Last week, I had the pleasure of leading a class of Digital Democracy, a Harvard Law School course being team taught by Berkman Center staff and faculty. The class, as a whole, is concerned with issues of political and legal power and how these power relationships change in the “new world” of the Internet. I’ve recently been interested in building statistical models for information flow and focused my lecture on questions of where, geographically, mainstream media focuses its attention, and whether this focus has economic, social and political consequences for the nations that are covered and ignored.

John Palfrey, Berkman’s fearless leader, did a great (if perhaps overly kind) job of blogging the class. The title of his post sums up the issue I was most interested in covering: “Is relative news coverage among countries a legal issue?” I figured it would be a lively topic for debate – in a global economy, being ignored (or misrepresented) by major media sources (CNN, the New York Times) can cost you foreign direct investment, international aid, intervention in military conflicts, involvement in trade negotiations, and so on. Surely some counterbalance should exist between the rights of the media to report what they want to report and the impacts this reporting can have around the world?

Evidently not. I had a hard time getting anyone to even consider a situation where the first amendment rights of a newspaper should be in any way constrained by considerations of fairness or political or economic impact. (To be very clear, I’m not advocating any constraint of first amendment rights – I was just interested to see whether I could get anyone to acknowledge the shortcomings the press has re: developing nations and suggest some solutions.) My colleague Charlie Nesson seemed to sum up my students’ and colleagues feelings with the comment, “Interesting stuff, but I don’t think it’s a legal issue.”

A week, and some web research later, I’ve finally got a retort: “It may not be a legal issue, but it’s certainly a policy issue, or at least it was 20 years ago.” In 1980, a UNESCO commission headed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Sean MacBride released a report titled “Many Voices, One World”. The report looked for ways to create a more equitable flow of news content, to encourage independent journalism in developing nations and to limit the power of media companies in wealthy nations.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the report was extremely controverisal in the United States and Europe. Gerald Long, managing director of Reuters at the time of the report’s release dismissed the entire 312 page document in the New York Times as a ‘’freak, rotten as a whole.’’ Most US reactions were based on concern that some of the report’s more radical suggestions – including the licensing of journalists – would compromise first amendment freedoms.

As UNESCO began implementing some of the report’s recommendations, the US, UK and Singapore pulled out of UNESCO – the US only rejoined UNESCO this year, 19 years later. Deedee Halleck, filmmaker and media professor, has an excellent description of the MacBride affair and a statement of support for the MacBride principles on her website. UNESCO, in a wonderful bit of irony, lists the MacBride report in its list of “major books”, but hasn’t distributed the report in over a decade.

Clearly the issues faced concerning news flow in the 1970s haven’t gone away – my research seems to suggest that these imbalances are as strong as ever. With the spread of the Internet and the accompanying concern about digital divides, why aren’t we hearing about information imbalances and calls for a “New International Information Order”, as was endorsed by the UN in 1974? Why has this chapter of media history been forgotten?

I’m happy to announce the launch of BlogAfrica, a new project intended to ensure that the blogosphere includes perspectives from and about Africa. The BlogAfrica project includes a catalog of Africa-focused blogs, hosted by our friends at allafrica.com. It’s a great starting place for people interested in reading African blogs, and anyone writing a blog from Africa, or with a focus on Africa is invited to list their blog there. We’ll also be promoting great Africa-centric blogs on BlogAfrica starting in the next few days.

BlogAfrica’s not just about recognizing the blogs that are out there. We’re also working on helping people in Africa get blogging. Andrew McLaughlin, Teresa Peters of Bridges.org and I will be travelling to Ghana from January 9th to 20th and offering free workshops on blogging at cybercafes and universities in Ghana. We’re very interested in having other bloggers join us on this trip, both to help teach workshops and to share their impressions of Ghana with their readers. If you think you might be interested, please read more about the trip on BlogAfrica and contact me at ethan@geekcorps.org.

Long-term, BlogAfrica will be providing hosting space for African weblogs. With space from Geekcorps, we’re already providing blogspace for some volunteers in Africa – in the near future, we hope to be providing space for African bloggers as well.

If this idea captures your imagination, please check out the blogs listed on the blog catalog, get in touch with me to see how you could get involved, and blog about it!

“The chief executive of the Ghana Telecom (GT) Mr. Oystein Bjorge has assured the public that his administration would not take advantage of its monopoly on the fixed line telephone market to cheat its customers as some people are trying to portray.

He said though it is undeniable fact that the units of the GT pay phone cards run faster than that of the fixed line telephone, it has nothing to do with attempting to cheat customers, in order to maximize profit.”

From the Ghanaian Chronicle, November 10th, 2003

UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland has declared that the humanitarian situation in northern Uganda is worse than the current situation in Iraq. It’s hard to compare the scale of tragedies, but it’s probably safe to say that the conflict in Uganda is one of the strangest in the world today.

The conflict Egeland is referring to involves the Lord’s Resistance Army, a bizarre paramilitary organization led by Joseph Kony, who claims to be fighting for a government based on the biblical ten commandments. In a recent incident in Lira, a town in northeast Uganda, LRA gunmen killed at least 40 civilians. According to reports, some of the victims were beheaded, and others burned as their huts were set aflame. More than 3000 civilians have fled the area.

Kony is the successor to his aunt, former prostitute Alice Lakwena, who led a group of Acholi rebels from northern Uganda in an ill-fated attempt to overthrow the Kampala government in 1988. Lakwena (an adopted name, which means “messenger” in the Acholi language) claimed to channel the spirit of a deceased WWI Italian army officer. Telling her followers that the sticks and stones they wielded against the Ugandan army would be transformed into rifles and grenades, the “Holy Spirit Army” was decimated almost immediately when it invaded Kampala. (Richard Petraitis gives an excellent history of the HSA and the LRA in his article “Joseph Kony’s Spirit War”.

Kony rallied the few survivors of the Holy Spirit Army, renamed it the Lord’s Resistance Army and began a campaign of terrror from bases in southern Sudan. The LRA “recruits” most of its soldiers by kidnapping children, abducting them to Sudanese bases and indoctrinating them into the army. It’s estimated that 20,000 children have been abducted in the past 5 years. Young boys are turned into soliders, while some of the young girls are sold as sex slaves. Kony is reported to have over sixty “wives” selected from the abductees.

While Kony and the LRA have a distinct flair for the surreal – Kony has declared that bicycles violate biblical principles and his followers routinely slash the buttocks of bicycle riders with machetes and destroy the offending machines with axes – the Ugandan conflict has as much to do with tribal politics as with religion and magic. Milton Obote, Uganda’s first post-independence prime minister, was a northerner and favored by the Acholis. When he was ousted for the second time by current president Yoweri Museveni (he was ousted over a decade before by Idi Amin), a southerner, Acholis percieved a loss of power, and many joined the HSA and later the LRA. (The BBC has an excellent Uganda timeline, outlining some of these events.) Their discontent has been amplified by Museveni’s “no party system”, which has outlawed all political parties but Museveni’s. (Museveni claims that his party is a “national movement” for all Ugandans, not a political party.) Putting aside the brutality and magical trappings, the conflict looks a little like the tribal and political one that’s been tearing the Ivory Coast apart.

Convential wisdom suggested the solution to this conflict involved Sudanese cooperation. Sudan had, historically, allowed the LRA to operate with impunity in Southern Sudan because Uganda had supported the SPLA, the southern Sudanese rebels struggling to overthrow the Northern Sudanese government. But earlier this year, in an attempt to improve its international image, the Sudanese government permitted 10,000 Ugandan troops to carry out “Operation Iron Fist”, raiding the Sudanese countryside to capture LRA leaders. The operation appears to be a failure, though, as the LRA is striking back in an increasingly bloody fashion.

Waiting for international intervention in this situation? Don’t hold your breath. In Liberia, ECOWAS was able to deploy ECOMOG as peacekeepers. Without a strong regional peacekeeping force, East African conflicts have been handled by the African Union in Burundi, or the UN in eastern Congo. But the UN has been unable to put a large enough force in the Bunia area to disarm warring forces, and Burundi is the AU’s first peacekeeping mission. So unless someone discovers oil in northern Uganda sometime soon, the conflict may well continue indefinitely.

I’ve been getting reports that RSS feeds from my blog are getting misformatted in many folks aggregators. Friends who are blogging with the Harvard software seem to be having better luck with posting as “news” than as “stories”, so I’m going to convert my postings to news as well.

Since past attempts to post as news have obliterated my past posts, I thought I’d include links to the past stories I’d posted here.

Corruption Case on Hold… Due to Corruption

We’ve Got Oil! and Other Bad News

Nigeria: Second to None in Our Hearts

Africanblogs.com?

Corruption and the Nigeria Scam

Props for Payne

We report, you believe, you get it wrong

Fight terrorism, cure malaria

Antiquated, illiterate, destructive and indefensible

Remembering the Senegalese Ferry Disaster

Peacekeeping: How Many Troops is Enough