Thailand's Parliament this week refused to extend the lèse majesté laws that restricted media coverage of issues involving the royal family and advisors.
What has taken them so long?
Thailand's lèse majesté laws abandoned: http://www.newswatch.in/news-analyses/global-monitor/9376.html
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
Sorry, I've worked in PR, so, I guess, I'm tainted.
However, in the 101 scheme of things . . .
For too many movers and shakers -- businesses, clerics, criminals, mercenaries, and, of course, politicians -- the "Fourth Estate" looks as though it should be their agent (if it's not Murdoch's, lock, stock, and barrel).
Journalists, properly, ought to be the agents only of their own conscience and of God.
I wish not to commit Somalicide, which I think possible were I to delve into Somali affairs in-depth.
As hinted at in the dark humor of the previous post, what makes Somalia particularly dangerous to scribes is its cocktail of lawlessness and sophistication all around.
It has been also convenient to point the finger at the "Islamists", whether they are "there" or not (and I put it that way because of so much unclaimed and uninvestigated mayhem, or if investigated then unreported in depth on web sites like Shabelle's).
On its surface, the journalism on journalism in Somalia paints President Yusuf's government as the strong man's proto-democratic effort reverting to its roots as an autocrat's state. One need not be so quick to buy that impression, however, because so little that is sensible emerges from the incidents on-site journalists cover.
On any given day, Shabelle.net's English page features a raft of mayhem leads. Today (October 18, 2007):
Beneath the leads: no people, just shoot-'em-up cartoon figures or less--i.e., the explosion at H/wadag intersection: " . . . a hand grenade thrown at government police on the spot." There's not a hint of a "who" (done it) in that.
Another facet of information development and delivery caught my attention a couple of weeks ago when government forces raided Shabelle's headquarters in Bakaaraha. No question "the government done it"--troops, bullets, detentions, the works", but why? A reader provided more sensible comment on the incident than the news, but I have left it without corroboration or refutation: truth to tell, I'm not sure I want to know "why" all that much.
This week saw another Transitional Federal Government (TFG) raid against another ostensibly honorable institution: the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). Googling the story this morning, which is like getting the Internet to regurgitate information, and intuition brought in three stories, two of them fairly claiming the raid and subsequent detention of Idris Osman, the Somali program's chief, a mystery. This excerpt comes from yesterday's Associated Press filing:
"Interior Minister Mohamed Mohamoud Guled denied that government forces carried out any operation at the U.N. compound. But he said the WFP had recently distributed food aid without consulting the government. In recent months, the government has blocked aid distributions to areas perceived to be adversarial." [2]
Without consulting the government? Is that cause for raid and detention? I should be outraged. " . . . blocked aid distributions to areas perceived to be adversarial" could go both ways, I guess, but between the implications of giving "aid to the enemy" and the use of famine as a weapon, one wants so much to love the UN.
An Agence France Press (AFP) filing this morning also neatly eludes sensibility, knowingly so, I think:
The government has yet to comment on Osman's arrest. He is being held in a cell near the presidential palace.
"We hope that Idris will be released soon because he is innocent and did nothing wrong," the official added. [3]
Someone must have commented, however, because the post by the morning's UK's Guardian Unlimited delivered up the nut, and perhaps one should call it the knot: "But UN officials said it was linked to a new method of food distribution that began on Monday using 42 local mosques to get aid to more than 75,000 people in Mogadishu." [4]
Here, finally, is the secularizing, proto-democratic TFG given the predicament of approving the distribution of aid through clerics who seem not to have suffered at the hands of the Islamic Courts or deny that aid to some 75,000 Somalis.
Who is twisting whose arm?
Instead of discussion of food distribution security, however it's done (I'm just a guy on the outskirts of the Internet), before or after the fact, between Somalia's government and the U.N.'s relief mission, the U.N.'s scheme would seem to have threatened to present relief as coming through the mosques in opposition to the government.
As a story, that " . . . using 42 local mosques to get aid to more than 75,000 people . . . ." makes sense of the raid and arrest, and it doesn't entirely hold the U.N. safe and apart from criticism as regards its liaison with the Yusuf government.
Unfortunately, whether expressed through gallows humor or in the rails of general (never too specific) protest over the drubbings reserved for journalists, intimidation is a force or tool that works, and nowhere more so than in the development and distribution of information.
The demonstrative embrace of terror that would bomb a food line outside of a mosque needs condemnation too, but for whoever in the press is up to that on location, pray for their survival.
# # #
2. Hassan, Mohamed Olad. "Somalia Detains U.N. Food Aid Official." Associated Press, October 17, 2007.
3. "UN official still held by Somali security." AFP, October 18, 2007.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
As with any and every navigable river, everyone with access to it will use it or benefit from its presence. That axiom applies to Burma as well as it does anywhere else, and it applies to the information river that is the Internet as well as to watery ones. In Burma, the military junta, in the first of its most recent efforts to keep its head, elected instead to cut off a few toes by draining the Internet portion of the country's information supply and social (read: business) communicating ability.
From the few pictures I've seen, the country looks modern enough with its built cities, wide streets, industrial sites--all the means of production. Without the Internet, however, it will have turned its gains backward by about 30 years.
By way of comparison, look no further than the American Civil War and the deep south's faith in plantation-like self-sufficiency and stubborness.
Then check out Seth Mydans' piece in The New York Times on Burma's crackdown on Internet and similar electronic, boundary-busting communicating technologies and their users.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
Bloggers, if we're to have any integrity at all, face the same gut, logic, restraint, and sense issues as do journalists elsewhere, and nowhere may this be more so than from up in the second row where everything and anything can "go live" on the Internet and with varied potential for corroboration.
Amid rumors of thousands dead and hundreds, if not thousands, imprisoned, Ed Cropley's piece for Reuters looks into the character of the rumor mill and the difficulty of knowing for certain what has happened to so many monks.
Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma).
Cropley, Ed. "Death toll in Myanmar crackdown is anybody's guess." Reuters, October 2, 2007.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
The first thing I expect any real "journo" out there to say is, "Ain't nothin' like the front row!"
I believe it.
But then I might think, "The front row gets kind of bumpy, and you have to drink the water . . . and whatever's coming off the field, watch out."
This is so much more comfortable: click--over to Burma; click--catch the story on de-mining at Nahr al-Bared, Lebanon; click--Hamas launches rockets against Israel, Israel responds (darned re-runs!); click--Somalia: the misery channel; click--Afghanistan (say, whatever happened to last week's kidnapped ICRC workers? Freed: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ISL272480.htm).
Drudge, so I've heard, made up the news and sometimes legitimately beat the real thing to the punch.
Oppenheim, et al: Reuters sends us "alerts", rough and ready first "graphs" of what's coming in from the field: hey, batter batter, hey!
Front row: get over to county records and find out who owns the building, the company, the land, the mineral rights, air rights; follow the money back to the owners, lenders, investors; learn something about each; look again at the deed: whatever the story, is it starting to make sense?
Second row: accept the field report; corroborate it, if possible; look further into the information woven into the Internet; any patterns? what is the material--action, clues, commentary--trying to tell you? are you "getting" it?
And, my favorite, how far from the first row is the second row, really?
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
