11 comments

• Vilhelm Konnander Contributor profile »

  Dear Ossetian,

  I am sorry if you are disappointed, but am unsure of whether it emanates from the piece by a Russian blogger, to which the above posts refers, or if it is the comments that annoy you.

  However, I will try to reflect on your question in accordance to some of the interpretations I can perceive, and on which I have myself previously put down quite some thought.

  As for the comments, they are posted by people like you, who have had this opportunity with – to my knowledge – no – if any – other censorship than if the comment constitutes spam or is highly abusive, racist, inticing violence etc. However, the level of tolerance is as high as possible. Comments do not represent the views of Global Voices, but of those who choose to post them.

  If you find the piece by a Russian blogger incorrect, then it should be noted that it merely constitutes a referral to a piece by a person with – as far as I know -has no connection to Global Voices.

  During the conflict, I tried as much as possible to refer to blogs in Russian as well as western blogs (I do not know Georgian, why such blogs were naturally omitted) to cover as many sides of the story as possible.

  One problem though was the mere amount of Russian bloggers writing about the conflict, which in itself may have given a less representative picture of their views than intended. That is still no reason to assume that the choice of referrals to Russian blogs was intentionally distorted.

  A much greater issue, which I felt quite problematic, was the often very abusive contents on many Russian blogs writing about the conflict, even from blogs that I normally read and enjoy. That emotions run high during conflict is natural, but it is still no excuse for e.g. ethnophobia etc. Also, with such an amount of people covering one theme at once, abuse becomes a natural disqualifier regardless of argumentation. This equally applied to Western or any other blogs. Such pieces are, with few exceptions, simply not of interest and have little news value. The alternative would have been to give preminence to such contents, if they indeed were representative of how a significant proportion of Russian bloggers portrayed the conflict. Such pieces were also frequently quite curt, e.g. referring to newspaper articles and then exacerbating the arguments found there in an extreme way. Of course, this might be considered a sin of omission on my part, but my gut feeling was that such referrals would not have improved the quality of coverage, and it would only have served to exacerbate impressions internationally of a violent and aggressive Russia to a level unwarranted for, whereas many real aspects of the story were still obscure.

  One interesting paradoxical observation is that often coming across pieces by activists of what in Russia is considered extremist parties, as e.g. National Bolsheviks, I had the impression that their pieces were more often that not both well-versed and argumentative in a manner not found among many more mainstream Russian bloggers.

  Whereas no generalisations can be made from the above, there is, as you may see now, quite some reasoning behind the assortment of blog pieces that I choose to refer to. Then, of course, what seems interesting at the spur of the moment may be given preminence in comparison to what at a later point actually becomes more relevant, but such things there is little real knowing about.

  The same goes for chronology. With different and opposing views of events and how they evolved, getting the facts chronologically right from what people write on blogs appears possible – if at all – only in retrospect.

  Of course, I can only comment on my part, whereas other GV-contributors may have made other considerations, of which I am unaware. Still, I believe that all the GV-people covering Russia and the CIS I have met share a common and genuine interest to cover the region as objectively as possible, perhaps for the same or other reasons as I feel this is desirable: Russia and the CIS is simply too interesting a story today to give way to any intentional subjectivity. Quite the opposite.

  This is how I feel, and I am not aware of any conscious bad will or intent against any part of relevance for the story. But of course, I can only reflect on my own experience, which by no means may be representative of Global Voices.

  Finally, I am happy that you addressed this issue, and hope that you find my reply of interest.

  Yours,

  Vilhelm

  22 August 2008, 21:23 pm

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