Undercurrent

The Norwegian debate about debating culture on the web continues and coincides with an Online Journalism Review story on how reporters are learning how to interact with readers/users. This appears important to me:

Positive interaction can occur, but reporters must first cultivate a non-confrontational temperament and other subtle skills — such as interpretation of syntax and a level of transparency — if they are going to interact successfully.

However, it’s possible to argue that Scandinavian news sites are taking more risks in interacting with readers, such as allowing comments to articles, the pitfalls of which the Dagbladet debate is about. So hopefully we can also lead the way in establishing best practice…

Dagbladet.no has an important piece about how extreme views dominate their web debates (disclosure – I was interviewed for the article). This is of course exasperating for editors and journalists who want to involve readers in constructive debates. When it comes to sensitive and complicated issues such as immigration and minorities, moderate voices just don’t want to participate if the debate is dominated by extremists. On the other hand, there are many good reasons to allow even extreme views, so that they can be met with knowledge-based arguments. Public debate should never be a domain for “experts”.

By writing this piece, Dagbladet has challenged their readers. Shortly after publishing there were already over 500 comments. This is an all-important subject that I’ll return to, and hopefully also Dagbladet and other media.

I’ve stuck the irrepressible button on the site to support that excellent free speech initiative by Amnesty. Censorship can only be fought by being as persistent as the censors. See also Amnesty’s Free Shi Tao campaign – the man who was jailed when Chinese authorities were aided by Yahoo.

How to escalate a non-story and make a PR disaster for yourself: A blogger named Moni learns that her friend didn’t get her contract at the German chapter of Transparency International renewed. Moni doesn’t like that and writes a (very civilized) blog post criticizing Transparency for not living up to its own high standards. A couple of months go by, then Moni receives a strict e-mail from Transparency’s lawyers saying that if she doesn’t remove the post, they will take legal measures. Moni blogs about this (and removes the post – but it’s there in the cache), and of course this is what happens:

Bloggers in Germany and internationally pick up the story and it spins out of Transparency’s control. Moni storms up the blog charts. German media get interested – interview with Moni in Netzeitung.

Now the story seems to be over: Moni’s blogging lawyer just issued a statement saying Transparency won’t pursue the issue further. And Moni confirms. Transparency, meanwhile, wonders what hit them: “Whatever we do, it’s wrong… Maybe we shouldn’t have reacted at all”, says spokesman Bäumel.

The German press self-regulator, der Deutsche Presserat, has turned down a complaint against Die Welt’s reprint of the Danish Muhammed cartoons. According to the press council, the cartoons treat the current issue of “religiously motivated violence” with the “typical means of the cartoon” – in a way that does not mock the (muslim) religious communities.

UPDATE: The debate in Oslo yesterday turned out not to be very much about blogging vs. journalism at all – ref. the title “Cowardly editors or irresponsible bloggers?” – but about how mostly editors and journalists have handled the Muhammed cartoons controversy (arguably a more important topic than blogging, you might say…). Accompanying the debate was the result of an email survey among Oslo journalists (769 of 2600 responded). Here 70 percent said they wouldn’t have published the cartoons. Among different reasons given for not publishing, one wrote: “I want to live”.

Instead of a meticulous report from the meeting, a quote from a new Kenan Malik article in Index on Censorship:

In the real world, where societies are plural, then it is both inevitable and important that people offend the sensibilities of others. Inevitable because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable and we should deal with those clashes rather than suppress them. Important because any kind of social change or social progress means offending some deeply held sensibilities. ‘If liberty means anything,’l George Orwell once wrote, ‘it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’l Not to give offence would mean not to pursue change. Imagine what Galileo, Voltaire, Paine or Mill would have made of Ian Jack’ls argument that one should not depict things that may cause offence. Imagine he’ld lived 700 years ago and had said, ‘In principle it’ls right to depict the earth orbiting the sun, but imagine the immeasurable insult that the exercise of such a right would cause…’l

There just might be a consensus emerging that the cartoon controversy shows that confrontation sometimes is very productive. Certainly the result is a much more diverse debate about integration and religion.

Chinese authorities are fighting a losing battle against the dissemination of unwanted news and views in blogs, it is argued in Newsweek’s report about blogging in China. That must be one of the most optimistic assessments so far:

Indeed, whereas in the West bloggers tout themselves as an alternative to the mainstream media, in China they in many ways are the new mainstream: rather than, say, watching bland programs on state-owned CCTV, many urban Chinese turn to Web sites such as Sohu.com, Sina.com and Baidu.com for breaking news-and then disseminate that information via e-mail and mobile-phone text messages. “A Chinese blogger is just like an American columnist,” says Zhao Jing, a journalist whose popular blog on Microsoft’s blog service, MSN Spaces, was recently shuttered on orders from Beijing. “We journalists can’t tell the truth, so we tell it with blogs.”

UPDATE: The Washington Post is running a series this week on The Great Firewall of China (via Center for Citizen Media).

What is the EU up to in the cartoon controversy? An EU media code of conduct? Javier Solana travelling the Middle East telling everyone that the Union will do whatever it can to avoid something similar happening again? It’s an embarrassing mess. And the EU spin doctor and her blog? Quiet.

At least the parliament shows some life signs.

Steve Kelley of The New Orleans Times-Picayune neatly sums up the fate of today’s cartoonists. And here’s how the unlucky Klaus Stuttmann sees it:

Man schaut viel genauer hin, ob irgend jemand den Sinn einer Zeichnung falsch auffassen könnte. Da bleibt dann weniger Raum für Subtiles, was wiederum den Nachteil hat, dass die Karikatur an Intelligenz verlieren könnte. (“You check more carefully if someone might misinterpret the point of a drawing. That leaves less room for the subtle, and that has the further disadvantage that the caricature could lose its edge” – my transl.)

(Cartoon reproduced by kind permission of Steve Kelley).

In today’s Tagesspiegel, an open letter from German cartoonists in support of their colleague Klaus Stuttmann. Stuttmann has had to go into hiding after receiving death threats because of a cartoon his Berlin newspaper published on February 10 (click “Bilderstrecke” to see it). As the paper has tried to explain, the subject is the German debate about security under the upcoming football World Cup. Iranians have used it as a pretext to threaten Stuttmann, demand an apology (very original) and attack the German embassy in Teheran.

A commentary in today’s Tagesspiegel calls what’s happening now an extension of the taboo zone. There’s every reason to fear that. The imbalance between a very real death threat and a mere cartoon makes this an unfair struggle. Who can say that there aren’t small internal censors growing in the heads of writers and cartoonists everywhere now?

In days like these it’s tempting to quote John Stuart Mill. Every day:

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. (from On Liberty).