The good folks at WorldChanging have posted an interview with me, right next to a story about extremely muscular cows. Bovine company aside, I had a great time talking with WorldChanging co-ringleader Alex Steffen, and he did a terrific job of editing a rambling, two-hour conversation into something vaguely coherent. I always enjoy seeing what the dozen talented authors on this blog are talking about, and it’s always fun when they’re talking to me…

Passion of the Present reminds us that today is Sudan: Day of Conscience, a day dedicated to interfaith dialogue and action on the situation in Darfur. Jim Moore, Katrin Verclas and crew are offering a stark and moving poster and fact sheet on the situation in western Sudan.

I’m commuting from my home in western Massachusetts to the Berkman Center in Cambridge once a week, usually on Tuesdays. If all goes well, the trip takes about two and a half hours each way – in the morning, fighting traffic, it can be closer to four hours. It’s not surprising that I’m becoming addicted to talk radio, audio books and other forms of the digital spoken word.

My drug of choice is This American Life, Ira Glass’s weekly cocktail of radio documentary, investigative journalism, short stories, and personal essays. The shows are loosely linked around a theme – on one of the programs I listened to yesterday (thanks to Audible and my well-travelled iPod) was “Lost In Translation”, four essays with a common thread of intercultural communication and misunderstanding.

Tucked in between a goofy essay on comedy karaoke and a profile of Yao Ming’s translator was one of the best pieces of radio journalism I’ve ever heard. Nancy Updike interviews Nasser Laham, the editor for Bethlehem TV, a privately owned television channel in the Palestinian Territories. On a nightly TV show, Laham provides simultaneous translation of Israeli television into Arabic, giving his viewers an insight into what their Israeli neighbors are thinking and feeling.

Laham pulls no punches – when Israeli television calls suicide bombers “terrorists”, so does he, rather than using term commonly used in Palestinian media, “martyrs”. He airs hours of coverage on Israel’s annual holocaust commemoration events – when Palestinian viewers complain that they’re not interested in Israeli rememberances, he berates them, telling them it’s important for them to understand Israeli suffering as well as Palestinian.

Laham’s story is a compelling one: arrested at age 17 for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, he spent 6 years in Israeli prison. While incarcerated, he learned Hebrew, and immediately started teaching the language to fellow prisoners. On his release, he became a journalist, using his linguistic skills to monitor Israeli newspapers and draw out stories not covered by the (decidedly non-independent) Palestinian press.

Given the stories Laham covers and the critical voices he translates, one would expect him to be a controversial figure. And he is – but he’s also an incredibly popular one, and many of his viewers credit him with helping them achieve a new understanding of Israel. Still, he’s having a difficult time convincing his children that they should learn “the language of the enemy”, as they put it, or preventing them from throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. (Updike covers all this ground and more in about 19 minutes. You should listen to it now.)

In the groundbreaking 2002 Arab Human Development Report authored by Egyptian sociologist Nader Fergany and others, scholars suggested three key factors constraining human development in arab states: lack of political freedoms, lack of women’s rights and major knowledge gaps. (The Economist offers a typically smart and snarky summary of the report.) While many Arab League states spend meaningful sums on education, there’s an enormous translation gap that separates Arabic-speaking scholars and students from the rest of the world.

Roughly 330 books per year are translated from European languages into Arabic. That’s roughly one fifth as many as are translated into Greek. Since medieval times, the report estimates that only 10,000 books have been translated from European languages into Arabic, roughly as many translated by Spain in a single year. Authors of the 2003 Arab Human Development Report point out that this translation gap has symbolic, as well as practical consequences:

“Translation is a means of seeking knowledge, and it represents an interaction among civilisations through the transfer from one language to another, by humans or machines, (through) written or oral (words), with the goal of achieving scientific and cultural objectives. While more knowledge-hungry countries are paying attention to translation from sources other than English and efforts in this regard are not restricted to recent or contemporary knowledge, a marked shortage of translations of basic books on philosophy, literature, sociology and the natural sciences is quite evident in the Arab world,”

Translation’s been on my mind lately as I’ve wrestled with editing the BlogAfrica newsfeed. Like many Americans, I’m basically monolingual. Many of our best bloggers post in French, and I’m using a combination of Babelfish, high-school spanish and my francophone spouse to decipher what folks are saying. While I occasionally get the gist of people’s posts, I’m miles away from being able to provide meaningful translation.

I think the most important thing weblogs can (potentially) do is give people a sense what their neighbors around the world are thinking and feeling. I’m convinced that projects that help people build and read weblogs by people in other countries will help, slowly but surely, achieve political change, ala Jim Moore’s Second Superpower. But it’s one thing for all of us to have an online voice (and, needless to say, we’re decades away from a world where everyone has good, affordable, internet access.) It’s another thing for us to be able to understand what each other is saying.

Saad Khan, writing an op-ed in Lebanon’s Daily Star points out that it would require a huge troop presence to stabilize Darfur:

“The mountains in Darfur are inaccessible. Everybody traditionally carries weapons. When Sierra Leone with 1/35th the area needed 17,000 UN troops to maintain peace, it would be unrealistic to expect 2000 African Union troops to perform miracles. Even 600,000 troops would fall short of requirement in Sudan.”

He goes on to argue that disarming militias either within 30 days (the UN’s demands) or within 120 days (the Arab League’s counterproposal) is “a big joke”. He argues:

“The disarming and demobilizing is simply impossible, in the short term, even if the United States Marines swarm the area. The people who have seen rapes of their daughters are not expected to give away their self-defense weapons. In the tribal set-up, even the aggressors and rapists would never surrender weapons, fearing revenge.”

Unfortunately, his proposed solution sounds a lot like the US’s solution to the Iraq “problem” – precisely what Khartoum and many Arab league countries fear:

“The solution lies in forcing the resignation of Bashir government through international pressure, or even other stronger means, and then a sustained democracy has to be put in place.”

Just read a fascinating paper, thanks to links from friend Chris Warren and from Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy. Titled “How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru”, it’s an examination of the most efficient way to bribe different institutions to keep a corrupt government in power, while still pretending to be a democracy. The authors conclude that it’s disproportionately important to control the press, especially television stations, if you’re hoping to subvert a democracy.

Authors Pablo Zoido and John McMillan found a terrific data set to use in the study of corruption. In 1990, Alberto Fujimori, a political unknown, won the presidency of Peru. Behind the scenes, Fujimori was controlled by secret police chief Vladimiro Montesinos Torres. Montesinos kept control of the country for a decade through a complex web of bribery and other “obligations” that prevented opposition parties, the judiciary or the media from challenging Fujimori’s executive power.

Much to the delight of social scientists, Montesinos was a meticulous recordkeeper. He required receipts for all his bribes, and structured many of them as legal contracts, explicitly purchasing services, like favorable headlines in a newspaper, for fixed fees or monthly payments. And he videotaped most of his transactions, creating a set of Nixon-esque tapes collectively referred to as los vladevideos.

With such well-documented corruption, the authors are able to use the theory of “revealed preference” to calculate the relative importance of bribing different branches of Peruvian government and society. The discovery that the opposition politicans were bribed at $5,000 (US dollars) to $20,000 a month (roughly equal to their official monthly salaries of $4,500 plus an equal amount for expenses) and that bribes to the judiciary ranged from $2,500 to $55,000 a month (generally three to four times official salaries) paled in comparison to the bribes given to television channels, which reached up to $1.5 million dollars a month.

(A flaw in methodology, in my opinion: the authors aren’t able to give us the revenues earned by the legitimate businesses. As a result, it’s hard for us to know whether television stations required enormous bribes because of their relative incorruptability, or because they were so profitable that it would take millions a month to effect their bottom line. Furthermore, it would be useful to see speculation on what profits a media source might have generated by being an opposition voice and giving viewers unique stories. But this objection doesn’t detract from the analysis the authors offer – we can tell what Montesinos thought was worth paying for by seeing what he did pay.)

Why is it worth so much more money to buy a television station, versus an opposition politician or a judge? Simple: to control the media, you need to control all of it, while to control a political process, you often need just a simple majority. In buying opposition politicians, Montesinos needed to choose only 12 of 69 available congresspeople, allowing him to select individuals who he thought would be vulnerable to bribery. With the judiciary, he simply needed a simple majority of justices and control over the administrative judge who assigned judges to cases.

But a single renegade television channel could bring down a government. Indeed, that’s what ultimately happened, as independent, unbribed Channel N aired a series of Vladivideos that caused Montesinos and Fujimori to flee the country. (Fujimori ultimately resigned… via fax. Technology wins again.) TV reaches 95% of homes in Peru and, as in most nations, is the main way the population gets its news. Montesinos’s willingness to pay stations millions a month reflects a realization that popular uprising, brought about by a message on a medium that reaches a majority of the population, is the ultimate check to any government’s power.

These ideas provide interesting fodder for discussion in the context of US debates on media consolidation. While media consolidation implies that a corrupt US government might have to bribe only half a dozen companies to control the news (fewer, if we assume one of those companies is already in the government’s pocket), this analysis suggests that the sums involved might be astronomical, and that the last network to hold out might have terrific economic incentives (as well as ethical reasons) to continue to air anti-government views.

It also raises the question of the value of the Internet as an “safety valve” for alternative viewpoints – would it be adequate to control television in a (reasonably) well-functioning democracy like the USA, when dissenting voices could make themselves heard on the ‘net. The Montesinos strategy suggests that a politician can afford to ignore dissenters who’ve got small audiences – he didn’t bribe a number of small magazines and newspapers read primarily by Peru’s elite, either because they were incorruptible, to expensive to corrupt… or irrelavent, once he controlled the major TV channels. Would Montesinos have bothered to bribe bloggers? Probably not. With even smaller audiences, he’d likely have dismissed us as even less relevant than opposition papers.

I’d been looking forward to seeing Robert Greenwald’s documentary “Outfoxed”. As an amateur media critic and firm believer that most television news in the US has a conservative bias, I figured there was a good chance I’d find a lot to like in the documentary and might learn something about this surprisingly popular network.

Unfortunately, “Outfoxed” kinda sucked.

It’s not so much a documentary as it is a training film for liberals who want to win an arguments with conservatives over whether Fox News Channel is or is not “Fair or Balanced”. (Surprise – it’s not. And if you needed this documentary to tell you that, you’re either watching too much, or not enough television.)

The filmmakers do a decent job of identifying and documenting the techniques FNC uses to support a pro-Bush worldview: shouting down opposing viewpoints, recruiting weak “liberal” guests (who are usually centrists), blurring the line between opinion and journalism, and maintaining consistent messaging dictated by management, designed to satisfy network owner Rupert Murdoch.

Some of the sequences are pretty funny – after Bill O’Reilly insists he’s only told one guest to “shut up”, we see a dozen instances of his unique approach to quieting unruly guests. Other moments are unsettling – watching O’Reilly abuse Jeremy Glick, son of a Port Authority worker killed in 9/11 who had the temerity to tell O’Reilly that his father would not have supported an invasion of Afghanistan gives you a sense of how brutal and intimidating the commentator can be.

Greenwald makes the convincing case that FNC has abandoned all pretenses of journalistic objectivity and instead is operating a propoganda machine like those seen in eastern Europe during the Soviet Union. But this is neither especially surprising or very interesting.

Far more interesting to me would have been an analysis of why FNC has been so economically succesful selling propoganda to people who, unlike people living in the Soviet Union, are free to change the channel. Why do so many people choose to watch FNC rather than (slightly less biased) alternatives on broadcast or cable? And why are other news networks following FNC straight to the bottom in broadcasting left-bashing infotainment?

I came away from the film with a profound sense that the smart, articulate people interviewed in the film were missing a basic truth: the folks running Fox New Channel couldn’t care less whether they’re doing objective journalism. They’ve concluded that they can make money and advance an ideology by producing a certain type of programming, a form of programming that breaks many of the sacred, self-imposed laws of journalism. It’s a little like watching guerillas fighting regular army troops: “Wait, isn’t that against the rules? They can’t shoot at us and then disappear into the jungle, can they?”

They can, and they will. And Outfoxed helped convince me that my friends on the left doesn’t understand how this battle is fought or how this medium works. The Nixon/Kennedy debates taught almost everyone that image is at least as important as content on television. That’s why most people who sit in front of a TV camera wear solid colors (not red, which bleeds on video) and pancake makeup (men and women alike). The folks in Outfoxed evidently didn’t get the memo – one of the talking heads wears tweed, and the moires generated by his moving sportcoat turn the screen into a psychedelic 60s flashback. The graphics showing Murdoch’s rise to power are amateurish. The video clips of Fox – recorded by viewers who were monitoring the channel for the techniques Greenwald identifies on consumer equipment – range from crystal-clear to blurry, with badly flanged sound.

Perhaps this is all the result of underground chic – a way of saying “We’re not paid for by corporate America – you can tell we’re for real because we’re rough around the edges.” But the other message it sends is, “We don’t understand how to do this stuff at a professional level and we’re dramatically outgunned by the slick folks at FNC who use a wide variety of audio and video techniques that we don’t have access to.”

But that wasn’t the problem for me (as much as I wanted to take a makeup brush to the Outfoxed celebrities and save them from their own cameras). Like most people, I hate being preached at. I haven’t seen Farenheight 9/11 because Michael Moore tends to piss me off on film or on paper. It doesn’t matter that I agree with Moore on many political points – I hate having those points rammed down my throat without any contrasting perspectives, or any opportunity for his targets to fight back. I’d much prefer it if he’d report and let me decide.

There’s a terrible irony to a film which complains about unbalanced, biased, manipulative, unfair coverage in an unbalanced, biased, manipulative and unfair manner. It wouldn’t have killed the filmmakers to examine CNN, MSNBC and the broadcast networks to see whether FNC is uniquely bad, or whether conservative overrepresentation is a problem across all television. It would have been interesting to hear official FNC representatives react to the statistics presented regarding the network’s biases. But Outfoxed takes a very Fox-like approach to the subject matter – show a number of folks who all happen to agree with you and ignore the existance of another point of view. Perhaps this makes it a useful counterbalance to the propoganda broadcast on FNC… but it’s not very interesting to watch.

There’s so much good work that can be done on the subject of television journalism and the challenges to the existing model of journalistic objectivity. “Control Room”, a vastly better documentary than “Outfoxed”, focuses on the complex decisions the executives of Al Jazeera make every day to navigate between providing a believable, objective, journalistic voice and between their own ethnic identity and pride. Not satisfied with showing us how difficult those decisions are within Al Jazeera, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim also focuses on Lt. Josh Rushing, the media representative for the coalition forces, and his struggles to understand how American actions are viewed by Arab audiences.

The filmmaker clearly has a point of view – she wants the viewer to understand that Al Jazeera is vastly more complicated than the portrait we get from American media – but she allows the viewer to draw any number of possible conclusions as to whether Al Jazeera is objective, and to whether or not it’s a positive force in the middle east.

Greenwald should see if Noujaim is interested in giving lessons. (”Control Room” isn’t a fluke – Noujaim also made the brilliant “Startup.com” a few years prior.) And unless you need to win an argument about bias on Fox New Channel, don’t bother with Outfoxed – go see Control Room instead.

Alex Steffen at WorldChanging.com wrote a great summary of an essay I wrote a few months back, called “Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower”. The last line of his review is one I wish I’d written: “A Second Superpower without the developing world is really just a small group of us making a lot of noise.”

The essay was written in reaction to Jim Moore’s visionary, optimistic and very smart essay: “The Second Superpower Rears Its Beautiful Head”. In it, Jim makes a persuasive case that a global movement of highly wired, socially conscious citizen activists can act as a counterbalance to the US, the alleged “sole remaining superpower”. While I share much of Jim’s hope, I’m concerned that, without a conscious effort by current members of the technorati, the Second Superpower will only include certain people and perspectives. (The essay was also written for the book “Extreme Democracy”, which is being published on the web over the next few weeks.)

Jim and I have both been following the situation in Darfur closely, trying to understand the role of the Second Superpower in pressuring Khartoum and other world governments. Jim has taken his own words to heart and is working hard to mobilize the Second Superpower through his work with Passion of the Present, one of the leading online resources on the crisis. While I’ve been trying to share stories about Darfur with my (half dozen) readers, I’ve been looking at the situation from an academic perspective as well, trying to figure out whether the stuff I wrote in the aformentioned essay is true or not.

One of the contentions I make is that webloggers are an amplifier – they pick up certain stories from the media and reinforce them. When the media doesn’t cover a part of the globe, bloggers are helpless as they’ve got no signal to amplify. My theory, at that point, put most of the blame global media companies – bloggers don’t talk about Africa because Africa doesn’t make headlines, and therefore we have no signal to reinforce.

Darfur has challenged that theory for me. The truth is, the media’s done an excellent job in the last two months of reporting the story, as I noted a few weeks back. But while the blogosphere has picked up the story, they haven’t massively amplified it – Blogpulse shows about 0.03% of blog entries mentioning Darfur and 0.07% mentioning Sudan. While this number has risen substantially in the last couple of months (from a near-whisper), it still is an order of magnitude smaller than the number of blog entries (roughly 0.9%) mentioning Iraq.

All of which leads me to think that the amplifier analogy needs a slight bit of tuning. Weblogs are a selective amplifier. They’re amplifiers with filters – their authors. We pick up certain data from the outside world and reinforce what we think is most relevant, discarding the rest. So when we want to look at the spread of a story like the genocide in Darfur, we need to look at two parts of the system – the signal coming in (media) and the filters it passes through before being reinforced (bloggers).

In the case of Darfur, the signal is pretty strong – not nearly as strong as that of Israel or Iraq, but reasonably strong. Some bloggers were predisposed to reinforce the signal – folks who consistently blog about Africa, religion or human rights, for instance; others have been encouraged by Jim and others to reinforce it.

But most people haven’t. This may be because they blog topically and they’re more likely to talk about technology or US politics than international issues. It may be because they don’t know much about the situation and feel they have little to add. Or it may be that they felt little personal connection to the situation and the stories have never registered for them.

John Prendergast from International Crisis Group thinks that the stories won’t register for most people until they’re tied to images. Unfortunately, he further worries that the refugees from Darfur aren’t sufficiently telegenic – people may not be dying quickly enough to motivate people to pay attention to this story.

FaithfulAmerica.org is trying hard to ensure that Americans do see the story of Darfur, not just in the hard news media and the blogosphere, but also on daytime television. They’re working to raise $45,000 to send a TV crew to the refugee camps on the border of Chad and Sudan where many of the displaced people from Darfur are staying. Their goal: to ensure that “the people of Darfur will have an opportunity to appear directly on America’s news shows and talk shows.”

Will that make American bloggers better amplifiers for the stories coming out of Sudan? Or are blogs good for talking tech and less good for talking human rights, genocide and the future of humanitarian intervention? In other words, Sudan may help us figure out whether the Second Superpower works the way we hope it does.

Dear friend and colleague Stephanie is working in Asuncion, Paraguay, this summer. Her recent post on the tragic supermarket fire helped give me a sense of the magnitude of this disaster in a sleepy country of 5.5 million. As she says:

Asuncin is a city of just around a million people, and all of Paraguay has only 5 1/2 million. For 400 to die in one single catastrophe is nearly unheard of, aside from the infamous wars they’ve held with neighbors Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. So it’s not such a surprise to have encountered the overwhelming shock and sadness felt by this entire country. I sat watching the news all night long, fielding phone calls from friends who were telling me about colleagues and neighbors’ children who were killed or badly burned. One woman’s office IT guy had 3rd degree burns on his hands and face and was waiting to hear word of his girlfriend’s status, having suffered burns over 86% of her body. Everyone knew someone in the fire, and everyone was in mourning.

AllAfrica.com has an excellent interview with International Crisis Group’s John Prendergast, who visited rebel-held areas of Darfur recently along with Harvard’s Samantha Power. Prendergast explains why he thinks the international community hasn’t yet been moved to intervene in Darfur:

What’s going to start killing them in large numbers, which will then create the dramatic graphics that will – three months from now – instill the kind of emotion necessary for sufficiently robust action, are the diseases that are going to rip through these camps. I think that there will eventually be some form of action, but it just may happen after a couple hundred thousand people who could have been saved will have died.

Prendergast notes that the debate over whether the crisis in Sudan is a genocide or not is a largely meaningless one – the international community has an obligation to act to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe as well, and debate over terminology may well be a smokescreen to cover lack of will at the top to provide the support needed for intervention.

He further points out that intervention in Darfur is extremely unlikely to involve US troops – the AU has expressed its intent to send 3,000 troops to the region, a deployment that would clearly have peacekeeping implications. Prendergast notes that such a deployment would require substantial fiscal and logistical support from the US, rather than troops on the ground.

Reuters reports that 35,000 Sudanese marched in Khartoum to protest the UN resolution threatening action, if not sanctions, against the government unless major progress is made in the situation in Darfur. The article also suggests that AU involvement is likely to provoke a much less dramatic reaction than US intervention:

Hassan Ahmed, a Sudanese protester in his 60s, said: “If they want to send African troops, then those are from among us, but we will not allow a single American foot to rest on Darfur soil.” He said he was not a government loyalist.

In early 1998, Tripod, a company I helped founders Bo Peabody and Dick Sabot build, was sold to search engine Lycos for $58 million dollars. We were perhaps a little early in selling the company – a much smaller rival in the online community space, TheGlobe.com, went public later that year at a valuation of $850 million. (Of course, a few years later, they were bankrupt, out of business and neck-deep in securities litigation.)

Had we waited a little longer or been a bit braver, taking the company public, perhaps we’d have made more money. But I remember feeling like we’d dodged a bullet. Dick, our chairman, is a brilliant development economist and had me firmly convinced that we were in a market bubble that could burst any minute. For the year “key personnel” were prohibited from selling their stock, I watched the stock ticker every morning, waiting for Lycos’s stock – and everyone else’s – to collapse. Instead, it increased seven times in value the year I held it, and ultimately financed the launch of Geekcorps.

I was long gone by 2000, when Lycos was bought by Spanish internet firm Terra (a branch of Spanish telephone company, Telefonica) for $12.5 billion dollars, but a number of friends from the Tripod days were still working within the company. My more ambitious friends were learning Spanish in the hopes of building better relationships with the new management; my more optimistic friends thought the company would “grow into” its valuation by expanding into Latin and Central America.

It didn’t, and Terra/Telefonica sold Lycos and “related assets” – including Tripod – to South Korean firm Daum Communications for $95 million, less than 1% of what Terra had paid four years ago. In the intervening years, the tech bubble finally imploded, and thousands of dot.coms dissapeared without a trace. Lycos grew less and less popular, and lately has ranked seventh amongst search engines and portals in traffic.

Some analysts are suggesting the main value Lycos has to Daum is the 170,000 paying users of Tripod and Angelfire (a rival homepage service I helped Lycos buy and integrate into the network…). It’s oddly satisfying to know that the project I started working on late in 1994 is the one of the few pieces worth salvaging in 2004.

Increasingly I wonder whether Tripod was five years too early, instead of just six months premature. Tripod was interesting to Lycos as an acquisition target because it had a lot of traffic – about 15 million people looked at Tripod web pages every day when I left the company. But Tripod was interesting to me – and to most, though not all, of my colleagues – because it demonstrated that the most interesting things on the Internet might be put up by individual users, not by corporations.

Weblogs have gone a long way towards proving this point. And while they’re a damn sight more sophisticated than the pages we offered users in 1996, the basic, radical idea that individuals should have a space where they could express themselves on the net without needing to know how to administer a server is one that Tripod and others helped pioneer almost a decade ago.

It’s probably a good thing that people don’t pay multiple billions of dollars for loss-making companies nowadays. And undoubtably, the vast majority of companies that sprang to life like mushrooms after a long rain deserved to die a quick death when venture capital dried up. But I miss the creativity and craziness that came about when twenty-somethings with no business experience thought they might be able to create something new and beautiful with a wacky idea and a few thousand lines of code.

Or, as the bumper sticker on my truck says, “I want to be irrationally exuberant again.”

Good luck to my friends at Tripod/Lycos who’ve managed to survive the voyage from Williamstown to Waltham to Spain to South Korea. I guess it really is a worldwide web…