Information is Power...or, The Power of Information (Musings on the Sunday NYT)

A theme emerged from the Sunday New York Times coverage of the natural disasters in China and Burma: access (or lack thereof) to information, and its relation to power. Namely, the articles illustrate how issues of information can turn a natural disaster into a political threat to regimes bent on control and restriction.

First, Burma. (Officially Myanmar, but like many, I refer to the country as Burma because I do not recognize the legitimacy of the military dictatorship that changed the name in 1989.) The military junta continues to deny access to areas devastated by Cyclone Nargis. Two weeks after the cyclone, the United Nations estimates that only 20% of the survivors have received even basic assistance. All foreigners are banned from the hard-hit Irrawaddy Delta, and even aid convoys arranged by domestic groups have been turned back at military checkpoints. As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown aptly said, the natural disaster of the cyclone “is being made into a man-made catastrophe” by the government’s refusal to render aid to its own people. The French ambassador warned that the junta’s actions could turn the humanitarian crisis in a “true crime against humanity.”

China is responding rapidly to the massive 7.9 earthquake that hit the Sichuan Province on Monday—the interesting factor here, as the New York Times discusses, is how China controls media coverage of natural disasters to the wider public, and how its attempts to control public information are starting to erode. The Central Propaganda Department forbade journalists from entering the areas affected by the earthquake, as it has done with other disasters in the past, but several journalists ignored the order, and their newspaper took great risks by printing their dispatches. Though most editors obey the orders from the Central Propaganda Department—which issues all mandates through a verbal network, and has no public address or phone number, which seems like something out of a movie about the Cold War—and the New York Times notes that those that are reporting on the earthquake stay away from politically sensitive topics, such actions by rogue journalists represent a crack in the government’s intense effort to control public information.

As the Times “Week In Review” columnist Philip Taubman writes, “A dash of openness can be a dangerous thing for an autocratic state.” Think about it—all of the best dictatorships make a concerted effort to control the media, with official media outlets promoting official news, views, and propaganda. While attempting to control domestic coverage of the earthquake, the Chinese government as allowed international press to report more freely—China tightly controls internet and other access to foreign media sources, but as Taubman notes in a comparison to Russia, small steps toward open access can set into motion “unsettling” political forces. The government of Burma is bent on restricting any access at whatever cost, but the “Public Editor” writes, in an explanation of the frequent use of anonymous sources in Burma and Zimbabwe, that international and local reporters go to extreme lengths to sneak into and report on the disaster zone.

The moral of the story? Repressive regimes make valiant efforts to control access to information because their power depends on it, but that control can never be airtight. And therein lies their (potential, hopeful, eventual) demise. Natural disasters have political consequences in any state—hello, Katrina—but their potential to disrupt the controlling practices of autocratic regimes like Burma and China is particularly significant. China and Burma’s different responses to their respective disasters could yield similar political results—China’s relative openness could start the “crack” of open information, and Burma’s adamant denial of access currently serves to highlight the human rights abuses of the regime and increase international pressure for reform.

And even in the most repressive states, there are always people willing to risk their lives to access and spread information.

And if you’re wondering what’s going on in Zimbabwe: Violence continues (I know you’re shocked), and Morgan Tsvangirai canceled plans to return to Zimbabwe to campaign for the June 27 run-off due to assassination plots.