Close to 60 countries are planning elections this year. Close to 60 chances to change political fates, 60 occasions to uphold democracy by exercising democratic rights. The number of elections that will be truly fair and equal is likely to be lower. Election fraud or election irregularities are rampant problems, and sometimes voters complain about hurdles to free elections even in old democracies. We will learn and see a lot this year, and many new and old problems of electoral systems will come under renewed scrutiny. Election monitoring is an opportunity for development groups to have an impact – and sometimes it’s a matter of media development.
Originally published on February 8, 2011
Frank Rich, op-ed columnist at the New York Times, made a very important point this week: Revolutions are not about Facebook and Twitter. Revolutions are about human dignity and hunger. It seems that a few journalists are trying to push the (mainstream) media's fascination with the role of (social) media in Egypt, Tunisia, and Iran toward a more realistic point of view. After a prime-time CNN talking head stated that social media are the most fascinating thing about the events in Egypt (!), some senior journalists seem to have had it with the ICT hype. Rich tries to pull attention to why people rise up against their government: "starting with the issues of human dignity and crushing poverty."
- Iran, Islamic Republic of
- Egypt, Arab Republic of
- Middle East and North Africa
- Information and Communication Technologies
- Richard Engel
- Public Sentinel
- New York Times
- Lawrence Pintak
- Jim Clancy
- Independent Media
- Frank Rich
- Al Jazeera
We see donation appeals everywhere these days - to help the people in Japan, to help the people in Darfur, to help the people in Haiti. What influences our decision to give? An interesting study comes from British psychologists, who analyzed how individuals respond to donation appeals in the wake of man-made disasters - like war - versus natural disasters. The authors around Hanna Zagefka from Royal Holloway University in London found that natural disasters elicit more donations than those caused by people. Their explanation: people tend to assign some blame to the victims of man-made disaster, while they blame no one for being overrun by a Tsunami.