 Okay. Thanks everybody for being here. I'm Dan Roddy, I hold the Shrier Chair here at CSIS. We're going to be talking about media matters, how media connectivity and an open internet are changing the world. I think the issue of an independent media, free communication is an important part of democracy and good governance. It's about holding governments accountable. It's about private enterprise. There's a whole series of important functions that an independent media, both traditional media and new media, play. The United States has played a number of roles in encouraging the proliferation of independent media and free media in a number of quiet ways, working through democracy and governance partners, through AID funding, through the State Department. Some philanthropy and some companies do this, though I think it's primarily, has been a U.S. government and ODA type function, a foreign aid type function. So I think it's a particularly interesting panel, very thoughtful folks. You have their biographies in front of you. We have Jeanne Borgot, who's the President of Internews. We also have Ambassador Carlos Pascual, who's the former U.S. Ambassador of Mexico and Ukraine. And we also have Masoud Faravar, who's the Chief of Afghanistan Service for the Voice of America. So I think you're going to hear some very interesting insights to this important and timely topic. You can think of any number of regions around the world where this is a salient topic. I'm going to ask each of the panelists to make some opening remarks to get us kicked off. And then I've got a series of some pointed slash leading questions for the panelists, and then we'll open it up for a discussion with the audience. So without further ado, I'm going to turn the floor over to Jeanne. Jeanne, the floor is yours. It's okay to sit here. Thank you, everyone. And thank you, Dan, for hosting this panel. This is needless to say a topic that's near and dear to my heart. I wanted to start today basically to tell my personal story about sort of how I got so consumed with this issue. And it started a long, long time ago, so long ago when Carlos and I were working together at USAID back in the early 90s, I was supporting the democracy programs in Moscow from 1993 to 1996. And it was an amazing time there, coups, the first parliamentary democratic elections, reforms that were working, reforms that weren't working. But it was really an exciting time to be working in the democracy sector. There were bad things happening. And one of the hardest things that happened was in December 1994 when Yelton started the first war in Chechnya. And one of the most disheartening parts about it was the lack of conversation about it. No one was focusing on it in Moscow. This war was happening. Many of us were devastated by this development. But no one was talking about it. No one was talking about it until one small thing happened, a small television station in Dagestan videotaped the first body bags of Russian soldiers coming out of Chechnya. And that wouldn't have had an impact, except that the video was picked up by a Moscow station. And when a Moscow station picked up a video, it was broadcast around the country. And this type of video, seeing those body bags, stimulated some of the first anti-war protests happening against that war. And I was just, in all of the work that I did in Moscow, that was one of those powerful things that I saw in a very tiny way, changing that society. After Moscow, I went on to the Balkans. And I spent time in Serbia, where I saw the revolutionary power of media with B92. Then on to Kosovo, after the war, when you saw the importance of media when it comes to nation building, with Kohadetore Radio TV 21, I was completely hooked. And so in 2001, I joined InterNews. And at InterNews, I've been able to really bear witness to this power around the world. I've seen it just recently in Burma. Some of the most exciting parts of the transition in Burma are about the opening of the media and information space. It's complicated what's happening there, but you're seeing a lot of excitement in that space. I was just in Sudan, incredibly difficult environment, incredibly vulnerable. But there's a heroic journalist all around the country, new community radio stations popping up, all sorts of amazing things happening at journalism schools. And so you're seeing progress, you're seeing development. And I think one of the most exciting cases, I'm so glad Masoud is here, is in Afghanistan. The media opened up at the end of 2001, and it's one of the most vibrant, pluralistic, independent media you'll find in the world. And in a place that needs a lot of good news, the media story is incredible. So I'm really thrilled to be talking about an issue that I obviously feel passionate about. But one of the things, one of the reasons I'm really happy to be here is that we have so much more progress to make. This job isn't anywhere near done. In fact, it's getting harder around the world. The media profession is incredibly dangerous and it's gotten only more dangerous in the last decade. In the last 10 years, 506 journalists have been killed doing their work. Many of them because of violence, but many of them just simply murdered for the purpose of being journalists. There's incredible censorship is on the rise. Digital surveillance, these issues are really, really crippling the journalistic profession. According to Freedom House, only one in seven people in this world live in a society that is declared to be a free press. And so we have a huge journey to make. So I just want to hope that we can, in this conversation today, really focus on that and the importance of rededicating our attention to the importance of freedom of expression and a free press. Thank you. Thanks, Jeannie. Ambassador, I know you have some some opening comments and I'll have questions for you, but Dan, thanks very much. It's a pleasure being here with Jeannie and Masoud. And with all of you for this conversation. I think Jeannie has outlined well the importance that media has has played in creating an opportunity for individuals in countries for political parties for movements to be able to have informed choices. And those informed choices have been a central part of democratic development and the ability to participate in practical ways in countries. But I think the challenge in the job is getting even harder. There's a time when we thought about media and the freedom of the media as whether or not it had the freedom and the flexibility to express itself based on a political environment and regime. We're now in a world where individual listeners have the ability to turn on and off that media as well. And it's the listener side of the equation combined with the variability of who can control it and affect it from the top. That's creating new challenges in foreign policy and in national security that we have not faced before. Let me describe a little bit of this in a couple of examples. Let's take the situation of Russia and Ukraine. From a perspective that one might have from the West, from institutions around this town, one might see that since March of this year, Russia has violated the territorial integrity and sovereignty of a neighbor, annexed the territory of Crimea, funded special forces that have gone into the eastern parts of Ukraine, provided equipment to support an insurgency. That equipment was responsible for the downing of an international commercial airliner. And when that still did not result in a clear and absolute crisis that Ukraine cannot contain, Russia invaded with its troops itself. And indeed, as in Chechnya and the 1990s, one of the factors that changed some of that dynamic was when you had the tragedy of Russian kids coming home in body bags, it was hard to deny that Russia was actually there. So you have this reality that we might look at and say, what's ambiguous about that? If you look at this situation from within Russia, the perspective that you will get is, why does the international community not understand us? Why are Russians not respected? That Ukrainians are a state of nationalists who do not understand and respect the rights of other citizens, and that Russia had to take a role to protect the rights of its citizens within Ukraine. How is that perspective so fundamentally different? Part of it is indeed the role of the state. And if one looks at Russian participation in social media, whether you like it or not, it was brilliant. If you look at their daily takes, the capacity to get out a message and penetrate has been phenomenal. But the other side of it, the flip side of it is that there has not been an interest or a willingness to hear alternative views. It's not that the alternative views haven't been out there, but that the lack of trust that has existed precluded those messages from penetrating. And how does the international community confront that situation? Where a president of a country can say that I have 85% of the people behind me. I have a mandate to do what I am doing. And yet at the same time, you have violated international law, destroyed the effectiveness of the OSCE, made the UN Security Council effectless through your veto power, and invaded the neighbor of a territory. And in the end, the impact, the place that this has driven policy is that the only way to get a change in this situation is to create pain. And that pain has been prescribed through economic sanctions. And ironically, economic sanctions which are starting to bite and hurt Russia, the Russian economy, the population and workers, but not necessarily having a change in the policy environment. How do you break through? And there are a number of other examples that we can go through. I will just mention one other, and maybe we can come back to this in the discussion as well. It's affecting the world of energy and the world of climate. Today we live in a situation where the projections over the next 20 years have much greater investment in renewable energy than in any other form of energy. And yet at the same time, the way that translates into actual generation capacity, renewable energy isn't keeping up, it isn't going fast enough, and we cannot find a solution to climate change unless we radically change the incentives for investments in individual countries, and in particular Asia. And if you look at Asia, the story is coal. In India, the consumption of coal is rising 4% or 5% a year. In Southeast Asia, coal is going to go from 28% to the fuel mix to close to 50% to the fuel mix. And why? Because it's not competing. If you look at it from a perspective of what projects generate the best returns from investors, it's still renewables have not been able to compete. It has been very difficult to have that discussion and debate because it is taken in some cases as a lack of belief in the importance of renewable energy and the potential for its competitiveness. It's not that one doesn't believe in the potential of renewable energy. It's that in the end, when you've got banks and private investors making investment decisions, their decisions are going to be based on what projects give them the best rates of return. And there are a whole range of factors that are affecting those equations and affecting the outcomes. If you can't have a discussion and a debate that actually penetrates to those that are the believers on renewable energy issues to be able to get greater sophistication on how you put together the worlds of finance and energy development in order to come up with better solutions, we can't succeed. And so part of the challenge, just going back to Jeannie was laying on the table about the importance and the issues of media today. The challenges of having multiple independent voices still exist. That doesn't go away. But the other part of the challenge is to understand in a world where you can have RSS feeds, you can look at the websites you believe in, you can get yourself fed with the information that reinforces your particular point of view. How do you break into that world to have an impact on views and perspectives to get better policy outcomes? And that is one of the hardest foreign policy challenges that we face today that is affecting the other big issues like Russia and Ukraine, like the issues of climate change. I think it's affecting many of the questions that we're facing in the Middle East. And so I think this issue has to be put front and center on the agenda and reinforces why there has to be such an invigoration of why we focus attention on media today. Thank you. Masoud, talk a little bit about your work at Voice of America and tell us a little bit about the freedom of media in Afghanistan. Thank you, Dan. I'm truly humbled to be on this panel with panelists of such caliber. I am the service chief for the Afghanistan service at Voice of America. I've been with VOA for the past two years. Before that, I spent four, almost five years working in Afghanistan for inter-news. So it's great to be on the panel with Jeannie. I worked, I went to college and worked for almost 10 years as a business journalist in the US and went back to Afghanistan in 2007. And when I went back, for the first time, I found my passion and it was either, you know, I had a great job here in the US, but when I was in Afghanistan, I realized that every day I, through the work I did, I made a difference, whether it was through working with young journalists and mentoring them or through reporting and programming that had an impact. I, a couple of nights ago, I watched a great new documentary about the final days of President Karzai. It was produced by a colleague, a journalist who works for Channel One in Kabul. And in the beginning of the documentary, he made a comment, said something that, to me, kind of encapsulated how Afghan journalists viewed President Karzai. They're a love and hate relationship with him. He said that throughout his 13 years in office, Hamid Karzai viewed local media with great skepticism. He gave dozens of interviews to foreign media outlets, but only a handful to Afghan media outlets. He considered young journalists superficial, yet the greatest achievement of President Karzai's government was the development of, the development and growth of a free media sector, the greatest achievement. That was quite a statement and Afghan journalists treasure their freedom that they've been given. The story of this greatest achievement has been told many times, and I don't want to rehash it here, but suffice it to say that the progress of development has been breathtaking. For the West, I think the return on investment has been spectacular. For the price of a jet fighter, we have built a vibrant, professional and increasingly self-sustaining media. Talk of a big bang for your buck. I think that's something to be proud of. The impact, I talked about impact on how every day as a journalist working for internews and the radio program there, I felt I was making an impact and the media has had a great impact and it extends beyond just democratic development. It's about changing social attitudes and there's data to back it up how in the past decade through exposure to the foreign, foreign cultures and outside world, people's attitudes towards human rights, democracy, women have changed for the positive. There is the recent Asia Foundation survey had an interesting finding that for the second year in a row, 75 percent of Afghans expressed trust and confidence in the media. This is for the first time, this surpassed trust and confidence in religious leaders. So, that's, people are behind it and they realize that the media is an important pillar of the new Afghanistan. Finally, I wanted to get back to what Jeanie said about the challenging environment. I think the achievements that we have made in the past 13 years have been great. We have bigger, bolder and more professional media sector but it's also very fragile and in need of continued and sustained support. I also think that the media serves as an important bulwark against the return of the Taliban. In Afghanistan, one thing that I noticed when I went back is that every journalist is a media activist and I say that in a positive sense that everyone fights for their rights. Every time there is an attempt to clamp down on the media, journalists take to the streets, raise their voices and they are not going to easily give back the freedoms and the rights that they have achieved in the past decade. I look forward to taking your questions. Mr. Thanks. Let me start with you and could you talk about how many journalists were there in 2000, in the year 2000 in Afghanistan and how many are there today? Start with that and then could you talk a little bit more about what the role has been of the United States, a little bit more specific in terms of the sorts of training that's gone on, in terms of supporting that proliferation of journalists to me because I think it's been quite impressive. Well, the media sector is one of the fastest growing sectors in Afghanistan. I think I've seen figures like 10,000 new journalists. Right, that's up from zero from 14 years ago. From almost zero. Literally zero. That's right. It's interesting to contrast that with what has happened in this country in the U.S., over 50,000 jobs have been lost in the print media sector. I was lucky to escape the downsizing in this country and spent a few years of my professional career in Afghanistan. Internews has been at the forefront of media development in Afghanistan through training courses and a local media partner. Jeannie can talk about that. And that's been funded by U.S. government, USAID or the State Department. That's right. That's right. And Voice of America as an international broadcaster is a major player in Afghanistan and has been, I grew up listening to Voice of America in the early 80s. I never thought that I would come to Washington and run the service. Some of the broadcasters who are still on the air were people that I looked up to. And I think at Voice of America at the institutional level, there's a lot of soul searching going on about the organization's mission. Some of you may know about the new legislation on the Hill that tries to reorganize the agency. But at this Afghanistan service level, I think we have a very clear head about what is it that we want to accomplish in Afghanistan. And that is to engage and inform audiences in support of democracy and freedom. I think the international broadcasters also play an important role in serving as a model for local media and as a partner to a lot of local affiliates. Mr. Soud, I think about, I'd be curious about what is the media mix in Afghanistan. Do most people consume information through radio? Is it television? Is it a society that, how is information transmitted? That's going to one question. And the second is, could you talk a little bit about, given the proliferation of media, what is that meant in terms of specific changes in attitude? Certainly that statistic about the trust in, the trust to me is fascinating that there's, it's media is more trusted in Afghanistan than religious leaders. That's really quite striking. I'm not sure what percentage of the United States trusts the media in this country. But I'd say, but I'm sure it's much higher in Afghanistan than it is in the United States. But just so specifically, how is media consumed in Afghanistan today? And then second, talk a little bit about what changes in the last 14 years, what societal attitudes or changes have, can you track in terms of polling because of this openness or this change in media? So I think the rapid development of the media sector was a testament to Afghanistan's hunger for information. You know, this sector was really built from scratch. Afghans are news junkies and sophisticated consumers of media. Quite a lot has changed in the past 13 years. Radio remains the primary source of information and news for most Afghans. That is changing. And radio listenership is down. TV viewership has increased in the past couple of years. And we are seeing that in our own research surveys at VOA. Our TV viewership numbers were up by about 30% in the past year. Radio listenership for VOA study, but generally in Afghanistan it has declined, especially in the cities. In most cities, I think for the first time two years ago, TV viewership topped radio listenership. But when you get out of major population centers, radio remains the primary source of information. I think radio will remain important for at least another generation in Afghanistan. At VOA, there has been a strategic focus on TV and digital media in the past couple of years. And that is in response to changing audience habits. VOA was primarily a radio broadcaster, but now most of VOA's audience comes from TV and digital and not radio. But in terms of the impact that the media has had in Afghanistan, I think the primary impact has been the contribution to a democratic society. You can't have democracy without the free press and vice versa. Public education has been another important role that the media has played in terms of informing and educating audiences, citizens about the new Afghanistan, the new democratic institutions and the rights that they have achieved. Afghans are very, have or polite but have very strong opinions and you can hear that and see that on TV and radio every day. Social media has seen a dramatic increase in growth in the past couple of years and the most recent election this year in both rounds. Social media played an important role both positive and negative. I think it was served as a double-edged sword. Social media can be a unifying force as well as a polarizing force. It is what you make of it. But that is also that's a small segment of the audience but it's rapidly growing and at VOA we are allocating greater resources to digital media. Mr. Su, let me just let me push on one last question which is is there a VOA equivalent for either India, Pakistan or Iran? How do those three actors support or engage in media activities in Afghanistan? Well all those three countries have a broadcast into Afghanistan. Pakistan radio has a program in Dharian Pashto for Afghanistan. All India radio has a program in Dharian Pashto but they're not really major players. Iran on the other hand is a major distributor of media in Afghanistan especially in Western Afghanistan where audiences TV viewers can get the Iranian TV and at the national level there are Iranian TV programs. So Iran is a major player with Pakistan and India or not. Great, thank you very much. Ambassador both to Mexico and Ukraine and you touched on some of the challenges in Ukraine. Could you talk a little bit about a little bit more in the case of Ukraine about the role of if let's call it propaganda in terms of you certainly touched on if you could just talk a little bit about how how sophisticated some of our the adversaries if I can put it that way are in terms of using propaganda and how should independent media respond to this? How should we how should the United States be supporting an independent media that may not necessarily agree with us on everything but how do we support sort of a responding so that the narratives aren't dominated by folks that frankly are speaking a lot of untruths or pushing an untruthful line but get dominate the media that's one question in the context of Ukraine and Russia but if you could talk there's been a number of scandals around corruption and violence in Mexico in the last several months that have had a media component if I think about the scandal with the first lady some that had to do with her deciding to talk to a to a gossip magazine about her home and and that's led to a whole series of events and to talk a little bit about how the role of media has been played in on that as well as in the case of some of the vibe the terrible violence that's happened recently with those those students in Mexico talk about what role the media has played in some of that and how independent media has has had a role in that so Ukraine Russia and propaganda is one question and then in the role of independent media and some of these scandals in Mexico two small issues two easy ones you know on on Russia and Ukraine you almost have to think about three different audiences that you're working with and trying to deal with at the same time there is a Russian audience which in and of itself has its diversity there's a Ukrainian audience and in that Ukrainian audience you have its own diversity and in particular how does the Ukrainian media and Ukrainian leadership relate to the populations of the east and south and then you have an international audience particularly Europe and the United States and if one wanted to one can almost go even further because there is yet a wider international audience that looks at the situation and sees a different type of storyline of a David and Goliath type of story and so you can't lose track of all of those pieces I think one of the things that that is a challenge in the media world that we're dealing with today is that first of all we've got so much that's played out in the 140 character world and in that four hundred forty character world the challenges how to speak in terms that grab attention which often leads to hyperbole and extremism and is suitable to links which take you to usually more hyperbole and extremism at times and so it's it's a hugely important tool but it's a tool that is unchecked and unregulated and doesn't have any of the standards of independent media that I know if you were starting a program with interviews on media training first things that you would standard you start with are the ethics of the media and how you report and multiple sources none of which applies to this world the media so then you you begin with that you have the ability to reach millions and tens of millions of people directly and that capacity to get a direct message out then starts to become its own battle with the independent media because in effect if you're in a certain country in the circumstance you don't need the independent media because you can get your message out there directly and indeed at a certain point it almost becomes a situation where what goes out through social media becomes the storyline and the independent media is reporting on that and reporting on the battle between that message and the conflicting message that you're trying to get on the other side right so it's a very different type of world that we're working with and in in Russia one of the things that has happened is that because of a lack of trust in the international community a lack of faith in whether that international community understands Russia and a perception that President Putin has been advancing and protecting Russian interests it becomes extraordinarily difficult to break through either for independent media or any other social media because there is this bulwark of perceptions that's already out there and reinforcing itself and how do you deal with that kind of challenge and I don't think we have a simple answer I think part of it requires yes still working on the ethics of independent media part of it requires understanding that there is a role for social media to play globally and internationally but once you have a mind frame and a perspective that says that this is my view crossing over that and trying to reshape perceptions becomes extraordinarily difficult to do I mean and that shouldn't surprise us that much I mean look at the the polarization that you've gotten in American politics and once you get that kind of polarization in our own political world how easy is it to break through that and actually convey opinions that have a more balanced or different perspective it's hard and so that's one of the challenges that we're facing in Russia today and Ukraine they're facing two types of challenges at least one which is extremely obvious and is really hard is that if you believe in a whole unified independent Ukraine that will retain the territories in the east and south how do you convince the populations in those parts of the country that the leadership of Ukraine believes in you cares for you and wants to reach out with to you especially at a time when you've got such a powerful media force coming from Russia and another perspective and so in the end it requires not only a message but concrete actions but when those concrete actions you have to carry out in the midst of a war it becomes extraordinarily difficult to do and potentially one of the things that you can do is to demonstrate that the rest of Ukraine has a strategy a path and a direction but how do you do that and manage that in a way that creates confidence that those who feel that they have been disenfranchised or not included are not just simply going to be left behind but that the potential for them is actually be included in another more prosperous whole and those are the kinds of challenges that are being faced by leadership and by media itself and trying to keep this country together and the change both the realities on the ground and the perceptions of what those physical realities can be as well as how you can make convey and communicate those messages with the United States and with Europe you have yet another challenge and again you've got to put this back in the broader political context that we have of instability in the Middle East had a deal with ISIS the implications that that has had on Iraq on Syria and Turkey and stability in the Levant and then you take on other crisis throughout the world whether they be longer term crises on climate change and had a deal with those to more focused issues that can arise in specific parts of the world like the South China Sea and and so the challenge that you end up facing is how to break through to political leaders who in the end want to see a problem and an issue result. I mean the transition in Chancellor Merkel if you look at her relationship with Russia and with President Putin from March to August vis-a-vis the kind of tension that we saw from August reaching a culmination point at the G20 meeting started to tell us that it took a huge amount of time for political leadership in a sophisticated country with access to all of the evidence and the media to be able to have an impact on their perceptions of what was actually happening internally within Russia and whether President Putin was actually telling the truth right so yet another challenge to actually face and in this context and the question that we have to ask ourselves is how do policymakers engage and one of the things that becomes obvious is well we got to get a lot better at understanding social media how that relates to individual populations how it relates to the official media in individual countries but it also raises the question of when is that social media is going to when is it going to be credible and how can you actually break through to be listened to we don't have great answers to those questions and I think that those are some of the issues that we have to deal with there's another set of questions that becomes also very pressing which is how do you deal with sort of the first order of journalism where you have responsibility in your reporting as the primary basis for being able to act in a responsible matter how do you deal with this in a world of social media where the last thing that you want to do is get media censorship but at the same time you want to improve the standards and the skill and the quality of those who are engaging in that world that's an area that has barely been explored and everybody looks at it with fear and trepidation because the last thing that you want to end up with is then feeling that what you're calling for is the censorship of social media and believe me there are enough states that actually want to be able to do that that there is a real dangerous road to actually go down so I'm not giving you a huge number of answers on these issues because I don't think we have the answers and what we've been seeing in the past months is reflective of the fact that we've got a lot of big problems and challenges and we haven't figured out how to step up to them and be able to handle them in the most effective way going back to Jeannie's earlier point I don't know if you want me to stop there before I keep rambling on and go to Mexico I'll come back to you about Mexico I think that thank you for that is a very complete answer thank you Jeannie I want to come back to this issue of censorship because I think this is the point that the ambassador was talking about in the case of Russia and the issue of regulation and government interference could you I know this is this has sort of been rising on your radar screen could you just talk a little bit further about that I when I think of Argentina country I know well there's been sort of increased government interference in the media I think of Venezuela another country where that that I'm familiar with where I've seen a lot more of that but you're seeing this all over the world you we were talking about this beforehand about Africa and other regions where you work just just talk a little bit further on this because I think it builds a little bit on the points that the ambassador was talking about and I think in some ways if I think about Afghanistan it's sort of that's sort of an example from the points that masseuse making of a country where there's not a lot of censorship and there it's sort of one of the good news stories of Afghanistan is the proliferation and independence of media where it's kind of sort of working and they're sort of not the sort of ham-handed regulation or heavy censorship by government so talk a little bit further about that yeah I actually want to go back to a point that Carlos is making and then come to your to your point I think that the we'd asked we talked yesterday about so what what's changed in this world and I think Carlos really captured what's changed in the digital revolution the change in the way people create consume share information and content has just wildly changed the work that we do and we are really struggling as an organization and as a field to assess where are those pressure points where do we find the place that actually can help inform debate do all the things that we knew the media did years ago and sort of refill that and I think we're in a period of transition but as we're saying back there I'm also an optimist I mean you do see the rise of importance in content I mean sort of people are starting to after lots and lots of sort of flux are starting to go back to the content producers that they trust and I think the issue of trust the issue of media literacy these issues of what are going to drive us forward going in so at interviews we're spending a lot of time thinking about what we call sort of information ecosystems that actual flow that trust where people turn to make actual decisions not just their fun Facebook feed but actual decisions about their lives and so we're really exploring that so we can figure out how to change these issues the censorship issue is really interesting because it's hitting us at a lot of different ways and censorship is changed a lot again the open digital space is really brought surveillance privacy issues like that that's really freeze and cause a chill over the sector the fact that you it's very very difficult to stay safe online it's very very difficult to stay safe with your mobile phones is very difficult to sort of protect yourself and your sources and it's and it's just ratcheted up so fast and it's so hard to stay ahead of the dangers of this profession that that's sort of like this whole new form of censorship the other form is just the interesting that going back to the Russia Ukraine model is there are countries that present themselves as democracies and present their open and independent media's when it's not in it's not happening at all I mean it's represented as this thing that isn't and I think the most interesting thing about the Russia Ukraine bit is there isn't really they call it an information war and it isn't really a specific propaganda it's an undermining a complete undermining of trust it's lobbying out all sorts of crazy ideas so that you can't trust any of it so it's totally different from a propaganda campaign of the past and so it's it's something that we've rarely seen before it's like this whole new space of what an information war means and what a propaganda means and so I don't have an answer for that particular issue but I again I'm hopeful on some of the social media coming back around I want to give one example about how it's playing out and in a place like like Burma where again we've seen journalists who were in exile for years and years and years flooding back into into Yangon and amazingly sort of able to start their own newspapers published freely and they're incredibly excited there's sort of a side story being that they're all coming back and trying to set up daily newspapers and we're looking at them like no not daily newspapers a very difficult business model you know think about the internet think about your mobile content but there is just so exciting that they can create a daily newspaper and in place that they've never been able to do that before but one of the there's very few people online but one of the the the ways in Burma it's still I don't know it's five percent somebody here might have a better statistic than I do but but people who are going online are going online via social media they're going online via Facebook it's sort of that they're the direct way to most people in Burma the internet is Facebook in the way that when we all in my generation went online for the first time it was AOL your closed garden that told you here's your weather here's your news and and that's how people are experiencing the internet in in in Burma right now and that's good I mean Facebook is bringing people online and we feel really excited about that but when we talk to our media partners there we're sort of encouraging them you've got to move beyond Facebook the power of the internet is really on outside of that place for a news organization you need to build your website both both so that you can actually generate income from your news services which you can't do on Facebook but also so you can control your reputation what happens on Facebook in the comments section gets what Carlos is saying all the good news starts here but the comments go and go very quickly into very very bad hate speech and things like that that you just lose control completely and so we're really advising our partners there's like get your own sites control that conversation control your brand find ways to monetize your content that's your future so there's that that that good and bad that Masoud was talking about about social media does have an incredible power to enhance media but there's also dangers. What does success look like how do you work yourself out of a job in terms of working with a with a partner on the ground. Well since we've been focusing so much on Afghanistan my my dream is that internews will be leaving Afghanistan in the coming years in Afghanistan we when we went in in December 2001 there was nothing it was starting from nothing that the government at the time was open to allowing for relatively open media information laws which allowed for proliferation of media outlets that's a good thing we've seen a proliferation there's hundreds of radio stations dozens of television stations but more importantly you need the support organizations that keep this alive you need the journalist associations you need the journalism schools that keep creating these new quadres there's a lot of support institutions that are critical so our strategy in Afghanistan in the early days was about sort of helping grow the market our strategies now are about building these institutions that will keep it going and keep it vibrant and alive and I do hope in a couple of years we will be out and our partners who are incredibly effective will be leading the charge. So very interesting set of activities at part of the broader democracy and governance conversation what kind of financial support has that been steady has that been growing in the last four or five years in the US government talk about how what kind of support given that 85% of your resources come from governments primarily not a USAID and the State Department flat steady or growing over the last five years. Yeah we have definitely been feeling the crunch of the cuts in foreign aid and recently we've been investigating sort of what's going on we all of the democracy organizations around how to have been feeling it I mean there's been a pretty 19% reduction last five years. It's actually much bigger than that. Oh really? Yeah we've seen it. Ha, she's setting me up here. No, what we've what we've found and this is we're working very closely with USAID on this to investigate sort of what's going on with democracy funding because we've been all experiencing cutbacks but we have discovered in the last five years that's a 38% decrease in democracy in the last five years. Yeah, yeah. That's a Twitterable tweet. So okay good. Okay I think we open it up for Q&A I'm gonna take two or three questions we'll put them as a group so this gentleman here you have to raise your hand because we're gonna group them together so if you have a question now's the moment. So who's got a mic? One of my colleagues this gentleman over here this gentleman back there this woman here so let's take those three. Name, title keep it if you could keep it brief. Yeah I'm Mark Nelson from the Center for International Media Assistance just following on the conversation that just ended. The work that we did when I was at the World Bank with inter-news on media development and how it's funded and the role of donors and this is Jeanie really knows well showed that the numbers are not only under pressure but they are really small and in this area of media development in particular. If you look at the overall impact of ODA the world is spending about $135 billion a year on development activities and of that less than 0.5% about $650 million was spent on media and we're talking about the most generous possible description of spending on media because a lot of that was promoting donor activities and communications and other kinds of things that weren't really focused on building sustainable media institutions in countries. So your question is? My question is are we spending enough in this area? Is it vastly underestimated as an area for foreign policy for overseas development assistance and as a priority of our overseas policy? Great. This woman here. Hi, my name is Heather Andrews and I'm a doc student at George Mason University in international education and my interest is digital and media literacy. And you talked a little bit about critical or media literacy and I obviously come from an education background. So as you said, to have a functioning democracy, we want a free media but I believe we also need a critically literate citizenry who's willing and able to use media literacy skills like how to deconstruct the message, identify bias, stereotyping, who's left out of this message, et cetera. So I wonder what you know about efforts to promote the explicit instruction of critical media literacy in countries and if there's a lot of will to do that or if it's really just kind of one-off teachers or small organizations who have to kind of push this through. Thank you. OK. And this gentleman back there. Hi, my name is Mustafa Murad. I work with an organization called One Global Economy and Non-Profit here. I'm not into media per se but I am in development so I'll stick by that. My concern is really the poor and the underserved who have been led down by everybody across the world. Their issues are not represented. They are not represented. And that, in my opinion, has a direct connection with trust. You trust somebody when you think he understands you or covers you. And their issues are not covered in favor of the whole grammar of things, ISIS, and whatever. So my question is, how do you make progressive media, if you will, more than a conversation among like-minded people? I'm speaking particularly about Egypt where this is definitely the case. Thank you. Thank you very much. Why don't we just take those three? So, Jeannie, I'll give you a chance to respond. Yeah, it's a diverse group of things. I'll just thank Mark Nelson for making the plug that I was going to make at the end of it. Is there enough resources? No. The answer is a very simple no. I think the interesting thing about making the case for the investment is it is beyond democracy. I mean, we know that it's about economic development, it's about social support. I mean, so media is an interesting space to invest. We view it as something like energy. Without it, with it, everything goes better. And so we're trying to make that case that you should be investing in something that actually advance, it's a root solution to advancing all sorts of development issues. The literacy issue, just quickly, have not seen a robust investment. What is this thing? Media literacy is understanding, what you're reading, understanding what you're seeing. And it's getting more complicated, actually getting to Mustafa's point. It's as stories become more complex, as the media ecosystem gets more complex, media literacy is a lot harder. And particularly these days, I mean, there's this amazing other fantastic thing happening in the media space is just the proliferation of data and data, which is such a powerful storytelling tool and sort of pulling data from governments and pulling data from this social media. And people are relying increasingly on lots of graphs and pictures and visualizations. So there's other issues. It's not just media literacy. It's graphicacy. It's numeracy. It's understanding these visuals that are coming in in really complicated ways. And so I think the future of our work will have a lot more of that and pushing that along. Going to Mustafa's point, the vast majority of the people that we work with are in that wildly underserved constituency. 60% of the world is still offline. We talk about the social media problem, but 60% of the world is offline still. So there's vast majority of people are not even part of that conversation. The second piece is of those who are online, 23% fewer women are online. And so you get to these underserved and you get to the women. And so we still have a big, big battle ahead of us to help tap into and help serve the information needs of the vast majority of people in the world. Ambassador? Ambassador, go ahead. OK. OK, Mr. Short. I think the point about media literacy is an important one. In Afghanistan, there hasn't been any systematic effort to promote media literacy. I think if you look at the audience, attitudes, and surveys that have been done, they have become more sophisticated just because consumption has increased. Media literacy should also be in Afghanistan as in other places and compass social media literacy, you know, how do you verify and content that you get on social media? And that has been an issue in Afghanistan, you know, even during the recent elections at the height of the crisis, there were calls for a clampdown on social media and even a ban on Facebook because of a perception that a lot of people were using it irresponsibly. So I think it's also part of social media literacy ethics training is also an important one that Ambassador mentioned. We want to continue to promote social media and access to social media. It's important to promote ethics of social media use. Just to add a couple of things. First on the, just putting the issue of spending and perspective, there's more capital that leaves Africa as a result of corruption and capital flight every year than foreign direct investment and foreign aid combined, right? And a huge amount of that actually goes from countries that are resource rich countries. It's the base source of capital that there is. And indeed, one of the most important tools in those countries to combat corruption continues to be media and has to be media. It doesn't mean that it's enough. It doesn't mean it's working everywhere. Nigeria is a good example. Nigeria is a country where the Nigerian leadership and others will acknowledge and recognize the depth of corruption that exists there. There is an extractive industries transparency initiative group that is quite active there. Media is quite engaged in reporting on these issues. And the good news is that there is actually a debate about corruption. And the bad news is that even with that debate, there are potentially billions of dollars that simply disappear from accounts on an annual basis. My point here is that the amount that gets spent on media relative to the billions that disappear in capital flight and corruption is tiny and minuscule. And we have to stop looking at these issues from a perspective of five or $10 million spent here or there relative to a small democracy program and a foreign aid budget. We have to look at these issues as where are the huge capital flows that are moving and occurring in the world today? And what are the factors that create a difference in how that capital can move? And media can be part of that. But we haven't thought about it from that perspective. And if you start changing that perspective, I think it starts to change the cost-benefit analysis a little bit more. On the issue of the poor and underserved, I think one of the striking things, again, let's go back to Africa, one of the revolutions in the African continent has been mobile telephones. And it was something that was simply not predicted in 1980s because we thought it was going to the spread of mobile communications was going to follow the same pattern as occurred in the United States. And you had to have landlines, and eventually you would have mobile telephones. And no, it just blew it apart. And as a result of that, it created a whole new field of economic development of how you could use mobile phones and banking. And so that became a source of economic development and growth. Now, the question that we come back to is that those telephones are fundamentally a source of communications and media. And the implication is that they're going to become a more powerful source for the future on how people communicate and how those underserved without a voice actually get their voice heard and expressed. One of the challenges still is how to make the connection between the ability to express that voice, to how do you make that connection so that it has an impact on politics? And how do you change the perception of leaders that power is sustained not by the ability to control resources and to keep them for yourself, but to actually win the trust of a population because they get the resources and that that becomes the mechanism for reinforcing your longevity and tenure and politics. And that becomes, I think, a fundamental equation that we're struggling with. Communications are going to be part of it, but a different kind of communication as well, which has become much more decentralized. Thank you. We have one last question for Jeannie based on this discussion. I think the ambassador is absolutely right that actually in the last three years, foreign direct investment has outstripped foreign aid to Africa, and it's probably not going to change. And as of 2007, remittances has outstripped ODA in Africa. And so I think we're in a different world. And so we should think about foreign assistance as a catalyst. 85% of your budget comes from governments, such as the United States and others. And I suspect that this is a tricky topic. It's not impossible to get corporate funding for, but this is something that oftentimes requires risk capital that governments like the United States can provide in terms of assistance. But I do think it gets to another point that the ambassador was talking about in terms of having an independent media that's sustainable and that there's these large resources out there. How do we, you work with a lot of for-profit companies as well as non-profit companies. Can you talk a little bit about how they remain, once you, going back to this year of working yourself out of a job, what are these, it probably isn't a sustainable business model to open a paper newspaper in Burma. Can you talk a little bit about how you provide assistance and how that sort of sustains the work and how you worked yourself out of a job? Because the foreign aid is marginal and small amounts and it's important, and I pay my mortgage on this topic of foreign assistance and how we use it, but talk a little bit about how these activities that you're supporting on the ground remain sustainable when there's only a teeny amount of foreign aid and oftentimes they have to be for-profit institutions. How does that work and how do you intersect with that? I'm gonna go back to that question but make a couple of comments on what Carlos said. I mean, one thing that's exciting about the field is that because of all of this investment, a vast, a huge change is happening in our space due to private investment, due to what's happening in the private sector, so foreign aid doesn't need to answer all of this, particularly the access point, the mobile phone explosion is a huge change in the sector that we don't need to think about. So for me, the foreign aid pieces is hitting those market failures for where it's not moving and increasingly I'm seeing it shift to the content and how you get the quality content you need over sort of access because again, the market is sort of stepping in and ensuring access at many different levels. Going to the financial viability of media, if we had a good solution to that, we would be very, very wealthy organization because this country is still grappling with how do you set up viable financial models? That said, you see it and you find it and our partners around the world are finding really interesting ways to become, to be and remain financially viable. In Afghanistan, the community radio stations that span the country have networked together, there's a network of 67 of them now connected and so even though they can't get sort of advertising in their individual community, they're able to pool their reach together and generate advertising support from the national level across the country and then share that advertising. Many, again, getting to the very, very poorest levels, community-owned, community-run radio stations are relatively cheap. I mean, they don't cost a lot and the way they make their money is through birthday calls, anniversary celebrations. I mean, modest amounts of money donated to this incredibly important resource of their community, this platform to communicate, this platform that has their community voices on it. People give to that and people want messages out there and will pay to help keep these alive. We have rarely left a country or worked with the media outlets that have had, I mean, certainly there's market failure and media outlets go out of business but we've seen more success in them staying alive than then going out of business. It is a valuable, valuable tool despite all of these changes. Okay, so you're just closed with, are you an optimist about the future of developing country media? Given some of the challenges, there's censorship, what makes you optimistic about the future of media and developing countries? I'm most optimistic because of our partners in seeing the incredible work that they're doing around the world, the incredible creativity, the learning that we in this country can have from them as they navigate this changing space. I think it's hard. I mean, I hope we can get to the point, I think Carlos's point about getting our arms around this new media scene so that we can advance progressive policy. I mean, the most famous comment on the role of media and governance is from Amartya Sen as he looked at famine in India and said that there, since India became independent, there has been no famine because of the politics and culture and he reflected specifically on the media that the role of the media is to both unearth the problem as it's emerging and put pressure on politicians to take action. That is our ideal and that we wanna get back to that ideal and it's very, very complicated in this new space but that's where we're trying to go. Please join me in thanking the panel.