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Internews helps Southern Journalists Hold Key Climate Negotiators to Account at UN Summit JamesFahn/Internews Climate Change fellows interview a German environment official (December 12, 2008) Reporters supported by Internews and its partners at the international climate negotiations underway in Poznan, Poland have made their mark in a series of scoops that have forced negotiators to take their responsibilities towards the developing world more seriously. Navin Khadka, a journalist with the BBC Nepali Service, highlighted a crucial two-year delay caused by bureaucratic fumbling in the approval of Nepal’s national plan to adapt to climate change. His work sparked an escalating blame game between two agencies and led to calls for a complete overhaul of the system. “There is an inherent complexity to access the fund, which needs to be reformed totally if the developing countries are to adapt to the challenges of climate change,” commented Saleemul Haq, head of the climate change group at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Another example of the impact that developing world journalists made on the summit came at an event where the Norwegian Environment Minister, Erik Solheim, announced the creation of a fund to support sustainable energy technologies. In describing an example of what the fund could do, he cited the possibility of replacing the dirty and unsafe mobile generators supplying electricity for shops on the streets of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Little did the Minister know that there were journalists from Sierra Leone and Liberia in the audience. Harold Williams, a reporter for Africanews.com, subsequently asked whether there had been any studies of the impact such a project might have on Sierra Leoneans in the generator business. The Minister had to admit there had been no such studies, but seemed pleased nonetheless to have been posed the question, and before leaving made a point of going up and shaking Harold’s hand. Harold Williams and Navin Khadka are reporting from the UN Climate Summit thanks to the Climate Change Media Partnership (CCMP), an ambitious program launched at the Bali Summit in 2006 by Internews, Panos and IIED to scale up the quantity and quality of coverage of climate change issues and the international negotiations. The CCMP has brought 37 journalists from 29 developing countries to Poznan, Poland where the latest talks are being hosted. “We are more than just the largest media bloc here at the UN Summit in terms of number of journalists in Poznan and reach to hundreds of millions of people,” said James Fahn, the Director of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network. “According to the UN coordinators of the negotiations, who have been following our output, we are also providing some of the best informed, balanced reporting to key countries in the climate change fray, such as India.” For Internews and its partners in the CCMP, Poznan is a key steppingstone for the endgame negotiations to be held in Copenhagen at the end of 2009. “Every day here in Poznan our journalists have reported on how their own governments are either opening up or blocking the road to Copenhagen,” said Internews’ Mark Harvey. “2009 will be a definitive year for the world’s climate, and journalists supported by Internews, Panos and IIED will be there in force to ensure that audiences in the developing world get a ringside seat on what is being decided in their name.” The Climate Change Media Partnership’s work in Poland is funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, the Germeshausen Foundation, the World Bank Institute for Sustainable Development, the Ashden Trust, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation. About the Climate Change Media Partnership The Climate Change Media Partnership was created in 2007 to bring journalists to the UN climate change summit in Bali. The journalists produced around 720 stories during the summit and have gone on to cover climate change in depth over the past year. To interview any of the journalists who attended the Bali summit, please contact: mike.shanahan@iied.org For more information on the Climate Change Media Partnership see: www.climatemediapartnership.org After the success of last year's CCMP work in Bali, there was intense competition for this year's program. Of the 1092 journalists who requested information about the fellowships, 391 applied. The journalists selected to attend this year’s UN climate change summit in Poland are from Antigua; Bangladesh; Bhutan; Brazil; Cambodia; Cameroon; China; Colombia; Ethiopia; India; Indonesia; Jamaica; Kenya; Kyrgyzstan; Laos; Liberia; Madagascar; Malawi; Malaysia; Mexico; Mongolia; Myanmar; Nepal; Nigeria; Peru; Sierra Leone; Suriname; Uganda; Vietnam; and Zambia. The United Nations Development Programme’s 2007 Human Development Report on climate change states: “The media have a critical role to play in informing and changing public opinion. Apart from their role in scrutinising government actions and holding policymakers to account, the media are the main source of information for the general public on climate change science.” The heads of both the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, have urged the media to do more to address climate change. See: * UN seeks media partnership on climate change * More Media Coverage of Climate Change a Necessity
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The Huffington Post - the Internet Newspaper: News blogs video community
The Permanent Campaign Has No Borders
December 18, 2008
By David Hoffman, Internews Network President
Why stop here? What started in America can spread across the globe. Having demonstrated the massive power of digitally connected social networks to transform the political landscape, the Obama campaign has reinvented the architecture of democracy. Entrenched power centers and special interests will retain substantial influence, but newly mobilized cyber citizens will increasingly define the national agenda. The four-year cycle of electoral politics will give way to the Permanent Campaign.
In the Permanent Campaign, partisan politics are not replaced by bipartisan compromise; they are transcended by post-partisan ad hoc coalitions built around issues. The Rovian politicization of government was a petri dish of inbred incompetence. David Axelrod's shock troops came together to bring about change, but they are more tactical than ideological. The Bush universe was static and inflexible; the Obamian is technocratic, open source and responsive. Politics in America will never be the same.
But neither will it be in the rest of the world. The unprecedented attention and passionate interest in the US election ensures that people everywhere will learn the lessons of Obama's victory. The 2008 election dramatically reverses the global narrative. Osama mania may begin to be replaced by Obama mania. The idea that the son of an African man could become president of the United States is certain to inspire the youth of the developing world. Whereas President Bush tried to impose democracy on the world from the top down and bring regime change by force of arms, Barack Obama's campaign can spread the virus of grassroots activism through the same kind of participatory media that fueled his campaign.
A smart, power-driven foreign policy has the potential to infect closed societies everywhere with the germ of freedom. To take the maximum advantage of this transformative moment, however, the new administration will have to do a radical makeover of the post-WWII, Cold War era United States public diplomacy apparatus. The foreign broadcasting budget swelled to $650 million dollars after 9/11. Arab language satellite television and radio stations were launched, but they failed miserably to gain an audience. Small wonder. People everywhere prefer getting their news from local sources. Al Jazeera's English language channel similarly failed to penetrate the American heartland.
In our hyper-connected digital world, governments cannot compete with YouTube in defining the narrative about international events. "Official" sources of information have little credibility. The government's role, rather, should be one of facilitating the growth of independent media and the unfettered use of the Internet and mobile phone technology. With a tenth of the budget spent on foreign broadcasting, US media NGOs have trained tens of thousands of journalists and helped start thousands of independent radio and television stations. Content management systems in Farsi have allowed new online and print publications to proliferate in Iran. Schoolchildren in Egypt are being taught how to use the new media tools. An SMS text news service is spreading across Sri Lanka. Independent radio stations are broadcasting programs about gender and tolerance from inside the tribal areas of Pakistan, and a network of radio stations has been established throughout Afghanistan -- all with relatively small amounts of US foreign assistance funds.
The principles of applying smart power to international relations are the same as the community organizing strategies that Barack Obama honed on the streets of Chicago. Instead of pre-packaged messages broadcast overseas, building the capacity of local media, independent bloggers, citizen journalists and investigative reporters, promotes transparency and creates a culture of democratic activism. Providing people with the tools to get the information they need and a voice that can be heard strengthens local communities and empowers public citizenship. The message can no longer be controlled. Information breeds freedom.
The Permanent Campaign is a dynamic model that poses a threat to authoritarian regimes everywhere. The hunger for change is not confined to America. If Barack Hussein Obama can succeed in overthrowing George W. Bush, then democracy is demonstrably real and people everywhere, no matter their race or identity, can start saying, "yes we can." President Obama can facilitate the spread of democracy without even mentioning the word. By championing the cause of information access as a universal human right, Obama will spread the Permanent Campaign to every corner of the earth. The technology for viral organizing is there. Two-thirds of the world has mobile phones and two billion people are online. This information space is vastly different than the tightly controlled airwaves of the Cold War era when our foreign broadcasting system was born. A new foreign assistance strategy that supports the growth of local independent media and universal access will restore American leadership in the cause of freedom. In the information age, the Permanent Campaign has no borders.
David Hoffman is President of Internews Network, a non-profit organization that has worked in over 70 countries to empower local media worldwide.
(Source:Internews)
***
The Huffington Post - the Internet Newspaper: News blogs video community
The Permanent Campaign Has No Borders
December 18, 2008
By David Hoffman, Internews Network President
Why stop here? What started in America can spread across the globe. Having demonstrated the massive power of digitally connected social networks to transform the political landscape, the Obama campaign has reinvented the architecture of democracy. Entrenched power centers and special interests will retain substantial influence, but newly mobilized cyber citizens will increasingly define the national agenda. The four-year cycle of electoral politics will give way to the Permanent Campaign.
In the Permanent Campaign, partisan politics are not replaced by bipartisan compromise; they are transcended by post-partisan ad hoc coalitions built around issues. The Rovian politicization of government was a petri dish of inbred incompetence. David Axelrod's shock troops came together to bring about change, but they are more tactical than ideological. The Bush universe was static and inflexible; the Obamian is technocratic, open source and responsive. Politics in America will never be the same.
But neither will it be in the rest of the world. The unprecedented attention and passionate interest in the US election ensures that people everywhere will learn the lessons of Obama's victory. The 2008 election dramatically reverses the global narrative. Osama mania may begin to be replaced by Obama mania. The idea that the son of an African man could become president of the United States is certain to inspire the youth of the developing world. Whereas President Bush tried to impose democracy on the world from the top down and bring regime change by force of arms, Barack Obama's campaign can spread the virus of grassroots activism through the same kind of participatory media that fueled his campaign.
A smart, power-driven foreign policy has the potential to infect closed societies everywhere with the germ of freedom. To take the maximum advantage of this transformative moment, however, the new administration will have to do a radical makeover of the post-WWII, Cold War era United States public diplomacy apparatus. The foreign broadcasting budget swelled to $650 million dollars after 9/11. Arab language satellite television and radio stations were launched, but they failed miserably to gain an audience. Small wonder. People everywhere prefer getting their news from local sources. Al Jazeera's English language channel similarly failed to penetrate the American heartland.
In our hyper-connected digital world, governments cannot compete with YouTube in defining the narrative about international events. "Official" sources of information have little credibility. The government's role, rather, should be one of facilitating the growth of independent media and the unfettered use of the Internet and mobile phone technology. With a tenth of the budget spent on foreign broadcasting, US media NGOs have trained tens of thousands of journalists and helped start thousands of independent radio and television stations. Content management systems in Farsi have allowed new online and print publications to proliferate in Iran. Schoolchildren in Egypt are being taught how to use the new media tools. An SMS text news service is spreading across Sri Lanka. Independent radio stations are broadcasting programs about gender and tolerance from inside the tribal areas of Pakistan, and a network of radio stations has been established throughout Afghanistan -- all with relatively small amounts of US foreign assistance funds.
The principles of applying smart power to international relations are the same as the community organizing strategies that Barack Obama honed on the streets of Chicago. Instead of pre-packaged messages broadcast overseas, building the capacity of local media, independent bloggers, citizen journalists and investigative reporters, promotes transparency and creates a culture of democratic activism. Providing people with the tools to get the information they need and a voice that can be heard strengthens local communities and empowers public citizenship. The message can no longer be controlled. Information breeds freedom.
The Permanent Campaign is a dynamic model that poses a threat to authoritarian regimes everywhere. The hunger for change is not confined to America. If Barack Hussein Obama can succeed in overthrowing George W. Bush, then democracy is demonstrably real and people everywhere, no matter their race or identity, can start saying, "yes we can." President Obama can facilitate the spread of democracy without even mentioning the word. By championing the cause of information access as a universal human right, Obama will spread the Permanent Campaign to every corner of the earth. The technology for viral organizing is there. Two-thirds of the world has mobile phones and two billion people are online. This information space is vastly different than the tightly controlled airwaves of the Cold War era when our foreign broadcasting system was born. A new foreign assistance strategy that supports the growth of local independent media and universal access will restore American leadership in the cause of freedom. In the information age, the Permanent Campaign has no borders.
David Hoffman is President of Internews Network, a non-profit organization that has worked in over 70 countries to empower local media worldwide.
(Source:Internews)
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