There is an interesting story on the ABC news website about censorship and the way news moves across the Internet.
The government of Myanmar has been trying to suppress news of the protests & crackdowns in the country. However, amateur videos have been showing up on YouTube, and an ABC correspondent filed a report using his cell phone.
Now the question is:
Will this footage make a difference? What do you think?
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Myanmar, censorship, and the Internet
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5 comments:
I think it will help raise awareness about what is going on in Myanmar.
Before the Internet these kinds of stories often got surpressed, or did not come to light right away.
Governments are able to keep an eye and likely control a small group of reporters, but doing the same to hundreds if not thousands of ordinary people is other story.
In essence the Internet makes these thousands of people news reporters. As we are now seeing, these "new" reporters are helping shed light on what is going on in their country.
Here is a link to an article on CNN
.com today about how a blogger in England, although many thousands of miles away, is getting news of what is happening in Myanmar out to the public- something the mainstream media is finding difficult to do.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/09/27/myanmar.dissidents/index.html?iref=newssearch
I think the video connects people together and we try to get our government to intervene, but they usually do too little too late. It seems if it does not directly affect the United States, we turn it over to the U.N. and they have little power.
I noticed this issue is fading from the view of the mainstream media. This is a problem with the mainstream media. They jump on a story and covered it for a few days, then leave the story and never come back to it.
With bloggers they can keep on a story till it is really resolved.
They are under no pressure to move to the next hot new story.
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