The media, I think in their highest function, are mediators. They’re intermediaries between government and the society, between, you know, one sector of the society and another. They allow communication. They allow the collective to understand itself. At a time when the media so often distort our images of ourselves and one another, how can we repair its mirrors to gain a clearer sense of who we are and what we want from our society and our lives? Radio if it’s used in a positive sense, it can contribute to peace, to conflict reduction, to reconciliation. And with Studio Ijambo here in Burundi for the last nine years, the results show that we’re on the right track. Today on A World of Possibilities, media as mediator, transforming conflict into communication. The possibilities are, really are endless. We don’t know exactly where this is taking us, but this is definitely some sort of transition. And I think that in time, people will have to look at this particular moment and say, you know, this is what really was the turning point, that something new began here that took us in a new direction. You know, the kind of programs we make are really directed at trying to find or trying to help people understand or reach the common ground between them. We try to break down the stereotypes and try to help people see that the other really is like them. If it bleeds, it leads, so says the nightly news editor. He assumes, of course, that audiences are always more attracted to violence than to its resolution, and that the drama of conflict lies more in the strife than in the stretch to reconcile. But is that really so? Are we reaching the point where the media’s fascination with the inhumanity of man-to-man is becoming, dare I say it, a little boring? Is it radio, trash TV, the verbal brawling that passes for political debate? Are they all growing a little stale and maybe more than a little predictable? Are we really as vile and violent as we’re made to appear in the media mirror? Where does the real drama lie today? In the harm we can do to one another? Or in the healing? In revenge? Or in reconciliation? In our isolation and suspicion of one another? Or in our capacity, despite all odds, to connect? Today on A World of Possibilities, we’ll turn the media’s mirror not on the destructiveness of conflict, but on its potentially creative energy. Trapped in every conflict, like the pent-up potential of a nuclear chain reaction, is the possibility of deep connection. And the very media that spread distrust like a killer virus among us can be used to combat that virus, not by denying the reality of conflict, but by using its energy to transform ourselves and our relationships with others. We’ll be hearing from three people in various parts of the world who are using the mass media as a medium to heal the wounds of war and civil strife, and from a fourth who explores the possibility that the emerging medium of internet blogging might one day help transform the means by which we communicate with one another. So join us for an exploration of the media as mediator rather than manipulator. My name is Mark Sommer. I’ll be your guide. Welcome to A World of Possibilities. In the pioneering effort to develop the mediating potential of the mass media, experimenters come from both professions. William Ury is a renowned international mediator who’s worked with warring parties in conflicts from the Middle East and Chechnya to Indonesia and South Africa. Most recently, he’s worked to prevent civil war in volatile Venezuela between President Hugo Chavez and his powerful opponents in the media. By encouraging the development of a citizen-based third-side movement, he sees the value of negotiating from a both-and rather than an either-or perspective. He directs the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School. Bill speaks with us from a studio in Boulder, Colorado. Is there some other way to understand media than the way we’ve understood them up to now that’s contained in this strange coincidence between media and mediate? Yeah, I do think so. Because I think, you know, when you meet with the media and you say, you can be a mediator, they say, no, no, we’re not going to get involved in politics. Our job is just to report. At the same time, in the broader sense of the term, the media, I think in their highest function, are mediators. They’re intermediaries between government and the society, between one sector of the society and another. They allow communication. They allow the collective to understand itself and to understand what’s going on and to carry on a constructive conversation about how to move forward. And to me, the media can play in its highest role, an enormously important role in conflict. I saw it in Venezuela. I mean, one of the biggest problems in Venezuela, people pointed out to me again and again, is the media are so polarized and they kind of form the consciousness of the society. People are glued to these TV screens or to their radios or reading newspapers. And the language was so charged and polarized and one-sided that it was, the image in the media was creating or was exacerbating the deep polarization in the society and was exacerbating it to the point that I’ve seen conflicts where the media was used, I’m not saying the media did this, but the media was used to foment mass violence. A good example was Yugoslavia. Another example was Rwanda, where, you know, TV and radio were used to really create the conditions under which, you know, massive amounts of violence and human rights violations took place. And the media can play just as constructive a role and can be an instrument for peace. And so that’s, to me, the great challenge. Let’s go back to Venezuela and the particular circumstances that you went into. When you asked people from the media to work together in this way, from opposite sides and not as antagonists, but to try to do some bridging, how did they respond? Well, I think there were some that were already really interested in this and were already starting to work together. So there was a group of them that responded extremely well. And we started to, when I came back on further trips, to have workshops for journalists from both sides about how to cover the news in a way that actually could help Venezuelan society deal with its differences in a peaceable way. And one of the things that’s interesting is, you know, when you talk to journalists, I mean, they were very interested in this, you know, how do you cover negotiations, for example? Because I think for a lot of journalists, negotiation or a peace process seems something very elusive, something very intangible, and quite frankly, boring. Whereas war and conflict is something exciting. And so naturally, if you’re trying to attract readers or listeners or viewers, you know, you’ll go to what’s exciting. And in fact, the media sometimes play that role of actually going to one side of a conflict and saying, what do you think of the other? And they’ll say, they’ll give you an earful and they’ll say, did you go to the other person? Did you hear what that person said about you? And then, you know, they actually can sometimes play that role of actually polarizing or instigating conflict in a somewhat irresponsible fashion. And what the workshop was about was how to convey the real drama of what happens in negotiation and in peacemaking and in conflict transformation, that there’s a real drama that you can see when you play the role as I do of a third party, a human drama with rich, deep emotions and shifts and so on. Because what the media were doing in this particular case, there was something called the Mesa de Negociación, which was a table where government and opposition were meeting. And every day there’d be a press conference and there was nothing to report. So it was a little bit like putting a camera at the end of a race, just waiting for people to pass by. And so, you know, they’re seeing only the end of the process. So it’s like you’re seeing nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then whiz, everything goes by. Instead of covering the race from the start and really showing people what’s the drama, what’s the obstacle, all the obstacles to reaching agreement, and how people start to begin to overcome those obstacles, which is where the dramatic potential of a negotiation lies. Are there ways in which media can help us communicate and problem-solve in the near term so that we can actually deal with these urgent priorities in, say, the next 50 to 100 years? The answer, I think, is yes. I think the media would be critical. The media are really, in many ways, the eyes and ears of the emerging nascent global community. And in their highest sense, in their best sense, they serve as a kind of third side. They play a third side role. They play the role of the witness, paying attention to what’s going on in the world, paying attention to a genocide that’s taking place in Sudan right now, for example, calling people’s attention. It’s through the media that the various resources of humanity get mobilized to deal with these kinds of situations. So I do think the media has an enormously important role, and I would say it may not always just be the mass media, but include in the media the Internet. There’s enormous potential for humanity to learn, to speed up the way in which it learns to deal with its differences. So I think the media has enormous potential to contribute to the peace of the world. What will it take to shift us to the notion that there could be elements in what each of us is saying and believes that have some validity, and that we’re not going to be able to reach any kind of accommodation or any deep truth without shifting to more of a both and kind of paradigm? I think that’s the key. And you know, you see some experiments, we’ve seen some experiments in the media using the media for these kinds of purposes. You know, you’ve seen, for example, Nightline pioneer teleconferences between Israelis and Palestinians, or between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or between different groups, you know, using the media to actually allow people to actually hear the other side and begin to understand the other side. You have organizations like Search for Common Ground, which pioneers radio soap operas in different parts of the world, including Rwanda and Burundi, where the soap operas feature both sides of a conflict, like the Hutus and the Tutsis, and showing the way in which they work out their differences. So to go from an either-or mentality, either I’m right or you are, to both-and, that you have a point, you have part of the truth, I have part of the truth, and how do we work together to create something that’s better than either of us could do alone? That to me is the noblest role of the media, is to really encourage that kind of conversation. We’re a long ways away from there, but I think we’re in the beginning of an era of experimentation. How do you do it in ways that have all the juice of the imperfection of human beings? Because, I mean, I think a lot of people, they don’t want to, they don’t want a sort of gauzy good intention here. They want this thing to have some gritty reality to it. Have we, in many of our experiments, almost sought to dampen the conflict mistakenly? I think so. I think a lot of us have a slight aversion to conflict, and I think it’s important to bring out the drama of conflict. There’s a beauty in conflict, and that tension is a creative tension. There’s potential. I mean, every great human transformation takes place through conflict, through those kind of creative tensions. And I think the challenge is to portray that in the media, not as, you know, as you put it, you know, just kind of goody-goody, but it’s actually to show people enmeshed in conflicts that we can identify with, where the emotions are high, the despair is intense, there seems to be no way out. And then to show people that, okay, you know, there are these challenges. I mean, the first challenge may be the people challenge, may be the human challenge, that both sides are so reactive, so deeply enmeshed in fear and anger that there seems to be no way out except fisticuffs. And then they have to face, once they face the people barrier, they have to face the problem barrier, which is that, you know, one side wants one thing, the other side wants something very different. How could there possibly be any solution to that? And then begin to look for the ways in which human creativity, human ingenuity, shows ways that actually both sides could be able to benefit. And then finally, there’s the third barrier, which is the barrier of persuasion. How do you actually go from a good idea to an agreement, and an agreement that’s actually implemented that actually makes for a resolution and a better relationship among the parties? And if we could sort of show that drama, almost like going over hurdles, of how people navigate or go down a river, raft a river, where there’s a lot of obstacles in the way, I mean, that would be inspiring to people, and you’d actually show people how difficult the conflict is. You wouldn’t be underplaying it, you wouldn’t be covering it over, you’d be right in there, and yet showing how ordinary human beings can actually find their way through extremely difficult, seemingly impossible, intractable conflicts. And we have examples. I mean, you have South Africa. I mean, who would have imagined, when I first went to South Africa, everyone thought that place was going to go on at war for 30 years, 40 years, as long as anyone could see. And there was a transformation there, seeing the same thing in Northern Ireland. And you see the same things in schools, or in families, where there’s these unexpected breakthroughs, unexpected reconciliations, and that’s, there’s real drama, there’s real power in that. After a short break, we’ll return with Linus Lackmulder, director of Search for Common Ground Studio Ijambo, in the African nation of Burundi. You are listening to A World of Possibilities, a production of the Mainstream Media Project. For more information about this and other programs, and to access the full interviews with some of our guests, please visit our website at aworldofpossibilities.com. Now to journalist Linus Lackmulder. Lina directs the international non-profit organization Search for Common Ground’s Studio Ijambo in Burundi. Like its neighboring nation, Rwanda, site of a notorious campaign of genocide a decade ago, Burundi has had its tragic tensions between rival Hutus and Tutsis. Despite social strife and formidable technical hurdles, Lina has helped make national and community radio in Burundi into a catalyst for conflict resolution, and in the process has produced prototypes for a new kind of mediating media that could one day go global. She speaks with us from a state-of-the-art radio studio in the capital. Radios in general here are not very expensive. They’re considered a very, very valuable possession. In an average poor family in Africa, amongst the prized possessions would be a bicycle and a radio. We have heard in recent years about radio being used for both positive and negative purposes in various conflict situations in parts of Africa. What was its role in Rwanda in inciting the slaughter and genocide that occurred there? The role in Rwanda was very unfortunate. There was a radio called Radio Myokolin, which means Radio Thousands of Hills, and it wasn’t a state radio. It was actually a private radio, which promoted ethnic hatred in a very direct way. When the genocide was underway, it incited people to commit massacres, even going to the point of giving information about where groups of Tutsis were and where there still needed to be extermination taking place. So it played a very, very direct role. One has to say that it was accompanied by a political strategy and a political plan of genocide. It wasn’t only the radio station that contributed to the genocide, but it’s a clear example of how it was used, it was not controlled. It absolutely contributed to the ethnic hatred and to the coordination of the killings during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. So it’s been used to incite ethnic hatred, as in Rwanda. Has it also been used equally effectively to promote reconciliation? I would say yes. I mean, I think that’s a constant struggle that we’re trying to deal with. The experience in Burundi of Studio Ijambo, which was created in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda, is based on that belief that radio, because of its enormous power and influence, can play a role. How one does that is a combination of various different strategies, which include giving accurate information, giving information that gives voice to all sides, and also promoting positive values and positive information to give people a sense of what they can aspire to and to give people a more balanced view of what is actually going on in their country, not only in the negative sense. So it’s that belief that a radio, if it’s used in a positive sense, can contribute to peace, to conflict reduction, to reconciliation. And with Studio Ijambo here in Burundi for the last nine years, the results show that we’re on the right track. There’s a common assumption that the only kind of media that really appeals to a broad public is media that emphasizes conflict, violence, various forms of anger. In radio, it’s sometimes known as rage radio. Does reconciliation radio appeal as broadly as rage radio in Africa? In some ways, journalists all over the world are obliged to give coverage to negative events, which involve killings and violence and massacres, etc. Where I think our approach differs is that we see media as much larger than that. We have, for example, extremely popular radio dramas, soap operas, which are the most popular programs listened to in the countries where we work. And through those radio dramas, we’re able to deal with conflict, to show those conflicts, and to show ways in which people can deal with them, and to promote positive models of tolerance and peaceful cohabitation. So radio is really far beyond the news headlines. That’s the reality, and it’s based on that reality that we work. I’ve noticed in the work that we do here in producing this program, that the programs that receive the most mail and response are those that take a large issue and take it down to an individual life. A program that we started four and a half years ago is called Inhingi Ubunhu, which means Pillars of Humanity, or Heroes. And every single week for the last four and a half years, we go and find the story of someone who has risked their life during the various conflicts that have happened in Burundi to save the life of someone of the other ethnic group. They took their neighbors, they hid them in their houses, they dug holes in their backyard and hid them there for weeks on end. They transported them on their bicycles over the border to safety. The pressure by the society was so great on people to contribute and participate in this violence that when we show the role of individuals, their ability to say no and to stand up for humanity, it has an incredible impact. And just a last word on that. In April this year, Studio Ajambo and Search for Common Ground organized a Heroes Summit, and for three days we invited 200 of these people to celebrate the spirit of humanity that each of them demonstrated, and to imagine a vision for the future based on their own life experiences. So we always need to break everything down to the individual, and that’s where we’ll have more of an impact. One of the great challenges to those who would try to transform media into something that draws people together and connects them with one another rather than divides them in various ways is creating a dramatic tension. Now, you’ve said that by creating radio drama and by finding these personal stories, you can do that. Is it showing results? You said the radio dramas are some of the most popular. When you do the stories, when you air the stories of these heroes, does that end up being popular on all sides of the ethnic divides? The reactions that we had from this Heroes Summit were absolutely extraordinary. The summit received worldwide coverage, and we had Holocaust victims who had heard about this who said, exactly, that’s why I’m alive. It’s people like that that we need to promote in this world. We’ve done some evaluations of our programs in Burundi and in Congo. For example, around the Heroes Program, we asked people who’ve listened to that, does that make you think differently about people of the other ethnic group? And more than 50 percent of people said yes, which is, in a way, a measure of success, because as I explained earlier, the country became completely Balkanized, and people actually had very little contact with people of the other ethnic group, and assumed that everyone of the other ethnic group was responsible for the violence in one way or another. When you’re doing this kind of reconciliation radio, are you engaged in something that’s much longer term by necessity than something that is designed to polarize and marshal forces on one side? Are the impacts inevitably longer term but deeper? I would say so. I think in Burundi, and a number of people would testify to this, that Studio Ijambo was the first to begin to bring in new voices to the airwaves. Following on that, there’s been a rise of independent radio stations, and we now have almost 10 radio stations in Burundi, including some very, very powerful independent radio stations. What it means is that people feel as though their voice counts. People feel as though if they have a problem, they go and contact a journalist from the radio station, and that can help them to try and resolve their problem. It also has an incredible role on holding leaders accountable. In the era of one national radio station owned by the government, obviously the leaders of the government had almost a monopoly on the airwaves, and now the people have a voice, and that translates into a real societal transformation in terms of people saying, we can talk about this, things that we thought were taboo we can say. We can ask questions of our leaders without feeling fear, because the journalists are enabling us to open up that space of dialogue, so I think it has many, many long-term impacts. Have you actually used Studio Ijambo and radio in Burundi as a kind of town meeting, as it were, as a kind of place where all parts of the society can actually convene and do some problem-solving? Absolutely. We collaborate with a radio station that actually grew out of Studio Ijambo called Radio Isanganiro, and that radio station regularly does a radio forum. They’ll be on air from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Recently, we did one of those about the current political standoff, which we are living through today in Burundi, where there is a huge conflict around how will power be shared, how will we move on out of this current transitional period into an elected government where Hutus and Tutsis will both feel protected and will feel included. And we brought that debate right to the population through this kind of radio national debate. You probably haven’t been back much in the United States in the last recent years, but it’s rare indeed for a public official to set him or herself down and expose themselves to a broad public calling in. That’s a level of democracy and access that withered away in the United States some time ago. I’ve made short visits to the United States, and I’ve been amazed at how much the media has become a tool of extremism and of hardening positions and of reducing debate. And I feel as though the media, as it’s fallen into the hands of private ownership and private conglomerates, is playing a role of accentuating the differences and giving much and much less voice to the people of what we would call the civil society or the ordinary people. So I feel the media in the United States is actually moving in the opposite direction. I wonder whether the kind of work that you’re doing, for example, this work you’re doing with Heroes, who saved people of opposing ethnic groups, this is a universal story. And my sense of it is that media can be like a tribal drum, and it can be infectious. When you start with stories like that, they can communicate themselves and be a catalyst for many more stories of that kind coming out of other cultures. It all comes down to, as journalists, what are the questions that we ask? You know, if we’re going to give excessive airtime to people who are promoting negative stereotypes of the other, we need to also interrogate ourselves as media professionals. I think even in the war against terrorism, that there is an incredible role for the media to do in-depth, constant coverage of who are these people that we call terrorists? Why do we accept so readily this terminology without interrogating it and finding out who are these people? How can we actually enable humans to understand each other? The essence of the Heroes program is to say, you thought all Tutsis were killers. Well, let’s hear about one who wasn’t. And if we can begin to do that about ordinary Afghans, then hear their personal stories. I think it will help people to have a much better understanding of the dynamics of the world and to be much more critical of the people that they call their leaders. Media mediator Lina Slachmolder speaking with us from the African nation of Burundi. I’m Mark Summer, and this is A World of Possibilities, distributed by the WFMT radio network. This is A World of Possibilities, a production of the Mainstream Media Project. If you wish to contact us, please direct emails to comments at aworldofpossibilities.com. This program is distributed by the WFMT radio network. I’m Mark Summer, and this is A World of Possibilities. This program, Media as Mediator, is underwritten by the Arsenault Family Foundation. Coming up, Barbara O’Brien, who’s tracking the phenomenon of blogging on the internet as a potential vehicle for humanitarian bridge building. But first, we turn to Francis Rolt, director of Search for Common Ground’s conflict-resolving media projects worldwide. A veteran international journalist, Francis Rolt brings a lifetime of experience in media to bear on the challenge of social conflict, primarily through the use of radio, the most widely accessible source of information and communication worldwide. He speaks with us from his office in Brussels. You have worked specifically in recent years with an organization called Search for Common Ground on using media as a kind of mediator of conflicts to reduce tensions between ethnic groups and political factions. Tell us about the kinds of environments in which you’ve worked and how you’ve sought to be effective in very polarized situations. Well, I worked as director of Studio Ajambo in Burundi for nearly three years. I was leaving Burundi nearly four years ago now. I’ve been based in Brussels, but I’ve been traveling to other places where we were running workshops and trainings for journalists and for writers of radio soap operas, which we do quite a lot of. The kind of programs we make are really directed at trying to find or trying to help people understand or reach the common ground between them. We try to break down the stereotypes and try to help people see that the other really is like them and that most people in almost any conflict I’ve ever been in actually want peace. They want security for their children. They want to be able to send their children to school. They just want peace. You know, in American media, the sort of shouting matches that pass for debate in television and radio, many people are now saying that those have a certain flatness to them, despite all the screaming, that they tend to turn into ugly white noise. The question is, can we engage conflict without smoothing it over in false ways, allow it to happen, but at the same time include in it this kind of facilitation that enables it to be transformed so that there’s creative energy coming out of it instead of destructive energy? Have you actually done radio that documents that transformation as it occurs? Over, you know, a long period of time in some of the production studios that we have in, for instance, in Burundi or in Sierra Leone, in Liberia, yes, we have. I think not just in our news and current affairs and magazine programs and roundtables, but even in the soap operas, which are pretty firmly based in the reality of people’s day to day lives. Even in the kids’ programs that we do, which are made by kids for kids, there’s a program called Golden Kids News in Sierra Leone, in which the children, these are between eight and 15 years old, go out and interview people. They’ve interviewed the president even at the time in Sierra Leone, and they do document changes in people’s ideas that, and to some extent, I think they even push change, and I think that’s very important as well. That’s totally intriguing, eight to 14 year old kids interviewing a president of a country and others, and actually, do you think it’s because they’re kids that they can ask those sorts of questions that catch these people by surprise or that in some way they affect them and they have to be more honest in response? Yeah, I’m not sure that they’re more honest, but kids ask very guileless questions, which are very often very smart questions as well, and important people are sometimes agreed to be interviewed by the children because they think, well, this is going to be a very safe interview, there’s no problem here, and then they find themselves put in a situation where they’re faced with a kind of innocence, but children who’ve grown up in conflict are often not that innocent, and they will ask questions about peace, they will ask questions about what the president or what the politician is doing in very concrete terms to help bring peace, and they say, we want peace, we want to be able to go to school, we don’t want all this fighting and killing around us the whole time, so what are you doing? And that’s a pretty tough question to answer for many people. What about the soap operas? Now, do you create soap operas that are not just this sort of storm and drong of adultery or one or another mistaken relationship, but that actually demonstrate the resolution of a conflict? I think we try to stay away from that so much, that again, you know, it’s not so much a matter of trying to show people the way, but more a matter of trying to have an impact perhaps on some aspects of conflict or some things which drive conflict, such as stereotyping of the other, and we do try in many of our soap operas to break down stereotypes and to show that people from the other side or the perceived enemy is actually very much the same as you or me. Do you quite deliberately avoid moralizing and preaching? Well, we try to, and sometimes it does creep in, I must admit, and yeah, it’s hard to avoid sometimes. It gets in there not because we want it, but writers sometimes take on a kind of moralizing aspect or moralizing idea, moralizing view of things, and if we’re not very watchful, then yes, it can happen, but certainly we try to avoid it, yeah. And you try to avoid it because you think ultimately it’s counterproductive? Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it’s, you can’t tell people what to think. They have to start thinking those things for themselves, perhaps because of the way the story unfolds, because of the way characters interact. No one likes being told what to think, and it’s a kind of instant switch off. The reason I raise the question is because I’m really wondering whether we’re really talking about trying to do something rather different in media from the way it is so often used as a means of controlling minds and manipulating images. Are you actually talking about a process that’s more like opening up possibilities for people rather than funneling them in a particular direction? Well, I think conflict often results from people having their choices shut down one by one and feeling themselves to be in a situation or being led into that situation where they don’t have choices. I think that we’re in the business of trying to help open up those choices again and open up people’s minds again away from very fixed and rigid views of society, of culture, whether it’s their own culture or someone else’s, of history, because if you have a very rigid view of those things, then you can be easily led into conflict, I think. That’s what politicians and other leaders in conflict do. They develop a discourse which is very powerful and very strong, which speaks at a very basic level to people’s desire to make things simple. Things aren’t simple, actually, ever in any place. But everyone wants to believe that we’re right and those other people are wrong. And that’s all there is to it. It’s black and white. And I think it’s very important, yeah, to try and reestablish some of the sort of graininess between the black and the white. Well, you know, as you look at the infrastructure of radio around the world, how do you think it could be linked up in ways so that it’s a different kind of model, not broadcasting from the few to the many, you know, sort of a monolithic message, but many to many so that the compelling voices can be heard in a way that enriches everyone and breaks down stereotypes? One of the most fascinating things that we did in Burundi when I was there was to have talk shows in which we would send two or three journalists out to remote villages with a mobile phone. And we’d get the journalist to gather a group of people, they’d have the radio on so that they could hear where the discussion was going, and then they could contribute to the discussion. And I thought it was wonderful, you know, just to be showing that people who are usually completely ignored, not included in any way in any kind of public discussion of events or of things that should happen in their country, are given value when you do that. By allowing them to speak, you’re increasing their sense of themselves and the sense of their own worth and power. This is a step beyond the sort of man-on-the-street interviews where you just take snippets from people for 15 seconds, you know, in response. You’re saying that in real time, they’re actually participating in that conversation. Yeah. Although, I think probably the early Vox Pops were, in essence, doing that. I mean, you think about what early radio was like, even in the 50s, you know, it was very top-down. It was, we stand here or in front of the microphone and we tell you the truth. We are the BBC, for instance. And I think Vox Pops was an attempt to get away from that abyss and try and include voices of people who weren’t normally heard. Because in the 50s, even, I think, ordinary people weren’t considered very much in those terms. Who would want to hear them? And that was certainly some of the reaction I got in Burundi when I suggested that, even from some of the studio journalists. But why should we do it? Who wants to hear what some peasant living in, you know, rural Burundi has got to say? It’s a very common reaction, I think. And what, were you surprised by the kinds of things they said? I think, yes. I think sometimes it was quite surprising. What happened was, it helped me understand, actually, that people do want peace and they don’t want war and they do understand, they know quite well that, you know, they used to live in peace with their neighbors and they understand pretty much that they’ve been led up the garden path by politicians. To a great extent, especially at a time when people feel largely anonymous in mass society, the media often end up being the mirror by which we see who we are. Are the media as we see them today representing us as we really are? Particularly in the West, you know, Europe and North America, I think, the media is so competitive and so commercial and increasingly owned by fewer and fewer corporations or individuals that the mirror it presents is a very, very small mirror, perhaps, which reflects only that bit which the corporation wishes us to see for one reason or another. I mean, I’m not really suggesting it’s a conspiracy, but corporations have an objective, which is to make money. And sometimes making money and mediating information are not easily compatible. Francis Rolt. In a moment, blogger Barbara O’Brien. This is A World of Possibilities. Copies of this program are available on CD or tape and can be requested by email at comments at aworldofpossibilities.com. Not long ago, the word blogger wasn’t even in the dictionary, let alone in our daily vocabulary. Now we can begin to see how these self-appointed online commentators can influence even the largest media outlets, for good or ill. Barbara O’Brien tracks the sudden emergence of the blogging phenomenon in a newly published book Blogging America, Political Discourse in a Digital Nation. She explores whether blogging might someday transcend its current preoccupation with personal opinions and provide a forum for genuine problem-solving conversations. She speaks with us from her home in New York City. Define for us what blogging is. I must admit that even though I’ve been in media and I use the internet all the time, that it wasn’t until several months ago that a staff member told me that he went to blogs all the time. And I said, well, what is a blog? There are different kinds of blogs, first of all. It’s short for web log. And it started out really in the late 90s as technological people writing about the newest things happening in technology and talking about it on the web. And around 1999 or so, it became much easier for people to start their own. You didn’t have to know programming code. And so people just began online diaries, talking about their families, talking about their new puppies, just all sorts of things. And also about that time, people started blogs that focused on political opinion. So what I’m focusing on are the politics blogs, which are different from just journaling because we really are in there daily looking at news stories and updating people as to what’s going on in the political world. And bloggers and people who spend a lot of time on the web tend to be opinion leaders. And so it’s going to continue to be an influence in politics. And so the next election in 2008, I think you’re really going to hear about the blogs and the bloggers and what’s going on. And the political candidates and the campaign managers are going to have to pay attention to it. Why do you think they’ll need to pay attention to it when it’s a number of fairly narrow conversations narrow in the sense that it’s a relatively few people, mostly of like mind, who are speaking and listening to one another? Well, I’m not entirely sure that that’s the case. If you take just a handful of blogs, five or six of the top blogs, these people are getting half a million readers a day, first of all. And second, it is a vast online conversation. Each blog is not an island. Bloggers link to other bloggers. Someone writes an essay on his blog, and later in the day, there’ll be six other bloggers who picked up on that essay and are writing commentaries on that essay. And there is a certain amount of contact going on between left and right. We do read each other’s stuff, even if we don’t agree with it. So it’s really a huge conversation that’s going on, and the blogs tend to be the facilitators. You know, I recently interviewed a pollster about the divisions in American society at this point. She began the conversation by saying, this is the most partisan moment I’ve ever encountered in American history. And I wonder if there are ways that this blogging conversation, some part of the blogging world could begin to be a space in which there is a convergence. Well it could be. It very well could be. I have to inject quickly when everybody says, oh, this is the most partisan time in American history. No. 1860 to 1865 was a little worse. What’s happening right now is you’ve got the mass media is all being used by various political factions to keep us away from each other. It’s part of the marketing of politics that you’ve got the people who have brand Republican and the people who are running brand Democrat want you to not buy their product and buy this other guy’s product. And so this is one of the reasons why we can’t get together is that media is being used in such a way as to be divisive and to make us loyal to this brand and not that brand. Now I can understand why politicians would want to do that because that mobilizes their bases, brings in more money, you know, the animus creates a certain kind of dynamic. Why would the media want to divide us? Well part of it is, and this is particularly true with television, is that it’s entertainment, you see. For the most part political discourse on television is to real debate what the World Wrestling Federation is to athletics. It’s not real, you see. It is staged, it is contrived. You’ve got the same talking heads showing up in a lot of different sources. And it’s entertainment, you see. From Washington, the McLaughlin Group, the American original. For over two decades, the sharpest minds, best sources, hardest talk. And people take their roles and they duke it out with each other and you cheer for your team. And you’re not learning anything, of course. That’s the whole problem with it. You can’t actually learn something from this because nobody gets a chance to get in more than two sentences before they’re being interrupted and yelled at. What mechanically or physically does it disallow to do a lot of travel? Fundraising. Oh, John, are you kidding? He can do it. He can travel away. Kerry can travel. Oh, you’re crazy, John. Kerry can travel the entire United States. He can travel the entire United States. He’s got Air Force One. No, he can’t go out every day the way Kerry can. He goes out. The whole world covers the entire United States. I understand that. Are you kidding? I understand that. Meanwhile, you’re going to go retail. He’s working subtext. You don’t go retail. You don’t go retail now. You know, you’re going to carry off on the wrong foot. Okay, the voice of experience. Right. Lately, it seems that whenever someone has an opinion that takes more than ten words to express, the new buzzword is that it’s a buzzword. It’s a buzzword. It’s a buzzword. It’s a buzzword. It’s a buzzword. It’s a buzzword. It’s a buzzword. ten words to express, the new buzzword is that, oh, that’s too much nuance. You know? Oh, my goodness. He can’t express himself clearly. He’s not a plain talker because he has to take, you know, all these big words to express himself. Well, you know, think about the Lincoln-Douglas debates. You know, those guys would stand there and talk without interruption for an hour, hour and a half to express their views. And now somebody can’t even get out a sentence or two sentences to express a point of view. This is really serious. What if you established a blog that, for example, created conversation, a multilayered or multilog between Americans and Iraqis or Americans and Muslims? It wouldn’t be difficult at all. Technically, it could be easily done. I think what I’m suggesting is that instead of having these essentially armed camps, verbally armed camps, that we create a conversation commons where it used to be the town meeting, but this would be, you know, more like, you know, town meetings that are bridges, essentially. Well, yeah, I think that’s what we’re evolving toward already. The newest thing lately the past year has been group blogs. In other words, instead of just one person blogging to an audience, there’ll be a whole consortium of people who will be posting on the same blog and expressing opinions. And I think we’re moving in that direction already, that people of some sort of commonality, whether it be people of the Middle East and the West who want to find common ground, start blogging together. And that could be easily done. I mean, we’re biological creatures, right? We are messy and we’re oozy and we’re liquid and we’re very organic. And so anything that is an expression of us is going to turn out that way, even if cold technology is being used to transmit it. It’s still a big soup is what it amounts to. And the possibilities really are endless. We don’t know exactly where this is taking us. But this is definitely some sort of transition. And I think that in time people will have to look at this particular moment and say, you know, this really was a turning point. That something new began here that took us in a new direction. If the media is our mass mirror, how can we polish it so that it more truly reflects our healing as well as our harming tendencies? If, as many of us suspect, there’s a pent-up appetite for connecting with one another and for seeing those connections reflected in our media, then how can we persuade those with their hands on the channels to get with the program? Maybe we should call it true grit, since the real heroes and heroines these days are not those with the guns, but those with the grit to walk through the walls between us. I’m Mark Summer, and this has been A World of Possibilities. Thanks for listening.