Blogging When It is Not Allowed

Posted on September 22, 2005 in Blogging Censorship Courage & Activism

I don’t normally tout books (and who reads this blog anyways?) but a recent release from Reporters without Borders caught my eye and it directly pertains to the topic of blogging. Why is this book important? Let’s just say that in more than a few places, you can be imprisoned or even killed for blogging.

The description of the pdf file (which is free) says, in part:

Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they’re tremendous tools of freedom of expression.
Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.
Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles.

I found the first sentence of the second paragraph telling: Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. And this is true in the United States where, often, the only critical analyses of our government and the puppet media come from electronic media. We have, on occassion, united our voices to overturn a reactionary zealot as we did when Trent Lott praised segregation. On the other hand, American bloggers wimped out when the War in Iraq was being pushed. Only a few of us, a very very few, have any right to say “We told you so.” And that is so very sad: we have yet to learn to use our minds and flex our power for change.

The truth begins in our neighborhoods. Open your windows and hear what there is to be heard. In America, you might hear birds, the distant barking of a dog, traffic, or the wind. Those, my friends, are the sounds of a country which fills the ear of other people with machine gun file, bombs, and soldiers shouting orders in a language that they do not understand.

There are other sounds — such as the stready conformity of bicycles coming down the street in China — which mask horrors of their own. There is the sound of friendly tour guides in Cuba hiding Castro’s atrocities and the shrill threats of Cuban emigres in Florida that also confound freedom of speech. From Washington to Moscow to Peking to the Vatican, coverups abound. And it is up to bloggers to print what the mainstream media won’t print, to give aid and comfort to those who open their eyes in far places oppressed by home-grown and foreign tyrannies.

We bloggers are the free. Think for yourselves. And write what you see. Tell the truth.

Here’s the link for the page with the book.