Citizen Propaganda and Failures of the Blogosphere

Ethan Zuckerman recently wrote about the most recent Russia/Georgia conflicts and the failure of the Georgian blogger community to tell unbiased stories about what was occurring.

Two good friends have taken the blogosphere to task for its failures during the conflict. Rather than rise to the defense of Georgian, Russian, Ossetian and global bloggers, I wanted to take a look at their critiques and at the phenomenon of citizen media during the conflict and at the emergence of one of the interesting epiphenomena of citizen media: citizen propaganda.

He goes on to cite examples of how the normally very active, very vocal world blogosphere failed to provide relevant information at all during the conflicts. In the U.S. especially he quotes Joshua Foust of Global Voices who specifically criticized U.S. blogs for not linking to Georgian and Russian blogs, even when many wrote in English.

Part of the problem he states, is that inaccurate comparisons and sensationalism have begun to encroach on blog territory as much as it has in traditional journalism and news media over the years. This occurs when people who are inexperienced with a region, write about events, drawing comparisons to things that they know, which often aren’t the most accurate representation. For instance…

Early analysis of post-election violence in Kenya made inappropriate analogies to genocide in Rwanda, anticipating uncontrolled, systemic violence that (thankfully) didn’t come to pass…

But in these cases, when the world at large is getting it wrong, it’s up to locals to get it right so that those interested in digging deeper will find more accurate information. Herin lies the greater danger in what some call ‘citizen propoganda’…

Evgeny Morozov, a Belarussian journalist who’s fascinated with both citizen media and the different faces of cyberwar, is frustrated by a different form of blogger shortcomings: the absence of citizen war reporting in Ossetia. Morozov acknowledges that Ossetia is pretty far off the beaten path and that it may not be fair to expect there to be many bloggers in the region: “It would be sublimely naive – and condescending – to expect South Ossetians or Georgians to respond to intense shellfire by taking a crash-course in podcasting, even if they did have electricity and and an internet connection.”
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Besides the scarcity of blog accounts from the ground, Morozov is concerned with their veracity and reliability: “Most were of poor quality, and many appeared on blogs with no reputation, no previous blogging history (some had been registered only a few days before the war), and carried no identification of a real person with a real name who could claim responsibility for or ownership of them.”
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On the other hand, Morozov is pointing to a very real problem with blogs focused on Ossetia. There’s a wealth of blogs that claim to give eyewitness reports of the conflict, and these eyewitness reports tend to strongly favor one interpretation of events over another. My friend and colleague Ivan Sigal pointed me to OSRadio, a blog that promotes Ossetian independence in English, and features reports from television cameraman Algis Mikulskis. His accounts are profoundly anti-Georgian and include a blurry mess of first person observation, second-hand recounting of journalist’s war stories, and the repetition of rumor… all legitimated by the fact that the correspondent is on the ground in the warzone. How reliable is Mikulskis? How biased towards one interpretation or another of events on the ground is he?
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citizen media accounts – blogs of eyewitnesses, journalists writing in a personal capacity, the writings of people who know and are passionate about the region – are actively engaged in rhetorical warfare as well. Georgian, Russian and Ossetian bloggers – whether off-duty journalists or ordinary citizens – all want the suffering of their group acknowledged on a global stage and are all presenting the conflict from their personal perspectives. These perspectives sometimes include troubling eyewitness accounts, and sometimes include amplification of rumors, usually ones that support that author’s interpretive frame.

He comes to the conclusion that it’s probably naive to expect citizen accounts of a war zone to be less politically biased than those from professional media, but in a situation where one believes professional media to be part of a propaganda strategy, it’s understandable that readers would turn to bloggers for an “unfiltered view” of events on the ground. You can find his commentary on the topic in full at My Heart’s in Accra, it’s one well worth the read.