Bloggers Busted Chinese Communist Party Official

Internet has prove itself to be the most powerful tool when it comes to disseminating information. Bloggers in China got together and made the capture of a Communist Party Official possible.  Li Xingong was the deputy director of the Yongcheng city in China. A man with great power in his hands confessed raping multiple underage girls during the police interrogation. However, his capture would not be possible without the help of Chinese bloggers.

Before his arrest, online activists has been calling the case to the public's attention. Sina Weibo, a popular Chinese blog service, has been a central area for the movement against Li Xingong's arrest. Bloggers are outraged by his actions and through blogging, Li Xingong's shameful actions were exposed. This kind of phenomenon was fairly new to the country since the flow of information is tightly controlled by the government.

The number of blog users have increased exponentially in China. This creates a perfect platform for online activists to voice their opinions and expose corruptions in China. They have been quite successful in spreading and gathering news. With the increase of internet and blog users, Chinese politicians start to fear they will lose control of the flow of information.

In class, we discussed about the different ways that blogging has come into play in our society now. However, as this news points out, blogging has created this completely different meaning for the citizens in China. It is interesting to see the power of Internet and how easily one can start a movement just by typing a few words online. As we post our weekly blog, we should think about how lucky we are to have this kind of privilege to post whatever we want on the internet.


For the complete article, click here.


Reported by Ashley Huang

Mexico Turns to Social Media and Citizen Journalism During Drug War Media Blackout

A recent article from Houston Based Blog attempts to understand the phenomena known as Blog Del Narco.

The war on drugs in Mexico has taken the lives of more thank 50,000 citizens in that country in the last six years. Journalists account for 44 of those deaths. The state of Journalism in Mexico is one of fear and complete censorship. The drug cartels have been systematically shutting down news rooms and freelance journalists by threatening to kill them and their entire families. Reporters, editors and photojournalist's bodies along with their family members, have been found along streets and sometimes hanging over bridges displaying large banners with written messages to the public known as narcomantas. At times grenades have been thrown directly in to the buildings of news rooms.

Newspapers are still being printed and news is made everyday in Mexico, the difference is, only the murder is reported. No names are used, no suspects are reported and sometimes bylines in articles are left blank. Newspaper editors have been known to approach the cartels and ask, "what would you like us to report on?" This is media coverage about the drug war in Mexico today.

The last six years however, social media has played a central role in the reporting of the drug related violence. Enter, Blog Del Narco a blog that has been up and running since 2007. What makes this blog special is the ability to stay anonymous. All that is known about the blog is that it was created by a computer science student in Northern Mexico. It is ran by a handful of editors, and moderators and it is protected by numerous firewalls that protect it's location.

This cloak of invisibility allows users to share information freely with out fear of retaliation. One can open an account and start blogging today under anonymous. Now I can shoot a video at a downtown mall where a shooting may take place and I can upload to YouTube and then post in on Blog Del Narco where I can comment on what I saw and any details of the vehicles, weapons, or identities of the individuals involved. I can warn people, do stay away from downtown  or stay of the highways.

See Video of Shootout 

This has not only proven valuable to citizens in the violent towns but it also has become a free for all information bulletin. It is believed that the site is getting up too 1million hits per months. Visitors include, private citizens, Mexican police, Mexican Federal agents, American DEA, CIA and of course the gang members themselves. cartel members will post a video of a an execution and comment on why they did it and who is next. The graphic nature of the site is what gives it part of it's credibility. The videos are not censored, the violence is raw.  

One incident occurred in 2011 where a couple of teenage boys took out cell phones while sitting on their front porch of their home. They were witnessing a shooting directly across the street. They decided to hide behind a car parked in their driveway and start filming the shootout. The five minute video showed SUVs peeling out and machine-gun fire crackling down the residential streets. Members running in and out of vehicles and eventually bodies dropping to the floor and left dead. The two boys who were cousins decided to upload the video rot YouTube as soon as they got in the house. I mean that was some great video surely it would go viral that night. What occurred next changed the way citizen journalism operated over night. The video was posted on Blog Del Narco and later viewed by the gang members involved in the shootout earlier that morning. A quick scan of the location and point of view of the camera lens, allowed the gang members to identify where the video had been shot from. The next morning, the two boys got a knock on the door.

The YouTube comments were still coming in when an R.I.P. comment read the names of the two amateur videographers.

I do not know what is going to happen in Mexico but I hope the government acts quickly to protect journalists. I also hope social media will play a larger role in the dissimanation of cartel activity in Mexico.

If intelligent voices are being ignored, are the voices that are speaking up not good enough?

With so many creative, insightful bloggers on the web today, sometimes it is difficult to know what information is most trustable, and what information is not. In Joshua Foust’s “Echo Chamber”, he goes over the ways that bloggers have “failed” to do their job. He clearly expresses his disappointment towards the lack of intellectual and powerful contributions that could have been made towards the blogging coverage of the war in Georgia. It strikes a chord with me because for someone like me, who is very unfamiliar with current events and the blogosphere, it is rare to ever notice if a blog or story is “flat” or “narrow” as Foust mentions.

I don’t read much of the news nor do I even follow any particular blogs, so in many ways it is hard for me to give a blog a grade. Foust has clearly given bloggers an “F” for the ways that the current happenings in Georgia were told, but a reader like me would have no sense of a good or bad blog.

“Rather than providing the clarity, nuance, and honesty that they promise to provide, the big blogs instead retreated to their comfortable and predictable ideological corners. By keeping to their usual haunts, these blogs did their readers a tremendous disservice: they were just as incurious and ideological as they regularly accuse the MSM of being.” – “Echo Chamber", Joshua Foust.

 I guess my point is – What truly determines a blog as “flat” and “narrow”? If intelligent voices are being ignored, are the voices that are speaking up not good enough, should I be able to trust the voices that aren’t categorized as intelligent? How do readers like me build a rubric to score a blog as sufficient (with clarity, honesty, and nuance)?While Foust may be disappointed, I wonder what his definition of an intelligent voice may be. Instead of complaining, I wish he would have provided a way for us to look out for the “intelligent” ideal voices – some tips on how we can recognize and avoid bloggers that just talk in big circles.

A Blog's use as a News Source

According to the Digital Journalism seminar discussion, not all people born into the "digital age" should be considered "digital natives", since that's not a guarantee that one is naturally tech savvy. Palfrey's three-step process is more believable of an average internet user's online research process than the usual assumption that most users merely read blogs as their news source and cease further research.



One blog in particular is apparent in encouraging further research of a topic in every post he writes. Instapundit, a popular blog created by Glenn Reynolds, touches on several subjects including politics, mass media and the War on Terror.

Many of Reynolds' posts consist of one statement but half of the statement will be a link to another article talking about the topic. Although Reynolds' wit and quickness of distributing posts initially gain readers' interest about the topic, providing a link or several links in the post to longer articles further encourages readers to become knowledgable about the topic. 

Although most blogs provide biased opinions about their chosen topic, that does not mean blogs should be written off completely as a source of information.

I agree with Palfrey's assertion that part of a blog's function is providing a starting point for research of a particular subject or topic that sparks the interest of the reader. However, it is up to the reader to find more accurate and objective text/media on the subject in order to gain concise knowledge to form their own opinion, and to possibly spread their own newly-formed opinion through their own means of communication; whether in a social networking site, their own blog, etc.