Paul and Selwyn deep dive into the battle to control a narrative, waged by all sides in a polarised combative world, and how modern mainstream media institutions, like Radio New Zealand, fall vulnerable in the absence of robust all-sides-considered analysis and debate.

In this episode, Paul and Selwyn analyse how fourth Estate bias, propaganda, and conflict-force fact-vacuums are the challenge of our times in this disinformation age.

Upon this context, Paul and Selwyn consider:

* Why Is the Radio New Zealand sub-editor pro-RU-content debacle symptomatic of a fact-vacuum environment?

* Why is all media vulnerable to disinformation in the absence of robust NATO-Ukraine-Russia analysis?

* What are the unspoken of ‘big picture’ shifts in Russian Federation / Global South relations?

LINKS and REFERENCES:

• https://KiwiPolitico.com
• https://www.dekoder.org/de/person/ekaterina-schulmann-0
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/media/180
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/news-extras/story/2018893905/rnz-editorial-audit
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/top/491788/nz-entering-ukraine-conflict-at-whim-of-govt-former-labour-general-secretary
• https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/25/russia-ends-nowhere-they-say
• https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-russian-elites-think-putins-war-is-doomed-to-fail

INTERACTION:

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You can continue to interact with this podcast, simply by going to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

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For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
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• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

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Twenty years after the 9/11 attacks prompted the US to invade Afghanistan, the Taliban announced they have taken the whole country again last week.

Journalists who remain there are at risk in spite of assurances media freedom will be respected.

Will proper journalism be possible under the Taliban? We ask a former foreign correspondent there who was once jailed by another repressive regime.

Anyone filling their lockdown downtime binge-watching the final series of US spy show Homeland might have found its fictionalised account of the US trying to get out of Afghanistan in a hurry pretty prescient.

“It’ll be Saigon all over again,” the gravelly-voiced Afghan president says as he warns the US that making peace with the Taliban will end in tears.

When the US troops left this month, it was indeed a case of “choppers at the embassy compound” once more.

And after that, getting other people out who feared the Taliban became a story all of its own.

RNZAF and NZDF forces dispatched to get out New Zealand citizens and visa holders provided the media with dramatic stories of improvised rescues.

One  exclusive in the New Zealand Herald described a grandmother in a wheelchair hauled out from the crowd via a sewage filled ditch, illustrated with NZDF images and footage.

But while the government said it got about 390 people out of the country, Scoop’s Gordon Campbell pointed out authorities here have not said how many were already New Zealand citizens — or Afghan citizens or contractors whose service put them and their family members in danger.

Afghan translator Bashir Ahmad — who worked for the NZDF in Bamiyan province and came to New Zealand subsequently — told RNZ’s Morning Report he knew of 36 more people still stuck there.

Sticking around

The end of 20 years of US occupation was witnessed by BBC’s veteran correspondent Lyse Doucet. She was also there in 1989 reporting for Canada’s CBC when the Soviet Union’s forces pulled out after its occupation that lasted almost a decade.

Back then she pondered how she would work when power changed hands to the Mujaheddin. Thirty-two years on, herself and others in Afghanistan — including New Zealander Charlotte Bellis who reports from Kabul for global channel Al Jazeera — are also wondering what the Taliban has in store for them.

The last time the Taliban were in charge — 1996 to 2001 — the media were heavily controlled and independent journalism was almost impossible.

Local and international media have flourished in Afghanistan after the US ousted the Taliban 20 years ago – but now their future is far from clear.

The Taliban have offered reassurances it will respect press freedoms. On August 21 they announced a committee including journalists would be created to “address the problems of the media in Kabul.”

But some have already reported harassment and confiscation of equipment. Five journalists from Etilaatroz, a daily newspaper in Kabul, were arrested and beaten by Taliban, the editor-in-chief said on Wednesday.

The #Taliban has arrested and badly beaten two journalists from @Etilaatroz . They journalists were covering demonstration in #Kabul. #Taliban_has_not_changed pic.twitter.com/gGZgWeXSFa

— Abdul Farid Ahmad (@FaridAhmad1919) September 8, 2021

Other local journalists got out while they could.

The day before the suicide attack outside Kabul airport the BBC’s Lyse Doucet found pioneering journalist Wahida Faizi — head of the women’s section of the Afghanistan Journalists Safety Committee — on the tarmac trying to get out. (Faizi has reportedly reached Denmark safely since then through the assistance of Copenhagen-based group  International Media Support.)

In the meantime, the Taliban have been getting to know reporters who are still there.

Charlotte Bellis told RNZ’s Sunday Morning she was sticking around to cover what happens next in Afghanistan and build relationships  with the Taliban — and even give them advice.

“I told them … if you’re going to run the country you need to build trust and you need to be transparent and authentic – and do as much media as you can to try and reassure people that they don’t need to be scared of you,” she said.

It helps that Al Jazeera is based in Qatar where the Taliban have a political office.

Earlier this month, the Taliban’s slick spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi told Charlotte Bellis they were grateful for New Zealand offering financial aid to Afghanistan.

But that money is for the UN agencies and the Red Cross and Red Crescent operations — and not an endorsement of the Taliban takeover.

That prompted the former chief of the UN Development Programme – Helen Clark – to call in to Newstalk ZB to say the media had been spun.

“They’ve cottoned on to the fact they can use social media for propaganda,” she told Newstalk ZB.

“When journalists run these stories it implies that governments are supporting the Taliban when nothing could be further from the truth,” Clark said.

How should the media deal with an outfit which turfed the recognised government out of power — and whose real intentions are not yet known?

The Taliban’s governing cabinet named last week has several hardliners — and no women.

Will reporters really be able to report under the Taliban from now on?

Peter Greste was the BBC’s correspondent in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s when the Taliban was poised to take over the first time — and he is now the UNESCO chair in journalism at the University of Queensland.

“We need to make it abundantly clear to the Taliban that they need to stick to their promises to protect journalists and media workers — and let them continue to work. The Taliban‘s words and actions don’t always align but at the very least we need to start with that,” Greste said.

“And we need to give refuge and visas to media workers who want to get out,” he said.

“Watching the way they treat journalists is going to be an important barometer of the way they plan to operate,” said Greste, who is working with the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom to monitor abuses and to create an online “Afghan media freedom tracker”.

“There’s been an obvious gap between the spokespeople who say they are prepared to let journalists operate and women continue to work — and the troubling reports of attacks by Taliban fighters on the ground, going door-to-door looking for journalists and their families,” he said.

“We need to maintain communications with them. We need to use all the tools we can to make sure we are across where all the people are. Afghanistan’s borders are like Swiss cheese. It’s not always easy to get across — but it is possible,” he said.

Peter Greste said the translators and fixers the international journalists rely on are absolutely critical to international media.

“Good translators don’t just translate the words– but help you understand the context. To simply give refuge just to the people who have their faces in their stories and names on bylines is not fair,” Greste said.

Greste was jailed for months in Egypt on trumped-up charges in 2014 along with local colleagues when the regime there decided it didn’t like their reporting for Al Jazeera.

It triggered a remarkable campaign in which rival media outlets banded together to demand their release under the slogan “Journalism is not a crime”.

Does he fear for journalists if the Taliban resort to old ways of handling the media?

Will we even know if they make life impossible for media and journalists outside the capital in the future?

“The country has mobile phone networks now it has social media networks. It is possible to find out what’s going on in those regions and it’s going to be difficult for the Taliban to uphold that mirage – if that’s what it is,” he said.

“I’m not prepared at this point to write them off as an workable and we need to acknowledge the realities of what just happened in Afghanistan,” he said.

When Greste first arrived in Afghanistan for the BBC in 1994 there was no reliable electricity supply even in the capital city — let alone local television like TOLO news.

“One of the great successes of the last decade or two has been the flowering of local media. Western organisations and donors and Afghans have understood that having a free media is one of the most important aspects of having a functioning society,” he said.

Afghans have really taken to that with real enthusiasm. The number of outlets and journalists has been phenomenal. You can’t put that genie back in his bottle without some serious consequences,” Greste told Mediawatch.

The regime in Egypt wasn’t afraid to imprison him and his colleagues back in 2014. Does he fear for international reporters like Charlotte Bellis and her colleagues?

“Al Jazeera will have a lot of security in place to make sure the operation is protected,” Greste said.

“But of course I worry for Charlotte — and also the staff at work with her. As a foreign correspondent though, I think you enjoy more protection than most other journos locally,” Greste said.

“If my name had been Mohammed and not Peter and if I’d been Egyptian and not Australian or a foreigner there wouldn’t have been anywhere near the kind of outrage and consequences for the government,” Greste said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is winning praise for her campaign to clean up the internet, and in particular for her announcement of the “Christchurch Call” Summit to be held with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris next month. And if they can come up with some meaningful and effective ways to make the internet less available to terrorists and violent extremists then this will be a major accomplishment.

Regulating the internet is notoriously difficult, however. It might be one of the big issues of our time, but no one seems to have the answers for how to do it in a way that will be both effective and satisfactory. There’s a good chance the whole episode will amount to yet another talkfest of platitudes and politicking. This is certainly the view of Newstalk ZB’s Barry Soper, who forecasts an outcome of “full, frank and meaningless words” – see: Irony to New Zealand and France’s terrorism summit next month.

Not only this, Soper suggests that the motivations for the summit are opportunistic: “The idea no doubt came from the French President Emmanuel Macron who’s been haemorrhaging in the opinion polls at home… The international voice of reason and compassion Jacinda Ardern would have immediately come to mind and the pledge she’s now calling the Christchurch Call was born.”

The Herald’s political editor takes umbrage at such scepticism, declaring this type of view out of place: “They are the sort of critic who would never start anything unless success were guaranteed. The suggestion that Ardern do nothing after the murders of 50 people in New Zealand were live-streamed and shared on social media is to deny human nature and New Zealand’s own instincts” – see: Jacinda Ardern is knee-deep in planning joint initiative with France.

Audrey Young predicts real change will emerge from a difficult area of reform: “It won’t eliminate the evils that lurk within social media. But it won’t be nothing either.” She sees it as a positive sign that Ardern and Macron are being so inclusive in their approach: “Ardern’s natural instincts are to collaborate as broadly as possible… That factor alone makes it important to get co-operation from social media themselves, rather than using heavy-handed regulation or attempting to bully the corporates into participation.”

However, as with other international agreements, the more people you bring to the table, the greater the likelihood of a watered-down outcome. And this is the point made in Tom Pullar-Strecker’s article, The devil will be in the detail of the ‘Christchurch Call’. This reports Colin Gavaghan, director of the Centre for Law and Policy in Emerging Technologies at Otago University, as cautioning against going too broadly: “The risk, he argues, is you can end up with texts that are pitched at such a level that ‘no-one could disagree with them’ but which don’t tend to mean anything in practice.”

Pullar-Strecker’s article emphasises the uniqueness of this summit, as normally the outcomes are relatively pre-determined, with a text negotiated in advance for participants to sign up to. This won’t necessarily happen in this instance.

The success or otherwise of the initiative will be determined, it seems, by how ambitious the internet regulation campaign ends up being. Ardern, herself, is very keen to see a narrow focus for the regulations, which deal specifically with the online sharing of terrorist acts. Ardern says: “This is not about freedom of expression. This is about preventing violence and extremism and terrorism online”.

This approach is easier than going down the route of attempting to take on “hate speech” and extremist politics in general. And that is also the advice of Paul Brislen: “There are a number of things they should be looking at. The trick will be narrowing it down to something that is achievable because there are so many things that are getting out of control with the world of social media that need a regulator to step in… Trying to stay focused is going to be critical” – see Thomas Coughlan’s Speculation rife on value of ‘Christchurch Call’.

But even a focus just on violence and terrorism could be incredibly difficult. The same article makes this point: “Victoria University of Wellington media studies lecturer Peter Thompson said just defining what terrorism was presented difficulties. ‘It’s not a straightforward thing to decide what is and isn’t terrorism: live-streaming mass murder, well yes, but how do you decide which groups are considered terrorists or not?’ he said.”

Rick Shera from Netsafe and Internet NZ is also pleased that the Government is focused on dealing to the narrower and less contentious issue of terrorism: “I’m glad we are sticking to violent extremism and terrorism. Once you go into fake news, damage to democracy and other forms of online harm it becomes very difficult. Freedom of speech and the US position on that make it hard to make gains, so if the target is narrow it may be easier” – see Colin Peacock’s Does social media reform have the law on its side?

In this article by Peacock, the major issue of the United States is brought into the debate. After all, the US tech companies are based there, and benefit from that country’s very strong ethos and constitutional protections of political freedoms. This is lamented by some participants in the debate. For example, Internet NZ’s chief executive Jordan Carter is quoted, saying “The nature of their black and white constitutional protections on free speech in the US – and the current state of their politics – don’t leave me with any confidence that they will be able to drive change in this area”.

Clearly, the strong US resistance to censorship and over-regulation of speech means that Ardern’s “Christchurch Call” could run into problems. And it’s not just the US Constitution that might stymie reform, as explained by tech expert and journalist Bill Bennett, in Peacock’s article: “The problem with the US is they have two things that stop them from acting. One is the First Amendment which is all about free speech and not censoring people. The second thing is something called Section 230 that gives social media companies an out. They are not responsible for things posted on their site”.

There are, however, some major debates going on in the US about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. And the above article reports internet law academic Eric Goldman suggesting that any subsequent changes from that debate might be crucial: “He thinks cutbacks of Section 230’s scope do pose serious risks to free speech online. So is it the outcome of this behind-the-scenes legal argument playing out in the US right now – and not a headline-making political summit in France – which will really determine whether internet giants take responsibility for extreme content on their platforms?”

For the best discussion of these political freedom issues, see Gordon Campbell’s column, On Ardern and Macron’s campaign against violent social media content. In this, Campbell explains what might be coming after two decades of self-regulation of the internet, given the strong political appetite for serious regulation.

He worries that Ardern and co will end up going beyond just the clampdown on terrorist and extremist violence, and might produce something that impacts on general political activity: “Once you get beyond those low hanging fruit….it becomes difficult to censor online content without doing real damage to freedom of expression, and to genuine political dissent. It would be unfortunate if the best friends of the Ardern/Macron initiatives turn out to be the tyrants in countries that would (a) dearly love to see tech companies forced to hand over the keys to encryption, and (b) would readily embrace further restrictions being put on the online content their dissidents are allowed to post.”

He also believes regulation could ultimately prove unpopular, which is why Facebook and the like want it to be carried out by governments, “presumably, so that the politicians then get to wear the backlash once people realise the full implications of allowing the state to define and police the content deemed acceptable on the Net.”

Mostly likely, there will be simple progress made in Paris, such as tightening up of Facebook Live. The big question will be whether online providers end up having to do more vetting of content before it’s published, which would be of huge consequence, and what Campbell calls a “disastrous outcome”.

And he gives the example of his own media platform, Scoop: “Every year, Scoop also publishes close on a million New Zealand press releases issued by all and sundry. In that respect, Scoop functions as a national community noticeboard. It rejects press releases that contain libels and/or socially inflammatory hate speech. Imagine though, if Scoop was required to pre-check every one of those press releases for accuracy, balance and for whether or not they might hurt the feelings of people in public office. It would not be remotely practical or affordable for Scoop to do so – and its efforts would be gamed by those with malice in mind against the organisations issuing the press releases in question.”

Similarly, Internet NZ’s Jordan Carter suggests that relying on artificial intelligence to vet and remove content could be a problem: “Applying overly tight automated filtering would lead to very widespread overblocking. What if posting a Radio New Zealand story about the Sri Lanka attacks over the weekend on Facebook was automatically blocked? Imagine if a link to a donations site for the victims of the Christchurch attacks led to the same outcome? How about sharing a video of TV news reports on either story?”.

Carter has his own list of “six thoughts” about how to make the regulation of the internet work, including keeping the scope of the exercise narrow, and striking the right balance between “preventing the spread of such abhorrent material on the one hand, and maintaining free expression on the other” – see: How to stop the ‘Christchurch Call’ on social media and terrorism falling flat.

There really will be difficulties, no matter what approach is chosen. Claire Trevett points out: “As with climate change, making the right noises and getting the desired results are two very different things. It will be something akin to Hercules wrestling the Hydra. As soon as one head is chopped off, another two will appear” – see: PM Jacinda Ardern gathers allies to wrestle the social-media Hydra.

And it’s the politicians themselves who might have the most to lose, given their increasing preference to use Facebook and the like “to bypass the filter of the traditional media and speak directly to supporters and voters. This has some pluses for those politicians – but not necessarily for democracy. Over-reliance on social media over journalistic media allows them to escape questioning on issues they may not want to face. Macron has also come in for criticism for trying to stifle the ‘Yellow Vest’ protest use of social media. Ardern herself has been known to vote with her fingers when it comes to expressing her disapproval with certain social media platforms.”

Facebook and Instagram have been key parts of Ardern’s campaigning, and Trevett points out that “in the last election, Labour spent $475,000 on advertising on Facebook – four times as much as National – as it tried to appeal to younger voters.”

Finally, for the lighter side of the debate and some apparent irregularities in social media regulation, see Hamish McNeilly’s Gone in 20 minutes: Facebook strips student nude mag cover and Andrew Gunn’s We’re taking urgent steps to address this.