Recently there have been reports on a mailing list I am on that Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan has been arrested in Tehran. Some of the accounts posted indicate that he had recently gone back to Tehran after being in exile for a while and was happy to be back, but was then arrested.

Hossein has been an important blogging pioneer, helping to spread blogging in Farsi, and thus in Iran.

Also he has provided helpful commentary and critiques of western media distortions about Iran.

Last November, I was at a program at the Columbia Journalism School on the Changing Media Landscape, where Hossein spoke as part of a panel. He pointed out the use in the U.S. press of the term “ambitions” to frame the Iran nuclear issue .

Here’s a short excerpt from my blog about the program:

Hossein pointed to the political use of the… weiter lesen

Evo Morales, the President of Bolivia, in a talk to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, offered an alternative viewpoint of how member nations should deal with the economic crisis.

He presented a critique of what he called was “the continuation of the neo-liberal agenda of the developed nations”, explaining how this approach would only deepen the crisis rather than help to solve it. “In order to put an end to the financial crisis,” he said, “we have to put an end to the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO).”

“It is important to move forward to deep economic change,” Morales explained. This means changing the economic model. He called for replacing the neo-liberal model.

His alternative agenda included providing aid to the victims of the crisis, not the ones who caused the crisis. By the victims he meant those who have lost their homes, and those who… weiter lesen

Part I – Netizen Journalism Panel: The Internet, Netizens, and Journalism

[Note: In October, 2008 there was a panel about Netizen Journalism at the 9th annual conference of Internet researchers (IR9.0 is the tag) which was held in Copenhagen. Following is an abstract for the panel, and then a summary that Axel Bruns posted on his blog of the session. A slightly edited version of one of the talks at the panel, my talk about Candlelight 2008 in South Korea as an example of Watchdog Journalism, is online in an earlier post on my blog.]

In his pioneering research about the impact of the Internet, Michael Hauben recognized that the nature of the Net made possible a new form of citizenship, a participatory form that is oriented toward a public purpose. He called the people who were developing this new form of citizenship, netizens.(1)

What would be the… weiter lesen

 
What is the significance of the recent Presidential election in the US? Barack Obama won the Presidency through a great effort by people in the US and around the world. Also, however, the election demonstrated the great weakness of the political party system in the US as there was little difference expressed on many of the issues in the run-up to the election. Instead of the election being a means for a broad ranging public discussion of the many problems facing the American people, and people around the world, the personality of the two candidates and their perceived capability became a basis for speculating on whether their election would be the basis for a hopeful outcome or not.

While some of the mainstream media have continued the hype of the election process by speculating on whether or not… weiter lesen

I have been in Berlin, Germany for the last two weeks of the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign. This has made it possible to get a different perspective on the U.S. election than is obvious in the U.S. In general, for the Europeans I have spoken with, it appears that the election has been framed so it appears that the two candidates of the major parties represent the majority of Americans. This is not the reality. In general, many Americans see themselves as independents, not represented by either the Republican or Democratic Party. Yet there is little in the media coverage to help Europeans recognize this reality.

In the English language media coverage of the election I have observed, mainly BBC or CNN, the reporters have focused on those who support either the Republican candidate John McCain or the Democratic candidate Barack Obama. The large number of Americans who are… weiter lesen