internet

"To gain greater international support for Israel Defense Forces operations in the Gaza Strip," Israeli Foreign Minister (and candidate for Prime Minister) Tzipi Livni directed the Foreign Ministry to lead "an aggressive and diplomatic international public relations campaign." In addition to meetings with foreign officials and interviews with international media, Israeli officials are posting videos to YouTube and conducting "press conferences" via the microblogging site Twitter. The Israeli military described one of its YouTube videos as a bomb attack on "a Hamas truck carrying dozens of Grad rockets." Yet human rights groups say the truck belonged to a local resident, who was moving equipment out of his workshop, after the house next to it was bombed. Ahmed Samur, the person who says the bombed vehicle was his, told Haaretz, "These were not Hamas [who were killed], they were our children." BBC News writes that "the incident shows how an apparently definitive piece of video can turn into something much more doubtful." Doubts have also been raised about the Israeli Foreign Ministry's changing graph of the number of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. Still, according to the BBC, "Israel appears to think its [PR] efforts are working," to "justify the air attacks" and "show that there is no humanitarian calamity in Gaza."

This "Air Force Blog Assessment" chart specifies "rules of engagement" for dealing with bloggers.

As part of its bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, China pledged to expand press freedom. (To see how that went, read our 2008 Falsies Awards, in which China won dishonorable mention.) Now that the Games are over, "China has resumed blocking access to the Internet sites of some foreign media," including the BBC, Voice of America, Hong Kong's Ming Pao and Asiaweek. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said the sites have been blocked because they broke Chinese laws, such as "recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation." He added that if the foreign sites "exercise self-discipline," they would enjoy "better Internet cooperation." An Asia researcher with Human Rights Watch observed that with the Olympics over, "The spotlight has moved out of China. ... It's easier to suppress dissent when you don't have 10,000 journalists in town." Perhaps concerned that its weakening economy will embolden dissidents, China is cracking down. Authorities have arrested and harassed signatories of an online appeal, "Charter 08," which calls for multiparty democracy and greater freedoms in China.

Netroots activists who supported the Barack Obama campaign thought they were joining "a new political movement that would be mobilized for big goals -- to end poverty or fix the healthcare system, or maybe to end the U.S. reliance on foreign oil," writes Peter Wallsten. Some are disappointed by what Wallsten describes as an "often secretive debate ... among top campaign staff members over how to refashion the broad network of motivated volunteers into a force that can help Obama govern," and by a seeming focus on more trivial goals. Last week, for example, Obama's campaign manager sent out an email calling on people to "Support your local animal shelter to give animals in your area a chance." James Dillon, who volunteered for Obama, says, "I'm not trying to discourage anyone from helping animals, but there are a lot of people hurting right now. If this movement is going to sustain itself, it has to have as grand a mission as electing Barack Obama." Micah Sifry of TechPresident.com has also warned that "by leaving people in the dark and only conducting one-way consultation on the movement's future, the Obama campaign risks losing its most vital resource: its grassroots base."

A consumer group filed a complaint against the medical device company Medtronic, because an online video promoting one of the company's products "did not make consumers aware of the risks, warnings, precautions or side effects" associated with the product. The video, which was posted to the YouTube website, was produced for Medtronic by the broadcast PR firm VNR-1 Communications. After a consumer group, Prescription Project, filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Medtronic pulled the video from YouTube. The group also called on the FDA "to take action against YouTube videos promoting medical devices from Abbott Laboratories ... and Michigan-based Stryker Corp." The Prescription Project's director said the videos "raise serious questions about whether drug and device companies are using the Internet to skirt laws that safeguard consumers." In related (fake) news, Richard Edelman blogged that ABC News Now producer Jessica Guff told him that PR people should offer TV newsrooms "fully formed four minute segments, with visuals, spokespeople and news hook all conceived." She explained, "Don't just send me a pitch letter or a book which requires me to put together the piece," because "we are short staffed."

The election of Barack Obama as America's next president has prompted a number of analyses of what has been described as "one of the most effective presidential campaigns that's ever been run." Now the Obama team is showing that it intends to use some of the same new internet technologies that made it "kind of the Google of politics" to reinvent the way the White House communicates with the public. The presidential inauguration committee has launched "a campaign-style social networking web site, pic2009.org." They've created another website, change.gov, to communicate with the public during the transition period until Obama takes office. And as Micah Sifry noted on Wednesday, change.gov is starting to "go interactive, intensively. ... A few hours ago, the Change.gov blog led with a post called 'Join the Discussion' and pointed readers to a video from two members of the health care transition team," which invites readers to "join the discussion" with suggestions for how the healthcare system should be changed. Already the forum has attracted thousands of comments. "Imagine what happens if those numbers -- on not just any 'centralized site' but the one that symbolically and perhaps literally has the attention of the President-elect -- start climbing into the five- and six-digits," Sifry writes. "Before our eyes, we are witnessing the beginning of a rebooting of the American political system."