Ahmadinejad a Persian Nixon?

IntLawGrrl Hope Lewis is right in her post below: not quite 'Nuff Said about what's happening in Iran. Not only because, as she says, the fundamental issue is the right of the Iranians to freedom of expression, association, political opinion, etc., but because the right to self-determination means being able to choose one's leaders without outside interference, as well as without fraud. So I'm wondering to what extent the media may be considered to interfere, and to what extent the events in Iran are a result of media and the power of modern commication technology.
I'm wondering this because here in Paris, I have met Iranian women who contradict the image we outside Iran have all been given of what it's like on the inside. They urge people to visit, and a young French woman's story confirms a greater openness and freedom than we believe prevails: traveling through the Middle East alone in her truck with her dog, she became slightly annoyed with the overwhelming kindness and generosity of the Iranians because she was never alone: constantly in someone's enjoyable company, always the very welcome guest. If we who oppose the imposition of the veil cover our heads to visit Iran and Iranians starved for outside contact, are we capitulating? Supporting the regime, or supporting the people?
With these questions in mind, I listened to the news on the eve of the Iranian election and heard there was a good chance President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (above left) would not be reelected. Then, just like Floyd Landis (right) blowing past the opposition to win the 2006 Tour de France after having fallen hopelessly behind (or so it seemed), he was announced the landslide winner. My husband and I joked about doping and were not surprised to hear accusations of fraud. Intriguing, then, to read in Ken Ballen's and Patrick Doherty's Washington Post article that

our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election. ...

Iranians view their support for a more democratic system, with normal relations with the United States, as consonant with their support for Ahmadinejad. They do not want him to continue his hard-line policies. Rather, Iranians apparently see Ahmadinejad as their toughest negotiator, the person best positioned to bring home a favorable deal -- rather like a Persian Nixon going to China.

Allegations of fraud and electoral manipulation will serve to further isolate Iran and are likely to increase its belligerence and intransigence against the outside world.

When I first learned of their article, I thought they might be journalists manipulated by pro-Ahmadinejad interviewees. But Ballen is president of Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion (a nonprofit institute researching attitudes towards extremism), Doherty is deputy director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, and they've been doing these polls for 3 years now.
So how did word of fraud spread so quickly and convincingly -- convincingly enough to get today's thousands of Iranians out into the street despite truncheon-wielding security forces? Are we being manipulated, or are they? If they succeed in obtaining what they want, manipulation may not matter in the end -- except to the extent it is further evidence of media's power to shape events and our need to be wary, and chary, of it.

Trade & Culture: Paths to (Re)conciliation

My warm thanks to IntLawGrrls for inviting me to contribute a guest post. It is a splendid initiative to report on relevant international law topics from a female perspective (and I do love the pink background).
Having the IntLawGrrls’ floor, I would like to share some ideas stemming from my current research, which focuses on the relationship between trade and cultural norms at the international level, taking into particular account the impact of digital media. As a sort of a broader research agenda on the theme, I published an article in the Journal of International Economic Law. But lately, I have also been trying, in my paper entitled "Trade and Culture: Keep the Border Fuzzy, Please," to go a step further and discuss the fuzzy borders between trade and culture, and whether and how we could manage them in the contemporary media environment.
The pair “trade and culture” can be singled out and deservedly labelled as unique in the “trade and …” discourse. The reasons for this exceptional quality lie in three points:
► The first is the intensity of the relationship, which is indeed most often framed as “trade versus culture,” and has been a significant stumbling block, especially as regards audiovisual services during the Uruguay Round of negotiations of the World Trade Organization (logo above left) and subsequently.
► The second specificity of the relationship is that the international community has organised its efforts in a rather effective manner to offset the lack of satisfying solutions within the WTO framework. The 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, adopted under the auspices of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (logo below right), and the legally binding UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, came into force two years ago this month, are clear signs of the potency of the international endeavour, on the one hand, and of the (almost desperate) desire to contest the existing WTO norms in the field of trade and culture, on the other.
►A third distinctive characteristic of the relationship between trade and culture -- one that is rarely mentioned and blissfully ignored in any Geneva or Paris talks -- is that while the pro-trade and pro-culture opponents have been digging deeper into their respective trenches, the environment in which trade and cultural issues are to be regulated has radically changed. The emergence and wide spread of digital technologies have modified profoundly the conditions for cultural content creation, distribution and access, and have rendered some of the associated market failures obsolete, thus mitigating to a substantial degree the “clashing” nature of trade and culture. Under the conditions of the digital media space, any trade restriction may in fact be counterproductive to a thriving cultural environment, and the focus on “trade versus culture,” especially in the classical context of audiovisual services, may be too narrow and thus fail to recognise the augmented significance of other regulatory domains (such as intellectual property).
In this sense, there is a pressing need to re-evaluate the existing tools of media regulation, including those targeted at the protection and promotion of cultural diversity. Such regulatory experiments would certainly unfold first at the domestic level; however, paradoxical as it may sound, it could be that the WTO offers better solutions than UNESCO when these matters are to be taken up at the international level.