 I'm Anya Schifrin, and I edited the book Global Muck Raking. And three of our contributors are in the audience, Katie Redford, Clifford Bob, and Jeff Ballinger. And I know it's a horrible day out there, and it's very, very nice of you all to show up in this terrible weather. The Global Muck Raking was a big project that took a couple of years and involved dozens of people. And I was kind of the conductor. So of the orchestra. So I thought rather than talk you about it, I'm just going to show you some pictures from the book so you can get a little sense of some of the research that went into it. And then we'll have a discussion about journalism and impact and advocacy. For those of you who don't know, Global Muck Raking is a collection of investigative and campaigning journalism from around the world over the last 100 years. Originally, I thought this would be a book of 15 essays about journalism and it grew to be 47 pieces of journalism introduced by 40 different historians, scholars, and activists. So you can tell it became an all-consuming labor of love as well as the contributors. I had research assistants who speak Swahili and Turkish and French and Italian and we just kind of went for it. So one of the things is, the book started because I was in 1600 and I was asked to teach the course by a historian called Richard John. And somewhere along the line he said to me, well, you're in charge of Africa and India. And I went in such a panic. How am I going to teach that? That I started looking in libraries all over the world for interesting articles and I got some of my researchers to do that too. And we found so many interesting things that I decided I wanted to edit a collection of journalism and I divided it into the sections that matter to journalists in developing countries. So it's different than what you would see in the New York Times. So we have a section on things like slavery and trafficking or anti-colonialism or environment and natural disasters. Again, just to give you an overview. These are some of the things that I found. This is, and I'll just show a few pictures to you just to give you a flavor. When I was in the British Library in London, one things I was curious about was how journalism changed in the post-colonial period in Africa because of course many of the African leaders really believed in the power of journalism to educate the public. And journalism is a tool that had a very sort of utilitarian function. So this really for me illustrates the concept of development journalism. You can see the African, brave African journalist in front of the continent of Africa wielding the fountain pen, breaking away from his chains and using it to vanquish the imperialists down at the bottom with the dollar and the pound. This is, again, I just found this in the British Library and got a picture taken of it. Here's another article from 1961 in Accra. Journalists urged to educate the public. Front-page articles sort of lecturing journalists about what their role should be. This is the Calcutta Gazette, which I read in Calcutta. One of the points I make is that 19th century newspapers were very often like blogs. So they have all kinds of funny letters and random stories. I was very amused in one of these old newspapers. I read an article about how terrible the traffic was on the bridge in Calcutta because of all the horse and carriages. I left the library, got in a cab and got stuck on the same bridge. I like to show these pictures because many of our younger students and the younger journalists I'm meeting around the world haven't actually gone into the old collections and don't know what they look like. But you can see there'll be advertisements on the front page, something that's, again, come back into fashion, announcements of the clipper ship going to China with all the opium. So the other point I like to make is that these collections are not being digitized. They are collapsing. Many of them tore and crumbled in my hands as I was reading them. And often when they're digitized, they're not actually searchable. This is Amritabh Bazar-Patrika. We probably won't have time to show pictures of it today, but it was an important newspaper in Bengal. Many of you know Amartya Sen's work about the press and famine. They had a role to play also in covering the famine, although not as much as the statesman. So you're just getting a few highlights here. I'm sure many of you have read King Leopold's Ghost, so I won't even talk about it now. But for me, that was sort of a foundational book because of Adam Hochstahl's argument that the journalists played a very important role in exposing the situation in the Congo. After I read, this is E.D. Morel's newspaper, West African Mail, which talked a lot about the conditions in the rubber gathering. This is from the British Library. After I read that, I began curious to know what other 19th century journalists were doing sort of campaigning journalism. So I kept reading and I found that of course, while E.D. Morel and George Washington Williams had been campaigning in the Congo, Benjamin Saldana Roca had been writing about conditions in the rubber plantations on the Amazon. He had a tiny newspaper called La Sanction, which nobody really knew about, except for the people living in Iquitos. Here's some of the pictures. And by luck, a couple of American engineers came through the town, read the newspaper, found out what was happening, and brought the news back to London. So one of the points we'll be talking about today is how do campaigns go global? What makes a little piece of news or about an atrocity or brutality that people are writing about in a small place and they're nowhere? How did they get kind of global interest? That was something I became, started to become interested in, as we were preparing the book. Again, after that, 1906, probably none of you knew this, there was a boycott of Cadbury chocolate because they didn't know about whether the labor conditions in South Tome and Principay took eight years for the Cadburys to make up their mind. They sent a journalist called Wilbur Burt to investigate, he stopped in Portugal, learned Portuguese, went to South Tome and Principay. According to Catherine Higgs, he was such an idiot, that he reported back from South Tome and Principay and said, everything's great, the kids have huge stomachs, they're all fine. Henry Neveson, the American journalist who'd written about slavery for Harpers, went and did his own investigation and wrote a series of reports. There were editorials in the London Standard, Cadbury sued, eventually they decided they needed to clean up their act. I'm oversimplifying, but I wanna make sure that you all see the resemblances between some of the debates we've had over Nike, which Jeff Naliger will talk about, and Foxconn and some of the other great kind of labor stories. I'll end it here, but this PowerPoint, I'll stop, but I have sort of 25 pictures of different journalists and causes, and I think that you get my sort of main point, which is that the pieces in this book raise a lot of questions about the role of journalism, the role of advocacy, campaigns, and I'm really happy today because instead, I've been giving talks about this book all over the world, especially anywhere where journalism is having a hard time, people are interested, so I gave four talks in Malaysia, two talks in Turkey, I just got back last night from Budapest and Johannesburg, and I've been meeting a lot of young journalists, investigative journalists all over the place, and what's great about this panel is there's no journalists on it. We have really people that are more interested in, we've got two campaigners, I guess is how I would describe you, and a professor who's written a lot about ideas and campaigning and how ideas spread, so shall we all start our conversation? Thank you very much for coming here on this horrible day. I'm gonna have to turn this off, whatever. I'll just leave that, I guess. Yes, I think that's right, and I'm supposed to velcro this on. Okay, thank you, Jack. Thank you, so once again, Katie Redford, Clifford Bob, and Jeff Ballinger, and I think that I would, I'd like to start by saying that one of the things that surprised me as we were doing the research for the book was I had always thought, I hadn't understood how connected advocates were to journalists for many of the big stories. There's a kind of narrative that we hear a lot, which is, oh, nowadays it's so terrible, the New York Times has cut back their spending on investigative journalism, and if you wanna know what's really going on with, say, Philippine workers in the Middle East, you have to read a human rights watch report from Amnesty International or a report from Earth Rights, and what surprised me, and maybe it shouldn't have, as we were researching the book, was that historically, many of the important stories, I thought of it as just stories, there was involvement in some way from an advocate or from a campaigner, like the Cadbury's helping support newspapers during their fight against slavery, and I thought that this would be really a good point to begin with Jeff Ballinger, because you did such a good job in Indonesia and in Vietnam of getting the press to focus on labor conditions, especially in the Nike subcontractor, so I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about that relationship. It's hard to talk just a little about it, but I'll try. I think a little background would be helpful, a background, my personal background, that is having done seven, eight years of labor organizing and political work in trade unions and then going to law school, and I was very interested in international law and human rights, and so I took the international law and the human rights courses, and then I said to myself, oh my god, there's no place to adjudicate these cases, I mean, you have laws, but I spent the last year of law school in medial studies, media law, and because I knew the only place to adjudicate would be on the streets and the court of public opinion, so that's what I took with me when I went abroad, along with a couple of subscriptions, many subscriptions, magazine subscriptions, but among them the Columbia Journalism Review and the Index on Censorship, so I kind of knew when I was leaving in the mid-80s that the only thing that would help the people that I was gonna be interacting with would be getting their stories a wider audience, so that's what motivated me and it didn't take me much time in Indonesia to discover what the big story would be. There was a team of 10 Indonesian doctors who'd followed these 20 or 30 Indonesian women, minimum wage working women. These doctors did blood samples and stool samples and monitored their health and 88% were anemic of these 30 women operating, earning just the minimum wage, so I knew that this was the story. There was a question of how to get the story out, so there was a time when my boss visited Indonesia and I told him this awful minimum wage, 86 cents a day was only 60% of the minimum physical need for a single adult, not for a family, but for a single adult, admitted by the Indonesian government and they had just had this flood of foreign investment from China and from Taiwan and South Korea because democracy in the late 80s had come to both countries and so all these low wage industries migrated to China and Indonesia, so the Indonesian government was kind of off balance. They didn't know kind of how to handle this, whether they should even have a minimum wage. There had not been a lot of agitation up till then, so one of the first things I read in the local press I had translated from Indonesian was at a strike at a Reebok producing factory where the bosses had tried to cut the wage from 86 cents a day to 84 cents a day, trying to find rock bottom I guess that's the only explanation and I was very pleasantly surprised that this was being reported in the newspapers and not just the elite newspapers, but in the tabloids that the workers read, so complete with pictures of workers in the streets and I thought, wow, this is, in a Suharto run pretty tightly controlled atmosphere, this was very interesting and how could we gin it up basically was my dilemma, problem and my boss visited and he said, well, why don't you monitor compliance with the minimum wage? Why don't you see who's paying and maybe people aren't even paying the minimum wage and so we did, we got about $5,000 from local AID funds and did this survey and the press reported all of our findings that half of the factories weren't paying the minimum wage even this very inadequate minimum wage, so I really felt buoyed up by this, that it seemed like the government wanted to punish these foreign investors as well and I have to take a step back here and explain it wasn't, Nike wasn't running these factories, they were the South Korean and Taiwanese contractors, supplier factories, most of you in this room would know that, but that was a conceptual hurdle I had to get over with American readers because they thought, oh, they saw that, Nike's not gonna cheat workers and that's what I thought too, I joined the softball team not long after arriving in Jakarta and three of the guys on my team were from Nike and one of them said, what are you doing here and I said, well, the American unions have a small office to help the Indonesian workers and he narrowed his eyes and he said, I'm your worst nightmare and I thought it was the usual business labor banter you get into when you identify yourself as a union person so I didn't think much of it until we did this minimum wage survey and these shoe factories showed up as big abusers, big cheaters and so of course I paid pretty close attention to those factories for my remaining couple of years in Indonesia and then after leaving, stayed in touch with this burgeoning movement, these workers who had started strikes and some of them were fired and some of them were, it was not like Central America, they didn't murder trade unionists, they didn't disappear them, they tried to marginalize them, they had the Asian way of dealing with the problem but I made it my business to narrowly focus on these 15 or 20 big shoe producing and Nike producing factories because I figured if you tried to take on child labor across Asia, well, good luck, you're not gonna have much success but if you narrowly focus on one set of factories, one brand in one country, then there's a good likelihood that you will know more about those factories than that company does and that's exactly what happened over the late 80s, early 90s, I was sending out packets of information to human rights groups and journalists maybe 10, 15 a month for five or six years and a few stories got in American press, a few wire stories but not much until Kathy Lee Gifford was dragged out on the world stage, she was this hostess of a television program in the morning and Charlie Kernigan, one of the old most effective anti-switch up organizers had found some of her garments being produced in El Salvador or Honduras, I'm not sure which, but it's child labor or something, he confronted her and she made this because she had this podium, right? I mean she had five mornings a week on television and she called him a liar and long story short, she got hammered and he had the goods on her and then she eventually came around to the White House and said you guys ought to be doing something about this to Bill Clinton and Robert Reich and so what ultimately came of that, the corporate social responsibility pledges and social auditing that went out in the factories was not very satisfying, in fact it was a smoke screen but I must say that the agitation in Indonesia and tying Nike to that and making them the focus really helped those workers in Indonesia and not only the ones in the shoe factories but all minimum wage workers, wage was increased from 86 cents a day to like $2.47 which is triple real wage in a five, six year period largely because of this news, this avalanche of news. I was really gratified that American papers responded to this story the way they did and so it was that group of workers and that cohort in Indonesia, the low wage workers who benefited a lot and unfortunately the anti-switch up movement sort of stalled because people said oh it's being taken care of, there are these codes of conduct in place and so that wasn't very satisfying, in fact that was something that still needs to be addressed because there are still these abuses going on and I think I'll leave it there and maybe pick up some other things in the question and answer but two takeaways I think I have to leave you with is referring back to not thinking there was any place to adjudicate, well I talked a lot in the early 2000s at business schools and I went to the Tuck School at Dartmouth maybe three years, four years in a row and talked to almost a dozen classes, different classes on business ethics and with hundreds of students and these were doing international business, these students were doing international business, not once did the ILO come up, not once did somebody mention isn't there an international labor organization, and their budget is something like $280 million a year, it shows you how insignificant they are and how there really isn't any place to adjudicate, there isn't any advocate for these workers who are still being abused and mistreated so I really think that the other takeaway I'll leave you with is if you have the data you can do some good work, like only two cases I'll mention, how many here have heard about Walmart bribing people in Mexico and China? Oh, good number, Pulitzer Prize winning story but a couple of pension funds, a couple of union pension funds said we're gonna do a civil action against Walmart for doing this and Walmart tried to pull an end run by spending $430 million on compliance, lawyering up and saying, trying to convince the courts that they were serious about getting ahead of this bribery question the courts in Delaware said, uh-uh, we're gonna make you give all those documents to these lawyers for these two pension funds and that's huge, the last thing was the Harvard Institute for International Development and the Russian privatization there was a story and institutional investor this guy doggedly pursued, you know, Jeff Sacks and a guy- Andre Schleifer. Schleifer, Schleifer's a tenured professor still at Harvard and that forced Harvard to give back $25 million to USAID because they saw a lot of dirty dealing and these, you know, the oligarchs were the ones benefiting from the privatization in Russia so I'll leave it there and hopefully we'll get to some questions you might have about me. Actually, Jeff, I have some questions. Oh, sorry. I mean, there were millions of things I wanted to ask you but we've, you know, not as much time as I could spend all day on this but I did wanna ask you, one thing that people are always saying to me is could we, could the successes of the Nike campaign would that be possible today and can in the sort of fragmented world that we live in with so many different investigative reporting websites, so many little stories and what about boycotts? Is that even possible now or was this really, or does it maybe be different tactics? It's not so generous. It's pretty close because of the breadth. I mean, the length of the campaign. This is like a 12 years invested in this before we got to, you know, the nois but two things, two cases I'll give you that give me hope is that if you're persistent you still can get restitution for workers. There are two cases. There are very different cases. One was the United Students Against Sweatshops. One guy just got determined to fight for these workers in Honduras that again, Nike had cheated. Nike Producing Factory and he pursued it just, you know, by bringing workers from Honduras, taking them around the country, organizing in very innovative and aggressive ways and he won that restitution case. The workers got millions in compensation. Another one, a very different case. Some Vietnamese group in Australia, expat Vietnamese in Australia learned about a factory in Malaysia producing t-shirts for Nike and all full of Bangladeshis and Vietnamese who were horribly treated and they got a film crew from Australia to go there, film it and that film alone. I mean, that was almost all it needed to be done for these workers to get millions in restitution. So I've been disappointed that there haven't been more of these, you know, these types of efforts because God knows there are many opportunities to do it. On the boycotts, I'll tell you, I worked on the last successful boycott in America with the clothing and textile workers. But they were back when they were the amalgamated clothing workers of America in the 70s and we, you know, hurt this company. Willie Farah was the guy who put all of his pants factories on the Texas-Mexico border in the 70s and hurt him, but that was the last boycott that was successful in the States. And I see the Nike campaign as an implied boycott because their sales fell in America, 96, 97, 98, all the way up to 99 when they were spending billions in advertising. So their US sales suffered because of, you know, the hammering they were getting in the press. So, you know, I never called it a boycott, nobody ever presented it that way, but people put two and two together. If you're saying this company is not worthy of your trust, then, you know, they react against it. Really interesting. I mean, in a way, you're also reminding me a bit of this wonderful series in Bloomberg about the labor conditions in the iPhone 5 factory in Malaysia because I don't know that anybody stopped buying, you know, Apple products. It's very tough to pry Apple aficionados away from their gadgets. I mean, that's a difficult one. I have a plan we can discuss later, but it wouldn't involve actually asking people not to buy the thing, but connect those workers with the consumers. We can do that now with the Weibo, is it the Twitter of China? And, yeah. I think there's a way to address it, and I'd very much like to explore that. I mean, I think one of the questions that really, one of the things that's interesting about the book is there's some examples of journals that really made a difference, and then there's plenty of examples of journalism that didn't make any difference. For example, Gareth Jones' coverage of the Ukrainian famine in 1932. He wrote 30 stories about it, published 30 stories over two weeks, and nothing happened because the geopolitical situation was such that no one was gonna send any food aid, whereas in 1943, when the statesman showed photographs of starving children in Calcutta, the British were ashamed. So, I mean, clearly there's lots of things that you have to have in place for journalism to make a difference, right? One is at your point that it has to be sustained over a long period of time. One, terrible expose usually doesn't affect anybody. Second is you have to be writing or exposing organizations or entities that actually care about their reputation. So Stalin didn't necessarily care. People in the US thought people were starving in Ukraine. And then clearly there's a distinction between a domestic audience and an international audience. I lived in Vietnam for several years and the Vietnamese cared a lot about what the Vietnamese, the Vietnamese government and the party cared about what Vietnamese people thought, but they didn't necessarily care that much about what foreigners thought. So I know you're gonna say something. So, do you want to wait before I turn it over for the phone? No, I just say the Vietnam case was so interesting because we gave to Roberta Baskin of CBS, the consumer reporter who did the Indonesia Nike story. We gave her translations from the Vietnamese labor newspaper that described these workers getting slapped around. And she was on a plane within a couple of weeks. I mean, it was just that, and that was definitely a message from that government to those companies saying, people around those factories will burn the damn factories down unless you deal with this. Yeah, well, I mean, sorry. Once now we're on Vietnam, I used to live there and I did some labor stories. So now I really could go all afternoon because obviously Vietnamese government was in a way very divided, right? Because there were union elements that cared about working conditions. And then there were people that just wanted to attract foreign investment and would tell Vietnamese journalists and foreign reporters, you know, don't cover this. So I think playing to kind of domestic constituencies also matters a lot. But I think what I wanna talk to Cliff about, well, you've got two great books on the subject. One about the global right wing and then the one that really kind of inspired me for this book in which you talk about how foreign causes get international attention. So I'd love to hear you talk about that a bit too. Sure, yeah. Thanks very much. Oh, thank you. My interest in this whole area is, I guess mostly academic rather than activist, but I am very concerned about the kind of issues that Jeff is talking about. And my interest started really when I read back in the mid 1990s about the execution of Ken Sarawiva, an activist from Nigeria from a small ethnic group, the Agoni, who was executed by the military government of Nigeria in 1995. And in reading about that case, I first understood him as an ethnic activist trying to get more rights for his small group, trying to get more power for his group within the Nigerian state. And I became very interested in why that group in particular did kind of rise to the top of the media agenda, at least for a short period of time in the 1990s and why I even came to know of his group and of him when in particular he was just one of many other ethnic activists among minority groups in Nigeria trying to get international attention and support for his cause. So I got very interested in trying to come up with kind of a theory, if you will, about how some cases like his get to the top of the international agenda and others don't. And a big part of it, I found, was the role of the media, definitely. But I actually tried to take it back a step and look at the way in which local activists first try to promote their causes through any mechanism at all, whether domestic or international. And a lot of times these local activists will find they're up against the total stone wall within their own societies. Certainly Sarah Weewa did in the early 1990s, again a military dictatorship that didn't really pay any attention to his demands for his group. And so he became a key actor in trying to get international attention and support for his group. He traveled overseas, he had the resources to do that. He was a fairly wealthy man, actually a member of the media in Nigeria and he tried to get the attention of non-governmental organizations in Europe and in the United States to his, the problem is that his group was facing. Initially he didn't succeed particularly well. A number of groups in the environmental field and the human rights field basically didn't feel that the problems his group was facing which he did frame as an inability to get the interests of this minority group recognized within Nigeria. They didn't see those as important enough or relevant enough to their causes. And in frustration he began to write pieces in the Nigerian media and I tried also to get it to the international media. The piece that I have in the book that he wrote in 1990 basically says if the Nigerian government doesn't do something to try to deal with the demands of these minority groups, doesn't stop repressing that there's gonna be a war in the Niger Delta. Unfortunately that really wasn't listened to by the government and it wasn't picked up by the international press at all. Over a decade later there was very severe bloodshed in the Niger Delta which in some ways continues to today. Certainly in the late 90s, early 2000s it was quite severe. But anyway he did ultimately succeed in getting at least some attention for his cause. And the way he did this I think was quite interesting and says something about how the press sometimes does get involved and sometimes doesn't get involved in particular issues. As I said his main focus initially was on the ethnic rights and repression of the minority group in Nigeria. But to get the international press interested in the problems that the group was facing he had to really reframe it to make it more interesting and appealing to international audiences. And he did that by focusing on the role of Shell Oil Company in the Niger Delta. Shell had actually been present there for decades and its operations were not up to any types of international environmental standards. There were many accidents, many oil spills. They also often turned to the Nigerian military or police forces to force workers to do things they might not otherwise do or to repress strikes. And so Sarah Weewa and what I call basically a kind of a marketing campaign reframed those the issues that had originally spurred Agony activism namely minority rights within Nigeria. Reframed them as the repression of this indigenous group by a multinational corporation. A corporation which kind of reminiscent of Nike sells directly to consumers in the developed world. And therefore there could be a relatively direct connection made between what was happening to the Agony people in the Niger Delta and what you and I might buy at a gas station on the street in Europe or in the United States. And when he did make that connection and began talking about it to various non-governmental organizations especially environmental ones like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. It started to get some real traction in the international media. And for me what was interesting was that he was able to in a sense shift the main focus of what the Agonis were concerned about locally to something somewhat different at the international level. I mean environmental problems were real for the people of the Agony of the Niger Delta but they were the ones that really took off internationally whereas the minority writes problems. The difficulty they had getting representation at the international level really didn't pick up internationally among the medium. So for me this suggested that a major problem that a lot of local activists face is how to make their very pressing national or domestic demands appealing to international audiences. And this kind of reframing process that he did and I found a lot of documents showing the shift and the way he portrayed this cause over time was really quite key. The other thing that I think is interesting and important and also kind of relates to Jeff's earlier point and some of what Anu was saying is that it's not every activist that can necessarily do this. As I mentioned, Sarah Weewa was a wealthy man and had a lot of international contacts. He spoke English fluently and he was a very articulate writer. So he was able to do this kind of international marketing in a way that a lot of local groups, particularly the ones I compared his group to in the Niger Delta weren't able to do. In addition, he faced a very repressive state which did not respond to the demands domestically but which was kind of seen as a pariah state and of course a very well-known state being the largest by population in Africa. So I think the enemy that they were trying to, that they were facing in that case was one that could also attract international attention both of course Shell but also the Nigerian state at that point under this military dictatorship. So all of that in the book that I wrote, The Marketing of Rebellion, I try to put into a broader theoretical framework to try to understand why in some cases small scale social movements or insurgent groups can gain international attention whereas others that look very similar operating at the same time against the same opponents might not be able to gain so much attention. And of course, unsurprisingly, I have a little connection which is that I was covering Shell from Amsterdam during the 90s and I don't think you can overestimate what a huge story that was. I remember that annual shareholders meetings when people call for a moment of silence and how Shell after Kent Harawira was executed by the government and the newspaper coverage, you remember in the days leading up to his execution and the days afterwards. It was really a kind of a tremendous media phenomenon in the way that Nike was too. This is such an interesting conversation because it's turning so much into kind of tactics about advocacy. I know also you've made the point in your book that the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi sort of fit into your theoretical framework because they're also very personable, speak English or have a lot of international contacts. I don't know if you want to comment on that or if I should weigh in with Kyi here. Well I would just say, I mean, I think that, especially with regard to the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama, in looking at their case, which in some ways is successful because they are very well known internationally, the flip side is that they really haven't achieved a lot of what they might want within China. Even though they have a major international following, it's a situation where they're facing a very difficult and powerful foe. And so to focus just on the international media attention can I think sometimes divert attention from the fact that they may not actually be achieving all that they really want on the ground. But from the more sort of academic standpoint, it's interesting to note that other minority groups in China, like the Uighurs, a Muslim group in Western China, facing almost exactly the same kind of repression that the Tibetans have, have not even gotten that high level of international media attention or they're certainly not as well known as the Tibetans among the foreign populations for what that's worth, I guess I'd say. And that comparison also helps bring out another aspect of this. I think the identity of the group that's seeking international attention can make a difference. I think that Tibetans, first of all, having the Dalai Lama as their leader as mentioned with the various charismatic and articulate aspects that he, characteristics that he clearly has makes a difference. But I think the fact that the Uighurs are a Muslim group that they've been heavily tarred as terrorists by the Chinese government, I don't think that's really correct in a lot of ways. But to the extent that's happened and it fits into this broader global narrative about terrorism, that has I think kept their cause from rising as significantly as the Tibetans. Absolutely, and I think there's loads of data about how much money people give when there's a flood in Pakistan versus a flood in somewhere that's more appealing or more friendly to us. You also, I mean, it also touches on the point that Jeff made, which is that journalism or campaigns can have an effect when it's something small and easy to fix, whereas something huge like redrawing boundaries, that's obviously gonna be a much more difficult cause. So I think this brings us very nicely in many ways to the whole point about Burma, Myanmar, and Unicale. On several levels, one of the things I tried to do in the book as much as possible was include journalism from developing countries written by reporters in those countries. And I wanna also just mention in the book that some of the pieces are more kind of classical campaigning journalism, but a lot of it is sort of good old fashioned investigative journalism. And if we were in a room with more, had more journalists on the panel, we'd probably talk a little bit more about the journalism and the techniques and the reporting. But I think it's nice to keep going with this sort of activist question. So one, the piece that you introduced, Katie, is interesting on a few levels. One is that because Burmese journalists were not able to write about these problems, a foreign journalist from the Los Angeles Times were the ones who exposed the story. So I'd love to hear your take on that. Then there's of course something you both sort of touched on, which is the interplay between foreign coverage and domestic coverage and domestic impact, right? Sometimes when the local press can't cover it, the foreign press can, it can get picked up locally or at least there's an international sort of embarrassment that can happen and push governments. And then the third thing is because you were involved in this lawsuit that went on for years, I'm happy that you'll be able to talk a little bit about legal questions. And of course, oil and mining are a big theme of the book because there's so much, there's so many human rights, there's so much journalism about it all over the world with sort of varying degrees. So there's some thoughts for you. Thank you so much, Katie. It's the first time we're actually on a panel together on all the book events. I'm really, really glad to be in the same room as you. Yeah, me too. Thank you. So I know this was kind of random like who's in DC, but you just set me up so well for what I wanna say because EarthRates International, the organization that I co-founded and that I still run was really established in 1995 to deal with the two things that you both just precisely spoke about. First, I was a third year law student in the 90s when it was true that, okay, a corporation goes overseas, commits or is complicit in human rights abuses and there's nowhere to adjudicate it. They're above the law in this age of globalization. There was no globalization of justice in the law. It was very clear that a company was subject to the law of the land in which it operated. So if it was operating in Burma, great, bring them to court in Burma. If it was operating in Nigeria, great, bring them to court in Nigeria. And in those two cases, obviously a military dictatorship, very repressive, it would have been life-threatening for people to try to pursue their cases. And so I started EarthRates with the goal of changing that and for sure the imprisonment, the torture and eventually the execution of Ken Sarawila and the Igoni Nine were a watershed moment in terms of the complicity of oil companies and corporations in general in human rights abuses and also the connection between environmental harm and human rights abuses. The Ken Sarawila campaign was the first time in which global human rights organizations and global environmental campaigners came together on one shared campaign. He was a prisoner of conscience for Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, the biggest organizations in the world came together to campaign to save his life and EarthRates eventually represented his family and others in a lawsuit against Shell demanding accountability for their role in his torture and execution. So these two sort of problems of lack of accountability and no court to go as well as the interconnection between human rights abuses and environmental harms are what inspired me and others to start EarthRates back in 1995. And the first place that we went was, as Anja mentioned, to Burma because one of our co-founders was from Burma. And brutal human rights abuses, slave labor, torture, rape on widespread scales by the military for decades. But in the 90s, corporations started getting involved and companies started going into Burma in search of these valuable resources, oil, gas, mines, gems and literally doing deals with the Burmese military signing contracts. And this was the subject of the piece that I set up in the book about Unicale, which has since been taken over by Chevron, but at that point a US multinational oil company based in Los Angeles that had gone into a contractual relationship with the Burmese Army, which is notorious for human rights abuses, to construct a pipeline across Burma to carry natural gas from Burma into Thailand. And as part of the contract, the Burmese Army was actually hired by the oil company to provide security for the pipeline. And in fulfilling its contractual responsibilities, the Burmese Army did what it always did in its security operations. It forced villagers out of their homes. It enslaved villagers to first build the military barracks that would house the soldiers sent to provide security for the oil companies and its pipeline, and then later forced villagers to build the infrastructure for the pipeline, helicopter landing pads, pipeline roads, bridges, ports, all kinds of infrastructure that villagers from the region were forced, often at gunpoint, to do for the army who was hired by the oil company. And so, as a young idealistic lawyer who, yes, went to law school and was told that, no, you can't do anything about this because it happened in Burma, I also remembered what I had learned, one of the few things I remember from law school, that the law is a dynamic and ever-changing thing and you can always change the law if you have the right facts. And we, as a human rights organization with people on the ground, human rights investigators who were able to go into the pipeline region and talk to villagers, talk to victims and survivors, and talk to witnesses of the abuses on this pipeline, we had the evidence. We had a clear case for complicity with this oil company and the human rights abuses. And so, we filed a case in 1996 against Unical for its complicity in human rights abuses in Burma and it became the first case ever in which a company was sued in the United States for human rights abuses that happened overseas. And that was in 1996, the year after Ken Sarawila was executed and immediately the agoni came to us and said, if you can sue Unical for abuses in Burma, can you sue Shell for their complicity in the executions? And we said, let's try and we did. And so these cases went on for, the Unical case went on for 10 years, the Shell case went on for 13 years, they dragged through the courts and eventually both cases were successfully settled on behalf of our clients and these companies who fought tooth and nail to ever avoid paying a dime to our clients, eventually paid a lot more than that. And yeah, we're great lawyers but I will absolutely say that it was the journalism that forced these companies to come to the table on the eve of trial because there had been so many stories, such bad publicity, such bad press and they were terrified at the prospect of journalists. Front page newspaper, Unical, guilty of human rights abuses, Shell guilty of torture and executions. And that was what really kept the campaigning on the ground internationally going was the media and the journalism every step of the way. The piece that is in the book, as you said, was by Lisa Garian who was a journalist from the LA Times and Unical, headquartered in Los Angeles. So we also sued their president and their CEO who lived in Los Angeles, went to church in Los Angeles, were upstanding members of the community in Los Angeles and were hoping that they could sort of avoid any scrutiny because all of the stuff was happening in Burma or in this highly technical lawsuit that nobody really understood. And the interesting thing was, as Anya said, not only were journalists in Burma unable to document the story and report on it, in fact the only people that could report on it were foreign journalists because the pipeline region was so highly militarized that the only journalists that were allowed to go in were those that were escorted and arranged by the oil companies. So the companies took a couple of very well-staged junkets to press junkets to the pipeline region and they showed them pig farms and chicken farms and all the development work that they were doing on the ground and how they were bringing these poor Burmese people out of poverty. And so the LA Times actually sent Lisa on one of these junkets but then let her have days on the front end and on the back end to talk to real people who had fled from the region, our clients and others to hear what the real story was on the ground. And so doing that kind of reporting in a region that you can have a rainstorm and the roads washed out and then the people that you're supposed to be meeting don't show up, which is exactly what happened to her. She had to spend a lot of time and she actually had to take two trips because the first time she came our clients couldn't cross the border into Thailand. And she still says today that there's no way that newspapers would budget for that anymore would give a journalist 10 days to cover one story and then go back when it didn't work out so well the first time due to borders closing or roads being washed out. But that story appeared, it was a front page LA Times story two days in a row right on their home turf where this oil company that was trying to hide behind oh that's all happening in Burma or that's all happening in the court they had nowhere to hide anymore and our clients who were interviewed and whose words appeared on the front page were given a voice were given a platform to tell their story for the first time and after that story came out they were like we don't care what happens in this case we had the chance to speak truth to power to tell our story and to have people listen and that was the justice that they had really cared about all along and then we won the case anyway so that was great and I do think that the media I mean we then brought that media to shareholder meetings to all kinds of campaigners were using those stories to pressure the company. It's so interesting I mean that question of documentation evidence comes over and over again in the book I mean literally in Congo in the 1890s journalists had a problem finding out what was happening in the with the rubber gathering because the boats were all controlled by the Congolese they relied on missionary accounts. I tried to do once a journalist in training in Indonesia in one of the mining areas and we were told by the Indonesian government you can't go and we said what and they said yeah the mining company controls that and we spoke to the foreign minister and said of Indonesia can't you do something they said no sorry just last week in Johannesburg I was giving course on covering oil and mining and websites you can use because obviously the hope is that the internet the data will make a difference because again so many African journalists can't get to the places where the extraction is happening and I just said yeah who in the room has been to an oil or mining area and has been taken by a big company and almost every like two-thirds of the people in the room raised their hand I mean you know I wonder whether the internet is really gonna make a huge difference because in theory now people can get information from the locals about what's happening the hope is obviously that it will but it's so interesting that Burm I mean again this is such a perennial problem and it seems like it shouldn't be really I don't know I know we're finishing at quarter to two so I don't know if Jeff or Cliff or Katie want to comment on each other's remarks before we open to the floor anything spark something you'd like to I was just thinking as you were talking about the control of information by corporations which I think is a very critical factor and not really just by corporations but also by governments and their efforts to throw kind of blanket blankets over a lot of potential problems and the examples you gave are interesting ones I have just reminded of our own government secrecy about so much that's going on with the war on terror and the difficulties independent journalists have of doing reporting outside of being embedded in the military which basically means you're being fed what they want you to see and I just think that although we've talked mostly about problems over there in the developing world we could see similar types of problems right here and that also sort of brings to mind an article I read today about what's happening in Mexico in the wake of the killings of these 43 students which has become a huge story in Mexico and of course is directly related to the drug wars and our war on drugs in the US but has not really gotten a lot of attention in the United States despite that easy connection that could be made and in some ways the responsibility of the US, our policies for what is going on there. So I guess my point is we have our own problems with controlling information within our own government and on the other hand maybe even in a place where it's probably relatively easy to get information out doesn't necessarily mean that a target government or those who are responsible are gonna actually respond. That's right. I spent the weekend reading Joel Simon's new book which I can't recommend highly enough. He's the head of the committee to protect journalists and it's called The New Global Censorship and he talks a lot about that and about surveillance and what's happened. Chapter, yeah, chapter five and six on drug wars really, really cover that. Anyway, audience, I'm sure people have questions so let me, yes in the red shirt. Hello, my name, can you hear me? I'm sure you can. My name is Adama Odefa. I'm Nigerian. I'm in the media and I was at home when the cancer we were saying happened. So it's interesting that your vision eliminates a bit of the story and a very important bit of it. So what happened was that what got international attention wasn't that cancer we were, we told his story, that Shell was killing the environment. What got international attention was that cancer we were mobilized the youth in Oguni kingdom and they attacked and brutally murdered the elders of the kingdom. Now the military dictatorship, which was mad and we all hated them, pounced on him and his execution was eventually a reprisal killing, which is wrong. So what got the media attention at that time, it became so hyper was that he didn't have a trial. They just constituted a kangaroo cot. He didn't answer. He didn't say one word in his trial and they went ahead and hung him. So everybody was appalled by that but he wasn't entirely a saint. He was also a villain. Those elders had families and they were brutally murdered on the streets of the town and displayed publicly and then the military attacked them. Yes, the all companies are hated in Nigeria till now and they do all kinds of terrible things and they cohort with the government and with the elders of the different communities where they operate, which was the reason why Ken Sarawir would thought that the answer to the problem was to kill off the elders so that he can make an example. Unfortunately, other communities in the oil producing side of the Niger Delta took that to be a precedent and went on killing as a show of activism to bring some development to their communities and this went on until eventually someone from the Niger Delta became president of the country who still is president of the country and there has been calm in the Niger Delta since he took over. Now, we don't know what's going to happen when he leaves but for now, there's calm in the Niger Delta. So that was what happened in the Ken Sarawir case and that was how we got attention. But of course, also, the American government, their foreign policy was so geared towards ending dictatorship at that time and they supported a lot of Nigerian activists and a lot of the media were fighting the dictator at that time and I remember our Nobel laureate, Waleisha Yinkai. That's terrific, but I bet other people want to ask questions, so carry on. Yeah, so please be careful not to edit history. It's not right so that the younger generation will know what the truth is. Thank you. Did you want to comment or should we just take it out? Well, yeah, I mean, I think you certainly are correct that there were the killings of these Agoni elders and I do think that Sarawir was heroized made into a kind of saint in the way that the, well, in the way that international media portrayed this, particularly in the wake of his execution. I don't know enough about what went on on the ground to comment on whether or not he was responsible. Certainly the trial, which you mentioned yourself, was really kind of a kangaroo court and so I think that this kind of complexity that you're talking about is very commonly the case in the issues that we hear about in a much more simplified version at the international level. I do talk a little bit about that in the book that I wrote, but I think that the point for us here is that that kind of simplifying of the stories is sort of one of the ways in which international tension actually does happen and as I suggested previously, the complexities regarding the ethnic interactions, the belief by the Agoni that they were not getting enough representation, not getting enough oil revenues from the central government is something that also has not, didn't really become part of the story internationally. It was just focused on the conflict between Shell and the Agoni people. Yeah, I think you're speaking to something that has come up again and again in the book, which is in a way, because journalism is storytelling, a lot of elements get left out and a lot of nuance gets left out. So it's been interesting for me as I've taken the book around the world because when I go someplace, sometimes someone will pipe up and say, well, that journalist wasn't pure enough or that journalist did another story that was terrible or that journalist oversimplified and sometimes people get really kind of angry and emotional. How could you put them in the book? So it's given me a lot of chances to kind of think about that and often the point I'll make is, you may not like the work that newspaper did five years later, but you know what? Censorship isn't necessarily the answer and I think, yeah, I guess I'm also getting a sense of in a way how publications, how ephemeral they are sometimes. So you have a journalist who was fantastic on cause A, but 10 years later did a terrible job on cause B or a publication that changed and that transition is also one of the things that I found about the book, which is that pretty much, as we think about the importance of institutions and do we need strong media, one of the surprising things about the book was that pretty much every newspaper and magazine that's in it that published incredible investigative reporting doesn't exist anymore. And I thought you had to have strong institutions that lasted for the journalism to have an impact, but in many cases the journalism endured even though the institutions didn't. So that's another point that we got from the research. Quickly, yeah? Thank you very much. My name is Nia Quete. I'm a foreign policy activist here and very much a big fan of the media and of democracy and I didn't even know that the book talked about Africa that much until your presentation. I was born in Ghana and came here to grad school, but I'm actually here to be a bit of a contrarian because I think the media also, who polices the media? And as we sit here now, two things the media have done in this country that bothers me as an Africa activist is how Ebola was covered. It's, I think it was just appalling. And African kids have been beating up and other things. Then another minor story is the revolution in Burkina Faso recently. There's good comment on it, but it's tied to other African dictators, whereas my 30 years of activism here tells me that the US actually supports all these African dictators, not just the US, but other countries too, but the US does a lot. And I wish the press would actually tell the American people, look who we are supporting and look what it is doing here. So I was hoping maybe somebody can do a book on where the media drops the ball. I mean, I think your book is great. So guess what? There is a book about that. I was just giving a talk in London and some of the professors I know at City University are about to do an updated version of the 1983 classic work on how Africa is framed. Since I do spend a fair bit of time looking at African media, I have to say that this is a comment I hear all the time how wrong the Western press gets Africa. And Ebola, I think, is very much on people's minds right now. But I actually do know two academics who are about to edit a collection of how the sort of West Frames Africa, which again is a kind of perennial subject in journalism study circles. So I think your point is well taken. Yes. I think science journalists are also appalled by Ebola's been covered. But science journalists have been let go by practically every newspaper around CNN, got rid of their science students, they have a doctor. But just because somebody's an MD doesn't mean they do a good job. And there's been a huge misunderstanding and it's been the hysteria that resulted is disgraceful. Thank you for that. And I also wanted to make another point and that is when things get oversimplified in newspapers, it is often because whoever is editing that story says we've got X number of inches and no more or this is too complicated and I'm gonna change it. And so the reporters are necessarily responsible for that kind of muddle. Okay. I think this is one of the great things about the internet is there's infinite room so we can have more in-depth reporting if people have the attention spans to sit through it and read. Did you, Katie, it's like you wanted to comment. Yeah, I think, you know, I said about sort of the Lila case and the Unical case, how the journalism actually, we felt helped our case and helped engender a lot of activism around it with whether it was shareholder or political or even forcing the company we felt to come to the table and talk to our clients. But to your point, we had the opposite impact in another one of our cases against Chevron for human rights abuses, execution and killings of environmentalists in Nigeria. And we went to trial in San Francisco and it just so happened that our trial was during the Somali pirate drama, which it was in the media. And at the same time, this was during a time when I think everyone was getting emails from people in Nigeria saying send me your bank account and there was coverage of that in the media and Chevron's lawyers absolutely used that media hysteria around the Somali pirates to paint our Nigerian clients as pirates who were just there to steal from this poor oil company, Chevron and hijacked their, yeah, and it worked. It worked, the jury was absolutely like, yeah, they're all pirates and it was unbelievable. We just were sitting there like, what just happened? So it can work the other way and I think particularly when it comes to Africa, that's a phenomenon that we have to take quite seriously. So what did the panelists think then? Now, presumably with the internet, everyone's connected. It must be, I mean, are we now getting better? I know we're getting faster information, right? And I say in the book, news travels faster now even if it's ignored when it arrives. Are we also getting better quality information to the fact that we can have instantaneous photographs and constant contact around the world? Are people gonna be better informed in your view? And Jeff, you're shaking your head. No, I think it's, you know, when there were three big networks and you got a story on the network, you could just sit back and say, well, millions, millions of people sat in their living rooms and over the next football game or whatever, we'll share what they saw and guy will say, yeah, well, I saw that too, you know. That's vitally important, that's missing. You don't have, and the resources that these networks could put into a story and develop the story and really nail it down, that is huge loss for us. And I disagree that, you know, there's just too much noise out there, there's too much information out there because there are good sites. I was very excited to see CRI Online, Center for Investigative Reporting online, now has an analyst, impact analyst. This is great. This is absolutely what we gotta do because these centers for investigative reporting have been proliferating, but okay, maybe there's a glut. We have to take a step back and say, what has worked? You know, what have we done? What have we seen that's really worked? And one last thing is, you know, we have to have some good news reporting as well because I wanna give a shout out to USAID, I mentioned them earlier, giving me a small human rights grant, monitor compliance with the minimum wage in Indonesia. Well, they took some heat for that. The Nike rep in Indonesia called them up and said, were you giving money to this guy who's, you know, we're getting hammered in the press and you know, it's partly your fault. They gave me a grant just before I left Indonesia, they gave my little institution a grant, 16 times the size of the original grant, just to say to this company what they thought. And they really deserve to be applauded for that. You don't ever see good news stories about, you know, what an aid agency or a government agency has done it very rarely, you know. So, you know, what we did with that money was to interview workers, 160,000 factory workers in Indonesia were interviewed over, and this built up, because they were asked, did you get the minimum wage, did you get the week after Ramadan off, did you get, you know, the bereavement leave or something and these girls said, I had no idea. And, you know, they themselves took to the streets, their agency is what brought change, you know, and that's what I think I may have kind of skipped over in my presentation, it was a number of strikes and the demands these workers were making that really sealed the deal. Yeah, Claire, Katie, any comments? I think one thing I want to say, oh good, Alicia, I was hoping that we'd hear from you. I was going to call on you. Hi, Alisa Tkacheva. My question is about how the events in Ukraine are being covered and what the role that investigative journalism can play when two states are practically unfolding this like propaganda campaign against each other. Thank you. Actually I was hoping you were going to talk about Ukraine, I was going to ask you to, what do you have? Did you call it so close, what do you have? Can you? Well, my question is, are the stories that we've been talking about, the state doesn't think there's no more digital or what do you say that is coming at all in this sense? I'm not a journalist, of course, but I would certainly say it's a difficult situation and you certainly hope that journalists will probe and investigate the statements that are made by the two rival governments and their allies, because I think internationally other states are taking one or another side and my own view is that often journalists on certain beats will just kind of convey what the government spokesman is saying, even in democracies, rather than trying to critically analyze what's being said and so I think obviously there are many examples of journalists who do go beyond just the statements and not report them as fact, but I think in this kind of almost interstate conflict as you're saying, it's particularly important but difficult also to get to what's really happening on the ground because the different states are gonna exercise real control over these areas, you may not be able to get in at all unless you're being embedded in one way or another by the different militaries or governments, so it's a very difficult situation. I definitely make it a point not to talk about things that I don't know what I'm talking about, Ukraine and that situation is, I know what I read in the media, but I will say that these days it's very hard in most situations to distinguish between the corporation and the state and so I do believe that any situation, there are going to be corporate actors, there are going to be financial actors, there will be government actors and you really need to dig into all of it to find out what's really going on so I just a couple of comments to wrap up, I think that war time is always sort of disastrous for journalism in many ways, I think that historically, again, I'm thinking about some of the coverage of the Boer War, obviously the Vietnam War, World War I, clearly during war time I think the first Iraq War, the first instinct of the press is to rally to the government and I think that would be true pretty much and I'm trying to think of some exceptions but so I think that you often get the sort of competing nationalist narratives, no question. Again, the conflicts going on around the world now are extremely dangerous for journalists, especially the freelancers that are being sent out that are being used or just being hot without any protection. Journalists who aren't even on assignment are getting killed, Jill Simon talks about that, the fact that the internet has caused this disintermediation, people don't even need journalists to tell their story anymore so they can just kill them so I think that's really terrible and I'm not sure that's gonna aggravate all the problems that we've just talked about. I also wanna, but I do wanna end on a cheerful note which is that when you spend a couple of years reading journalism over the last 150 years, you realize how much great reporting is happening right now and it's astonishing to me. I think when I look at the 19th century and I look at where we are today, there is, as Jeff pointed out, an abundance, a fascinating, rich, marvelous reporting happening all over the world. I think that it's also partly that we get used to getting our news in a certain way and how we like it to look changes so to read the sort of turgid parliamentary analysis of the British Newspapers of the 19th century doesn't even fit with our modern psyche just as nowadays people like maps and visuals as well much more than say before. So I think, I can't speak to the future of journalism. I don't know where the funding will necessarily come from but I do wanna say that reading lots and lots of old newspapers makes, has made me feel very sort of cheerful about the coverage we're getting now despite all the obstacles that we've also talked about. So thanks everybody for coming on this formal weather. I just point out, I have a little Nike campaign scrapbook up here, it's 20, 30 pages long if you're interested. Mostly pictures, the visuals that are missing from the book which I wanna talk to Anya about having a study guide to accompany the book I think journals and crafts would really. I love it, and if we can sell 7,500 copies we can go into a second printing and then I wanna put in, I'm getting all these ideas for people that should have been in this one. So if everyone in the room could each buy 100 copies we'll get there for the second edition. Thanks everybody on this horrible weather. Thank you to the panelists too.