In Africa, “journalists as a part of civil society have fallen off the radar,” according to Heather Gilberds, a Canadian media developer who works in Africa. Radio is still the most popular medium in sub-Saharan communities, she says. Africans don’t listen to radio on radio sets, they listen asynchronously, through IVRs—systems for recording telephone content. This is important because listeners hear their radio programs on their phones, and need to pay low phone call rates, instead of high data rates. Because electricity is intermittent and costly, their phones are charged through solar panels.
In Hungary, where Gilberds is a visiting fellow at CMDS (Central European University), the embattled journalism sector is also coming up with creative ways around their structural problems. The government has regulated and purchased and hounded most of the mainstream media here, so aggressively co-opting the once-independent journalists that Freedom House, the International Committee for the Protection of Journalists, the European Union and United States government have all put Hungary on the downward spiral list for press freedom.
But in the midst of all that pressure, good journalists have emerged, using not only traditional document searches and data crunching but also drones that are essentially flying iPhones, to map the questionable shift of resources from the public treasury into the pockets of the favored few who are close to the Prime Minister. No fewer than four investigative news organizations have emerged in Hungary to track the land sales, phony foundations to launder money, castle purchases, massive stadium construction, and nontransparent government contracts landing in the hands of the inexperienced, the unqualified, and the unchallenged cronies of Viktor Orban.
We heard yesterday about how they are using drones, from atlatso.hu, perhaps the most established and famous of these investigative journalism ventures, headed by enfant terrible Tamas Bodoky. He has been known to take Hungarian authorities to the International Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to get back his computer, confiscated by police during one spate of scandal stories, and to fight other government actions aimed at suppressing his investigative efforts.
The conversation at the Open Skies, Open Societies conference was about how small drones are being used by atlatso and others to make the invisible visible. They are part of a network of private, non-governmental drone users relying on remote-controlled devices like the Phantom quadcopter, a three-pound, kite-sized flying camera. This video shows some of what they are doing: http://english.atlatszo.hu/2016/05/09/drones-in-the-service-of-transparency-atlatszo-hu-releases-feature-film-on-new-investigative-technology/
“Dronalism,” as people are now calling journalism using drone-based video and data gathering, is the latest Big Thing proving that journalism is not only not dead, but it is morphing into ever more powerful forms. Marietta Le, an atlatso journalist, was denied access to Budapest maps by authorities citing copyright concerns. But now a privately-owned drone can cover city streets from the air, making possible a new map that is even more up to date, showing areas that the authorities might wish to keep secret.
Probably the most famous Hungarian dronalism came during the huge Budapest Internet Tax demonstration in October 2014, shot from a drone operated by CEU’s Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, who now directs the Good Drone Lab at the University of San Diego.
The law is still murky about drones. Privacy and safety are legitimate, complex and important issues. For journalists, drones offer not just new reporting and visualization opportunities, but new tensions with governments. A reporter from another Hungarian investigative news organization, 444.hu, was confronted by police who confiscated his drone, when he was trying to document the extraordinary property development going on in the tiny town of Felscut, the beloved childhood home of Prime Minister Orban. The government had funded a $17 million new soccer stadium there that was bigger than the Lithuanian national stadium, even though the town has only 1,800 residents. The prime minister is a soccer fanatic. The stadium is about 20 feet from his country house. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/business/international/the-village-stadium-a-symbol-of-power-for-hungarys-premier.html?_r=0
A humanitarian network of private drone operators sprang up to help after the April 2015 Nepal earthquake, calling themselves the UAViators (UAVs are unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones.) Their drones flew below the cloud cover, enabling first responders to get real-time information to rescue teams. But the Nepalese government moved to limit the drones in the emergency-effected areas, for fear that “sensitive information might be leaked and pictures of valuable heritage sites (be taken) illegally.”
This week’s drone conference organizers, including CMDS at Central European University and the Good Drone Lab at the University of San Diego, suggested that civil society activists and journalists should step up now to work with policy-makers who will decide how and when private drones can be used in the future. If they are a hazard to aviation and privacy, there should be rules. No drone operator wants to collide with a first responder during a crisis. But drones are already a benefit to transparency and accountability, so there should also be rights. “As long as authorities are not willing to provide the data, we want to do it,” concluded Czech journalist Jan Indra.
The Good Drone Lab’s report on private drone use around the world is available at http://digital.sandiego.edu/gdl2016report/1/
When our honest, contentious, eye-opening meeting was over, I was too preoccupied to post this. Here is what my colleague ended up writing about our INSIDE THE STRUGGLE conference, which was amazing.
http://www.ceu.edu/article/2015-12-14/fighting-racism-two-continents-ceu-conference-examines-us-civil-rights-movement
The hardest thing about living in Hungary is the official government ideology of hate. Lots of people in nearby countries also embrace Orban’s intolerance toward the refugees; the Polish ambassador told me last night that 80% of Poles said they would like Orban to be their prime minister, too! It isn’t difficult, living in this ugly atmosphere, to understand what happened to Jews and Roma people here during World War 2.
Fortunately good people also come from Hungary, although they are in the minority here, according to all the polls. When a thousand weary Syrian refugees walked along the M1 highway to Vienna, not trusting any more what Hungarian officials told them, villagers came out to feed them trays of pogacs, the traditional salty Hungarian pastries. During the height of the crisis at the train stations in August, many Hungarians resisted the official propaganda and threats of legal action against them, to bring food, clothing and blankets for the hundreds of thousands of refugees coming from the war zones in Syria, Afghanistan, and parts of Africa. Volunteers from Hungary and the CEU community (students from over 100 countries, including Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, you name it) developed, through Facebook, a Migrant Aid civil society response that has saved people’s lives.
Together they developed some clever hacks, like figuring out if you unplugged the Exit signs and Coke machines at the Keleti train station, you could find some electricity for the power strips that volunteers brought so the refugees can plug in phones. Phones? Yes, the refugees desperately needed to contact their family members, to use the GPS apps to figure out where they were going, to get information about what was safe and what wasn’t. Some news trucks also allowed them to use their generators to recharge batteries. CEU volunteers provided and staffed free Wifi hotspots, a flow of translators, sandwich-makers, and hardy souls who took sick and dirty refugees into their own homes, so they could bathe, eat and sleep before starting up again the next day.
Austrians braved criminal liability to drive across the border and pick up the most desperate cases, bringing them back for free, across to safety in Vienna. Hungarian, Bulgarian, Russian and other traffickers were hanging out at petrol stations along the route through Serbia and Hungary. Local taxi touts were charging 200 Euros to drive from Szeged to Budapest (where the refugees thought they could catch a train to Austria), a trip that should have cost a tenth of that amount. Hungarian media, which are in the thrall of the government, were told not to broadcast images of refugee children.
It’s funny that German anarchists were among the best organized volunteers who showed up in Hungary, providing food and rapid responses to the constant changes in policy that kept making things worse. The Hungarian government finally mobilized the Knights of Malta and one or two other officially sanctioned charities to help carry babies and refugees in wheelchairs across rural ditches in remote fields during the starless nights at the height of August’s crisis.
This may be the most documented movement of refugees in history; everyone in the train station wanted to show the volunteers their pictures, to share, across the language gap, exactly what they had already gone through. Now this swollen river of human misery is out of the headlines and sights of busy Budapest, because the new refugees have been diverted to march through a tiny corner of Hungary that is far from the capital. But we aren’t fooled. We are just working on cleverer ways to nudge the policy makers and deliver the essentials. Stay tuned for more reports, as hundreds of thousands more Syrians cross the Hungarian border, in hopes they can quickly leave this country that has officially told them they are unwanted scum, terrorists, and job-stealers. Official Hungary seems to have learned nothing from its own history and the Holocaust. It is profoundly ironic that Germany is now the promised land for these desperate people. Let’s hope a better solution can be found– before Germany’s official hospitality is used up, too.
My friend Seth Effron in North Carolina has been handed a dream assignment: figure out how to repurpose some campus buildings to help serve the cause of good journalism. Here is my dream for his project:
Create the one and only tech hub devoted to creating journalism apps that are actually in the interest of the journalists and the public, instead of the advertiser/propagandists or those simply measuring and promoting what is “popular” and “trending” on the Internet? In other words,use part of your space for hackathons or steady work where developers would make new apps or programs that would create:
–A better word processing/editing program than Word for text, plus affordances that enable linkages and embedded video/photos more easily, including CREDITS
–A true micropayments system so that people would pay pennies (dimes?) for articles, where the cost of processing the payment would be minimized so the payments could be truly low cost. This could help support the authors rather than the thieves like Huffington Post.
–A pedigree branding system for journalism pieces that is like a “good housekeeping seal of approval” or the logo for “free trade” coffee/chocolate, which would be signifying voluntary membership by journalists/content providers, asserting they are working according to certain ethical standards. This would help consumers find and value this content over less reliable content.
— an “origin” tag, brand or logo for each participating piece of information moving through the food chain that would enable viewers to know where it originally came from. It could be included in the branding tag (above), put on as a news flash/photo/video originates and that continues to be embedded in the news content as it works through the food chain
–tags, brands or imbedded logos that indicate some of the important sources of the info (tags that are links perhaps to the original documents/videos)
I kept hoping when I was managing a Knight Foundation Challenge grant at the MIT Media Lab that some of the students would be interested in such projects, but they were more interested in non-journalism tools and practices, building devices without much regard to the actual social need for their functions. Maybe in North Carolina Seth can turn that around, and start with the functional challenges to support good journalism from all sources.
Walking home today from an Easter Monday walk in Budapest, we unexpectedly came upon an artist, Tibor Szilagyi, trying to challenge the government’s “Germany Made Us Do It” statue project in Freedom Square. Tibor wanted to protest the government’s planned statue, which aims to absolve Hungarians from any Holocaust guilt.
Tibor’s art installation was three large tree branches formed into a “tree,” each carrying one word written on a white streamer: “beauty,” “truth” and “goodness.” Two police stood warily nearby, guarding the site. This has been a confusing assignment for them. Every day the government’s workmen try to build up the base of the statue, and every day Hungarian protesters politely deconstruct it piece by piece. The police video this illegal activity, but aren’t arresting people yet. They wait and watch as people like Tibor work to create a counter-message on the site, one that seeks to honor the 560,000 Jews, Roma and other innocents killed almost entirely by fellow Hungarians during World War 2. Hungary was Germany’s ally until near the end, when the government tried to change sides, as they saw the Axis losing the war.
Some, like Prime Minister Viktor Orban, argue that Hungary had no choice, because if it didn’t ally with Germany from the beginning, it would have been invaded, like Czechoslovakia, and the Jews would have been killed sooner. Hungarian Regent Miklos Horthy tried to protect the Jews, under this interpretation, and nearly succeeded until the end of the war, when the Germans marched in to Budapest, rounded them up and send them to Auschwitz. But this account overlooks the decades of official Hungarian anti-Semitic laws and activities, including willing Hungarian complicity throughout the war in creating Jewish and Roma slave labor camps where thousands died, episodes of rounding up Jews from the countryside, and killing them; and the wholesale theft of Jewish businesses, property and jobs well before the Germans took over in 1944. Hungary allied with Germany in World War Two to get back the lands it lost the last time they joined together, as allies in World War One. In the end, it was Hungarians who shipped the Jews off to the death camps, or tied them together and shot them into the Danube in 1944. Only about 200 German troops were in Budapest at the time.
We were amazed to see how, in front of Tibor’s “tree,” the embattled scaffolding for the government’s statue has become a beautiful protest memorial of handmade signs, pictures, stones, and candles to honor the Holocaust dead. Someone placed two empty white chairs facing each other, to represent the lack of dialogue in Hungary about this painful history. Hungarians’ real roles are not discussed openly or honestly in most official textbooks; Holocaust guilt is not a widespread source of concern here. But the Fidesz government, to promote nationalist pride, has gone too far now, blaming Hungary’s German allies for everything that happened.
Tibor was taking the makeshift Freedom Square anti- memorial to a new level. The police decided today to call in reinforcements. Soon there were eight uniformed officers huddling around the artist. He smiled and chatted with passersby, while the officers looked puzzled about what to do. We were delighted to see the U.S. Charge D’Affaires, Andre Goodfriend, taking pictures of the scene and inquiring about what was going on.
We all took pictures, and, sensing that there was no violent confrontation in store, went home. If this shows up in the news here tomorrow, it will almost certainly be about a troublemaker who wanted to erect an illegal monument and disrupt the civil order. And it could well be about foreigners who don’t want Hungarians to be proud.
I hope Tibor is proud, and I would like to respect the pride of all Hungarians. But that would require that these whitewashing official historians face the truth honestly. That is the only way to build a future that can’t be torn down, plank by plank, every time a new government comes to power.
