“The truth of what’s happening” How Tibetan exile media develop and maintain journalistic authority
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tibet is one of the most restrictive places in the world for press freedom, with information online and offline tightly controlled and censored by the Chinese government. Foreign correspondents are restricted from travelling to and reporting in Tibetan areas, while Tibetans who act as sources are often persecuted. Despite this level of repression, Tibetans still find ways to tell the rest of the world what is happening in Tibet. This paper explores how it is possible to authoritatively report on events in one of the world’s most restrictive places for press freedom. Instead of relying on a single individual or news organisation, we find that reporting is conducted through journalistic networks consisting of sources in Tibet, Tibetan exile journalists, and source intermediaries called ‘communicators’. Based on fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with Tibetan journalists and communicators we explore how they develop and maintain journalistic authority, while being in exile and having to deal with severe constraints to press freedom.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".