Reuters is reporting that Janjawid militias shackled villagers and burned them alive during recent massacres in Darfur. These reports come from a document authored by African Union observers deployed to Darfur earlier this month. The document makes clear that attacks on villagers in Darfur are continuing despite the ceasefire, though observers say that cannot confirm that Sudanese forces have been fighting alongside militiamen.

African Union officials are meeting in Accra on Thursday to discuss peace strategies for Darfur with Kofi Annan. It’s likely to be a busy day – already on the calendar are discussions between Annan, Cote d’Ivoire’s Laurent Gbagbo and rebel leaders to discuss the ongoing situation Ivorians refer to as “no war, no peace”.

While the EU is stepping to the plate and pressuring Sudan with possible sanctions, Colin Powell has made it clear that the US’s pressure on Sudan won’t extend – at this point – to military intervention, though Britain and Australia have expressed willingness to commit troops to an international intervention.

The talk of intervention is clearly making Khartoum nervous – foreign minister Osman Ismail has made clear that he would view foreign involvement as “attack” and that Sudan would retaliate. While the Khartoum government is generally about as credible as former Iraqi Minister of Intelligence Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, they make one valid point in their otherwise absurd critique of US Congress’s nonbinding genocide declaration: “The international community has so far contributed only about 20 percent of the resources needed in Darfur despite the outcry over the situation.” Indeed, everyone’s rhetoric on Darfur would have a great deal more credibility if nations stepped up to support the desperately underfunded relief efforts in Darfur.

Want to put your money where your mouth is on Darfur? Join me in supporting Doctors Without Borders/MSF – or visit Passion of the Present for a good list of other NGOs doing work in Darfur.

There’s a wonderfully surreal little piece of video on CSPAN’s website. (Top of two links, realplayer only) Mychal Massie, an African-American columnist for conservative website WorldNetDaily.com, was scheduled to appear on CSPAN to respond to NAACP director Kweisi Mfume’s observation that some black conservative organizations have strong backing and financial support from white republicans. The Washington Times quotes Mr. Mfume, in an address to the organization’s annual gathering, as saying: “When the ultraconservative right-wing attacker has run out of attack strategy, he goes and gets someone that looks like you and me to continue the attacks…”

Mr. Massie’s appearance was organized by Project 21, which brands itself “The Conservative African-American Network”. P21, a project of the “conservative, free-market foundation” National Center for Public Policy Research, which organized the network to help locate and publicize the views of black conservatives. They’ve been very effective at getting press coverage… at least, on Fox News Channel, where Project 21 commentator Kevin Marks recently explained President Bush’s refusal to speak at the NAACP conference:

“[I]t would be like asking a Jewish rabbi to go down to a Ku Klux Klan skinhead convention.”

Alas, Mr. Massie caught a flat, so we couldn’t find out whether he, too, felt the head of the nation’s largest civil rights organization was a KKK skinhead. So Project 21’s executive director David Almasi filled in. Almasi is also the executive director of the NCPPR, a frequent commentator an racial issues and coauthor of a Contra-apologist history of Nicaragua. He’s the author of the last three policy papers on Project 21’s website, including an explanation of why most NASCAR drivers are white.

Given his stature and frequent appearances on the behalf of black conservatives, you’d expect Mr. Almasi to be an African-American. He’s not.

CSPAN’s Robb Harlston – himself black – seemed a little flustered when he began interviewing the decidedly caucasian Mr. Almasi.

Harlston: “Um…a program for conservative African Americans. You’re not African American.”

Almasi: “I’m white.”

Almasi went on to explain that he’d tried to find another speaker, but that he was the only one who could make it, and therefore, he’d be speaking as “…the way some of my friends describe my job: the whitest black man in America.”

So here’s the thing. I’m a white guy who spends most of his time working on African issues. I went to Ghana for the first time as the whitest African drummer in Western Massachusetts. I sometimes get invited to international development conferences to provide “an African perspective”, an experience that always makes me deeply uncomfortable, and which I’ve been known to diffuse by saying, “You can tell how hard the organizers worked to get a diverse crowd on stage because I’m your African representative.” And I’m profoundly flattered when friends in Accra, appreciate that I know a few phrases of Twi or my alumni card from the University of Ghana and announce: “You’re a Ghanaian!”

But I’m not a Ghanaian. I’m a wealthy white American. And if I ever presumed to speak “from an African perspective”, rather than from my observations as a white dude working in Africa, I would hope the crowd would boo me off the stage. And Almasi tried hard to make that distinction himself, spending the first minutes of his interview (before declaring himself a black man) explaining that he worked for the 300+ African-American conservatives who volunteered for Project 21.

I’d be lying if I said that liberal development agencies didn’t do this as well. We worked hard at Geekcorps to ensure we could direct interviewers to articulate, quoteable African partners who’d had good experiences working with us.

But I can’t imagine a circumstance in which we would have put a white Republican in front of a camera to explain that white Republicans weren’t actually running black conservative organizations.

And then I realized: it didn’t matter. A couple thousand people, at most, would watch the CSPAN segment (not a chance I would have seen it, unless I’d read Joshua Holland’s excellent piece, “Blackwashing”, which in turn I wouldn’t have seen unless I ingested blogs alongside newspapers as part of my daily media diet.) Hundreds of thousands of people will see black conservatives at the Republican convention, at pro-Bush rallies, on Fox News. All of those people will be there because they support conservative causes, but some will have been carefully stage-managed into place by organizations like Project 21, who realize that it’s more important to convince the right that they’re not all white than it is to convince African-Americans that Bush has their best interests at heart.

Stage managing works most of the time in a world where we see better than we read. It’s only at moments of extreme incongruity like this, where the seams show, that we realize how much work goes into ensuring we see precisely what one group or another wants us to see.

I’m no longer working with Geekcorps, but I remain a passionate fan and supporter of the work geeky volunteers are doing around the world. One of my favorite ongoing projects is the one Ian Howard, coordinateur de programme, geekcorps Mali (”les volontaires de l’informatique”) is overseeing in Bamako, Mali.

Community radio is a tremendously important medium in Mali. It’s one of the best ways for people in rural areas, especially non-literate people, to get information about local and national affairs, as well as about health and agricultural issues. There are hundreds of stations in the nation – some broadcast 24/7, others a few hours a day when power is available.

One of the huge challenges radio stations face is providing content for their listeners. It’s hard to pick up the New York Times in Timbuktu, or even subscribe to the AP Newswire. So radio content is often limited to pirated cassette tapes and news the broadcasters are able to gather on their own.

Providing Internet access to radio stations would allow broadcasters to report national and world news to their communities. It would also allow programming from one radio station to be shared over the ‘net and broadcast by other Malian stations. Finally, it would give Malians living abroad the chance to hear about the events in their home communities.

The challenge? Lots of these stations are way, way off the grid, powered by solar or generators. And phone lines are unavailable, unreliable and impossibly expensive. So Ian and crew are putting together a plan based around low-end computers, open source software and long distance WiFi links. Here’s an update Ian sent last night to the global team (literally – he’s got help from everywhere from Denmark to Vanuatu…) helping him out:

technology solutions that we are developing.

Congrats Ian, Pierre and Rian – it’s an important first step and I can’t wait for the day I can hear Malian radio over the Internet…

The good news: Most Americans (69%) would want the US to intervene to prevent genocide, if the UN determined genocide was occurring in Sudan.

The bad news: Very few Americans have actually heard that a genocide is occurring in Sudan. Only 14% said they had heard “some” or “a lot” about the situation in Darfur. Over 50% said they’d heard nothing at all.

These figures come from the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which surveyed roughly a thousand randomly selected Americans.

The 14% figure baffles me, as the global media I’m watching has actually stepped up and embraced the Darfur story. The New York Times has mentioned Sudan in 13 stories over the last week (about a sixth as many mentions as Israel, for instance, but more than all but one other sub-Saharan African nation…); BBC’s run 27 stories in the last 14 days, more than on any other African nation. It’s not just the “elite” media – both Google News and Altavista News, which aggregate a wide range of less highbrow sources, report above average media focus on Sudan. (Lots more media numbers available on my Global Attention results pages…)

Is it possible that the story’s getting told and we’re not hearing it? I was talking with the very wise David Weinberger yesterday, who observed that people are lots more likely to help people they know personally – or feel a cultural connection to – than folks they feel disconnected from. If cultural proximity is the key to personal engagement, the odds seem to suggest that the US and Europe are unlikely to rally sufficient support for intervention in Muslim, African Darfur, a place that’s probably impossibly far away for the vast majority of people who hear the horrific news about what’s going on.

I also wonder about the role of images in focusing attention on situations like Darfur. The normally image-savvy BBC has used the same AFP photo – a militiaman on horseback – for the vast majority of their Sudan stories. I conclude (wholly unscientifically) that they don’t have good photo or video footage from Darfur. If they, with their Africa focus and global reach don’t have footage, there’s probably not a lot of video to be had. (Happy to be proven wrong on this, if someone knows where lots of Darfur video can be found…)

No video equals no TV news coverage, which means most post-literate Americans won’t hear about the situation. And no TV coverage means no images that make it hard for people to sleep at night, makes them bring up genocide around watercoolers or over lunch, makes them call their senators or congresspeople… Is it possible that the US intervened in Bosnia because we had better video than we did of Rwanda? Or that the people in the photos and video looked more like us?

The UN’s more than $200 million short in raising funds for humanitarian aid in Darfur. In the meantime, the $126 billion the US has spent on an unnecessary war in Iraq is now estimated to cost each American family $3400. The GAO revealed today that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost $12.3 billion more than estimated.

It’s too bad – there’s some people who could have really used that $12.3 billion…

Wired News has a story on telemarketing in Senegal. Following in the steps of Ghana and South Africa, which have marketed telemarketing and phone support to the English-speaking world, Senegal is now marketing services to France. Competitive advantages include the neutrality of the Senegalese accent (which means that Senegalese telemarkers don’t have to take courses in Parisian French before getting jobs, though they do need to learn lists of French cities and towns) and Senegal’s fiber-based telecoms access.

I wish the Wired piece had dug more deeply into the telecommunications situation that’s enabling outsourcing. Senegal’s Sonatel is a near-monopoly provider, which dominates local access to the SAT-3 cable. While it’s great that PCCI, the company operating the callcenter is able to work within the Senegalese telecom environment, I find myself wondering what sort of deal they were able to swing with Sonatel to make such a business possible.

The New York Post, in a move that must have been highly painful for their Murdoch-appointed editorial board, managed to praise Harlem Democrat Charlie Rangel for his protest in front of the Embassy of Sudan last Tuesday. In an editorial entitled “Rangel Gets One Right”, the Post describes the situation in Darfur as “de facto genocide” and, while taking swipes at Kofi Annan and the UN, praises Rep. Rangel’s actions.

Democracy Now has a transcript of an interview with Rep. Rangel shortly after his arrest.

While the US is more partisan and divided than in recent memory, it’s reassuring that truly pressing crises like Darfur can bring liberals and conservatives together. While we haven’t seen them hauled into jail yet, religious conservatives like Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas have been urging pressure against Sudan for years and have been in the lead in sponsoring resolutions that would term the situation in Darfur a genocide.

A little over a year ago, I started posting data I was scraping off different news sites, inviting other researchers who were interested in media attention to play with the data and publish their own conclusions. A year later, someone’s finally taken me up on the offer, in a wonderful and useful way.

I got an email a couple days ago from Michael Adler, a guy I hadn’t had any previous contact with, virtually or otherwise. He was writing to tell me that he’d written a set of scripts that processed my data, put it into a SQL database and used gnuplot to produce an elegant series of time series graphs. Would I like to see the results?

Would I?! Rewriting my code so that I could see results over time has been on my to-do list for about nine months now. I’ve already installed shackles on my desk so I could chain myself until I got the code written. While I’ve been struggling to turn Amazon’s sales rank into actual sales figures (more on that next week, I hope), someone I’d never met was doing my research for me. I love the Internet…

Michael was kind enough to let me mirror his results on my site, and has sent me his scripts, which I’m hoping to ruthlessly plunder and turn into lots of tasty database driven code later this summer. (Perhaps the shackles will still get some use.)

In the meantime, I’m enjoying watching how news media work in parallel on stories like Iraq or how attention slowly builds around stories like the crisis in Sudan. I’m already seeing some evidence that blogs (represented by Daypop stats on Michael’s charts) are moving in lockstep with major media sources. Thanks, Michael, for giving me lots more to think about.

As most of my regular readers (all three of you) know, I’m obsessed with what the US media chooses to cover (and not cover). As I’ve accused friends in the media of overfocusing on events that concern wealthy nations at the expense of African, Central Asian and other developing nations, I’ve gotten a consistent response: “That’s what people want to read about.”

Compulsive researcher that I am, I’m interested in figuring out if that’s true. It seems to me that blogs offer one way of figuring out what people are actually interested in – if someone chooses to write about a topic, it reflects a certain degree of interest. Given the large number of people who use blogs to feature news stories they’ve found interesting, to some extent, blogs represent a selective filter of what readers found interesting in the news.

(There’s at least two valid objections to the previous statement. For one thing, I suspect most bloggers write primarily about personal matters, not about the news, so the filtering effect is probably dampened by the small percentage of people who use blogs this way. Second, there’s a small number of people who use blogs to do original reporting – rather than filtering what other journalists are creating, they’re creating their own journalism.)

So how does this selective filter work? Are bloggers more interested in some topics than others? I’m starting to think about experiments to answer that question. The good folks at Intelliseek have given me access to their Blogpulse engine, which has let me see how many mentions a given set of keywords has recieved on the blogs Blogpulse tracks within a set timeframe. The database also includes information on how many blogposts occurred in that timeframe, so I can make reasonable guesses about what percentage of blogs mentioned a phrase in a given time period.

I’m not able to get nearly as rich data from Google News. (Google’s API still covers only the search engine proper. Grr.) But past experience suggests that the vast majority of searches return information from the past 14 days, allowing me to align timeframes with a Blogpulse search. While I can’t guess at what percentage of results these stories represent, I’m able to do a side-by-side comparison of hits. Here’s the results of a couple of searches I’ve run recently…

The final column – Google versus Blogpulse – is the interesting one, I think. On items that got a lot of attention in mainstream media, but very little attention in the blogosphere, the number is large (very few bloggers seem interested in John Negroponte, the US’s new ambassador to Iraq, while lots of newspapers, especially in the Middle East, are asking interesting questions about his past.) When the number is low, more bloggers are talking about the issue (while there are only a handful of news stories talking about the new Firefox browser, 0.19% of blog posts in the last two weeks mention the software.)

(It would be interesting to know what the ‘equilibrium point’ is between Google and Blogpulse – i.e., at what ratio is a story equally popular in the aggregate news media and in the blogosphere – but to calculate that, I’d need to know the number of entries Google News is tracking, or have a keyword guaranteed to have the same percentage representation across the two sites…)

I’d love to have a list of “top 100 news stories” I could run through this process every day, tracking uptake by bloggers from the mainstream media – anyone have good thoughts on generating this list? It’s kinda the mainstream media version of the Daypop 40… I’d also be grateful for suggestions of interesting, timely (i.e., breaking in the last week) stories to check out and see how Google and Blogpulse cover them.

(This is part of my new “open research” philosophy, where when I don’t know what to do next, I post it on my blog and beg for help. My next post explains why I have at least a modicum of belief that this method actually works…)

BlogAfrica is alive and well. After a few months of near dormancy due to massive overcommitment on part of the founders – myself included – we’ve revived the regular blogfeed, a selection of posts from the 150 blogs registered in the BlogAfrica catalog. You can view the feed on the main BlogAfrica page, or subscribe to the RSS feed via your favorite aggregator. We’re trying to keep the feed to 5-10 items a day, in a variety of languages (primarily English, French and Italian.) Many thanks to Gudio Sohne and AllAfrica’s Kwindla Kramer for their work on the tools that let us provide this feed.

After spending the last ten days catching up with new posts in the African blogosphere, I have a few new favorite bloggers. Two folks I’m greatly enjoying reading:

Owukori’s Black Looks. The author describes herself as “an African feminist, a woman of a certain age who has travelled the world, the cities of Africa, the Americas, Middle East and Europe, now living in rural spain under the guise of being an organic farmer. But still my heart is and always will be in mother Africa.” Her blog offers an overview of some of the most contentious and timely issues facing the continent: African/Arab tensions, refugee issues, women’s rights and much more.

kwailawai* advertises “news and reviews of cool south african film, music and culture”, and delivers, with insights on both films and the industry that produces them. Recent articles have focused on incentive schemes used by the South African government to make the country more attractive to filmmakers, South African films in festivals in Zanzibar and Cannes, and a review of an odd website that seems to focus on South African rednecks.

Watch the feed for more news and opinions from all over the continent!

Jan Egeland, the UN undersecretary on humanitarian affairs, has been the most passionate and persistent voice on the global stage talking about the situation in Darfur. In an interview with the UN’s IRIN news service, he clears up a couple of interesting misconceptions about the situation in Darfur. A few points I found interesting:

- He believes the current aid problems are financial ones, not access ones. Aid workers are helping over 800,000 people and are able to reach most of the people who need help, so access is a less serious issue than when Andrew Natsios challenged the Khartoum government.

- While the US, UK and a couple of EU states have stepped to the plate, contributing meaningfully to the relief efforts, most EU and AU nations have not, and the oil-rich Arab states have done nothing.

- While there’s been speculation that the attacks by Janjawid have been motivated by a desire to claim land, many of the villages attacked have been destroyed entirely. In many cases, corpses of farm animals have been dumped in wells, rendering those wells useless and the villages uninhabitable.