Marginal comments on media, science & development – NOTHING official about this!
Author: Nalaka Gunawardene
A science writer by training, I've worked as a journalist and communication specialist across Asia for 30+ years. During this time, I have variously been a news reporter, feature writer, radio presenter, TV quizmaster, documentary film producer, foreign correspondent and journalist trainer. I continue to juggle some of these roles, while also blogging and tweeting and column writing.
Who said YouTube is only for activists and video enthusiasts to share their content?
The above appeal is by Australia’s Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who’s using the popular new media platform to reach out to children and young adults in Japan in a campaign aimed at stopping Japan’s stubborn insistence on whaling.
This is very encouraging – to see a government putting aside diplomatic niceties and taking a campaign right to the heart of a society that is still culturally attached to whale meat. For sure, Australia is also active in inter-governmental negotiations to sustain the global ban on whaling, but addressing the issue from the demand side and future generation angle can make the anti-whaling positions stronger.
Here’s how Reuters reported the story this week:
CANBERRA, Oct 9 (Reuters) – Australia has taken its battle against Japanese whaling in the Antarctic to the Internet, with a new YouTube campaign unveiled on Tuesday that targets Japanese children.
“Can you imagine what life on Earth would be like without these magnificent creatures? Hundreds of years of whaling have nearly wiped them out,” Australia’s Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull says in the video, subtitled in Japanese.
Japan plans for the first time to hunt 50 humpback whales in the Antarctic over the coming summer, with the endangered animals currently migrating south along the Australian coast. Japan also plans to hunt 935 minke whales for scientific research.
The Japanese whaling fleet, hampered by a fire on the factory processing ship Nisshin Maru last February which killed one crewman, was recently bolstered by the addition of a new chaser vessel.
Australia’s government, facing re-election in weeks, has dismissed as futile the opposition’s calls for legal action over Japanese whaling in Australia’s Antarctic Whale Sanctuary, which is not recognised by other nations.
Japan’s fisheries agency, confident its whaling rights will be confirmed, has challenged any country to take it to the International Court of Justice in The Hague
Turnbull said Canberra would fight in the court of public opinion.
Here’s an animated anti-whaling TV commercial I came across on YouTube that takes a different look at the same issue. It was produced by Saachi & Saachi Poland:
For ten years, this ordinary Nepali man’s photo has been a rallying call for documentary film-makers across South Asia, home to one fifth of humanity.
He has become the symbol, and the logo, of Film South Asia (FSA), a regional film festival organised every other year in Kathmandu since 1997. FSA, whose latest edition rolls out in the Nepali capital this week (11 – 14 October 2007) is the leading and most enduring film festival that brings together South Asian film-makers and film-lovers. It is a low-budget, high-energy festival organised by the non-profit Himal Association.
Having been associated with FSA from the beginning (I was on the first festival’s jury, and have hosted a couple of travelling festivals since), I was curious about who this old man was. On a visit to Kathmandu last month, I asked FSA Chairman and documentary champion Kanak Mani Dixit about it.
It turns out that the FSA logo is derived from this photo, taken of an ordinary Nepali called Ram Bahadur Tamang. Photocredit goes to Cory R Adams.
Ram Bahadur belonged to the Tamang people, who are believed to have migrated to Nepal from Tibet. Today, the Tamangs reside mainly in the high hills north of Kathmandu.
Perhaps inspired by my query, Kanak has written up the story behind the photo/logo in his column On the Way Up in the latest issue of Himal Southasian which he edits.
He says: “The Tamang from Byabar served the Rana palaces as guards and porters. Ram Bahadur was one such. One day, he was caught by a photographer holding an early-model Sony video camera. He had a Sirdi Sai Baba badge on his left lapel. The image of Ram Bahadur is now the logo of the Film South Asia documentary film festival. He looks out over the world through his camera and his other, free, eye. The trophy given to the best film at the end of each FSA is known as the Ram Bahadur Trophy.”
Not much more is known about old Ram Bahadur. He had moved on shortly after this picture was taken. We don’t know, for example, if he ever actually used the Sony camera, or was just playing with what, at the time, seemed a high-tech curiosity. This was, after all, the early 1990s when video cameras were not quite ubiquitous.
This year’s campaign, spearheaded by UN International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction aims “to inform and mobilize Governments, communities and individuals to ensure that disaster risk reduction is fully integrated into school curricula in high risk countries and that school buildings are built or retrofitted to withstand natural hazards.”
Buried beneath this development jargon that UN agencies are so fond of is something very important: sensitising the next generation about living with hazards can help make our societies better able to cope with disasters when they do happen.
And you never know when an informed and alert school kid could save the day — and many lives.
A good example came from Thailand when the Indian Ocean Tsunami arrived without any public warning on 26 December 2004.
Tilly Smith, an eleven-year-old British schoolgirl, was on holiday on Maikhao Beach in Thailand with her family when the tsunami hit. Just a few weeks earlier, she had studied tsunamis in school — and immediately recognized the signs of the receding sea as a sign of an impending disaster. She warned her parents, which led to all the hotel guests being rapidly moved from the beach.
This simple, timely action by a single schoolgirl saved the life of dozens of people. Tilly’s story highlights the critical importance of basic education in preventing the tragic impacts of natural disasters.
According to the Wikipedia, Tilly’s family have declined requests to be interviewed by commercial and national broadcasters, but Tilly has appeared at the United Nations in November 2005, meeting Bill Clinton the UN Special Envoy for Tsunami Relief, and at the first year anniversary in Phuket, as part of the campaign to highlight the importance of education.
In December 2005, Tilly was named “Child of the Year” by the French magazine Mon Quotidien. On the First Anniversary of the Official Tsunami Commemorations at Khao Lak, Thailand on December 26, 2005, she was given the honour of closing the ceremony with a speech to thousands of spectators which read in part:
Yes, that’s right: games. Disasters are serious phenomena, but there’s no reason why disaster awareness and preparedness have to be all dull and dreary.
There’s a old Chinese saying: “I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand.” Disaster preparedness and training are now moving more into the realm of understanding by doing — simulations or drills for community evacuation, and games that allow players to prevent or manage a disaster.
I first played such a game in January 2007 when, while in Honolulu for a conference, I took the day off and flew to Hilo where the Pacific Tsunami Museum is located. The volunteer-run museum, based in what is known as the tsunami capital of the world, engages local people and foreign visitors (including curious US mainlanders) on the science, history and sociology of tsunamis.
A basic game there allows a visitor to be play the role of Director of Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre (PTWC) , a US government institute that monitors seismic activity and has a mandate to issue alerts, watches or warnings to all countries in and around the Pacific Ocean. The game allows players to choose one of three locations where an earthquake happens — Alaska, Chile or Japan — and also decide on its magnitude from 6.0 to 8.5 on the Richter Scale.
In the real PTWC, five geophycisists are on duty round the clock. If the magnitude exceeds 7.5, the epicentre is located. If it’s in an area likely to cause a tsunami, a tsunami watch is sent to nearby coasts and a tsunami watch is set for areas with a travel time more than three hours away. Messages are sent to the tide observers for reports on the first wave, and telemetered water level gauges are checked. It’s by quickly assessing the seismic, sea level and historical data that scientists at PTWC decide if a warning is needed for areas already placed under a tsunami watch.
Since the system was set up in 1947, it has never missed warning of a damaging tsunami, but there have been a number of very expensive evacuations that turned out to be unnecessary. “These precautions are needed to ensure public safety, but scientists are working to minimise unnecessary warnings without ever missing a hazardous event,” the Tsunami Museum panel explained.
It’s revealing to play the role of a scientist who must quickly marshal lots of information and decide on whether or not to issue a warning. The cost of inaction can be high — but a false alarm doesn’t come cheap either.
I played the game three times, and each time erred on the side of caution — costing the hapless Hawaiian tax payers lots of money.
In real life, those who have their finger on the alert/warning button have to take many considerations into account. Repeated false alarms can erode public confidence in early warning systems. But suppressing a warning on a real breaking disaster — such as what happened in Thailand when the Indian Ocean Tsunami broke in December 2004 — can be truly devastating.
I don’t envy those who have to make this decision as part of their daily work. But after playing the game, I appreciate their challenges a great deal better.
This is an interesting video, uploaded last month on to YouTube by media activists.
In September 2007, Katie Couric, anchorwoman of CBS Evening News reported live from Baghdad. But instead of using that opportunity to ask tough questions and dig for the truth, Couric asked soft questions and repeated a number of false Bush talking points.
As activists point out, the media’s failure to ask tough questions helped America get embroiled in Iraq in the first place.
It’s hard to believe that Couric currently occupies the slot that was long adorned by the likes of Walter Cronkite, anchorman for The CBS Evening News for 19 years (1962 – 1981). During the heyday of CBS News in the 1970s and 1980s, he was often cited in viewer opinion polls as “the most trusted man in America”, because of his professional experience and avuncular demeanor.
Media watchers cannot help comparing how Cronkite covered an earlier, equally controversial conflict that left America bruised and bleeding: the Vietnam War. Following Cronkite’s editorial report during the Tet Offensive that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
How times have changed. Couric is the media lap-dog that every government and military would wish to have — her recent reportage from Iraq would probably be held up by some of them as ‘an example to every journalist covering a war’.
Incidentally, Cronkite provides the voiceover introduction to Couric’s CBS Evening News, which began on 5 September 2006.
Yet no one had the capability – and vantage point – to take such images until satellites were launched into orbit, and later astronauts followed.
Beginning in the 1960s, thousands of stunning images — showing our planet in space, as well as the Moon and other celestial bodies in our Solar System — have entered the public domain. These are now part of our popular culture and represent a major educational resource.
These images didn’t come for free. It has cost space agencies – primarily NASA, the American space agency – literally billions of dollars over the decades to capture and deliver these images that we happily, freely bandy around. Contrary to what some people believe, NASA is not a world space agency. It’s the national space agency of a single country, financed by tax payers of that country.
Yet, early on, NASA adopted a very far-sighted, public spirited policy that all its space images would be made available free of copyrights to anyone, anywhere on the planet. This is what enables me to use space images on my blog – and keeps tens of thousands of such images in the public domain.
This is what the NASA official website currently has to say about it:
“NASA still images, audio files and video generally are not copyrighted. You may use NASA imagery, video and audio material for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits and Internet Web pages. This general permission extends to personal Web pages.”
Significantly, this includes commercially produced and marketed products, even though NASA’s guidelines make it clear: “If the NASA material is to be used for commercial purposes, especially including advertisements, it must not explicitly or implicitly convey NASA’s endorsement of commercial goods or services…”
I was curious to see what copyright policy the space agencies of other leading space-faring nations follow. This is what I found on the European Space Agency’s website:
“The contents of the ESA Web Portal are intended for the personal and non-commercial use of its users. ESA grants permission to users to visit the site, and to download and copy information, images, documents and materials from the website for users’ personal non-commercial use. ESA does not grant the right to resell or redistribute any information, documents, images or material from its website or to compile or create derivative works from material on its website. Use of material on the website is subject to the terms and conditions outlined below.”
As we can see, it’s a lot more restrictive than NASA’s. I haven’t been able to check the policy of Russian, Chinese or Japanese space agencies, and wonder how liberal or restrictive their copyright policies are.
On strict legal terms, I suppose, creators or finders can be keepers. Arguments can be made that space images obtained at tremendous cost to tax payers can be owned, copyrighted and managed by those agencies and nations footing the bill. This is what makes NASA’s open copyright policy so creditable. Our visual public media — broadcast television, video, DVD and the web — would all have been so much poorer if some nitpicking lawyer or bureaucrat had succeeded in persuading the early NASA management to be more restrictive.
While still on the subject of space images, I wonder why so many images of Earth from space show Africa. I had to search for some minutes to find an image that showed Asia – the largest continent – from space. Next to Africa, the one showing the Americas seems the most popular.
We have to remember that some images we find online are composite images, carefully assembled by combining the best attributes of many images taken over time. Photographing or video filming our planet is not as simple as just going to space, aiming a camera and shooting. It involves a great deal of skill, resources and effort.
And keeping the resulting images in the public domain and open to access takes foresight and public spirit. As the Space Age turns 50, we must acknowledge this aspect of space exploration, which allows compositions like this, found on YouTube, for all of us to enjoy.
The Space Age was ushered in by the launch of a 83.6km metallic ball, named Sputnik 1, on 4 October 1957. When it happened exactly half a century ago, the course of history was changed forever.
‘Sputnik’ is Russian for travelling companion or satellite.
Here’s how a newsreel of Universal International News, screened at cinemas across the US, reported the development:
As one comment, posted by fromthesidelines said on YouTube:
“This was one of the last weekly newsreels seen in movie theaters across the country (thanks to television)- this excerpt, from October of ’57, shows how much of an impact Russia’s “Sputnik” had on space and world affairs. Note that animated “simulations” were used, as Universal did NOT have access to any of the actual footage of “Sputnik” itself!”
“Although I had been writing and speaking about space travel for years, I still have vivid memories of exactly when I heard the news. I was in Barcelona for the 8th International Astronautical Congress. We had already retired to our hotel rooms after a busy day of presentations by the time the news broke. I was awakened by reporters seeking an authoritative comment on the Soviet achievement. Our theories and speculations had suddenly become reality!
“For the next few days, the Barcelona Congress became the scene of much animated discussion about what the United States could do to regain some of its scientific prestige. While manned spaceflight and Moon landings were widely speculated about, many still harboured doubts about an American lead in space. One delegate, noticing that there were 23 American and five Soviet papers at the Congress, remarked that while the Americans talked a lot about spaceflight, the Russians just went ahead and did it!”
And here is how Arthur C Clarke sums up the accomplishments of the first 50 years of space exploration:
“On the whole, I think we have had remarkable accomplishments during the first 50 years of the Space Age. Some of us might have preferred things to happen in a different style or time frame, but when our dreams and aspirations are adjusted for reality, there is much we can look back on with satisfaction. (For example, in 1959 I took a bet that men would be landing on the Moon by June 1969, and lost only very narrowly.) And in the heady days of Apollo, we seemed to be on the verge of exploring the planets through manned missions. I could be forgiven for failing to anticipate all the distractions of the 1970s that wrecked our optimistic projections — though I did caution that the Solar System could be lost in the paddy fields of Vietnam. (It almost was.)”
When 13-year-old Adriana (played by Paulina Gaitan) is kidnapped by sex traffickers in Mexico City, her 17-year-old brother, Jorge (Cesar Ramos), sets off on a desperate mission to save her. Trapped by an underground network of international thugs who earn millions exploiting their human cargo, Adriana’s only friend throughout her ordeal is Veronica (Alicja Bachleda), a young Polish woman captured by the same criminal gang. As Jorge dodges overwhelming obstacles to track the girl’s abductors, he meets Ray (Kevin Kline), a Texas cop whose own family loss leads him to become an ally.
From the barrios of Mexico City and the treacherous Rio Grande border, to a secret internet sex slave auction and a tense confrontation at a stash house in suburban New Jersey, Ray and Jorge forge a close bond as they frantically pursue Adriana’s kidnappers before she is sold and disappears into a brutal underworld from which few victims ever return.
This is the synopsis of Trade, a feature film that opens across the United States on 28 September 2007.
Inspired by Peter Landesman’s chilling NY Times Magazine story on the U.S. sex trade, “The Girls Next Door,” (published in January 2004), TRADE is a thrilling story of courage and a devastating expose of one of the world’s most heinous crimes. The American debut of Marco Kreuzpaintner, one of Germany’s leading young directors, TRADE is produced by Roland Emmerich and Rosilyn Heller from a screenplay by Academy Award(R) nominee Jose Rivera (The Motorcycle Diaries).
Explaining the social context to this dramatised story, the movie’s website says: “The practice of slavery in the US is something most people think ended with the 13th Amendment in 1865, but in recent years it has returned in an even more virulent form. Fueled by the collapse of the Soviet Union and other eastern European countries, new technologies like the internet, and sieve-like borders, the traffic in human beings has become an epidemic of colossal dimensions. The State Department estimates that as many as 800,000 people are trafficked over international frontiers each year, largely for sexual exploitation. Eighty percent are female and over fifty percent are minors. Many people in this country push this atrocity out of their minds, believing that it only occurs in faraway countries like Thailand, Cambodia, the Ukraine and Bosnia. The truth is that the United States has become a large-scale importer of sex slaves. Free the Slaves, America’s largest anti-slavery organization estimates that at least 10,000 people a year are smuggled or duped into this country by sex traffickers.”
On 19 September 2007, they held a benefit premiere at the United Nations headquarters in New York that included supper in the UN Delegates dining room. This marked the first film premiere event ever to take place at the United Nations, with the crusty UN officials mingling with film stars and artistes.
Television gets blamed for lots of things that go wrong in our world. This isn’t surprising, given it’s the world’s most powerful medium and the key role it plays in our cultural, social and political lives.
A sociological study some years ago said broadcast TV was partly responsible for the movement of millions of people from villages to cities in search of jobs, higher incomes and better living standards. The glitzy lifestyles dramatised on TV was creating illusions in the minds of rural women and men, especially the youth, it said.
Of course, such migrants soon discover a very different reality in the cities. But few want to go back to where they came from. As they hang on in the cities, some fall prey to human traffickers, always on the prowl for vulnerable people to trade in.
The United Nations estimates that the total market value of human trafficking is 32 billion dollars — one of the most lucrative illicit trades in the world. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that worldwide, about 2.5 million people are victims of trafficking.
If TV indirectly contributed to this human perversion, it can also help society stand up and fight against it. As Music Television (MTV) is now doing.
MTV, the most popular music channel in the Asia Pacific region, will be playing a different tune in the weeks to come. For half an hour at least, beginning 18 September 2007 for MTV Thailand, live and hip music will give way to the harrowing accounts of three victims of human trafficking. This is part of the MTV Exit campaign.
Trafficking of people in the region will be given a human face through the personal accounts of Anna, Eka and Min Aung. Anna was forced into prostitution in the Philippines, while Eka is an Indonesian who was an abused domestic worker in Singapore. Min Aung from Burma recounts his sad experiences working and being practically imprisoned in a factory in Thailand for two years.
Lynette Lee Corporal writing for Inter Press Service (IPS) quotes MTV Thailand campaign director Simon Goff as saying: “We worked with organisations and talked with experts to see what forms of trafficking we would focus on, the most prevalent forms that affect our audiences. We selected regions that would best represent the issue. Then, finally we brought in a production team, led by a Thai producer and a director from the UK.”
More extracts from her article:
Goff said that it took them six weeks of pre-production work, including research and sourcing, another six weeks to shoot the documentary, and six weeks more of post-production work. It took about four and a half months of “solid production,” he added.
Beyond the emotional and unsettling accounts of the trafficking survivors and the disturbing re-enactments of rape, beatings and abuse, the documentary also had interviews with a trafficker and a ‘client’ who openly admitted to the crime. In an interview with ‘The Chairman’, a Filipino recruiter who forces young girls into prostitution, revealed the horrific experiences young girls go through, and this was reinforced by what ‘Ama’ , a Chinese client who admitted to paying for sex with trafficked girls, narrated.
The challenge now, said Goff, is to break the people’s apathy and denial about human trafficking. “Ultimately, time will tell. We have launched the campaign and it’s already out there in the media. We hope that the show will make people realise that they are both a part of and a solution to the problem,” he said.
In Thailand’s case, he added that it is also important for Thais to realise that it is not just about Thai victims being trafficked abroad, but it’s also “necessary to look that we have other nationalities, such as Min Aung, who has been trafficked here”.
“I am overwhelmed by the potential of the web to link like-minded people and move them to mass-action,” the late Anita Roddick once wrote. “We are excited to experiment in other media too — perhaps subversive billboards, or a television program, or other print projects. As someone once said, we are only limited by our imaginations.”
In the summer of 2003, I was invited to join a small group of people at Anita’s country home, Highfield House, in Arundel, Somerset, England. It was a one-day brainstorming on the future of Hands On, a global TV series that she’d been hosting for three years.
Hands On stood out as a beacon of hope amidst so much doom and gloom on television -– it featured environmentally-friendly technologies, business ideas and processes that have been tried out by someone, somewhere on the planet.
It covered a broad range of topics, from renewable energies, waste management and information technology to food processing and transport. The aim was to showcase good news and best practices so they could inspire others — entrepreneurs, communities or even governments — to try these out.
Watch a typical Anita introduction of Hands On and a sample story in capsule form:
Anita brought her usual passion and dynamism to our discussion, energising the development and communications professionals enjoying her hospitality. Covering good news was already going against the media’s grain, but it was harder to keep at it year after year, especially when the media landscape was changing rapidly. It was a challenge to stay engaged and relevant to viewers across Africa, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Europe.
During the meeting, Anita asked me to sum up the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) which was coming up in a few months. Putting aside all the ‘developmentspeak’ of UN agencies, I described it as an attempt to put new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to work for the poor and disadvantaged of our world. Or get the geek tools to work for the meek. (I still think my phrase ‘Geek2Meek’ sounds better than the official ICT4D, where D stands for development.)
We agreed that civil society had to seize the opportunities offered by these new media tools. (A few months later, Anita presented two Hands On editions called ‘Communicating for Change’ on BBC World that profiled some initiatives doing just this.)
Always fond of analogies, I likened Hands On to Arabian Nights, which, according to legend, a young woman had spun from her rich imagination for 1,001 nights to save her life from an evil king. In Hands On, I suggested, we are telling stories to save not one life, but all life on Earth.
Anita quite liked my analogy. She was always a good story teller, and had so many good stories to tell (A favourite opening line from her biography, Body and Soul: “There I was, with my panty down to my knees.” You’ll never guess why until you read that story…)
She challenged everyone at that meeting to make Hands On more interesting to younger viewers in different cultures. We recognised that offering one media product to a global audience was a tough sell: most people prefer a home-made, local story.
But then, she’d built the entire Body Shop chain with a largely common product offering, even if raw materials were sourced from different parts of the globe. She never imposed the Body Shop experience on our meeting, but it was sometimes instructive to look at how a globally available product could still be localised.
This is just what we did in the months and years following the Arundel brainstorming. We rolled out the ‘Localising Hands On in Asia’ project, which saw several dozen Hands On stories being versioned into local languages and distributed through broadcast and narrowcast means in Cambodia, India, Laos and Nepal. The two-year project, generously supported by Toyota, was hugely successful in delivering the Hands On stories to millions of people who would never have been exposed to it in original English.
Open Minds! 