Many netizens worldwide have long realised that the Internet is not completely without fetters, but those in Thailand say a three-year-old law is now practically choking Thai self-expression and right to information in cyberspace.

More to the point, Thai netizens, journalists and media advocates say that the country’s authorities have taken advantage of ambiguities in the Cyber Crime Act (CCA) to censor or close down altogether websites or forums that the government deems “offensive”.

“The problem with the cyber crime law is its lack of clarity, which leaves it wide open to misinterpretation,” Chiranuch Premchaiporn, director of the yet-to-be-unblocked independent news website Prachatai (‘Free People’), told a discussion here this week to review and propose amendments to the law.

Already, reports of prosecution under the computer crime law have driven much political discussion underground. Others worry this is discouraging people from debating key issues in the public sphere, especially amid the political divisions in Thailand that led to the largest protests in decades by the anti-government United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship and the military’s subsequent crackdown in May.

Already, “the authorities’ actions are driving the growth of underground forums and space,” adds Chiranuch.

The actions of Thailand’s online censors “will cause people to drop off from the discussion of issues”, agrees South-east Asia Press Alliance Executive Director Roby Alampay. “Only the truly determined and technologically savvy will continue to find ways to express their voices online,” he adds.

Critics say that the government has been on an intensive cybercrackdown in the last two years. The international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders says that in July 2009 alone, the information and communications technology (ICT) ministry, citing threats to national security, blocked more than 16,944 websites.

Internet freedom activists say that as of this year, the number has reached more than 50,000, adding that it is difficult to get a clear figure of exactly how many websites have been blocked.

Likewise, “it is difficult to say how many have been charged under the CCA.” said independent media lawyer Sinfah Tunsarawuth. “There are at least 10, but we don’t know if there are more as defendants don’t want to talk and would rather settle out of court. It’s also difficult to track down individual court cases.”

Thailand, a country of 68 million people, has 13.4 million Internet users, with 113 Internet service providers (ISPs) licensed as of July 2009.

Netizens say the CCA has enabled authorities to step up the online clampdown. Other regulations in place that affect the online community and media include the emergency decree that the government imposed in April and remains in effect in Bangkok and several provinces, and which allows it to shut websites deemed to detrimental to security.

Among the websites that have been blocked since April is Prachatai. Even before that, Chiranuch herself was charged with violating Section 15 of the computer crime act for postings made on Prachatai’s web board that were allegedly in breach of the lese majeste law.

CCA critics also cite the law’s Section 14 as being problematic. It covers offences such as the uploading of material deemed “likely to” threaten any person as well as national security or sow panic among the public, Sinfah’s report says.

“If anyone is seen as ‘likely to’ harm national security, it doesn’t have to happen but that person is already liable,” he told IPS recently. Against the backdrop of legal restrictions on expression, Thai Netizen Network committee member Sarinee Achavanuntakul says that there is a need to distinguish between threats to national security and the expression of opinion. “We should be able to define what constitutes dangerous content,” she says.

But one hindrance to this, says Thai Journalists Association president Prasong Lertratanawisut, is that implementing bodies such as the ICT can easily be “led by political agendas”.

Political analyst Suranan Vejjajiva adds that the Thai authorities’ notion of control is through the use of propaganda. “The bureaucratic system has so many laws, rules and regulations that give universal power to the person holding office,” he also says. “They think that control or shutting down websites, for instance, gives more security but, in fact, reflects insecurity.”

TNN’s Sarinee believes as well that the government does not really understand the nature of the Internet and that, unlike the more traditional forms of media, it simply is impossible to censor it.

At the same time, she worries that “unless you make it a very personal thing” and show people how censorship affects their own lives, they would not to care to react to the government’s current sweep through the Web.

Prachatai, however, seems to be waving a white flag, and is closing down its controversial web board end of July. Chiranuch, who says past comments on the board have led to the arrest of several people, explains, “We don’t want to mislead users that we can protect them online.”

“We’d rather shut down the web board than collect our users’ personal data,” she also says, referring to a provision in the law that directs Internet providers to collect and store online users’ personal information for 90 days.

Comments Suranan: “Sharing is the heart of the new Internet culture where everybody is a stakeholder. Unfortunately, the government and other organisations can’t seem to come to grips with this and are refusing to understand that the world has changed.”

*The Asia Media Forum (http://www.theasiamediaforum.org) is a space for journalists to share insights on issues related to the media and their profession. It is coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific.

Thailand’s media are not very happy these days, and it’s not only because of an emergency decree that turns three months old next week.

There are also government-instigated ‘media reforms’ in the offing, which has upset some members of the media here, along with press-freedom advocates.

Just this week, two forums discussing these reforms in the aftermath of Thailand’s biggest political conflict in decades attracted media professionals and observers, including academics.

Commented Thai-language daily ‘Khao Sod’ senior editor Kiatichai Pongpanich at the forum sponsored by the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand: “The state looks at the media as a destructive element so (it wants) to reform them.”

As it is, media members here say, press freedom and freedom of expression have been curtailed with the continued imposition of a state of emergency in the capital and several provinces.

The emergency decree was first declared on Apr. 7, weeks into the anti-government protests by the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) that were calling for a new election to replace the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.

Thousands of websites, including independent news portals like Prachatai.com, have been shut down by authorities under the emergency decree.

“Even now, we are not getting the truth about the number of websites being shut down,” said media reform activist and Thai Netizen Network board member Supinya Klangnarong. “We’re very concerned because after the emergency decree took effect in early April, we have heard that quite a number of Internet users have also been arrested.”

The international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders estimates that Thai authorities have blocked more than 50,000 websites so far, mostly for either being pornographic in nature or being “seditious”. But media activists say the real figure is much higher.

The emergency decree was a result of the government’s imposition of the Internal Security Act in April. The prolonged protest by tens of thousands of UDD supporters paralysed Bangkok’s shopping district. The ensuing military crackdown on the protesters on May 19 resulted in 88 deaths, majority of whom were civilians, and injured some 1,800 people.

Since then, the government has said that its plan to conduct media reforms within the next several months is part of its efforts at “national reconciliation”, since the political conflict had left Thai society severely divided.

In truth, talks on the need to revisit media practices arose after accusations came from all sides regarding biases in the local media during the three-month-long protest of the red shirts, so-called because of the demonstrators’ protest colour.

The perceived slants in coverage so incensed many Thais that journalists and the media entities they worked for became targets of public ire.

‘The Nation’ and ‘Bangkok Post’, for example, were forced to close down for a day after their offices were threatened with arson. Channel 3 received similar threats.

Thai journalists attending this week’s forums on ‘media reforms’ themselves acknowledged that the country’s media were far from perfect, especially in covering conflict situations.

They said that the recent political crisis saw the media divided into pro- and anti-government sides. This, the journalists admitted, led to biased reporting and self-censorship, among other things.

“We dramatise reports and paint them in red, yellow, white and other colours,” said ‘The Nation’ assistant group editor Kavi Chongkittavorn at a discussion organised by the South-east Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) Thai Journalists Association (TJA), Thai Broadcast Journalists Association (TBJA), and Thai Media Policy Centre of Chulalongkorn University.

“We consider fact-checking as a waste of time,” added Kavi, who is also chairman of SEAPA. “Biases are coming through because some are too close to sources.”

SEAPA campaign and advocacy officer Kulachada Chaipipat said that during crises, the mainstream media often “fail to provide comprehensive explanation on what is happening and are very weak at putting into context about the events”.

She noted, however, that “access to truth is more difficult in crisis situations”. She added: “Even the media don’t know what is happening.”

Journalists have thus argued that the government should focus first on freedom of information, as well as on ensuring press freedom and freedom of expression.

Kiatichai also observed that state-initiated media reform could be problematic if the process does not involve media institutions and professionals, even as doubts about such reform simmer.

Among the reforms being suggested by independent groups and media professionals are the restructuring of state-controlled media – whose coverage angered groups that saw it as just a mouthpiece of the current government — a review of ethical standards, and a proposed law for the allocation of airwaves.

Premier Abhisit Vejjajiva’s Office Minister Ong-art Klampaiboon, however, was quoted last week by local papers as saying that the government will not influence the media-reform process in any way. According to English-language daily ‘The Nation’, Ong-art said that the government “had no intention of dictating how media reform should proceed” and would only be a “facilitator”.

Kiatichai, though, stressed the importance of “thinking progressively not just about reforms, but also of media development”.

“Media resources are under-utilised for development,” he said. “For reconciliation to happen, we also need to eradicate corruption and poverty. The latter especially is very true, as we have seen in the red shirts’ demands and protests.”

*The Asia Media Forum (http://www.theasiamediaforum.org) is a space for journalists to share insights on issues related to the media and their profession. It is coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific.

Resentment here toward the foreign media had been simmering in the wake of the Thai government’s crackdown against protesters in May, but it nearly came to a boil when Thai panelists aired their frustrations recently about what they called western bias, misunderstandings of the Thai political culture and reporting that tried to fit events into a bad-versus-evil contest.

It may take a long time for emotions to subside and allow a sober look at how the international media reported on one of the most painful moments in the modern history of this South-east Asian country.

Meantime, anger against ‘foreign media’ in general continues, especially among those who have rallied around the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva in the weeks during which the world saw scenes of street battles between soldiers and armed elements among the protesters, unidentified snipers, armoured personnel carriers ramming through barricades and buildings going up in flames.

After a week-long operation to disperse the protest by the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), which had been camped in Rajprasong commercial district since early April as part their demands for a new national poll, 88 people had been killed and 1,885 injured.

In local media and in social networking sites, criticism of and anger over ‘biased reporting’ of the use of soldiers to crack down on the protests, especially by the U.S. Cable News Network (CNN) and British Broadcasting Corp (BBC), continues to simmer.

These came to fore – amid lusty cheers and jeers from listeners mostly sympathetic to the government – at a packed Jun. 2 discussion organised by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand.

“The half-truths (in foreign media reports) are more damaging than outright lies!” said National Artist Sumet Jumsai, the country’s leading architectural conservationist and among the four panelists at the forum. “They (foreign journalists) come here and suddenly become experts,” he fumed. “It’s not really the truth per se but the perception of the truth that is working here.”

But several defended the foreign news reports by pointing to local media’s “own biases,” including patronising attitudes toward the protesters. Indeed, the UDD itself had scored the Thai mainstream media for having an allegedly anti-red shirt stance and for supposedly exercising self-censorship in favour of those in power.

The issue of understanding how media work – that foreign media are very diverse, cannot be lumped into one basket and that media freedom means having the space to make errors or different viewpoints – also came up.

“Freedom of expression is also about not protecting the opinions that are not politically correct and not protecting the opinions of the government,” said a Swedish embassy official. “Do you also believe that freedom of expression includes having the right to not actually be right?”

Still, “there are absolutely no excuses for coming out with one-sided biases (by foreign media). Everybody (out there) seems to believe this is a romantic, very peaceful, non-violent protest,” said ex-senator Kraisak Choonhavan, deputy chairman of the Democrat Party to which Abhisit belongs. He said many foreign media reports tended to side with the red shirts and portrayed the government as having used excessive force.

But, Kraisak told the more than 150 people at the forum, the foreign media had failed to report that UDD leaders, at the height of the protests, had uttered statements that incited violence and hate. “Not a single word from news organisations about these incidents,” he said. “How could you forget about these events?”

Particularly sore points of contention are the issue of legitimacy of the current government and how media report on the nature and core issues raised by the UDD, known as red shirts because of their protest colour.

In criticising western news networks as being “too sloppy in their reporting,” Pana Janjirov, chief operating officer of the English-language daily ‘The Nation’, cited a BBC report that said Abhisit “was not elected to his post.”

This relates to the core point of contention by the UDD, which had sought a new election because it said the 2008 parliamentary vote that put the Abhisit-led government into power was flawed and was the result of previous manoueuvres by the military and the elite to keep out from power elected politicians they did not favour.

UDD leaders had said this was because the Bangkok-based political elite did not want to allow a government supportive of the fugitive ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, which is the UDD’s political patron, to sit in power. Twice in 2008, pro-Thaksin politicians who headed the government lost their posts through court decisions, leading to a rejigged composition of parliament and paving the way for the new vote for the current government.

In a document distributed at a briefing with foreign media in late May, the government listed the claim of the government’s being “unelected and lacks legitimacy, or came to power through dubious means” as among the “misperceptions” by foreign media. It said the 2008 parliamentary vote was constitutional and is “in fact, similar to the British system.”

Composer Somtow Sucharitkul, whose writings about the flaws of foreign media had gone viral in the Internet, said that the international media’s “biases” could be caused by many factors “apart from a reporter not doing a proper job.”

“Western civilisation has a natural tendency to see a story of an oppressed people battling an incredibly evil dictatorship,” commented Somtow, citing the fawning foreign media coverage of the Philippine ‘People Power’ uprising that toppled a dictatorship in 1986. “It’s a very compelling story and it is easy to fall in love with this drama.”

“They tend to see a mother story that every other story has to fit into and foreign reporters in Thailand are burdened by this handicap,” he said, adding that groups like CNN reported the UDD protest as an uprising against a ‘bad’ government. “They see slogans that they believe in and add two and two together.”

*The Asia Media Forum (http://www.theasiamediaforum.org) is a space for journalists to share insights on issues related to the media and their profession. It is coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific.

After months of turmoil, silence – albeit an uneasy one – has finally fallen over the streets of Bangkok. But the shouting continues in cyberspace as Thais and even foreign residents bicker and debate over what this South-east Asian country has just experienced, as well as about the challenges it continues to face.

Nearly two weeks after the army crackdown on anti-government protests, many continue to use the Web as a convenient place to unload their emotions and thoughts about one of the most painful moments yet in modern Thai history.

Reflecting the sharp and emotional divide in the country, posts on Facebook and other social networking venues range from those saying ‘we love the Thai army’ to those sympathising with some of the grievances by the protesters with the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD).

Some conversations centre around praise or criticism of the government and the UDD. Others ask how reconciliation can be done after the most violent episodes of political unrest in this country.

Still others rue the burning of buildings around Bangkok on May 19, the day the army went through the barricades around Rajprasong shopping district to break up a campsite that the UDD had set up since early April as part of its campaign to demand a fresh election by the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.

Wrote Patnaree Wongsuwan on the Rajprasong Facebook page: “So sad to see many memorable places burn down…Very quiet and smell still there. I feel lost in downtown and (feel it’s) haunted there.”

More than 30 buildings across Bangkok – including the upscale Centralworld mall – smouldered after being torched by what officials say were UDD supporters angered by the surrender of their leaders earlier on May 19.

There is even an ‘I Love Centralworld’ Facebook page, gathering thoughts such as ‘Even if they burn us 1,000 times, we’ll build it 10,000 times… and I’ll go 10,000 times more’ that others have called misplaced given the number of lives lost in the government operation.

Some 88 people have died and 1,885 injured in the government operation from May 13-19, according to official figures. Most of the fatalities were civilians.

The UDD red shirts, called such because of their protest colour, argued that a new poll was needed because the incumbent government came to power in December 2008 through a parliamentary vote assisted by the military instead of a national election. Since that tense week in mid-May, when street battles raged in some areas amid the sound of gunfire and the fear of snipers, many Thais have been going online, whether it is because they are frustrated by local media reports, because of what some perceive as biased reporting by the some international media outfits or because they want to exchange views with others.

A political analyst and blogger who goes by the handle ‘Bangkok Pundit’ says that an “information deficit” had pushed people into cyberspace.

One of the more popular English-language Tweeters in Thailand, Bangkok Pundit comments, “The most important role that online media played in the recent crisis was providing timely information. Many TV stations broadcast normal programming — a mixture of game shows and soap operas — even on the day of the crackdown and riots.”

He adds that on Twitter at least, “there is instant feedback so people can quickly challenge the accuracy of reports”.

Given the free-for-all nature of the Net, however, some posts have ignited feedbacks so passionate that verbal fisticuffs have all but broken out in many blogs, websites, Facebook pages, and even in tweets.

Some Netizens have been apparently irritated and angered enough to open fresh Facebook pages in retaliation, among them one calling for the sacking of a Cable News Network (CNN) reporter who has been accused of biased reporting in favour of the red shirts.

Pakorn Lertsatienchai, researcher at Chulalongkorn University’s Social Research Institute People, says join groups online to be able to “get some frames for analysis of the situation”. But unfortunately, he points out, the frames are not neutral.

Indeed, many now say that that sifting the truth from an overwhelming deluge of information online is a must.

Even Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s secretary general Korbsak Sabhavasu — a Tweeter himself — was quoted at the height of yet another attempt at talks with the red shirts as expressing concerns about social networking sites and their less than accurate information adding to the tensions.

Asawin Nedpogaeo, communication arts dean of Dhurakij Pundit University, explains that while social media can act as an alternative source of information and fill a void the mainstream media cannot do, “the viewpoints expressed here tend to be extreme and limited among groups of people who share the same idea”.

“Social media allow people to seek their own interest as this is such a huge space for information, help them shut down to things they don’t like, and just go for what they’re comfortable with,” Asawin says.

In two weeks in April alone, before the Rajprasong crackdown, Facebook.com reported 288,360 new registrations in this country of 2.7 million Facebook users.

This was even as the government, under a state of emergency put in place in early April, began blocking websites, including independent news site Prachatai.com. Local media reports say that there are now than 1,000 websites blocked since May 19.

As for online media being a venue of fair debate in lieu of a politically divided mainstream media, Pakorn is not quite sure. “It depends on your ability to search for information and justify information as fact. Fair debate must be based on facts,” he says. “The Internet contains a lot of rumours, organised ones.”

He says that online information is best used for “humanitarian aid or voluntary groups” such as the post-crisis cleanup campaign for Bangkok, where thousands showed up to volunteer after May 19. That, adds Pakorn, is “a good sign for humanity”.

*The Asia Media Forum (http://www.theasiamediaforum.org) is a space for journalists to share insights on issues related to the media and their profession. It is coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific.

As big a story as this week’s crackdown on anti-government protests in Thailand is the significant number of journalists killed or hurt, and media professionals and organisations threatened during the country’s most serious political conflict in years.

Conflict reporting in Thailand comes with a very high price as two journalists and many more were injured in recent weeks. Credit: Lynette Lee Corporal/IPS

Since April, two foreign journalists, a Japanese and an Italian, have died from bullet wounds while covering operations against the protests by the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), whose supporters are called red shirts because of their protest colour.

Italian freelance journalist Fabio Polenghi was shot by unidentified gunmen on Wednesday, during a blockade to end the two-month old UDD rally in the Rajprasong commercial district. Reuters cameraman Hiroyuki Muramoto died during an Apr. 10 attempt to break up protesters at another protest site.

But in addition to the usual risks that come with reporting in conflict situations, journalists and media organisations found themselves walking a tightrope of a mix of censorship, accusations of bias, as well as bomb attacks.

This has kept media rights groups busy, issuing statements that they are not combatants in the conflict and that both the government and the UDD must let them to do their job.

“We condemn the intimidation of the media and being the target of the red shirts yesterday at the height of the crackdown,” Thai Journalists Association (TJA) vice president Chavarong Limpattamapanee said in a phone interview.

“We are asking the government to stabilise the situation and do whatever they can to protect the members of the media as well as media offices,” he said, referring to the arson attacks by angry red shirts on Thai television Channel 3 Wednesday. The offices of the English-language dailies ‘Bangkok Post’ as well as ‘The Nation’ were forced to close down in the afternoon that day after receiving threats.

For two days, government spokesman Panithan Wattanagorn has referred to the worrisome deaths and targeting of foreign journalists – events that grabbed international headlines.

“The government of Thailand is committed to make sure that foreigners, guests of the country will be safe and secure, increase protection for embassies, tourist locations and especially for foreign media that may be targeted in this violent acts,” he said on television Thursday.

A Canadian freelance reporter, a Dutch journalist, and a U.S. documentary filmmaker were also injured Wednesday. On May 14, during clashes between protesters and soldiers, a French cameraman and two photographers from the Thai-language daily ‘Matichon’ and ‘The Nation’ were injured.

There have also been increased tensions between journalists and red shirts who accuse the media of misinformation. The ‘Bangkok Post’ reported that red shirts threatened a journalist doing interviews among them for fear that the information would be used to undermine the protests. In March, the government television station was the target of a grenade attack.

These reflect the deep split in views about the UDD protests, which had focused on demanding a new election to replace the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.

According to Thai journalist Noi Thammasathien of the U.S. media training network Internews, the Thai mainstream media have been split into the ‘yellow’ and the ‘red’ camps, the former being associated with pro- government groups and the latter with the UDD.

“The media have been under tremendous pressure, especially from the government, the military and their supporters. So observers say media content has not been satisfying for other sectors, like the red shirts, because they believe that self-censorship is at work here,” said Noi.

Often, rights advocate Dewi Ratnawulan says, media from both the government and opposition have become instruments of agitation and discord. This has eroded their credibility, “perhaps one of the reasons why media organisations have been the target of attacks.”

“Apart from the obvious bias of reporting in the mainstream media identified with the government, the red shirts’ media are also guilty of the same with information meant to fuel an already tense situation within the rally site,” said Ratnawulan of the regional human rights organisation Forum- Asia.

But “there is no government interference in the print media,” TJA’s Chavarong said, despite the state of emergency. Television stations, he added, were asked in a meeting with the government to cooperate with them in the light of the emergency. “There were no written orders but merely suggestions on how to cover the crisis situation,” he explained.

Violence, including arson attacks that gutted more than 35 buildings, erupted hours after UDD leaders surrendered as troops closed in on the Rajprasong site on Wednesday.

The protesters had been camped out there since Apr. 3, demanding a new poll because they say the current government came to power not through elections but with the military’s aid. The UDD has as its patron fugitive ex- Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who is popular among the rural poor.

As of Thursday, officials said 44 people had died and 384 injured since May 14 when troops started mobilising troops in preparation for a dispersal.

The foreign media, Noi observes, have been more like a “helper” in the news situation in that many, especially the red shirts, look at them as those “who could give balanced information” if only because they are ‘outsiders’.

Lamenting the foreign journalists’ deaths, Chavarong said that some might have had the tendency to underestimate the Thai situation and been “too confident owing to their training on conflict reporting”.

“The Thai reporters don’t have that same kind of conflict reporting training and so tend to be on the safer side. What they usually do is to follow the instructions of officers. This is why in the Apr. 10 clashes, no local journalists were wounded,” Chavarong explained.

But in recent days that saw the involvement of unidentified snipers, the situation became harder to navigate.

“We didn’t know where the bullets were coming from. The main problem is that this was not a normal peaceful demonstration. And on the final day of the crackdown, we got word that red shirts planned to target all journalists on the ground and threaten them with bodily harm,” said Chavarong.

*The Asia Media Forum (http://www.theasiamediaforum.org) is a space for journalists to share insights on issues related to the media and their profession. It is coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific.

Two months into Thailand’s anti-government protests and as an army-led blockade is underway to end them, the media are struggling with challenges to their credibility and perceptions of bias in the South-east Asian country’s gravest political stalemate in years.

Already divided before the protests started on Mar. 12, media have also been working under a state of emergency that was declared in April and was this week extended beyond Bangkok and surrounding areas. Navigating the polarised environment is far from easy, journalists say.

“The biggest challenge journalists are facing now is how to get the truth. The second difficulty is how to keep themselves safe,” Nophakhun Limsamarnphun, front-page editor of the English-language daily ‘The Nation’, said in an interview.

But there is not one truth for all 67 million Thais, and different versions of it are reflected in the different media, whom many tend to categorise into those that back the government, those that give space to both government and anti-government sides, and those that are by the protesters themselves.

The red-shirted protesters with the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) have been demanding that the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva dissolve Parliament and call for a new election. They say that Abhisit came to power not through an electoral mandate but through manoeuvring by the military and after the negation of electoral mandates won by political parties they voted for. These parties, like the UDD, have as their patron fugitive former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who lives in exile and who the government says is financing the protests.

Since early April, UDD protesters have occupied the Rajprasong commercial area and on May 13, the government cut off water, electricity and access to it. It ordered the blockade after the red shirts refused to end their protest despite the offer of a November poll by Abhisit, who has since revoked his offer.

Just as the protests have divided society, they have divided the media.

Government media outlets have come under fire for bias, and some state television announcers have received threats. Mainstream media have been faulted for reporting mostly the government’s views, or failing to provide balance and space for opposing views.

In March, a grenade was thrown at the state-owned National Broadcasting Services of Thailand. In April, news reports said that red shirts surrounded Channel 3’s broadcasting van and told the staff to leave. A brick was thrown through a side window of the van, they added.

The Thai Journalists Association (TJA) had said: “Media workers are not a contesting party to the UDD protesters. . . . We urge the leaders and the protesters to cease any action that is perceived as threatening or intimidating to the media and instigating violence.”

Independent publications like the ‘Prachatai’ have also gotten into trouble – and its website site blocked under state of emergency rules.

Pana Thongmee-arkom of the National Telecommunications Commission say impartiality is almost impossible to achieve. “What matters is that the media offers balanced information. So far, the information that mainly come from the mainstream press is imbalanced and reflects more the views of urban dwellers and not much of the rural people’s opinions,” he told a May discussion.

Asawin Nedpogaeo, dean of communication arts at Dhurakij Pundit University, said: “What’s coming out now in terms of news and opinion is largely influenced by the government because of the strict controls put in place after the violent clashes that happened in the past weeks.”

After several violent encounters in April, clashes and deaths from snipers’ shots have occurred since May 13. On Saturday, news reports said at least 42 people had died since the Apr.10 clash and more than 1,400 injured.

But for Pravit Rojanaphruk of ‘The Nation’ newspaper, it is not just about censorship: “They (media) have become even more partisan and bloodthirsty and think a violent ending (to the protests) is acceptable.”

For the red shirts, Asawin explained, “Not only have they been treated unfairly by laws, they have also been discredited by mainstream media’s coverage of their protest action.”

“The red shirts have been voraciously consuming foreign news media, translating them into Thai, printing them out and distributing them among the protesters,” Pravit said.

“The media did a very good job of trying to scare the public, not without the help of the government,” said long-time Thailand resident CJ Hinke, whose Freedom Against Censorship Thailand website was among the 600 blocked under the emergency.

Often, many fear “being judged and saying the wrong things” and this comes out as self-censorship, including in the media, Hinke added.

But Nophakun disagreed: “It may be true in the past and there is indeed some truth in the perception that we don’t want to be judged negatively and to conform with mainstream thought, because we try to be nice and not to hurt other people. But this is not the case now as more people are starting to speak out.”

This, he said, is happening in the UDD protesters’ voicing of problems about poverty and exclusion. “I think there is some truth to what protesters have said. The problem has existed for years but no one ever addressed it,” said Nophakun.

Thus far, he said, the situation is “getting better as we are getting more respect from the protesters and we are now being allowed in the protest site”. On Saturday, reports said there were few or no journalists in the Rajprasong protest site amid fears of a crackdown.

Newspapers threatened with lawsuits across borders. Journalists feeling lost as they seek redress in cases where the state is less than impartial in investigating the killings of journalists. Media caught in attempts to use religion to curtail room for public debate.

These are samples of the legal hurdles to press freedom in Asia that have emerged in recent years – and point to why media organisations need to sharpen their legal knowledge and tools in order to resist intrusions into their role as the Fourth Estate.

Indeed, news organisations are fast learning, sometimes the hard way, that they need to know not just domestic laws but international ones in the age of the Internet, which has broken down the old barriers between what was national and international publication of media material.

In a sign that nothing is purely domestic any more, the Kathmandu-based ‘Nepali Times’ newspaper found itself threatened with legal charges on defamation and copyright violation in Britain for a story, published in its online edition, on the resettlement of families of ex-Gurkha soldiers – or Nepalese fighters – who had been integral to the British Army.

“Our case proves libel tourism is alive and kicking and, as more and more content goes online, how anyone anywhere in the world is vulnerable to self- censorship due to libel threats in UK courts,” Dixit, publisher of the ‘Nepali Times’, told a recent media conference here organised by the Hawaii-based East-West Center and Hong Kong University’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre.

Dixit says that plaintiffs often lodge libel suits in Britain as a deterrence against free speech because of its strict defamation laws and expensive legal fees.

Libel tourism s defined as the practice of “shopping for beneficial jurisdictions” by U.S. journalist Drew Sullivan in a report on silencing the press through transnational legal threats.

The British-based ‘Times Online’ newspaper called London “the libel capital of the world” after High Court records showed that it received 259 libel cases in 2008, the highest since 2004. It was unclear how many involved non- British and online publications.

While threats to media have gone transnational, the tools and options for coping with them are going beyond borders as well.

In ‘Nepali Times’ case, this has meant working with the London-based Media Legal Defence Initiative, which represents defendants in libel tourism cases in British courts as part of the legal aid it extends to media around the world.

In the case of the November 2009 massacre of 32 journalists in southern Philippines – who were among 58 people killed in an election-related incident – legal advocates brought in international legal expertise when they gathered evidence because powerful politicians and police were suspected of involvement in the crime.

In a case that made world headlines, the journalists and other locals were ambushed as they accompanied a politician in Maguindanao province on his way to file his candicacy for the May 10 national poll.

The main suspects included members of the powerful Ampatuan political clan, but the justice department dropped charges against two of them in April. Harry Roque Jr, director of the Centre for International Law in the Philippines and counsel for the kin of 12 victims, helped them protest the move.

Lawyers looked for international options to pursue an impartial inquiry, since public officials themselves have been linked with the murder.

“If the domestic legal system is not working, then we have to explore alternatives such as turning to international legal systems,” says Roque, who is linked with the South-east Asia Media Legal Defence Network (SEAMLDN), the first regional network of lawyers to defend free media in South-east Asia.

The victims’ kin hold the Philippine government accountable for the crime, but the law says the state “cannot be sued without its consent,” he explains.

Over in Malaysia, tough laws have been used in recent years to restrict the media space for debate by citing sensitive issues like religion, activists say.

In July 2007, ‘Malaysia Today’ editor and blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin was the subject of a police complaint under the Sedition Act that alleged he had insulted Islam and incited racial hatred in the mainly Muslim, multi-ethnic country.

In September 2008, he was detained under the Internal Security Act for reportedly having “insulted the king and incited racial hatred” on his blog. He was freed two months later after the court found his detention illegal.

“It is a media challenge, especially concerning defamation in religion, which is used as a basis to control freedom of expression,” says H R Dipendra, Malaysia-based coordinator of SEAMLDN.

In 2007, the government banned non-Muslim publications from using the word ‘Allah’. In January this year, Malaysian courts overturned this decision, saying that the word is “to exclusive to Islam”

Given media organisations’ need to fight new legal threats, Dipendra says that having regional and international networks is crucial. But he says this poses a challenge to the legal profession because, for instance, many lawyers in Malaysia prefer corporate over criminal and human rights work.

Still, Dipendra says: “I think the network (SEAMLDN) is the last strong defence versus tyranny.”

*The Asia Media Forum (http://www.theasiamediaforum.org) is a space for journalists to share insights on issues related to the media and their profession, democracy, development and human rights in Asia. It is coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific.

Despite issues of discrimination and violence hounding ethnic minorities, they continue to lack ‘voice’ in the mainstream press and suffer prejudices from journalists themselves.

Journalists from the Asia-Pacific region voiced this sentiment during the three-day 2nd International Media Conference in Hong Kong that concluded on Apr. 28.

Themed ‘Reporting New Realities in Asia and the Pacific’, the Honolulu-based East-West Center and the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre event gathered more than 200 journalists from the region.

Political repression and genocide, says Indonesian journalist Andreas Harsono, are occurring right now in Indonesia’s westernmost province of West Java, some 4,000 kilometres west of the capital Jakarta. Yet, the mainstream media remain mum about it, he claims.

Similarly, the plight of some 130 ethnic minorities or 40 percent of Burma’s 56 million population is also often generally ignored by the Burmese press, although the media in exile are trying to take the lead in reporting on such issues.

“Since the 1960s, Papua has been off limits to foreign journalists. Because of this ban, they have to rely on reports by local journalists. Sadly, according to a local Papua leader, nine out of 10 Indonesian journalists in the province work for the state intelligence agency,” says Harsono, who is also the Indonesia and East Timor consultant to the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch.

The oppression of Papuans in West Java, recounts Harsono, began in 1962 with Indonesia’s military incursions and subsequent rule of the state in 1969.

“The Burmese media are newbies when it comes to covering the ethnic issue. There is a general lack of understanding among Burmans about ethnic issues and reports are very limited,” notes Aung Zaw, founder and editor of ‘The Irrawaddy’ magazine, which is published by exiled Burmese journalists in Thailand.

Many of Burma’s ethnic groups, such as the Karen and Kachin, have long been engaged in separatist movements and comprise 40 percent of the whole Burmese population.

For Thailand-based researcher and coordinator of the Canadian International Development Agency’s human rights programme, South-east Asia Regional Cooperation in Human Development, Ahmed Abidur Razzque Khan, the media have also turned a blind eye on the plight of the Rohingyas, a Muslim ethnic group in west Burma, which is also called Myanmar.

“The Burmese and even the Thai media have generally ignored the Rohingyas and have not really gone beyond their reporting of the hundreds of refugees found afloat at sea by Thai authorities in 2008,” says Khan. Since then, there have not been any reports about them anymore, he added.

The Rohingyas are not recognised by the military government as Burmese citizens. For the past 20 years, hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas have fled to refugee camps in both the Bangladeshi and Thai borders. Reports say that even at the camps, the Rohingyas suffer from persecution and appalling living conditions.

Aung Zaw says that the prejudice and self-censorship prevailing among journalists about ethnic groups are very real issues.

“For our part, we try to bridge this gap by hiring as many ethnic minorities in our staff as possible, not as a token but because it is necessary to give them a voice through the media,” he explains. The media, he adds, play an important role in correcting misperceptions and biases.

Earning the trust of ethnic minorities, says Martha Mollison, director of the Australian production company Dancing Iris Video, takes time, and journalists, especially outsiders, have to be patient.

“Among some aboriginal communities, it is not OK to ask a direct question. The information is offered, not asked for,” she says.

With over 20 years of experience training indigenous peoples in video and print productions, Mollison says the “white journalist” has the responsibility of getting his stories right.

“Information is regarded by white people as a commodity. For indigenous peoples, information is a property that they can choose to allow you to know or not. And even if they allow you access to that information, it does not mean that you can sell that,” she adds.

The distrust among the Papuans of outsiders, especially the “straight-haired” Indonesians, explains Harsono, runs deep.

“In Papua, all journalists are straight-haired people and are Muslims. If you ask questions, they will keep mum,” says Harsono of the Papuans, who are of Melanesian origin like Australia’s Aborigines, and one of 800 ethnic groups in Indonesia.

It is quite sad, he adds, that the “massacre of the Papuans” has gone on unreported as “not a single newspaper in Indonesia mentions about the killings and persecution”.

Longing for independence, the Papuans resorted to sporadic resistance movements against the government in recent years. Figures show that some 30,000 Papuans have been killed since 1969 due to the conflict.

“It used to be that we could turn to the international media in pressuring the local media to report more about these persecutions. But with the banning of foreign media as well from Papua, the situation is not very hopeful,” Harsono tells IPS.

*The Asia Media Forum (http://www.theasiamediaforum.org) is a space for journalists to share insights on issues related to the media and their profession, as well as stories and opinions on democracy, development and human rights in Asia. It is coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific.

The English language, as a medium for reporting in the region, is both a boon and a bane for many countries in the Asia-Pacific region in terms of getting ‘heard’ or generally being ignored by the global community.

“If you want to talk to each other in this region, you talk in English. Increasingly, the English-language press plays a key role regionally and internationally in keeping the information flow open and expanding the regional voice,” said ‘The Jakarta Globe’ chief editor Lin Neumann at a discussion during the East-West Center’s second international media conference here.

The East-West Center is a Honolulu-based international education and research institution promoting better understanding among the United States, Asia and the Pacific.

Jointly organised by the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, the event with the theme ‘Reporting New Realities in Asia and the Pacific’ brings together some 200 journalists and other media professionals from the United States and the Asia-Pacific region. It ends on Apr. 28.

The presence of an aggressive English-language local press, added Neumann, is a response to an information gap brought about by a shrinking news budget meant to send a western foreign correspondent to cover stories in the region.

“The decrease in foreign correspondents in the region has led to less coverage [of regional issues]. The irony of it all is that Asia is more important than ever before to the world and yet it is covered less aggressively and less thoroughly by the western media (than) it was in the past,” added Neumann, who has worked in the region for the last two decades.

Apparently, this lack of interest by the western media in Asian issues is also the case among Asian countries when it comes to western-oriented issues.

“The irony is, the more globalisation we have, the more localised the media are in Hong Kong,” Yau Lap-Poon, Hong Kong’s ‘Yazhou Zhoukan’ (Asia Weekly) magazine editor in chief, said.

The concern now in the Hong Kong press, he explained, is very local and seldom does one see international news splashed on the front pages.

Although there seems to be a lack of international ‘dialogue’ between western and Asian countries brought about by economic constraints, Neumann noted — and was quite surprised by — the “cross-cultural dialogue” taking place on the ‘Jakarta Globe’s’ Facebook account.

“We post in English and we will be getting lots of comments in Bahasa Indonesia. It is a phenomenon, a fierce aspiration to speak English and we’re seeing an expression of this on Facebook,” he said. The paper’s Facebook account currently has more than 110,000 fans; some 13,000 people, meanwhile, follow them on the popular micro-blogging site Twitter.

Yau said there is a trend in bilingual communication in newspapers, at least in Hong Kong. Figures get translated into English and some columns are translated as well.

While there was a general agreement that the English language will assume an increasingly important role in the region, researcher Tridivesh Singh Maini cautioned against creating a “faulty perspective” if regional-language media are ignored.

“Think tanks and other experts, especially from western countries, should study local-language papers and get a feeling of what is being said, as they might not be getting the correct picture of what’s going on,” said the research associate of the Singapore-based Institute of South Asian Studies.

Citing as an example India’s Hindi-language media, which “has three times more than the reach of English-language newspapers,” Maini explained that it is very important for decision makers to be able to get the pulse of the people.

“The way to do this is to study local-language media instead of just focusing on what the restricted English-language papers have to offer,” he said.

Neumann lamented that the nuances of regional issues tend to get lost on western audiences in the English-language media.

It does not help either that there is “not a tremendous appetite” for news from Asian countries such as Lao PDR and Cambodia, he added.

University of Hawaii Professor Thomas Brislin said that one of the problems involving countries where there is a lack of English-language media such as Vietnam and Lao PDR is the propagation of stereotypes and misperceptions.

According to Brislin, it is not uncommon for a western editor, when assigning a reporter to cover Vietnam, to ask for references on what the western media often refer to as ‘Vietnam War’.

“There is not a great interest and understanding about the Mekong region and stories don’t get told. The fact that there hasn’t been a conflict in these countries also contributes to the limited audience,” Neumann said.

Neither does it help that the western media make no efforts to fully immerse their journalists into the local culture and language, said Brislin.

“It used to be that you went to get language studies. It is not the case anymore. Instead, there’s a reliance on whatever English-language media is available,” said Brislin.

The result, as Maini pointed out, is that the end product loses the nuances of a local issue. Thus, the cycle of misinformation and biases continues.

*The Asia Media Forum (http://www.theasiamediaforum.org) is a space for journalists to share insights on issues related to the media and their profession, as well as stories and opinions on democracy, development and human rights in Asia. It is coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific.

Many parents are scratching their heads as they watch youngsters in the Asia- Pacific region create often-private online worlds, feeling lost over how to be a part of it and oversee their Internet lives.

“Parents of children aged 15 to 17 years old don’t know much about what their kids are doing. The older the children get, the less involved are the parents in their kids’ Internet activities,” says Juthamart Rattanakhom, former head of academic affairs of Thailand’s Assumption Commercial College.

Parents tend to monitor the online activities of young children from six to nine years but “once they get older, parents leave them alone in general,” adds Juthamart, a teacher for the last 27 years.

Thai youngsters can spend up to 12 hours a day in Internet cafes playing online games, far beyond the average of 3.1 hours a day that the Ministry of Culture says young people spend online daily.

This trend of young people, especially teenagers, spending more unsupervised time online – either at home or Internet cafes – is pretty much reflected in other parts of the region, which is home to 764 million Internet users, according to the Internet World Statistics.

In India, two-thirds of those who access the Internet do so from cybercafes, workplaces and areas outside the home, says a 2009 study by marketing research company comScore.

In the Philippines, 74 percent of children aged 10 to 17 have access to the Internet and eight out of 10 online users go to Internet cafes, according to a 2009 study by the Manila-based Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication (AIJC).

A Microsoft Australia study released in March showed that 65 percent of parents let their children surf the Internet “unsupervised and unrestricted at home”. The report says that more than 60 percent of parents are aware of parental control software that sets limits to a child’s usage of the Internet, but they do not really use this.

“It is difficult for parents to look into the Internet habits of their children, especially if the latter access the Internet in Internet cafes,” AIJC President Ramon Tuazon says in an interview.

Cheap Internet fees make this access much easier, especially when youngsters need to shell out only 10 pesos (20 U.S. cents) to play games for an hour.

“I think 90 percent of Bangkok-based kids are into online gaming,” adds Juthamart, saying that boys tend to go for role-playing games like AdventureQuest and Alien Invasion. Internet café fees are just 20 to 25 baht ( 70 to 77 cents) an hour in the Thai capital.

In an email interview, Mumbai-based Smita Deodhar says that while she monitors her son and daughter’s Internet usage regularly, it is not always easy for parents to be aware of their children’s cyberspace activities.

“All this policing is useless. If they (kids) want to do undesirable things online, there are a thousand ways to do it without the parents’ knowledge,” remarks Deodhar.

Tuazon adds that cyberspace is often still unfamiliar terrain for many parents. “Except for younger parents, the older ones are also not techno- savvy,” he explains.

Apart from the issue of spending a lot of time in cyberspace, which often means being cooped up indoors, parents and teachers are also concerned about young people falling prey to child prostitution, paedophilia and other forms of abuse online, such as cyberbullying. Cyberbullying, cases of which have been reported in South Korea, Japan, Singapore and the Philippines, occurs when a child is subjected to harassment, threats and other forms of psychological torment through the Internet or mobile phones.

Thus, analysts say, it is time for schools and families to be aware of how big a role the Internet has become for young people. For them, the virtual world goes far beyond one where they just search for information or exchange e- mails and often defines a significant part of their social identity.

“In Thailand, schools teach computer lessons more as an educational tool. When parents introduce their kids to the computer at home, they too must be aware of their responsibilities,” says Juthamart.

To help parents on guiding children online, Tuazon says the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) is producing a manual on media and information literacy that is due out in mid-2010. This will instruct teachers and parents on how to teach children about responsible Internet use, adds Tuazon, who is a UNESCO consultant.

In the end though, Deodhar says the best way to help children acquire the skills to use the Internet responsibly while having fun is to treat them as adults. She explains: “Give them an idea of the dangers that lurk here, draw their attention to news reports that speak about such examples, make them responsible, sensible kids. Be watchful in a non-suffocating, open way and all will be well.”

Adds Deodhar: “I am for moderate, loving, consensual censorship.”

*The Asia Media Forum (http://www.theasiamediaforum.org) is a space for journalists to share insights on issues related to the media and their profession, as well as stories and opinions on democracy, development and human rights in Asia. It is coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific.

For press freedom advocates, it was bad enough, though not totally surprising, to hear that the government had shut down the opposition media amid the state of emergency in the Thai capital. But alarming to them is the gagging even of independent news sites.

“There is a mistaken notion that we are supporters of the red shirts,” Chiranuch Premchaiporn, director of the independent Thai news website Prachatai.com said in an interview with IPS, referring to the red-clad protesters that have been demonstrating here for the fourth week to get the government to call for a new election.

“I have to say again that we are an independent media organisation that does not take sides with anyone in particular,” she explained.

Prachatai.com – which means ‘free people’ – is one of the 36 websites singled out for blocking by the government in a directive approved Thursday. Most of the other sites were media outlets by opposition groups themselves.

But “we will continue to follow events and I hope (the government) will see us in a proper light, that we’re just doing our duty in informing the public about what’s happening,” added Chiranuch, who is out on bail on a lese majeste charge due to comments that were not removed from Prachatai’s discussion board in 2009.

Thus far, Prachatai’s English-language site, Prachatai.org, is still on.

Among the blocked opposition-backed sites is People’s TV, the satellite television station of the red shirts, as the supporters of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) are called due to their protest colour.

Also blocked were an FM community radio and online sites, including the red shirts’ YouTube channels and pages on Facebook and Hi5.

Thai media activist Supinya Klangnarong says that banning these websites is “simply wrong”.

“This government worries too much,” Supinya, the head of the Thai Netizens Network, said, referring to the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. “It has become so fearful that they tend to exaggerate and see the Internet as the enemy when it is not. The Internet is a space for different views to be discussed.”

The government hopes that shutting down some communication networks of the red shirts will weaken the protests, which on Friday continued despite the emergency decree. That decree was instituted on Wednesday night, after a group of protesters broke into Parliament grounds.

Tens of thousands of protesters remain at the Rajprasong intersection, which they have occupied since Saturday.

Sathit Wongnongtoey, Abhisit’s office minister in charge of shutting down the media sites, said the opposition media content “contained distorted facts and was aimed at inciting unrest”, according to news reports Thursday.

Thai anthropologist Yukti Mukdawijitra says the crackdown on opposition media sites “is just something they had to do” but is unlikely to be permanent. He, however, feels that the government has let its Achilles’ heel show by these acts of censorship.

“I think it shows that the government can’t calm down the protesters and so they try to give a semblance of control by doing something else, that is, ban the opposition’s media sites, which is something they have control over,” said Yukti, deputy dean and graduate programme director of Thammasat University’s sociology and anthropology department.

Supinya agreed: “This government is very insecure and believe that shutting down opposition sites will help them control the situation.”

But she says that shutting down these sites while leaving government-backed media institutions untouched – which has already drawn rallies from the red shirts — will upset the public. “Television is almost one-sided and biased for the government side,” she says.

The Thai Journalists’ Association questioned the “double standard” being employed by the government. “…The government continued to use state-owned radio and TV stations to present one-sided information,” it said in a statement. “The government also allowed other radio stations and another satellite TV to present similar content of state media, which could lead to further rifts in society.”

Overall, Chiranuch says she is worried that with the blocking of Prachatai, people would not be able to access diverse and more independent information and this could lead to further confusion and fear-mongering.

“It can be a frightening thing for both the protesters and the general public not to have access to reliable information,” she said.

Yukti finds it sad that Prachatai’s independent coverage has been twisted by other groups as sympathy with the red shirts. “If you report about the red shirts, you would most likely be identified with them. I don’t think the public cares about these (episodes of) web censorship,” said Yukti.

People react negatively to media bans when their personal space is attacked and majority of Thais see the Internet more as “personal space” for networking instead of a political venue, Supinya notes.

“A temporary shutdown of sites is fine but not if it’s permanent, which will definitely invite negative reactions from the public,” she said.

Second-class legislators. A different political species in the Philippines’ rough- and-tumble – and very personalistic – brand of electoral politics.

All of these capture a bit of what a party-list member of the House of Representatives is, 12 years after elections began to be held for slots that were meant to allow representation of groups like fishers, migrant workers, veterans, women, urban poor and others that would otherwise have a hard time getting into public office.

The election of party-list legislators was meant to counter the elitist and often corrupt system of district-level politics, where candidates with money, name and fame – sometimes all in the same clans — often provided people tickets to power.

Indeed, the number of party-list congressional representatives has grown over the years and they occupy 52 of the 269 House seats today in this South-east Asian country of more than 92 million people.

But while they are the politically correct legacy of the post-dictatorship Constitution of 1987 – playing key roles in the passage of more progressive laws like those on cheaper medicines, the urban poor and more control on transnational firms – they are still not seen as quite like the other legislators. They also attract less excitement from voters.

“There is a sense of tokenism, yes,” said Danton Remoto, chairman of ‘Ang Ladlad’ (Coming Out), a political party pushing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues. It is one of 187 party list groups seeking to win slots in the lower chamber of Congress during the May 10 national election.

“Ang Ladlad is not just treated as a second-class Party List nominee, but as a pariah by some conservative, narrow-minded quarters,” Remoto said in an interview, referring to the Catholic Church in this mainly Catholic country.

District-elected legislators do not see party-list members as equals, says Jose Descallar, advocacy officer for the anti-abortion ‘Pro-life Buhay’ (Life) party. “District representatives consider themselves the true representatives since their constituency is more quantifiable and geographically determinable, unlike party-list groups, which are sector-based,” he explains.

Most members of the lower house of Congress are elected from their geographical districts – the traditional mechanism of legislative representation. While they represent areas, party-list representatives represent groups of people and specific causes. The members of the upper house of Congress, the Senate, are elected nationally.

A member of Congress from the southern Philippines is in fact quite vocal that “party-list representatives only duplicate their (district legislators’) functions and projects”, says journalist Sherrie Ann Torres, who wrote a series on the party-list system for the online newspaper ‘Vera Files’.

The first party-list representatives were appointed by the President from 1987 to 1997, and campaigned for the first time in the 1998 national poll. A party-list group names one congressional member if it gets at least 2 percent of the total number of voters in the party-list election. The maximum number of nominees is three.

“They see us as members of Congress but cannot really say what distinguishes us from the district congressmen,” says Walden Bello, a University of the Philippines professor, author and party-list member of Congress for the Akbayan Citizens’ Action Party, which has its roots in the country’s social movement.

Many remain clueless about the significance of a well-represented party list system, he adds. A Pulse Asia survey in February shows that 69 percent of Filipino voters are unaware of it.

But although Filipinos are unclear about party-list representatives, Bello disagrees that they are second-class citizens in Congress. “We are treated as equals,” he says.

The party-list legislators’ difficulty in getting voters’ attention is also reflected in the lack of space for their platforms in the media, which tend to gravitate toward popular candidates and big political machinery.

“The media must be educated further on the importance of the party list system so that they’d know what to ask, whom to ask and what kind of law this is,” explains Torres. She adds that other party-list groups have resorted to multimedia venues, such as Facebook and Twitter, to reach more groups.

Ironically, the party-list system is also seen by some politicians and dubious groups as a shortcut to getting into Congress, which would be a “bastardisation” of its goal, says Cristina Palabay of the Gabriela Women’s Party, which has a party-list seat.

Media reports say that a son of outgoing President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is eyeing to be nominated to a congressional seat under ‘Ang Galing Pinoy’, a party-list group that supposedly represents security guards.

Bello says the law’s weaknesses can be addressed in the future. Reforms are already coming out, including a clearer definition of what a marginalised group is and “who can represent an accredited party for a marginalised group”, he adds.

In he end, he says, voters and watchers of the Philippine democratic process must not miss the main point, which is the party-list legislators’ voice in shaping national policies and diversifying representation in a typically oligarchic and elitist electoral system.

“Whether it was on land reform or on protecting the rights of labour or on human rights or on the conditions of the urban poor or informal settlers, it was the party-list representatives that played the most prominent role in these debates and played a leading role in crafting legislation,” Bello points out.

*The Asia Media Forum (http://www.theasiamediaforum.org) is a space for journalists to share insights on issues related to the media and their profession, as well as stories and opinions on democracy, development and human rights in Asia. It is coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific.

Often described as too square and boring, Philippine presidential candidate Benigno Aquino III reaches out to the music-television generation as a smiling, hip-hop rapper in his television advertisement.

To show voters his lighter side, candidate Richard Gordon lipsynchs in a slapstick video with local comedians in YouTube while trying to the keep pace with The Tokens’ 1961 hit ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’.

Catchy songs, sung by children in his advertisements, is how real estate tycoon Manuel Villar reminds voters that he knows what poverty is. ‘Have you ever bathed in a sea of garbage?” and “Have you ever spent Christmas on the streets?” go the lines of one campaign tune.

With over a month left before the May 10 national elections, nine presidential candidates are busy displaying their ‘artistic talents’ using television, radio, print and online venues to get the nod of voters in this South-east Asian country. Sixty percent of 92 million Filipinos are eligible to vote, along with 7.8 million overseas voters.

Thus, 30- or 60-second election advertisements are what Filipinos have been seeing regularly on their televisions screens and the Internet, and hearing on the radio, since the campaign season began in February.

Song and dance numbers, campaign ditties from the catchy to the forgettable, along with rich doses of humour and satire, have long been part of the fiesta culture of politics in the Philippines.

The entertainment-loving crowd relishes the sight of their would-be leaders performing for them, whether it is in campaign sorties, or on television or radio.

“As in many parts of the world in varying degrees, politics is like selling consumer items. Definitely, showbusiness is a major part (of it),” said Joel Lacsamana, deputy director for presidential candidate Gilbert Teodoro, a former defence secretary.

“People need to get to know who you are and that you are a candidate. The next step is to give yourself a brand and identity,” said Prospero de Vera, a professor of public administration at the University of the Philippines. A candidate for national office needs a voter recognition of 95 percent or more in order to win, he explains in an interview.

Since politics and show business merge during campaign periods, presidential candidates have been racing to get endorsements by actors and actresses, singers and entertainers.

This is the thinking behind one of Aquino’s television commercials, ‘Hindi Ka Nag-iisa (‘You Are Not Alone’), which is among the most-star studded political advertisements in a long time.

Its title coming from the slogan that became a national rallying cry after the 1983 assassination of Aquino’s father, the late Benigno Aquino Jr who was a key oppositionist to dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the advertisement shows people from all walks of life – acted out by a who’s who list of movie and television stars — carrying torches in support of the candidate Aquino.

Recall is key not just because travelling to campaign across the Philippines – which has 7,100 islands – is not easy.

In the first poll with a computerised counting system in May, voters will be voting for a long list of 11 kinds of public officials – president, vice president, 12 senators, a congressional representative, a party-list representative, a governor, a vice governor, up to seven provincial board members, a town mayor, vice mayor, and up to 12 local councillors.

Although radio reaches virtually all Filipino households, television has a 71 percent penetration rate — and is an essential tool for campaigning.

In the last national elections in 2004, surveys showed that “at least 90 percent of Filipinos got their information about the candidates from television”, De Vera added. Today, the candidates who have the biggest funds obviously find it easier to get airtime, especially during primetime from 7 to 10 p.m.

“The best and quickest way for a candidate to introduce himself to the public is through TV ads. . . . so it makes sense to put a lot of campaign money into TV ads,” De Vera continued.

On Friday, the Commission on Elections said that Aquino and Villar had exceeded the maximum airtime of 120 minutes set by law for each television station, in this case the ABS-CBN network.

As of Mar. 12, Aquino had 291.5 minutes airtime there and Villar, 250 minutes, it said. “We will warn them from airing further ads on the stations where they have exceeded their limits,” Comelec spokesman James Jimenez said.

Election offences are punishable by imprisonment, fines and disbarment from public and elective office.

Earlier, an AGB Nielsen media group study said that Villar spent the most in advertisement spending, which reached 150 million pesos (3.2 million U.S. dollars) from Feb. 9 to Mar. 8.

Filipino voters do expect to be ‘charmed’ by their candidates. “Even if there’s a growing number of more mature voters now, majority still go for the popular and entertaining. They actually clamour for the candidates to perform song-and-dance numbers in rallies,” said Ditas Bermudez, a former copywriter for an advertising agency.

But not all agree, saying that following the advertisements does not mean they rely on them to make a final decision in come voting day.

“I’m not really convinced by ads because they’re just like commercials. They’re like shampoo ads. They just make themselves sound good, but it’s not true,” said Aiza Salazar, a 24-year-old midwife. “I would believe more if I read something about a candidate.”

For others, the advertisements confirm whom they would not vote for.

“Erap is unwatchable, unlistenable to me. What the heck is he still doing alive in the political scene? He has no shame!” Heart Mauricio, a businesswoman from the central city of Cebu, says of former president Joseph Estrada, who was convicted of plunder, was pardoned and is again running for president.

*The Asia Media Forum (http://www.theasiamediaforum.org) is a space for journalists to share insights on issues related to the media and their profession, as well as stories and opinions on democracy, development and human rights in Asia. It is coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific.

Anyone who is still trying to look for neutrality or balance in the Thai media in these days of political ferment, ahead of large anti-government protests expected in the capital, has a pretty tough job.

“Thai society is very divided politically and I don’t think the mass media are helping at all. Rather, they have become part of this political division,” Pravit Rojanaphruk, a senior journalist at the English-language daily ‘The Nation’, said in an interview.

He is referring to the rising political temperature in the country these days, as tension rises ahead of the rallies being organised in the coming days by the red-shirted supporters of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), whose patron is the exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

The protesters plan to get hundreds of thousands up to a million red shirts, called so because the colour of their ‘uniforms’, to descend upon the capital to challenge the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. They say they are coming to protest injustice and their disenfranchisement by the Bangkok-based political elite that had reversed electoral mandates, including the election of pro-Thaksin politicians after the former premier was ousted in a 2006 coup.

The rallyists are coming in from Thailand’s rural heartland in the north and north-east, many of whose people support Thaksin, who was also convicted in an earlier corruption case, and believe he has also been a victim of injustice.

The rallies also come two weeks after the Supreme Court’s ruling that found Thaksin guilty of abusing power when he was in power by introducing favourable policies that benefited his family-owned telecommunications empire. It ruled that the government could seize 1.5 billion U.S. dollars of Thaksin’s 2.3 billion dollars in frozen assets.

News of the rallies and the government’s warnings about trouble have prompted some offices to warn staff to stay away from some areas or ask them to work from home. Roads near rally sites will also be closed on Friday.

Pravit explains that majority of the mainstream media have become polarised into the ‘yellow’ – the colour of the supporters of the government and those against Thaksin — and ‘red’ media.

In a society so divided politically – as it has been since the 2006 military coup against Thaksin – there is only a small percentage of Thai media that try to fairly present both sides of the story, according to Chiranuch Premchaiporn, editor of the independent web newspaper Prachatai.com.

“I think only about 30 percent are trying to present balanced stories about this current political situation. The rest all have taken sides,” she said.

“A big mess” is how a journalist working for a leading Bangkok-based daily, who requested anonymity, calls the Thai media when it comes to covering the political tensions in the country.

” ‘Bangkok Post’ seems to be leaning towards the ‘centre red’, while ‘The Nation’ is now extreme yellow. In that sense, you have a balance of views,” quipped the journalist, referring to the two English-language dailies in Thailand.

He added: “‘Bangkok Post’ seems to take sadistic glee in running reds-related stories to make the yellow feel downtrodden while ‘The Nation’ runs yellow stories to make the reds feel rotten. I think both sides want to win.”

It is unfortunate that some media institutions “seem to want to sow panic and fear in the society (by the kind of stories they release),” adds Chiranuch.

“Most of the stories we see now in relation to the rallies is a projection of how the violence will happen. We don’t see them questioning the government side on how they’re going to commit to using non-violent measures when trying to contain the crowd, for example,” she said.

‘Post Today’ journalist Cholticha Lermtong disagrees with the perception that the mainstream media have a pro-government stance.

“The reason why mainstream Thai media have a bad attitude toward the reds is because they have prior experience of violence from them in the past,” she said, referring to the series of April 2009 demonstrations where journalists working for government-run media institutions were threatened with bodily harm and invectives.

At the same time, she said that there is “only a small group from the red shirts” that resort to violence. “I still believe that a majority of reds do not want violence,” she added.

But in truth, the pro-Thaksin supporters’ mistrust of the mainstream media has some basis, Pravit explains.

“After the September 2006 coup d’etat that ousted Thaksin, the editorials that came out in the mainstream media all declared the coup as justifiable and I think that was the genesis of the view that mainstream media are anti-red shirts,” he said.

Ahead of the weekend rallies, Pravit says he would be worried if the government “prematurely and unjustifiably shuts down pro-red shirts media” under the Internal Security Act, which the government is implementing until Mar. 23. “That would upset the crowd and precipitate violence,” he said.

Already, according to journalists who were interviewed, many mainstream media institutions carry an already visible anti-red shirts tone in their products. “Adopting this tone in the stories will only create more anger among the protesters as they will feel they are being treated unfairly again,” said Chiranuch.

Moreover, she continued, this gives the impression that “the right to assembly is an illegal act”, when it is not.

For the other journalist with a leading Bangkok-based daily, the point is that the current manner of reporting is creating the “misperception that one political group is more violent than the other”. “I’m not too sure how it came to be that the yellows were perceived as violent. Time and time again, in the April (2009) riots and other incidents, they (red shirts) have proven incapable of keeping their hordes in control,” said the senior journalist, a self-confessed yellow supporter.

Time Chuastapanasiri, senior researcher with the Bangkok-based media watch group, Media Monitor, takes a more distant view of the situation. “Each media outfit has its own way of reporting this story and are usually driven by different goals. And it’s a reality that conflict and violence have more news value,” he said.

To make sense of the very partisan picture, audiences are turning to sources other than local mainstream media to understand the nuances of a very complicated political situation.

“A lot of educated Thais will be turning to foreign media to try to get as much information as possible. It’s strange but it’s true,” said Pravit.

For Chiranuch, the new media play a crucial role in presenting alternative sides to the story. “I think people will look for alternative sources online,” she said.

But Time cautions that the foreign and online media are also prone to biased reporting, and that quality reporting must understand “the political context and report with objectivity”.

In the end, local journalists find their own ways of dealing with the country’s biggest political story at the moment, one that they are also involved in as in citizens.

Cholticha says that whatever her political leanings, she will try to “approach protesters with respect and neutrality”.

“Despite my vehemently yellow-shirt political affiliation, I honestly try to be objective when reporting news,” added the journalist with the Bangkok-based daily quoted earlier.

For Pravit, space must be created for all sides in the fractious political scene to express themselves. “I think we have to open the space for different voices to end this division once and for all.”

Not even religious advocates and leaders and can say no to the power of online media, whose call they are heeding in order to spread various messages of spirituality.

In late January, Catholics heard an edict from Pope Benedict XVI urging the flock to use the new media to spread the Good Word. On Feb. 22, the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, officially opened a Twitter account that now has more than 157,000 followers.

But apart from these high-profile figures, leaders of various other religious and spiritual communities in Asia are no strangers to the new media. In recent years, they have become very visible in blogs and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

This new technology has not so much seen the flock following the shepherd, as it has the other way around.

“We’ve always been in traditional media — print, radio, and TV. But we saw people migrating to the Internet,” Roman Catholic lay evangelist and author Bo Sanchez told the AMF. He added that this virtual community started five years ago in the Philippines, 81 percent of whose 92.2 million people are Catholics.

Apart from having a mobile phone ministry that sends a weekly text message to subscribers, his group also sends emails with daily Bible reflection guides to members and copies of his talks as mp3 audio files.

But Islamic teacher and writer Sadaf Farooqi, based in Pakistan, had no idea that there was “such a large Muslim, English-language online readership” as early as 2005.

“I share my articles and establish contacts with notable Muslim scholars, writers and teachers worldwide, who are involved in Islamic educational and welfare work,” said the mother of two, who has taught Islamic education courses for women in the last seven years.

Farooqi uses Hotmail, Windows Live Spaces, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogger, WordPress and Twitter.

Cittasamvaro Bhikku, the Bangkok-based English monk who founded the ‘Little Bangkok Sangha’ website, was looking for an online venue for his series of ‘dhamma’ (virtuous path) talks nearly four years ago when he stumbled upon an audience waiting for such a site.

He set up The Little Bang (http://littlebang.org/) website, an online centre for updates in the Buddhist community. Majority of Thais are Buddhists.

“The Little Bang web page is not meant to be a personal blog. I never use the word ‘I’ there. The goal is not online interaction but just to have a regular English-language resource for people in the community,” said the monk, popularly known as Pandit Bhikku. He was ordained in the Thai Theravada tradition more than a decade ago.

“We don’t really interact in the blog; we interact face-to-face,” he said, adding that there are 2,000 to 3,000 people on his mailing list, with a core group of 200 people and a wider group of 600 who check the site from time to time.

“I think it’s a great idea for Buddhist monks to catch up with the trend and create blogs or online sites. It is effective in making more people aware and in reaching a wider community,” said Kamonwan Khamching, a Thai kinesiologist who checks the schedule of activities in Little Bang.

Both Sanchez and Farooqi stress that online venues work particularly well in reaching younger people, who grew up with new technology.

“They are the ones who use the medium most comfortably,” said Sanchez, a recipient of the prestigious The Outstanding Young Men award in 2006.

Sanchez is visible online in such sites as The Kerygma Family, Preacher in Blue Jeans, and BoSanchez.ph. He also has a Facebook and Twitter account.

Farooqi adds that Muslims in the west are particularly keen on using online resources. “This is especially true among many second-generation immigrants who can only read English. Thus, they turn first to the online world for seeking knowledge about Islam,” she said.

Other religious leaders and scholars in the Muslim community have made their online presence felt through many other sites, including those like Muslim Matters and Ask Imam.

“I don’t think it is taboo for an Islamic religious leader to join online sites like Facebook and Twitter. These are just means to an end,” said Pakistani journalist Farah Zahidi Moazzam, who is also an Islamic preacher, teacher and counselor.

As long as one maintains “modesty and decency” and does not resort to lies, then it is perfectly fine to use the new media, she explained.

Islamic hardliners, she noted, might feel they should not be using the online media due perhaps to “a lack of education or awareness” or the feeling that “more bad comes these tools than good, such as pornography, for instance”.

But the ease of sharing and accessing information is among the things spiritual leaders and followers, much like advocates of other causes, like about the Internet.

“We love the fact that we can reach more than a hundred thousand people who have opted in our mailing list — without much cost,” said Sanchez.

“I like almost everything about the new media, as they make knowledge sharing and networking so easy,” agreed Farooqi.

People are more open to reading Islamic material online than having face-to-face discussion, she sys. “One (reason) is shyness and the fear of revealing their lack of knowledge, and another is privacy, which is aptly met in cyberspace,” said Farooqi.

Kamonwan says it is the same among Thais. “I think Thais are more comfortable expressing themselves or asking questions about spiritual issues online than via face-to-face discussions,” she said.

But like other Internet users, leaders of religious communities find that it can eat up a bit too much of one’s time.

Ideally, Pandit Bhikku says, he would like to spend just a “couple of hours” per week online. He ends up spending more time than that because he personally writes the information on the Little Bang website. As for his Facebook account? “Somebody else does my Facebook for me,” he said.

“We don’t like that it’s getting noisier every second — with people receiving more and more emails every day. Websites are multiplying. So much is happening that we need to stand out above the noise,” said Sanchez, who gives a short update once or twice a week to 20-plus social networks, via ping.fm, a service that updates one’s social networks in one click.

The trick, Sanchez says, is in moderation and balance. “The online concerns are the same offline. It’s a need for spiritual connection, practical help on relationships, family, finances, and physical healing,” he said.

Farooqi adds that while physical presence at the mosque can never be replaced by the online world, that experience “would still be a very positive one spiritually”.

Festive days are here again in the Philippine political scene as 10 presidential candidates – ranging from the son of a former president to an environmentalist, a Christian minister and a former actor – battle it out for the voters’ ‘yes’ come May 10.

Song-and-dance numbers, endless handshakes and bear hugs, autograph signing and photo opportunities are staple fare these days in the Philippines’ freewheeling media, one of the liveliest in South-east Asia.

Primetime television is peppered with highly sophisticated — and definitely expensive — political advertisements as well as well-placed endorsements by movie stars.

Then, there are the usual rousing speeches on the campaign trail in this country of more than 92 million people. An estimated 90,000 candidates are said to be vying for some 17,600 elective posts, ranging from president to members of Congress to mayors and village chiefs.

But in addition to the traditional ways of campaigning among the country’s more than 50 million voters, the fiesta-like atmosphere of the three-month election campaign that began on Feb. 9 has gone viral online.

Candidates’ use of a mix of virtual ways of competing for votes can either be a blessing – in that they get easy and oftentimes free exposure to online users – but also a curse because what they say will be closely scrutinised in the process.

The new media are “providing transparency to the election campaign” as a whole, says English-language daily ‘Business Mirror’ section editor Lyn Resurreccion.

“Since anybody who is a member of a social network or who has a blog could speak his mind and comment or provide information about a candidate or any event in the duration of the election campaign, it’s an important venue for communication among the electorate, whether the information provided are verified or not,” Resurreccion said.

“Reaction-wise, mainstream media appear to be far from the reach of their audience,” she added, comparing the immediate feedback and reaction on blogs and social networking sites with that of the letters section of the print media.

A strong, active online presence also helps candidates reach out to the huge overseas Filipino community, given that more than 10 percent of the country’s population is estimated to be working in more than 120 countries. Overseas voting is scheduled for April, ahead of the May 10 vote in the country.

But candidates’ online pitches also mean that the virtual world can become “a venue for propaganda”, says journalist and blogger Ellen Tordesillas.

“Websites like Facebook have changed from being merely social networking sites for friends and families and have now been flooded by all these election-related content. Of course, we also know these things come and go,” Tordesillas, a columnist for the English-language daily ‘Malaya’ and Filipino-language tabloid ‘Abante’, told the AMF.

Facebook, Friendster and Multiply, as well as popular video site YouTube, the microblogging site Twitter, and online encyclopedia Wikipedia are among the social networking sites where candidates try to sell their campaigns, platforms and personalities to the public.

The sizable bunch of presidential candidates – Sen. Benigno Aquino III, Manny Villar, Richard Gordon, Nicanor Perlas, Jamby Madrigal, Gilberto Teodoro, Eddie Villanueva, Joseph Estrada, Vetellano Acosta and John Carlos delos Reyes have an online presence of one type or another.

The official website of Aquino, son of the late former President Corazon Aquino (http://www.noynoy.ph/main/index.php) is a virtual campaign headquarters — with interactive links to his other sites, campaign buttons, badges and other merchandise.

Known by his nickname Noynoy, the senator has 697,855 fans on his Facebook page, whose Frequently Asked Questions page has information as serious as his platform of government to the mundane, such as why he uses a different middle initial. He has nine websites.

His vice presidential running mate, Mar Roxas, takes a more personal approach to his Facebook fan page, which has 139,264 fans, via testimonials and fan photos. For a more personal touch, the page also has his wedding, honeymoon and family pictures.

Opposition candidate and ex-President Joseph Estrada – who was ousted in a popular uprising in 2001, convicted of plunder and then pardoned in 2007 – had his team set up three Facebook accounts. These have only attracted less than 5,000 fans.

“Why not give him a second chance? His dedication to the poor didn’t fade even when he was exiled (a reference to his detention while waiting for conviction),” read Estrada’s profile box.

“Social networking sites only work to the advantage of the candidates because they are just a click away from the voters. They are also a cheaper way of promoting one’s candidacy,” explained Sherrie Ann Torres, a reporter for GMA television network.

Torres also sees them as “another propaganda tool” that depicts an imaginary “perfect candidate”. She added: “These sites only provide an edited, well-researched presentation of a candidate, thus shortchanging the voters.”

In addition, Tordesillas says, a candidate with a Facebook account usually has another person posting and replying to messages for him or her.

In presidential candidate Villar’s Facebook account, for instance, the wall messages are mostly updates of his campaign sorties and releases reposted from various publications, and video links to his YouTube channels. In Christian minister-turned-candidate Eddie Villanueva’s three Facebook accounts, most wall posts are from his supporters and not ‘personal’ ones from him.

Still, Tordesillas said that because of the new media, “there’s a two-way thing going on now, which makes it easier for all concerned to get information and get immediate feedback.”

Resurreccion says that the new media have also made this election campaign more open than the last presidential poll in 2004. Many candidates, however, put up personal websites and pages in social networking sites during the 2007 local elections.

Despite the vibrant campaigning and political debates happening in blogs, websites and social networking sites, though, the Philippines’ online world remains limited mostly to urban areas and those with access to the Internet.

A 2009 study by AC Nielsen-Yahoo showed that about 28 percent of 35 million Filipinos living in urban areas have access to the Internet. Twenty percent of Internet users are aged 20-29 and majority are between 10-19 years old.

Quoting from a study by a political consultancy group, Tordesillas says that there are currently 8.5 million Facebook users in the Philippines. “In the last three months of 2010 alone, there has been an increase of 4 million Facebook users here,” she said, adding that 51 percent of them are users between 18-35 years old and overseas Filipino workers.

But overall, “we are still trailing poorly behind such countries as Singapore and South Korea in terms of Internet use and access,” she said.

That means that television, apart from radio, continues to lord it over the Philippine election campaign because of its household penetration. “Television still enjoys 90 percent reach, while print is rapidly declining due to the global crisis what with print costs, for instance,” Tordesillas said.

*Asia Media Forum (http://www.theasiamediaforum.org)

The changing ‘face’ of the media landscape in the Mekong region is eliciting both excitement and fear from observers and professionals alike.

The growing power of new media and citizen journalism, the increased involvement of civil society organisations in the dissemination of information, and the often conflicting issues between perceived image and the actual ‘media product’ are just some of the issues tackled in the Mekong Media Forum, being held here from Dec. 9 to 12.

In a session titled ‘Shifts in the Media Landscape’, both journalists and academics underscored the need for more cooperation and vigilance if all Mekong countries — comprising Burma, Cambodia, China, Lao PDR, Thailand and Vietnam — are to see more confluence rather than divergence and if they are to be viewed by the international media sans western lenses.

Chinese journalist Li Gun cited China’s efforts toward this end.

After the international controversy brought about by the much-maligned Beijing 2008 Olympic torch relay that trained the global spotlight on the Chinese government’s human rights policies, the state began to pursue a ‘media makeover’.

“China is employing a top-down approach in its aim to expand its international media influence,” said Lin Gu, a freelance journalist from Beijing and a former fellow of the ‘Imaging Our Mekong’ training programme for journalists that IPS Asia-Pacific and Probe Media Foundation have been implementing since 2002.

Lin Gu was referring to the Chinese government’s efforts to ‘soften’ the country’s image in light of international criticism about its stance on political issues involving Tibet and Burma.

“After the 2008 Olympics, the Chinese government thought hard as it realised its need to expand its media influence,” added the two-time awardee of the Asia Development Bank Institute’s Developing Asia Journalism Award. “This attempts to “offer a Chinese perspective of Chinese affairs.”

Other developments that indicate China’s push for a space to air its view of the world include the launch in April 2009 the English-language newspaper ‘Global Times’.

Another is the setting up of a 24-hour English-language news channel by the government, which Lin described as its version of the TV news channel Al- Jazeera International.

Thai researcher and academic Palphol Rodloytuk added that language barriers within the region need to be lowered to ensure a more effective media among Mekong countries. “Language ought not to be a barrier. [It’s unfortunate to see] a person who can’t stand in the podium even though he has something brilliant to say just because he can’t speak English,” said Palphol, Thailand’s country representative to the Asian Media Information and Communication in Singapore.

Acharawadee Buaklee, Thai Public Broadcasting Service (TPBS) reporter and coordinator, agreed. “[This is why] I like what the Imaging Our Mekong programme did in eradicating language barriers. At the same time, we open the forum for people to exchange ideas; we’re also a very strong network,” said Acharawadee, a former Mekong media fellow herself.

For Kevin Yuk-Shing Li, project coordinator of the Hong Kong-based non- governmental Globalisation Monitor who runs several Mekong-focused discussion lists, this is a good time for the Chinese public to see and understand how other countries perceive it.

“A lot of investments from Chinese companies are creating some kind of controversy in the region and the world,” said Li, who follows issues surrounding the Mekong River, such as upstream dams and overseas Chinese investments.

Li said there are still considerable knowledge gaps between China and other Mekong countries like Vietnam and Thailand. In the past few years, however, apart from the Chinese-language versions, there have been numerous media reports tackling development issues in the region in these countries’ English-language newspapers.

But while there are extensive debates between state institutions and NGO workers about Mekong issues, not much is being heard from the grassroots.

Stressing the importance of civil society’s involvement in media institutions, Palphol cited the TPBS’s evolving model that gives due recognition to its role. TPBS represents Thailand’s first foray into public broadcasting in 2008.

TPBS’s core values of independence, ethics and teamwork can be “adapted and adopted” by other Mekong countries and made to fit their local needs, he explained. Palphol said ‘closer cooperation’ among Asian nations could be partly achieved through the creation of a network of ASEAN (Association of South- east Asian Nations) television stations, and the recent establishment of the Federation of ASEAN Community Radio.

The communities’ active involvement in bringing out issues and information, too, easily translates into the ever-growing reach of citizen journalists, who are taking advantage of the ‘freedom’ being afforded to them by the ‘new media’.

In China, Lin said that many traditional journalists “who can’t express themselves” in the mainstream media are turning to the Internet. Calling this trend “footnote journalism,” he said this venue is filled with “grassroots voices” ranging from the youth to environment activists and farmers, to name some. Thus, he added, “we see a happy emergence of citizen journalism in China”.

“As mainstream journalists, we need to understand this new paradigm and think about how we can communicate more effectively to the public and with the citizen journalists,” said Acharawadee.

She added that one of the new things that has emerged from this partnership between citizens and mainstream media in Thailand is a training programme introduced by TPBS.

“When citizen journalists present the news, the station will edit, check and verify information before it is distributed to the public,” said Acharawadee. Dubbed the Public Communication Unit, the programme also teaches citizen journalists basic journalism skills “so they know how to present their stories,” she added.

While citizen journalism will replace mainstream media, or at least not yet, she says it gives people “a space” for their views.

As far the mainstream media giving ordinary people a voice, Lin said this is happening now. “Many journalists now want to give space to local people. The argument is that we already give so much space and time for the government. Now it’s time for the grassroots to be heard,” he said.

At the same time, Lin said that the government, in disseminating its view of the world through media initiatives, should also be prepared for criticism as this is “a price one has to pay” for being a major world player.

“The government should stop being overly emotional and oversensitive to outside criticism,” he said. “The Chinese government is obsessed in getting a good image abroad but the kind of ‘product’ that you can deliver is another story.”

*http://www.ips.org/TV/mekongmediaforum09/

Elections are always a period of intense coverage by the Thai media. The sheer surfeit of stories on candidates of every political stripe and selected issues is guaranteed to raise media visibility a notch or two higher.

But such heightened visibility does not necessarily translate to ‘expertise’ about the issues, no thanks to a complex set of factors.

For veteran Thai journalists and broadcasters, their country’s media are burdened by the complexities of Thai society and thus are not able to play their role well in disseminating information on crucial matters.

“I am dissatisfied by the lack of effort from the media to engage the people in politics after every election. They have an important role in reporting what politicians have been doing since they were elected,” said Dr Chirmsak Pinthong, a veteran journalist and broadcaster as well as former Senate member, at a seminar jointly organised by the German non-profit Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and Thailand’s Office of the Election Commission (ECT) in this capital on Nov. 23.

Dubbed ‘The Role of Media in Election Campaigns’, the seminar gathered together around 50 journalists, ECT representatives, non-governmental organisation workers and academicians. It focused on the roles media play in election campaigns and examined the differences between the media practices in Germany and Thailand during election periods.

According to Chirmsak, instead of educating the public and continuously monitoring politicians, the media encourage “lethargy in politics” such that the people end up thinking “our job is just to vote, and that’s it”.

“There should be a media campaign to expose undesirable politicians, but I am not seeing this,” said Thepchai Yong, director of the government-run Thai Public Broadcasting Service.

Instead, Thepchai continued, the media sometimes “give airtime to corrupt politicians” in the form of a “tour of rich politicians’ homes…”, which “amplifies the luxuries of politicians and conveys the wrong values to the people”. As for post-elections monitoring, the moderator for Radio Thailand of the country’s Public Relations Department, Fongsanan Charmornjan, urged the media to closely watch the performance of Thai parliamentarians, particularly those who have a penchant for “disappearing” during working hours.

She added that the media, with the help of the ECT, should publish a list of parliamentarians who do not attend meetings, which denies the parliament a quorum.

“A parliamentarian’s job is to attend meetings, not go to funerals,” said Fongsanan. “Politicians of a hundred thousand funerals (are) a big problem in Thai politics.”

If Chirmsak could have his way, he would rather see the ECT focusing not only on election management but also on developing programmes that would educate the public about democratic values. He said these are important if everybody wants to see the patronage system go in Thai politics.

“The most influential factor in elections is the patronage system, where one repays the good things another has done for them. [Many politicians] channel that to vote buying and other corrupt practices,” he said. Other factors that put an ugly mark on Thai elections include the lack of public awareness and education about politics and officials, cheating, and the media’s seeming inability to be vigilant and act as watchdogs, he added.

Thepchai cited Germany’s very clear guidelines and rules about the scope of the media’s duties in helping maintain a thriving democracy coupled by responsibility and awareness, as reported by Germany’s Hans-Bredow Institute director Dr Wolfgang Schulz and researcher Stefan Heilmann at the seminar. A society that adheres to regulations is what he wants to see in his country, he said.

“There are similar rules and regulations in Thailand, but people don’t follow them,” he added.

Thepchai, however, believes that there are two kinds of electorate — those who cast their votes for the vote-buying candidate or are under pressure to vote for certain individuals, and a growing number of individuals who raise questions about politicians’ fitness to govern and their respective platforms.

“The media’s role here is to provide that second group enough and accurate information. . . . And the ECT should start developing a new generation of voters who know what the political parties are doing,” he said. “It is not enough [for the ECT] to go on air and say ‘Come out and vote’.”

For his part, ECT secretary general Dr Suthiphon Thaveechaiyagarn urged the media to cooperate with the elections body in working “towards a common goal” and understand the complexities of election rules and regulations.

“The confusion in the media about election laws comes from the fact that many elections rules in the national and local levels contradict themselves. This confuses electoral officials and trickles down to the media and eventually the public as well,” he said.

The media, he added, is further limited by the lack of print space and air time to present these rules to the public, leading to misunderstanding and tension among the ECT, media and the electorate.

“If media members don’t understand, then they should ask us, and we will explain (the rules) to you. But if you make your own assumptions and present facts about something not entirely true, then people misunderstand. It is difficult to correct public misperception later on because the damage has already been done,” said Suthiphon, referring to past instances when the public questioned election procedures and the proclamation of winners, the basis for which was not clear.

He assured the members of the media, however, that the ECT is exerting efforts to correct these contradictory rules, as well as encouraging more transparency in the election body.

Beyond righting the election rules, Fongsanan said everything boils down to constant monitoring. “I don’t have much hope in our elections system and our politicians, but I have hope in the monitoring system by independent groups in society,” she said.

Thepchai echoes Fongsanan’s view. “Good governance should have transparency, which will make it easier for us to monitor political organisations and accountability,” he said.

*Asia Media Forum (http://theasiamediaforum.org)

By Lynette Lee Corporal
CHIANG RAI, Thailand, Oct 19 2009 (IPS)

How countries can develop and provide key services to their citizens while acting responsibly in limiting emissions is a balancing act for many Asian countries, including those in the Mekong region.

WWF's Geoffrey Blate Credit: Lynette Lee Corporal/IPS

“You can’t say no to infrastructure and good sanitation and water delivery systems,” Geoffrey Blate, Greater Mekong climate change coordinator for the World Wildlife Fund, said in an interview on the sidelines of a consultation with stakeholders held by the Vientiane-based Mekong River Commission in this northern Thai city on Oct. 16-17.

“But what we’re saying is let’s take into account and emphasise a bit more the role of healthy ecosystems in providing resilience to climate change because ecosystems do play that role,” he added.

More than the development of climate change-proof infrastructure, Blate said the WWF would like to see more ecosystems-based adaptation strategies from the December global negotiations on a new global deal on climate change, as well as from any regional agreement on the matter.

“At least in the lower Mekong countries, it’s land use change that is contributing the most to the emissions at this point.” said Blate.

Investing in the environment has become even more important in protecting communities against the negative impact of climate change.

Blate explained that getting ecosystems, like mangroves, wetlands and watershed forests, to remain healthy will actually “provide a lot of resilience to climate change”.

On Oct. 5, the WWF itself released a report that urged the creation of a regional climate change adaptation agreement in the Mekong region, considered one of the most biologically diverse in the world. This diversity would be threatened by climate change.

“The report calls for the reduction of unsustainable, illegal or unregulated resource extraction, which includes wildlife trade, trafficking, infrastructure development, among other things,” Blate said.

Thus far, he credits countries like Cambodia for pushing for the creation of protected sites. As of 2003, the country has placed 25 percent of its land under its protected area and forest conservation project.

The Copenhagen climate change talks scheduled for December, said Blate, are crucial in that they would provide an overall framework for international cooperation among developed and developing countries.

IPS: Which among the six Mekong countries do you think would be the first to take that crucial step toward the creation of a regional climate change adaptation agreement? GEOFFREY BLATE: The question is difficult because all have to agree that they are going to work on this together. And all these goals of reducing current non-climate threats, including infrastructure development and other causes of habitat loss, are all wrapped up into regional trade, exchange of goods and integration of economies.

Thailand can say, ‘We’re going to really focus on this, making sure that there’s no wildlife trafficking. We’re going to really make sure that any forestry or any agricultural product or fisheries are done in a sustainable way as possible’.

But their resources are connected to their neighbours, and so there really has to be an agreement. Who should take the first step? Any of them should take the first step. Maybe China should take the first step as it’s the most capable in the region.

IPS: ‘Capable’ meaning…? GB: They are the most developed and have the most capacity. We just heard in the MRC meeting that they are very keen to cooperate and provide non-technical assistance.

In a country like Cambodia, or Laos, there’s still quite a bit of poverty; they are still struggling. Personally, I would expect countries that have a little more integrated economic development at this point, like Vietnam and Thailand, to step up a little bit more.

Thailand really should be — of the lower basin Mekong countries, in my opinion — the one to provide more leadership in this regard.

IPS: So it is more of a question of how capable these countries are and their willingness to make said changes? GB: Right. There’s political will and there’s governance. We already know that governance is a huge issue in all of the countries, but especially in the countries that are least developed.

IPS: How would you assess the MRC’s readiness or willingness to discuss and incorporate climate change in its plans? GB: I was encouraged to hear that people are pressing the MRC (to do something about it). But the MRC can only do as much as the countries, as member states, approve. I think the MRC is keen to address stakeholders’ concerns, to engage them in the consultation process and to understand how climate change will fit into this.

It’s tricky though. The MRC is a pretty big organisation, and climate change is meant to be a crosscutting initiative through the Basin Development Programme, the fisheries programme and other programmes.

How that’s working in a practical, realistic sense is hard to gauge at the moment. If I had to gauge it from this meeting, I would say that they could do a better job integrating the climate change initiative.

IPS: What do you mean by ‘better job’? GB: There is a climate change adaptation initiative, and that is sitting within the environment programme of the MRC. There is no one here from the environment programme or from that initiative. So how will the folks here and the rest of the BDP going to do the cross-walk with the climate change initiative and vice versa? I think people in the climate change programme should have been here to hear the concerns that have been raised.

The MRC has the initiative and is including the issue in their scenarios. Right now, as I understand it, they are only going to include it in the longer-term scenarios (beyond 20 years), but not in the nearer-term scenarios.

IPS: Will thinking of climate change as a development, and not just a mere environment, issue help in creating a sense of urgency among the public, including key decision makers? GB: We can start now and we should start now. Thailand and Vietnam now have national strategies. Cambodia and Laos are in the process of developing national strategies, but the process is very slow.

The MRC is probably in the best position to generate the necessary information and knowledge, and they’ve been doing it. However, it’s really only for the basin and there are lots of other links and areas that are connected to the basin which I think need to be included. So governments have to find a way to do it.

IPS: Do you see a shift happening in the way Mekong countries view climate change as being more than an environmental issue? GB: Some, not as much as there needs to be. In Thailand, I think people are starting to get it. The development community, like the donor community, the multilateral institutions, they get it. I still feel there’s a lack of awareness.

People kind of get that climate change is a problem, but I also think there’s a sort of ethical issue in the region where people think, ‘well, we need to develop and so we can’t worry about that’, and that since developed countries caused the problem, they should fix it on their own. But everybody has to take part in addressing this problem.

Excerpt:

By Lynette Lee Corporal
BANGKOK, Sep 29 2009 (IPS)

As the countdown to the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit draws to a close, gender and climate change advocates are doubling their efforts to make sure that 23 gender-related paragraphs in the negotiating text will make it to the new treaty that will be hammered out in December.

Gender advocate Cate Owren Credit:

At the ongoing 12-day Bangkok Climate Change Talks, which opened Monday and the latest round in a series of global discussions leading to the Copenhagen conference, the Global Gender and Climate Alliance (GGCA) is keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings.

Women’s Environment and Development Organisation sustainable development programme coordinator Cate Owren explains the GGCA’s stand and its next steps toward ensuring that gender equality is mainstreamed into climate change policies.

IPS: What has been the most challenging part of the negotiation process so far, particularly where it concerns the 23 paragraphs relating to gender?

CATE OWREN: Climate change has been very much categorised as a strictly environmental and business issue. The Kyoto Protocol deals with emissions productions, with the commitments of industrialised countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. In that context, it’s a bit more complicated. We certainly think a gender aspect exists there, but it’s a bit more complicated for all parties to grasp onto the connection of gender.

Still, we are very optimistic because parties understand the gender components much more and no longer think of them as a distraction.

IPS: Will this openness to the issue by the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) translate to support then? What kind of support do you expect to see in Copenhagen?

CO: It’s a party-driven process, so as much as we, as observers, can submit text, it doesn’t mean that much. The message has to come from the parties.

In the first half of the year, we saw a good number of parties submit the language necessary to secure the paragraphs in the negotiating text. As in past negotiations, we need written submissions and interventions on the floor and for parties to take the microphone and mention ‘gender’.

IPS: What lessons have you and your alliance learned from past climate change talks? What were the mistakes, if any, of past negotiations that advocates would do well not to repeat?

CO: The GGCA, as an advocacy team, are very careful to work with parties based on their positions and their priorities. We try to work with parties as technical advisers. It’s very important for us that the negotiations continue. We want to find solutions and help to find solutions that can make the policy and project implementation more effective.

It’s widely accepted that gender equality is a prerequisite for sustainable development. If climate change negotiations are in a vacuum, if they’re not taking into account the best practices and lessons of sustainable development, then we fear all our work will be in vain.

IPS: Do you see a pattern in the existing system that keeps you from introducing gender sensitivity on issues of climate change?

CO: Up until this year, the climate change negotiations were a bit of an anomaly, and it was very hard as an NGO, as an IGO, even for other UN agencies to work with the UNFCCC, which was such a specialised, specific agency. It really kind of pigeonholed us in the environment issue and business or economic issue.

I do think it has shifted, and this is one of the reasons why the GGCA was formed. We came together because we needed to be a united front when it comes to climate change negotiations. We knew Copenhagen was a milestone.

The alliance has been a very fruitful model, and we’ve seen a lot of progress in the last nine months.

IPS: Are you satisfied with available research data on gender and climate change?

CO: There’s always a need for more data although there has been a growing amount of data on disaster risk reduction and natural disasters. We need specific research about the impacts of climate change on specific groups, particularly on those most vulnerable, including women.

We can ask for data or research, but unless it really has a gender perspective, unless there’s a true analysis in that research, then we still sort of repeat our mistakes of having generalised information. We don’t actually know who is receiving funds or if women are able to access pertinent information in the same way that men are, for instance.

IPS: Will this lack of data or research material weaken the GGCA’s position in the final phase of the negotiations?

CO: I don’t think so. I think there’s enough proof that the impacts of climate change are being felt and those most vulnerable are those most urgently affected.

There was one study, for example, by the London School of Economics about a year and a half ago, that found a direct relationship between the deaths of women and men in times of disaster. In societies where women and men were less equal, more women died. The opposite was also true in countries where there was more gender equality; there was an equal number of deaths among men and women.

Excerpt:

By Lynette Lee Corporal
BANGKOK, Sep 11 2009 (IPS)

They may be in their twilight years but Asia’s senior citizens are not ready to be left behind — and forgotten — by the wide, wired world.

Screen shot of Lola Techie's Facebook account Credit:

Citizens aged 65 and older are often thought to be out of place in the age of the Internet, usually the territory of the young.

But this is not the case for Tessie Moreno, a 67-year-old Filipino grandmother of 16. Known as ‘Lola Techie’ (Grandma Techie), Moreno is the official endorser of a computer literacy campaign for the Filipino elderly that was launched by a local telecommunications company in August 2008.

“I like chatting, playing online games, surfing, blogging, going to YouTube,” said her profile on Facebook, where she has more than 96,000 fans.

Upon Moreno’s retirement a few years ago in the Philippines, where Internet rate stands at 21 percent in a country of 92 million people, she really got into the ‘goodies’ cyberspace had to offer, including Twitter, Skype, Plurk and YouTube.

This celebrity grandmother’s fascination for the Internet will not be lost on 63-year-old Purnima Phadke, a German teacher and translator living in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

After undergoing a basic computer training course, the avid environmentalist and activist has become a fan of Google, Wikipedia and sites related to environment, science, history.

For Phadke, being a senior citizen need not mean going blank when her grandchildren start “talking about websites, downloads, emailing and forwarding”.

“Internet is, in one sentence, the world at your fingertips. In fact, it has made my life richer, more interesting,” she told the AMF. Phadke juggles her time between communicating with one daughter who lives abroad and watching videos and photos of her grandchildren online, and keeping in touch with her professional contacts.

Then there is India’s Arunachalam Kumar, whose ‘ixedoc’ Internet identity is quite popular online, including in the United States-based website Sulekha.com that has a million or so members worldwide.

Based in the south Indian city of Mangalore, Kumar is a medical college dean and anatomy professor who got “wired” about 10 years ago. At 60, he has more than 1,500 online write-ups, around 900 blogs and spends about 150 minutes online daily.

A self-taught cyber surfer, Kumar said: “The Internet has changed my world. . . . Many wonder about my wasting time on the Internet, not really aware of the potential of the medium to be a very useful tool for research and reaching out.”

News reports say that older people are among the faster growing users of the Internet in industrialised societies. While such data are not easily available for Asia, examples show how some elderly citizens are exploring the Internet as usage rates continue to grow in the region.

Internet penetration in Asia stands at 18.5 percent, compared to the world average of 24.7 percent, according to Internet World Stats, a website that tracks Internet usage around the globe. As of June 2009, it reported 704.2 million Internet users in Asia, or 42.2 percent of the world’s users.

Some Internet companies are already responding to having more elderly users. In March 2009, Baidu, the leading search engine in China, launched a search engine for elderly users that has more mature content such as classical poetry, larger fonts and less cluttered pages for easier navigation.

Local industry reports say Baidu hopes to see the number of older users in China continue to rise. Only five million people over the age of 50 had used search engines by the end of 2008, out of a total of some 300 million Internet users in China at the time, according to the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC).

But while the numbers of Asian users are large – China alone has 338 million users, Japan has 94 million and India 81 million — the percentage of the population using the Internet is often much lower. This stands at 25 percent in China, 7 percent in India and is much higher at 74 percent in Japan.

Those like Lola Techie and Phadke are often still the exception when it comes to computer and Internet literacy.

For instance, Phadke’s 74-year-old husband, a chemical engineer, does not quite share her enthusiasm. While conceding that the Internet is a “great development”, Purushottam Phadke admitted that he “cannot get the hang of using the computer”.

“I have made attempts, but I forget the steps involved, because my memory is not as efficient as it used to be. If I did not find it troublesome to remember, I would also have been happy to learn,” he explained.

Thai neighbours Aunt Tui, 67, and retired military officer Samai Tipprateep, 68, are not too keen on the Internet as well.

“I’m scared of using it (computer). It’s a machine and I’m afraid it will explode or something if I hit the wrong buttons,” quipped Tui, a grandmother of four who once upon a time did ask her grandchildren to teach her. “I ended up forgetting how in just ten minutes after they taught me. I felt embarrassed,” added the Bangkok resident.

Samai had a Hotmail account five years ago but eventually gave it up. “It wasn’t easy to learn how to use the Internet and all those commands. But you know, I’m an old man with a bad memory. It was hard to keep up,” he said.

Still, both Samai and Tui find the Internet very useful. “It helps people get to know things globally faster than they can imagine,” said Tui. Samai added: “The Internet is superfast and I could visit places I’ve always wanted to go to within seconds, without having to spend a lot.”

But when catching up with friends, he prefers to use the telephone. “Nothing is good as hearing their voices. Typing all the time is too cold,” Samai added.

A quick check of Thai online sites reveals minimal computer literacy programmes for the elderly – or almost none. Most websites relating to the elderly deal with health care issues.

Computer literacy programmes are often among the most effective ways to get the older generation familiar with the Internet. In Singapore, many computer lessons for seniors are sponsored at the community level. Some older folk rely on the time and patience of their children and grandchildren to teach them about the online world.

“The whole world is moving to this mode of communication, so it makes sense to keep pace… and you don’t feel you belong to an ‘obsolete’ generation,” added Purnima Phadke.

While there are basic computer classes for the aged in India operated by private institutions, there are really no widespread and comprehensive government programmes to teach computers to the elderly, said the Phadkes’ daughter, journalist and researcher Smita Deodhar.

“Computer literacy is predominantly an urban phenomenon — it is spreading to small towns and to a very limited extent, to the relatively more advanced rural areas. But the elders who have caught on would belong to a very distinct urban, middle-class and up educated group,” added Deodhar, also an avid blogger.

Meantime, Moreno is busy with the ‘Teach Lola’ website (www.teachlola.com), dedicated to teaching grandparents about the nitty-gritty of computer and Internet use.

According to BayanTel, the Philippine telecommunications company behind the ‘Teach Lola’ website, only “11 percent of the elderly know how to use the Internet”. But BayanTel officials admit that since there has not been any comprehensive study on the “Internet habits of the elderly”, it is difficult to say how many of the elderly are really wired.

In India, a Facebook-like website for people aged 50-plus has been attracting a lot of senior citizens. The social networking site Verdurez.com now has 4,000 members, and its oldest member is 70 years old.

“We’re in an ‘age of connections’ and it is but natural for people, more so with the elderly, to want to stay connected, especially if you think about the Filipino diaspora and those who are far from their loved ones,” observed Kathy Moran, a features and technology journalist with a Philippine daily broadsheet.

More than 10 percent of Filipinos live overseas, making finding ways of staying connected a basic need for many families.

*Asia Media Forum (http://www.theasiamediaforum.org)

Excerpt:

They were usually the first to arrive at work and the last to leave, and often took the blame for boo-boos in the following day’s issue of the newspaper. Now the newsroom’s unsung heroes, who engage in a daily deadline battle armed only with their sharp eye for detail and those squiggly proofreading marks, are facing a new kind of threat — extinction.

The telltale signs have been present for the past 20 years or so — the advent of desktop publishing software, multi-tasking in the newsroom, streamlining of staff, upgrading of skills and cost-cutting.

All these have been spelling the demise of the paste-up and typesetting sections, which used to be an integral part of the news production process.

“Yes, maybe in the future, proofreading as a separate entity in the news process will become obsolete. (More and more) copy editors are already the ones doing the proofreading,” Bertoldo Deloso, editorial systems assistant head for the English-language daily ‘Philippine Daily Inquirer’, told the AMF.

Having been in the proofreading profession for the last 24 years — 18 of them spent with the ‘Inquirer’ — Deloso has been witness to the inevitable changes in the newsroom.

“We don’t use the term ‘proofreaders’ in the ‘Inquirer’ anymore. They are now called editorial production assistants, or EPAs,” he added.

EPAs, he explained, proofread copy and execute layouts based on dummy sheets on the computer. In effect, this set of combined tasks has absorbed what used to be crucial parts of the process — typesetting and paste-up.

Until up to more than a decade ago in many parts of Asia, the news production process involved a very tedious process of printed drafts shuttling back and forth between proofreaders, typesetters, paste-up artists and editors. Oftentimes, proofreaders, along with the night editor, would check for errors even after the first print-run of the following day’s issue.

But those days are gone, it seems.

“Proofreaders started to disappear with the advent of computers in the newsroom. They were replaced by technology,” said Kamal Siddiqi, editor of reporting of one of Pakistan’s leading English-language dailies, ‘The News’.

Traditionally, proofreaders are tasked to manually check for spelling and grammatical mistakes, coherence, and double-check facts. Subeditors are in charge of editing and cutting stories, as well as writing headlines and captions, among others.

Barbara Marchadesch, the editor of the Philippines-based online property resource ‘Global Property Guide’, thinks it is more likely a question of efficiency rather than technology.

“Proofreaders won’t disappear because of advances in software, but because companies might think it would be better to have just one editor do all the work,” said Marchadesch.

Nalini Rajan, a professor of the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai, India, agrees that proofreading is fast becoming redundant given the present newsroom environment. “I would agree that subeditors are quite capable of proofreading, with computer aids like spell check and so on,” she said.

For ‘The Nation’ deputy managing editor Kumar Krishnan, a proofreader’s role in the newsroom “has been diluted to a great extent in the sense they don’t pore through every word of text” anymore.

‘The Nation’, one of Thailand’s leading English-language newspapers, currently has just a couple of proofreaders who are tasked to thoroughly check the pages’ printouts. The said pages also go through the paper’s subeditors.

“It would be physically demanding for a couple of guys to be reading through some 30 pages everyday. They mostly look for typographical mistakes in headlines, captions, font, style, intros and whatever else in their wisdom needs to be brought to the attention of the editors,” explained Krishnan.

Proofreading as a career “is almost finished”, he conceded.

“Publishing houses are increasingly likely to consider them a needless cost and prefer to pass on the responsibility to the subeditor. And then, who among the present generation wants to become a proofreader?” he said.

Deloso, who himself had no formal training in proofreading, believes that proofreading, at least in the Philippine print media, is “only a temporary vocation for most people”.

“Being a proofreader is a stepping stone toward a higher position, that is, becoming a reporter/writer in the future,” he said. In fact, the turnover of editorial production assistants in the ‘Inquirer’ is quite fast as the section is considered a breeding ground for future reporters, he said.

Admittedly, proofreaders are also “poorly paid and badly treated”, said Siddiqi, in many countries in the region.

“Wherever they exist in Pakistani newspapers, proofreaders are on the lowest rung of the editorial ladder,” said Siddiqi, who added that ‘The News’ itself does not have proofreaders any more.

Krishnan agreed: “Undoubtedly, the print media was never too kind to them. They were always the poorer cousins of subeditors.”

However, it’s difficult to generalise about whether “they have toiled without appreciation”, he added. “I, personally, have always been grateful to them for catching those elusive mistakes on the page,” said Krishnan.

In fact, said Marchadesch, errors are easier to spot in print than on the computer screen.

“Preliminary editing is often easier on the computer, because you can slash and burn your way through obvious errors, but in the final editing stage smaller errors are more easily spotted on hard copy,” she added.

Krishnan, too, does not want to let go of the proofreading section just yet. “I believe in looking at a printed version of the page before it is filmed. . . . It serves as the last line of defence to iron out any mistakes, or even make improvements,” he said.

Siddiqi, meanwhile, prefers to have proofreaders in the newsroom if only to act as perfect foil to complacency and laziness.

“Subeditors overly rely on the spellcheck function of the computer, which leads to many lapses,” he said.

But Deloso also pointed out that these hi-tech tools are rather fun and speed up the editorial production work process. “The computer helps EPAs tremendously in spotting typographical errors,” he said, adding that he does not really miss the old way of doing things.

Clearly, proofreaders are being asked to adapt. Krishnan believes that they “should evolve” and focus more on “only the most important and sensitive reports”, as well as those parts that have a “high visibility on the page”.

“That way, you would need fewer proofreaders while still having the last line of defence,” he said.

Whether employing the ‘dying art’ of proofreading marks or clicking on that mouse, editors “need a set of fresh eyes” in spotting errors on the page, Deloso maintained.

After all, he said, good proofreaders do not only have the ability to spot typographical errors, but factual errors and inconsistencies. “I think proofreading is still a significant part of the news process,” said Deloso.

*Asia Media Forum (http://theasiamediaforum.org)

By Lynette Lee Corporal
BANGKOK, Aug 18 2009 (IPS)

In what is considered a milestone in the fight against gender-based violence, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the Philippines-based Coalition Against Trafficking in Women- Asia Pacific (CATW-AP) conducted the first ever all-male youth workshop on gender sensitivity in Thailand on May 9-10. Of those who applied for slots, 30 university students from Bangkok were selected to participate. CATW-AP executive director Jean Enriquez talks to IPS about the significance and impact of the workshop on changing the misconceptions of men about women and helping put a stop to violence against women.

IPS: This is the first time that a workshop on gender sensitivity was held for males in Thailand. How did the idea come about? JEAN ENRIQUEZ: UNIFEM initiated the project, and we understand (it was) also inspired by the presentation we made at its conference on ‘Men as Partners to End Violence Against Women’ on Sep. 3-4, 2007, where a young male graduate of our camps spoke.

Our project in the Philippines started in 2004. We have since conducted eight camps across the country involving 350 young men. This was followed by camps on ‘Gender Issues, Sexuality and Prostitution’ for young women to address their vulnerability to sex trafficking. The graduates of the camps have become advocates (against) sexual violence and have created a multiplier effect as they mobilise at least 100 to 300 more young people to every forum they organise.

IPS: Based on what the participants in Thailand shared during the workshop, how would you describe the views of young Thai men on gender sensitivity as compared to other men in other Asian countries? JE: What actually stood out is the similarity in terms of socialisation. It is clear that patriarchal values cut across races. There are numerous efforts to help women, children, perhaps even men in the sex industry in Thailand. But efforts to challenge buying/consumption, and therefore this component of the demand side to sex trafficking, is still wanting. An enabling environment coming from the academe, government and civil society that widely critiques male consumption of sexually trafficked persons would facilitate young people’s understanding that there is a norm among duty-bearers to oppose such practices.

IPS: How do Thai men view issues of gender equality, homosexuality and masculinity? JE: Homosexuality is not a difficult issue for young Thai men, who recognize that homosexuals have rights similar to heterosexuals. Particularly challenging for them is removing ideas that blame women victims of rape and prostitution. There are strong beliefs among them that women want or provoke rape. The massive sexualisation of women’s images in media shapes their inclination to believe that women want sexual violence.

IPS: What other misconceptions about gender-based violence surfaced during the workshop? JE: That women enjoy pornography and are being used in the sex industry, that men should earn more than women, and that women should primarily perform housework.

IPS: What are the dangers of young men seeing themselves as ‘protectors’ and ‘helpers’ of women who have been subjected to various kinds of violence. Shouldn’t they instead see women as ‘equals’? JE: Chivalrous ideas — which are still underpinned by views that men are strong and women are weak — are the normalised definitions of ‘gentlemanhood’. Some may come from positive values as respect, but the training asserted that those have to be reinvestigated (to see if there are) assumed weakness on the part of women and assumed strength and privilege on the part of men.

As for proposals for concrete actions on fighting violence against women, the training included, for example, a proposal such as “don’t assume that women want to be protected; rather ask if (they) need help”. One should act based on capacities and skills on observed forms of violence against women. Collective actions are encouraged.

IPS: What kind of feedback and commitment did you get from the participants at the end of the workshop? JE: The feedback (from the participants) was very heartening. They expressed interest in working with CATW-AP and UNIFEM. Many young students want further training. They even want to come to the Philippines, having heard of our long-term programmes. Many admitted to acts they deem are violative of women and committed to start (correcting their actions).

A basic parameter of the training is creating a conducive and safe space for young men to share and reflect on their socialisation, thinking, beliefs and behaviour, so as to facilitate authentic redefinition of masculinities towards more positive relations with themselves, (the) women around them, other sectors considered marginalised (i.e., children, homosexuals, etc), and society at large.

IPS: Your future plans? Will there be future workshops in rural areas as well? JE: We hope we can get involved in training other stakeholders such as teachers in rural areas in Thailand. We would not pretend that we can learn the (Thai) language quickly to be able to train young people in the rural areas; learning the language is crucial. In our experience, it has not been difficult to reach out to schools in the rural areas.

(*This feature was produced by IPS Asia-Pacific under a series on gender and development, with the support of UNIFEM East and South-east Asia Regional Office.)

(END/IPSAP/LLC/TBB/0207009)

Excerpt:

Like all forms of abuse, ending violence against women is as much men’s fight as it is women’s. It’s a good thing some members of the opposite sex are taking on this challenge.

Young Thai male participants at a UNIFEM workshop on gender-based violence Credit: UNIFEM

“We need to listen to the ‘unheard voice’ of women and be their ‘voice’ too,” declared Aekarak Sethi. “If we bring this out with the right attitude, then we will have taken the first steps to (raising) awareness about gender issues,” added the environmental science freshman at Mahidol University.

Like Aekarak, 22-year-old Tananchon Suttichuay’s eyes have been opened to the reality of gender-based violence.

“I have heard about it for years, but I never realised how important and serious it is,” said the International Relations senior from Chulalongkorn University.

Alongside these young men’s awakening to the reality of gender-based violence comes a growing understanding of the issues confronting Thai society in this regard, and how these affect, nay, violate women.

“We have places like Pattaya, known or ranked as one of the ‘sin cities’ in the world,” said Tananchon, where prostitution and human trafficking are rampant. He knows full well that women are among the prime targets of these social maladies.

Politics and a general sense of apathy among the public make it difficult to find solutions to the problem, he rues, notwithstanding the efforts of the authorities to address it.

“Thai people themselves consider this issue very common and not too serious compared to the problems of day-to-day living,” laments Tananchon, who hails from north-eastern Thailand.

Gender-based violence in Thai society “has long been an issue”, he said.

Statistics from the Thai Bureau of Health Systems Development Department, which has access to 300 hospital-based One Stop Crisis Centre (OSCC) units in the country, show that 19,068 women and children “suffered from violent abuse in 2007”. An average of 52 cases of “mental and physical violent abuse against women and children” is also reported daily from all of Thailand.

The United Nations reports that about 2.5 million people, most of them women and children, are being trafficked around the world at any given time for labour and sexual exploitation. Most of the abusers are reportedly either boyfriends or close male friends, as well as husbands and male relatives.

On Jun 5, 2008, Thailand enacted the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act 2008. This landmark legislation is expected to curb violence against women.

Getting males to understand the concept of gender-based violence need not be a formidable task. In the case of Aekarak and Tananchon, a two-day workshop on gender sensitivity did it for them.

The workshop was organised recently by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and facilitated by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women-Asia Pacific (CATW-AP), a non-government organisation in the Philippines that promotes women’s human rights and stands against all forms of violence against women.

“Our idea was to work with young men and boys to educate them, make allies out of them in raising the level of awareness about gender-based violence in the country,” said Mika Mansukhani, UNIFEM project coordinator for preventing trafficking in women in Thailand.

“While I’ve always been interested in such campaigns, I never really had an opportunity to undergo a gender sensitivity workshop, and it has been quite an emotional experience for me,” Aekarak told IPS.

Hearing the experience of Filipino trafficking survivor Marevic Fontanilla helped strengthen the two men’s resolve to take a stand against gender-based violence.

Fontanilla is a survivor of child abuse and prostitution.

But more than the emotional impact of the workshop, what struck the young participants was the realization that emerged from being made to evaluate existing misconceptions about issues ranging from masculinity to gender roles, to name a few.

“What actually stood out was the similarity in terms of socialisation, how young men are steeped in their ideas and shaped by societal pressures to appear strong, act aggressively and the normalised idea that men can buy women and children,” said CATW-AP executive director Jean Enriquez.

Thai males are no exception, of course. According to Enriquez, their socialisation patterns are quite similar to those of other men in the region and, to a certain extent, globally.

“It has proved more challenging to change the widely accepted idea of buying women in Thailand, given also that the country is in the hub of sex trafficking in the region,” added Enriquez.

One common misconception that came up during the workshop was that women “enjoy pornography and (are) being used in the sex industry”, said Enriquez.

She added that many of the participants were “shocked” to hear the number of women who become victims of gender-based violence. They were equally alarmed by the number of local Thai men, especially young men, involved in buying women in prostitution, “especially for their first-time experience”, said Enriquez.

The Office of Women’s Affairs and Family Development reports that from 2005 to 2008, there have been 10,816 cases of domestic violence against women and children in Thailand. This translates to an average of 29 such cases each month. Perpetrators include male and female family members as well as strangers. Bangkok has the highest number of reported cases of violence in Thailand.

Physical abuse emerged as the most common form of abuse committed against women and children, followed by verbal abuse, rape and abandonment.

According to Aekarak, there was a big debate about the sheer magnitude of the problem during the workshop, with some of them saying that “women get into prostitution because they like it”.

With his newfound understanding of gender-based violence, Tananchon said he is committed to raising awareness of the issue. However, “it’s a long road ahead”, he cautioned. “It’s very hard and almost impossible to change one’s belief just like that,” he said.

Mansukhani concedes that it’s going to be a challenge for these young men to take action. “When they leave this ‘safe space’, they’ll be bombarded by the same problems. One-off trainings won’t work; we want to keep at it,” she said.

Notwithstanding the uphill battle facing men like Aekarak and Tananchon, they refuse to be daunted. Tananchon said he will try “as much as I possibly can”.

Aekarak believes it will be a gradual process. “It starts with your own self and will eventually spread to other people. Personally, I’ve made a commitment to listen, understand and respect women,” he said.

(*This feature was produced by IPS Asia-Pacific under a series on gender and development, with the support of UNIFEM East and South-east Asia Regional Office.)

(END/AP/LLC/TBB/010709)

“Thank God for condoms!” Donald Messer of the U.S.-based Centre of Church and Global AIDS declared during one of the many sessions at an AIDS conference for the Asia-Pacific, which ended here Thursday.

Condoms on banners at ICAAP. Credit: Johanna Son/IPS

Conservative religious leaders would frown at Messer’s remarks, but many activists and health advocates here say there are far too few religious leaders getting involved in fighting HIV and AIDS – despite the heavy toll these have taken on people’s lives and well-being.

Messer says, some faith-based leaders and their communities stigmatise men who have sex with men (MSM) and injecting drug users – among whom HIV infection rates have been rising – and thus contribute to the obstacles that make it harder for them to get information, and access to treatment they need.

“Many religious groups and leaders are unwilling to address HIV/AIDS and make it a priority,” explained Messer, who is executive director of the Colorado-based centre. “Their commitment level is quite low particularly when compared to the size of their budget and the amount of work they do.”

Thirty-three million people worldwide are living with HIV/AIDS and more than 15 million children have been orphaned due to the disease, he adds, criticising what he called the apathy of many Christian groups.

“We’ve been talking about HIV/AIDS and the religious groups’ response for three decades now. We’re still talking too much even now,” noted Dominica Abo of Fiji.

Abo believes that the “most powerful contribution” church leaders can make in efforts to curb HIV and AIDS is to use their clout in societies the world over to eradicate stigma and discrimination and address biases that put groups like women at risk.

More than 50 million women in the Asia-Pacific are put at risk by male partners who have unprotected sex with commercial sex workers, share needles, or have sex with other men, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

“At the end of the day, in all cultures, it is the women that are blamed for the spread of HIV/AIDS,” Abo added.

Everyone should look at women and children from a faith-based perspective, points out Reverend Youngsook Charlene Kang of the United Methodist Church in the U.S.

“Women account for nearly half of HIV/AIDS infections worldwide and almost two-thirds of those among young people. Twenty-five years into the global epidemic, there is still no widely available technology that women can both initiate and control to protect themselves from HIV/AIDS,” she argued.

What the world needs, she adds, is more female control in HIV/AIDS prevention through new strategies and developments in technology. These can include the use of microbicides, which are expected to block 40 to 60 percent of the HIV virus from the moment it enters the body, and improved female condoms.

“The best control at the moment is the female condom,” Youngsook said.

Messner says it does not help that more often than not, violence against women is “tolerated by the religious community” because of the status quo and the avoidance of taboo topics. “Some religious leaders are more eager to preserve the purity or correctness of theological perspectives than their task to save human lives,” he remarked.

While women should be able to be more assertive in their relationships with their partners and husbands, Youngsouk adds that the sensitisation of men to reproductive health and rights issues is equally important.

Many conservative Muslim and Christian groups, as well as the Roman Catholic Church, continue to preach against the use of ‘artificial’ reproductive health methods – including condom use – which they believe promote promiscuity.

“[Yet] when used directly and consistently, condoms are humanity’s best protection and weapon against HIV/AIDS,” Messner said.

In the end, he argues, the failure to use protection methods violates a fundamental premise on which all religions are based – the basic protection of life.

“Silence kills, but it can also be broken. Blind idealism is dangerous but it can also inspire as it attracts people to higher ideals,” said Messer.

Added Youngsouk: “We need to call on religious leaders to educate and create new pathways within our churches for parishioners to learn the role that faith communities can play.”

*TerraViva at ICAAP 09 (http://www.ipsterraviva.asia)

“There has been so much confusion going around transgenders. We are not MSMs [men who have sex with men] and don’t lump us under the transvestite [category either] because we have different needs,” declared Kartini Slemeh at the 9th International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP) here.

A transgender, Slemeh heads a transgender support programme in Malaysia that works under the Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP) – an informal alliance of sex workers and organisations active in 40 countries.

Slemeh and other transgenders from the region said their cause was being taken for granted by many due to lack of knowledge and indifference.

A transgender identifies oneself with another gender other than what the person is biologically born into. Transgenders may identify themselves as homosexuals, transvestites or transsexuals – but some consider conventional sexual orientation labels inapplicable or inadequate for them.

“It’s a very complex thing trying to describe what a transgender is because it goes way beyond mere appearances or sexual preference,” Yuni Shara, who heads Kebaya, a non-government organisation based in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, told IPS.

Shara said that societal structures make it very difficult for transgenders to be accepted in society. “For instance, I have a difficult time deciding whether to join male or female worshippers.”

Stigma and discrimination for a transgender starts at an early age, said Luluk Surahman. “The lack of knowledge and information about reproductive health are compounded by confusion about one’s sexuality, resulting in the individual often being ostracised within the community,” said Surahman.

According to Surahman, there are about 4,500 transgenders in Jakarta and some 1,500 of them are under 25 years old. “Often they are undereducated, have no adequate skills to support themselves, which is one of the reasons why they turn to sex work,” Surahman explained.

The lack of support systems and awareness among transgenders has contributed to the rise of HIV/AIDS cases. “Almost 40 percent of transgenders in Jakarta are already infected,” added Surahman.

Zhao Jian’gang of the Yunnan-based Alliance of Chinese Transgenders disclosed that about 200 transgenders engage in sex work in the southwestern province. Like their counterparts in Jakarta, most of them have low educational background and move frequently from place to place.

Misconceptions about their clients and the low use of condoms even with their partners make their behaviour at high risk for HIV/AIDS.

Subject to arbitrary arrests and ridicule even by the media – which sensationalise their cases – transgenders often experience abuse.

“A friend of mine who got breast implants was arrested because of sex work. They cut off her hair at the detention and rehabilitation centre and placed her with male prisoners,” he said.

People Like Us (PLUS) representative Utpal Chakraborty talked about the darker and more dangerous side of being a transgender in India.

“Transgenders live under threat of rape and other forms of abuse. Many join the ‘hijra’, the eunuch community, and undergo illegal, secret and crude castration operations,” said Chakraborty, whose organisation works for the “promotion, protection and advancement” of young men’s health and rights. He said that 30 percent of those who undergo such operations die.

Support groups like Kebaya believe that even if it is a slow process, doors are opening for dialogue not only within the transgender community, but also in the wider population.

“Apart from family meetings, we conduct regular dialogues once a month with the local community and also with religious leaders,” said Shara.

Surahman and fellow advocates have also started getting in touch with religious leaders and explaining to them the facts about transgenders. Although complete acceptance may be a long time in coming, she realises that baby steps are better than nothing.

“We’ve also tried to lobby for the basic rights of the transgender in the parliament. Everything is still in the process and we don’t see any clear result as of yet,” she said. “But we’re not about to stop pursuing this.”

Perhaps one of the biggest hurdles that advocacy groups face right now is how to change the mindset of transgenders themselves.

“We often ask them about their concerns and dreams and oftentimes they would tell us their dreams, such as having a big house, a handsome boyfriend or even to be able to start a salon. No one said anything about wanting to know more HIV/AIDS, for instance,” said Surahman.

Experts say it is important that skills and educational programmes fit the needs of the transgender community and, in the process, elevate their economic status and protect them from human rights violations.

The most important thing, of course, is for them to feel empowered and accepted by society.

“We are really advocating for full inclusion of our own gender identity within the present societal framework,” agreed Zhao.

*TerraViva at ICAAP 09 (http://www.ipsterraviva.asia)

The scant presence of mainstream media organisations at the 9th International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP) was a sad reflection of how the press was overlooking the big story on HIV/AIDS, say some journalists and development analysts at Asia’s largest meeting on the pandemic.

If journalists are attending ICAAP this week, they are here not so much to contribute to discussions around media’s awareness of the pandemic and their role in reporting on its sensitively and in a knowledgeable manner, but as mere reporters, these observers add.

The poor presence of mainstream media is a sign that the Fourth Estate is failing miserably in its role as a good source of information, says Trevor Cullen, head of journalism at Australia’s Edith Cowan University.

“The problem is that very few mainstream journalists are here at the conference. Up to 80 percent of people don’t get their news from international journals or research reports; they get it from the media,” Cowan said at a session on how the media are talking about HIV and AIDS.

The entire ICAAP, which has more than 100 sessions from Aug. 9-13, only has one session on the media – and just an oral abstract one at that. This “is really not good enough,” he rued.

“It is unfortunate that we got a very small abstract session at this international conference of more than 3,000 people, because I see the need for the role of the media to be discussed more openly and debated upon,” Cullen told the less than 30 listeners in the room, a number that dwindled to less than 20 much later.

Cullen, who has been involved in research on HIV/AIDS reporting for the last 12 years, criticised the “lack of imagination, initiative and linkage” of the mainstream media that is “in the business of finding new angles”.

“We’re very blinkered. We’ve ‘narrowcast’ instead of broadcast these issues. In Australia, for instance, you won’t have any story on HIV/AIDS unless it’s absolutely sensational,” he added.

By the mid-1990s, or more than a decade after the earliest HIV cases were reported, HIV/AIDS had become “just another health story”, he pointed out.

Others had similar views about what the lack of interest in following HIV and AIDS closely either at the ICAAP or in general.

But Michael Tan, who is a columnist in the English-language daily ‘Philippine Daily Inquirer’ apart from being chair of the University of the Philippines’ anthropology department, also looked into the lens that media often wear when they report on the pandemic these days.

It used to be that the media training sessions needed to be heavily focused on the use of sensitive language on HIV and AIDS. But media’s challenge now is look deeper into the social and other aspects related to the pandemic, as the disease also evolves.

“We’ve moved from the use of sensitive language. The journalists know how to be politically correct (these days), but the problem is they’re still using the same old moralistic brains,” he said, specifically referring to case of the Philippines.

“It will take more then language to reframe their mindsets on gender and sexuality,” Tan said at a press conference Tuesday.

Rosalia Sciortino, associate professor at Thailand’s Mahidol University, lamented the small number of journalists at the Tuesday press conference after a plenary session around the social inequities that help fuel the spread of HIV.

ICAAP organisers had designed more discussions around themes outside the biomedical aspects in order to have more public awareness of the social contexts that deprive some of the most vulnerable groups of the help they need.

“We wanted to focus on the power dynamics as well,” Sciortino said. Already, she explained, media too often report on HIV as a health issue and put such articles only on the health page, when it is much more than a medical, scientific or health issue.

But going back to the basic journalism rule of putting the ‘5Ws and H’ in stories, Cullen added that media have “omitted the why and the how” when reporting on HIV and AIDS.

Unless the media are engaged in a meaningful way, then the same pattern will keep happening, said Imelda Salajan, media and public awareness consultant of the Jakarta-based advocacy group On Track Media.

“Consistency in promoting the issue should be on top of the agenda. But as it is, communications is always given a very small place in the budgetary plan by donors. It can’t be a one-time programme. The media should think of a long-term strategy and there are creative ways of doing it,” she said.

Syed Qamar Abbas, deputy manager of the AIDS control programme of Pakistan’s Sindh province, suggests the use of creative tools to reach public audiences. “Innovative methods, such as tele-films, are effective in changing attitudes and lifestyles. In our research, we found out that programmes such as films made for television have 30 percent more impact than the traditional ways of presenting news or issues,” he said.

For their part, proponents of community and cable radio report positive results in efforts at the grassroots level to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS.

Nalamdana (‘Are you well?’ in Tamil), is a non-government organisation that runs a popular cable radio programme at a government hospital in the southern Indian state. The show aims to raise awareness about and decrease the stigma of women undergoing anti-retroviral treatment (ART) in the hospital.

“We have noted the positive response of women undergoing ART in a government hospital in Tamil Nadu,” said Nalamdana project director R Jeevanandham.

“We use cable radio to address depression among women and enable them to access special counselling. We also send messages via popular songs and dramas tackling key issues on HIV/AIDS,” he pointed out, adding that counsellors are on hand to discuss the disease on-air.

But tackling HIV and AIDS even in alternative media spaces such as community radio is not always smooth sailing, due to the same cultural and religious factors that constrain public discussion and openness about the pandemic.

“There are still many people especially in rural areas that have little or no knowledge about HIV/AIDS. Community members are still trapped in terms of morality and religion.

Thus, discussion about the issue doesn’t really take off. And then, there are still doubts and fears of breaking cultural traditions and discussing taboo topics,” said Dina Listiorini of the Atma Jaya University of Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

For a long time, the mass media have stuck to portraying HIV and AIDS as the ‘3H’ — Haiti, homosexuals, and heroin junkies, she said, citing previous studies.

But “we have to use all different media to get the message across,” said Cullen. “Use all media, but try to go for quality. For this, you need to train people. We’re just reporting the tip of the iceberg, only 20 percent of the story. We need to realise that HIV/AIDS is a massive story that affects all aspects of our lives.”

*TerraViva at ICAAP 09 (http://www.ipsterraviva.asia)

By Johanna Son and Lynette Lee Corporal
BALI, Aug 10 2009 (IPS)

The failure to reach the neediest, often the most stigmatised, people and the global financial crisis, loom as Asia-Pacific’s biggest challenges in coping with HIV and AIDS at this point, despite the major headway it has made in expanding the number of people with access to treatment.

This was the assessment of a mix of experts Monday at the 9th International AIDS Conference on Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP), the region’s biggest conference on the pandemic that is being attended by more than 4,000 people. Attended by public health experts, researchers, community organisers, advocates and development agencies, ICAAP held its first full day Monday and will run until Aug. 13.

The recognition that the Asia-Pacific has made major strides toward the goal of giving universal access to treatment for whose living with HIV and AIDS has been a common thread through the simultaneous sessions here.

The number of patients getting anti-retroviral therapy (ART) has risen to 565,000 people today. This is a three-fold increase from the figure in 2003, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS).

Given this progress in the last two years, “meeting this (universal access to treatment) is not an aspirational goal,” remarked JVR Prasada Rao, director for UNAIDS Regional Support Team-Asia Pacific.

“The progress shows that universal access is possible, not a utopian deal in this region,” added Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said at a discussion Monday.

In 2006, the world’s governments committed themselves to the cause of achieving universal access in HIV prevention, treatment, care and support by 2010. Countries like Thailand, Cambodia and Laos account for a good part of this progress in access to treatment, because they are able to provide 80 percent of those who need ART the drugs they need.

But while headway in access to treatment may be a reason for optimism, experts also said the Asia-Pacific could do much better in access to prevention, care and support – the other components of the goal toward universal access.

Across the region, prevention and care and support in HIV and AIDS are undercut by stigma and discrimination, lack of legal protection that put groups such as drug users, sex workers and men who have sex with men at more risk — and as well as resource constraints that governments face at a time of recession.

“We need to reach men who have sex with men, intravenous drug users and sex workers and have the right legal environments to achieve universal access for them,” Kazatchkine said.

But this cannot happen if drug use is still subject to the death penalty in many Asian countries, even as sharing of needles is a major mode of HIV transmission, he added. In 2007, Indonesia had the highest figure in Asia of drug users having HIV at 60 percent, followed by Burma at nearly 50 percent. Afghanistan has one million drug users, of which 120,000 are injectors.

Likewise, 12 countries in the region have laws that criminalise on the basis of sexual orientation, same-sex relations and sodomy.

There has been some good news though, such as the decision by the New Delhi High Court to strike down a section of the Indian Penal Code on male to male sex. Taiwan has a new law granting sex workers the same rights as their clients. Nepal recognised constitutional rights of sexual and gender minorities.

“Out-of-school youth, street children, young sex workers, including youth men who have sex with men have different needs. But they have the same rights,” said youth campaign coordinator Liping Mian. She added that her research in 2007 showed that sex workers are getting younger at the age of 15 or 16.

Women, including pregnant ones, and young people also need to be reached better by prevention and treatment efforts in Asia. Fifty million women, comprising 34 percent of all infections in the region, are put at risk by their male partners, UNAIDS says.

But a respected medical professor, David Cooper of the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, University of South Wales, tempered some of the optimism stated here by official development institutions.

He pointed out worrisome gaps, such as the fact that those with lesser financial resources getting less of the benefits of medicine and care that have been extending the life spans of those living with HIV and AIDS by 12 to 20 years.

“We now have all the drugs available but we’re not treating HIV-positive infants and those that belong to middle and lower income brackets,” Cooper said. “We’ve to do better and right now, we’re not doing well with pregnant women and children. The prevention strategy should be increased.”

“We’re nowhere near universal access in this region,” he added.

Discussions on how to improve responses to HIV and AIDS nearly 30 years into the pandemic — and on the eve of achieving the goal of universal access to treatment in HIV and AIDS — are occurring against the backdrop of concerns about how the financial crunch puts additional pressure on developing countries’ already tight resources. The response to AIDS is “in competition with the global financial crisis” and the fact that more countries are being affected by conflict and displacement, Rao added. Still, he said, UNAIDS expects “much larger funding” from the Global Fund that can help more people get access to treatment in Asia.

But those like Samsuridjal Djauzi, an Indonesian doctor who is ICAAP co-chair, says “we should (already) discuss how to mobilise other resources in order to continue our programmes” and reach the universal access goals that countries like Indonesia expect to meet in 2010.

HIV prevalence in Indonesia remains low at 0.2 percent and the death rate from AIDS has decreased from 46 percent in 2006 to 17 percent in 2008 due to anti-retroviral treatment.

“The financial crisis cannot be an excuse to spend less on health. It’s important that we do not lose the gains we made,” Kazatchkine pointed out.

At the formal opening of ICAAP Sunday night, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said that leadership is key to preventing and coping with HIV and AIDS. “The best way to strike a blow against AIDS is through leadership. Without leadership, the fight against AIDS becomes sporadic, reactive, without focus, lacking resources, and will eventually lose steam,” he said.

*IPS Asia-Pacific’s TerraViva at ICAAP 2009 (http://www.ipsterraviva.asia)

Excerpt:

“Please help me find a way to have some money for milk,” pleaded Benjawan Marongthong, mother of two young boys and former worker in a garments factory.

Laid off two years ago and unable to find work at a time when the ranks of the unemployed are swelling as a result of the global economic downturn, Benjawan is almost at the end of her rope.

With her husband the only breadwinner in her family, she has to make the most of the household’s monthly income of 9,000 baht (247 US dollars). “I’d like the government to at least help reduce the social security contribution of 400 baht (11 dollars) we are required to pay every month,” she said. She was referring to the workers’ share of social security.

Speaking at a workshop on the ‘Impact of the Economic Crisis on Women Workers,’ organised by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the Women Workers’ Unity Group (WWUG), here Thursday, Benjawan’s plight is not too different from that of a growing number of Thai workers.

While many had to closely watch their expenses before, they are now finding themselves in dire straits as factories, hit by falling overseas orders in Asia and beyond, are closing, cutting work hours or wages. Women are among the most vulnerable groups in this crisis.

“While it is true that women were able to enter the Thai labour sector better than in the past, their bargaining rights and overall job security, coupled with the burdens of being the family breadwinner, have decreased,” Thai labour minister Paitoon Kaewthong conceded at the meeting.

“The majority of women workers are becoming disproportionately susceptible to job cuts and are more likely to be harder hit by raising unemployment,” added Alice Chang, labour director of Union Network International (UNI) Global Union – Asia and the Pacific Region, a network of trade unions totaling two million workers.

Even in the most optimistic of scenarios, Chang said that the number of unemployed Thai women is expected to increase by 14.4 percent this year.

Historically, Thailand has had much lower unemployment rates than neigbours like the Philippines, for instance, but the problems are no less real in this South-east Asian country.

Thailand’s unemployment rate stood at 1.4 percent in 2008, or about 530,000 people. While this was much lower than the 5.7 percent average of other South-east Asian countries, there are worrisome signs for Thailand. For instance, the National Statistics Office said the poverty rate for 2008 reached 8.9 percent, up from 8.5 in 2007 – the first increase since 2000.

The National Economic and Social Development Board, the state planning agency, reported that the country’s unemployment rate is expected to rise to 2.5 percent in 2009. This means that more than 900,000 out of a national labour force of 37.6 million workers could be jobless this year. In 1998, during Thailand’s worst economic crisis, the unemployment rate hit 4.4 percent.

The Thai government has been trying to create economic stimulus packages to help stem the unemployment tide, including a recent decision to give employees who earn less than 15,000 baht (411.78 dollars) a month, a one-time assistance package of 2,000 baht (55 dollars).

Chang noted, however, that “none of these plans have any specific measures for women workers”.

A report released Mar. 5 by the International Labour Organisation echoes the same concerns for women workers during hard times. The unemployment rate in 2008 for women workers in South-east Asia was six percent, up from 5.8 percent in 2007.

In South Asia, the unemployment rates stayed at six percent in both years. For this year, the report ‘Global Employment Trends for Women 2009′ says female unemployment rates in South-east Asia and the Pacific could range from 6.5 to 6.8 percent (eight million women) and from six to 6.8 percent (11 to 13 million people) in South Asia.

Informal workers, who include many women, are also feeling the pinch because they have fewer social safety nets than those in the formal sector. According to the Bangkok-based United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, 65 percent of working women in the region are in the informal sector, which means they work as contractual or casual workers and are not entitled to full workers’ benefits.

In a set of proposals presented to the workshop participants, the 46 organisations under the Women Workers’ Unity Group asked the government to set up support funds for laid-off workers, promote job-training skills for workers in small and medium enterprises, provide employment and reduce social security contributions.

Minister Paitoon maintained that the Thai government is closely monitoring the number of workers being let go and taking some measures to help ease the unemployed workers’ burden.

On Jan. 7, the ministry of labour announced the disbursement of 10 billion baht (277 million dollars) to help ease unemployment woes. Paitoon was quoted in newspaper reports as saying that the budget would be spent on “professional training activities for about 500,000 jobless employees” who would also be given an allowance of about 200 baht (five dollars) per day.

“Already, five million workers have indicated interest about this grant,” he said.

But Chang has reservations about workers demanding that ‘’government give us more money”. “Where will this money come from? If income drops and tax from workers drop, how is the government going to get money? What you want is not to get money, but get employed back.”

According to the minister, there are about 100,000 job vacancies at present and the labour ministry is organising another job fair on Mar. 20 and 21 in the Thai capital.

“If there aren’t enough job vacancies, then we might propose that we reduce the number of jobs for migrant workers and give these posts to Thais. Of course, we will give the migrant workers assistance and compensation as well,” he added.

Chang sees the minister’s proposal as problematic. “The minister’s proposal to kick out migrant workers and give the jobs to Thais will not work. You have to remember that there are many Thai migrant workers in other countries as well. If you start kicking migrant workers out, then other countries might also start kicking out Thai workers. Employment rights for foreign workers must be protected as well,” said Chang, a specialist on women’s issues.

For Voravidh Charoenloet of Chiang Mai University, the problem should be addressed with long-term solutions, instead of measures like the 55-dollar assistance. “The 2007 economic crisis won’t end within two years because this is a global issue we’re facing here,” he said.

It is also not enough telling the unemployed to go back to the countryside and find work there. To address the problem, he said, one must look at deeper issues of income gaps and land reform.

Echoing the professor’s sentiments, parliamentarian and human rights activist Rachdaporn Kaewsanit said that Thailand must adopt measures that will support the agricultural industry “if you talk about workers going back to their hometowns for good”.

“We need to redefine poverty – is it the lack of money or the lack of food? We need to have a change in attitude,” she explained.

(*This story was written for the Asia Media Forum coordinated by IPS-Asia Pacific)