Tag: Decoder

  • With News Decoder, students explore their role in the world

    With News Decoder, students explore their role in the world

    Back in 2020, during the height of the Covid epidemic, high school students in the U.S. state of Connecticut sat down with News Decoder founder Nelson Graves to explore a number of thorny topics that ranged from the death penalty to whether animals should be kept in zoos.

    The students in “American Voices & Choices: Ethics in Modern Society” at Westover School had been working with News Decoder since the start of that academic year, mastering the process we call Pitch, Report, Draft and Revise — or PRDR — to identify topical issues at the intersection of ethics and public policy.

    They pitched ideas they wanted to report on: teen health; police brutality; abortion; economic privilege in the environmental movement; the risks of experimental vaccines; the impact of alcohol on youth.

    Later, each student received detailed feedback from a News Decoder editor, aimed at helping them narrow their research and produce original reporting.

    Westover was an early News Decoder school partner. Since our founding 10 years ago, News Decoder has worked with high school and university students in 89 schools across 23 countries.

    Decoding news in school

    Teachers have used us as part of their course curricula, as extra credit assignments and as standalone learning opportunities for their students.

    At Realgymnasium Rämibühl Zürich in Switzerland, teacher Martin Bott brings News Decoder in each year. In one weeklong workshop, students produced podcasts. Over five days, they pitched News Decoder stories about a problem they identified in their local communities, identified an expert to interview, found how that problem was relevant to people in other countries and then wrote a podcast script, revised it and recorded it. “[News Decoder] enabled me to do a few projects which really open up perspectives for the students, give them a taste of life beyond the classroom and of the world of journalism,” Bott said. 

    In another workshop for RGZH, News Decoder turned students into “foreign correspondents.” They were tasked with finding stories in Zurich that people in other countries would find interesting. Like the students in the podcasting workshop, they then found an expert to interview, wrote a draft and revised it with the goal of publishing it on News Decoder. 

    One student in the workshop noticed a demonstration of people with dogs and got up the nerve to talk to one of them. They were from an organization that rescued Spanish greyhounds and she decided it would be a good idea for a News Decoder story. The story she wrote ended up as one of News Decoder’s most-read stories of all time.

    Not only have Bott’s students been able to publish stories on News Decoder, many of these stories, including the article about the greyhounds, have won awards in our twice yearly global storytelling competition. 

    “We’ve been delighted to get so many of those stories published on News Decoder,” Bott said. “That’s very, very motivating for the students. And it’s a wonderful learning process for them because they realise it’s not just about school rules and so on out there.”

    Challenging students to do more

    Bott said that working with professionals at News Decoder gets the students to step up. “When you’re a journalist, you’ve got a responsibility,” he said. “That’s something we’ve been able to talk about with journalists who’ve met us from various parts of the world through News Decoder. And you’ve got real pressure as well. And they’re not, I think they’re not quite used to that. So it really opens their eyes.”

    At The Hewitt School in New York, 15 teens at the all-girls school meet once a month as a club. They read and discuss News Decoder stories and pitch their own stories. They also prepare for a cross-border webinar; each year they join with students from a News Decoder partner school in another country, and decide with those students on a topic to explore. 

    They then research the topic, interview experts and come together with the students from the other school to present their findings live in a video conference before an audience of people from the two schools.

    In 2024, students from The Thacher School in California worked with peers at the European School of Brussels II on a webinar on consumerism and the human impacts of climate change. 

    Russell Spinney is faculty adviser for News Decoder at Thacher. “The webinars really were kind of ways just to get to know each other, discover that we actually do have some common interests. But not only that, that we also have problems that are similar,” he said. 

    “News Decoder’s workshops,” he said, “get students to think of ways to communicate their research beyond the classroom and connect with what’s going on in the world.” News Decoder has partnered schools this way in some 50 school-school webinars. 

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  • Can you believe it? | News Decoder

    Can you believe it? | News Decoder

    Can you tell the difference between a rumor and fact?

    Let’s start with gossip. That’s where you talk or chat with people about other people. We do this all the time, right? Something becomes a rumor when you or someone else learn something specific through all the chit chat and then pass it on, through chats with other people or through social media.

    A rumor can be about anyone and anything. The more nasty or naughty the tidbit, the greater the chance people will pass it on. When enough people spread it, it becomes viral. That’s where it seems to take on a life of its own.

    A fact is something that can be proven or disproven. The thing is, both fact and rumor can be accepted as a sort of truth. In the classic song “The Boxer,” the American musician Paul Simon once sang, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

    Once a piece of information has gone viral, whether fact or fiction, it is difficult to convince people who have accepted it that it isn’t true.

    Fact and fiction

    That’s why it is important — if you care about truth, that is — to determine whether or not a rumor is based on fact before you pass it on. That’s what ethical journalists do. Reporting is about finding evidence that can show whether something is true. Without evidence, journalists shouldn’t report something, or if they do they must make sure their readers or listeners understand that the information is based on speculation or unproven rumor.

    There are two types of evidence they will look for: direct evidence and indirect evidence. The first is information you get first-hand — you experience or observe something yourself. All else is indirect. Rumor is third-hand: someone heard something from someone who heard it from the person who experienced it.

    Most times you don’t know how many “hands” information has been through before it comes to you. Understand that in general, stories change every time they pass from one person to another.

    If you don’t want to become a source of misinformation, then before you tell a story or pass on some piece of information, ask yourself these questions:

    → How do I know it?

    → Where did I get that information and do I know where that person or source got it?

    → Can I trace the information back to the original source?

    → What don’t I know about this?

    Original and secondary sources

    An original source might be yourself, if you were there when something happened. It might be a story told you by someone who was there when something happened — an eyewitness. It might be a report or study authored by someone or a group of people who gathered the data themselves.

    Keep in mind though, that people see and experience things differently and two people who are eyewitness to the same event might have remarkably different memories of that event. How they tell a story often depends on their perspective and that often depends on how they relate to the people involved.

    If you grow up with dogs, then when you see a big dog barking you might interpret that as the dog wants to play. But if you have been bitten by a dog, then a big dog barking seems threatening. Same dog, same circumstance, but contrasting perspectives based on your previous experience.

    Pretty much everything else is second-hand: A report that gets its information from data collected elsewhere or from a study done by other researchers; a story told to you by someone who spoke to the person who experienced it.

    But how do videos come into play? You see a video taken by someone else. That’s second-hand. But don’t you see what the person who took the video sees? Isn’t that almost the same as being an eyewitness?

    Not really. Consider this. Someone tells you about an event. You say: “How do you know that happened?” They say: “I was there. I saw it.” That’s pretty convincing. Now, if they say: “I saw the video.” That’s isn’t as convincing. Why? Because you know that the video might not have shown all of what happened. It might have left out something significant. It might even have been edited or doctored in some way.

    Is there evidence?

    Alone, any one source of information might not be convincing, even eyewitness testimony. That’s why when ethical reporters are making accusations in a story or on a podcast, they provide multiple, different types of evidence — a story from an eyewitness, bolstered by an email sent to the person, along with a video, and data from a report.

    It’s kind of like those scenes in murder mysteries where someone has to provide a solid alibi. They can say they were with their spouse, but do you believe the spouse?

    If they were caught on CCTV, that’s pretty convincing. Oh, there’s that parking ticket they got when they were at the movies. And in their coat pocket is the receipt for the popcorn and soda they bought with a date and time on it.

    Now, you don’t have to provide all that evidence every time you pass on a story you heard or read. If that were a requirement, conversations would turn really dull. We are all storytellers and we are geared to entertain. That means that when we tell a story we want to make it a good one. We exaggerate a little. We emphasize some parts and not others.

    The goal here isn’t to take that fun away. But we do have a worldwide problem of misinformation and disinformation.

    Do you want to be part of that problem or part of a solution? If the latter, all you have to do is this: Recognize what you actually know and separate it in your head from what you heard or saw second hand (from a video or photo or documentary) and let people know where you got that information so they can know.

    Don’t pass on information as true when it might not be true or if it is only partially true. Don’t pretend to be more authoritative than you are.

    And perhaps most important: What you don’t know might be as important as what you do know.

    Questions to consider:

    1. What is an example of an original source?

    2. Why should you not totally trust information from a video?

    3. Can you think of a a time when your memory of an event differed from that of someone else who was there?

     

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  • Decoder Replay: Gold is valuable. But you can’t drink it.

    Decoder Replay: Gold is valuable. But you can’t drink it.

    We’re marking World Water Week, a gathering in Sweden intended to solve water-related challenges such as droughts, floods and food security. Let’s invest in it.

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  • Decoder Replay: Let’s celebrate Mandela Day

    Decoder Replay: Let’s celebrate Mandela Day

    February 11, 1990 was truly a turning point in the history of South Africa.

    For decades the nation at the southern tip of the continent had been pilloried by much of the rest of the world. This was because of its apartheid racial segregation laws that hugely favoured the white population over the far larger and mostly black majority.

    Apartheid means “separateness” in Afrikaans, the language rooted in Dutch that evolved when the country was a colony.

    By 1989 — itself a remarkable year for the wave of revolutions in communist East Europe — South Africa had made significant steps in its effort to end its pariah status. International sanctions were costing it dearly economically, culturally and in sporting terms.

    As a taste of events to come, the government freed senior figures in the African National Congress (ANC), the exiled organisation waging a low-level guerrilla campaign against apartheid.

    The fight against apartheid

    A favourite weapon of the ANC was small mines. One of them exploded in a shopping mall in the commercial capital Johannesburg just as I had finished shopping there and was safely in the mall’s car park.

    But there was no word when ANC leader Nelson Mandela — who ultimately spent 27 years incarcerated, much of it in an island prison — would be freed.

    Lawyer Mandela entered the world stage with a famous speech at his 1963 trial for sabotage acts against the state in which he stated that freedom and equality were “an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

    Releasing Mandela from prison was a key card that South Africa could play to regain respectability, and the government would play it “soon,” Anton Lubowski, an anti-apartheid activist and human rights advocate, told me.

    Lubowski did not live to see his forecast fulfilled. In September 1989, gunmen pumped AK-47 rifle rounds into him, with the coup de grace a pistol bullet. He was the latest in a long list of opposition figures in southern Africa to fall victim to unnamed assassins.

    Freedom as news

    Knowing that Mandela was expected to be released — his freedom would be a huge news story — but not knowing how or when it would happen was particularly frustrating for a news agency reporter like me.

    Reuters and its rivals compete tooth and nail to get stories first, and to get them right. Being just one minute behind another news agency on a major story rates as a failure.

    What I dreaded most was that Mandela would be released from prison unannounced, just as his ANC colleagues had been. This possibility made it necessary for me and my colleagues to be constantly alert, straining to catch the first authentic information.

    The problem was that, then as now, the pressure to get hard information was compounded by a fog of fake news and hoaxes, saying that the release of Mandela was imminent or indeed had actually happened.

    These claims were typically relayed on pagers, the messaging devices of the pre-smartphone age. Such messages, no matter how bogus-sounding, had to be checked. This took time and energy and shredded nerves.

    Recognizing a hero

    It was one such scare that prompted reporters to flock to an exclusive clinic outside Cape Town where Mandela was known to be undergoing treatment.

    It was then that another problem surfaced: Nobody among us knew what Mandela looked like after his marathon spell in prison. There had been no pictures of him. Would we even recognise him if he walked out of the clinic?

    The hilarious result was that every black man leaving the clinic — whether porter, delivery man, cleaner or whatever — came under intense scrutiny from the ranks of the world’s press assembled outside.

    But on the timing of the release, I had a lucky break. A local journalist friend introduced me to a senior member of a secretive police unit who was willing to share with me whatever information he had on when Mandela would be a free man.

    The police official’s name was Vic — I did not then know his full name. But he was no fake policeman. He introduced me to his staff in his offices, which were in a shopping arcade concealed behind what looked like a plain mirror but was in fact also a door.

    Verifying fake claims.

    All cloak-and-dagger stuff. With enormous lack of originality, my Reuters colleagues and I referred to Vic as our “Deep Throat,” the pseudonym of the informant who provided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with information about the 1972 Watergate scandal.

    Some time in the latter half of 1989, Vic told me in the less than cloak-and-dagger setting of a Holiday Inn coffee shop that Mandela was likely to be released in January or February of 1990.

    This was not precise information, but at least it was better than anything that I had, or apparently anybody else in the news business.

    In later meetings, Vic refined the information without disclosing the exact day of the release, which apparently was known to just four people in the South African government.

    One of the ways Vic was valuable to us was that whenever a fake claim about Mandela’s whereabouts surfaced, I could call him, day or night, to check. And it was Vic who told me on February 10 that “it looked like” Mandela would be a free man the next day.

    And so it proved.

    Mandela instantly became universally recognisable, South Africa disbanded apartheid, elections were held in which all races voted, the ANC won, and Mandela became South Africa’s first fully democratically elected president.

    February 11, 1990 is indeed a day to remember.

     

    Three Questions to Consider

    1. Why did apartheid last so long?

    2. What was the reaction of South African whites to Mandela’s release?

    3. Can you think of someone today who is trying to fight against an system of oppression?

     

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  • Decoder Replay: Is truth self-evident?

    Decoder Replay: Is truth self-evident?

    Fake news is dangerous. But it’s hardly new.

    More than 3,000 years ago, the largest chariot battle ever pitted the forces of one of the most powerful pharaohs of ancient Egypt — Ramesses the Great — against the Hittite Empire in Kadesh, near the modern-day border between Lebanon and Syria.

    The battle ended in stalemate.

    But once back in Egypt, Ramesses spread lies portraying the battle as a major victory for the Egyptians. He had scenes of himself killing his enemies put up on the walls of nearly all his temples.

    It was propaganda. “It is all too clear that he was a stupid and culpably inefficient general and that he failed to gain his objectives at Kadesh,” Egyptologist John A. Wilson wrote.

    Disinformation in ancient Rome

    The Roman general Mark Antony killed himself with his sword after his defeat in the Battle of Actium upon hearing false rumors — fake news — propagated by his lover Cleopatra claiming that she had committed suicide.

    American patriots, including the esteemed U.S. statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin, and their British enemies swapped spurious allegations during the American Revolution that murderous Native Americans were working in league with their adversaries, scalping allies.

    How about the 1938 radio drama, “The War of the Worlds”? Adopted from a novel by H.G. Wells, the radio broadcast fooled some listeners into believing that Martians had landed in America. Newspapers of the day said the broadcast sparked panic.

    But historians today say the panic was exaggerated. So it was fake news about fake news!

    There is no shortage of modern-day instances of fake news. In Myanmar in 2018, the military spearheaded a campaign of fake news, mainly on Facebook, claiming the Rohingya minority had murdered and raped members of the Buddhist majority. The Rohingya were described as dogs, maggots and rapists. The fake news helped trigger violence against the Rohingya that forced 700,000 people to flee their homes.

    The irony is that many in Myanmar had turned to Facebook for information because the military had alienated many citizens with its control of the media. But the same military took advantage of the false reports to crack down on the Muslim minority.

    Election falsehoods

    Similarly, fake news has been used in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Sri Lanka to influence the outcome of elections, hide corruption and stir up religious animosity.

    One of the ironies of fake news is it can embolden authoritarian governments to turn the tables and use made-up news as an excuse to crack down on the media. That can enable the regime to control the media message. In other words, fake news to the rescue of autocrats.

    But we should not fool ourselves into thinking that fake news can be cured merely through technological solutions, that it’s a product of our times, that it’s mainly political and that it’s peddled only by our opponents. It’s not the property of any one political party or interest.

    Fake news takes root in the gray area between truth and fiction, an area we can be quite comfortable in. There is something very enticing about fake news, especially if it aligns with our pre-conceived notions. Yet we are apt to think that fake news is the exception, a new aberration.

    We can easily fall victim to fake news in part because we are not always disgusted by lies. We are taught at a very early age that deceit – deception, dishonesty, disinformation – is all around us. And that not all lies are as harmful as others. Our parents read us fairy tales from the earliest of ages, and many tales involve lies.

    The telling of fairy tales

    Take the ancient fable of “The Cock and the Fox,” included in the medieval collection of Middle Eastern folk tales, “One Thousand and One Nights.”

    A hungry fox tries to coax a rooster out of a tree by telling him a tall tale — that there is universal friendship now among hunters and the hunted. The cock has nothing to fear, the wily fox says. It’s a lie, of course.

    So, the equally wily cock resorts to his own lie: he tells the fox that he sees greyhounds running towards them, surely with a message from the King of Beasts. The fox, outwitted, runs away in fear. So here we have two lies in a single story. The moral? “The best liars are often caught in their own lies.”

    Children and their parents are quite comfortable surrounded by lies. Is Santa Claus a malicious or harmless lie?

    Do you know the story of the Wizard of Oz? That classic U.S. movie about a young girl lost in a fantasy world, pursued by witches, struggling to go home? The entire plot relies on a deceit – a supposedly powerful wizard who is nothing more than a bumbling, ordinary conman, who uses magic tricks to make himself seem great and powerful.

    Deceit at the service of entertainment.

    Advertisements are often innocent exaggerations, fiction if you will in the service of business and profit-making. But sometimes ads can veer into falsehoods.

    So fake news is not new. And we’re no strangers to lies. What does that mean for those of us interested in making the world a better place? Should we simply give up because the task is too great?

    Hardly. The lesson is that truth is not black and white, but grey, and it’s a moving target.

    Take, for example, colonialism. From the 15th century on, white Europeans conquered huge swathes of the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania. They subjugated millions of people, using brutal violence in many places to subdue indigenous populations. They brought diseases that wiped out millions.

    They exploited natural resources, using native labor and pocketing most of the profit from sales into a global trading network that they established. By 1914, Europeans had gained control of 84% of the globe.

    We know all of that now because colonized peoples have revolted against their colonial rulers and won independence. The wars of independence have been won, yet so many countries around the world are still grappling with the shameful effects of colonialism and racism.

    The ambiguity of truth

    But would everyone have agreed on that depiction of Europeans as rapacious colonialists before the wars of independence?

    Certainly not most of the Europeans, who believed they were exporting a superior civilization to backward natives. Missionaries who led many colonial ventures believed they were doing God’s will by converting native populations to Christianity. And not a few natives turned a blind eye to atrocities and benefited financially.

    For a glaring example of the ambiguity of truth, take the United States. Its Declaration of Independence, borrowing from the French enlightenment, states that “all men are created equal,” with “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It put notions of freedom and equality at the heart of the American experiment. Yet it was written by a slave owner, Thomas Jefferson, and represented 13 colonies that all, to one degree or another, allowed slavery.

    Convinced of their superiority and driven by an almost unquenchable appetite for wealth, white settlers drove Native Indians from their homes. The U.S. government authorized more than 1,500 attacks and raids on Indians. By the end of the 19th century, fewer than 238,000 indigenous people remained, down from some 5-15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.

    What is more, settlers in the South imported slaves from Africa, forcing them to work on vast plantations and denying them the very rights to life and liberty spelled out in the Declaration of Independence.

    Rights and repercussions

    Both Native Indians and African Americans are struggling to this day to come to terms with the treatment they suffered at the hands of the white colonials.

    Would a white settler have seen himself or herself as a murderer? Hardly. In their minds, they were doing God’s work.

     Mind you, the desire to colonize is not peculiar to Europeans. Imperial Japan and imperialist China both established overseas empires. The Empire of Japan seized most of China and Manchuria. To this day, Chinese nationals and South Koreans harbor ill feelings towards the Japanese. Chinese dynasties won control over parts of Vietnam and Korea.

    There’s an expression in newsrooms around the world: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Put another way, the same individual might seem a terrorist to some, a hero to others.

    Take Yagan, a 19th century indigenous Australian warrior from the Noongar people. He played a key role in early resistance to British colonial rule in an area that is now Perth. His execution by a young settler figures in Australian history as a symbol of the unjust treatment of indigenous peoples by colonial settlers.

    A hero to his people, he was a murderer in the eyes of the British.

    Different perspectives on history

    Or take the Incan emperor, Atahualpa, who resisted the explorer and conquistador Francisco Pizarro, to this day a Spanish hero. Pizarro forced Atahualpa to convert to Christianity before eventually killing him, hastening the end of one of the greatest imperial states in human history.

    How you view Pizarro may depend on where you are sitting and when you lived.

    There are countless modern examples of radically different perspectives on events. Such discrepancies may be inevitable. Dogged journalists can shed light on events and protagonists, and help shape history – for better or for worse.

    Joseph McCarthy was a U.S. senator who in the early years of the Cold War spearheaded a smear campaign against alleged Communist and Soviet spies. Only courageous reporting by a small group of journalists who dared question McCarthy’s tactics and risked being tarred as Communist sympathizers themselves led to McCarthy’s downfall.

    Joseph McCarthy (L) with his attorney Roy Cohn, who later mentored Donald Trump (Wikimedia Commons)

    The New York Times and Washington Post went out on a legal limb when in 1971 they published the Pentagon Papers, a U.S. government history of the Vietnam War that laid bare official lies that drove American policy for more than a decade in Southeast Asia.

    The government called the man who leaked the government documents a criminal and sought to prevent the newspapers from publishing the damning revelations.

    The newspapers won their case before the Supreme Court, and their reporting increased public pressure on the government to withdraw from Vietnam.

    Watergate upended a presidency.

    You’ve perhaps heard of Watergate? Literally speaking, it’s a hotel in Washington, DC. But it has come to stand for the dogged and courageous news reporting by two journalists with the Washington Post who exposed crimes by President Richard Nixon and helped lead to his resignation in 1974.

    Courageous investigative journalism is hardly confined to the United States. A non-profit news outfit called AmaBhungane — in Zulu, “dung beetle,” an animal that digs through shit – has reported on corrupt business deals at the highest levels of South Africa’s government.

    In the Arab world, investigative journalists in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain, Palestine, Mauritania, Algeria, Kuwait and Sudan have uncovered tax evasion, money laundering, drug smuggling, torture and slavery. They have unmasked doctors who have removed the wombs of mentally disabled girls with the consent of parents.

    But it’s not all easy sailing. According to Freedom House, in 2017 there were only 175 investigative journalists in all of China, down 58% since 2011.

    What does this mean for you, a young activist who wants to help change the world?

    Truth is murky.

    The lesson is that the truth may not lie squarely on one side or the other, but rather in a murky, grey area. It can take courage to shine a light in the shadows, teeming with lies. And you may have to hear viewpoints that differ radically from your own. It pays to listen.

    Progress against racism, inequality and injustice depends on an informed public.

    The best journalists recognize their responsibility to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which state that: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights; and everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

    As the third U.S. President Thomas Jefferson said: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

    So stick up for your rights, including the right to free expression. Be fair. And remember that one man’s terrorist may be another man’s freedom fighter. You don’t have a lock on the truth.

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. Why is it important to understand that fake news is nothing new?

    2. Do you think there is any way to stamp out fake news?

    3. What does it mean to say, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”?

     

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  • Decoder Replay: Australia waltzes with two superpowers

    Decoder Replay: Australia waltzes with two superpowers

    The index ranks 26 countries and territories in terms of their capacity to shape their external environment. It evaluates international power through 133 indicators across themes including military capability and defense networks, economic capability, diplomatic and cultural influence, as well as resilience and future resources.

    The portrait that emerges from its latest survey is that while China’s overall power still lags the United States, it is not far behind, even though the current economic slowdown is holding it back in the short term.

    After the two superpowers, trailing a long way back as the next most powerful countries in the Asia-Pacific are Japan, India, Russia and then Australia.

    Economic versus military power

    The index confirms that China draws its power from its central place in Asia’s economic system, while that of the United States comes from its military capability and unrivaled regional defense networks.

    Australia’s relationship with the two mirrors the dilemma facing the whole region.

    The United States is far and away Australia’s main strategic partner and has been since the Second World War.

    In a deal signed in March 2023, Australia is set to acquire a conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered submarine capability with help from the United States through the AUKUS Treaty, which also involves the United Kingdom.

    This was followed by plans to station more U.S. forces in Australia, especially in air bases in northern and western Australia. There are also moves to increase cooperation between both countries in space, speed up efforts for Australia to develop its own guided missile production capability and work with the United States to deepen security relationships with other countries in the region — most notably Japan.

    This comes as Australia has been working hard to get trade restrictions eased with China after it imposed tariffs on a range of Australian products in 2020 during a standoff with the previous government.

    Dining with Joe and Jinping

    China is still Australia’s largest two-way trading partner in goods and services, accounting for almost one third of its trade with the world. Two-way trade with China grew 6.3% in 2020-21 to A$267 billion (about US$180 billion), mostly due to the coal and iron ore sectors.

    So as it stands, Australia’s security relies on the United States but its economic prosperity is heavily influenced by China.

    It’s no surprise then that Prime Minister Albanese had to walk a fine line in 2023 — going from a state dinner at the White House with U.S. President Biden on 26 October to meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping 11 days later.

    Colin Heseltine, a former Deputy Head of Mission at the Australian Embassy in Beijing and now senior advisor for independent think tank Asialink, said Australia is in a conundrum over China.

    “Australia’s major trading partner is also perceived as our No.1 security threat,” he said.

    Normalizing relations before an abnormal U.S. election

    Heseltine believes there is a mood of cautious optimism about the growing relationship between Australia and China since the election of the Albanese government, but expects the future will not be completely free of headwinds.

    In the end, Australia, like many other nations in the region, is pragmatically making the situation work. It has seen relations with Beijing normalize, or as some prefer to describe it, stabilize.

    As for the United States, relations between Canberra and Washington remain vibrant and strong.

    The next big issue for Australia in managing this twin policy of improving ties with the Asia-Pacific’s two diverse superpowers could well be the 2024 U.S. presidential election — who wins it and if China features in it.

    And those things are outside its control.

    Three questions to consider:

    1. What is the emerging dilemma facing most democratic nations in the Asia-Pacific region?
    2. Is China likely to overtake the United States as the Asia-Pacific’s major superpower anytime soon?
    3. What is the biggest threat to the current status quo facing nations in the region?

     

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  • News Decoder helps launch digital student journalism tool

    News Decoder helps launch digital student journalism tool

    Gathering and assessing the quality of information is one of the most effective ways to develop media literacy, critical thinking and effective communication skills. But without guidance, too many young people fail to question the reliability of visual images and overly rely on the first results they find on Google.

    That’s why News Decoder has been working with the Swedish nonprofit, Voice4You, on a project called ProMS to create a self-guided digital tool that guides students in writing news stories.

    The tool, called Mobile Stories, is now available across Europe. It takes students step-by-step through the journalistic process. Along the way, they gain critical thinking skills and a deeper understanding about the information they find, consume and share.

    It empowers students to develop multimedia stories that incorporate original reporting for school, community or global audiences, with minimal input from educators. It comes with open-access learning resources developed by News Decoder.

    After a decade of success in Sweden, Voice4You partnered with News Decoder to help make the tool available across Europe and the globe. Throughout the ProMS project, new English language content suitable for high schoolers was developed and piloted in 21 schools in Romania, Ireland and Finland. The Mobile Stories platform has demonstrated remarkable potential in building student confidence and media and information literacy by providing a platform and an opportunity to produce quality journalism.

    From story pitch to publication

    Using the new international version of Mobile Stories, students have already published 136 articles on mobilestories.com, with another 700 currently in production. Their topics range from book reviews and reporting from local cultural events to in-depth feature articles on the decline in young people’s mental health and child labor in the fast fashion industry.

    “The tool looks like a blogging platform and on every step along the way of creating an article, students can access learning materials including video tutorials by professional journalists from around the world, articles and worksheets,” said News Decoder’s ProMS Project Manager Sabīne Bērziņa.

    Some of these resources, such as videos and worksheets are open access, available to all.

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  • Decoder: The Silence of America

    Decoder: The Silence of America

    Iconic photos from the Cold War cover the corridors of the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, news networks created by the U.S. government to counter censorship and disinformation from the Soviet Union and their East European satellite nations during the Cold War.

    Images from 1989, the year communist rule melted away in more than a dozen countries, were reminders of earlier days when Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty had broadcast news in Polish, Czech, Slovakian and the Baltic languages; those countries are now robust democracies as well as members of the European Union and NATO.

    Those historic photos jostle with more recent images from countries where human rights and democracy are not observed, including Russia, Belarus, Iran, Afghanistan and other nations across Central and South Asia. In total, the two networks broadcasted in 27 languages to 23 countries providing news coverage and cultural programming where free media doesn’t exist or is threatened.

    The journalists who broadcast there often do so at great risk. 

    Many are exiles unable to return to their own countries. Three of their journalists are currently jailed in Russian-occupied Crimea, Russia and Azerbaijan. The charges against them are viewed as politically motivated.

    Countering power with news

    On 14 March 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order which cut the funding for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. It also cut the funding of Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Network, the Voice of America — the “official” voice of the United States — as well as Radio & Television Marti which broadcasts to Cuba.

    The funding cuts would effectively silence these networks. In response, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. 18 March that argued that Congress has exclusive authority over federal spending and that cannot be altered by a presidential executive order. Voice of America Director Michael Abramowitz filed suit 26 March. 

    On March 27, the Trump administration announced it had restored the funding for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. 

    Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty came into being after the end of the second World War when Europe became a divided continent. While the wartime allies, including Britain and the United States, focused on rebuilding their economies after years of war, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sent his army to occupy most of Eastern Europe. 

    Despite promises made at a meeting in the Crimea, known as the Yalta Conference, during the final months of the war in 1945, Stalin refused to allow free elections in East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. 

    Neither were free elections held in the three Baltic countries — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — which the Soviet Union had annexed in 1940. The crushing of democratic rule in so many nations was characterised by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as “an iron curtain” that had “descended across the continent.” 

    After years of fighting Nazi Germany, half of Europe was now ruled under a Soviet dictatorship.

    Containing communism

    The United States responded with a policy of ‘containment’ that aimed to halt the spread of communism without using soldiers and tanks. Radio Free Europe started broadcasting in 1950 followed by Radio Liberty in 1953. 

    With a system of transmitters pointing east, news programmes that countered the state propaganda were beamed to the countries in the Soviet bloc, eventually in 17 languages. These were tactics that came to be known as ‘soft power’.

    Based in Munich, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL as they became known, attracted dissidents who opposed the Soviet-imposed governments. Their audiences grew during the Cold War, despite threats of prosecution. 

    In addition to news, broadcasts covered music, sports and science. Banned literature written by dissidents who challenged the communist systems could be heard on RFE/RL. Czech dissident Vaclav Havel was one of those voices.

    The Berlin Wall tumbled down in November 1989. It was followed by the Velvet Revolution that overthrew the Czech government and installed as its president, the former political prisoner Haval. He invited RFE/RL to move their base from Munich to Prague. 

    “My confinement in prison might have lasted longer had it not been for the publicity I had through these two stations,” Haval said at the time. 

    An outcry in Europe and elsewhere

    The news that the Trump administration would shut down the radio networks spread quickly. Listeners, viewers and supporters who had lived through the Cold War years when only pro-government broadcasts were legal, shared their stories on social media:

    “In Romania, they [RFE] lightened communism with the hope of freedom.”

    “As a small girl, living under a communist regime in Poland, I remember my grandfather listening every night to Radio Free Europe, to get uncensored news from around the world, to get different opinions on the world’s affairs, and probably hoping that one day, he would live in a free world. It was illegal to listen to this Radio, and the quality was very poor, and yet, he would do it every night … ” 

    Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski recalled how his father had listened to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. “This is a great shame,” he wrote. “My grandfather was listening to RFE in Soviet-occupied Poland in 80s. It’s how we learned basic facts about our own countries because communist propaganda was so tightly controlled.”

    On 17 March the Czech Republic asked the foreign ministers of the European Union to support RFE/RL so the journalism could continue. 

    One diplomat who was in the meeting said that stopping RFE/RL’s broadcasts would “be a gift to Europe’s adversaries.” Already Russia’s state broadcaster, Russia Today, had tweeted that cutting the funding for RFE/RL was an “awesome decision by Trump.”

    When Vaclav Havel welcomed Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to Prague after democracy had been restored to Czechoslovakia, he said that having RFE/RL in the Czech capital was equivalent to having three NATO divisions. 

    The supporters of the networks are hoping that the soft power of free media is indeed able to pack a powerful punch for free media.

    Update to this story: As of 30 March, Radio Free Liberty has informed News Decoder that, while two weeks worth of funds have been received, the rest of U.S. government funding had not yet been restored. We will continue to update this story as we learn of further developments. 

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. Why, during the Cold War, were radio broadcasts across closed borders one of the few ways people could receive news that was not controlled by the government?
    2. In what ways are people limited in accessing news, culture and music?
    3. In what ways might a free media be important in a democracy?

     

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  • Decoder: The Paris (Dis)Agreement

    Decoder: The Paris (Dis)Agreement

    The newspapers dubbed it “unprecedented”, “historic”, “landmark”.

    Then-U.S. President Barack Obama called it a “tribute to strong, principled American leadership”.

    When 195 countries came together nearly 10 years ago to adopt a legally binding agreement to try to avert the worst effects of climate change, it was considered a triumph of diplomacy and a potential turning point for the world. The deal that emerged is now so well-known it is referred to simply as “the Paris Agreement” or “the Paris Accords” — or sometimes just “Paris”.

    But with a stroke — or several — of his black-and-gold pen, U.S. President Donald Trump has taken the United States out of the fight to stop global warming, casting the future of the pact and everything it hoped to accomplish into doubt.

    Has the departure of the United States doomed the campaign to cut greenhouse gas emissions to failure? And if not, who will take up the torch Trump has cast aside?

    Uncharted waters

    The good news is that climate change experts believe the benefits of a transition to renewables — from energy independence to cleaner air — are so compelling the shift will go with or without the United States.

    The bad is that Trump’s actions will give many countries and companies an excuse to leave the battlefield. And that may make it impossible to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of holding temperature rises to well below 2 degrees Celsius.

    Listing all the steps Trump has taken so far to undermine the climate campaign would take hundreds of words. So here are just a few.

    Since 20 January 2025, the newly-minted U.S. government has:

    • Withdrawn from the Paris agreement for the second time – joining the ranks of Yemen, Iran and Libya as the only countries outside the pact.

    • Said the Environmental Protection Agency would look at overturning a 2009 ruling that greenhouse gases threaten the health of current and future generations – effectively gutting the agency’s legal authority to regulate U.S. emissions.

    • Rolled back dozens of Biden-era pollution rules.

    • Abandoned a deal under which rich countries promised to help poorer ones afford to make the transition to sustainable energy.

    • Eliminated support for domestic and international climate research by scientists.

    • Halted approvals for green energy projects planned for federal lands and waters.

    • Removed climate change references from federal websites.

    • Set the stage to fulfil Trump’s promise to let oil companies “drill, baby, drill” by declaring an energy emergency, which will allow him to fast-track projects.

    Eliot Whittington, chief systems change officer at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, said that the United States is entering genuinely uncharted waters.

    “The Trump administration is making changes far in excess of its legal authority and drawing more power into itself and away from Congress, states and the courts,” Whittington said. “It is doing so in service of an explicitly ideological agenda that is hostile to much green action — despite the popularity of environmental benefits and high level of environmental concern in the U.S.”

    Alibi for inaction

    Trump has repeatedly — and falsely — called the scientifically-proven fact that mankind’s actions are leading to planetary heating a hoax. In November 2024, following the onslaught of deadly Hurricane Helene, he said it was “one of the greatest scams of all time”.

    For a hoax, climate change is packing a painful punch.

    Last year was the hottest on record, and yet even with countries touting net-zero gains, emissions also hit a new high. According to World Weather Attribution, the record temperatures worsened heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, storms and floods that killed thousands, displaced millions and destroyed infrastructure and property.

    In other words, the need to curb emissions is only growing more urgent.

    Alister Doyle, a News Decoder correspondent who authored “The Great Melt: Accounts from the Frontline of Climate Change“, believes Trump’s anti-green policies will slow but not stop the move away from fossil fuels.

    “But while other nations will stick with the Paris Agreement, almost none are doing enough,” he said. “Trump’s decision to quit will provide an alibi for inaction by many other governments and companies.”

    Voters look to their wallets

    Ambivalence about net-zero policies had been on the rise even before Trump took office, stoked by populist political parties.

    There are clear long-term economic benefits of the transition — from faster growth to the avoidance of costs linked to natural disasters. But Whittington said that the short-term sacrifices and infrastructure spending it will require have proven a tough sell when voters are facing difficult financial circumstances at home.

    “After a global inflation shock post-pandemic, governments have little financial space to defray the costs of upfront investment and generally voters feel like they don’t have the space to take on additional costs, even as a down payment on a better future,” Whittington said.

    This is further complicated by a powerful lobby against climate action led by oil and gas companies, which have devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to the effort. While most have also made public commitments to green goals, the sentiment shift has led several to abandon most or all of these in the past few weeks.

    Whittington believes that, despite these setbacks, the energy transition will eventually gain enough momentum that even fossil fuel producers will be unable to step on the brakes. It will be led by multiple countries and propelled by a variety of forces.

    Chief among these is the need in today’s politically fractured world for energy security: the guarantee a country will have access to an uninterrupted — and uninterruptible — supply of energy at a price it can afford. This is particularly important to countries dependent on imported energy.

    China leads the way.

    In its pursuit of energy self-sufficiency, China — both the world’s largest fossil fuel importer and the world’s top greenhouse gas emitter — has earned itself a less dubious distinction: it now leads the globe in the production of renewable energy and electric vehicles.

    “The International Energy Agency says that China could be producing as much solar power by the early 2030s as total U.S. electricity demand today,” Doyle said.

    Europe, meanwhile, has been on a quest to wean itself of Russian oil and gas and has rapidly increased its adoption of renewables. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, is currently the world’s second-largest wind power producer and plans to double capacity by 2030.

    “Europe as a whole — including the UK — generally is leading the world in showing how to cut emissions and grow the economy,” Whittington said.

    The United States, he added, will likely stay involved in areas where it holds a technical edge, such as battery development.

    Even the Middle East will have an increasingly compelling motive for going green(er): the need for other sources of income as fossil fuel demand falls from a peak expected in 2030.

    Public pressure itself may again become a driving force for change.

    As hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves and other climate-related disasters increase — and as a younger, more climate-aware generation finds its voice — voters may start worrying less about their personal finances and more about the future of the planet.

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. What is meant by the “green economy”?
    2. How can a government encourage or discourage climate action?
    3. What, if any, changes to your lifestyle have you made to help our planet?

     

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  • Decoder Replay: Bacteria doesn’t stop at the border

    Decoder Replay: Bacteria doesn’t stop at the border

    During the Covid pandemic, nations realized they needed to work together to keep their people safe. That’s where the World Health Organization comes in. 

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