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Oh yes, we’ve been preparing for this moment for more than a year. Who wants to come along?

So now that the right-wing media have had a go at Barack Obama about his Pastor, now the left-wing media is having a go at John McCain’s crazy pastor too (although it’s not really clear whether it really is his pastor or just a guy he shook hands with on stage).

Let the battle begin: Here’s the video.

Brave New Films invites you to meet: Rev. Rod Parsley, the televangelist megachurch pastor from Ohio who hates Islam. According to David Corn of Mother Jones, Parsley has called on Christians to wage war against Islam, which he considers to be a “false religion.” In the past, Parsley has also railed against the separation of church and state, homosexuals, and abortion rights, comparing Planned Parenthood to Nazis.

Wow. He sounds friendly.

On Beliefnet, David Gibson seems to regret that political leaders in the US are forced to create a distance between themselves and their religion to make themselves electable (he is talking about Obama not McCain).

Seems more to me like they are forced to align themselves with one crazy faith or another to even be considered for nomination. I wish America’s leaders wouldn’t lend credibility to all the nonsense that goes on in the name of faith.

This is funny. How did they make Hilary look so mean?

It’s wonderful to have friends on the internet. In addition to two musical birthday cards, several Facebook wall posts, and a couple of old-fashioned text emails, I have also received an imaginary “dodo cake with coelocanth frosting”, a disturbingly festive song, a video interview with an artist, a poem that starts “she’s got 99 problems but years ain’t one”. A special treat were “happy birthdays” from Global Voices authors in Spanish, English, Danish, Ukrainian, Arabic, Chichewa, Malagasy, and more. Thank you everyone!

During the Media Re:Public conference in Los Angeles a little over a week ago, I was asked to come up with a 2-minute “provocation” about the future of news for a panel moderated by Jonathan Zittrain. Ethan summarized what all the panelists said.

I actually thought it was a pretty tame prediction, but I spent the rest of the day dodging journalists and editors who wanted to tell me I was wrong, naive, and even careless. Meanwhile younger colleagues were eager to tell me I was absolutely right. My friend Sameer Padania even rolled his eyes at me and said, “Have you even read the report I wrote? That’s exactly what I’ve been saying.” He’s not kidding. You can read it here. My favorite quote is attributed to Channel 4 reporter Sorious Samura, “When will foreign correspondents be foreign?”

I started with an anecdote, about a BBC World radio story broadcast to my California rental car radio. It was about a press tour organized by the Chinese authorities for foreign journalists to enter Tibet. The BBC was not invited, so the reporter interviewed a USA Today journalist about how the event had been interrupted by Tibetan monks protesting. Obviously what is happening between Tibet and China right now is very serious, but I still find this particular story silly. The journalist was reporting about a staged media event he hadn’t even been to, and his main source was another Western journalist.

I’m not targeting the BBC or this particular journalist in particular (he must have filed hundreds of different stories, and maybe even speaks Chinese). I just think the fact that a story like this is considered newsworthy is pretty depressing (especially since it must have been reported by a ton of other journalists already).

How many more years will we have to watch foreign correspondents parachute into a region and pretend they know what’s going on? How many more reports coming out of the Middle East from hotel rooftops will be delivered by people who do not speak Arabic, or know what “the Green zone” in Iraq was called before coalition forces arrived?

Not for long, is what I think. There are too many alternatives, and I’m not even referring to bloggers around the world. The type of thing we do at Global Voices is meant to be a service to professional journalists.

The founder of Alive in Baghdad, a fantastic video website that broadcasts weekly reports by Iraqi journalists, once told me in New York that he has a hell of a time getting news media organizations to recognize that his crew aren’t “citizen journalists” but actually, real, professional journalists who just happen to be Iraqi.

Sooner or later, qualified local perspectives will become what people prefer to hear, rather than what editors defer to when a situation becomes too dangerous for Western journalists to report from. It’s wrong not to have news from a faraway place, simply because there is no longer money to fly foreign correspondents there.

The internet has the effect of making international journalists even more accountable to global audiences that before. Just see Global Voices’ current China coverage. Yikes. Chinese bloggers are pouncing all over Western media inaccuracies. On openDemocracy, articles by authors from the region offer background on political history and media misunderstandings.

When the panel discussion in Los Angeles ended, the BBC’s wonderful Richard Sambrook graciously stood up and agreed with with some of what I said. In his own blog he wrote, “I agree the model of Foreign Correspondent is becoming rapidly outdated and needs re-inventing, not least to have authenticity with the subject which is lacking from many blow-dried parachute journalists.” Sambrook also noted that the BBC regularly uses over 400 “local stringers” around the world.

I think this just helps show that the end of what I consider old-fashioned foreign correspondence is coming closer. It’s not about where a journalist is born or not, it’s about listening and respecting people who are different, and trusting them to have the integrity to describe their own situation. I’m not saying it’s easier. But it could be better.

Here’s a brief report on American foreign media consumption. The part about Anna Nicole Smith is of course the most interesting… Robin from Snarkmarket sent it to me.

I am currently at a conference hosted by the Berkman Center and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, at the USC Annenberg School of Communications. The point is to talk about how we can merge new and traditional media in ways that can improve society. It is also presented as an occasion for the the MacArthur foundation to think about how they should shape their media funding in the future.

Lots of interesting people here, and halfway through the day. I’m sitting in a session with nine (?!) of people on the panel, and it’s developing more or less as a conversation. Jeez Berkman, your panels have almost no women on them.

Michael Smolens from DotSub gave an introductory presentation, about how his project is trying to break down language barriers. He told me yesterday that they are launching an update to the website soon, and that you will now be able to view DotSub videos with subtitles in any language on iPhones. This is what they are working on right now: Pangea Day.

Caramba, Global Voices is getting mentioned on every single panel today. And I haven’t said a single word.

Smolens used a Global Voices post as a key example of how subtitles can become a powerful vehicle for distribution. He showed a post written by Chris Salzberg in Japan a couple of months ago, about a video of a Japanese nuclear reactor leak. Chris added English subtitles to the video. It was picked up by whistle-blower site, Wikileaks, and from there it was Slashdotted, jamming DotSub’s servers for several hours.

In his presentation, Mark Jones from Reuters, is frank about the difficulty of convincing “old media” colleagues about the ability to trust Global Voices (for instance) as “authenticators of content”, and says he often brings up Global Voices’ Harvard origins to help persuade them (we, in turn, tend to mention our Reuters friendship). His point is that part of the challenge of getting “old media” to interact with “new media” is developing new mechanisms of trust and authentication. Ivan Sigal, who is also on the panel, suggests this might be helped along by “old media” being more honest and open about their own methods and limitations.

My favorite thing about these conferences is learning about new projects and seeing the people behind them. One brand new project I hadn’t seen before, is Vocalo. An idea to allow people to upload audio reports via telephone to the web, and have them broadcast on local public radio in Northwest Indiana and Chicago. Neat.

And now, lunch.

My colleague, Ethan Zuckerman is doing an incredible job (as usual) of live-blogging what people are talking about. He’s a much faster typer and thought-digester than I am. Oh, and if you want to hear what he sounds like, Ethan and I were interviewed together on Radio Open Source recently.

(I am sure he is happy now that Radio Open Source has put a much, much nicer picture of him to accompany the story.)

A Danish climber is interviewed in this heart-breaking film on The Hub that shows Chinese soldiers killing Tibetans on their way to see the Dalai Lama in India.

On Global Voices, John Kennedy is keeping track of new information on the riots in Tibet and the Chinese crack-down in this post. Snippets of news are coming out via micro-blogs like Twitter, but otherwise it’s mostly Chinese who are uploading comments.

Kennedy says:

**One reader has written in asking to know why there are no apparent Tibetan voices in this post. This of course is not a deliberate omission but a problem of not being able to find them. Any such related links if left in the comments or sent to chinese [at] globalvoicesonline [dot] org will be translated swiftly and everyone’s help is most welcome in this.

Keep an eye on this post: China: Fire on the streets of Lhasa, Tibet

Warning: this is not a comment on the condition of the planet, but a crude business plan to make money off vegetarians and their friends.

Vegetarians will only eat beef if there is no meat in it. So vegetarian restaurants are constantly serving up faux meat, imitation meat, mock meat, or meat analogue, as they also call it, and people happily order and chew on soy, mushrooms, and proteins, with a texture uncannily similar to meat – sans les corpses. You can get chicken, hot dogs, beef, and even shrimp.

I can’t help wonder, if no species has to suffer, why not get a little more adventurous in the “meat” offerings. You know you always wanted to taste dinosaur meat (I did). Even if it tastes just like chicken, you wouldn’t know if it was authentic. In fact, why not make a restaurant called Darwin’s that only serves the finest (faux) extinct or nearly extinct species.

The menu could change daily and the staff could quip, “Sorry, we’re all out of that.” Get it? I tested this idea on both a vegan and a vegetarian, and I think it’s a winner. I’m issuing this menu on a Creative Commons basis. If anybody makes a killing on this idea, I demand free food.

Today’s menu

Starters

Turtle egg soup
Humming bird tongues
Dodo nuggets
Baby polar bear tails
Southern fried finches
Wooping crane webs

Mains

White tiger curry with string beans
Brontosaurus burger
Leg o’ mammoth with greens (for 4)
Crispy panda with rice
Dolphin snout risotto
Bald-eagle noodles

Desert

Platypus milk pudding
Polar icecap cream

Every time I visit Voices without Votes I am stunned at the amount of engagement and creativity around the world in regards to the US elections.

Take this song from Jamaica for instance – it’s much better than anything that could have come out of the Obama campaign itself (via The World Wants Obama).

Jamaican reggae star Cocoa Tea has released a new song “We Want Obama”. The lyrics include this line: ‘This is not about class nor color, race nor creed. It’s about the changes, what the Americans need.”

Want more? Here’s a song about Barak Obama from Grenadian-Trinidadian artist, The Mighty Sparrow. These are the first lines of the song (see full lyrices here). This is not light fare, listen to the whole thing:

The respect of the world that we now lack,
If you want it back then, vote Barack!
Because this time we come out to vote!
Stop the war!
Stop genocide in Darfur!
No matter what,
Get health care for who have not!
The Foreign Relations Committee,
Can attest to his tenacity,
For homeland and job security.

No question US politics could do with a little more music, and I don’t mean this boring old stuff. Who will be the first to sell compilation CD’s of all the songs out there to raise money for the Obama campaign?

Well I never thought I would pay 15 dollars to watch an hour-long Coca-Cola advert, but I was spurred on by Atlantans who said The World of Coca-Cola museum was worth a visit.

Most memorable was the “4D” movie theater where wind, water, moving seats, and 3D glasses, brought a really poorly scripted film to life; and the tasting room, where dozens of Coca-Cola company beverages from around the world could be sampled (from Djibouti to Japan). It was an ode to their global franchise model and advertising campaigns. Brilliant propaganda.

Most interesting, was how they managed to avoid more than a single reference to the purported medicinal qualities of the beverage when it was first invented in 1885. And they only mention the controversial coca leaf (which was originally a main ingredient) once in an anecdote about how the bottle was designed. They must have thought people wouldn’t be interested to know whether it’s true they still purchase synthetic coca from this company.

Nor was there any mention of Coca-Cola’s involvement in trade union struggles in Colombia or overuse of pesticides in India, but that would probably be asking too much.

As far as museums go, I would much sooner recommend the thoughtful and charming Coca Museum in Bolivia. It explains the crazy history of how foreign powers since colonial times have tried rather irrationally to vilify and ban a plant. The coca leaf is used to produce cocaine, but only in enormously concentrated amounts, mixed with a cocktail of chemicals developed in the west, which have never garnered the same scrutiny.