Internet & Democracy Blog

After removing “Fitna” from its servers in response to threats against its employees, LiveLeak has restored accessibility through its website. The video entry is accompanied by this statement:

On the 28th of March LiveLeak.com was left with no other choice but to remove the film “fitna” from our servers following serious threats to our staff and their families. Since that time we have worked constantly on upgrading all security measures thus offering better protection for our staff and families. With these measures in place we have decided to once more make this video live on our site. We will not be pressured into censoring material which is legal and within our rules. We apologise for the removal and the delay in getting it back, but when you run a website you don’t consider that some people would be insecure enough to threaten our lives simply because they do not like the content of a video we neither produced nor endorsed but merely hosted.

The vigilance shown by both LiveLeak and YouTube (assuming that it received comparable threats) is worth applauding. The commitment to provide an open space for people to share and access content, even when and especially when some viewers and politicians may find it objectionable, supports the democratization of information. Without that commitment, a user’s interaction with news online is susceptible to the same problems the plague centralized media: the concentration of power to determine what is valuable or important information.

Over at the New York Times, Brian Stelter reports that the Internet is allowing users to displace “the professional filter[s]” of news e.g. the New York Times and Fox News. And in particular, Internet users are not “just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks.”

Although the article makes no reference to it, Stetler is describing semiotic democracy, a term which has been used to describe how the Internet disburses the power to participate in and add on to culture. Whereas in the past, semiotic power—the power to give meaning to symbols—was concentrated with a small set of power brokers (the government, newspaper editorial boards, large non-profit organizations, etc), the Internet allows individual users to determine what stories are important enough to be made available, circulated, and commented on for public consumption.

Stetler begins by pointing out that while Barack Obama’s speech in response to President Bush’s final State of the Union Address garnered little attention at traditional media outlets, footage spread through social networks and blogs [and presumably emails] to with the result of 1.3 million downloads on YouTube.

Stetler remains focused on Obama for the rest of the article, but given the timing, he might have included some coverage on the circulation of Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders’ short film “Fitna” as evidence of the potential hurdles “consumers” could face. Because of the Wilder’s film’s controversial subject matter—it interweaves quotes from the Koran with images of “Islamist” violence, threats of violence, and attacks on liberalism to support its warning that the “Islamization” of Europe is a threat to its liberal democracies—Dutch broadcasters refused to air it. After Network Solutions suspended the website Wilder’s intended to use to release the film, it was initially available at LiveLeak (for consumption, linking, and e-mailing), where it was the top film posted on Thursday.

But on Friday, users who clicked on links to the film’s entry on LiveLeaks were directed to “The Removal of ‘Fitna’: the official LiveLeak statement”. It tells viewers:

“Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature, and some ill-informed reports from certain corners of the British media that could directly lead to the harm of some of our staff, LiveLeak.com has been left with no other choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.

“This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net but we have to place the safety and well being of our staff above all else….We stood for what we believe in, the ability to be heard, but in the end the price was too high.”

The film is still available on YouTube (although it is divided into two parts), but Wilder’s experience suggests that a self-satisfactory conclusion that the mainstream media will no longer be the gatekeepers to the news shouldn’t end the discussion. User policies at websites like YouTube and LiveLeaks, as well as their vigilant defense of free expression will undoubtedly play a role in determining who and how the news will be filtered, and thus how consumers interact with the news.

Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center, is moderating a panel on the future of news at Berkman’s Media Re:public Forum. The panelists were given two minutes and gave us some soundbites.

Paul Steiger is Editor-in-Chief of ProPublica, a non profit with 25 journalists created to fill the gap left by the shrinking newsrooms in the country. He was a Wall Street Journal managing editor for 16 years previously. When he was at the WSJ, he remembers 15% of the budget being allocated to news and the rest to operations, and now at ProPublica more than 60% of the budget is on news. This is due to the web and how easy operations are now. When asked about his vision in 2013, he doesn’t anticipate making money since their mandate is not to sell advertising and remain a nonprofit.

Jonathan Taplin is a Professor at USC Annenberg and a former producer of films with Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese. He worries 2013 might bring commercial overload and not just an information overload. He agrees with David Weinberger that the struggle will be over meta-data. He sees an advance of the commodizing of freedom – social networks mine information about you even though they seem free. So he sees an eventual FaceBook/MySpace type polarization widely on the web where some users are in an ad free world they pay for and others in a free world full of ads. These become two separate world that don’t interact.

Jennifer Ferro is Assistant General Manager and Executive Producer of Good Food at KCRW. She sees a convergence of devices and platforms where devices become less relevant. She doesn’t think people are going to carry radios and the internet will become pervasive with a backbone of media sites people primarily visit.

Jonathan Krim is Director of Strategic Initiatives of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. He thinks the traditional story telling model, based on objectivity, will be abandoned and journalists will seek to attribute all points of view to others. He sees the blogosphere, television, and some print pioneers creating spaces where reporters are free to write what they know – where the quality of the reporters is important and considering the other side is important. This means that we will approach something closer to a press that reports along certain lines that will identify them. Krim believes this scenario enhances the credibility of the journalists and allows for wider sourcing and more public participation.

Lisa Williams, of Placeblogger.com, sees shorter job tenure with a greater number of popular journalists rather than a cabal of a few. This gives a wider breadth to the stories and more depth: for example 6000 amputee soldiers have returned from Iraq – but how many have been fitted with prosthetics? Important questions like this would be tough to answer in a traditional newsroom but in 2013 the media will be capable of answering this.

David Cohn, from digidave.org and Newstrust.net, has 2 mantras: 1) the future is open and distributed and 2) journalism is a process not a product. Cohn sees these converging to the question how does the process become more open and distributed? He wants newspapers to be more like a public library in that they are a source of information about your community. He follows ideas in Richard Sambrook’s talk last night in that he wants to content to be open and distributed through networked journalism.

Jon Funabiki is a Professor of Journalism at San Francisco University. He thinks dialog in 2013 will center around our passions. He sees 3 trends: 1) increasing democratic diversity in the US and increasing globalization 2) an explosion of ethnic new media from identity based communities 3) the increasing practice of community based organizations using new media tools like journalistic narrative story telling designed to move services to communities. So he wants to couple old media with new community produced media since it all contributes to the ongoing civic dialog.

Solana Larsen is managing editor of Global Voices and previously a commissioning editor of Open Democracy. She is worried about journalistic integrity – journalists interviewing journalists who are on the scene and reporting secondhand information with an aura of knowledability. She wants journalists to talk to local people and be honest with their audiences about how much they really know about the topic. She thinks in 2013 there will be no foreign correspondents and news will be reported by people who understand the local context and culture.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

Margaret Duffy is a Professor from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and she is speaking at Berkman’s Media Re:public Forum. She leads a Citizen Media Participation project to create a taxonomy of news categories and get a sense of the state of citizen media via sampling news across the nation. They are interested in where the funding in coming from, the amount of citizen participation, and getting an idea of what the content is. They are also creating a social network called NewNewsMedia.org connecting seekers and posters to bring together people interested in the same sorts of things.

She’s sampled the country in local regions and found that, for example, Richmond Virginia is a hotbed for citizen journalism and blogging and says their methods of connecting to each other are unique. This suggests that blogging and citizen media seems to remain a local phenomenon. Across the country, they were suprised by how the sites were not all that particpatory, for example there isn’t much capability to upload on these sites. She suggests this is because gatekeeping seems very important and blogs tends to be tightly controlled by their authors. They also have seen a lot more linking to outside their sites and many blogs are trying to sell advertisihng (with highly varying levels of success).

The driving force behind the project is the idea that from a social capital standpoint they think that strong community connection make a difference to how to community survives in a democratic process. Her results on the local nature of citizen media suggests a more traditional notion of what a community is. Ethan Zuckerman discusses that community can define itself by local geography or aroudn subject matter and he suggests (referencing the talk below) that we are developing new metric for monetizing site based on reaching the right community and how we define the community is important for the sustainability of websites.

Duffy is followed by Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet (ipdi) at George Washington University. She is discussing the “Media Habits of Poli-fluentials” and building on work from The book The Influentials by Ed Keller and Jon Berry. The idea is that one person in ten tells the other nine how to votes, where to eat, etc. The interesting thing Darr notes is that poli-fluentials (her term) are not elites in the traditional sense but local community leaders and ordinary folk who appear to be knowledgable to their peers. She notes that people who seem to know a lot of people tend to be these poli-fluentials.

In a study she published at the www.ipdi.com the internet users political campaigners had traditionally not focused on are in fact the most active and most connected people in their local community. So now the campaigns and news media understand their audiences differently. If you read a newspaper or watch Sunday morning talk shows and PBS you are more likely to be a poli-fluential (about doubling your odds). Interestingly, purchashing political paraphenalia online increases your odds of being a poli-fluential about 5-fold, as with joining political groups and actively emailing representatives. But the kicker is that people who are self-declared independents who made a political contribution are 80 times more likely to be a poli-fluential than not.

Can we find sustainable funding models for citizen journalism? She suggests the poli-fluentials are the ones to target by advertisers since their opinions are those that filter out influentially to the community and where you get the most band for your advertising buck.

ini the panel discussions following the talk, Marc Cooper from the HuffingtonPost and a USC professor comments on how much it matters who is reading his site. He wants to maximize this number, rather than target the poli-fluentials. Impact is whether people are reading the stories, whether they filter into the broader media and whether they spawn debate. Clint Ivy from Fox Interactive Media suggests that you need to decide whether your goal is to make money or not and the appropriate metric flows from this. He uses the number of comments per post to measure influence, others might just decide whether or not they get a sense a satisfaction from blogging. Dan Gillmor, another Berkman fellow and Director of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at ASU. reframes the problem as one of finding the right things to measure – how do you get a handle on the community mailing list that never bubbles out beyond the community. He thinks this things are enormously valuable and get overlooked. Ethan Zuckerman of GlobalVoices and another Berkman fellow is concerned about agenda setting and whether the right stories are coming up onto the front page and he is worried about the fact that the numbers tend to reflect not influence but whether the stories are important and underheard. Is is easy to get many hits on your blogs by picking a sensational story but having tens of hundreds of the right readers reading the right story is tough to measure. Marc Cooper questions whether any of these questions are new in the digital age or just a rehashing of the same question journalists have always faced.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

John Kelly is a doctoral student a Columbia’s School of Communications, a startup founder (Morningside Analytics), as well as doing collaborative work with Berkman. He’s speaking Berkman’s Media Re:public Forum.

Kelly says he takes an ecosystem approach to studying the blogosphere since he objects to dividing research on society into cases and variables because it is an interconnection whole. This isn’t right and basic statistical methods that use variables and cases and designed specifically to take interconnections into account. What he is doing with the research he presents today is using a graphical tool to present descriptions of the blogosphere.

Kelly shows a map of the entire blogosphere and the outlinks from the blogosphere. Every dot is a blog and any blogs that are linked are pulled together – so the map itself looks like clusters and neighborhoods of blogs. The plot seems slightly clustered but there is an enormous amount of interlinking (my apologies for not posting pictures – I don’t think this talk is online). In the outlinks maps to links from blogs to other sites – the New York Times is most frequently linked to and thus the largest dot on the outlinks map.

Kelly compares maps for 5 different language blogospheres: English, Persian, Russian, Arabic, and Scandinavian languages. Russian has very separate clusters and other languages get progressively more interconnected. In the Persian example, Kelly has found distinct clusters of ex-pat cloggers, poetry, and religious conservative bloggers concerned about the 12th Inam, as well as clusters of modern and moderately traditional religious and political bloggers. Kelly suggests this is a more disparate and discourse oriented picture than we might have thought.

In the American blogosphere Kelly notes that bloggers tend to link overwhelmingly to other blogs that are philosophically aligned with their own blog. He shows an interesting plot of Obama, Clinton, McCain blogopsheres’ linking patterns to other sites such as thinktanks and particular YouTube videos.

Kelley also maps a URL’s salience: main stream media articles peak quickly and are sometimes over taken by responses, but Wikipedia article keep getting consistent hits over time.

The last plot he shows is a great one of the blogs of the people attending this conference (and their organizations): there are 5 big dots representing how much people have blogged about the people – main stream media sites are the 5 big dots. Filtering out of those gives GlobalVoices as the blogs people mainly link to.

Crossposted in Victoria Stodden

David Weinberger is a fellow and colleague of mine at the Berkman Center and is at Berkman’s Media Re:public Forum discussing the difference the web is making to journalism: “what’s different about the web when it comes to media and journalism?”

Weinberger is concerned with how we frame this question. He prefers ‘ecosystem’ rather than ‘virtue of discomfort’ since this gets at the complexity and interdependence in online journalism. But the ecosystem analogy is too apt and too comforting and all-encompassing so he pushes further. He doesn’t like the ‘pro-amateur’ analogy since it focuses too much on money as the key difference in web actors, and yet somehow seems to understate the vast disparity in money and funding. The idea of thinking of news as creating a better informed citizenry so that we get a better democracy doesn’t go far enough – Weinberger notes that people read the news for more reasons than this.

So he settles on ‘abundance’ as a frame due to the fact that control doesn’t scale which is something being address currently with online media. “Adundance of crap is scary but abundance of good stuff is terrifying!” The key question is how to deal with this. We are no longer in a battle over the front page since other ways of getting information are becoming more salient. For example, Weinberger notes that “every tag is a front page” and email recommendations often become our front page. He sees this translating into a battle over metadata – the front page is metadata, authority is metadata – and we are no longer struggling over content creation. So we create new tools to handle metadata – in order to show each other what matters and how it matters. Tools such as social networks and the sematic web. All these tools unsettle knowledge and meaning (knowledge and meaning that has not been obvious but was always there).

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

Robert Suro is a professor of journalism at USC and spoke today at Berkman’s Media Re:public Forum. His talk concerns journalism’s role in democratic processes and he draws two distinctions in how we think about journalism that often get conflated: journalism is a business but also a social actor. he points out that when main stream media’s profitability decline we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming its impact of in the democratic arena declines as well.

He also has trouble with the term “participatory media” and draws a distinction between the study of who is participating and what means they use (his definition of participatory media) and “journalism of participation” which evaluates the media in terms of a social actor – the object is effective democratic governance. He is worried these two concepts get confused and people can mistakenly equate the act of participating in the media, for example adding comments to a web site, with effective participation in the democratic process.

The result of this distinctions is that if you want to assess participatory media in terms of social impact you have to study more than who they are and what they produce but also whether this activity is engendering civic engagement that makes democracy more representative and government more effective.

Suro notes that this isn’t new: he hypothesizes that journalism doesn’t change often but when it does it is a big change, and we’re in the middle of just such a change right now. As an example of a previous change he gives the debate between two editors who were interested in the creation of civil society. One was supported by Jefferson and Madison and the other by Hamilton and Adams. Both were partisan in what they said and who funded them and both were committed to democracy but understood the role of the state differently, resulting in the creation of the democratic and republican parties. Although both would be fired as editors today there is a long history of social democratic results in journalism and the fundamental role of journalism in a democratic society is subject to change. We should study the ongoing redefinition and try and understand causality and impact.

Suro also thinks the Lippmann/Dewey argument about whether the goal of journalism should be to produce highly informed elites or mobilize the masses and create informed debate is alive and well. He suggests we have always produces a mix of these outcomes and will inevitably continue to do so, but now we have the address the mix of journalistic processes. He thinks the right way to look at this is to asses what outcome to they produce in terms of quality of leadership. Suro also touches on Cass Sunstein’s polarization concern in that is will produce less effective governance: we need to understand how a mix of new and old media can create a megaphone that artificially amplifies a voice that might not be the most effective.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

I’m at Berkman’s Media Re:public Forum and Richard Sambrook, director of Global News at the BBC is giving the first talk. He is something of a technological visionary and his primary concern is with how technology is affecting the ability of, not only traditional media but anyone, to set the international news agenda.

The model that news stories may break on the blogs and travel to main stream media seems incomplete to Sambrook and he hopes to use the news audience to develop the agenda in an interactive way through network journalism. An example he gives is how the BBC puts their NewsNight show’s agenda online in the morning and invites people to comment on the choice of stories and angles they are taking on them. But this seems quite small, and as Ethan Zuckerman points out in a question, not much of a change in paradigm: Zuckerman laments that main stream media is trying to involve the public on their terms and in their way, through site-hosted comments and being quite closed about sharing their content. Sambrook explains this as slowness of cultural change at organizations like the BBC and is changing. For example, BBC video can now be hosted on any site. Sambrook is also worried that they just can’t seem to find the audience – the right people to engage with in various areas. He notes that the top ten sites (Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia Fox News etc) control 1 billion eyeballs. He doesn’t think current business models are sustainable and perhaps energy should be directed into a different metric than eyeballs to more accurately measure engagement and be able to monetize it.

Sambrook notes that across main stream media it is well understood that the future of news is online but there are cultural legacies within main stream media and even where there aren’t solutions to new problems aren’t obvious. Sambrook gives the example of the BBC’s river boat trip through Bangladesh. They experimented with several ways of reaching potentially interested audiences: twitter, google maps to track the boat, images on Flickr, radio and traditional news. They had 26 followers on twitter and 50k on Flicker but millions on the radio. This highlights the difficulty news outlets are having reaching their audience – the methods chosen are key, and how to do this is not obvious.

Sambrook says that he sees an upcoming tipping point for the data-driven web, or semantic web, in news applications. For Sambrook, this manifests as an improvement in the personalization of news. He mentions the BBC’s dashboard tool – a way to pull content from all over the BBC’s website to suit your interests and tastes. He is also concerned about the tension with agenda setting: “who is the curator of the kind of news you are interested in?” This also brings to mind Cass Sunstein’s polarization critique of the internet, especially for news delivered online – that we will only seek out news that fundamentally agrees with our own opinions and create echo chambers in which we never hear opposing thinking and thus open discourse and debate becomes stultified. He seems to see the future as communication within communities and he frames the problem as finding the right community and getting them involved in an effective way.

Crossposted at Victoria Stodden

Why does this video exist? More specifically, why is the story of Fouad Mourtada, a young Moroccan imprisoned for creating a false Facebook profile, on the evening news in Chile? The answer may surprise you.

We are accustomed to receiving news at the speed of light. We expect to see major events around the globe occurring in real time. Networks like CNN and the BBC bring the world into our living rooms and onto our laptop screens not only on the evening news but all day long.

For media outlets without a network of far-flung correspondents, wire services like Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP) create ready-to-print news stories and then sell them to other news organizations (*). This combination of correspondents and wire services is how we get most of our news.

But there are other options as well and, with the increasingly global nature of social networks, these methods of news dissemination may become more common.

Take the Fouad case, for example. I lived in Chile for 6 months in 2006-2007. While there I met Alberto Precht, with whom I share an interest in digital activism. I moved away from Chile almost a year ago but, through the wonders of such free communication tools as GChat and Facebook we kept in touch. In fact, we became closer friends because we actually communicate more often online while living on separate continents than we did when we were both living in Santiago de Chile.

I also have a Moroccan friend whom I met online. When Fouad was arrested this friend told me what had happened. I then told Alberto and, being a dedicated activist, he decided to get involved, even starting a Spanish-language Facebook group to support Fouad. When he was interviewed by a Chilean news program he mentioned Fouad’s case and – lo and behold – the news of Fouad traveled from Morocco to Chile in two interpersonal links in a social network.

Now, as an isolated phenomenon this means relatively little. It’s a fluke. But if it were a common occurrence it would become more significant. The way we currently think of ordinary people influencing the news is through blogs, and the effects are usually domestic. Bloggers, especially in the US, are opinion-makers, and for this reason reporters read those blogs and sometimes take their lead on stories, particularly in the field of politics.

The social network is another way for ordinary citizens to effect the news cycle, and the implications are similar as those for blogging: we represent a new series of interests and priorities and a fundamentally different perspective of what is newsworthy than the commercial services, which often play what will get high ratings: car chases, stories of the bizarre, celebrity gossip.

Too often they pander rather than challenge. They guess at what the viewer wants, often appealing to the lowest common denominator. When citizens have the ability to disseminate news they are actively telling media outlets what they care about, rather than being the passive recipients of others’ priorities.

I would like to see the Fouad case replicated, to see international social network “wire services” become a more robust phenomenon. Citizens have already taken on the role of correspondent and columnist. Is it so much to ask that we also begin to replicate complex international news organizations? Blog networks like Global Voices are already starting to fill this role. We have the tools and networks to make it happen.

I haven’t seen any evidence that the internet was an important facilitator of the organization of the protests in Tibet, but citizen reporting on the events in Lhasa beginning March 10 made heavy use of the internet. The interesting question is whether perspectives other than the official view are getting through to discussions inside China. There is a common belief that one of the biggest potential benefits of the internet is its ability to thrust free speech on a country whether the government likes it or not. The internet is thought to be just too porous and too amorphous for blocking to be successful for long – another site will carry the blocked content and technology will circumvent the blocks or get ahead of censorship.

It is clear how events were communicated to the world, through both traditional main stream media correspondent reporting (now first hand foreign correspondent reports are impossible (see Rose Luqiu’s and Ming Pao’s entries)), and the internet including: human rights reports; YouTube videos of the violence; cell phone videos; and pictures; and summary sites for example. The interesting question is whether the internet has facilitated communication about these events within China in a more open way than Chinese officials might prefer. For example, there are Chinese citizen reports that the news is forbidden to carry any stories related to the protests, YouTube has been blocked since March 15, same with Google news, and there are reports of internet searches returning results that include only the government version of events. For a fantastic discussion of Chinese media censorship see this OpenNet Initiative blog post.

Bothbloggers and twitter style posts (Fanfou and Jiwai in China) are reporting in real time on the events in Lhasa. Fanfou appears to be just such a technology that the Chinese government is not blocking completely. Some Fanfou users seem to be posting information the Chinese government might be sensitive about (such as “troops have now been dispatched toward Tibet. Wuhouci Rd. going both north and south have been completely sealed off…” and “Faint, it looks like we really are at war. Ximianqiao St and Wuhouci Rd. are all blocked off”, with posts like “For the most part Tibet related webpages are all closed” and “If Tibet is really rebelling, tomorrow we won’t be allowed to discuss this topic…” (both posted March 15). And posted on March 16: “Baidu Baike has locked out the term “Tibet” wiki has partially blocked the term” and “Can’t visit youtube, I wanted to see videos of the Taiwan traffic incident, Tibet incident, the UN referendum (in Taiwan), arggghh.” Translating and collecting these tweets has been the work of Davesgonechina as he encourages people in the West to engage the Chinese through Fanfou and Google’s Chinese/English translation tools.

It seems much of the Chinese blogosphere is censored within the PRC. Popular blogs in China such as EastSouthWestNorth were quick to report eyewitness accounts although in this case the poster says “note: This blog post was copied from elsewhere; attempts to post this blog post in China ends with eventual deletion.” Another report from within the PRC, at the the time of the protests, calls the Chinese blogosphere “a wind of peace, richness and harmony” with “movie stars’ and beauty’s pictures, seven-colored front page, but nothing related to what’s happening in Tibet, except a tiny link “Tibet” under the headline “traveling”” at Bokee.com, the self proclaimed “No.1 global Chinese BSP (blog service provider).” Blog readers from within China acknowledge the availability of information from the blogosphere that is not available in the main stream press.

Most reports of blogs and twitter style posts note that there is anger from Chinese citizens toward Tibet, and toward Western support of Tibet (such as Richard Gere’s call for a boycott of the 2008 Olympics). As Rebecca MacKinnon writes “John Kennedy has translated chatter from Chinese blogs and chatrooms that generally runs along the lines of: those ungrateful minorities, we give them modern conveniences and look how they thank us…” Many commentators are concluding this is the inevitable result of a state controlled media, but I suspect this is too facile. As discussed above, it appears there is some information on the internet that does not appear in the main stress press in the PRC. It is not a crazy notion that the events in Tibet might solidify grassroots Chinese support of official Chinese behavior, even if the press is fully transparent. The fact that information is getting through is vitally important, even if public opinion appears to be unswayed, or swayed in ways the West might not understand.

Just the fact that some of the communication on blogs and on twitter-like sites that would ordinarily be a target for censorship appears within the PRC is an enormous success for those who champion the internet as an unstoppable force for free speech. This step, albeit an involuntary one, toward the open and free flow of information should not be overlooked in media analysis of the coverage of Tibet.

Crossposted in Victoria Stodden