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PANEL: Global Media

Keynote: Li Xiguang, president of Tsinghua University’s International Center for Communication Studies

Master of Ceremonies: Kenneth Li, Technology Correspondent, Financial Times

Panelists:

Jared Kushner, publisher and owner of The Observer Media Group
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia
Jonathan Shen, senior producer for China Central Television
Riz Khan, host of “Riz Khan” on Al Jazeera International

Panel summary by Josh Sanburn, World Policy Journal

We live in a “brave new media world,” said Li Xiguang, the keynote speaker on global media, and challenged journalists to become smarter with new ways of informing the public. LI promoted what he called “dialogue journalism” and while he didn’t address China’s suppression of media outlets, he did chastise writers and editors for producing “bad journalism.”

The myriad ways media have changed within the last few decades and the pervasiveness of poorly reported stories were the starting points for a discussion on the traditional role of the journalist and the rise of the citizen journalist within the blogosphere. Kenneth Li proposed that today “everyone is a journalist,” but Jimmy Wales wasn’t so sure. “Everyone can write what they want,” he said. “Far more people today are ‘opinion columnists.’ But that’s a very different thing from journalism.”

Wales said journalists should still strive for neutrality, and he weighed the pros and cons of Twitter, which has helped organize protests in countries like Iran but has also been shown to cause widespread hysteria. “The medium is potentially dangerous,” he said.

It’s true that everyone has become a commentator, said Riz Khan, but that it’s more difficult today than ever before for governments to hide and control the media. “I’m happy to adjust to a new world where the old media is disappearing,” he said.

The financial markets are again getting pummeled, both domestically and globally. The nearly $800 billion stimulus package signed with fanfare by President Obama has done little to alter the mood. In fact, if you read through financial websites and assorted blogs on politics, economics, or anything related to those, you will find a nearly endless sea of misery. The level of anger, pessimism, despair, and sheer hopelessness seems to reach new highs every week, in inverse relation to the movement of global equity prices and the size of individual retirement accounts.

But bad fundamentals are only one aspect of what is going on. What makes the present that much worse is a complete meltdown of confidence about the very possibility of a more balanced future. And it’s not just an erosion of confidence. It’s the flourishing of our destructive instincts, the opposite of the “better angels of our nature,” the demons, the whispers in the night that all is about to go up in flames.

We all have our fears, whether we admit them or not. But this has gone too far. In the financial world, there is a game of one-upmanship to find more dire adjectives, and any who dissent and suggest that yes, there will be a tomorrow, and yes, there will be a future of growth, moderate and different but still motion forward and movement upward, they are treated with contempt. Indeed, contempt on the order of those made to walk the streets during the Cultural Revolution with dunce caps and signs of shame around their necks.

Those who bet that the market will go down until there’s nothing left to lose, who are convinced that value will be permanently wiped out—the shorts and the traders—they are enjoying their moment in the sun, and some are undoubtedly profiting from the collective misery. There’s nothing wrong with that in small doses, and almost everyone can benefit from hedging their bets in the market. But you can’t be short forever, and you can’t ultimately profit from everything going down. A few can make money for a while, and if you believe that it’s all survival of the fittest, then you probably don’t care if 99 percent suffer as long as you’re part of the 1 percent that prospers. The sheer delight in “burn, baby, burn” is hardly unique to our age. We’ve been there before, and it leads nowhere, except to a whole world in flames.

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The sophistication of China’s Great Firewall, the catchy name for the complex, internet censorship apparatus, is well known. Bloggers, journalists, regular Chinese citizens, and visitors passing through the country have all experienced frustration at not being able to read, view, or post so-called “sensitive” information on the web. By many measures, the Great Firewall has been a frustrating success. It appears now that by example and by proposal, China is exporting its internet censorship practices.

The latest move came on January 5, when China’s Ministry of Public Security announced a new initiative to crack down on websites with pornography. Google, Baidu, Sina.com, Sohu.com and other popular Chinese websites are targets of this new drive. There are fears, however, that this enterprise is a Trojan horse—that the real aim is to punish websites that, on occasion, publish material antithetical to the state’s political and economic agendas. For example, Tianya.cn, a very popular internet forum famous for exposing hoaxes and scandals (sometimes with political implications), is named as a target of this new program.

It is no surprise, then, that other countries have taken notice of the Great Firewall’s achievements and are instituting some of their own internet censorship protocols. Just across the Sea of Japan, Tokyo is also considering a plan to crackdown on websites featuring pornographic images of underage participants. Not that a restriction on underage sexual exploitation is bad news, mind you, but it opens the door for further online limitations.

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The following article appears in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal. For the month of November, read the entire 25th anniversary issue, fall 2008, for free!

It’s October 2033 and Shahinaz Abdel- Salam, 55, has just been appointed Egypt’s first female interior minister.

She’s about to address the nation by live holofeed to explain why she’s accepted a post that as a young woman she’d always dreamed would be abolished because, in the Egypt where she grew up, interior minister was synonymous with “chief torturer.”

Her office is in New Cairo, an area which was once desert but over the past few years has buzzed with university campuses and businesses freed from the suffocation of downtown Cairo. But her address to the public will be made from what used to be the downtown headquarters of the Interior Ministry called Lazoghli. For years, the building’s underground dungeons had held hundreds of thousands of political prisoners—at its peak estimated to be around 20,000—mostly Islamists. Continue reading…

On August 8, China will fling open its doors to the world’s finest athletes and welcome, for the first time, a global Olympic audience. Yet, while the world’s attention is distracted by the glint of gold medals in Beijing, Chinese officials are doing whatever it takes to ensure that only the high polish of the Olympic spectacle makes it out through tightly controlled (i.e. censored) television, print, and online media.

In light of the recent protests in Tibet, a catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan Province, bus bombings in Kunming and Shanghai, and terrorist attacks in Xinjiang Province, Chinese officials are determined to build a façade of control—and cohesive national pride—lest unsightly and embarrassing political demonstrations be broadcast around the world. From banning select foreign entertainers to jailing Beijing dissidents, liberties are systematically being curtailed in what was once hoped to be China’s great coming out party.

To their credit, in expectation of public protests of one kind or another, officials have set aside three city parks in Beijing where demonstrators can air their grievances—a highly unusual gesture from the authoritarian government. There is a catch, of course. “The police will safeguard the right to demonstrate as long as protesters have obtained prior approval and are in accordance with the law,” said Liu Shaowu, director of Olympics security, during a news conference.

According to the law, citizens (it is unclear how internationals figure into this mix) must apply for a permit, in person, five days in advance of the scheduled protest. The application requires detailed information, including the topic of dissent, slogans to be used, and the expected number of demonstrators. Moreover, protests that are disruptive of “national unity,” “social stability,” security, or that advocate for ethnic minority separatism (read: Tibet, Xinjiang) will not be approved.

Despite the obstacles, could we see some action in the parks? Quoted in the New York Times, human rights lawyer and advocate Xu Zhiyong said, “As a first step toward opening up space for dissent, it is appropriate…. There should be many people who are willing to use this space, petitioners and people who have experienced injustice.” It will take a clever protest application, however, or outright subversive action, to hold a demonstration that does not violate the government’s tightly scripted rules. Protesting on issues such as pollution, political prisoners, religious freedom (Falun Gong), Tibet, Xingjian, shoddy construction of schools in Sichuan’s earthquake zone, democracy, freedom of speech in general, corruption, land rights, and other issues will, in all likelihood, be denied their moment in Beijing.

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Welcome to the debut of The World Policy Blog, what we at World Policy Journal believe will be a whole new way of looking at the globe – not from an American perspective of “foreign” being everything outside the United States, but a world in all its variety and fascination, how nations, regions, and people interact among themselves. Our goal is to build a community of informed individuals who will come together here to exchange views or simply absorb interesting, perhaps controversial, but always provocative takes on events or trends that are shaping the world where we live – a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of human beliefs and emotions.

As a first step, today, I’d like to tell you, the members of this community (simply by virtue of your coming here to read our thoughts and observations – we will never require you to identify yourselves) about a gathering at World Policy Institute last week. We had a visit from 11 Iraqi sheikhs and provincial governors, representing critical regions in this war-torn nation.
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