Weekend Flea Market 5-Oct-07

An assortment of stuff I came across in cyberspace, offered second hand, for anyone who may be interested.

• If you haven’t read it already, Thomas Friedman’s penultimate op-ed 9/11 Is Over, is a must-read.
• China has now started blocking all RSS feeds as well.
• A woman has been sentenced to death by stoning in Iran for committing adultery. Kamangir and a group of Iranian bloggers are trying to stop that from happening.
• Microsoft launches HealthVault, an online repository where consumers can store medical information for free in an encrypted database. For once, Microsoft beats Google to something!
• Ashok talked about “Collective Intelligence” in the comments discussion on my post “Runaway Train“. Techcrunch reveals that a new site, CrowdChess, has launched. You log on and sign up for a game. Each side is made up of teams of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people. Anyone on a team can suggest the next move, and the move that gets the most votes is the one that is played out. Like Erick, I too wonder if any number of amateurs can ever beat a grandmaster in this scenario! What do you think?
• MMP has his own insightful analysis of why he blogs. He has developed an interesting universal model that shows how we all live in blogging CAVES. Check it out.
• Check out Ashok’s take on the various categories of Indian bloggers to have a healthy laugh at The Blogosphere Zoopedia.
• A US Senate Judiciary Committee has passed the Free Flow of Information Act. There is still a long way to go and final outcome seems uncertain at this stage. See Are Blogging Journalists Shielded? for background information.
• The Economist paints a sordid and bleak picture of the challenges involved in revamping Mumbai. A must-read if you care about Mumbai.
• Financial Times puts Rahul Gandhi’s first populist action after ascending to the Congress secretaryship as the backdrop to describe how political short-termism is hampering retail reforms.
• I had pondered on a few questions regarding cricket’s status in India in my 10 Thoughts on T20 World Cup Win post. Social psychologist Ashis Nandy has some interesting answers in his interview with Outlook magazine. He says there are only three areas of our life—cricket, cinema (Bollywood) and crime that recognize capability wholeheartedly and unconditionally.
• I have written about the contempt of court ruling regarding Justice Sabharwal. Vinod Mehta brings greater clarity to the issue and wisely cautions that if the media and the judiciary engage in a war, the only winners will be the politicians.
• To bring this potpourri full circle back to the US, Rajinder Puri takes on a lot of controversial issues in his take on the decline of the US. Some of his comments resonate with Shefaly’s comments in the discussion on Right To Free Speech: What does it mean?.

Right to Free Speech: What does it mean?

The controversy started last week, when Verizon (one of the two largest telecom carriers in the US), refused to make their network available for a text message program advocating abortion. The program allows people to sign up for messages if they choose, and is a completely voluntary exercise of choice for consumers. Verizon would have earned (some) money from the business, but instead refused it.

The move led to a storm of protests. As NYT observed:

Legal experts said private companies like Verizon probably have the legal right to decide which messages to carry. The laws that forbid common carriers from interfering with voice transmissions on ordinary phone lines do not apply to text messages.

The dispute is a skirmish in the larger battle over the question of “net neutrality” — whether carriers or Internet service providers should have a voice in the content they provide to customers.

CNET opined:

The idea that a telecom carrier will refuse to carry messages based on content is incredibly scary. Could they decide to broadcast messages sent by the Democratic party, but not Republicans? Christian messages but not Jewish? Everybody has a point of view that could be viewed as “controversial or unsavory” to someone else. Apparently the First Amendment does not in itself prohibit such censorship, but we should not accept such an action, which has been likened to the mass censorship of political speech by the Chinese government, no matter whether the carrier agrees with the content or not. Laws that forbid common carriers from interfering with voice transmission on phone lines do not apply to text messages. It’s time to change that law to protect free speech, no matter how it is communicated.

In a swift turn-around, Verizon reversed its decision and decided to carry the message. The Verizon public policy blog attributed the reversal to a dusty, internal policy, but remained ambivalent about whether any such policy will continue to exist in the future.

In the US, newspapers have the right to accept or reject any advertisement for decades. Newspapers are a publishing medium, clearly protected by the First Amendment, as they are liable for what they publish. Radio stations have a right to reject and censor what spots and ads they run (an antiwar campaign was turned down during Vietnam and the court upheld the station’s right to refuse). What about search engines like Google and Yahoo? In February this year, a federal judge settled that question when it gave the same right to search engines as that of newspapers: thus, Google can refuse to accept any ad, without any explanations required.

Free speech and net neutrality advocates like Timothy Karr on Huffington Post are lobbying to convene hearings on telecom censorship policies. If the telecom companies were purely private enterprises, a ruling either way might have been simpler. Being a government regulated industry adds further complications, as Richard Koman argues.

One of the earliest advocates (I could find) who saw all this coming back in 1995, was Nicholas Johnson in the Wired Magazine:

We find ourselves a little late in the free speech day, having already lost our rights to speak through dominant newspapers, broadcast stations and cable.  But insisting on the total separation of content and conduit as the Internet is privatized may still be our best hope.  It’s the only free speech forum left for those of us without $200 million in spare pocket change to buy our own newspaper or TV station.

The court has already ruled that Google is not your public square. Are Verizon and AT&T public squares?

A Case of Contempt

In a contemptuous ruling, the Delhi High Court today sentenced four journalists of Mid-Day newspaper to four months in jail.

It ruled that articles and a cartoon in the newspaper accusing former Chief Justice of India, Mr. Y. K. Sabharwal, were tantamount to contempt of court and would tarnish the image of the highest court in the people’s eyes.

Sabharwal Controversy

Former CJI Sabharwal retired in January this year, after a series of high-profile rulings in his career. In the past few months, he has been embroiled in controversy, especially related to his ruling over banning commercial establishments in residential parts of Delhi. The accusations are that this ruling benefited his son’s commercial enterprises.

Sabharwal broke his silence this month, when he responded to the charges in The Times of India. The Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms, has issued a rejoinder to his defense.

Contempt of Democracy

I wish to focus on the contempt of court ruling by the Delhi High Court, which interestingly was a proceeding initiated suo moto by the Court itself.

The Midday Editor, who was also sentenced, has clarified that they have taken truth to be their defense. They are going to appeal in the Supreme Court.

What is the ‘truth defense’ in this context? The archaic Contempt of Court Act (1971) was amended in 2006 (PDF) to add contempt acts not punishable:

“The court may permit, in any proceeding for contempt of court, justification by truth as a valid defence if it is satisfied that it is in public interest and the request for invoking the said defence is bona fide.”

If the journalists believe they’re telling the truth, why shouldn’t they be allowed the truth defense? Let further inquiry and investigation determine whether the articles and allegations were false, and if so, the journalists can be proceeded against. Gagging the media in such a way is tantamount to contempt of democracy!

Not surprisingly, there is going to be media outrage over this ruling. Experts have argued in the past about how the amendment to the act itself falls short of expectations, and as such is impotent to curtail the draconian contempt powers of the judiciary. A TOI editorial, Contempt for the Pen argues on Mid-Day’s behalf. 18 eminent personalities say “We Are Equally Guilty” on Outlook.

State of the Judiciary

Financial Times from London highlighted the state of affairs in the Indian courts today:

• No. of cases pending before the Supreme Court in June 2007 is over 43,000. In 1998, there were less than 20,000.
• There are 3.7 million cases in High Courts and 25 million in lower courts.
• World Bank rated India 173rd out of 175 for contract enforcement.
• An employment termination dispute takes 20 years if fought all the way.
• It takes an average 3.9 years to enforce a contract (compared with less than 10 months in China).

With such a state of affairs, the Judiciary is showing contempt to itself, to justice, to democracy, and the nation. It better start focusing on reform and clean up its act, rather than hold freedom of expression ransom in this struggling democracy.

Challenges in Journalism

The Kentucky Herald Leader reported an unusual story. An emotionally upset woman called up, and said that she had found the scalp of a dead friend’s remains, in the woods where he had accidentally died. His body had already been taken to the coroner’s office couple of days ago. She stored the 8×4 inch piece in a trash bag in her freezer, but didn’t summon the courage to tell the authorities or anyone. Finally, she called the Herald Leader. After some urging by the reporter, the remains were finally delivered to the coroner and the story ends.

Objectivity vs. Transparency

The real story that intrigues me begins here, in the Editor’s Behind The Headlines blog, since the reporter who actually took the remains from the woman and delivered them to the coroner, was the same one who wrote the news report. No one else was involved. The news article simply referred to himself as ‘the reporter’ anonymously, thus wrongly pretending the story to be objective. The Editor writes:

And thus a new chapter was added to the lore of the Herald-Leader newsroom — and a rather interesting ethical discussion was borne. The ethical conundrum was two-fold: Should a reporter accept proffered body parts? And, if a reporter does accept said body parts, has he become so tied up in the story that he can no longer objectively write it? Opinions in the newsroom differed on these points, as is often the case in journalism.

The question of whether the reporter should have helped the woman is a non-question for me. A reporter is first a human being, and then a reporter. About the second, I agree with Josh from CNET, who opines that objectivity becomes impossible in certain situations, the only sensible approach is transparency and full-disclosure. Patrick, from the Jakarta Post has a strong, well-argued opinion that the traditional ideal of objectivity is not only pretentious, it is false. He says:

The truth is that objectivity is not only an impossible ideal to aspire to; it might not even really be worth the effort. What would make far more sense would be for the press to aspire to accuracy, to fairness, to even-handedness, and to transparency. These at least, are attainable aspirations.

Anguish vs. Numbness

This further led me to think about journalists from their perspective - I mean really putting on journalistic shoes and cap. We bloggers are used to bashing the media. How many times have we deplored the way they scavenge the relatives of the dead or missing like vultures intent on squeezing every bloody drop of emotion to keep the audience glued? A British reporter covering the Congo Crisis once walked into a crowd of Belgian evacuees and shouted, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”.

Now, step outside your frame of reference for a moment, and read this article by war correspondent Jack Shafer on Slate, “In Praise of Insensitive Reporters“: There may be no tougher assignment in journalism than knocking on the door of a mother who has lost her young daughter to a killer and asking, “How do you feel?”. He argues that if the US media had stopped covering the Virginia Tech massacre after the real news was over, the public would have rioted. Read about Karina Bland, who covered a 4-month investigation into into young children burned, beaten, and sexually defiled, and became an exception in the industry when she took recourse in crisis counseling.

Soldiers, police, fire-fighters, and emergency medical personnel - all receive special training for dealing with traumatic events. Journalists, who are routinely involved in the same situations, receive none. Further, their industry shuns any signs of weakness, so reporters are used to bottling up their stress. They refuse to accept their grief, their horror, even to themselves.

The Apotheosis

The climax of the poisonous mix of harsh criticism and adulatory praise that journalists can encounter, came a few months after the publication of this photograph in the NYT:

This photograph showing a starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture won Kevin Carter the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. Along with the award, he also received criticism worldwide, aptly stated by St. Petersburg Florida Times: “The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering, might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.”

His photograph made the world weep, but another tragedy was to follow. Two months after receiving the Pulitzer, Carter committed suicide. Superficial observers relate his suicide either to an inability to handle fame, or guilt for not intervening and helping the child in this photo. The truth was much more complex as revealed by a Time magazine special feature.

Susan Moeller tells Carter’s story in Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death: He had gone into the bush seeking relief from the terrible starvation and suffering he was documenting, when he encountered the emaciated girl. When he saw the vulture land, Carter waited quietly, hoping the bird would spread its wings and give him an even more dramatic image. It didn’t, and he eventually chased the bird away. The girl gathered her strength and resumed her journey toward a feeding center. Afterward, writes Moeller, Carter “sat by a tree, talked to God, cried, and thought about his own daughter, Megan.”

Charles Freund puts the picture in perspective, in his article in Reason Magazine: Western newspaper readers saw a little girl. Carter, in the Sudanese village where he landed, was watching 20 people starve to death each hour. Perhaps he might have laid aside his camera to give the victims what succor he could (and thus never have encountered the girl in the bush); perhaps his photographs could have led to greater help than he could personally give. Should he have carried one girl to safety? Carter was surrounded by hundreds of starving children. When he sat by the tree and wept, it was beneath a burden of futility. But his was not a photo of futility, nor of mass starvation, nor of religious factionalism, nor of civil war. Readers saw a little girl. In part, at least, Carter died for that.

Further Reading: Wikipedia on Journalism Ethics and Standards, and a nice collection of articles on journalists covering war.

Technorati Tags: news, journalism, newspapers, press, culture, media, society

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WikiScanning India

In the privacy-cherishing geek Internet populace, a monitoring tool for tracing changes to Wikipedia entries is gaining notorious popularity. WikiScanner, a tool created a few weeks back, maps millions of Wikipedia edits to the IP address of the computer used to make those edits. By referencing public databases that map sets of IP addresses to the organizations owning them, WikiScanner is able to tell you which organization’s computer was used to make a certain edit.

There have been innumerable number of interesting discoveries so far. They range from the religious (Vatican, The Church of Scientology) and media (BBC, New York Times), to companies (Walmart, Sony) and governments (Australia, Canada). Wired magazine, which first broke the story, runs an updated list of salacious edits.

So, I decided to run WikiScanner on a few Indian organizations. As would be expected, there did not appear to be any serious objectionable edits, since the awareness of Wikipedia in our one-billion plus country is negligible enough to deter any unwarranted changes. Scans of educational institutes showed the educated elite’s fondness of the different branches of mathematics and computer science. Searches for edits from the top Indian IT companies revealed massive number of edits. They showed the passion of our software professionals for Bollywood (with one from Cognizant insisting via multiple edits that Celina Jaitley has ‘big ones’), Cricket (World Cup 2007 being one of the most edited entry), and of course, IT.

This was reassuring in a certain way, especially if you see how Western businesses are tainting their competitors’ edits and censoring true criticism of themselves. After spending a couple of hours or so, I could find only one objectionable entry, made by The Times of India, Chandigarh. Someone at The Times of India, decided to try and act smart:

They wrote in the Indian Express entry: “Long considered probably the most intrepid newspaper, it is also regarded as a perfect launching pad for young journalists, especially reporters, for the sheer independence they are offered by the organization. Of late, however, marketing forces combined with some poor editors at some editions have undermined the very values like unearthing the skeletons hidden in the cupboard of the powerful the paper stood for. Instead, sensationalism seems to overshadow investigation at times, its critics say.”

Technorati Tags: wikiscanner, india, media, wikipedia

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A Lesser Known Mutineer

It is people like these, from remote parts of India, that sometimes show us the way.

The BBC reports:

Gaurishankar Rajak is a poor, “untouchable” washerman, who barely went to school.

But the sixty-something Dalit from Dumka in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand has published a newspaper every week without fail for the past 21 years, highlighting discrimination against the poor and local corruption.

Mr Rajak’s four-page, handwritten Hindi-news Din Dalit is photocopied 100 times and sold to subscribers or pasted onto Dumka’s main traffic lights, bus stands and roads.

Din Dalit is not just another small town news sheet - the newspaper is registered with India’s Registrar of Newspapers, thanks to the efforts of India’s first Dalit President, KR Narayanan, after Mr Rajak wrote to him.

He still washes clothes for a living, and spends his own money to bring out the newspaper. The question burning in my mind is, why does it take 21 years for us to know about this?

Read the CNN-IBN report here, and watch the video here.
Photo Credits: BBC

Technorati Tags: india, journalism, press, newspapers, dalit

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Yearning for Sense Beyond the Earth

At the start of the day, I was almost sure I was going to write about how the world doesn’t seem like a place that I’m proud to be in.

Depressing Scene

The Indian Left wanted India to be Left behind. The Indian Right didn’t know what was Right anymore.

China, a communist nation, seeks to achieve a nuclear deal with Pakistan, a military dictatorship, which has a proven record of having proliferated nuclear weapons technology.

A group of eight Indian men were attacked violently in what appears to be a racist crime against Indians, not a common occurrence in recent times. But the media headlines in India and the Indian blogosphere continue to be obsessed with whether one Indian, once accused of a crime and now acquitted, gets a visa or not. Controversial racist slurs against Indian celebrities paid to act in shows abroad get wider attention in India than actual racist violence against innocent Indians in a foreign country.

It is at such times, that I feel the world is hopeless. It is not a place where I would be proud to be living. These are the times when I yearn for meaning; I’m yearning for sense, to make it all meaningful, somehow.

My mind becomes very unquiet. That’s when, like rays of sunlight in a darkened room, comes news like this.

NASA Audio Video History on the Web

I used to watch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series on Doordarshan during the 1980s. I read Cosmos and many other books that increased my fascination of astronomy. I constructed my own homemade telescope in my school days, getting Rs. 75 from my father, and using paper calendar rolls for the tubes. I used it to watch the craters on the Moon and the satellites of Saturn.

With select friends, I used to marvel at the NASA Apollo and Russian Sputnik launches. It was not until 1997 however, that I was able to watch the real action. I used to monitor the Mars Pathfinder’s movement across the Martian landscape with bated breath and indescribable excitement. Every movement of the Pathfinder against a rock, crater, or soil sample was relayed by NASA over the web, and we were enthralled by it all.

For all such aficionados, there is great news. Decades of NASA photos and videos are coming to the web!

The space agency and the Internet Archive said Tuesday that they plan to scan and archive more than 12 million NASA photographs and 100,000 hours of film and video footage for free access online, under an exclusive five-year agreement. As part of the deal, the Internet Archive will host the media album on a new Web site, Nasaimages.org.

Free Home Planetarium: Google Earth is now Google Universe!

This is absolutely wild. I used to have a DOS 3.1 based program in the late 1908s, that depicted the stars in the sky above your actual location, depending on your latitude and longitude. Now, it’s for free. Google Earth has now launched Google Sky! I think it puts the Earth in perspective!

How fascinating and unbelievably true?! Imagine, you can now traverse 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies from your desktop! I’ve spent numerous hours teaching friends, colleagues, and relatives, about the constellations and galaxies, and nebulae during cloudy skies. Imagine being able to do it using your net-connected-PC! Teach your children using Google Sky about astronomy. They might one day become Sunita Williams!

It’s often said that Google Earth and Google Maps took Cartography to the masses. TechCrunch says “Google Sky could well do the same for Astronomy.”

I do not know if this is going to bring Astronomy to the masses. There was once a time, when it was also often said, that looking at the heavens brings mankind closer, as he realizes he’s just a speck of dust on an insignificant planet, on an ordinary sized star in one corner of not just his galaxy, but completely irrelevant as far as the universe is concerned. There was a time when this thought did bring men together, either in the spirit of fear, or in the spirit of science. I don’t know if this is going to mean anything at all in today’s world.

In fact, I’m inclined to think quite the opposite. Rather than studying the stars, mankind will be more interested in how the stars positions affect his or her chances of making it with that other person, how his or her chances with this particular career lie, and so on. Will astrologers use Google Earth to pinpoint horoscopes? Is this going to be the modern panchang or Vedic calendar?

Making Sense

I’m sorry this is a long post. My point is, when such news about such great initiatives by human beings come along, I feel hopeful about this world again. That there are some people who understand what it all means. And then I’m proud to be living in this world again! I’m not sure if anyone will understand what I mean, so I guess I may be writing just for myself.

Images Credit Myself (of objects seen by naked eye myself)

Technorati Tags: india, nasa, politics, astronomy, google, carl sagan, cosmos, science

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Techno-Social News Tidbits

Here’s some interesting news stories from the past few days.

It’s not 42, like Douglas Adams thought it would be. It’s 26. BBC reports that research has proved that a Rubik’s cube can be returned to its original state in no more than 26 moves. A supercomputer took 63 hours to crank out the proof which goes one better than the previous best solution.

The study brings scientists one step closer to finding the so-called “God’s Number” which is the minimum number of moves needed to solve any disordered Rubik’s cube.

It is so named because God would only need the smallest number of moves to solve a cube. Theoretical work suggests that God’s Number is in the “low 20s”.

Did you know that the world record for solving the Rubik cube was 11.13 seconds? And if you’re interested in this kind of stuff, do you know that the game of checkers is solved? I mean really, solved?

An Ohio man charged with statutory rape says he thought a 13-year-old girl was actually 18. He tried to bring in evidence of her MySpace.com page, which falsely said she was. The appeals court rejected the evidence, and convicted him.

On a lighter note, there were many centuries during which mankind used to keep time using the Sun. Now, Sun was itself 5 days late.

Just like every major candidate for the White House has a health care plan, every major technology company has one, reports the New York Times:

The Google and Microsoft initiatives would give much more control to individuals, a trend many health experts see as inevitable. “Patients will ultimately be the stewards of their own information,” said John D. Halamka, a doctor and the chief information officer of the Harvard Medical School.

More importantly, every major Search Engine is capitulating on the healthcare scenario: Ask.com is offering ’smart answers’, Google is coming up with Google Health! For screen shots of Google Health, see First Google Health Screen Shots.

On another note, I just love Wikipedia, in the sense that it is so transparent! In this context, it is indeed interesting to observe how folks at Fox News and the New York Times have engaged in tweaking and manipulating the content on Wikipedia about themselves and their competitors. This is not just corporate espionage, this is corporate mudslinging!

This shows the empowerment of the public. These corporations or media houses cannot influence the content or description about them in, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica. But when they think they can manipulate Wikipedia, their antics are exposed! Three cheers to open source Wikipedia!

Technorati Tags: google, healthcare, rubik cube, wikipedia, news

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Spooky Spock

This is the spookiest thing I’ve ever seen on the Internet yet. A revolutionary people-focused search engine, Spock, launched into public beta today.

About 30% of all search traffic is people related - about 20 billion search queries per month. How is it different from Google or other mainstream search engines? If you Google “boxer”, you’ll get the Wikipedia entry for boxer dogs. Spock will give you Muhammed Ali and Mike Tyson.

Spock scans social networks such as LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, and other sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, and blogs. It then pulls that information into a concise summary about a person, such as his occupation, interests, age, marital status, photo, religious affiliations, and hometown. A click on the summary reveals related Web sites and known associates.

I decided to check how far I had been ’spocked’:

Wow. It already knows I work in the IT industry, though it got my title wrong. But, this shows it has already crawled my LinkedIn profile. Since I am virtually a nobody on this planet, let’s check out what Spock comes up with for an Indian sportswoman currently in the news for her stellar performance:

Notice how it has correlated her Wikipedia entry with her photograph on a magazine cover, and with her fan sites. “Disambiguating people, and then collapsing multiple sources of information into a single entry, or entity resolution, is part of the secret sauce of a people search engine.”, says Tim O’Reilly, who seems excited about Spock. That’s not all.

As a community user, I can add my own ‘tags’ to this person. I can, for example, tag her as “stupid” or “sexy”. Me and other community members are able to ‘vote’ a tag ‘up or down’. What is alarming is that even if you “claim your profile”, the Spock community gets the final say in the vote, as per this Time article.

How easily can this be used for snooping, privacy intrusion, and humiliation? Let’s say I’m a male student spurned by a girl in college. I tag her as “easy” on Spock. My friends and their friends vote the tag up. Another college student, who has heard rumors about an easily available girl in college, searches for her on Spock. And gets all the information he needs to start intruding her private life. As a more family friendly experiment, I searched for a female student using a common Indian first name:

(I’ve deliberately obfuscated the last name to respect the person’s privacy). I did not use any special tags, at all. The link to the MySpace site told me more about the person than, in this case, I wanted to know.

Spock has already ‘indexed’ over 100 million people. It doesn’t just crawl and index metadata. It tries to figure out who each document and web page is about.

Spock is not driving around town taking photographs of streets and shooting your pets or living room like Google. But it is driving through each and every narrow street, lane, path and avenue of cyberspace, while looking at you, what you’ve done, your relatives and friends, and trying to understand and make sense of it all. You think such a site will be banned? Forget that, even getting your own profile deleted may be legally difficult, according to Time.

This beast has only discovered my LinkedIn profile yet. Then it will discover me on Orkut. Once it crawls my blog, it will understand that the ‘About Me’ page really talks about me, and extract tags about my beliefs from it. It would probably guess from the URL of my blog that ‘mahendrap’ is my username on WordPress. It will then be able to link all the comments I’ve ever made in the blogosphere to me. It will crawl Flickr and YouTube and find pictures and videos. And like Mr. Spock, it will be completely unemotional about it all. It will methodically gather, process, and organize everything it finds about me. Can anything ever be spookier?

Technorati Tags: spock, search, privacy, internet, google

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Are Blogging Journalists Shielded?

A US congressional panel on Wednesday voted, against the Bush administration’s wishes, to shield journalists including advertising-supported bloggers from having to reveal their confidential sources in many situations.

This is a major milestone in the ongoing battle between freedom of the press and government control. In March 2005, a California judge asked 3 bloggers to reveal their sources. Even Time magazine had to bow down. Coincidentally, this comes at the same time that the House of Lords in the UK sided with a freelance journalist, who has fiercely refused to reveal his sources, in one of the country’s longest legal battle of seven-and-a-half years.

The Free Flow of Information Act compels journalists to reveal their source only under exceptional circumstances.

This is a sensitive issue and has been debated to a great extent, with the focus being on the question: are bloggers journalists? Now that the reporters privilege has been extended, this question assumes paramount significance. This privilege is accorded only to reporters, priests, lawyers, and therapists. As per a Pew survey in July 2006, 12 million Americans have a blog, and one-third of them consider it as journalism. Extending this privilege will make a vast section of the population untouchable for investigations.

Let’s take an example from The Brain Chimney: Caught In The Crossfire

This is my friend’s story, who agreed to let me post it on my blog very reluctantly, fearing there might some danger to him. On his request, I’m not sharing his name or the name of the village.

I think I was in 8th grade then, I was getting ready to go to school at 6 AM. We heard a couple of rounds being fired. I was scared to death. I started cycling to school, very reluctantly. On the way, I saw two CRPF soldiers lying in a pool of blood. The Naxals (Maoists now) had shot them. The soldiers begged for their lives before being shot. But that wasn’t my first tryst with terror. It is replete with such incidents. Life was never easy for the 60,000+ inhabitants of our village.

The story goes on to describe how the villagers are caught between the brutalities of both the Maoists and the Police in (presumably) some north-eastern region of India. If this story were about a town in the US, there would be a public outcry over it. The law enforcement authorities will then force the blogger to reveal his friend’s name, so that they can take the necessary action. The blogger will have to comply. Why? Because his blog does not have any advertisements!

How correct is it to distinguish bloggers with ads as journalists and others as not?

What about India? The Reporters Without Borders Annual 2007 report on India reveals:

Prahlad Goala, working on a regional daily in Assam State in the north-east, was killed after writing articles exposing nepotism on the part of a local official. Also, in the north-east, a bureau chief escaped a murder attempt by an armed communist group. A young correspondent for a regional newspaper in Maharashtra State, central India, Arun Narayan Dekate, was stoned to death by gangsters he had named in his articles.

In India, you don’t ask for sources. You eliminate the journalist. Period. However, this is not the legal approach. Consider the legal approach:

The authorities in Chhattisgarh State, east-central India, badly hit by a Maoist revolt, sacrificed press freedom to the fight against this new “terrorism”. A security order was adopted which allowed imprisonment from one to three years, for journalists meeting Maoist rebels. A score of reporters were assaulted or threatened with death by police officers supposed to counter the Maoist influence.

Clever politicians ‘get perturbed’ over the courts indiscriminately using their power of contempt to reveal sources, not while campaigning, but when talking to journalists during a seminar on “the use of law as an instrument of harassment”.

India has a long way to go. The Free Flow of Information Bill is not without flaws, as some thorny issues still persist. But it is a step in the right direction.

Image: Logo of the Inter American Press Association

Technorati Tags: journalism, press, freedom of expression, US, india, judiciary, law

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