From Stony Brook, nurturing Bhutan's democracy

In the old days, the people in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon had a monarchy that defined the boundaries of common discourse.

Now, Stony Brook University journalism professors are partners with a group in Bhutan to teach one of the world's youngest democracies about the role and functions of an independent press.

The new, three-year agreement focuses on instructing Bhutanese primary and high school teachers to view media as "a lens on society . . . and see what it says about changes in the community," Siok Sian Pek-Dorji, executive director of the nonprofit Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy, said in a telephone interview from the South Asian country.

That special lens includes getting young people engaged in democracy, teaching people how to discern what information actually is credible, and encouraging citizens to offer feedback to the media, Pek-Dorji said of the 700,000 inhabitants of the country, located between China and India.

All of these ideas are new for Bhutan, which became a constitutional democracy in 2008 after a century of absolute monarchy. The country still has a king -- Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck, 32 -- but the parliament has the power to impeach him.

"Here you are in this brand-new democratic society, and there's no legal precedent. The concept of freedom of the press is vague," said Dean Miller, director of Stony Brook's Center for News Literacy, who traveled with colleague Michael Spikes to the capital, Thimphu, in April for his first instruction of Bhutanese teachers -- a trip funded by the Bhutanese group. "The whole point of the news literacy course is that you can't have a functioning democracy if people aren't well-informed."

It is the first long-term linkage of a U.S. university with the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy. Some Stony Brook students are expected to visit Bhutan next year, Miller said.

Stony Brook will help the center develop curriculum on democracy and the role of the media for Bhutanese teachers to use in classrooms, and will review lesson plans and help design a website that makes the curriculum available online, Pek-Dorji said. "We're not taking the news literacy program wholesale from Stony Brook," she added. "We realized in a country like Bhutan that we should contextualize everything."

That has presented hurdles. "This idea that a citizen can demand answers of a government official is a new idea there," Miller said. "I had one teacher who stood up and gave several speeches in which he made it clear that he thought what we're all about was not a good thing."

Such an outlook stems from a "general belief that the government has done a good job all these years and given people a better quality of life" for the nearly 70 percent of Bhutanese that live in rural farming communities, Pek-Dorji said.

Still, Spikes, digital content producer at the Center for News Literacy, was struck by some similarities to the United States, with "children being influenced more by entertainers instead of who we might see as role-model types," he said.

He recalled walking in downtown Thimphu -- where traditional 14th century-style garb is common -- and hearing a Rihanna song as someone's ringtone.

The global impact of social media is making the world a much smaller place, with younger Bhutanese receiving their news from friends on Facebook, Pek-Dorji said, "so there's a lot of unverified information floating around."

As preserving Bhutan's culture dovetails with navigating new media, the partnership with Stony Brook is even more important, Pek-Dorji said. "It will help lay the foundations for a culture of democracy," she said.