Taliban to power, in 1996. And then, in 2001, came the Americans. Entire generations of Afghans—not to mention journalists, diplomats, and aid workers—have come and gone.  Not Robert Nickelsberg. Nickelsberg, a photographer, came to Afghanistan for the first time in January, 1988, on assignment for Time, to cover the Soviet occupation, and has returned regularly ever since. Nickelsberg has documented each period with searching eyes and a fearless comportment, capturing the novel and the surreal in a war that never ends.

 

Robert Nickelsberg

Nickelsberg has visited Afghanistan more than 50 times, and continued to take pictures throughout the Taliban years (1996-2001), when photography of human beings was banned.  In this Nat Geo interview, he describes how he did that:

 Each trip was a gamble. You had to register with foreign ministry and were given a guide and were not allowed to work without him at your side. Everything had to come onto a wish list of stories or interviews and they worked on it for you. They’re also reporting back to their seniors about you, what you’re like, if you’re some narrow-minded gringo, did you only want to take pictures of women—or of schools, when schools were closed…..  You could see if they’d take money at the end of the day, ten dollars or five dollars. If they did, you could see what did it get you the next day. You’d have to try everything—luscious meals, heavy meat lunches. If they went for the bait, so to speak, you might have a successful or fairly successful trip, or at least get to every appointment you hoped for.

Look at his website and come armed with questions.  Blog of the Week this week is shared by Carolyn Gearig and Alli Cope for writing about the pressures placed on female journalists.

The Viral President

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Images from Buzzfeed

 

He’s everywhere nowadays.  He’s done Vice.  He’s done Vox.  He’s done Buzzfeed.  He even made a funny vid for Buzzfeed.   The legacy media has stopped pretending not to care.   The Washington Post even ran a snarky article called Which image of Obama mugging for Buzzfeed’s cameras diminishes the presidency most, ranked.  Meanwhile, Michelle Obama danced with Ellen, having previously done push-ups with her.   For fans of the presidency, here are the White House pool reports or as one journalist called them ‘a mutually agreed upon plagiarism pact‘, courtesy of Gawker.

Thanks to Kasie Pleiness for the blog of the week.

Reading:

Press Freedom in the US

China Daily

 

For the sake of novelty, above is a cartoon from the China Daily (note: not an unbiased source) on press freedom in the US, which accompanied an editorial called Myth of US press freedom.

For next Tuesday, please read:

The Obama Administration and the Press (CPJ) 

US Surveillance Harming Journalists, Lawyers (ACLU/HRW)

Where’s the Justice at Justice? (NYT)

BLOGPOST: We have spent a lot of time examining how journalists operate in the different countries we have chosen to blog about.  What about journalists in the US?  How much freedom do they have to operate?  Write a 500-word post about press freedom in the US in 2014 using sources such as the World Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders and Freedom House.   Try to analyse the factors behind any change in US ranking when it comes to press freedom.

Wikileaks News

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brooklynstreetart.com

 

In Wikileaks news, Swedish supreme court has approved Julian Assange’s appeal hearing, a step forward for him after it was turned down in November.   Meanwhile, it has emerged that Google waited six months after the lifting of a gagging order to alert WikiLeaks that emails and other data belonging to its employees had been passed to the FBI. Other news:  Chelsea Manning will write a column for the Guardian from prison.

I forgot to name the Blog of the Week in class today: Kasie Pleiness did a nice job in unravelling the fallout from the Wikileaks cables in Turkey.

One interesting piece to read, about whether journalists should testify at tribunals.

Before Thursday’s class, please listen to The Arms Trader.   Read the Intelligence Factory and A Permanent War on Terror.   Also worth reading is To Catch A Terrorist.  And prepare some questions for Petra Bartosiewicz.

Censorship, Facebook and Travelling with Your Censor

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The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet via Daniel Dalledone/Flickr

This 19th-century painting by Gustave Courbet is at the centre of a dispute about Facebook’s censorship, after the social networking site closed down a French teacher’s account for posting the picture, which it deemed pornographic.  Now the man is suing Facebook for violating his rights to free speech and a Paris court is giving him a hearing.  The Verge wins the prize for the clickbait-iest headline, while Slate‘s take on it is as follows:

“Upon first glance, this news might seem like a big win for free expression. Facebook’s indecency policies, after all, are absurdly arbitrary and puritanical, calling for the censorship of nude drawings and breastfeeding photos. And a Courbet fan has a much better chance of winning a free speech claim against Facebook in France than in America: While the First Amendment only applies to government censorship, France’s free speech laws can sometimes be used to punish private censorship, as well…..But in reality, Thursday’s decision could clear the way for civil libertarian nightmares down the road.  European countries generally take a very lenient approach to free speech, granting the government broad powers to censor any expression deemed hateful. Allowing European courts to monitor the online speech hosted by American companies would ultimately result in punishment of unpopular views and chilling of vital expression”

In other censorship news, Peter Hessler wrote a magnificent New Yorker piece about travelling around China with his censor, which adds nuance to the debate.  Also, I can’t help loving this Onion piece about how grateful Chinese internet users are that censorship protects them from “endlessly looping GIFs of sitcom actors rolling their eyes or giving each other high-fives” and “overfiltered photos of food truck tacos or videos of high school students asking celebrities to accompany them to prom” (NOTE: THIS IS SATIRE).

ICYMI the Guardian had a great piece on abuse in a ‘black jail’ in Chicago that was far more reminiscent of pieces we are used to seeing from China or Russia, rather than the US.

READING (We will be discussing the following in class on March 10th, so woe betide anyone who hasn’t read them.)