Vlad Jecan

A CJP/IFEX report informs that Iran holds at least 52 journalists behind bars, “a third of all those in jail around the world”.

In most cases, authorities have filed vague antistate charges such as “propagation against the regime,” insulting authorities, and disrupting public order. But many cases are shrouded in secrecy, without even formal charges being disclosed.

Some detainees have already been sentenced to lengthy prison terms, lashes, internal exile, and lifetime bans on writing and other social and political activities. The cases of many others are pending. At least two face heresy charges that, upon conviction, would bring the death penalty.

You can find information on each jailed journalists on the CJP website.

Editor’s Weblog mentions an interesting report that suggests that people on Facebook prefer to link to broadcast sites, such as YouTube, to newspaper websites like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.  Google News, on the other hand, sends more traffic to newspapers.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal received 10.37% of its US visits from Google News, while it only received 1.41% of its visits from Facebook. The New York Times also received more visits from Google News than Facebook, with 5.21% and 2.96% of visits respectively.

This does not come as a surprise, however. Facebook is basically intended for online social interaction, media (images, videos) sharing, and offers various entertainment focused services. Therefore, it comes only naturally that users link to broadcast sites. Perhaps only a small percentage of Facebook users use their profile to follow newspapers and other online publications.

Google News is exactly the opposite. As we all know, Google unleashes its bots to index content based websites – from newspapers to blogs – to rank them and so on. People visit the aggregator’s site to seek information and their search results will, in most cases, send them to the better indexed online publications. In the same time, Facebook and Google News have complete different profiles. The first is entertainment and the later is information.

Will Facebook send more traffic to newspapers in the future? Questionable. However, I would like to see a similar analysis of Twitter and Google News.

Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security said that the ban on live coverage of attacks by domestic and international news organizations is necessary because they offer information to the enemy, Al Jazeera reports.

Al Jazeera quoted a couple of statements made by Hakim Ashir, the head of the Government Media and Information Center, who said:

(1)  Journalists are going to the scene of ongoing attacks, they endanger themselves.

(2)  But they also help inform the enemy with their live broadcasts or reporting of the progress of [police] operations.

(1)    Every war correspondent knows that his job is dangerous and assumes responsibility for his or her decision to report on an armed conflict.

(2)    The idea that journalists offer information to terrorists or a nation’s enemies when he or she is on the job is highly debatable. However, this has always been a good excuse to censor the press, to limit its rights and reduce freedom of movement for journalists in a conflict zone. This is why “embbeded reporting” was (re)introduced in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But more interesting is a statement made by the National Directorate of Security spokesman, Saeed Ansari:

Live coverage does not benefit the government, but benefits the enemies of Afghanistan

Since when must the press benefit the government? The press has no, or should not have, allegience to the government, regardless of the host country of a media outlet, and it does not benefit directly to the enemy. The press should benefit the citizens who have the constitutional right to know what is happening in their country.

The Afghan constitution guarantees freedom of speech. If Afghanistan wants to become a democratic nation, then it should better follow the constitution.

The new book is a collection of writings by Anna Politkovskaya. From The Guardian:

Politkovskaya never relents, never holds back. Her revulsion for the wild men of the Red Army as they rape and kill, for the corrupt warlords who take over in Grozny, for Vladimir Putin and his value-free Russia, for fellow journalists who play fellow travellers, is constant and corrosive. The BBC Trust would have a “fairness and balance” collywobble if she’d put any of this on air. She almost pleads not to be believed because she is so close to the quagmires of bias. But you also trust what she says, because fact piles unquenchably on fact, name on name, grisly deed on deed.

You can order a copy via Amazon here.

A British journalist was arrested by the Hamas police accusing him of “unspecified security offences”. The journalist, identified by the Interior Ministry spokesman Ehab Al-Ghsain as freelance correspondent Paul Martin, is accused of harming the security of the country. The Telegraph reports:

“We have confessions that the British journalist committed offences against Palestinian law, and that harms the security of the country,” Mr Ghsain said, without giving details on who had confessed and under what circumstances.

This comes as a surprise for me because I personally throught that Hamas is trouging for media attention and positive reaction. This is all part of what William S. Lind named the 4th generation warfare (4GW). Thomas X. Hammes continues the 4GW theory arguing that today militant groups try to gain the support and sympathy of the people, locally and internationally. Therefore, wouldn’t  be this move considered as counterproductive?

It may very well be. Personally, I have viewed a number of documentaries on Hamas and, of course, followed the Palestinian Islamist movement in news reports. Not long ago, the militants have sponsered a film. Of course propagandistic, yet it shows that Hamas is getting acquainted with 4GW. The documentaries showed journalists documenting the group’s cause, interviewing high ranking officials in the most remote locations out of fear of an Israeli raid and following the militants, all perhaps in an attempt to create trust between Hamas and the press.

Paul Martin’s arrest, however, comes as a surprise and perhaps suggests that Hamas supports journalists only when they write in their favor. Of course they do.

Patrick Cockburn is a journalist and a veteran war correspondent. He began his carrier as a Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times and the Independent in 1979 and he concentrated on Iraq ever since.

In 2003, just weeks before the US invasion of Iraq, Cockburn made his way to the country. Thanks to a book published in 1999 which was co-authored with his brother Andrew, he did not receive a visa to enter Iraq. The book, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, was not seen well by the Saddam regime. Cockburn writes in The Occupation, that the book did well in the black market, as some Iraqis photocopied the book, multiplied it and then they went on and sold the book. In consequence, Patrick Cockburn had to pass through Syria and into Northern Iraq controlled by the Kurds. Then he crossed the Tigris River by boat and made his way to Baghdad.

For the next three years, Cockburn would report on Iraq for The Independent and after the invasion he started to write for the London Review of Books. He was present when the Saddam regime fell and reported on the anarchy and looting that occurred throughout the country after the invasion. Cockburn writes that American soldiers did not intervene in order to stop the looting and try to install order in the streets of Baghdad. Throughout The Occupation, Cockburn criticizes the steps taken by the Americans to pacify regions of Iraq and eventually the entire country. Continue reading →

The power of the press is indisputable, especially in wartime. It has become general knowledge that the outcome of the Vietnam War was heavily influenced by correspondents who went beyond military issues and reported the tragic reality of a confusing war. War reporting existed in one way or another since the first group of primitive men tried to kill another group. In fact, the first “reported” battle is that of Kadesh in 1274 BC, when Ramesses II fought the Hittite Empire. The Pharaoh ordered inscriptions detailing the battle on temples in Abydos, Luxor and Karnak[1]. However, highly propagandistic, the hieroglyphs do not account the battle in its full extent. Nor do Caesar’s writings twelve centuries later when he narrates his attept to invade Britain. Continue reading →

There are some people who hold passionately on the idea of a European Union media. A single media with original specifics that is available only within the borders of the EU and which is, of course, completely different from anything else. In their narrow perspective, EU media enforcers (maybe militants) ignore the very differences, cultural and economic, that can be found within the same borders.

Simple, pragmatic questions like “do the Brits and Bulgarians have similar interests?” are ignored. If we research the matter a little, we’d find out that the British are more interested in foreign policy than the Bulgarians, the later being more concerned with domestic politics. With a mind on this we can simply ask ourselves: “then how can there be the same media?” There are other examples as well: the British public is generally interested in archaeology, the Romanian news consumers are not; the French prefer print newspapers while the Romanians enjoy TV and online publications. In consequence, the media adapts to each country.

The regulations proposed by the EU are pertinent and most welcomed by journalists. However, they do not create, nor even try to establish a single EU media – this is what researchers and media commentators have to understand. We should celebrate diversity, not ignore it.

Hold the Front Page wrote:

Mark Gale had been a journalist on the Haywards Heath-based Mid Sussex Times for no fewer than 60 years.

He loved his job as the paper’s music and theatre critic so much he continued to work for nothing following his retirement, coming into the office for two days a week.

“His writing should have earned him a job on the nationals but he was not ambitious and loved his job here so much he never moved on,” said a colleague.

60 years of writing for a single newspaper, isn’t it amazing? This probably takes a lot of commitment, loyalty and modesty. It is also shocking because most journalists migrate from a paper to another due to various reasons or write for multiple publications in the same time.

A post by Elizabeth Redman got my attention. She asks: “Will coding become the next indispensable skill [for journalists]?” Or should journalists write not only articles but software as well?

Indeed, it has become imperative for journalists to be comfortable with social networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and other. However, coding is not compulsory for using social networking and perhaps journalists can survive without knowing PHP. The part with “finding out information and building a platform to express it in new ways” does not require coding abilities. If it’s about the content, then a writer can set up a free blog on platforms like Blogger and Wordpress.com and publish materials in no time.

Continue reading →