Censorship in China targeted by RSF's new ad campaign

A creative new advertising campaign from journalist advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), aimed at various regimes hostile to press freedom, including China. Click for larger size to see the detail that makes this such a compelling design. (thanks, Oxblood!)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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pennydreadful

wow this is great, it’s brilliantly simple.
Will Shetterly

Antinuous, I’m making the note now: when you have nothing to defend your position, make sound effects. I am grateful; it’s much nicer than claiming the other person is lying.

Ack! Pthew! Fnerp!
Will Shetterly

Avram, I gave you Amnesty International because I’m after the truth, not because I’m trying to make points. I should’ve added something to the effect that Prisoners Oversea and Ifex seem to be useful and sincere efforts, even if their coverage of Cuba lacks depth and context. It is good to know that a few of the charged reporters are actually reporters–it would be nice to know about more of them, and if I find something out, I’ll pass it along.

I’m also grateful to you because I ended up learning about the Cuban Five–I hadn’t known the US locked up people for so long for dealing with information that’s in the public domain.
Will Shetterly

It’s a shame that Reporters Without Borders is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, an organization created during the Reagan administration to promote a very conservative concept of democracy. (See, for example, NED’s support for overthrowing democracy in Venezuela.) What they profess is grand, but what counts is what they do, and what they do is to serve the neocon agenda of the people who fund them.
ST

The bit at the top about “Mao’s China…” tells me most of what I need to know about this bit of propaganda. American’s who want to stir up scary images of China often resort to tossing out Mao’s name. Thing is, in China, people hardly think of it as “Mao’s”. To them they have advanced far beyond the period of Mao and today’s China is something Mao could hardly have imagined.

So to say “Mao’s China…” as is done here indicates an outdated, cold war era mindset that really needs to be updated to the 21st century. Certainly the Chinese I know to whom I just showed this ad laughed out loud about the Mao bit. One, a university professor currently sitting a few feet away from me, said that people who don’t understand China should just, and I quote her, “Shut the f@ck up. I’m so sick of these people who don’t know what they are talking about.”
Irene Delse

Avram #21: About the article in Le Figaro, two things.

1) Le Figaro is a right-wing journal supporting the current French president and his policies. Said president is coincidentally a strong ally of the current US administration. (In fact, the way Le Figaro covered the Sarkozy presidential campaign made some pundits here nickname it “The Pravda”.)

Note that I’m not saying you can’t trust this article, just that one has to be careful when using Le Figaro as a source.

2) The gist of the article is indeed that the combined funding from NED and Center from a Free Cuba amounts to only 2.5% of RWB’s total budget. (Emphasis here is mine.)

They also mention the following data: 10% of the group’s income are from public funding (which includes subsidies from the French and other states), 20% are donations from private companies and individuals and 60 derive from the sale of calendars, t-shirts and other products. The article doesn’t say where the remaining 10% come from, but they mention that RWB own reak estate in Paris and shares in Medias, a publication managed by Robert MÃ©nard’s wife.

Among the contributors to RWB are listed: George Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, multinational companies Benetton or Sanofi-Aventis, celebrities from arts and spectacle… and the ruling family of Qatar.

Bottom line: I don’t think Robert MÃ©nard is really a tool of the conservative US establishment, because RWB’s actions are embarrassing to the Bush administration too. After all, this same administration took China off the list of human rights abusers a little before the Tibet riots. When RWB puts pressure on Beijing, it is probably also felt in Washington.

But RWB is a really good
Antinous

Will,

That’s just a big, fat lie. As usual you only show up to voice your support for totalitarian regimes. Fortunately, there’s a link in the post so that readers can judge for themselves. I hope that they will do so.
Irene Delse

Oops! Fingers slipped. I’ll retype it here:

But RWB is a really good money-making and publicity gathering operation. You could say it’s activism done like a private business.
velocity girl

The idea is good, but the execution could’ve been better: The ad would’ve been a lot more powerful if blacking out some of the text actually had the effect of hindering communication. They should’ve written a full article for the ad.

#2: I didn’t know that…thanks for the heads up.
Will Shetterly

Antinuous, you’re very free with words like “lie.” You might want to do a little research. Are you saying Sourcewatch is wrong and it didn’t take a Freedom of Information Act to get NED to confess to funding Reporters Without Borders? Are you saying Allen Weinstein didn’t tell the Washington Post, â€œA lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.â€œ Facts aren’t hard to find if you’re willing to look.
juanpa

Zazou, Will only said “it’s a shame that RWB is funded by NED”.

I think it’s a very valid criticism.

Funding is important, and people should be very discriminating about it.

That’s why it is a scandal when some politician is known to be funded (even a small part) by mafia/foreign governments/drug dealers, etc.
Will Shetterly

St. May, excellent point. Talking about Mao’s China is like talking about Nixon’s USA: they both ended over three decades ago.
Takuan

google RSF and NED

“Will Shetterly” is a stooge of the communist Chinese government.
ZippySpincycle

Takuan, I did google “Reporters Without Borders” and “National Endowment for Democracy,” and regardless of what else he may say about China, Will Shetterly appears to be correct about RSF being funded by the NED (and by Cuban exile groups). This 2005 article in The Guardian seems to have a fairly non-shouty discussion of the connection: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/may/19/pressandpublishing.usnews

RSF is absolutely right to condemn China’s treatment of the press…but I’m also not so crazy about some of the company RSF keeps.
Takuan

and the item I found was heavily seeded with anti-Tibet propaganda. Can I discredit you by sending you an unsolicited cheque?
Avram

Will, first, this isn’t your blog, you don’t get to decide where the discussion goes.

Second, as far as the charges against the journalists goes, the only source you’ve cited is the official state-controlled house organ of the Cuban Communist Party. You are not in a position to be criticizing the quality of other people’s sources.

Third, you’re dishonest. You wrote, above: “As for Granma, I cite them because I haven’t found anyone who refutes them: if those were really reporters, wouldn’t someone have an article explaining how Granma and Spinwatch got it wrong? If you find one, I’ll praise your google fu.” I found sources that contradict the Granma story, and you just shove the goalposts, like a creationist presented with a transitional fossil.
velocity girl

Yeah, I’m not finding anything that condemns them very convincingly.
method

The point of the “Mao’s country” reference was to highlight how little things have changed in a given respect. It would be like saying “it’s still Reagan’s America” financially.

On the whole, the Chinese need to stop telling people to stfu, because they’re not the victims of history anymore. Being a player on the world stage means taking criticism.
Will Shetterly

Irene, thanks for that! I think you’re overestimating RWB’s effect on the Bush administration, though: NED and RWB provide the shield of plausible deniability. If RWB was willing to embarrass the US, they would be more critical of US allies.
hellhead

I, I, I, I waaaaant the kniiife.
Anonymous

is SpinWatch a reliable source? The site has a conspiratorial preoccupation with the influence of Jews in public life http://spinwatchwatch.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/a-keen-interest-in-the-jews/

and it is funded by a wealth Lebanese businessman who also has something of a fixation on Jews http://spinwatchwatch.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/agri-business-fortune-behind-spinwatch/

Will Deighton
Will Shetterly

Method, it’s interesting that you cite Reagan, because he’s the clear sign of change in the US: The CIA became subtler under him, spinning off some of its sneakier work to groups like NED.

I suppose the Chinese equivalent of Reagan would be Deng Xiaoping, who pushed the free market communism that’s created Chinese billionaires. It’s a strange new world. But the old games are still played, and one of them is to pretend the other side is still in the age of Nixon and Mao.
Avram

Will, having tracked down that Spinwatch article you cited, I have to say I’m unimpressed. The author, Luciana Bohne, admits that the arrested journalists were, in fact, writing material for public consumption. At worst, they’re paid propagandists. The comparison you draw, to hypothetical Chinese-funded al-Qaeda operatives, is bogus, because al-Qaeda goes far beyond propaganda to actual acts of terrorism.

(I also think the article has a bit of the whiff of propaganda about it. Note the loaded language Bohne uses to dismiss Pablo Alfonso’s columns: “trivial and titillating gossip”, whispers, “fluff items”, “silly charges”. She seems to think it’s silly to say that the house organ of the Cuban Communist Party will act as a stenographer for the declarations of the acting party leader.)

The Constitution of Cuba states that freedom of the press and artistic expression is subordinate to the political convenience of the state. (See Article 53 and section D of Article 39.) You, with the best of intentions, could go to Cuba and report honestly on what you saw there, and if the Castro government decided that your writing was not “in keeping with the objectives of socialist society”, you’d be breaking Cuban law.

All mass communication media in Cuba are considered the property of the state under Cuban law. Legally, there can be no independent journalism there. How, then, can I believe the Cuban government’s house organ when it claims that all convicted journalists are mercenaries? Even an honest dissident would be violating Cuban law, so am I being asked to believe that Cuba has no honest dissidents, or that the Cuban authorities magnanimously decide not to prosecute them?
method

Will, you’re just trying to greywash (I just made that up) the real issue. RSF doesn’t matter, NED doesn’t matter. I bet you RSF was created in the context of the 80s Cold War, when the US (including the CIA) was trying to use the differences in political freedoms between “free world” and Communist nations to sway the third way and neutral nations. The guardian article mentions that the money from NED was for a project involving African reporters, probably in Angola, Kenya, etc. There were plenty of organizations that are still in existence receiving money from the Soviet Union at the time. We know this history.

The issue is journalistic freedom in China, not just to report on issues of interest to foreigners like Tibet (most “independent journalists” are probably sympathetic to the popular line), but also to report on domestic issues like corruption, environmental degradation, umm the lack of political freedoms.
Will Shetterly

Method, yep, RSF and NED were created and promoted in the ’80s by Reaganites. Ethical people on both the left and the right object to them today. The point is how they manipulate issues to sway the public. Someone doing their work objectively would be wonderful. But instead, we have– Well, here’s a bit from Spinwatch:

Reporters without Borders mounted a campaign in 2002 characterizing the trial and imprisonment in Cuba of more than two dozen journalists, among 75 â€œdissidents,â€ as a violation of human rights. The Cuban government insisted that the accused were mercenary agitators paid by the US to pose as â€œindependent journalists.â€ As Granma reported, â€œnone of them even passed through a journalism faculty or school of journalism and never wrote a single line of journalism.â€

What would Americans say if a Chinese-funded organization that pretended to support free speech said al-Qaeda operatives should not be arrested because they were “journalists” who never happened to actually do journalism?

And NED’s support for overthrowing democracy in Venezuela is creepily like what the CIA did in Guatemala and Iran in the ’50s. I can’t trust people who only support democracy and free speech when it’s in their interest.
Will Shetterly

Avram, what the arrested people were actually doing in Cuba, I don’t know–but the Bay of Pigs fiasco gives Cuba a good reason to mistrust US operatives on its soil. I doubt the US would catch Cuban spies and say, “Oh, you’re journalists who just haven’t had the chance to do any journalism yet! Gee, here’s a ticket home. Good luck finding a publisher!”

If you don’t like Spinwatch’s take on RWB, try some others. Ron Paul’s take on NED is perversely fascinating–this isn’t a simple rightwing/leftwing issue.
Will Shetterly

Method, forgot to say this: I do like “greywash”! It’s a great word to describe what NED was created to do.
Avram

Will, they had done journalism. That’s what they were accused of; that’s why they were arrested. Prisoners Overseas says that Adolfo Fernandez Sainz was charged with writing subversive material on the Internet and granting interviews to Radio Marti. The law he was convicted under prohibits criticism of Cuba’s Communist regime. RaÃºl Rivero and Ricardo GonzÃ¡lez Alfonso have been convicted of publishing a subversive magazine.

What you’re missing here, Will, is the Newspeak element in the claims of the Cuban government and its supporters. Under Cuban law, any criticism is considered to be undermining of the socialist revolution, and is therefore illegal. It therefore gets redefined as non-journalism. So when Granma says that these people weren’t journalists, they’re actually just saying that these people didn’t support the Castro regime.
Antinous

You’re in quicksand.
Avram

Antinous, Will, calm down, both of you.

Will, Wikipedia’s entry, only 19% of RWB’s funding comes from North American and European governments and organizations, including the NED.

According to SourceWatch the RSF’s budget “RSF’s budget was primarily provided by ‘US organizations strictly linked with US foreign policy’”, however the link they provide to RSF’s Income and Expenditure page claims that more than half the group’s income is “self-generated” from sales of books, newsletter subscriptions, sales of ads in those publications, and special events.

Le Figaro published an article about the group’s funding, but it’s in French, which I don’t know, but if Babelfish is accurate, the combined funding from the NED and the Center for a Free Cuba amounts to less than 3% of RSF’s budget.
Avram

Antinous, you’re right, quicksand.

Will, I’ve had it with you. I’m done.
Will Shetterly

Avram, re your three points:

1. I’m only asking you to keep to the subject. Since I’ve done my share of digressing in my time, I certainly won’t insist you do. I’m just saying I may not follow you into the thickets if you insist on going there.

But, since I’ve gone partway, let’s continue:

2. So far, you’ve only offered evidence that three convicted Cubans were journalists. Granma claimed that more than two dozen were not. Where’s the evidence that those two dozen actually were journalists?

3. But you’re quite right: when I asked for someone to explain how Granma and Spinwatch got it wrong, I was thinking the refutation should be thorough and well-documented. I didn’t say that. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.

But I wish you’d found something like Amnesty International’s write-up here: Cuba Massive crackdown on dissent.

Amnesty’s explanation isn’t as simplistic as the sites you found. It notes this about Law 88: “The law calls for seven to 15 yearsâ€™ imprisonment for passing information to the United States that could be used to bolster anti-Cuban measures such as the US economic blockade.” That sounds like fairly standard spying laws about passing harmful secrets on to the enemy.

It also provides a context: “the Cuban government has become increasingly disturbed by the imprisonment and solitary confinement of five Cubans convicted in the US of spying on Cuban exile groups in Florida. Their sentences range from 15 years to life.”

It sounds like Cuba was playing tit for tat. It’s an ugly game. I see they’ve freed a few of those prisoners. I hope they free the rest, or offer evidence that they were being paid by Cason, the US’s man in Cuba at the time.
Avram

But if I just keep kicking…
Avram

Will, are you taking the word of the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party seriously?

It’s all well and good to be skeptical of what our own government and corporate-controlled media tell us, but Granma is a government propaganda source. Why do you trust them any more than you’d trust Fox “News”?
Zazou

Woa, judging an International, Paris-based NGO that gets funds from many other organizations, not to mention massive book sales, by one single sponsor, thatâ€™s going a bit fast, donâ€™t you think?
I doubt that Robert MÃ©nard, Rony Brauman and Jean-Claude Guillebaud had the Regan agenda in mind when creating RSF/RWB. The national antennas are semi independent, so though global issues are the same everywhere, there can be local differences…

Apart from that, their add campaigns are usually very good, and we need free press and reporters more than we need troops these days. I find the subtitle here very compelling.
Don’t waste your time attacking the messenger, read the message!
Avram

OK, here’s some better-presented information about RSF, from Counterpunch:

“Reporters Without Borders Unmasked”
by Diana Barahona, 17 May 2005

“Reporters Without Borders and Washington’s Coups”
by Diana Barahona and Jeb Sprague, 1 Aug 2006

Barahona at least directly addresses RSF’s claims about where their funding comes from.
Will Shetterly

Avram, your first link isn’t working, and a quick google doesn’t tell me anything about Prisoners Oversea except that its Australian writer has had some run-ins with Wikipedia of a nature that I didn’t pursue.

The second link sounds extremely biased; whether the writer’s right, I don’t know, since the law isn’t presented in Spanish. (Even the most honest translators can mistranslate things due to their assumptions.)

As for the third link, do you have a source for the full charges against Rivero and Alfonso? If their only crime is writing, I’m as appalled as anyone. But I did notice that they were writing for RSF/RWB, so anyone knowing its history would wonder if they were CIA agents. As for Granma’s statement, it was about more than two dozen people. Arguing that two of them were legitimate journalists could simply mean the two were running with spies–it’s possible to be both a legitimate journalist and an agent of a foreign country pursuing violent regime change. So I would really like to see the full charges.

And before anyone suggests the CIA wouldn’t help bad people against Cuba, I’ll mention Luis Posada Carriles, a terrorist that Bush likes.

All that said, I’d prefer to keep the discussion on NED and RWB. I’ve said often that Cuba and China have a long way to go on human rights. Shifting the focus to their targets smacks of suggesting that anyone who opposes the Iraq War must love Saddam Hussein. It really is possible for both of the major sides to be wrong.
Will Shetterly

Avram, what you cite is RWB’s current funding (and I’m only trusting their figures for the sake of this discussion). They have been diversifying. Tracking the money is challenging–for example, from the beginning, Center for a Free Cuba got money from NED that it then passed on to RWB.

There’s this from Sourcewatch: “Robert Menard, the Secretary General of RSF, was forced to confess that RSF’s budget was primarily provided by “US organizations strictly linked with US foreign policy” (Thibodeau, La Presse).”

As for Granma, I cite them because I haven’t found anyone who refutes them: if those were really reporters, wouldn’t someone have an article explaining how Granma and Spinwatch got it wrong? If you find one, I’ll praise your google fu.

(I confess, I didn’t look because I’m assuming Spinwatch did, so I won’t feel bad if you do find one. And it would be nice to know if Spinwatch wasn’t trustworthy. Their funders look much more ethical than RWB’s, but I could be wrong.)
Will Shetterly

Antinuous, that comes of arguing without facts. Google early and often, and check the sources of your sources–if they keep leading back to the CIA, it’s not unreasonable to think that means something.
Will Shetterly

Takuan, what you call “anti-Tibet propaganda” is what others might call “honest investigation.” In the contest between China and Tibet, both sides like to lie. Look, for example, at how long the “pro-Tibet” people hid the fact that the CIA was funding them even before the 1959 rebellion when Tibet’s upper class tried to restore a very brutal form of feudalism in Tibet.

When you look for facts, you do have to look a little, I’ll grant. NED works hard to blur the truth. When money speaks, what money wants to say is usually what’s easiest to find.

Zazou, look at Reporters Without Borders’ earliest funders and their primary funders today. “Follow the money” is always a good principle. It explains, for example, why they rank Cuba, a country where no journalists have been murdered, lower than Mexico, where many journalists have been murdered. If you would like more links to RSF/RWB’s critics, I posted the best ones that I found here.

You’re very right that the message matters. But you should also look at who the messenger serves. If you know RWB has a neocon agenda, you’re safe. But if you think they are what they claim to be, you’ll dance to their tune. It happened with the Iraq War, and it’ll keep happening–that’s the point of propaganda.
Antinous

Spluck. Glurg.
ST

@Method -> You say that the reason for using the Mao reference is to point out how little some things have changed. That is the problem. They HAVE changed and have changed quite a lot.

That professor I mentioned in my post was a young reporter for China Radio International back when Tiananmen Square happened. She was in the square that dawn morning when the shooting began (not to report as the Chinese media was not covering that incident, rather she was bicycling through the area on her way to work at the radio station). After seeing that she determined to get out and move to the U.S. to study journalism. She got her Masters and PhD in journalism from the J-School at Ohio University (one of the best programs). She is, definitively, an expert on China, Media and related cultural issues as she is now a professor focusing on exactly that area. She’s a smart cookie who has practical professional and academic experience re: China and it’s media and she is sick of the uninformed, inaccurate garbage like this junk from JWB (which is, sadly, the tip of the willfully ignorant iceberg). When she says STFU she isn’t just tossing out some rude language. It is a heartfelt response based on an accurate and informed opinion and I (a white American who also has a background in journalism) completely agree with her because, well… she’s right.
Will Shetterly

Avram, we cross-posted. I listed “Reporters Without Borders Unmasked” at the link I gave above. I’ve been meaning to track the trails provided in “Reporters Without Borders and Washington’s Coups,” but I haven’t had the time yet. The fanboy in me keeps thinking that the CIA is remarkably like Hydra in Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. It would be funny if not for the over-throwing democracies and promoting wars part.