Global Integrity Commons

Reporter’s Notebook Colombia: Corruption’s Family Ties

2010-03-18T10:00:00.002-04:00

Commercials showed humble peasant families as the people who’d benefit from a new government subsidy program intended for farmers. Soon after, though, entire families of campaign donors were receiving millionaire subsidies. Beauty queens and extradited criminals tagged along as well.

In the 2009 Reporter’s Notebook: Colombia, award-winning reporter Ignacio Gómez tells a story about how in his country close friendships and family ties matter more than anything when it comes to money and power. The closer the link is to the President, the better.

The story is part of the Corruption Notebooks, a collection of stories by leading investigative journalists from around the world on what happens when the public is either uninformed about abuses of power or incapable of doing anything about it. The Corruption Notebooks are part of the Global Integrity Report 2009.

-- Hazel Feigenblatt

-- Image: Botgata by NapaneeGal/Flickr (cc by/nc)

Reporter’s Notebook Nepal: When “pocketless” pants can make a difference

2010-03-17T13:00:00.002-04:00

In Nepal, tourists don’t need to leave the airport to start experiencing the “adventures” of visiting one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

True to the country’s bad reputation, corruption makes a quick appearance as soon as passengers arrive and are victims of everything from bribes to plain theft, by staff of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal, airlines, customs, immigration and even security personnel.

Mandatory “pocketless” pants for airport employees were recently proposed as possible deterrents to corruption but, as it usually happens in the country, the measure failed to be implemented.

In the 2009 Reporter’s Notebook: Nepal, local journalist Surendra Phuyal takes us out of the relatively controlled airport environment and into the country’s daily life marked by corruption.

The story is part of the Corruption Notebooks, a collection of stories by leading investigative journalists from around the world on what happens when the public is either uninformed about abuses of power or incapable of doing anything about it. The Corruption Notebooks are part of the Global Integrity Report 2009.

-- Hazel Feigenblatt

-- Image: Patan, Kathmandu by nubui/Flickr (cc by/nc/sa)

Reporter’s Notebook Ukraine: Corrupt Judges and Stray Dogs

2010-03-15T11:00:00.003-04:00

It is a really bad sign when police find more than US$1 million in cash in the office of the Administrative Appellate Court head, particularly if his explanation is that he was going to give the money to a church and didn’t have “time” to do it.

But for lawyers and prosecutors in Ukraine, the time to think about the meaning of signs is over. Most of them are nowadays convinced that their country has as many corrupt judges as stray dogs, as one of them bluntly puts it in the 2009 Reporter’s Notebook: Ukraine.

In the report, local author Vlad Lavrov shows what it is like to work in a legal system where so many judges should leave the bench and take the defendant’s seat.

The story is part of the Corruption Notebooks, a collection of stories by leading investigative journalists from around the world on what happens when the public is either uninformed about abuses of power or incapable of doing anything about it.

-- Hazel Feigenblatt

-- Image: Ukrainian street dogs by vtornick/Flickr (cc by/nc/sa)

Lack of Political Will Hinders Access to Information Regimes in Africa

2010-03-12T10:00:00.006-05:00

The Carter Center held a Freedom of Information (FOIA) summit in Africa last month to discuss the continent’s continuing struggles with citizen access to information. What was agreed upon? Tracking with findings from previous Global Integrity Reports, participants noted a need to go beyond broad rights to information (as guaranteed in the constitutions of many African nations) and towards institutionalizing citizen access regimes. In other words, the time has come to implement these rights through institutional mechanisms that guarantee citizen access to government information on a daily basis.

For three days in February, over 100 participants from governments, media outlets, NGOs, and the private sector, representing twenty African countries, gathered in Accra, Ghana for the African Regional Conference on the Right of Access to Information sponsored by the Carter Center. The goal: to gather ideas on how to advance the right of access to information on a continent that has severely lagged behind the rest of the world in passing legislation and providing safeguards for access to information.

Implementation Stunted Without Political Will

Conference participants agreed that in Africa, political and institutional constraints have limited opportunities to exercise the right of access to information. These findings mirrored those of the Global Integrity Report: 2009. For example, in Ghana and Sierra Leone, we found that laws guaranteeing a citizen’s right to access government information and basic records are absent. In Ghana, a lack of political will has impeded the passing of access to information legislation -- a Right to Information Bill has been pending since 2002 and has yet to be presented to Parliament. Our researcher in Ghana reported that although it is possible for citizens to obtain government information, such access is often dependent on bribes and personal dealings with public officials in charge of the information.

The Carter Center’s conference also concluded that even when FOIA-type laws exist, insufficient political will and weak legal and administrative guidelines have handicapped the actual implementation of these laws. Similarly, our researchers found that in many African countries with access to information laws on the books such as Liberia, Malawi, and Kenya, there are no institutional mechanisms in place to handle appeals if a citizen is denied access to government records. Laws in Liberia and Malawi are largely ineffective; obtaining government information and records can take months.

Utility of Information: A Case Study in Uganda

While access to information can undoubtedly help citizens demand enforcement of their rights and increase efficiency of service delivery (think public expenditure tracking surveys), in most countries, it is journalists who make the most use of open government provisions. Investigative reporting has the potential to spark public outrage and reform. Governments know this and (as was discussed at the Carter Center conference) this is one reason they may be less than enthusiastic about sharing information with the public.

In Uganda, a country that boasts one of the higher scores in public access to information indicators in Africa on the Global Integrity Report, the government refused to release information on profit-sharing agreements it signed with two oil companies, even to Parliament. This past December, two Ugandan journalists and a separate NGO sued to force the government to publicly reveal details and copies of the profit-sharing agreements. The power of journalists in Malawi to expose corruption in government is limited without an access to information law in place. Our reporter in the country noted, “Without this piece of legislation, journalists have to circumvent red tape to access vital information, a situation that tends to limit their accuracy and put them at risk for lawsuits.”

The African Regional Conference on the Right of Access to Information culminated in a regional plan of action that includes recommended actions for regional and international bodies, states, and non-state actors to advance the right to access to information. Participants agreed it is not enough to have laws guaranteeing access to information; governments and citizens must take responsibility to ensure information and records are provided effectively.

-- Emilie Yam

--Image: Xevi V / Flickr (cc by/nc/sa)

Clarification on Global Integrity's Trinidad & Tobago Reporting

2010-03-11T11:10:00.002-05:00

Global Integrity Report: 2009 clarification: It has come to our attention that a press release was issued locally in Trinidad & Tobago suggesting that the country had been added to Global Integrity's Grand Corruption Watchlist. This is not the case. Readers with questions about our reporting in the country should feel free to send an email to info@globalintegrity.org.

The Global Integrity Mashup Challenge

2010-03-09T12:01:00.014-05:00

Global Integrity is giving away $1000 in cash prizes to bloggers, designers and analysts who use our data. What do Global Integrity data say about an issue, country or region you care about? What is the story buried in that raw data?

The Global Integrity Mashup Challenge is a search for original analysis of Global Integrity’s data on governance and corruption trends that use our work to shed new insights on issues and regions of interest to the public. There are thousands of stories embedded within Global Integrity's data. Dig in and mash up our data with your knowledge to create new analysis of an issue you care about. We're looking for any content that can be used on the Web: Blog posts, academic analysis, infographics, video, audio.

To apply, read the wiki guidelines, publish your analysis online and send us a link via this form: http://bit.ly/macha10

If you don't have a blog, we can host your content for you. Apply by April 16, 2010 to be eligible for our $750 and $250 cash prizes. All entries will receive an "I Heart Integrity" laptop sticker.

Why a public challenge?

Global Integrity is a worldwide network of local reporters and researchers that collaborate online (learn more here). We have scaled up quickly by keeping our overhead very lean -- each year we engage roughly 100 field staff for every office staff. As a result we are very good at creating and publishing original content, but less good at analysis. We sometimes miss important stories buried in our data simply for lack of capacity. This contest is your chance to fight corruption by doing original analysis of this giant pile of raw information. And we have a sneaky suspicion that your analysis has the potential to simultaneously inform your own work-- whatever the focus may be.

Ready to Mashup?

Visit the Mashup Challenge wiki for more detailed information on how to start, what types of entries we're looking for and how we will be judging the entries (http://commons.wikispaces.com/Mashup+Challenge+2010).

As always, we'd love your help promoting the Global Integrity Mashup Challenge. Please visit our press room for more details. You are welcome to repost this text in any format.

Questions? visit the Mashup Challenge wiki for more details and don't hesitate to contact Norah Mallaney at info@globalintegrity.org

-- Norah Mallaney & Global Integrity

Post and Telecommunications of Kosovo (PTK) Reponds to Global Integrity Report

2010-03-08T08:19:00.008-05:00

Post and Telecommunications of Kosovo (PTK) asked us for a chance to respond publicly to our new Reporter's Notebook for Kosovo that appears as part of the Global Integrity Report: 2009. That Notebook recaps an already-reported controversy surrounding PTK, and we were happy to oblige PTK with an opportunity to express its views on the matter.

You can read the full letter from PTK here. Additional local press coverage of the issue is also here, here, here, and here (courtesy of PTK).

-- Nathaniel Heller

Responses to Global Integrity's Op-Ed on Tongan Procurement

2010-03-04T13:58:00.014-05:00

In Tonga, the Royal Commission of Inquiry is wrapping up its investigation into the tragic ferry accident of last August that killed 74 people. Global Integrity weighed in on the debate, using our locally reported data as the basis for a letter to the editor of the Matangi Tonga newspaper. The responses have been mixed and a few feathers may have been ruffled (in a good way, we would argue).

We have been following the Royal Commission of Inquiry’s progress over the past few months, and our disappointment over the emerging emphasis on individual actors rather than institutional weaknesses prompted us to say something. Below is the letter, as printed in the Matangi Tonga online:

Government
Major weaknesses in Tonga's procurement system
03 Mar 2010, 11:10
Washington DC, USA:

Editor,

TONGANS will always remember the day the Princess Ashika sunk in the Pacific waters. Just days after the tragedy, I flew over that same ocean on my first trip to Tonga to participate in a discussion of Tonga's corruption and transparency challenges based on recent fieldwork my organization, Global Integrity, had conducted with a team of Tongan researchers and journalists. After hearing the news, my colleague Nathaniel Heller and I were unsure of what we would find when we landed in Nukua'lofa. While so many Tongans we spoke with were obviously grief-stricken, we were most impressed by a sense of perseverance that the people of Tonga embodied. Nathaniel and I left Tonga just as the Royal Commission of Inquiry commenced and have followed the investigation out of both personal and professional interest.

However, as the inquiry has progressed, we were surprised to read the Prime Minister's statement that individuals' decisions, and not institutional government weakness, were to blame for the tragic accident.

The research our Tongan partners compiled in advance of our August 2009 workshop (data that reflects the time period of the Ashika's purchase) clearly point to major weaknesses in Tonga's procurement system that have nothing to do with individuals making poor decisions and everything to do with weak rules of the game. Large-scale procurements are signed with little public or internal oversight, which has been consistently reinforced by the Commission's findings. While procurement committee decisions are overseen by Parliament, the government has rarely made an effort to publicize the results of major government purchases meaning that those outside of government have little opportunity to monitor government procurements.

The Princess Ashika vessel was purchased in spite of serious structural damage, but because the government was not required to share detailed information on procurement decisions with the public, Tongans learned of these structural issues far too late. While the Prime Minister and the Commission of Inquiry may argue that certain individuals within the Ministry of Transport should have done a better job of performing due diligence, the truth is that oversight was remiss due to a lack of clear reporting requirements for procurement decisions both within government and to the public.

While the choices and actions of individual procurement officials undoubtedly played a role in the purchase of a boat unfit for the seas, this tragedy cannot be blamed solely on poor decision-making of a few individuals. The porous legal and regulatory framework is the real culprit. Until Tonga's procurement systems are reformed to establish a clear reporting structure and to require the public announcement of decisions, it is only a matter of time until the next tragedy occurs.

Norah Mallaney,
Global Integrity

And the Response...

One Tongan ex-pat called Global Integrity’s DC office to simply chat about the Commission’s interviews and the potential for reform in his country. He views the media as essential to pushing for progress. He believes that management systems should be in place not with the intention to constrain individuals but to allow for integrity to come through.

Here's one email we received:

“Hi Norah

I am 100% believe in your argument. The reporting system caused the disaster. Never been the individual. Asking the Prime Minister if he saw the report on due diligence he said no he trust the oral report from the Minister of Transport, asking the Finance Minister he said he trust the oral report from the Minister of Transport. Asking the Minister of transport if they have done any survey of the boat he said he rely on the report from the shipping cooperation. See how stupid of them keep relying on others without ever asking for a written report.
Stupid system!! Stupid people playing at the expense of the poor people.

Thank you Nora you are definitely right.

Regards
S”

We received another email enumerating many examples of procurement and privatization decisions that the King or other top officials have made favoring close friends or relatives. We won’t repeat the claims here, but this individual states that the emphasis on cronyism in awarding government jobs and contracts has led to agencies staffed by officials who do not have proper skills to effectively provide oversight.

As we highlighted in our letter, the lack of publicly available information makes it impossible for Tongans to track the tender and purchase decisions of their government. This individual seems skeptical that opening such records would change much:

“You made the comment …” Large-scale procurements are signed with little public or internal oversight, which has been consistently reinforced by the Commission's findings. While procurement committee decisions are overseen by Parliament, the government has rarely made an effort to publicize the results of major government purchases meaning that those outside of government have little opportunity to monitor government procurements.

You are exactly right. There is no transparency and no accountability. Even if the government became more transparent, I doubt if anything would change since there is no one to challenge them. That is and I am soon to be proven correct, that even with transparency, its up to the government to take it one more step and make itself accountable for its errors.

Hence the Royal Commission’s Terms of Reference (TOR) in the Ashika has no capability to implement criminal action or charges. It’s like a toothless tiger. The king and government would not want to incriminate itself now would it?

Best Regards”

Of course, we are not adored by all. Here’s one follow-up letter to the editor of Matangi Tonga:

Savai'i, Samoa

Editor,

The Royal Commission is in the process of finalising its report and everyone has their own theory as to what happened, didn't happen, was supposed to happen... One would expect from all the errors, deficiencies and shortfalls identified; that causal factors will be determined, as well as contributory factors, and from that the required corrective & preventative actions recommended for implementation.

Foreign based organisations such as Global Integrity who only spend 5 minutes in Tonga, and then think they know the answer to all the ills, issues and problems in Tonga should refrain from sensationalism and making unqualified and unsubstantiated claims.

If you claim to promote "Integrity" then you should not pre-empt the 'due process'. As we say here in Samoa "Fai fai lemu" - which means "slow down & have patience".

Siu 'Ulua

We look forward to the Royal Commission of Inquiry’s full report, which is due to be released later this month.

-- Norah Mallaney

Tracking Impact: Voies Nouvelles Brings Government and NGOs Together to Talk Education

2010-02-26T09:30:00.002-05:00

Voies Nouvelles, the Cameroon-based budget monitoring organization and a winner of the Global Integrity Impact Challenge in 2009, continues to push government reform, maintaining an interested public audience for their organizational activities.

When Voies Nouvelles submitted their proposal to the Impact Challenge, the judges were most impressed by the organization’s emphasis on government engagement as a key component to their budget monitoring work. Over the past year, we have kept up with the organization’s maintenance of important public relationships and have been impressed by Voies Nouvelles' consistent merging of the often siloed NGO and public communities.

Keeping with this organizational approach, last month, Voies Nouvelles gathered impressive group of 84 stakeholders to discuss regional education delivery. Tomo Onésim Cyrille, the Executive Secretary of Voies Nouvelles broke down the participants for me, who included a representative from the Ministry of Education, other ministry delegates, village chiefs, civil society and anti-corruption groups, a World Bank representative and someone from the German international development organization, GTZ. In much the same model that Global Integrity uses for its Dialogue Workshops, Voies Nouvelles used the results of its monitoring exercise— a study of public investment in Lekie over the three year period from 2007-2009— as the entry point for discussions of next steps and potential reforms.

The attendee list alone is a testament that the tenacity of Voies Nouvelles has not gone unnoticed. Take a look at Voies Nouvelles' newly designed website for more details on the January workshop and their other work.

And keep your eye on this space for the forthcoming announcement of Global Integrity's second annual Impact Challenge!

-- Norah Mallaney

Rwanda, Encore? The Longevity of Rwanda's Governance Reforms is Uncertain

2010-02-25T11:03:00.020-05:00

Post-genocide Rwanda has charged onto the international stage and is working hard to ensure the curtain doesn’t fall. The Global Integrity Report: 2009 finds that in Rwanda, the focus on building an institutional infrastructure to attract foreign investment has been one path for pursuing broader governance reforms. But can accountability reforms keep pace, or will Rwanda eventually end up on the list of one-man-rule countries?

Anti-Corruption is Good for Business

Actively promoting Rwanda’s image as a low-risk environment for foreign investment has been a priority for Rwandan President Kagame, who has been highly vocal in, what one Rwandan journalist calls, “his intolerance to irresponsibility and greed of any public figure.” Kagame’s anti-corruption campaign has led to the establishment of a number of strong internal oversight bodies within the Rwandan public sector. For example, the Global Integrity Report: 2009 speaks to the “fearless” reputation of the Auditor General.

The Rwanda Development Board (RDB) is another institution of note, newly created to manage the general business climate and institutional infrastructure while also providing oversight of state-owned companies. Budgetary support for both the RDB and the AG is subsidized by foreign aid, a scheme that poses a tenuous future for lasting accountability reforms: “Donors provide most of the government's operating budget and... can arbitrarily cut money if they so chose, as they did…when it became clear that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was active in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Some donors suspended their funding.”

Keeping bad news out of the press in Rwanda has thus become key for the government, to keep both foreign investment and foreign aid flowing. Unsurprisingly, this has had consequences for press freedom in Rwanda. While violence against Rwandan journalists has greatly decreased in the past decade, Global Integrity data suggest that self-censorship may actually be on the rise. Global Integrity’s 2009 Rwanda scorecard points to multiple channels through which government interferes with the media-- through direct employment of journalists, tipping newspapers off on what stories to report, and the use of expensive advertising campaigns on which media outlets are financially reliant. Whether in print, broadcast or online outlets, the general knowledge of who is an “untouchable” leads to “a great deal of self censorship in Rwanda,” according to Global Integrity data .

English and ICT: Great for Tourists and Businessmen, but Practical for Citizens?

In December 2009, Rwanda was officially accepted into the Commonwealth, a group of English-speaking ex-British colonies from around the globe. As one Western media outlet described it, “Kagame made no secret about wanting to switch from French, the language of Rwanda's Belgium colonial roots, to English, and to transform his country into Africa's cyber capital.” Investment in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has been a top priority for the Kagame administration with many of those efforts having been put under the leadership of the RDB. Shyaka Kanuma, a managing editor at Rwanda Focus, puts it simply: "Rwanda's progress in ICT has undoubtedly made it a regional business hub."

This transition to an English and internet-centric nation is bound to have repercussions for Rwandan citizens. Implementing this top-down Anglophone agenda means that English is being increasingly phased into classrooms, previously Francophone road-signs must be painted over and government literature republished. The Global Integrity Report: 2009 captures another practical implication of the language change in the advertisement of privatizations: “Yes [privatizations are advertised], but usually only in English, and even more so since the government banned [sic] French in schools in 2009.” Our 2009 assessment also notes that while “significant government support for ICT…extends to both government and business,” it’s unclear what the immediate positive effects for citizens have been. Internet penetration rates and literacy rates are low across Rwanda, diminishing the utility of internet-based mechanisms for civil engagement.

The trickle-down effect of foreign investment and foreign aid on Rwandan citizens —whether through direct budget support to government agencies or in private ICT-oriented business partnerships—remains an open question . What is undeniable, however, is the increasing centralization of power in the executive branch and the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front party, calling into question just how long Rwanda’s growth can be sustained without more effective checks and balances. The challenging media environment is just one sign. In addition, Global Integrity’s data notes executive branch policy decisions are not always explained to a satisfactory degree; party and state resources are increasingly intermingled; and appointments to government positions are often made based on party affiliation. Low scores for enforcement of executive branch conflicts of interest regulations are an increasing cause for alarm.

Will foreign investment in Rwanda continue to motivate accountability reforms? Or will governance reform be outpaced by technological development, allowing a small circle of Rwanda’s connected insiders to control an increasingly large amount of power and wealth? The scene has been set; with the spotlight on Rwanda, the international audience watches.

-- Norah Mallaney
-- Image: A vender sells weekly newspaper Umseso for 500 Rwf. (kigaliwire.com cc by/nc)

China and Vietnam: A Study in Contrasts or Similarities?

2010-02-24T12:16:00.016-05:00

In China and Vietnam, where the separation between the ruling party and the state is almost non-existent, the Global Integrity Report: 2009 shows how "corruption" and "good governance" are more than simple labels.

Standards of living in both countries have greatly increased since their economies have opened to the free market in the past few decades, but with more wealth circling the streets, corruption pervades many aspects of daily life. Our lead journalist in Vietnam reports that paying bribes to police, nurses, and judges has become routine. He writes that “to the average Vietnamese, living with corruption is unavoidable. It's about who you know.” The Chinese government has undertaken massive and highly-publicized efforts to fight corruption in its ranks, but doubts still remain as to whether the punishment of high-ranking officials is a genuine effort to root out corruption or is more about using anti-corruption as a political weapon. Our journalist in China reports one city government employee observing how, "There is no religion in today's China; money is their religion."

In 2009, China was dropped from the Grand Corruption Watch List, signaling that the country has made some progress in establishing a minimum of key anti-corruption safeguards. Countries on the Watch List have extremely poor conflicts of interest safeguards in government, weak oversight over large state-owned enterprises, and poor or non-existent controls over the flow of money into the political process, making them more susceptible to the risks of grand corruption and looting of public resources. Meanwhile, Vietnam has been added to the Watch List in part due to little to no transparency around the management and financial records of state-owned companies. China, meanwhile, has been taking small steps towards increasing the auditing standards of its SOEs.

In both countries, freedom of speech is severely stifled, and heavy restrictions are placed on media outlets, the majority of which are state-run. Reporting cases of corruption can often be dangerous in Vietnam, where bloggers have been jailed and citizens fear threats and abuses for speaking out against the government and corruption. Our data in China reveal that citizens have relatively easy access to the Anti-Corruption Bureau and “a majority of investigations by the anti-corruption agency and the judicial branch originate from citizen complaints.” This finding contrasts with the heavily publicized censorship of the Chinese media. Despite this suppression of public opinion, the Global Integrity Report: 2009 suggests that fear does not deter Chinese citizens from using institutional mechanisms to voice their concerns when those mechanisms are available to them.

You can read more by visiting the Global Integrity Report: 2009 website.

-- Emilie Yam

--Image of Saigon by Pol Malacara (cc by/sa)

Listen to the Global Integrity Report: 2009 Explained

2010-02-23T13:41:00.007-05:00

This morning, Managing Director Nathaniel Heller led a discussion of the key findings of the Global Integrity Report:2009 and the methodology behind our work. In case you missed it, here is a recording of the event.

-- Global Integrity

Global Integrity Report: 2009 Released!

2010-02-23T09:45:00.016-05:00

Global Integrity is pleased to announce the release of the Global Integrity Report: 2009, our flagship assessment of national-level anti-corruption mechanisms in countries around the world.

Read the Report here.

See also: Key Findings. Global Integrity Index. Methodology. Interactive map. Data download.

Based on original information gathered by in-country teams of local journalists and researchers, the Report combines on-the-ground journalistic reporting with more than 300 quantitative indicators for each country assessing the existence, effectiveness, and citizen access to key accountability and transparency mechanisms. All of our fieldwork emphasizes a transparent methodology, robust sourcing, and a mix of numerical data, granular narratives, and real-life case studies; this year’s Report is no exception.

New to our work? Check out our new home video for a brief explanation of what the Global Integrity Report is all about:

You can also download a Press Kit and a press release for additional background.

Among the key findings from the 2009 Report:

Despite a change of administration in the United States in 2009, significant progress has not been achieved in curbing corruption at the national-level in the U.S.

Uganda and Bosnia and Herzegovina have the dubious distinction of boasting the biggest “implementation gaps” of all countries covered in this year’s Report – that is, the gap between their anti-corruption laws “on the books” and the actual enforcement of those same laws.

Although the February 2010 presidential run-off election in the Ukraine demonstrated that the country is able to hold relatively free and fair elections, it has suffered significant setbacks in the implementation of other key transparency and accountability safeguards since Global Integrity’s last assessment in 2007.

Look for follow-on analysis on this blog during the next several weeks, and we warmly invite your feedback on the 2009 Report.

Want to publish your own analysis of the 2009 Report? Send us an email (info@globalintegrity.org) and we’ll be happy to give you the space to share your own take on this year’s data and reporting.

-- Global Integrity

Media Advisory -- Global Integrity Report: 2009 Conference Call

2010-02-22T16:27:00.002-05:00

International Nonprofit to Release Report with New Ratings on Anti-Corruption Mechanisms and Government Accountability in 35 countries

WHAT: Teleconference -- Global Integrity, an award-winning international nonprofit organization that tracks governance and corruption trends globally, will release a new report, highlighting 35 countries, which finds that despite a change of administration in the United States in 2009, significant progress has not been achieved in curbing corruption at the national level in the U.S. The Global Integrity Report: 2009 also highlights modest progress on anti-corruption in China, which has been officially dropped from Global Integrity’s Grand Corruption Watch List.

WHEN: Tuesday, February 23, 10:00 a.m. EST

HOW: Teleconference participants should call one of the following numbers:

U.S./Canada residents dial: 888-380-0730
International participants dial: +1-201-604-5110

Please identify yourself to the operator and indicate that you are on the “Global Integrity” call.

WHO: Nathaniel Heller, Managing Director, Global Integrity

CONTACTS: Carol Miller, (202) 306-0130; carol.miller@globalintegrity.org
Norah Mallaney, (202) 449-8122; norah.mallaney@globalintegrity.org

For more information visit http://www.globalintegrity.org

New Data! The Global Integrity Report: 2009

2010-02-19T10:00:00.004-05:00

Global Integrity is gearing up for the online release of the Global Integrity Report: 2009 which we will unveil this coming Tuesday, February 23rd. While our DC staff is busy finalizing scorecards, notebooks and graphics, our far-flung staff are just as hard at work, spreading the word to their local contacts in civil society, media and government.

The Global Integrity Report: 2009 contains rich, well-sourced details of the existence, effectiveness and citizen access to national-level anti-corruption safeguards in 35 diverse countries. Letting our data speak for itself, below are some of the interesting “nuggets” embedded in this year’s collection of scorecards:

In Uganda, our researcher states that: “in the period between 2005-2007, of all gifts declared [by government officials] none has been by a legislator. Not that they didn’t receive any gifts but because the Inspectorate of Government has no capacity to track all gifts received wherever they are handed.”

In Mongolia, our lead researcher speaks to media bias, stating “there are no significant examples of media outlets remaining separate from political or business interests as a point of brand distinction. News outlets do not appear to count objectivity, integrity, or trust as attributes they must cultivate in order attract consumers.”

In Lebanon, citizens must pay a deposit of approximately 16,000 USD to request to access asset disclosures from the General Prosecutor’s office or the first level investigative judge based in Beirut.

In Azerbaijan, opposition views are fiercely suppressed by government, who even go so far as to ban libraries from subscribing to opposition papers.

In Liberia, ballot security is threatened by high illiteracy rates which allow for people’s votes to be manipulated.

In Venezuela, our lead researcher notes that “one of the most important examples of the influence of the audit agency was the political sanctions imposed on about 200 politicians in the 2008 local and regional elections, which prevented them from running as candidates. Most of them were opposition leaders.”

Watch this space on Tuesday when the Global Integrity Report: 2009 will go live. And keep an eye on our twitter feed, where we will feature more specific findings that jump out of our 2009 data.

-- Norah Mallaney and Global Integrity

Governance and the Trickle-Down Effect: Citizens Monitor Service-Delivery in Georgia

2010-02-18T08:43:00.013-05:00

Corruption is often categorized as either petty or grand, with the implication that bribery is the form through which citizens are most directly impacted and inconvenienced in their administrative interactions with government. Despite that conventional wisdom, a number of Global Integrity field staff are taking on initiatives to show how grand corruption and weak institutional governance frameworks in fact have serious local impacts. They are doing so through citizen monitoring projects to promote better service delivery in their communities.

Our first example of this came from Brazil, where the investigative journalism organization, ABRAJI, created an online training course to teach reporters from around the country how to track fiscal spending. Our second example comes from Georgia, where Zaal Anjaparidze and his team the Eurasia Partnership Foundation provide financial grants and training to local NGOs, allowing them to keep an eye on services that matter most in their communities-- from federal housing distribution to the effectiveness of waste management services.

When I spoke with Zaal, a peer reviewer for the Global Integrity Report: 2009, it was clear that reform is at the core of the Eurasia Partnership Foundation’s Engage and Monitor for Change program. This initiative taps into pre-existing local civil society networks, providing training to those organizations on how best to design and implement citizen monitoring programs, and pairing them up with outside mentor groups and journalists. Together, these teams have the outlet and the reach to demand government attention.

The Eurasia Partnership Foundation was created in 2007 as a follow-up action plan to a national study of the state of civic monitoring in Georgia. The survey results looked promising: a culture of civic monitoring existed in localities across Georgia, but in most cases improvements needed to be made in how evaluations were being carried out. As Zaal put it, “local government frequently complains that civic monitoring done by NGOs is unprofessional.” Directed by the survey results, the Foundation adopted a mandate to improve the haphazard nature of citizen monitoring projects in Georgia. The existing base of local organizations made capacity building and the creation of a competitive grants process the program’s top priorities.

Zaal identifies the competitive grants process as an essential experience to help grassroots organizations who are “important at the community level” gain the experience to launch them into the “elite” status of the more well-established and well-funded CSOs. “Actually, the CSOs whom we selected as grantees have some experience in civic monitoring but this experience was not sufficient to do it professionally. Local government frequently complains that civic monitoring done by NGOs [Georgia] is unprofessional. That's why we conducted training of trainers in civic monitoring and advocacy and equipped NGOs with a Georgian language guidebook on methods of participatory monitoring which is tailored to Georgian realities.”

Stressing "Professionalism"

This training of trainers was initially completed by the Partnership for Democratic Change to either improve monitoring practices for groups who had previous experience or start from scratch with others.

In each monitoring exercise undertaken by the Foundation, target sectors are identified jointly by both grassroots groups, who represent local needs, and more mid-level groups with the specific training and better capacity to carry out the assessment. Zaal emphasized that these partnerships are essential not only for the monitoring project at hand but also for strengthening Georgian civil society more broadly.

Recent local monitoring projects have taken on the following service-delivery sectors: housing, health care, privatization of agriculture, forest management, local budget, and even waste management. In Kutaisi (Georgia’s second largest city), the Foundation partnered with local group Sachino to establish a homeowners association to increase civic participation in decisions related to on-going housing project construction.

The Engage and Monitor for Change program has had mixed results in terms of government cooperation and receptiveness to results. There is little outreach to local governments prior to the monitoring exercise. Instead, establishing a vibrant monitoring team is the first priority, after which the government is presented with recommendations based on civil society monitoring. Zaal finds that government receptiveness is often based on the “professionalism of the results.” To help translate the findings into government reform, Zaal says monitoring CSOs often try to partner with local media groups who can “help to mobilize communities,” “pressure government,” and “improve our public image.” The activist-focused, watchdog style of media reporting often pushes government to respond in some way, although Zaal admits the reaction is not always positive. This challenge came out strongly during the project’s two year review, where participants identified government buy-in as a main weakness in the “actionability” of project results:

“Participants stated that apolitical will of the government still doesn't contribute much to the engaged cooperation and dialogue between civic sector and government. The latter prefers to manipulate…citizen participation just for show…”

The Eurasia Partnership Foundation’s grants program is creating a culture of local civil society engagement throughout Georgia. The structure and mentoring aspects of these projects provide community groups with capacity to hold their governments accountable for service delivery, grounding the often elusive concept of governance in citizens’ daily lives.

-- Norah Mallaney

Accidental Censorship: How Did We Get Here?

2010-02-08T11:00:00.020-05:00

Part two in a our Accidental Censorship series is a content analysis of Chicago's local journalism, reprinted from The New News: Journalism We Want and Need (cc by). In it, our friends at the Community Media Workshop explore evidence that newspapers are covering local issues like schools, housing and pollution less than they were 20 years ago.

By Community Media Workshop

Many observers of today’s news business twists and turns start their historical overviews of the development of new online news publications in the late 15th century. That’s when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, ushering in an era of print innovation that prefigured the changes wrought on our society by the advent of social media. Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in a widely published opinion piece, advanced succinctly the comparison between the rise of social media and the advent of print:

Before Gutenberg, the monks copied illustrated manuscripts and were the keepers of information. Long after Gutenberg, during the Renaissance, society more or less figured out how to handle information. Today we are again living in those uncertain in-between years, when Gutenberg’s technology broke the old rules and allowed something new called literacy.1

The economic trauma our major news outlets are experiencing—such as the bankruptcy of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times—masks some of the real trends affecting local news. These trends suggest online news publications are likely to supplement, not replace these news outlets. However, a lack of local news is a real concern online news publications may help alleviate.

Is there less local news?

What constitutes local news may be hard to define, but we know it when we see it. However blurry the definition, newspaper audiences say it’s what they value most highly and would miss most if their daily paper disappeared. In one recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 43 percent of respondents said it would hurt civic life “a lot” if their local newspaper closed; and 30 percent of those who felt it would hurt civic life a lot pointed to their reliance on their paper’s local news as what they would miss.2

Journalists themselves increasingly point out that their ability to provide local news is their competitive advantage. A 2007 study by Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation, Is Local Journalism the Answer? noted local news may be the key to giving hometown readers “reasons to go to their local newspaper, in print or online”.3

While detailed content analysis was beyond the scope of our investigation, we attempted to get a rough sense of the quantity of local news coverage in our leading newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times. To do so, we selected some key terms we deemed likely to appear in coverage that exemplifies local news. These terms were drawn from our experience in community development, health and education, among other areas, and focused on issues and challenges that have long faced Chicago and the region. We also selected as keywords several of Chicago’s cultural institutions, which we reasoned would be likely to appear in stories about arts and culture and/or reviews of performances and other creative work. Keyword searches performed in March and April 2009 used the Newsbank archive and allowed us to examine how often the keywords appeared within a specific time frame. Searches included editorial, news, and feature stories in the two newspapers. We carried out the following keyword searches:

Air Pollution
Art Institute
Bribery
Charter Schools
Chicago Symphony
Corruption
Criminal Justice
DCFS
Early Childhood Education
Goodman Theater
Health and Uninsured
High School
Graduation Rates
Homeless and Chicago
Infrastructure and Chicago
Locally Grown Food
Ozone
Public Housing
Recycling
Regional Planning
School Reform
Senior Citizens
Toxic Waste
Vocational Education

Most of the results followed the same trend demonstrated for the six indicators in this chart:

We were unable to determine with the resources available to us what might have caused the apparent spike in local news coverage indicated by the keyword searches around 1994.We also noted some exceptions to the steadily fewer appearances of most of our keyword terms thereafter. The exceptions included corruption and bribery, which showed significant increases in the number of stories containing these words.

Are stories about corruption and bribery, which are staples of Chicago and Illinois politics, driving other local news stories such as the ones we searched for out of the news? It’s possible. Another interpretation is that as the newspapers have dropped some local news coverage, they have nonetheless kept the focus on their key government watchdog functions.

One important caveat on the keyword searches: they largely ignore context and make no adjustment for prominence within the newspaper (for example, a front page story received equal weight from the keyword search as one buried deep within one of the paper’s sections). We attempted to control for this with searches for several of these keywords within the first paragraph of a news story, or lead.

These reflected a similar trend as seen in the following chart (note the public housing line and high school graduation rates lines closely overlap).
While the measure itself was rough, the similar pattern across many different keyword searches appears to indicate that these topics have received generally less coverage as the years have gone by. It seems clear that there is less local news in our two leading newspapers today than there was 20 years ago.

Economic and audience trends

The Internet had been threatening the news business for years before the recent spate of economic challenges. As Ken Davis noted at the Chicago Journalism Town Hall meeting on February 22, news has joined other industries transformed by the Internet:

One by one, online has been either annihilating or completely rewriting the script for just about every kind of entity, organization, company that there is. And for the longest time the same thing was about to happen to the collection writing editing and dissemination of news. How we get it, how we distribute it to the public is changing almost by the hour.4

As Davis pointed out, the changes have sped up in the past 12 months, exemplified most dramatically by layoffs of some 100 journalists at the Tribune alone, and many more at other news outlets. The economic crisis is exacerbating what many say are larger problems in the news business.

Revenues down

Those changes include sharp declines in advertising revenue and paid circulation. Advertising revenue is in freefall, according to the Newspaper Association of America:

In 2008, for the first time since the association began tracking advertising in 1950, print ad revenue declined for an unprecedented third consecutive year. The 17.7 percent 2007-to-2008 decline was the steepest ever recorded.5
Online advertising revenue, which had been growing by double digits in the years since the Association began to measure it, slipped 1.8 percent in 2008 to $3.109 billion.6
Newspaper ad sales declined at an accelerating pace in each quarter of 2008, tumbling nearly 20 percent in the last three months of the worst year in the history of the industry.7

Paid circulation is also down. The Audit Bureau of Circulation reported recently that average daily circulation at 395 U.S. newspapers fell 7.09 percent in the first quarter of 2009, with daily average circulation in the three months ending on March 31, 2009, declining to 34.4 million from 37.1 million a year earlier.8

Audience up

At the same time, audiences for news online are growing. The Newspaper Association reported recent numbers that show visits to online newspaper sites have never been higher—a 10.5 percent increase at the end of the first quarter of 2009 over the same period the previous year.9 There is some debate, however, as to the significance of increased traffic at newspaper Web sites. Newspaper boosters contend it shows more engaged audiences for traditional news, while others suggest the numbers fail to compensate for a historic lack of engagement between readers and reporters and editors. It may be too soon to tell.

Certainly, print journalists are learning fast how to engage audiences online but it’s equally clear that they have a long way to go. In the Digital Media Cookbook, Rich Gordon of Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University succinctly frames the problem online poses to traditional news:

Visitors to newspaper Web sites use those sites less frequently, and for much less time, than readers of print editions—or visitors to online community sites. While newspapers have gradually managed to increase the time spent with their sites, nothing they have done has produced results nearly as compelling as the astonishing growth of MySpace and Facebook in the past couple of years.10

Gordon’s report offers insight into the problems newspapers face and suggests that they are working hard to solve them.

Chicago’s new online news

There’s no reason to assume that online news publications will do a better job of local news coverage than their counterparts in print and broadcast. An example involving international news helps illustrate this. The head of Public Radio International delivered a speech in 2008 about the lack of good international news, in which she noted that while local television news programs provided relatively little such news, online news did not perform better:

Last year, Pew and the Colombia J-School analyzed the 14,000 stories that appeared on Google News’ front page. And they, in fact, covered the same 24 news events. Similarly, a study in e-content showed that much of global news from U.S. news creators is recycled stories from the AP wire services and Reuters, and don’t put things into a context that people can understand their connection to it.

In fact, by many measures traditional newspaper sites appear to be outperforming online news publications, according to the 2009 annual The State of The News Media by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism.11 One component of the study contrasts “legacy media,” i.e. newspapers, with online news publications such as blogs and “citizen media” sites. Some examples:

Legacy sites (from traditional newspapers) offered almost double the percent of news (89 percent) in comparison with citizen news sites (56 percent) and three times that of blogs (27 percent).12
Citizen sites used legacy sites as news sources, with citizen sites linking to legacy news sites twice as often as legacy sites linked to citizen sites.13
The topic coverage on blogs and citizen news sites is generally narrow and the sourcing is light.14

As the survey also notes, online news publications not produced by traditional newspapers are an emerging phenomenon. They may be rare, but rapid growth of existing online news publications and expanding numbers of such publications is another key trend. Much has been and continues to be written on this topic. We found a useful source for monitoring the development of such sites and for how-to and related information to be the Knight Citizen News Network, a portal that guides both ordinary citizens and traditional journalists in launching and responsibly operating community news and information sites, which also assembles news innovations and research on citizen media projects.15 The site is maintained by J-Lab, a news innovation hub.

Finally, it’s notable that in reporting about of these new online news publications, Chicago is routinely cited as a national leader. One of Chicago’s leading online news publications, Chi-Town Daily News, was featured in the Washington Post on April 1, 2009; the article focused on how the site is filling gaps in local news coverage, quoting Chi-Town’s Geoff Dougherty: “When you look at a situation where a number of metro papers are going out of business, the thing that really gets shut down is local coverage. We can fill the gap.”16

A couple of weeks later, The New York Times cited online news publication EveryBlock.com, and quoted Adrian Holovaty: “We have a very liberal definition of what is news. We think it’s something that happens in your neighborhood.”17 The same day as the Times story, the Sun-Times reported that “the reinvention of the news gathering industry is being engineered—at least in part—in Chicago.”18

1 Ibarguen, Alberto, “The future of getting news to Americans,” Holland (MI) Sentinel, May 24, 2009
2 The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “Many Would Shrug if Their Local Newspaper Closed,” News Interest Index, March 12, 2009, people-press.org/report/497/many-would-shrug-if-local-newspaper-closed, Accessed May 25, 2009
3 Ludtke, Melissa, ed., “Is Local News the Answer,” Nieman Reports, Winter 2007, www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100107, accessed May 26, 2009
4 See chijournalismtownhall.com/ and full audio at www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=32307
5 “Advertising Expenditures-Annual” Newspaper Association of America Web site, www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-Expenditures.aspx, accessed May 24, 2009
6 Ibid.
7 “Advertising Expenditures-Quarterly,” Newspaper Association of America Web site, www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-Expenditures.aspx#spotlight-Quarterly accessed May 24, 2009
8 “Average daily circulation at 395 U.S. newspapers down 7.09%, audit bureau says,” by Agence France Press, April 28, 2009 at www.nationalpost.com/related/links/story.html?id=1539914 accessed May 24, 2009
9 “Newspaper Web Site Audience Increases More Than Ten Percent In First Quarter To 73.3 Million Visitors,” www.naa.org/PressCenter/SearchPressReleases/2009/Newspaper-Web-Site-Audience-Increases-More-Than-Ten-Percent.aspx , accessed May 24, 2009
10 Gordon, Rich The Online Community Cookbook: Recipes for building audience interaction at newspaper Web sites, Newspaper Association of America, 2008 www.naa.org/docs/Digital-Media/Cookbook/Cookbook08final.pdf accessed May 24, 2009
11 Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, The State of the News Media: An Annual Report On American Journalism, spring 2009, www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/index.htm, accessed May 24, 2009
12 ibid., “Special Reports: Citizen Based Media,” www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/narrative_special_citzenbasedmedia.php?cat=0&media=12, accessed May 24, 2009. The special report derived from a two-year survey by researchers at three universities, “Tracking and Analyzing Community News Models,” funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Knight Foundation. The first phase, conducted in late 2007, was released in the 2008 State of the Media report.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 www.kcnn.org. Accessed May 24, 2009
16 Kurtz, Howard, “Chicago’s Frisky Web Sites Gain Ground On the Bankrupt Newspapers,” The Washington Post (Washington Post-Los Angeles Times News Service), April 1, 2009
17 Miller, Claire Cain and Brad Stone, “News Without Newspapers,” The New York Times, April 13, 2009, p. B1, Late Edition-Final
18 Spirrison, Brad “Future of news being delivered in Chicago -- EveryBlock, Printed Blog, Newser leading charge to reinvent industry,” The Chicago Sun-Times, April 13, 2009, Final, p. 35

Click here for the rest of the The New News.

Upcoming in the Accidental Censorship series: In the third and final post, Global Integrity will examine the effects of technology, the market and political context on the quality of news around the world.

Tracking Impact: Romanian Academic Society to Address Problems Identified by Global Integrity

2010-02-03T17:41:00.002-05:00

Big news! Today, we received word that the Romanian Academic Society (SAR) earned a grant to implement its Global Integrity Impact Challenge project proposal. With this new funding, SAR will conduct a year-long assessment on the effectiveness of transparency and accountability mechanisms in the Romania’s energy procurement process -- a weakness noted in the Global Integrity Report: 2008.

Last April, SAR was recognized by Global Integrity as a winner of the Impact Challenge, a call for project concepts that use the Global Integrity Report to inform anti-corruption efforts on the ground. In addition to receiving a cash prize from Global Integrity, each winning organization’s proposal was passed along to our colleagues at the Partnership for Transparency Fund (PTF) for potential project funding. After an extensive review process, PTF has agreed to partner with SAR by funding its Citizens for Energy project, meaning this project concept will soon be a reality.

Congratulations to SAR! You can read their original Impact Challenge entry below.

Global Integrity has big plans for this year's bigger, better Impact Challenge. Watch this space! And if you're designing an anti-corruption project, contest-winning or otherwise, ask us how Global Integrity data might accelerate your work by targeting your interventions to the right issues and opportunities. Email me at info{at}globalintegrity.org.

SAR proposal:

“The project will monitor (for one year) and raise public awareness about the activities of two regulatory agencies which are crucial for the transparency and competitiveness on the Romanian market – ANRE (energy) and ANRMAP (procurement) – in order to improve their performance and accountability to the citizens.

The regulatory framework in Romania was largely set up based on international best practices, with support and pressure from the EU and other international partners. In theory, a good regulator should be competent, independent from the regulated industry, transparent, and open to consultation and public participation. Administrators must be accountable for their decisions, regulatory activities non-arbitrary and responsive, and adequate mechanisms should exist for the review of administrative decisions by courts or other bodies.

While such a formal framework has been indeed created, enforcement has always been a problem, as the Global Integrity Index 2008 for Romania shows. What is more, external pressures from abroad for accountable governance have subsided once Romania entered the EU in 2007, and it remains the responsibility of local institutions and civil society to ensure the effectiveness of regulatory mechanisms in the years to come. The purpose of the project is to introduce better mechanisms for monitoring the performance of governmental agencies by complementing the gap of public information, checking the agencies’ effectiveness and independence, and creating the prerequisites for an increased accountability to the citizens. The project will thus improve the independent oversight of government activities, and promote the citizens’ active participation in the supervision process.”

The Romanian Academic Society (SAR) is a Bucharest-based independent think tank, established in 1996 with the mission to raise the public awareness on policy issues, contribute through research and advocacy to informed policy formulation and assist administrative reform through performance assessments. We believe that countries in our region benefit more or less out of their European accession depending on how fast their improve their domestic governance and accountability systems. Our annual turnover is around $300,000, and the budget exclusively project-based, with the EU, German Marshall Fund, the Soros Foundation and the British government among its main clients.

-- Norah Mallaney

Brazil 2.0: Journalists Go Online to Open Government Records

2010-02-01T16:08:00.013-05:00

In the overlap of technology and democracy, Brazil is an early adopter (see here, here). So it’s no surprise to find a Brazilian journalism group leading the way with online training for journalists on how to use government data to tell stories. ABRAJI (short for the Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo) arms journalists with information and then lets the reporters do what they do best -- tell the story. Training its members to follow government fiscal transfers and to track down the criminal records of past corruption offenders, ABRAJI is encouraging journalists to go after big stories with local impact.

Veridiana Sedeh and Jose Roberto de Toledo spoke with me from ABRAJI’s headquarters in Sao Paolo. During our conversations, Veridiana and Jose Roberto emphasized the importance of creating a public memory through smart journalism informed by access to government record-keeping. I met Veridiana through her work as a peer reviewer on the upcoming Global Integrity Report: 2009, and that led me to ABRAJI.

Want access to a confidential database? Just ask.

The majority of ABRAJI’s efforts are focused on training, especially around monitoring of funds transferred from the national-level to state and local governments. Veridiana, ABRAJI’s executive-manager, estimates that ABRAJI has trained more than 4,000 journalists to date. Not bad for a group that only has 1,000 members -- 400 of whom have officially paid their dues!

Jose Roberto, ABRAJI’s Coordinator of courses and projects, drew me a rough sketch of how fiscal transfers work in Brazil. At the national-level, there is one large government account which is monitored by congress. Citizens do not have access to the details of the expanse of this fund. Money provided to state and municipal governments is allocated from this big, central pot. However, without clear knowledge of the volume of funding at starting point (i.e how much money is in the pot to begin with), it is not clear to the public what percentage of funding is going where.

In order to better track discrepancies in funding among projects and provinces, ABRAJI’s local NGO partner, Contas Abertas, convinced a legislator of the importance of public access to this account. The partner suggested that the congressman take action independently of his fellow legislators and provide the group with his password to national fiscal database. The congressman agreed to this scheme and gave up his password, granting the organization unlimited access of the (formerly) restricted online database. Building on this information, Contas Abertas created a more sophisticated system to track municipal funding by allowing users to cross reference national-level transfers against local records.

ABRAJI then activated its network of journalists across the country to be the test users of this new database. ABRAJI created training courses to teach reporters how to best leverage this newly available information. The training sessions occur both in person in the major cities and online, so as to reach journalists from outlying states such as Amazonas.

Jose Roberto stressed that the point of the training sessions and follow-on reporting is “not only to find the wrong things but to simply find where the money is going.” The goal is not to reveal major scandals, but rather, journalists are trained to link needs to funding by comparing the amount of funding local governments receive from the federal government to their levels of service delivery. The program is just beginning and Jose Roberto admits that his network is not at a full watchdog level yet. (He cites especially large gaps in the monitoring of contracting and political contributions in Brazil.) Still, ABRAJI has begun to collect stories from trained journalists who are using their new knowledge and tools to report on money flows. One example of a finding was in the town of Jaguariúna in the state of São Paulo, where a politically connected NGO called “Bola pra Frente” received almost double the funding from the federal government in 2008 than municipal government received! Jose Roberto says “now and then we see the results—not always in the whole story (journalistic piece) but [we can see progress] in the way they approach the story—with more data and analysis.”

“To fight numbers you must have numbers too”

Before ABRAJI’s training sessions, issues of fiscal transfers were not on the radar of many Brazilian journalists. Jose Roberto suspects reporters either “assumed it was known” that funding was biased or thought the subject was too “common” to write about. Reporters’ access to this information, through ABRAJI, coupled with training on how to use this financial documentation has changed that. Jose Roberto stated: “When they have raw data, [journalists] are much more confident. To fight numbers you must have numbers too. Access to information increases the level of journalism”

When I asked why this information wasn’t public to begin with, Jose Roberto said that access to information is “not in [the government’s] culture.” He suspects that the government is withholding this information not because they are afraid of a probing civil society, but rather because of low internet infrastructure that may collapse with too many users and be susceptible to hackers. However, Jose Roberto has seen recent improvements from the government with the development of a transparency portal to provide access to some information online.

DIY: ABRAJI’s Crime Database

ABRAJI has focused on another recent initiative of the Brazilian government: increased police operations targeting organized crime, NARCO and corruption. Law enforcement’s quick scale-up in activity has meant that record keeping has not been as diligent as it should be. Seeing this need for improved record-keeping, ABRAJI has created an online crime database is to sync all publicly available crime statistics and information in one space. The crime database combines the police reports with the media write-ups on specific incidences so that the names the police officers, lawyers and judges involved in the case as well as the identities of the accused are all in one space. This makes it easier for a journalist to search for background information and draw connections as he or she writes up a new incident.

The online, password-protected database is only accessible by journalists in the ABRAJI network. It is based on an Italian model where local reporters can cross reference lawyers’ names to see if there are common backgrounds and links between the lawyers and the accused.

Jose Roberto sees this as a tool that every newsroom should have and he and ABRAJI are playing with the idea of creating a connected archive to track potential conflicts of interest and corruption within the justice system by examining the links between prosecutors and the accused.

Even if there is consensus within ABRAJI that this has the potential as an expanding and replicable model, the organization has been slow to track how journalists are using this information. I specifically asked about concerns of keeping the names of the accused private, as well as protecting the identities of the victims. Jose Roberto pointed out that the database is not revealing any new information-- it is simply gathering information that is already publicly accessible and storing it together in one space. He added that until recently, there hadn’t been any push-back from civil liberty groups or from the accused. However, in late-2009 the password protected crime database went without its protection for a few days. During this time, a formerly accused citizen found his name on the website. The accused was outraged, but Jose Roberto reports that no legal action has come of this.

ABRAJI works to contextualize and inform public memory by arming reporters with the information they need to effectively tell their stories. With the Brazilian legislation warming to the idea of greater citizen access to information, ABRAJI expects its reporters will have increased potential to develop into watch-dogs of government spending; leveraging government information towards a greater civic consciousness.

-- Norah Mallaney

Accidental Censorship: How Policy, Markets and Technology Inadvertently Silence Political Speech

2010-01-26T08:00:00.009-05:00

Our first post in an ongoing series exploring the transformation of journalism and what that means for democracy. Journalist and media critic Anne Elizabeth Moore describes the forces that are inadvertently silencing political speech in the United States.

Sometimes, accidental policy can do a lot of damage.

In the spring of 2006, Time-Warner, the largest periodicals publisher in the United States proposed an increase in bulk mailing rates which would force smaller-scale publishers to shoulder the majority of the increases. The United States Postal Service agreed, willingly shifting their costs away from one of world’s most powerful media operations and towards their smaller competition.

The ever-privatizing USPS was once chartered by the country’s founders with the notion of supporting American democracy via cheap media distribution. But it now was flirting with the Dark Side, a metaphor made visible in several cities throughout the US when the postal service launched a marketing campaign for Star Wars, one of the most profitable film franchises ever. Independent filmmakers received no such publicity help.

Shortly thereafter, a non-profit organization that insulated independent and non-corporate periodicals from pressures like these declared bankruptcy while owing months or years of back pay to many of the publishers affected by the bulk-mail rate hikes.

In the essay that follows, we’ll see how more and more small publications went out of business -- an organizational bloodbath foretelling the current demise of the American newspaper industry. By 2008, no print publications covering corporate control of American culture and politics were left to report the police abuses that targeted independent media makers, first at the Democratic National Convention, and then at the Republican National Convention. Over the course of three years, despite the opportunities presented by blogs and social media, many voices offering dissent against the machinations of our political system and its corporate backers had been silenced.

More troubling is that these events have often been described as the natural outcome of a healthy free market. The opinion has been voiced, more and more frequently, that a lack of merit has led to these market changes. An honest debate is possible over whether MSNBC offers more valuable information than a local newspaper, but perhaps merit should not be a primary factor when considering access to information. In a democracy, the needs of citizens for deep and varied information sources must balance against the need to reward the most successful media business models. In a democracy, the silencing of voices is always censorship. However accidental.

Accidental censorship: a working definition…

Admittedly, it is easier to accuse one’s enemies of coercion, corruption, and censorship than it would be to accuse one’s friends of the same. But when one’s friends -- business partners, friendly government agencies, longtime supporters and associates -- assist in the process of silencing voices, in collusion with those that might be spoken against, it is all the more necessary.

Somewhere between overt censorship -- restrictions imposed by an outside force meant to suppress information -- and self-censorship -- internal decisions to withhold information, generally made out of fear of overt censorship -- lies a system of control over freedom of expression favored by democracies and almost entirely invisible to either the perpetrators or the censored. To ease the consciences of the oppressors here, and gain the trust of the oppressed, we’re going to call this accidental censorship. Because no one involved intends to explicitly suppress information, the term fits just fine. Yet in certain cases the information suppressed affects only those voices that dissent from, decry, or defame the powers that be -- those enacting the policies, legislation, or technological advances in the first place -- that may accidentally silence voices of protest. That is accidental censorship.

Accidental censorship is enacted through economic policies, legislation, and technologies that tend to hinder certain kinds of speech, often in combination with (and in marked contrast to) the rewards, adulation, and support granted other kinds of speech. This is the paradox of our times: while the volume of information online grows fantastically and the cost of publishing approaches zero, the range of topics being actively discussed in public space has narrowed. This contraction is most visible in the increasingly consolidated media that most Americans watch and read. A decrease in viewpoints represented in media has implications for not only the electoral process but also policy decisions and consumer behavior. Accidental censorship is inherently undemocratic; it must be understood and resisted.

Punk [Planet] is dead…

The nefarious if largely unknowable forces behind accidental censorship have been busy in recent years, and few individuals without direct experience can testify to their impact. The demise of my former magazine, Punk Planet, is an example. When we announced our final issue in the summer of 2007, there was no more significant news story among a certain close-knit but international band of scruffy losers who eschewed mainstream media. If you were not white, not male, not between 18 and 34 years of age, and failed to identify with punk, DIY, or anti-consumerist culture, you might have missed the news.

But if you were all or most of these, the outpouring of sorrow expressed in your visits, phone calls, emails, letters, YouTube testimonials, blog posts, good-bye parties -- not to mention the glowing obituaries in magazines, zines, and newspapers -- were all deeply appreciated. This emotion, however, runs close to the nostalgia so thoroughly mined in recent discussions of the so-called “death of journalism,” and obscures the fact that the demise of our little magazine was brought about by an identifiable set of dynamics that continue to impact the viability of print publishing in the US.

The accidental censor at work in Punk Planet's case was our very own newsstand distributor -- or rather, the for-profit forces that had come to plague all media, periodicals distribution included. A decade beforehand, newsstand distribution had been a healthy business, with competing companies always on hand to vie over the hateful task of shipping boxes of any given title all over the world. But just as the media conglomerates were voraciously gobbling up more and more print, broadcast, and web outlets, they were also -- less publicly -- back-pocketing the means of getting those various dispatches in front of readers. It was a situation many in the independent publishing community bemoaned, so in 1999 the Independent Press Association (IPA), the not-for-profit charged with creating a network of support for its member titles, purchased Big Top Distribution Services to ensure that at least one national independent distributor remained viable and capable of getting independent magazines into stores. But by the tail end of 2006, the IPA told the hand-to-mouth publications it placed on newsstands that it was closing its doors. Many were owed several thousands of dollars -- entire years' worth of back earnings; totals equaling annual operating budgets. Punk Planet, a 13-year-old magazine that served as the backbone of youth-focused independent publishing, couldn't survive.

As Paul Davis writes, in a muckraking essay we were determined would appear even if it was the last thing we at Punk Planet published (and it was), "The fallout has been profound -- the independent publishing community has experienced an unprecedented bloodletting in recent months, as magazines run on a shoestring have been unable to overcome huge losses in operating income." For several years previous, the not-for-profit organizations' desire to compete with the for-profit distribution model, indicated by ever more corporate new hires, had snowballed into an internal "tightly regulated, top-down management approach." This, in turn, "led to a lack of transparency" in its external fiscal communications. For several years, tiny-budget magazines had struggled with inaccurate financial reports, unreturned phone calls, and unexpectedly small checks. Accountability issues also mirrored the for-profit business model, but it was not the only destructive swath being clear-cut through the largely not-for-profit world of independent publishing.

Earlier in 2006, the United States Postal Service (USPS) had announced a rate hike that would disproportionately affect small-circulation magazines with higher bulk-mail costs. Following the announcement, the USPS allowed for only six days of public comment, but made scant fanfare of the fact that the proposal had been submitted by Time-Warner, one of the largest periodical publishers in the world, with titles including Newsweek, Time, and Entertainment Weekly. The new rates favored large-circulation magazines (Time, for example,) with increases of less than 10 percent, while small-circulation magazines, those that print lesser numbers -- often they are political, like Mother Jones, the Nation, National Review, New Republic, and Weekly Standard -- would pay 30 to 40 percent more. The projected increases for some titles were estimated at US$500,000 -- an amount that approached the annual budget of a few of the affected publications.

An "unprecedented promotion"…

The rate-hike announcement also coincided with a massive, nationally implemented Star Wars marketing campaign undertaken by the USPS. An "unprecedented promotion," the Lucasfilm website proclaimed of the 30-year-anniversary coup of an entire arm of the quasi-governmental agency when, in hundreds of cities across the country, for an unknown cost, mailboxes were done over in cute robot drag. "When you look at a mailbox, the resemblance to R2D2 is too good to pass up," one official stated. (You'd expect this quote from a Star Wars marketing rep, but it was provided by a USPS spokesperson.) A concurrent Target toy promotion further helped to account, alongside DVD sales, film and special effects production and real-estate revenue, for Lucasfilm's 2006 profits of $1.2 billion (calculated on average).

In effect, two different for-profit media ventures had turned the post office's national reach to private benefit, a problem no lesser American historical figure than James Madison had predicted.

When the post office was established in 1792, debates raged: not over how much to charge who for carrying what to where, but over whether or not periodicals -- newspapers then mostly -- should be charged at all. Madison stated that charging for delivery of the mass media of the day was "an insidious forerunner of something worse," while Benjamin Bache, Ben Franklin's grandson, argued that commercial pressure would quickly limit and soon end the creation of periodical publications.

As the largest employer in the country, the postal service was established as a governmental arm with the mission of delivering the widest possible array of media to the widest number of people. Clearly, it was not in the interests of democracy to use that wide access to promote a single film series or publisher's titles to those same people. But these were deliberate acts, enabled by the gradual privatization of the USPS, and with the sole objective of making profit. It is only by accident that independent publishers were stuck with the check.

Yet the pending economic downturn was clearly playing a role as well-evidenced by more than just the increasingly wonky decisions of traditionally less cut-throat agents. Punk Planet's last year of publication (2006/2007) had, on average, fewer ad pages than in 2003: approximately half. Exciting web technology, blamed for both the demise of print publishing and the increased costs of sending mail, provided a shiny distraction from the fact that independent online music labels, bookstores, publishing houses, and internet boutiques -- much of independent culture, in fact, and a great deal of it web-based -- was folding or suffering financially.

Between 2003 and 2007, when Punk Planet finally closed its doors, Stay Free!, Clamor, Kitchen Sink, Herbivore, Grooves, Rock N Rap Confidential, HeartAttack, and Rockrgrl all stopped printing. More have followed, joined now by movie-star rags, trade titles; even mainstream outlets like the Rocky Mountain News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the non-profit Christian Science Monitor have shut down their daily papers.

A figure greater than zero…

Elsewhere I have tallied and lamented the precise number of perspectives and opinions lost in this elaborate process, a figure that, being greater than zero, should alarm anyone concerned with democracy in America. Here, what’s important to note is that this loss was not merely the results of shifting consumer tastes, an argument often cited when lamenting the loss of Punk Planet (as tempting as it may be to remind us that punk is dead). Rather, this was a series of small but profound decisions by individuals and the organizations they managed from all points along the political spectrum, from the Executive Director of the not-for-profit IPA to the marketing director of the for-profit Lucasfilm, Ltd., and from the governmental (or semi-governmental) Postmaster General to the megalithic publisher Time Warner. These small decisions tended to favor certain kinds of speech -- in this case, corporate -- at the expense of others -- in this case, anti-corporate -- and failed therefore to preserve free speech at all.

That this scenario has come to pass in the United States, occurring across a bipartisan series of presidential administrations, each adopting ever more corporate friendly policies, will surprise no one. Yet we should realign our entire sense of surprise around this realization: it seems natural to life in a democratic nation that only certain individuals have access to all of its liberties. We have become comfortable with the suppression of certain voices, under certain conditions. Those conditions are multiplying rapidly and have fueled a dwindling of voices, as Sir David Hare underscored in an excellent speech at this year’s Freedom of Expression awards. “All sorts of wonderful reasons in all sorts of different cultures -- religious and non-religious -- are going to be given in the next 10 years, as they were given in the last, for why people should not say what they want, about what they want.” It is because these reasons strike us as reasonable that we do not consider them censorship. But it is because they keep entire classes of people from participating in the public sphere that, in fact, they are.

#AmazonFail…

A near-perfect example of accidental censorship -- and one particularly apt to explain the easy implementation of such policies under the free market -- was brought to life over Easter 2009 weekend when online bookseller Amazon admitted to a “glitch” that had caused 57,310 books to be removed from public view. While admitting error, Amazon simultaneously never denied that the “accident” was the unintended result of a policy decision to keep books with sexual themes or subjects hidden from Harry Potter fans. The affected books were on a wide range of topics including sexual health; feminism; lesbian, gay, and transgender issues; and erotica. They had all been tagged under an algorithm as “adult.”

Authors had trouble locating their own books on the site, and in the ensuing hubbub, hackers falsely took responsibility for the problem, various Amazon officials came forward with partial explanations, and virulent microbloggers (tagging posts with the term #amazonfail, now the incident’s de facto moniker) fed each other theories and harangued the company.

Early revelations of the problem had occurred months beforehand, but Amazon finally responded to the Twitter storm with the following canned statement: “In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude ’adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.” Two days later, Amazon told Publishers Weekly that the problem was an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error” and began, slowly but surely -- analog pace, some would call it, in a digital age -- to relist the various books and manuals that had been affected. For many, the question then became, as Publishers Weekly explained, “just how a sophisticated technology company could let something like that happen and then not respond to the criticism that erupted in a more timely and open fashion.” Some, however, spotted a deeper problem.

As media and technology critic Mary Hodder pointed out in a smart description of the incident, the company’s explanation of the blatant censorship as an “accident” relies on an acceptance of its hidden incorporation of algorithms. These, she notes, remain hidden for a reason: “technologies that use them are designed not to share the methods for providing information.” This is the commodity in intellectual property: knowing what factors drive decisions. Still, we’re reminded of the natural-seeming selectivity that gives some authors access to readers but shuts others out when, Hodder explains, systems like Amazon provide no “notice to users of the assumptions that a system is making.” In fact, she adds, these “may not even be apparent to those building the system.” So that when, as Amazon later explained, a French employee “accidentally” checked the wrong box, it’s entirely believable that he didn’t know he’d removed 57,310 books from the site’s promotional lists. So, true, #AmazonFail was a “glitch” -- an accident -- but because the tagging system had predetermined that books neutral on or supportive of homosexuality were marked as adult, while books that were denunciatory of it were not, the fundamental biases within Amazon’s algorithmic system were exploited, and an array of products the company represented were selectively hidden from public view.

It should go without saying that it is as political to denounce homosexuality as it is to laud it; it may be less evident that finding homosexuality unworthy of judgment one way or the other but still deserving of discussion as a health, social, or sexual issue is an equally political stance. The latter two, both representing minority points of view in contemporary American culture, were wholly eliminated, for a time, from Amazon’s marketplace of ideas -- based solely on the political stance with which they approached human sexuality, and not on their literal or graphic depiction of it.

Effective immediately…

The #AmazonFail would not be the last time readers looking for reporting on gay, lesbian or transgender issues would be cut off without warning.

On a Monday morning in November 2009, staff arrived at the Atlanta office of Southern Voice, a 21-year-old gay newspaper, to find the doors locked. A note on the door informed them that the parent company of their paper, Windows Media, had shut down. Four other newspapers that served the LGBTQ community, including the 40-year-old Washington Blade, had been shuttered on the same day.

Windows Media was owned by the Avalon Equity Fund, a private investment fund that had been acquiring media properties, in part financed by a government loan. Avalon was in federal receivership after violating the terms of a loan from the Small Business Administration (SBA) by not having sufficient outside investment relative to the size of their loan. The SBA took over the fund and began selling off assets. Presumably because the papers were not at that time profitable (along with, I should note, much of the US economy) they were listed on the liabilities side of the ledger, and closed without fanfare.

The staff of the Washington Blade were quick to organize themselves and launch a new print publication, DC Agenda, within a week.

The instant rebound of one of the five closed newspapers raises the question: why is the SBA, a government agency with a mission to “help Americans start, build and grow businesses” closing newspapers without first exploring ways to sell them or convert them to a community-supported business model? At the very minimum, transferring rights to the paper’s name would have allowed the unknown DC Agenda to retain the 40-year-old Blade’s history as the newspaper of record for the national LGBTQ community at no cost to the government.

Economic hard times or online competition alone can’t explain this. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ad sales at Southern Voice were recovering after panicked companies suspended advertising in early 2009. The first issue of the DC Agenda sold “six pages of ads without even trying,” according to editor Kevin Naff. Boston gay weekly Bay Windows (a competitor of the Avalon papers) described Avalon’s debt-funded newspaper buying and subsequent implosion as a “gay newspaper killing spree” fueled by poor management and a disinterest in community. Bay Windows editors assured readers that despite the poor economy, their paper was fine and that the financial crunch that destroyed the Avalon properties had to do less with bad economics and more to do with the now-familiar story of unsustainable, leveraged acquisition by the Avalon Equity Fund managers. It is dark comedy that the killing blow came from a government agency chartered to help “start, build and grow” small businesses.

But the end result is the same: for reasons largely unrelated to reader interest in these newspapers or the value of their reporting, a sizable portion of the US’s gay journalism went silent during an election cycle where gay rights referenda are among the most intensely contested issues facing voters.

The pattern of unstable ownership disrupting newsrooms is not limited to left-leaning outlets. In the same month the Washington Blade closed, the daily Washington Times found a key source of revenue cut off. The conservative newspaper and radio outlet was once reliably kept afloat by funding from Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. After the elderly Moon turned control of his finances over to his children in October 2009, the Times learned that the champions of the marketplace would now have to survive in it. This seemingly unanticipated change triggered what the New York Times described as “a tumultuous two weeks of resignations, firings and a discrimination complaint from the former editorial page editor.” The paper, which was hailed as an editorial niche for opinions too conservative for mainstream papers and has served as a key training ground for conservative reporters, has since announced layoffs of at least 40 percent of its 370-person staff.

The stunguns of democracy…

It is as tempting to write off some of these examples as simple examples of doing business in a free-market economy as it is to write off others as technological glitches. But when the overarching effect is to restrict the voices represented in media, and the restriction frequently lands hardest on minority opinions, we should not only consider such examples acts of censorship, but we must also work to prevent them in nations devoted to democratic participation. Because if accidental censorship is passively accepted, even speech that is not anti-corporate, politically unpopular, or “adult” might soon be difficult to voice.

This became clear to me a few days after we announced the closing of Punk Planet, when I ran into a reporter from the Chicago Tribune. “Bummer about the magazine,” he said, and I agreed: “But the even bigger bummer is to come, when we start to see the range of issues we would normally have covered go untracked in other media.”

If I could have predicted it with any accuracy, I would have mentioned the still-15-months-off Republican National Convention in St. Paul, when Tasers, pepper spray, mountain bikes, mace, smoke bombs, and Triple Chaser grenades (which may cause “injury or death,” the product description warns) were used in an episode of police violence nearly unprecedented (the dogs and firehoses used against the 1960s civil rights movement being another, much better reported, example). Volunteer medics, legal observers, and the independent press were all targeted. Police emptied entire pepper spray canisters directly into the eyes of protesters; some protesters were beaten with bicycles. Several hundred arrestees were denied medical care while detained, and Taserings continued in police custody. Three hundred ninety six people were detained on the last night of the convention alone, when those mainstream reporters sent to cover the convention had already gone home, and many independent reporters were still locked up. Nearby homes were raided by police; residents claim the police did not show search warrants.

The crackdown was funded by a US$50 million grant from the Department of Justice and bolstered by an insurance policy that had the Republican Host Committee agreeing to cover the first US$10 million in litigation over civil rights violations. (Slightly less violent tactics were used at the DNC convention earlier that month in Denver, making police torture and the silencing of political voices a bipartisan problem.)

The early-September 2008 event went largely unnoticed by the mainstream media, who were drawn instead into a debate over whether or not Tina Fey was being “unfair” to Sarah Palin. Even political media, like Huffington Post, rejected stories emerging from St. Paul as not of mainstream interest -- while Democracy Now’s reporting was largely focused on host Amy Goodman’s own arrest (which occurred alongside several other reporters.) Bloggers ignored this story too. The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan would later breathlessly cover street protests in Tehran but made a single mention of protesters in St. Paul amidst his thousands of words addressing the RNC. Talking Points Memo, the Corner and other leading political blogs largely ignored this episode.

Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but several of the reporters then in jail had written for me already, and an impactful issue of Punk Planet would have been easy to devise. The point is: no internationally distributed political or cultural magazine emerged touting RNC police torture as a cover story. None were left to do the job. Online evidence of this event remains largely limited to YouTube videos, Minnesota Public Radio archives and things I wrote.

This, however, would have been difficult to explain to the Tribune reporter. Although a fan, he disagreed that the closing of this single magazine would matter. “It’s a niche market,” he told me. “It doesn’t affect that many people.”

I was appalled that a fellow member of the press would so cavalierly accept the closure of any news outlet, and said so. Likely, his perspective has changed since losing his job at the Trib. Still, I expect all journalists -- even former journalists, whose ranks are filling out these days -- to follow Hare’s prescription for all appearances of censorship, accidental or otherwise: “you must condemn censorship, intimidation, bullying, coercion, torture, encroachment on human rights and illegality in your friends with exactly the same rigour you bring to its condemnation in your enemies.”

-- Anne Elizabeth Moore

Upcoming in the Accidental Censorship series: Global Integrity will examine the experience of independent media around the world, as told by its practitioners, while friends at the Community Media Workshop bring a content analysis that provides evidence of the decline in local coverage over 20 years.

U.S. Campaign Finance Controls Overturned by Supreme Court

2010-01-21T13:08:00.013-05:00

In what we would describe as an old fashioned case of narrow legal analysis getting in the way of common sense, the U.S. Supreme Court has today seen fit to overturn several longstanding controls over the amount of money that large corporate interests and unions can spend to influence elections. Because it's not like campaign finance represents the Achilles heel of most countries' anti-corruption system or corporate influence on US policy is already frighteningly pervasive or anything.

We'll let others provide the gory details, but suffice it to say that the court's decision today is a major blow to anti-corruption efforts in the U.S. We'll have much to say about this in our new national assessment for the U.S., which is due out next month as part of the Global Integrity Report: 2009. Watch this space.

UPDATE: By request, here's the opinion.
Citizens Opinion

-- Nathaniel Heller

-- Image by Serithian (cc by/nc)

Drug Money in Mexican Elections? Political Financing Rules Might Help.

2010-01-20T14:21:00.010-05:00

The pervasive influence of drug cartels in Mexico is, by now, a fixture in the media and public imagination. Since the beginning of Felipe Calderón’s tenure as President of Mexico, his administration has taken a more aggressive stance against the Mexican drug cartels. During Calderón’s presidency there has been increased violence especially in the cities that border the US, infiltration of drug cartels into the army and other government agencies. On the bright side, there have been notable arrests, including most recently that of cartel leader Arturo Beltrán Leyva (who was killed during the bust) and his brother Carlos.

However, of growing concern is the potential danger of drug cartels penetrating Mexican politics.

In a previous blog post I mentioned that in a conversation I had with the former head of the Mexican Federal Electoral Institute (just months before he assumed that position), he justified why Mexico should have a political finance system largely dependent on public funds (i.e., coming from taxpayers). He argued that a system like the US, which is more reliant on private contributions, would be dangerous because of the potential infiltration of drug traffickers into politics. (As a point of clarification, Mexico’s political financing does indeed rely heavily on public funds, as was the case in 2003 when I had the aforementioned conversation, and for many years before that.)

For a review of political finance rules, see the Global Integrity Report: Mexico. Narcotraffic was also featured (in gory detail) in our last Corruption Notebook for Mexico.

New developments

A recent in-depth piece* by the Mexican newspaper Reforma published January 10, 2010 highlights some reforms that could help prevent drug cartels from inserting themselves in Mexico’s electoral system. In early December a roundtable discussion about the challenge of illegal financing in politics (in Spanish, “La democracia en una encrucijada: El reto del financiamiento ilícito de la política”) was held at “Los Pinos” -- the Mexican President’s Office -- organized by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) and the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Among the participants in this discussion were a former auditor general of Argentina, a former Vice-President of Colombia, the founder of the Russian chapter of Transparency International, a former Corruption Prosecutor of Spain, and other international experts. Various recommendations were presented. However these were apparently not heeded since Calderón introduced in mid-December a bill to the Mexican congress which entailed many political reforms except for the measures that were suggested at this discussion. Reforma interviewed some of these experts for their in-depth piece.

The political reforms introduced by Calderón might not be bad, but they address other issues and won’t do too much to prevent the potential entry of drug money into Mexican elections. Among the reforms proposed by the Calderón administration are: enabling the consecutive reelection of mayors, federal and state representatives for up to 12 years; eliminating party-list proportional representation senators; establishing run-off elections for president; allowing CSOs to propose bills to congress; and enabling the Judicial Branch to introduce bills related to their competence.

So, besides having a political finance system more reliant on public funding, what additional related measures should be implemented in the Mexican context? This is what the roundtable experts recommended:

A campaign finance reform that imposes harsher penalties on offenders, especially when exceeding campaign expenditures limits. Carlos Jiménez, a former Corruption Prosecutor of Spain, says that the existing penalties are not as effective since political parties keep exceeding the expenditures limits. Sanctions must be also imposed to the party that receives the donations, but also to the individual or corporation that makes them.

Reduce campaign expenditure limits. Higher limits create the temptation to resort to illegal contributions to finance political campaigns.

Clear rules that strengthen the autonomy of the election monitoring agencies. The 2009 Mexico GI Report [coming soon] is consistent with this analysis, changes in the leadership of the Federal Electoral Institute (Instituto Federal Electoral — IFE) show the vulnerability of this agency to political whims, reinforcing its autonomy would prevent politicians from tinkering with this institute when they are not happy with it. Furthermore, the election agencies can’t do all the work, there has to be cooperation with prosecutors and other government agencies investigating money laundering.

Strengthen the auditing and oversight of political financing, especially at the state and municipal level. Humberto de la Calle, former Vice-President of Colombia, mentions that the Mexican government and institutions are not completely unprepared since they have some tools at their disposal, but the main weaknesses lie at the state and municipal level.

Reorganize complex systems of electoral organizations. Elena Panfilova, the founder of the Russian chapter of Transparency International, finds that too many electoral agencies (as she observes in Mexico) may be counterproductive. She recommends possibly eliminating some of them because, according to her, the multiplicity of agencies may be very expensive and produce results that have very little impact to Mexican citizens. She suggests that a public and transparent debate should be conducted on this issue.

Citizen involvement, mostly by voicing displeasure with electoral infractions and violations. Experts argue that passiveness or indifference will not put this issue in the spotlight, therefore it is necessary for citizens to condemn electoral violations because they essentially jeopardize democracy.

Finally, international cooperation is crucial. Drug trafficking is a transnational phenomenon, money flows travel across countries, and consequently cooperation with foreign agencies is critical to track and prevent the flow of drug money into Mexican politics.

So while strengthening the Federal Electoral Institute is key, as mentioned earlier, this should be conducted in tandem with efforts to strengthen the electoral agencies at the state level as well since they may very well be the weakest links. So the answer doesn’t just lie with the federal organization, cooperation and coordination between the electoral agencies and other government bodies is necessary to protect Mexican politics from drug money.

Some of these recommendations may be more appropriate for Mexico, but some could be applied to prevent illegal flows of money from organized crime in to political campaigns and parties in other countries.

-- Renato Busquets

-- Mexico City image by kainet (cc: by sa).

Citations:

Martínez, Martha. “Narco poder: tema para la reforma política.” Reforma, January 10, 2010, Enfoque section.

The Discreet Charm of Flexians: Reviewing Janine Wedel’s Shadow Elite

2010-01-18T08:00:00.009-05:00

Contrary to what its name may imply, “flexians” -- the subject of the anthropologist and public policy scholar Janine Wedel’s stimulating new book Shadow Elite-- are not alien beings from an episode of Star Trek. Rather, they are a relatively new, distinctly terrestrial constellation of actors who are remolding the landscape of global governance. Emblematic of the new era of “flexibility,” these elite players leverage their influence and power by moving in and out of multiple roles, often beyond public scrutiny. For academics, activists, and policy makers engaged in strengthening government accountability and transparency, Wedel’s work makes for a necessary though at times sobering read.

Applying her longstanding interests in informal institutions and social networks in Central and Eastern Europe to a more global arena, Wedel examines the rise of flexians and the social networks in which they interact (i.e., “flex nets”) in the US as well as Poland and Russia. These flexians are nomadic subjects who can move nimbly between the state and private sectors – maneuvering between roles as government advisors, business consultants, “think tank” intellectuals, and TV talking heads – in order to serve their own or group’s interests at the expense of the public’s. Their emergence was made possible by a number of broader developments, including: the growth of information and communication technologies; the “reinvention” of government and the attendant rise of deregulation and neoliberalism (i.e., the devolution and privatization of state power); the end of the Cold War; and the growth of performances and re-presentations of truth (or “truthiness,” in Wedel's term via Stephen Colbert). In their ability to personalize bureaucracy, privatize information, occupy multiple professional roles, and relax rules at the state-private nexus, flexians blur traditional boundaries between state-private, bureaucratic-market, and legal-illegal practices that ultimately undermines public accountability and market competition.

Shadow Elite carefully details the activities of these players in post-Cold War Poland and Russia as well as the privatization of and neoconservative ascendancy within the US government. In late socialist Poland, where the author first observed the workings of these operators, the mix of public and private as well as formal and informal practices enabled ordinary citizens and state officials to negotiate the constraints of a shortage economy. These same dynamics were also at play in 1990s Poland when the state was privatized – “legally” – by groups interested in serving their own interests. A similar fusion of official and private power could be seen in foreign aid targeted at Russia in the wake of socialism’s collapse. Wedel documents how key transnational actors from the Harvard Institute for International Development and the Chubais Clan bypassed traditional forms of government accountability and reshaped government outsourcing in the name of reforming the Russian economy (unfortunately, much to the country’s detriment). In the chapters that focus on the US, Wedel examines the increased outsourcing of US government functions to private entities and the influence of the neoconservatives (or “Neocons”) such as Richard Perle on American foreign policy leading up to the Iraq invasion. Indeed, she notes how despite the neoliberal rhetoric of downsizing government, the federal government has actually expanded for almost twenty years with many vital government functions contracted out to private actors working for think tanks, consulting companies, and the like. As a result, “private players are afforded fresh opportunities to make governing and policy decisions without meaningful government involvement. Whether for profit or to advance an agenda, they can privatize policy beyond the reach of traditional monitoring systems” (p. 75). The Neocons, too, personalized bureaucracy, privatized information, circumvented rules of accountability, and inhabited ambiguous professional roles to promote their foreign policy agenda in the Middle East. Despite the different country contexts, then, these flexians nevertheless share a remarkable set of behaviors that make them such adept manipulators.

Having adumbrated Wedel’s key arguments, I now wish to reflect on some of the theoretical/pragmatic implications of her critique that may be of particular interest to Global Integrity’s constituents. One of the key analytic points Wedel makes is the importance of social networks to the new system of governance. Instead of examining the production of governance power in a narrow and abstract legal-rationalistic framework, in other words, Wedel wisely puts human agency at the heart of her story. The flexians who are redrawing the boundaries between official and private power derive their group identity and authority from their shared social backgrounds, ideologies, and personal relations that enable them to link disparate yet powerful institutions together (in the case of the Neocons, think tanks, the media, and the Pentagon). In a flex group, an apostate is kept in line through immediate banishment from social membership – witness the temporary exile of Barry McCaffrey after he became critical of the conduct of the Iraq war (p. 3).

Unfortunately, conventional audits are inadequate tools to hold flexians accountable. In fact, they are part of the problem. Given the importance of network relations to this group, it should come as no surprise that accountability tends to become diffused, thereby making it difficult for current accountability systems to assess flex players. So far, flexians have demonstrated a remarkable ability to avoid the consequences of their actions because the tools to monitor and oversee them have not kept pace with changing practices. Traditional auditing tends to “break things down into observable, isolated, and often quantifiable pieces, and then scrutinizes the pieces – typically with little or no regard for the whole” (p. 197). This renders it unsuitable to the task of tracking flexians’ roving activities and their ever-shifting alliances. Instead, holding them to account requires crafting a system that is “holistic” in its approach, “one that considers all the components collectively and how they interact” (p. 201). How this system will look and operate – and to what effect – remains the task of our collective energies and creativity. For a collective response (not piecemeal responses by individuals or individual institutions) is what is necessary if such investigations are truly to have an impact.

Beyond scrutinizing standard monitoring practices, Wedel makes it clear that traditional analytic concepts such as “corruption” and “conflicts of interest” are not sufficient to grasp the operational complexities of flex nets and flex players. Their desire for power and influence (not just money) makes the corruption label difficult to stick. Moreover, the “coincidence of interests” – i.e., the dexterity with which they can move fluidly from one professional identity to the next, thereby enabling them to maximize ambiguity and deniability when necessary– cannot be easily labeled “conflicts of interest” (p. 12, 18). In many respects, then, this analysis echoes what an increasing number of people in the governance and anti-corruption communities have been urging us to do: unpack big, abstract, fuzzy concepts such as “corruption” and “conflicts of interest” in order to examine specific, concrete practices (see, for instance, A Users’ Guide to Measuring Corruption). Wedel’s research illustrates how such an approach can yield insights into “how societies work – in contrast to how they are supposed to work” (p. xi).

Wedel’s research also raises important questions about the origins of neoliberal “flex” governance and its agents. Rather than view them as a product of developments in the US or other Western centers of power, Shadow Elite traces the “inspiration” of the new system to practices already discernible in late socialist Poland. In fact, Wedel’s work implicitly suggests that to some degree contemporary US governance was profoundly shaped by experiments in Poland and Russia. The exercise of flex power by the Chubais-Harvard players in 1990s Russia, for instance, “ricocheted back to the United States” (p. 146) as seen and perfected by the Neocons. In short, Wedel complicates how center and periphery interact in the making of new forms of governance power by emphasizing its hybrid roots and the agency of actors sitting on the “margins.” What could this mean for people committed to counteracting the negative effects of neoliberal governance? It suggests that it may not be that easy: rather than originating from recognizable centers of power, neoliberalism’s rise and ever-growing influence have been generated through a distributed transnational network. And so, to attack powerful Western institutions (such as the media, Pentagon, think tanks, government bodies, and corporations) as the main promoters of the neoliberal agenda and treat those on the periphery as passive recipients would be too simple, as the sociologists Johanna Bockman and Gil Eyal (2002: 346) argue.

Finally, I wish to draw attention to an undercurrent of (productive) tension that runs through Shadow Elite. As an academic discipline, socio-cultural anthropology – Wedel’s professional background – is largely committed to making visible what has normally been glossed over, concealed, or otherwise unremarked (cf. Coles 2007: 193). And this is what Wedel sets out to do in her book by uncovering the subterranean activities of her elite informants. At the same time, however, she also remains critical of certain practices of transparency in the context of accountability systems that increasingly privilege performance and appearances of objectivity and transparency (or “truthiness”). The case of Enron is a good example of this. As she writes, “appearances are what matter. Nowadays one performs for the external evaluators, whether that be Enron’s top executives announcing amazing profits while the company is actually going down the tubes; Perle reporting his number of days on a project; or a report listing the titles and number of workshops held or performance goals met. As practiced today, ‘accountability’ encourages performance that showcases accountability, but not necessarily that is accountable” (p. 199). My point is not that Wedel is against transparency. Rather, I think that she is subtly problematizing it by suggesting transparency and accountability are embedded in power relations and therefore not necessarily objective purveyors of the truth. Indeed, as the anthropologist Kimberley Coles observes, “contrary to its claims, transparency provides neither full visibility nor full truth. Rather, transparency is partial, particular, and reliant on specialized knowledge” (Coles 2007: 192). Hence, one can be transparent and demonstrate accountability without being accountable. We must be careful not to conflate terms and concepts.

In future studies that build on this work, it would be valuable to see a more fully developed and in-depth examination of one flex group that is reconceptualizing state-private relations. Methodological challenges aside (e.g., gaining access), I believe there are significant benefits to an approach that examines the everyday micro-politics of a single group from an ethnographic standpoint, including foregrounding local particularities, political struggles, and internal conflicts and differences. In so doing, this may deepen the picture we already have by revealing these “shadow elites” to be perhaps less omnipotent and homogeneous than we thought.

Written with journalistic clarity without sacrificing theoretical and analytic rigor, Shadow Elite sheds light on a phenomenon largely hidden from the public gaze. Good scholarship, as Wedel herself notes (p. 205), seeks to understand before changing the world. In this, the book succeeds admirably.

-- Raymond June
-- Images from Janine Wedel’s home page

References:

Bockman, Johanna and Gil Eyal. 2002. “Eastern Europe as a Laboratory for Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of Neoliberalism,” American Journal of Sociology vol. 108, no. 2: 310-352.

Coles, Kimberley. 2007. Democratic Designs: International Intervention and Electoral Practices in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

June, Raymond, Afroza Chowdhury, Nathaniel Heller, and Jonathan Werve. 2008. A Users’ Guide to Measuring Corruption (Oslo: UNDP Oslo Governance Centre).

Wedel, Janine. 2009. Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market (New York: Basic Books).

UPDATED: February 15, 2010

Freedom in the World 2010

2010-01-13T08:00:00.002-05:00

Whether the global snapshot provided in Freedom House’s annual Freedom in the World assessment characterizes the 2010 results as a “declining trend” or a “stagnation” in global democracy, the report’s outlook is certainly bleak.

Good news was hard to find in Freedom of the World 2010. Arch Puddington, Freedom House’s director of research, spoke Tuesday in great detail on his organization’s fears that in the last four years, global democracy has downgraded from a point of stagnation to an outright decline. For example, the overview essay disparagingly reveals that “overall, the Middle East and North Africa region suffered a number of significant setbacks, and these were often centered in countries that had produced some evidence of reformist intentions in the recent past.” At the January 12 release event, Puddington added to this regional analysis, characterizing the Caucus Region as having “nearly as poor of a record” as found in the Arab world and stating that Latin America is a mild “success story,” but with “serious problems” remaining.

Freedom of the World: 2010 points to incidents on every continent where human rights defenders, civil society organizations and journalists have been under attack: China, Russia, Iran, the UK, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia are just a few examples. Their analysis finds violent repression especially pronounced in countries where civil society has taken on an increasingly political mission, filling the robes typically worn by opposition parties.

Synthesizing the findings of an assessment of this great breadth into key findings and regional analyses is a difficult task. One must balance the country-specific contexts with international standards, and decide whether specific events (like the CSO oppression discussed above) are isolated incidents or part of a greater “trend”.

Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Institution for International Peace warned readers of Freedom in the World to think critically about the index’s uses of labels like “decline”, “stagnation”, “setbacks” and “reversals.” Carothers believes that the report has at times “overstated” both specific events and preexisting conditions by labeling them as “trends.” In his critique, he pointed to multiple examples of what he found to be break-downs in the standards of the assessment where the label of “trend” was too liberally applied. For instance, the “setbacks” identified in the Middle East may be more of a stagnation of the previous impetus towards reform than an actual retrenchment in democracy. True, the political violence surrounding the Iranian elections (as highlighted in the report) can in no way be counted as progress towards democracy, but can this incident be applied regionally, attesting to a greater “trend”?

Carothers’ points get to the heart of one of Global Integrity’s greatest concerns about the difficulty of measuring fuzzy concepts like “democracy”. Labels can be misleading—for instance, what does “rule of law” or “corruption” really mean? The definition can widely differ based on the assessment and on the context in which it is being applied.

Getting back to the Freedom in the World assessment, the methodology for the final classification of a country as “free”, “partially free” or “not free” (big, broad labels!) has never been made explicitly clear. Without this criterion for assigning of scores, readers are left to wonder (as Tom Carothers does) why the political violence in Iraq has prevented it from reaching the elusive “free” score, while Mexico is labeled “free” despite its high levels of violence and political influence from drug cartels.

To briefly contrast with Global Integrity's approach, while we do use labels like "strong" and "weak" to describe complex systems, this is always based on hundreds of discrete indicators which can clarify what we think is happening. These transparent and dense data are at times less conducive to easy explanations and can produce some counter-intuitive results. But we're not in the business of confirming the conventional wisdom. Sometimes complex systems require complex explanations.

Also: if we title a dataset "2010", you can be sure it won't be published in January of that year.

But maybe it is not Freedom House’s intention to be detail-driven but rather to provide a user-friendly, easily digested, top-level snapshot? The report is visually appealing with a colorful map of the world. Country-level analysis taking the back seat to an overarching global summary. Why use four colors, when three will do? As such, the assessment maintains a high-profile and importance in providing an overview of democracy’s growing global reach.

However, to echo Carother’s comments, Freedom House users, especially policy-makers, should probe deeper than the Freedom of the World’s summary and maps, demanding that the “trends” identified by the report are supported by additional current and historical research.

For more on metrics and the difficult task of measuring fuzzy concepts like “democracy”, read Global Integrity’s A Users’ Guide to Measuring Corruption.

-- Norah Mallaney

We Are Global: From Fiji, a Journalist’s Stand on Censors, Bloggers and the Future of Free Expression

2010-01-07T16:00:00.008-05:00

In the South Pacific, I found a case study in modern censorship, as Fiji’s three-year-old military government collides with a once free local press, an emerging blogging culture and an ambivalent international community. Some basic facts are contested, but it is clear that free expression in Fiji is under intense pressure, in a sharp departure from Fijian cultural and political tradition. I talked over email with journalist and media academic Shailendra Singh, based in the Fijian capital Suva, about the future of free expression in Fiji.

Despite increasing government control over print media, Shailendra is determined. Journalists get heat from all sides, as even reporting the government’s arguments for media regulation has become controversial. But Shailendra argues for free exchange over partisanship. “It is absurd to fight censorship with censorship” Shailendra told me.

Shailendra worked with Global Integrity as a lead journalist in 2008, writing the Corruption Notebook: Fiji. As a senior lecturer on journalism, Shailendra encourages his fellow journalists and students to pursue stories to the greatest extent possible under the current restrictions. Bainimarama’s government, who seized power in a 2006 coup d’etat, has clamped down on the media. In a 2006 radio address, Bainimarama advised pro-democracy advocates to "shut their mouth," lest the military "shut it for them.” The arrest or deportation of prominent journalists followed.

This has never before been seen in the island nation, with the brief exception of a period during the 1987 coup staged by then military strongman, Sitiveni Rabuka. After the 1987 takeover, the media eventually regained full reporting rights. The future does not seem as certain now and Fijians turn to regional “parachute journalists” or anonymous bloggers for independent yet at times questionably reliable news. “In many cases the blogs are vitriolic and abusive,” Shailendra said. “On the other hand, some credible commentators who can no longer publish their articles in the local dailies have set up blogsites.”

Shailendra worries about the spill-over effect Fiji’s censorship may have on the region and he has spoken out on the need for Australia and New Zealand to put pressure on Pacific island governments that threaten press freedom: “Hopefully, they [AUS and NZ] will soon come to see that their own interests are at risk when basic freedoms are removed, and they will act accordingly instead of remaining aloof.”

“If you are looking for a silver lining,” Shailendra said, “the situation in Fiji has not only offered journalism an opportunity for self-reflection and improvement, but also a chance to focus attention on some very important areas that were overshadowed and neglected due to the heavy emphasis on politics. Local media is running a lot more human-interest stories. There is greater coverage of ordinary people, rural news and development issues.”

You can read our discussion below.

An inner-determination comes through in Shailendra’s responses, reflecting the fact that while open, public dissemination of information may be quelled for now, Fiji’s legacy of an active media will outlast the current crisis.

-- Norah Mallaney
-- Fiji beach image, by Jacek Sniecikowski (cc by/nc)

Norah Mallaney: Your Corruption Notebook: Fiji centered on the feeling of disillusionment among journalists and citizens who might have once hailed the 2006 coup as positive progress. Has this trend continued? Is current political dissent published in newspapers and other media outlets (radio etc)? Or is this more spoken of in private circles?

Shailendra Singh: The Fiji Government currently censors the news media. As a result, political dissent is not published. There is no law stopping people from discussing politics in private. But people would naturally be more cautious than they used to be about what they say, and who they say it to. Apart from a brief period after the coups of 1987, Fiji has always had a free media. The country was on a par with Australia and New Zealand when it came to media freedom and freedom of speech. There was, of course, the usual ranting by politicians and occasional threats in Parliament to shut down newspapers, or to bring in new laws to curb “irresponsible” reporting when sex scandals or corruption involving politicians were exposed. But until recently, no such laws were implemented, and journalists, by and large, went about doing their work without fear.

Now, for the first time, the media is under full censorship, which is an alien experience for us. Current censorship is by decree. But government plans to bring in a new media promulgation that will curb some of the freedoms that we took for granted in the past. The Government says tighter media regulations are needed to curb abuses by journalists. It blames the media for inciting racial animosities. It says such journalistic transgressions often go unpunished.

These assertions cannot be dismissed out of hand. Media has made mistakes. Some of these mistakes have been costly. But rather than censorship, training for journalists and supporting the setting up of independent media monitoring organisations, or media accountability systems, would be the proper thing to do.

Pio Tikoduadua, the permanent secretary in the Prime Minister’s office, recently said that Fiji’s media would no longer be self-regulatory under the new media decree, which is expected to come in force in 2010. Under the new promulgation, it is expected that a new body will be formed to hear grievances by people who feel they have been unfairly treated by the media. This new body will either replace or work alongside the Fiji Media Council, a self-regulatory body set up by Fiji’s news media industry.

So self-regulation, which is practiced by most democracies, could become a thing of the past in Fiji. The government’s argument is that the media cannot be judge and jury of its own conduct. It says the Fiji Media Council has failed to uphold ethics and improve standards. The media argues that excessive laws and punitive measures by government will only shackle the media, which could have grave repercussions in future. For instance, this government is strongly against corruption. Draconian media laws would be counterproductive for government’s anti-corruption drive.

Future governments may not be as well intentioned as the current government, and they may inherit a media law that they can use to shield their corrupt activities.

Norah: Blogs (both Fiji-based and in the broader Pacific region) seem to have taken on an identity as the “critical eyes” of the current government. Who is their intended audience? Considering internet penetrability rates, who is actually reading? How high is their credibility in Fiji and in the broader region?

Shailendra: Blogs have become an outlet for opponents of the present government to vent their frustrations, as they do not have any other avenue to voice their opinions. Blogs offer anonymity, thus safety from arrest and possible prosecution in court. Media consumers in Fiji are used to an outspoken and fairly aggressive media. Currently the media in Fiji has been tamed through a decree that the government introduced to encourage “a greater degree of responsibility” from the media. Journalists that fall foul of the decree face jail as well as stiff fines.

Readers in Fiji know that the media is being censored. They understand that the media is not able to report everything that goes on. There is a vacuum concerning government and political news, so a good number of readers are turning to blogs as an additional, or alternative, source of information.

Many blogs are based on opinion, hearsay or rumour. Ordinarily, such rumours would be investigated and reported by the mainstream news media. But presently this is not the case. So there is a lot of rumour mongering. People who read blogs choose to either trust or distrust the information.

It cannot be claimed that the blogs have taken on an identity as the “critical eyes” of the current government. For one, the bloggers are anonymous so their credibility becomes an issue. Some bloggers clearly have sinister motives. The bloggers are not bound by any journalistic principals, guidelines or ethics. They often publish without checking. In many cases the blogs are vitriolic and abusive. Many commentators and commentaries are racist.

On the other hand, some credible commentators who can no longer publish their articles in the local dailies have set up blogsites. This includes an economist and political commentator, Professor Wadan Narsey, who used to write regular columns in the papers. But the newspapers have stopped running his articles due to censorship. Professor Narsey posts his blogs under his names. His most recent posting was an analysis of the 2010 budget. In this instance the blog is playing the role of “critical eyes” on government as you put it. New technology has enabled Narsey to publish his work in an instant and makes it harder for governments to silence people.

However, internet penetrability is low in Fiji, so it would be mostly the urban educated who have access to and read these blogs.

Norah: How has the shift in media censorship impacted the lessons, training and student population at the Journalism School at University of the South Pacific?

Shailendra: In terms of media education and research, we have a unique, real life case study of censorship at work to examine and test against textbook theories. We cannot report freely, but we can debate the situation in class presentations and seminars, and write essays and research reports.

Also, we invited the Attorney General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum as a speaker recently. Our students had an opportunity to question him. They wrote news reports about what he said. The AG’s comments were widely reported, and they generated a major debate among regional media observers and commentators.

Some people were of the view that the AG should not have been invited as a speaker. Our view is that it is absurd to fight censorship with censorship. We as journalists should be aware that there are two or more sides to an issue. Furthermore, had we not invited the AG and reported his comments, there would have been no discussion or rekindling of interest, awareness and generating continued publicity about Fiji.

If you are looking for a silver lining, the situation in Fiji has not only offered journalism an opportunity for self-reflection and improvement, but also a chance to focus attention on some very important areas that were overshadowed and neglected due to the heavy emphasis on politics. Local media is running a lot more human-interest stories. There is greater coverage of ordinary people, rural news and development issues.

For instance, a recent issues of USP journalism’s training newspaper, Wansolwara, had a front-page report on how gaming centers in Suva were luring young people to play and spend money there. The story led to a police crackdown on 24-hr gaming centers. The article received a high commendation at the 2009 Journalism Education Association of Australia and New Zealand student awards in Perth, Australia, last month (December '09).

Another story on how the legal marriageable age for girls at 16 was leading to their exploitation has resulted in the law being changed in Fiji. We have also focused on the environment with students researching and writing stories on coral reef degradation, shark-fin fishery and climate change impacts.

Norah: In a recent interview you did with Radio Australia, you spoke of the need for greater pressure from Australian and New Zealand aid donors to keep media freedom high in the region.

Shailendra: Australia and NZ are the largest aid donors and regional superpowers. As such they have a lot of influence with Pacific Island countries. The two nations are understandably reluctant to be seen as meddling in the internal affairs of their smaller neighbours. But these two countries should not keep silent, or make token gestures, when fundamental freedoms are threatened.

For instance, the Laisenia Qarase Government that was ousted from power in Fiji by the military in 2006 had declared its intention to bring in a new media law, and also to introduce legislation to pardon people behind the 2000 coup. In my view, Australia and New Zealand did not do enough to try and deter the Qarase government from these taking these apparently unconstitutional actions.

Some Pacific Island governments often threaten to restrict media freedoms. When they do this, Australia and New Zealand should speak out, not only because it is the morally correct thing to do, but also because their own interests are threatened when regional governments move to place unreasonable curbs on basic human rights. Apart form the massive aid the two countries pour into the region, they have a lot of investments in Pacific Island countries. If the media is muzzled, it will not be able to report on government corruption, and also, how efficiently aid is utilised.

Corruption is rife in some regional countries, and aid is also hijacked and diverted on a regular basis. The media often reports this, and this is why some governments are so keen to silence the media. In the absence of a free media, the corrupt will become even more emboldened, and the scale of the problems will only increase. So Australia and NZ need to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to such issues. They need to persuade, sometimes coerce leaders, into institutionalizing transparency and accountability, if for no other reason, than for the sake of their own taxpayers and investments.

Australia and New Zealand are not averse to arm-twisting and riding roughshod over Pacific Island sensitivities when they feel that their interests are directly threatened, or when they are trying to gain an advantage, such as in trade talks. Aid has been used both as a carrot and stick. Examples of this abound.

The recent Julian Moti saga is a case in point. An Australian court dropped child-sex charges against Moti, a former Solomon Islands attorney general, last month (December). The Australian Federal Police (AFP) had resurrected the charges nearly 10 years after they were dismissed by a court in Vanuatu. The Supreme Court in Brisbane found that the prosecution was an abuse of process by police because its payments to the alleged victim's family in Vanuatu, totaling $AUD150, 000, brought the administration of justice into disrepute. The judge ruled against Moti's claim that the case against him was politically motivated as a result of the Australian government's concerns that his role as Solomon Islands attorney general would undermine a peacekeeping mission Australia was heading in the Solomons.

But many respected commentators believe this is precisely the reason the AFP went after Moti with such extraordinary determination. So it is not for nothing that Australia and New Zealand are sometimes referred to as “bullies” by their smaller neighbours. I am guessing that these two countries do not feel that freedom of the media is an important enough issue requiring their diplomatic intervention. Why else would they remain silent when media freedoms are threatened? Hopefully they will soon come to see that their own interests are at risk when basic freedoms are removed, and they will act accordingly instead of remaining aloof.