But critics say Sierra Leone’s new media law gives the government the powers to shut down media houses and ban individual journalists from practicing their professions. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Mohamed Fofanah
FREETOWN, Jul 30 2020 (IPS)

Last week, Sierra Leone’s parliament voted to repeal the country’s 55-year-old libel law, which criminalised the publication of information that was deemed defamatory or seditious, and which had been used by successive governments to target and imprison media practitioners and silence dissenting views. But not everyone is convinced it was in the best interest of media freedom.

On Jul. 23, in an unanimous vote, Sierra Leone’s parliament repealed Part V of the 1965 Public Order Act (POA), which criminalised  libel. It was replaced with the Independent Media Commission (IMC) Act 2020, which was also approved unanimously.

But critics say the IMC Act 2020 gives the Sierra Leone government the power to shut down media houses and ban journalists from practicing their professions.

Sylvia Blyden, who served as a minister of the main opposition All People’s Congress, and is currently editor of the local newspaper, Awareness Times, told IPS that she was against the repeal of all of the provisions in the POA.

Blyden, a prominent journalist and activist, is presently facing charges brought by the government for defamatory libel, publishing false news and seditious libel — charges that existed under the repealed Part V of the POA.
But Blyden told IPS that there are many protective caveats of that act, which made it not as bad as some people believed it to be. She added that the importance of the criminal libel laws went far beyond the practice of journalism and politics.

“It is sad for poor citizens who cannot afford the money to pay lawyers to institute civil libel litigation to protect their names and good reputations as there is no more punitive deterrent in place.
“I am not speaking of journalists, I am speaking of citizens assaulting other citizen’s reputation. We still have our laws to protect against physical assault on us but we have removed the laws that protect us against assault on our good names. Not much thinking went into this process of repeal,” she argued.

Others have noted that the IMC Act 2020 will serve only to “undermine media pluralism and completely eliminate the registration of newspapers as a ‘Sole Proprietorship’ business, and only provides for registration under the Partnership Act 1890 and the Companies Act 2009”.

Lawrence Williams, writing for the Sierra Leone Telegraph, said, “It’s important to note that many newspapers in Sierra Leone are registered under ‘Sole Proprietorship’ as one among several options provided for under the current IMC Act”.

He said the elimination of newspapers registered under sole proprietorship could lead to the closure of many independent publications, and could therefore “end media scrutiny of government institutions and public officials; and inevitably result to ending governance accountability and transparency in Sierra Leone”.

Amin Kef Sesay, writing in the Calabash Newspaper, said that the IMC Act 2020 would allow the government to “tie the hands of citizens from freely investing in the media and heading those institutions as editors, publishers, etc”.

But Sierra Leone’s information and communication minister Mohamed Rahman Swaray told IPS that the POA had been in violation of 12 international human rights instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that government had to comply with international standards.

He said that the IMC Act would enable the mitigation against sedition and libel against private citizens. He added that the Independent Media Commission, the regulatory body of the media, had been given quasi-judicial functions under the IMC Act 2020, and had powers of the high court to hear civil matters of sedition and libel.

• When the act is signed into law, the commission will be able to monitor and regulate the media, its content, ensure that a minimum wage $60 is paid to media practitioners, and to ensure that only qualified and trained media personnel are employed as editors/station managers etc.

Swaray also argued that the IMC Act 2020 was not government exercising further rights over the media. “We discussed the draft bill with the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) and they all agreed to the contents of the draft which was then sent to parliament so there was endorsement of the contents of the bill by SLAJ,” he said.

Swaray told IPS that government was very concerned about improving the media landscape in this West African nation as the old law meant the country’s brightest and best brains shied away from the profession because they could face criminal charges. “Women also were refusing to practice,” he added.

He is confident that the recent decriminalisation of the libel law will now see more women taking up the profession.
“Now the best minds and women will come on board and we will make the media and journalism a professional, lucrative and serious institution in the country,” Swaray told IPS.

Speaker of parliament Dr. Abass Bundu said at the time that parliament had restored the dignity of the media and he hoped that, going forward, responsible and professional journalism would hold sway.

Hassan Samba Yarjah, a commissioner of the Human Rights Commission in Sierra Leone, told IPS that the commission had called for Part V of the POA to be repealed every year for the last 10 years in its annual ‘State of Human Rights Report in Sierra Leone’.

He said that as a commission they could not emphasise the importance of the passing of the IMC Act 2020. Yarjah told IPS that the press and citizens would now have greater freedom to express their views, speak out, challenge government on issues affecting them, constructively criticise and speak truth to power without being arrested and branded a criminal.

He said that this return of power to the people was a big development for democracy here, adding that this would change the landscape of journalism and develop the media. “The commission will, however, continue to monitor these freedoms and also ensure that the Media and everyone enjoy this freedom with greater responsibility,” Yarjah told IPS.

Both the repeal of the POA and the passing of the IMC Act 2020 have been sent to President Julius Maada Bio for his signature.

One of KANA TV’s dubbing team in a specially equipped sound-proof studio reading from his Amharic script to dub over a Turkish actor. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By James Jeffrey
ADDIS ABABA, Dec 21 2017 (IPS)

On a Saturday afternoon in one of Addis Ababa’s khat houses, a group of men and women chew the mildly narcotic plant while gazing mesmerized toward a television featuring a South Korean soldier stripped to his waist and holding a young lady’s hand while proclaiming his undying love—somewhat incongruously—in Amharic.

Broadcast exclusively in the lingua franca of Ethiopia—a necessity with 80 dialects across the country—and after decades of drab Ethiopian state-owned television, KANA TV marks a breakthrough in Ethiopian televised entertainment. It may also signal a shift in Ethiopia’s much criticised media environment.The government appears to finally realise that squeezing private media is a mistake and self-defeating, leaving the field open to the likes of social-media activists with their own agendas.

“Kana” translates as something between taste and flavour, and Ethiopia’s estimated 4 million television households have found that this new private satellite TV channel carrying international standard programming very much to their taste. When it first aired, KANA seized a 40-50 percent share of the prime time market.

“It’s a crazy operation,” says co-founder Elias Schulze, the only non-Ethiopian amid the 180 staff. “At the beginning it took up to 50 man hours to dub one hour and we had to produce 200 man hours of content every day.”

So far KANA has dubbed 2,300 hours of foreign content, requiring a highly coordinated operation: research and analysis to select which shows to secure, then negotiations and purchase, followed by translation, casting, acting, syncing, audio editing, video editing, quality control and then scheduling. Finally, everything is uplinked to satellite.

“TV here used to be so boring, all the channels showed mainly news,” says an Addis Ababa resident and television viewer in her early twenties. “But KANA is pure entertainment, and people really like it.”

Ethiopia’s Amhara, the native speakers of Amharic, only constitute about a quarter of Ethiopia’s 100-million population. But before its launch, KANA conducted research that showed 70 percent of the country’s television viewers understood the language to a reasonable level.

That was an improvement on the 50 percent who couldn’t understand the Arabic-language satellite channels that had come to dominate Ethiopian viewing.

“People watched them because they enjoyed the quality and good storylines,” says Hailu Teklehaimanot, a producer and head of communications at KANA, and a former newspaper editor. “So we thought why not make that quality understandable through dubbing, while at the same time, our staff got on-the-job training we could eventually use for original productions.”

About 90 percent of KANA’s current output is dubbed foreign shows. The eventual goal is for half of output to be home-grown productions like KANA’s new Masters at Work series, which showcases the works of Ethiopian singers, poets, fashion designers, photographers and the like.

“There’s a narrative in mainstream media—both local and international—focusing on development or lack of development at the macro level,” Teklehaimanot says. “But there is a different narrative at the micro level in which inspired young people are doing new things.”

One example of this on Masters at Work is photographer Girma Berta, who specialises in taking photos on his mobile phone of simple images such as street kids and street vendors going about daily life.

“The message I want to send out to young people with interests in photography is not to be scared to try new things,” Berta says during his Masters at Work appearance. “Also, I would advise them to use social media properly to share their pictures, because they can show their pictures to the rest of the world easily; I think until we can find the style of photography that defines us, we must search for it ourselves.”

Staff working at KANA TV. Photo courtesy KANA TV.

Despite such offerings of inspiration, the majority of KANA’s audience watch its shows like viewers anywhere—for entertainment or as escapism from the daily grind.

Others, meanwhile, would rather not watch it at all.

“I don’t let me family watch KANA TV otherwise we’ll never talk to each other when I return from work,” says one taxi driver in Addis Ababa.

Meanwhile, conservative commentators have decried KANA’s foreign soap operas for corrupting Ethiopian culture, while others have similar concerns.

“I believe [the Ethiopian Broadcasting Service] has been doing a far better job than KANA in representing Ethiopia’s indigenous and diaspora [populations],” Addis Ababa-based Mahder Sereke says on Twitter. “Also KANA’s soaps are debasing, not to Ethiopia’s culture but to Ethiopia’s women [through] their false—negatively—gendered depiction.”

EBS is a privately held media company based in the U.S. that targets the global Ethiopian market resulting from successive waves of emigration during decades of tumult in Ethiopia forming a significant Ethiopian diaspora of around two million people. The largest communities are in the U.S., with estimates varying from 250,000 people to about one million.

KANA has also been criticised for undercutting local production and poaching viewers from other TV outlets, thereby actually reducing opportunities for local artists and creative types to illustrate their works.

Meanwhile, some viewer fatigue has seen KANA losing some of its grip on the prime time market. But KANA’s emergence appears to indicate Ethiopian television could be finally changing for the better—albeit not as fast as many would wish.

In the past, Ethiopian government spokespersons haven’t been shy of explaining that media reform shouldn’t be rushed due to Ethiopia’s developmental state.

But now the government appears to finally realise that squeezing private media is a mistake and self-defeating, leaving the field open to the likes of social-media activists with their own agendas.

“The problem is a lot of things people view as gossip if heard by mouth, when they read about it on social media they take as fact,” Lidetu Ayele, founder of the opposition Ethiopia Democratic Party, says of social media’s influence during protests in Ethiopia.

And so, whether out of acknowledgment of the rights of Ethiopians not to be spoon fed state-sponsored propaganda or out of its own self-interest, the Ethiopian government is letting some winds of change finally blow through Ethiopian media.

“We don’t agree with the characterization that Ethiopia’s media landscape is repressed,” says Nazrawi Ghebreselasie, KANA’s managing director and co-founder. “It’s true that the industry in general is in its infancy; however, due to conducive policy environment, we are seeing massive investment going into media.”

Others, however, note that a new entertainment channel like KANA doesn’t connote Ethiopia’s media being unshackled—a fact emphasised by Ethiopian journalists and bloggers arrested for their journalism, often on the basis of terror charges, as highlighted by the international Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Media freedom depends on which yardstick you use,” says Daniel Berhane, a prominent Addis Ababa-based blogger. “The government appears to be relaxing about online and television media, but there are still no opposition newspapers.”

Ethiopia ranked 150th out of 180 countries in the 2017 press freedom index rankings by Reporters Without Borders. The international non-profit organization that promotes and defends freedom of information and the press states that the Ethiopian regime systematically uses the country’s anti-terror law against journalists.

Contrary voices, as a result, often have to come from the likes of ESAT, a popular Ethiopian satellite channel also broadcast from America. It is highly critical of the Ethiopian government and advertises itself as speaking for those who can’t speak in Ethiopia.

But part of KANA’s expanding original production base includes plans for a new news show, hence a whiteboard in the company’s offices covered in green marker pen hashing out its development.

Whether this news platform can be as insightful and demonstrate as much editorial freedom as news channels coming from outside Ethiopia will have to be seen.

But, at the same time, there appears reason for some optimism.

“The [negative] international view of media in Ethiopia is a bit exaggerated,” said Zekarias Sintayehu, editor in chief of Addis Ababa’s Reporter newspaper. “It is not a cakewalk to be journalist in Ethiopia but nobody can deny the prospects of a better media environment in the future.”

Judoka Rafaela Silva, who won Brazil’s first medal – gold - on Aug. 8, had received racial slurs like “monkey that should be in a cage” when she was disqualified from the London 2012 Games; now she is fa heroine. Credit: Roberto Castro/Brasil2016

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 18 2016 (IPS)

Brazil’s first gold medal of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics gave it a new multipurpose heroine, Rafaela Silva, whose defeat of the favourites in judo has made her a strong voice against racism and homophobia. Not only is she black and poor, but she just came out as gay.

In her first remarks as an Olympic champion, on Aug. 8, she referred to the harsh criticism she received after being disqualified in the second round of the London Olympics in 2012, when people lashed out against her in the social media, with one saying she was a “monkey who should be in a cage.” Her medal is her vengeance against racism.

It is also an example of a triumph over the poverty and crime that drags down so many young people in the Cidade de Deus, the Rio de Janeiro “favela” or shantytown where she grew up, which was made famous by the film City of God.

Colourful figures like Silva or Jamaican runner Usain Bolt, or unbeatable athletes like U.S. swimming legend Michael Phelps,are crucial in the Olympics, which have become a huge global media event, more than the leading international sports competition.

Sheer overkill also plays a key role in the media spectacle. In the Aug. 5-21 Rio Games, 11,552 athletes – eight percent more than in London 2012 – are participating in 306 medal events in 42 disciplines.

But the number of journalists grew even more, by about 20 percent. More than 25,000 accredited reporters are covering Rio 2016, which translates into 2.2 press, TV, radio and internet journalists for each athlete during the 19-day Games.

The Rio Games – the first held in South America – are the most connected Olympics in history, with data traffic and internet activity four times greater than in London.

And while six million tickets were sold for the stadiums, according to the organisers, billions in profits have been made from the spectators watching the Games on TV or over the internet worldwide.

The opening ceremony alone was watched by an estimated three billion people around the globe. The colourful ceremony and its special effects, directed by prize-winning filmmakers, cleared up the doubts about the success of the Games, due to threats like construction delays, the Zika virus epidemic and Brazil’s political and economic crisis.

The filtered view provided by dozens of TV cameras is no substitute for the actual atmosphere of the stadiums, but it makes it possible to see up-close details from different angles, including up above, which is impossible for spectators in the stadiums. And the technological advances constantly improve the experience of watching the Games from far away points on the globe.

Aesthetics is another dimension that colors the competition. It played a role in the inauguration of the Games and its strong presence in some disciplines, like the various gymnastics or diving events, helped minimise the military origins of many Olympic sports, like wrestling or shooting.

Judoka Rafaela Silva, who won Brazil’s first medal – gold – on Aug. 8, had received racial slurs like “monkey that should be in a cage” when she was disqualified from the London 2012 Games; now she is fa heroine. Credit: Roberto Castro/Brasil2016

But the drama seen in many of the contests is perhaps the central element of the Olympic media spectacle.

More people remember Swiss long-distance runner Gabriela Andersen’s struggle to finish the 1984 Olympic marathon in 37th place, staggering with heat exhaustion in the final 200 metres, than the actual winner of the marathon in Los Angeles that year.

For the honour of lighting the Olympic cauldron at the inauguration of the Rio 2016 Games, the athlete chosen was Brazilian runner Vanderlei de Lima, who became famous in Athens in 2004 when an Irish priest shoved him to the side of the road when he was in the lead in the marathon.

A Greek spectator helped free Lima from the grasp of the priest – who was later defrocked – and he continued the race. But he lost time and his rhythm was broken, and he ended in third place. For exemplifying the spirit of sportsmanship he showed by settling for the bronze, the International Olympic Committee awarded him the Pierre de Coubertin medal, a special decoration that carries the name of the founder of the IOC.

The footage of the incident, broadcast over and over around the world, made Lima an Olympics symbol.

The show needs heroes. National ones abound; sometimes winning a medal is all it takes. So far in Rio 2016, there are many examples.

Judoka Majlinda Kelmendi will surely provide a major boost to the eight-year-old Kosovo’s consolidation as an independent nation now that she has won the country’s first medal – gold. In 2012 she competed under the Albanian flag.

Fiji as well won its first medal – also gold – in Rugby Sevens, which debuted in these Games as an Olympic sport. (Rugby union was played at the Olympics from 1900 to 1924.)

Puerto Rico, an associated free state of the United States, with its own delegation in the Olympics, also took its first gold medal in Rio, won by Monica Puig in tennis.

The IOC recognizes 208 national committees, surpassing the 193 members of the United Nations. Some participants in the Olympics are not independent states, as in the case of Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, the Virgin Islands or American Samoa.

Dramatic incidents like the one involving Vanderlei de Lima also give rise to Olympic heroes, who add to the show.

Etenesh Diro of Ethiopia was cheered when she completed the 3,000-metre steeplechase, even though she finished seventh. She had pulled off her shoe when it was torn in a tangle with other competitors and continued on, barefoot.

But although she didn’t qualify for the final, the authorities rewarded spots in the race to her and two others who fell.

Heroes are generally individuals. Maybe that’s why football didn’t overshadow the Games – a worry that was apparently behind some restrictions set on participating in the sport, which is wildly popular in Brazil, such as a 23-year age limit, with three exceptions.

At any rate, the Olympic audience is guaranteed thanks to the diversity of sports, cultures and dramatic personal or national situations.

The excess of raw material for journalists and for the television and online show and the out of proportion size will make it difficult for another country of the developing South to host the Games in the near future.

Besides aspects linked to the needs and pressures of what is, more than anything, a huge global spectacle, the decision will also be influenced by the problems that cropped up in Rio, like construction delays, urban crime, water pollution, half-empty stadiums, and unsportsmanlike loud booing of some foreign athletes and teams.

Moroccan security forces charge against a group of Sahrawi women in Laayoune, occupied Western Sahara. Credit: Courtesy of Equipe Media

By Karlos Zurutuza
LAAYOUNE, Occupied Western Sahara, Aug 23 2015 (IPS)

Ahmed Ettanji is looking for a flat in downtown Laayoune, a city 1,100 km south of Rabat. He only wants it for one day but it must have a rooftop terrace overlooking the square that will host the next pro-Sahrawi demonstration.

“Rooftop terraces are essential for us as they are the only places from which we can get a graphic testimony of the brutality we suffer from the Moroccan police,” Ettanji told IPS. This 26-year-old is one the leaders of the Equipe Media, a group of Sahrawi volunteers struggling to break the media blackout enforced by Rabat over the territory.

Ahmed Ettanji and a fellow Equipe Media activist edit video taken at a pro-independence demonstration in Laayoune, occupied Western Sahara. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

“There are no news agencies based here and foreign journalists are denied access, and even deported if caught inside,” stressed Ettanji.

Spanish journalist Luís de Vega is one of several foreign journalists who can confirm the activist´s claim – he was expelled in 2010 after spending eight years based in Rabat and declared persona non grata by the Moroccan authorities.

“The Western Sahara issue is among the most sensitive issues for journalists in Morocco. Those of us who dare to tackle it inevitably face the consequences,” de Vega told IPS over the phone, adding that he was “fully convinced” that his was an exemplary punishment because he was the foreign correspondent who had spent more time in Morocco.

“The Western Sahara issue is among the most sensitive issues for journalists in Morocco. Those of us who dare to tackle it inevitably face the consequences” – Spanish journalist Luís de Vega
This year will mark four decades since this territory the size of Britain was annexed by Morocco after Spain pulled out from its last colony of Western Sahara.

Since the ceasefire signed in 1991 between Morocco and the Polisario Front – the authority that the United Nations recognises as a legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people – Rabat has controlled almost the whole territory, including the entire Atlantic coast. The United Nations still labels Western Sahara as a “territory under an unfinished process of decolonisation”.

Mohamed Mayara, also a member of Equipe Media, is helping Ettanji to find the rooftop terrace. Like most his colleagues, he acknowledges having been arrested and tortured several times. The constant harassment, however, has not prevented him from working enthusiastically, although he admits that there are other limitations than those dealing with any underground activity:

“We set up the first group in 2009 but a majority of us are working on pure instinct. We have no training in media so we are learning journalism on the spot,” said Mayara, a Sahrawi born in the year of the invasion who writes reports and press releases in English and French. His father disappeared in the hands of the Moroccan army two months after he was born, and he says he has known nothing about him ever since.

Sustained crackdown

Today the majority of the Sahrawis live in the refugee camps in Tindouf, in Western Algeria. The members of Equipe Media say they have a “fluid communication” with the Polisario authorities based there. Other than sharing all the material they gather, they also work side by side with Hayat Khatari, the only reporter currently working openly for SADR TV. SADR stands for ‘Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic’.

Hayat Khatari, the only reporter currently working openly for SADR TV in Laayoune. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Khatari, a 24-year-old journalist, recalls that she started working in 2010, after the Gdeim Izzik protest camp incidents in Laayoune. Originally a peaceful protest camp, Gdeim Izzik resulted in riots that spread to other Sahrawi cities when it was forcefully dismantled after 28 days on Nov. 8.

Western analysts such as Noam Chomsky have argued that the so-called “Arab Spring” did not start in Tunisia as is commonly argued, but rather in Laayoune.

“We have to work really hard and risk a lot to be able to counterbalance the propaganda spread by Rabat about everything happening here,” Khatari told IPS. The young activist added that she was last arrested in December 2014 for covering a pro-independence demonstration in June 2014. Unlike Mahmood al Lhaissan, her predecessor in SADR TV, Khatari was released after a few days in prison.

In a report released in March, Reporters Without Borders records al Lhaissan´s case. The activist was released provisionally on Feb. 25, eight months after his arrest in Laayoune, but he is still facing trial on charges of participating in an “armed gathering,” obstructing a public thoroughfare, attacking officials while they were on duty, and damaging public property.

In the same report, Reporters Without Borders also denounces the deportation in February of French journalists Jean-Louis Perez and Pierre Chautard, who were reporting for France 3 on the economic and social situation in Morocco.

Before seizing their video recordings and putting them on a flight to Paris, the authorities arrested them at the headquarters of Moroccan Association of Human Rights (AMDH), one of the country’s leading human rights NGOs, which the interior ministry has accused of “undermining the actions of the security forces”.

Likewise, other major organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly denounced human rights abuses suffered by the Sahrawi people at the hands of Morocco over the last decades.

Despite several phone calls and e-mails, the Moroccan authorities did not respond to IPS’s requests for comments on these and other human rights violations allegedly committed in Western Sahara.

Back in downtown Laayoune, Equipe Media activists seemed to have found what they were looking for. The owner of the central apartment is a Sahrawi family. It could have not been otherwise.

“We would never ask a Moroccan such a thing,” said Ettanji from the rooftop terrace overlooking the spot where the upcoming protest would take place.

Edited by Phil Harris   

By Jan Oberg
LUND, Sweden, Aug 7 2015 (IPS)

It’s absolutely necessary to remember what happened 70 years ago in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see the movies from then, listen to the survivors, the hibakusa. But it isn’t enough for us to rid the world of these crimes-against-humanity weapons. And that we must.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are history and are also the essence of the age you and I live in – the nuclear age. If the hypothesis is that by showing these films, we create opinion against nuclear weapons, 70 years of ever more nuclearism should be enough to conclude that that hypothesis is plain wrong.

Jan Oberg

There is a need for a frontal attack on not only the weapons but on nuclearism – the thinking/ideology on which they are based and made to look ‘necessary’ for security and peace.

Nuclear weapons – only for terrorists

At its core, terrorism is about harming or killing innocent people and not only combatants. Any country that possesses nukes is aware that nukes can’t be used without killing millions of innocent people – infinitely more lethal than Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and so.

Since 9/11 [attack on the Twin Towers in New York], governments and media have conveniently promoted the idea that terrorism is only about small non-governmental groups and thus tried to make us forget that the nuclear ‘haves’ themselves practise state terrorism and hold humanity hostage to potential civilisational genocide (omnicide).

Dictatorship

No nuclear state has ever dared to hold a referendum and ask its citizens: “Do you or do you not accept to be defended by a nuclear arsenal?” Nuclear weapons with the omnicidal ‘kill all and everything’ characteristics is pure dictatorship, incompatible with both parliamentary and direct democracy. And freedom.

Citizens generally have more, or better, morals than governments and do not wish to see themselves, their neighbours or fellow human beings around the world burn up in a process that would make the Holocaust look like a cosy afternoon tea party. In short, nuclear weapons states either arrange referendums or must accept the label dictatorship.“Citizens generally have more, or better, morals than governments and do not wish to see themselves, their neighbours or fellow human beings around the world burn up in a process that would make the Holocaust look like a cosy afternoon tea party”

The idea that a few hundred politicians and military people in the world’s nuclear states have a self-appointed right to play God and decide whether ‘project humankind’ shall continue or not belongs to the realm of the civilisational perverse or the Theatre of the Absurd. Such people must run on the assumption, deep down, that they are Chosen People with a higher mission. Gandhi rightly called Western civilisation diluted fascism.

Unethical

Why? Because – simply – there can be no political or other goal that justifies the use of this doomsday weapon and the killing of millions of people, or making the earth uninhabitable.

Possession versus proliferation

The trick played on us all since 1945 is that there are some ‘responsible’ – predominantly Christian, Western – countries that can, should, or must have nuclear weapons and then there are some irresponsible governments/leaders elsewhere that must be prevented by all means from acquiring them. In other words, that proliferation rather than possession is the problem.

However, it is built into the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that those who don’t have nuclear weapons shall abstain from acquiring them as a quid pro quo for the nuclear-haves to disarm theirs completely.

That is, the whole world shall become a nuclear-weapons-free zone (NWFZ).

Those who have nuclear weapons provoke others to get them too. Possession leads to proliferation.

The recent negotiations with Iran is a good example of this bizarre world view: the five nuclear terrorist states, sitting on enough nukes to blow up the world several times over and who have systematically violated international law in general and the NPT in particular, tell Iran – which abides by the NPT and doesn’t want nuclear weapons – that it must never obtain nuclear weapons.

Simultaneously, they turn a blind eye to nuclear terrorist state, Israel’s 50+ years’ old nuclear arsenals.

And it is all actively assisted by mainstream media which seem to lack the knowledge and/or intellectual capacity to challenge this whole set-up – including the racist belief structure that “we have a God-given right and are more responsible than everybody else – particularly non-Christians…”

But what about deterrence?

You’ve heard the philosophical nonsense repeatedly over 70 years: nuclear weapons are good to deter everyone from starting the ‘Third World War’. That nukes are here to never be used. That no one would start that war because he/she would know that there would be a mass murder on one’s own population in a second strike, retaliation. But think! Two small, simple counterarguments:

• You cannot deter anyone from doing something unless you are willing to implement your threat, your deterrent. If A knows that B wouldnever use his nukes, A would not be afraid of the retaliation. Thus, every nuclear weapons state is ready to use nukes under some defined circumstance; if not there is no deterrence whatsoever

• The United States has long ago done two things (as the only one on earth): decided on a doctrine in which the use of small nukes in aconventional role is fundamental, thus blurring the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons; and said that its missile defence (which it also wants in Europe) is about preventing a second strike back – shooting down retaliatory missiles – so it can start, fight and win a nuclear war without being harmed itself. Or so it can hope.

Hope

Let’s rid the world of this civilisational mistake. Nuclearism and nuclear deterrence are the world’s most dangerous ideologies comparable to slavery, absolute monarchy and cannibalism that we have decided – because we are humans and civilised and can think and feel – to put behind us.

There is no co-existence possible between nuclear weapons on the one hand and democracy, peace and civilisation on the other.

It’s time to regain hope by looking at all the – civilised – non-nuclear countries and follow their example. Thus, 99 percent of the southern hemisphere landmass is nuclear weapons-free with 60 percent of its 193 states, with 33 percent of the world’s population, included in this free zone.

The West, the United States in particular, which started the terrible Nuclear Age, should now follow the great majority of humanity, apologise for its nuclearism and move to zero.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Scenes from the Apollo 11 television restoration press conference held at the Newseum in Washington, DC on July 16, 2009. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/cc by 2.0

By Nora Happel
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 29 2015 (IPS)

Although the United States as a whole is becoming more ethnically diverse, newsrooms remain largely dominated by white, male reporters, according to a recent investigation by The Atlantic magazine.

It found that just 22.4 percent of television journalists, 13 percent of radio journalists, and 13.34 percent of journalists at daily newspapers came from minority groups in 2014.

Another new census, by the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), found just 12.76 percent minority journalists at U.S. daily newspapers in 2014.

While the percentage of minority groups in the U.S. has been steadily increasing, reaching a recent total of 37.4 percent of the U.S. population, the number of minority journalists, by contrast, has stayed at a constant level for years.

This is particularly true for the share of minority employment at newspapers, which has been staggeringly low – between 11 and 14 percent for more than two decades, as illustrated in a graphic by the Pew Research Center and ASNE.

Many say it is a major problem for a field that strives to represent and inform a diverse public, and worrisome for a medium that has the power to shape and influence the views and opinions of mass audiences.

“Journalism must deliver insight from different perspectives on various topics and media must reflect the public they serve. The risk is that by limiting media access to ethnic minorities, the public gets a wrong perception of reality and the place ethnic minorities have in society,” Pamela Morinière, Communications and Authors’ Rights Officer at the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), told IPS.

Under-representation of minority journalists has negative effects on the quality of reporting.

Speaking to IPS, Alfredo Carbajal, managing editor of Al Dia (The Dallas Morning News) and organiser for the ASNE Minority Leadership Institute, said, “The consequence [of ethnic minority groups’ under-representation] is that news coverage lacks the perspectives, expertise and knowledge of these groups as well as their specific skills and experiences because of who they are.”

ASNE President Chris Peck added: “If newsrooms cannot stay in touch with the issues, the concerns, hopes and dreams of an increasingly diverse audience, those news organisations will lose their relevance and be replaced.”

Commenting on the underlying reasons, both Carbajal and Peck underscored the lack of opportunities for minority students compared to their white counterparts.

“Legacy journalism organisations have relied too long on an established pipeline for talent. It’s a pipeline dominated by white, mostly middle class and upper middle class connections – schools, existing journalism leaders, media companies. It’s something of a self-perpetuating cycle that has been slow to evolve,” Peck said.

This argument is echoed in a recent analysis by Ph.D. student Alex T. Williams published in the Columbia Journalism Review. Confronted with the claim that newspapers cannot hire more minority journalists due to the lack of university graduates, Williams took a closer look at graduate and employment statistics provided by Grady College’s Annual Graduate Surveys.

He found that minorities accounted for 21.4 percent of graduates in journalism or communication between 2004 and 2013 – a number that is “not high” but “still not as low as the number of minority journalists working in newsrooms today.”.

The more alarming trend, he says, is that only 49 percent of graduates from minority groups were able to find full-time jobs after their studies. Numbers of white graduates finding employment, by contrast, amounted to 66 percent. This means the under-representation of ethnic minorities in journalism must be traced back to recruitment rather than to graduation numbers, he concluded.

A main reason why minority graduates have difficulty finding jobs, according to Williams, is that most newsrooms look for specific experiences such as unpaid internships that many minority students cannot afford. Also, minority students are more likely to attend less well-appointed colleges that might not have the resources to keep a campus newspaper or offer special networking opportunities.

Another reason is linked to newspapers’ financial constraints. Peck told IPS: “There is a challenge within news organisations to keep a diverse workforce at a time when the traditional media are economically challenged, even as new industries are actively looking to hire away talent that represents the changing American demographic.”

Further, union contracts favour unequal employment, according to Doris Truong, a Washington Post editor and acting president of Unity, who was quoted in 2013 article in The Atlantic.

“One piece of this puzzle is layoff policies and union contracts that often reward seniority and push the most recent hires to leave first. Many journalists of color have the least protected jobs because they’re the least senior employees.”

Different ideas and initiatives have been put forth to increase the representation of minority journalists.

Amongst the ideas expressed by Pamela Morinière are the inclusion of diversity reporting in student curricula, dialogues in newsrooms on the representation of minority groups, making job offers available widely and adopting equal opportunity and non-discrimination policies.

Chris Peck emphasises the importance of “home-grown talent”: “Identifying local students who have an interest in journalism and that have a connection to a specific locale will be a critical factor in the effort to diversify newsrooms. It’s a longer term effort to cultivate local talent. But it can pay off.”

“Second, I think it is important to tap social media to explain why journalism is still a dynamic field and invite digital natives to become part of it,” he said.

Civil society organisations such as UNITY Journalists for Diversity, a strategic alliance of several minority journalist associations, aim at increasing the representation of minority groups in journalism and promoting fair and complete coverage about diversity, ethnicity and gender issues.

The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) is part of the alliance. It seeks to advance specifically Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) journalists. Its president, Paul Cheung, told IPS: “AAJA believes developing a strong pipeline of talents as well as diverse sources are key to increase representation.”

“2015 will mark some significant milestones in AAJA’s history. AAJA will be celebrating 15 years of training multi-cultural high school students through JCamp, 20th anniversary of […] our Executive Leadership programmes and 25 years of inspiring college students to enter the field of journalism through VOICES.”

Ethnic minority journalists are not the only under-represented group at news outlets in the U.S. and around the world. The Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media states that women represent only a third of the journalism workforce in the 522 companies in nearly 60 countries surveyed for the study. Seventy-three percent of the top management jobs are held by men, while only 27 percent are occupied by women.

“When it comes to women’s portrayal in the news, the situation is even worse,” Pamela Mornière told IPS.

“Women make up only 24 percent of people seen, heard or read about. They remain quite invisible, although they represent more than half of the world’s population. And when they make the news they make it too often in a stereotypical way. The impact of this can be devastating on the public’s perception of women’s place and role in society. Many women have made their way on the political and economic scene. Media must reflect that.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

By Daya Thussu
LONDON, Jul 1 2015 (IPS)

As the leaders of the BRICS five meet in the Russian city of Ufa for their annual summit Jul. 8–10, their agenda is likely to be dominated by economic and security concerns, triggered by the continuing economic crisis in the European Union and the security situation in the Middle East.

The seventh annual summit of the large emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – also takes place with a background of escalating tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine and the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), as well as the growing economic power of Asia, in particular, China.

Daya Thussu

Nearly a decade and a half has passed since the BRIC acronym was coined in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, a Goldman Sachs executive, now a minister in David Cameron’s U.K. government, to refer to the four fast-growing emerging markets. South Africa was added in 2011, on China’s request, to expand BRIC to BRICS.

Although in operation as a formal group since 2006, and holding annual summits since 2009, the BRICS countries have escaped much comment in international media, partly because of the different political systems and socio-cultural norms, as well as stages of development, within this group of large and diverse nations.

The emergence of such groupings coincides with the relative economic decline of the West.

This has created the opportunity for emerging powers, such as China and India, to participate in global governance structures hitherto dominated by the United States and its Western allies.

That the centre of economic gravity is shifting away from the West is acknowledged in the view of the U.S. Administration of Barack Obama that the ‘pivot’ of U.S. foreign policy is moving to Asia.“The major countries of the global South have shown impressive economic growth in recent decades … [it is predicted that] by 2020 the combined economic output of China, India and Brazil will surpass the aggregated production of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy”

And there is evidence of this shift. In the Fortune 500 ranking, the number of transnational corporations based in Brazil, Russia, India and China has grown from 27 in 2005 to more than 100 in 2015. China’s Huawei, a telecommunications equipment firm, is the world’s largest holder of international patents; Brazil’s Petrobras is the fourth largest oil company in the world, while the Tata group became the first Indian conglomerate to reach 100 billion dollars in revenues.

Since 2006, China has been the largest holder of foreign currency reserves, estimated in 2015 to be more than 3.8 trillion dollars. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), China’s gross domestic product (GDP) surpassed that of the United States in 2014, making it the world’s largest economy in purchasing-power parity terms.

More broadly, the major countries of the global South have shown impressive economic growth in recent decades, prompting the United Nations Development Programme to proclaim The Rise of the South (the title of its 2013 Human Development Report), which predicts that by 2020 the combined economic output of China, India and Brazil will surpass the aggregated production of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy.

Though the individual relationships between BRICS countries and the United States differ markedly (Russia and China being generally anti-Washington while Brazil and South Africa relatively close to the United States and India moving from its traditional non-aligned position to a ‘multi-aligned’ one), the group was conceived as an alternative to American power and is the only major group of nations not to include the United States or any other G-7 nation.

Nevertheless, none of the five member nations are eager for confrontation with the United States – with the possible exception of Russia – the country with which they have their most important relationship. Indeed, China is one of the largest investors in the United States, while India, Brazil and South Africa demonstrate democratic affinities with the West: India’s IT industry is particularly dependent on its close ties with the United States and Europe.

Although the idea of BRIC was initiated in Russia, it is China that has emerged as the driving force behind this grouping. British author Martin Jacques has noted in his international bestseller When China Rules the World, that China operates “both within and outside the existing international system while at the same time, in effect, sponsoring a new China-centric international system which will exist alongside the present system and probably slowly begin to usurp it.”

One manifestation of this change is the establishment of a BRICS bank (the ‘New Development Bank’) to fund developmental projects, potentially to rival the Western-dominated Bretton Woods institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF. Headquartered in Shanghai, China has made the largest contribution to setting it up and is likely that the bank will further enhance China’s domination of the BRICS group.

Beyond BRICS, Beijing has also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which already has 57 members, including Australia, Germany and Britain, and in which China will hold over 25 percent of voting rights. Two other BRICS nations – India and Russia – are the AIIB’s second and third largest shareholders.

Such changes have an impact on the media scene as well. As part of China’s ‘going out’ strategy, billions of dollars have been earmarked for external communication, including the expansion of Chinese broadcasting networks such as CCTV News and Xinhua’s English-language TV, CNC World.

Russia has also raised its international profile by entering the English-language news world in 2005 with the launch of the Russia Today (now called RT) network, which, apart from English, also broadcasts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in Spanish and Arabic.

However, as a new book Mapping BRICS Media – which I co-edited with Kaarle Nordenstreng of the University of Tampere, Finland – shows, there is very little intra-BRICS media exchange and most of the BRICS nations continue to receive international news largely from Anglo-American media.

The growing economic cooperation between Moscow and Beijing – most notably in the 2014 multi-billion dollar gas deal – indicates a new Sino-Russian economic equation outside Western control.

Two key U.S.-led trade agreements being negotiated – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and both excluding the BRICS nations – are partly a reaction to the perceived competition from nations such as China.

For its part, China appears to have used the BRICS grouping to allay fears that it is rising ‘with the rest’ and therefore less threatening to Western hegemony.

The BRICS summit takes place jointly with Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Heads of State Council meeting. The only other time that BRICS and the SCO combined their summits was also in Russia – in Ekaterinburg in 2009.

Apart from two BRICS members, China and Russia, the SCO includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. SCO has not expanded its membership since it was set up in 2001. India has an ‘observer’ status within SCO, though there is talk that it might be granted full membership at the Ufa summit.

Were that to happen, the ‘pivot’ would have moved a few notches further towards Asia.

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Hazel Henderson
ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida, Jun 20 2015 (IPS)

Challenges to advertisers and marketers arose in the past century. Critics deplored the role of cigarette marketers who exploited the aspirations of women by associating smoking with liberation. 

Such manipulations were explored by Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders (1957), along with Marshal McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message (1967) and Stuart Ewen’s Captains of Consciousness (1974).  The use of subliminal advertising (rapid flashing of product images faster than human cognition) was challenged and the public discussion led to its disuse.

Hazel Henderson

By the 1980s, Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis described the “deliberate manufacturing of falsehood” in The Unreality Industry (1989), followed by William Schrader’s Media Blight and the Dehumanizing of America (1992), Naomi Klein’s No Logo (1999) and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (2005).

Fast forward to today’s ethical challenges.

Political advertising of candidates was likened to selling toothpaste as it emerged in the 1970s and summarized by Charles Lewis in The Buying of the President (1996) and James Fallows in Breaking the News (1996). Today, the gutting of restrictions on money in U.S. elections has led to the well-financed blizzard of attack ads that lead millions of voters to turn off their TV sets in disgust. Media corporations and their TV channels have come to rely on such financial bonanzas during elections.

What this confirms is that advertising influences media owners and the content of programmes and often distorts news coverage, leading to subtle commercial censorship rarely recognised as a threat to free speech in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

Civic groups’ limited funding precludes challenging false and misleading advertising and the “greenwashing” of many companies’ poor environmental records. “Civic groups’ limited funding precludes challenging false and misleading advertising and the “greenwashing” of many companies’ poor environmental records”

I summarised these issues a few years ago in an interview in Forbes magazine on why I founded the EthicMark Awards for “advertising that uplifts the human spirit and society”.

These Awards recognise that advertising, a global 500 billion dollars a year  industry, can be a powerful force for good beyond consumerism, in educating, inspiring and showcasing the best innovations for growing more inclusive, greener, knowledge-rich and sustainable societies.

The newest challenge to advertisers comes from Silicon Valley with the many apps that allow users to skip and block ads, including AdBlockPlus (downloaded 400 million times), as well as add-ons to Chrome and Firefox browsers.  Ad block users have grown to 200 million a month, according to PageFair and The Economist.

Advertisers could redeem their reputations and business models via Truth in Advertising Assurance Set Aside (TIAASA) which would disallow their tax exempt funds on false advertising and then award these funds to civic challengers to hire ad agencies to prepare counter-advertising campaigns.

All this highlights the growing vulnerability of media business models in the United States, other industrial societies and worldwide.

Many new media business models which no longer rely on advertising are debated in The Death and Life of American Journalism (2010) by Robert McChesney and John Nichols who compare media access policies in many countries which subsidise investigative journalism, such as Britain’s BBC.

In the United States, foundations support news organisations such as the National Geographic, the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica, and media outlets such as the Columbia Journalism Review. The American Prospect and The Nation are largely funded by subscribers as well as PBS and NPR in broadcasting, along with many internet-based media such as The Real News Network.

Google banned ad-blocking apps in 2013, yet alternative web-browsers such as UC Browser already claims 500 million users, mostly in China and India, and Eyeo launched its ad-blocking browser available for mobile devices running Google’s Android.  These battles will rage on until legal systems – always lagging behind technology – catch up.

Two reports from the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program led by Charles Firestone – “Navigating Continual Disruption” and “The Atomic Age of Data” – discuss the digitisation of ever more sectors of industrial societies and the internet of things (IOT).

In the United States, the monopolising of internet access by Comcast, AT&T and Verizon has restricted broadband access to millions in less affluent, rural communities and prevented small towns from competing with public broadband systems, as reported by the Center for Public Integrity and Susan Crawford in Captive Audience (2013).

The good news follows the analysis and proposals of Kunda Dixit in DatelineEarth: Journalism as if the Planet Mattered (IPS, 1997) and includes Dan Gillmore’s We the Media (2004) on grassroots journalism; David Bollier’s In Search of the Public Interest in the New Media (2002); Democratizing Global Media (2005); Making the Net Work: Sustainable Development in a Digital Society (2003) from Britain’s Forum for the Future; and Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future? (2013). (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By David Kode
JOHANNESBURG, Apr 24 2015 (IPS)

Pierre Claver Mbonimpa is not permitted to get close to an airport, train station or port without authorisation from a judge.  He cannot travel outside of the capital of his native Burundi, Bujumbura. Whenever called upon, he must present himself before judicial authorities.

These are some of the onerous restrictions underlying the bail conditions of one of Burundi’s most prominent human rights activists since he was provisionally released on medical grounds in September last year, after spending more than four months in prison for his human rights work.

David Kode

Mbonimpa was arrested and detained on May 15, 2014, and charged with endangering state security and inciting public disobedience. The charges stemmed from views he expressed during an interview with an independent radio station, Radio Public Africaine, in which he stated that members of the Imbonerakure, the youth wing of the ruling CNDD-FDD party, were being armed and sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo for military training.

The arrest and detention of Pierre Claver is symptomatic of a pattern of repression and intimidation of human rights defenders, journalists, dissenters and members of the political opposition in Burundi as it heads towards its much anticipated elections in May and June 2015.

The forthcoming polls will be the third democratic elections organised since the end of the brutal civil war in 2005.  The antagonism of the CNDD-FDD government and its crackdown on civil society and members of opposition formations has increased, particularly as the incumbent, President Pierre Nkurunziza, silences critics and opponents in his bid to run for a third term even after the National Assembly rejected his proposals to extend his term in office.“The international community and Burundi’s donors cannot afford to stand by idly and witness a distortion of the decade-long relative peace that Burundi has enjoyed, which represents the most peaceful decade since independence from Belgium in 1962”

Tensions continue to mount ahead of the polls and even though the president has not publicly stated that he will contest the next elections, the actions of his government and the ruling party clearly suggest he will run for another term.  Members of his party argue that he has technically run the country for one term only as he was not “elected” by the people when he took to power in 2005.

Civil society organisations and religious leaders recently pointed out that Constitution and the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement – which brought an end to the civil war – clearly limit presidential terms to two years.

As the 2015 polls draw closer, state repression has increased, some political parties have been suspended and their members arrested and jailed. The Imbonerakure has embarked on campaigns to intimidate, physically assault and threaten members of the opposition with impunity. They have prevented some political gatherings from taking place under the pretext that they are guaranteeing security at the local level.

Civil society organisations and rival political movements have on several occasions been denied the right to hold public meetings and assemblies, while journalists and activists have been arrested and held under fictitious charges in an attempt to silence them and force them to resort to self-censorship.

Legislation has been used to stifle freedom of expression and restrict the activities of journalists and the independent media.  In June 2013, the government passed a new law which forces journalists to reveal their sources.

The law provides wide-ranging powers to the authorities and sets requirements for journalists to attain certain levels of education and professional expertise, limits issues journalists can cover and imposes fines on those who violate this law.  It prohibits the publication of news items on security issues, defence, public safety and the economy.

The law has been used to target media agencies and journalists, including prominent journalist Bob Rugurika, director of Radio Public Africaine.

The government does not see any major difference between opposition political parties and human rights activists and journalists and has often accused civil society and the media of being mouth pieces for the political opposition, describing them as “enemies of the state”.

In the lead-up to the last elections in 2010, most of the opposition parties decided to boycott the elections and the ruling party won almost unopposed. However, the post-elections period was characterised by political violence and conflict.

Ideally, the upcoming elections could present the perfect opportunity to “jump start” Burundi’s democracy.  For this to happen, the media and civil society need to operate without fear or intimidation from state and non-state actors.  On the contrary, state repression is bound to trigger a violent response from some of the opposition parties and ignite violence similar to that which happened in 2010.

The international community and Burundi’s donors cannot afford to stand by idly and witness a distortion of the decade-long relative peace that Burundi has enjoyed, which represents the most peaceful decade since independence from Belgium in 1962.

It is increasingly clear that the people of Burundi need the support of the international community at this critical juncture. The African Union (AU), with its public commitment to democracy and good governance, must act now by putting pressure on the government of Burundi to respect its democratic ideals to prevent more abuses and further restrictions on fundamental freedoms ahead of the elections.

The African Union should demand that the government stops extra-judicial killings and conducts independent investigations into members of the security forces and Imbonerakure who have committed human rights violations and hold them accountable.

Further, Burundi’s close development partners, particularly Belgium, France and the Netherlands, should condemn the attacks on civil liberties and urge the government to instil an enabling environment in which a free and fair political process can take place while journalists and civil society activists can perform their responsibilities without fear.  (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Despite the vast number of media outlets and news sources worldwide, women and girls are still not getting enough attention in the news.

That is why the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), the largest study on gender and media, launched a new fundraising campaign on March 5th to improve gender equality.

Every five years since 1995, the GMMP has picked a single day of the year to analyse global media coverage with respect to gender.

Through such analysis, GMMP has discovered great disparities between women and men in news coverage. The organization claims that “even though women make up more than half the world’s population, less than a quarter of what we see, hear or read in the media are the voices of women.”

GMMP’s investigations show that the ways women and men are represented in news stories highlights gender discrimination and stereotypes. The organisation brings its results directly to governments, and tries to persuade them to change policy.

The fundraising campaign invites people to contribute $10, and to invite 10 friends to do the same, in order to raise enough money to launch another monitoring day. It is organized through social media and calls on users to reach out to their friends and networks using Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

The idea of a one-day study of gender representation in the world’s news media was developed at the 1994 international conference “Women Empowering Communication”, in Bangkok. In 1995 volunteers from 71 countries monitored the news in newspapers, on television and radio, and collected over 50 000 media records.

GMMP continues to re-examine the selected indicators of gender in the news media, comparing female presence with male visibility, gender bias and stereotypes in news content.

On the last monitoring day, in 2010, results showed that only 24 per cent of news subjects on television are female. Men are usually portrayed as experts in their field. On the internet, 16 per cent of female news subjects were addressed as victims in contrast to 5 per cent of male news subjects.

GMMP involves grassroots organisations, university students, researchers and experts working on a voluntary basis.

GMMP explains that women and girls become second-class citizens when their concerns are not reflected in the news, saying that their activity “challenges media organizations and professional journalists to implement editorial policies that are fair, more balanced, and more gender friendly.”

The project is run by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), an international non-governmental organisation that promotes social justice.

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

In the wake of last week’s attack on French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo that left 12 people dead, a heated battle of opinion is being waged in France and several other countries on the issue of freedom of expression and the rights of both media and the public.

On one side are those who say that freedom of expression is an inherent human right and a pillar of democracy, and on the other are representatives of a range of views, including the belief that liberty comes with responsibility for all sectors of society.

“I’m worried when one talks about our being in a state of war,” said John Ralston Saul, the president of the writers group PEN International, who participated in a conference here Jan. 14 on “Journalism after Charlie”, organised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

“The war against fundamentalists isn’t going to work,” he said, arguing that education about freedom of expression has to start at a young age so that people know that “you have to have a thick skin” to live in a democracy.“Ignorance is the biggest weapon of mass destruction, and if ignorance is the problem, then education is the answer” – Nasser David Khalili, Iranian-born scholar and philanthropist

PEN International, which promotes literature, freedom of expression and speaks out for “writers silenced in their own countries”, has strongly condemned the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, but the organisation is also worried about how politicians are reacting in the aftermath.

It called on governments to “implement their commitments to free expression and to desist from further curtailing free expression through the expansion of surveillance.”

In the Jan. 7 assault, two hooded gunmen gained access to the offices of Charlie Hebdo during an editorial meeting and opened fire, killing cartoonists, other media workers, a visitor and two policemen. The attackers were in turn killed by police two days later, after a huge manhunt in the French capital, where related attacks took place Jan. 8 and 9.

In the other acts, a gunman killed a young female police officer and later held hostages at a kosher supermarket, where police said he murdered four people before he was killed by the security forces.

Charlie Hebdo had been under threat since 2006 when it republished controversial Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad originally published in 2005, and in 2011 its offices were firebombed after an edition that some groups considered offensive and inflammatory.

Several critics accused the magazine of Islamophobia and racism, while the cartoonists defended their right to lampoon subjects that included religious leaders and politicians.

Before the attacks, the magazine’s circulation had been in decline, with readers apparently turned off by the crudeness of the drawings, but the publication is now being given wide moral and financial backing.

More than three million people of different ethnicities and faiths marched in Paris and other cities last Sunday in support of freedom of expression, including some 40 world leaders who joined French government representatives.

Among those marching, however, were officials from many countries active in “restricting freedom of expression”, according to PEN International and other groups. “This includes murders, violence and imprisoned writers on PEN’s Case List. These leaders, when at home, are part of administrations which are serious offenders,” said the organisation.

Saul told IPS that in the last 14 years, PEN International has noted a “shrinking in freedom of expression” in Western countries, “not only of writers and journalists but of citizens”. He said that the main problem for the organisation was impunity.

While everyone condemned the Charlie Hebdo attacks, some participants at the UNESCO conference argued that the media need to act more responsibly, especially as regards the portrayal of minority or marginalised communities.

As the debates took place, the latest edition of the magazine was being distributed, with another cover portraying Muhammad, this time holding a placard saying “Je Suis Charlie” and with the caption “All is forgiven”.

“The media must mediate and refrain from the promoting of stereotypes,” said French senator Bariza Khiari, in a segment of the conference debate titled “Intercultural Dialogue and Fragmented Societies”.

She said that most adherents of Islam were “quietly Muslim”, keeping their religion to themselves while respecting the secular values of the countries where they live. “But we have to recognise the existence and importance of religion as long as religion does not dictate the law,” she argued.

Khiari told IPS that the radicalisation of some French youth was taking place because of their hardships in France and the humiliation they faced on a daily basis. These include Islamophobia, joblessness and stops by the police.

The senator said she hoped that young people as well as the media would reflect on what had happened and draw some lessons that would result in positive advances in the future.

Annick Girardin, the French Secretary of State for Development and Francophonie, said that democracy meant that all newspapers of whatever belief or political learning could publish in France and that people have access to legal avenues. But she acknowledged that there was a failure of integration of everyone into society.

Regarding the protection of journalists, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova told IPS that “now was the time” for the United Nations and particularly UNESCO “not just to reaffirm our commitment to freedom of expression” but to consider other initiatives.

“Something that is probably not so well known to the general public is that we are constantly in contact with governments where these cases (attacks on journalists) have happened in order to remind them of their responsibilities and asking for information on the follow-up measures, and I would say that even if they are not spectacular, we’ve still seen more and more governments who are taking this seriously.”

Alongside journalists and cartoonists, the UNESCO conference included Jewish, Muslim and Christian representatives who called on the state to do more to educate young people about the co-existence of secular and religious values and ways to live together in increasingly diverse societies.

“Ignorance is the biggest weapon of mass destruction, and if ignorance is the problem, then education is the answer,” said Nasser David Khalili, an Iranian-born scholar and philanthropist who lives in London.

One topic overlooked however was the less discernible attacks on journalists, in the form of press conglomeration, cuts in income and a general lack of commitment to quality journalism.

“Freedom of expression has no meaning when you can’t find a job and when media is controlled by big groups,” said a former journalist who left the conference early.

Edited by Phil Harris

Ahmad (right), a 19-year-old student of engineering and one of Bab Al-Tabbaneh’s fortunate young people, chatting with a friend. He has been able to go to university, thanks to a grant from the Ruwwad Al Tanmeya NGO. Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

By Oriol Andrés Gallart
TRIPOLI, Lebanon, Jan 10 2015 (IPS)

“People get used to war. During the last battle, children were still coming to play. Can you imagine, a seven-year-old boy running through the bullets just to play video games,” says Mohammad Darwish, a calm man with a curled beard framing his face.

Sitting behind the counter of his cybercafé, located in one of the main streets of the Bab Al-Tabbaneh neighbourhood in this northern Lebanese city, Darwish says that his young customers have resigned themselves to the persistence of armed conflicts.“People get used to war. During the last battle, children were still coming to play. Can you imagine, a seven-year-old boy running through the bullets just to play video games” – Mohammad Darwish, owner of a cybercafé in the Bab Al-Tabbaneh neighbourhood of Tripoli

Despite their age, they are pretty sure that clashes – which have become routine here over the past six years – will erupt again sooner or later. Even when calm reigns, the shelled and bullet-riddled buildings in Tabbaneh stand as a reminder of previous clashes.

The last eruption of violence was in late October 2014. Clashes between the army and local Sunni gunmen paralysed Tripoli for three days and destroyed part of the historic old city, leaving at least eight civilians, 11 soldiers and 22 militants dead. The army now controls Tabbaneh, with soldiers and tanks deployed on every street corner.

Curiously, flags and posters of the Islamic State (IS) can be seen displayed in houses and shops.

“I support IS [Islamic State] and the [Al-Qaeda-affiliated] Jabhat Al-Nusra (JN)”, says 19-year-old unemployed Hassan with a smile, explaining that he thinks IS will give him rights “to have a job, to live peacefully according to Islamic precepts, to move freely.”

Tabbaneh is probably the hardest neighbourhood to grow up in the whole of Tripoli. Despite being the second largest city in Lebanon, barely 80 kilometres north of Beirut, policy neglect by various central governments has left this Sunni-majority city suffering from alarming poverty, unemployment and social exclusion, and Tabbaneh is one of its poorest and most marginalised areas.

Seventy-six percent of Tabbaneh inhabitants live below the poverty line, according to a study on ‘Urban Poverty in Tripoli’, published in 2012 by the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA).

These circumstances, aggravated by the political exploitation of sectarianism within a very conservative society, have fuelled the frequent rounds of violence, mainly between Tabbaneh and the neighbourhood of Jabal Mohsen.

A giant poster on a balcony in Bab Al-Tabbaneh in memory of a young boy killed during clashes in the neighbourhood. Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

Both neighbourhoods are separated just by one street, but while Bab Al-Tabbaneh inhabitants are mostly Sunni (like the main Syrian rebel groups), most of Jabal Mohsen’s inhabitants are Alawites (the same sect as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad).

This sectarianism has determined a rivalry that dates back to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon which began in 1976 and ended in 2005, but which has turned violent again since 2008, and especially since the beginning of Syrian civil war in 2011. During the last three years, more than 20 rounds of fights have broken out in Tripoli, most of them between Tabbaneh and Mohsen militias.

“We fight to defend our people, to achieve peace,” says 19-year-old Khaled, who usually works in a bakery but also belongs to a local militia. But Ahmad, who is of the same age, is sceptical: “People fight because they don’t have money or work.”

Ahmad is studying engineering, thanks to a grant provided by Ruwwad Al Tanmeya, a regional NGO that works in the area through youth activism, civic engagement and education. Because his father served in the army, the state paid the major part of his school fees when he was younger and he was able to study in private schools outside Tabbaneh.

Hoda Al-Rifai, a Ruwwad youth officer, agrees with Ahmad: “Many families don’t have incomes. Whenever the conflict starts, the fighters get paid. And these fighters also give money to children to fulfil specific tasks. They can have three dollars a day and this is better than going to school. Their parents also think this way.”

Stereotypes also contribute to make things hard for Tabbaneh’s youth – including finding a job outside the neighbourhood – and shape their personality, explains Hoda. “When we started, the youth had no self-confidence. The media do not produce an image of these neighbourhoods as areas where you can find brilliant young men, willing to study. They just underline the clashes and all kinds of negatives things.”

“There are no members of JN or IS here,” Darwish tells IPS, adding that many in Tabbaneh see the IS flags as a way of showing dissatisfaction over the government’s alleged abandonment of the Sunni community and specifically of Tabbaneh.

“This is not a religious conflict but political. When politicians want to send a message to each other, they pay for clashes here,” adds Darwish’s 49-year-old aunt, veiled and dressed completely in black. “In this city, you can give 20 dollars to a boy so he starts a war,” explains Darwish.

Nevertheless, various studies have found that only a small percentage of the estimated up to 80,000 Tabbaneh inhabitants take part in combats, and Sarah Al-Charif, Lebanon director of Ruwwad, stresses the immediate improvements observed in Tabbaneh and Mohsen youths who participate in the NGO’s projects.

“They become aware of their shared interests, values and pain,” she says. “They became more open-minded, especially the girls.”

For Sarah, in addition to public investment and job opportunities, any solution must include awareness and education, to which Hoda adds: “First of all, citizens need to understand why the clashes take place.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Drawing for peace - a signature cartoon by Plantu

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Jan 8 2015 (IPS)

“They are cowards who react to satire by going for their Kalashnikovs.” That was how renowned French cartoonist Plantu described the killers of 10 media workers and two policemen in Paris Wednesday.

One of the murdered journalists, cartoonist Bernard Verlhac who went by the pen name of Tignous, was a member of Cartooning for Peace, the organisation that Plantu founded with former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2006, following the protests sparked by the controversial Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.

Tignous worked for Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French magazine that the murderers targeted.

According to police and eyewitness reports, two hooded gunmen entered the premises of the magazine and opened fire in the late morning. After they fled the scene, in a car driven by a third participant, 12 people were confirmed dead and at least 11 injured, some critically.“Cartoonists – Christian, Muslim, Jewish cartoonists – are scandalised and angry. And to express ourselves, we take up a marker and we draw” – Plantu, co-founder of Cartooning for Peace

Video footage, filmed from neighbouring buildings, showed the attackers killing an injured policeman as he lay in the road. On Wednesday night, the police presence in France’s capital city was huge as security officials tried to track down the attackers who reportedly had been identified.

French President François Hollande said in a public address that the killers would be brought to justice and “severely punished” for their actions. Appealing for unity, he said the attack was an assault on national ideals and freedoms, including freedom of expression.

Meanwhile, many French residents took to social media to express solidarity with the magazine’s staff, posting images with the words “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie), and thousands gathered on the historic Place de la Republique in Paris, and in several other cities in France.

The magazine had been a target for several years, since it published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. In 2011, assailants firebombed its offices in the city’s 11th district, and its cartoons have been considered offensive by various groups over the past two years. Its cover this week featured the controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq, whose newly published novel “Soumission” portrays a future France living under an Islamic regime.

But condemnation of the murders came from all sides of the religious and political spectrum on Wednesday. The French Muslim Council said the “barbaric action” was also an attack “against democracy and the freedom of the press,” while the Protestant Federation of France expressed “revulsion” and said the “hateful” acts could have no justification in any religion.

Irina Bokova, the director-general of Paris-based UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency, said she was “horrified” by the attack. “This is more than a personal tragedy,” she stated.  “It is an attack on the media and freedom of expression.  The world community cannot allow extremists to silence the free flow of opinions and ideas.  We must work together to bring the perpetrators to justice and stand together for a free and independent press.”

Rights group Amnesty International said the attack was a “black day” for freedom of expression and a free press, while the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) called the assault a “barbaric act of violence against journalists and media freedom.”

EFJ president Mogens Blicher Bjerregaard stressed that journalists today face a greater range of dangers and threats than ever before.

Last year, 118 journalists and media workers died for doing their jobs, according to the EFJ and other organisations, bringing the total to more than 700 deaths over the past decade.

On Nov. 2, the United Nations marked the first international Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists. The organisation said that the majority of the killings “were deliberate murders committed in connection with journalists’ denunciation of crime and corruption.”

Charlie Hebdo’s recent cartoons had poked fun at the head of IS, or the Islamic State, and had even seemed to forecast an attack, saying that fighters had until the end of January to “present their wishes” – a reference to the French tradition of government ministers presenting their “voeux” to the press each new year.

From around the world, condemnation of the acts and condolences for the victims’ families were transmitted to France by heads of state and foreign ministers. But perhaps the most profound messages came from colleagues in the media world – cartoonists.

Plantu said that Cartooning for Peace, where staffers worked late into the evening, had received thousands of messages and drawings.

“We are angry,” he said on French television. “Cartoonists – Christian, Muslim, Jewish cartoonists – are scandalised and angry. And to express ourselves, we take up a marker and we draw.”

He said that Cartooning for Peace had been created for the very purpose of creating bridges between people, religions and regions and that cartoonists’ work was “stronger” than the “barbaric acts” committed by the “cowards” on Wednesday.

Plantu told IPS at a conference last year in the southern French city of Montpellier that the work of the non-profit organisation was important in promoting dialogue, understanding and mutual respect by using cartoons as a universal language.

At that conference, one of the featured participants was Tignous, who showed himself to be funny in both speech and drawing. As he and a journalist got lost trying to make it to the conference centre, he cracked jokes about his legs being too short to jump fences, but he ended up being the one to find the right direction.

Later at the conference, he produced cartoons that had the audience laughing out loud. For him, and other cartoonists, the work was about freedom to poke fun at extremists and political hypocrites.

At the creation of Cartooning for Peace, the founders said the initiative was meant to highlight the notion that cartoonist’s influence comes with a “responsibility to encourage debate rather than inflame passions, to educate rather than divide.”

According to commentators, Charlie Hebdo may have inflamed passions with its satire, but the killings on Wednesday seemed an attempt to end all debate, and to foster further division in France, where the extreme-right National Front party has been rising in popularity.

“The targeted assassinations were staged in order to establish terror and muzzle journalists, cartoonists but also every citizen,” Cartooning for Peace said in a statement. It added that the attackers would not have the last word because “art and freedom will be stronger than any intolerance.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Mario Lubetkin
ROME, Dec 10 2014 (IPS)

The vast international and national media impact of the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2), held in Rome from Nov. 19 to 21, demonstrated the growing interest that nutritional problems are arousing worldwide, primarily because the media themselves are increasingly reporting issues related to poverty and exclusion.

Thousands of articles in leading newspapers from different countries of the world, numerous television reports and substantial social media activity focused on ICN2, jointly held by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), 22 years after the first international nutrition conference, also in Rome.

Global representation was ensured through participation by more than 100 ministers and deputy ministers as the leading actors responsible for nutrition-related matters in their respective countries.

Mario Lubetkin

With a policy document and a framework for action containing over 60 points, adopted by consensus and applicable at national and international levels, this conference completed one phase and launched another whose results will be seen in the years to come.

Unlike other international meetings of this nature, this time the media highlighted the interventions of keynote speakers and the final documents, but more importantly continued to publish information and thought pieces on nutrition for some weeks following the conference.

Nutrition has achieved visibility as an issue on the global news agenda, primarily because of its serious social ramifications in developing and developed countries alike.

Countless experts brought to the fore the inherent existing contradiction of having 800 million people suffering from hunger (albeit 200 million fewer than 20 years ago), while 500 million adults are suffering from obesity. The seriousness of the situation is compounded by the fact that the number of the latter is still rising and is resulting in serious health risks for the population at large.“Nutrition has achieved visibility as an issue on the global news agenda, primarily because of its serious social ramifications in developing and developed countries alike”

Suffice it to say that 42 million children are overweight, while malnutrition is the underlying cause of 45 percent of infant mortality.

Statistics indicate that unhealthy diets and lack of exercise are the cause of 10 percent of deaths and permanent disability cases.

Over two billion people, or approximately one-third of all humanity, suffer from micro-nutrient deficiencies.

The problem among children under five years of age is particularly distressing because 51 million suffer from wasting, or low weight for height, which in turn results in higher mortality from infectious diseases. Moreover, 161 million children in that particular age group also suffer from growth retardation.

Malnutrition also has high economic costs. Recent studies have indicated that malnutrition hunger, micro-nutrient deficiency and obesity result in annual costs of between 2.8 and 3.5 trillion dollars, or 4-5 percent of world gross domestic product (GDP). The per capita cost is estimated to be 400-500 dollars per year.

In his speech during the International Conference on Nutrition, Pope Francis said that “when solidarity is lacking in one country, it is felt around the world.”

Despite there being enough food for everyone, food issues are subject to manipulated information, corruption, claims regarding national security, or “teary-eyed evocations of economic crisis”, the Pontiff said. “That is the first challenge we need to overcome”, he asserted as he called for the rights of all human beings to be uppermost in all development assistance programmes.

The Pope also stressed the need to respect the environment and protect the planet. “Humans may forgive, but nature does not”, he argued, adding that “we must take care of Mother Nature, so that she does not respond with destruction”. In this way, he linked the debates on nutrition with the ongoing International Conference on Climate Change in Lima, Peru (Dec. 1-12).

However, despite the breadth of international coverage, it is noteworthy that the leading media did not fully analyse the conference’s Framework for Action, which essentially sets the course for gradual resolution of nutrition’s major challenges.

The Framework for Action proposes the enhancement of political commitments, promotion of national nutrition plans incorporating the different food security and nutrition stakeholders, an increase in responsible investment, the fostering of inter-country collaboration, whether it be North-South or South-South, and the strengthening of nutrition governance.

The Framework also recommends measures to achieve sustainable food systems, revise national policies and investments, promote crop diversification, upgrade technology, develop and adopt international guidelines on healthy diets, and encourage gradual reductions in consumption of saturated fats, sugar, salt or sodium.

The chapter on communications suggests the conduct of social marketing campaigns and lifestyle-change communication programmes promoting physical activity, dietary diversification, consumption of micronutrient-rich food products to include traditional local foods, and taking account of cultural factors.

Although the principal responsibility for implementing the Framework for Action rests with governments and parliaments, non-State actors such as civil society and the private sector have an important role to play by joining forces in ensuring that the proposals are put into action.

Throughout this process, the media have a crucial oversight role in ensuring that the challenges and proposed solutions identified by the Second International Conference on Nutrition become reality in the short and medium terms. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

These Haitian schoolchildren are being supported by a WFP school feeding programme designed to end malnutrition which, for many countries, can be a double burden where overweight and obesity exist side by side with under-nutrition. Credit: UN Photo/Albert González Farran

By Gloria Schiavi
ROME, Nov 23 2014 (IPS)

Not only do 805 million people go to bed hungry every day, with one-third of global food production (1.3 billion tons each year) being wasted, there is another scenario that reflects the nutrition paradox even more starkly: two billion people are affected by micronutrients deficiencies while 500 million individuals suffer from obesity.

The first-ever Global Nutrition Report, a peer-reviewed publication released this month, and figures from the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) highlight a multifaceted and complex phenomenon behind malnutrition.

“The double burden of malnutrition [is] a situation where overweight and obesity exist side by side with under-nutrition in the same country”, according to Anna Lartey, FAO’s Nutrition Director. “And we are seeing it in lots of the countries that are developing economically. These are the countries that are going through the nutrition transition”."The double burden of malnutrition [is] a situation where overweight and obesity exist side by side with under-nutrition in the same country. And we are seeing it in lots of the countries that are developing economically. These are the countries that are going through the nutrition transition” – Anna Lartey, FAO’s Nutrition Director

Beside hunger then, governments and development organisations have also been forced to start tackling over-nutrition.

“While under-nutrition still kills almost 1.5 million women and children every year, growing rates of overweight and obesity worldwide are driving rising diseases like cancer, heart disease, stroke and diabetes”, Francesco Branca, Director of Nutrition for Health and Development at the World Health Organisation (WHO), explained in a statement.

The solution does not lie in the realm of science, health or agriculture alone. It requires a cross sectorial and multi dimensional approach that includes education, women’s empowerment, market regulation, technological research and, above all, political commitment.

For this reason, representatives of governments, multilateral institutions, civil society and the private sector met in Rome for the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) that took place at FAO headquarters on Nov. 19-21. Jointly organised by FAO and WHO, the conference came 22 years after its first edition and, unfortunately, addressed the same unsolved problem.

Malnutrition, in all its forms, has repercussions on the capability of people to live a full life, work, care for their children, be productive, generate a positive cycle and improve their living conditions. Figures from the Global Nutrition Report estimate that the cost of malnutrition is around four to five percent of national GDP, suggesting that prevention would be more cost-effective.

With the goal of improving nutrition through the implementation of evidence-based policies and effective international cooperation, ICN2 produced two documents to help governments and stakeholders head in the right direction: the Rome Declaration on Nutrition and a Framework for Action.

The conference also heard a strong call for accountability and for the strengthening of nutrition in the post-2015 development agenda.

Flavio Valente, who represented civil society organisations at ICN2, remarked that “the current hegemonic food system and agro-industrial production model are not only unable to respond to the existing malnutrition problems but have contributed to the creation of different forms of malnutrition and the decrease of the diversity and quality of our diets.”

This position was shared by many speakers, who stressed the negative impact that advertising of unhealthy food has, mainly on children.

According to a participant from Chile, calling obesity a non-communicable disease is misleading, because it spreads through the media system very effectively. He added that Chile currently risks being brought before the World Trade Organisation (WTO) by multinational food companies for its commitment to protect public health by regulating the advertising of certain food.

This happens in a country where 60 percent of people suffer from over-nutrition and one obese person dies every hour, according to the permanent representative of Chile at FAO, Luis Fernando Ayala Gonzalez.

In an address to the conference, Queen Letizia of Spain also acknowledged the responsibility of the private sector: “It is necessary to help the economic interests converging towards public health. It is worth remembering that no country in the world has been able to reverse the epidemic of obesity in all age groups. None.”

The outcome of ICN2 brought consensus around a plan of action and some key targets.

Educating children about healthy habits and women who are in charge of feeding the family was recognised as crucial, as was breastfeeding, which should be encouraged (through paid maternity leave and breastfeeding facilities in the workplace), and the need to empower women working in agriculture.

Supporting small and family farming would also give people better opportunities to eat local, fresh and seasonal produce as well as fruit and vegetables, reducing the consumption of packaged, processed food that is often low in nutrients, vitamins and fibres and high in calories, sugar, salt and fats.

However, teaching people how to eat is not enough, if they cannot easily access quality food – hence the need for relevant policies targeting the food chain and distribution.

Initiatives like the Fruit in Schools programme proposed by New Zealand go in the right direction, especially when implemented within a coordinated policy that promotes physical activity and a healthy lifestyle that fights consumption of alcohol and tobacco.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Mario Lubetkin
ROME, Oct 3 2014 (IPS)

It is common belief that good news is less interesting for the general public than bad news; ­this is why media coverage tends to focus on catastrophic events and disasters, both natural and man-made.

Fortunately, there are some exceptions: a report launched by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on Sep. 16 stating that hunger has dramatically decreased by 100 million people received widespread international attention, with more than 2000 articles published, including many stories in major media outlets.

Some of the articles expressed surprise over this improvement in the fight against hunger, apparently assuming that poverty and hunger in the world will only continue to increase.

Mario Lubetkin

This extensive media coverage reinforces the importance of the news, not only because of the impressive numbers, but also because it reveals an ongoing trend towards a further reduction of hunger in the future.

In fact, recent FAO estimates show that the global reduction of hunger is continuing. For the period 2012-2014 the number of chronically undernourished people is estimated at 805 million people, 100 million less than a decade before, and 209 million less than in 1990-1992.

One aspect of hunger reduction that has not been analysed extensively by the media is the fact that 63 countries have already reached the first Millennium Development Goal (reducing hunger by half between 1990 and 2015), and that many countries have only one year left to reach this goal.

However, in spite of this progress, there are large disparities between regions. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the highest hunger rates and it has shown only modest improvements in recent years, as figures reveal that 1 in 4 people are undernourished. In several North African countries, however, the situation is more promising and levels of under-nutrition remain low.“In order to claim victory, we need stronger efforts and better coordination among the actors that have already lifted millions of people out of poverty: governments, international organisations, non-state actors, the general public, and those who inform public opinion: the media”

Asia, the most populated region in the world, is home to the highest number of hungry people, but there are interregional distinctions: although there has been little improvement in southern Asia, improvements in East Asia and Southeast Asia are encouraging.

Latin America and the Caribbean have shown rapid progress, particularly in the south of the continent. One of the main reasons for this progress is the boost given by public policies promoting nutrition, many of them unique to the region, and some inspired by success stories in other countries, such as the Zero Hunger Programme in Brazil.

Still, it is clear that though we have won several battles in the fight against hunger, we still have a long way to go.

In order to claim victory, we need stronger efforts and better coordination among the actors that have already lifted millions of people out of poverty: governments, international organisations, non-state actors, the general public, and those who inform public opinion: the media.

How can we better inform the public about this progress, which is undoubtedly positive for humanity, without stopping at the data that international organisations provide on the issue?

The answer is clear: in order to understand these numbers and figures, they cannot be read as an isolated event, but as a continuous process of change influenced by multiple actors, both public and private.

Why do the media ignore these important issues which are receiving more space on the global development agenda?

Who doubts whether food security, food loss and waste or nutrition policies are in the interest of international public opinion?

We are aware of the great challenges in the field of communication, exacerbated by the long and deep economic crisis affecting many media outlets. There are fewer printed media; newspapers have fewer pages; there are fewer journalists in the newsrooms. Traditional journalism programmes at universities have left many journalists ill-prepared for covering breaking news in our new digital age.

These are some aspects that should be taken into consideration in the present situation. All of these changes will affect not only the current generation of journalists, but also future generations that will have the responsibility to inform the public on these issues with increasing urgency.

In a few weeks we will face a new communication challenge: the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2), taking place in Rome between Nov. 19 and 21, 22 years after the first such conference.

The invitation to participating states is that commitment alone is not enough; it is only the first step. ICN2 will design the framework for countries to transform their commitment into action and impact.

And we could not have chosen a more opportune moment: governments are currently discussing the second stage of the Millennium Development Goals – the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – starting next year, with the aim of eradicating hunger and poverty worldwide.

It is clear that in the media’s coverage of ICN2, the focus should be not only on informing the public about the daily activities of the conference, but also on the issues it aims to address, as well as the strategic debate surrounding the larger goal of building healthier societies­ – an undertaking in which governments must play a key role. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

By Mairead Maguire
BELFAST, Sep 12 2014 (IPS)

While the United States, United Kingdom and NATO are pushing for war with Russia, it behoves people and their governments around the world to take a clear stand for peace and against violence and war, no matter where it comes from.We are at a dangerous point in our history of the human family and it would be the greatest of tragedies for ourselves and our children if we simply allowed the war profiteers to take us into a third world war, resulting in the death of untold millions of people.

Mairead Maguire

NATO’s decision at its summit in Wales (September 4-5) to create a new 4,000 strong rapid reaction force for initial deployment in the Baltics is a dangerous path for us all to be forced down, and could well lead to a third world war if not stopped. What is needed now are cool heads and people of wisdom and not more guns, more weapons, more war.

NATO is the leadership which has been causing the ongoing wars from the present conflict in the Ukraine, to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and others.

NATO’s latest move commits its 28 member states to spend two percent of their gross domestic product on the military, and to establish a series of three to five bases in Eastern Europe where equipment and supplies will be pre-positioned to help speed deployments, among other measures. “We are at a dangerous point in our history of the human family and it would be the greatest of tragedies for ourselves and our children if we simply allowed the war profiteers to take us into a third world war, resulting in the death of untold millions of people”

This decision by the United States/NATO to create a high readiness force with the alleged purpose of countering an alleged Russian threat reminds me of the war propaganda of lies, half-truths, insinuations and rumours to which we were all subjected in order to try to soften us all up for the Iraq war and subsequent horrific wars of terror which were carried out by NATO allied forces.

According to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OCSE) observation team, NATO’s reports, including its satellite photos which show Russian combat forces engaged in military operations inside sovereign territory of Ukraine, were based on false evidence.

While NATO is busy announcing a counter-invasion to the non-existent Russian invasion of Ukraine, people in Ukraine are calling out for peace and negotiations, for political leadership which will bring them peace, not weapons and war.

This spearhead military force will be provided by allies in rotation and will involve also air, sea and special forces. We are also informed by a NATO spokesperson that this force will be trained to deal with unconventional actions, from the funding of separatist groups to the use of social media, intimidation and black propaganda.

No doubt the current Western media’s demonisation of President Vladimir Putin and the Russian people, by trying to inculcate fear and hatred of them, is part of the black propaganda campaign.

NATO’s latest proposals of 4,000 soldiers, and a separate force of 10,000 strong British-led joint expeditionary force also proposed, is a highly aggressive and totally irresponsible move by the United States, United Kingdom and NATO. It is breaches the 1997 agreement with Moscow under which NATO pledged not to base substantial numbers of soldiers in Eastern Europe on a permanent basis.

NATO should have been disbanded when the Warsaw Pact disintegrated but it was not and is now controlled by the United States for its own agenda. When speaking of NATO, one of President Bill Clinton’s officials said “America is NATO”. Today NATO, instead of being abolished, is re-inventing itself in re-arming and militarising European states and justifying its new role by creating enemy images – be they Russians, IS (the Islamic State), and so on.

In an interdependent, interconnected world, struggling to build fraternity, economic cooperation and human security, there is no place for the Cold War policies of killing and threats to kill and policies of exceptionalism and superiority. The world has changed. People do not want to be divided and they want to see an end to violence, militarism and war.

The old consciousness is dysfunctional and a new consciousness based on an ethic of non-killing and respect and cooperation is spreading. It is time for NATO to recognise that its violent policies are counterproductive. The Ukraine crisis, groups such as the Islamic State, etc., will not be solved with guns, but with justice and through dialogue.

Above all, the world needs hope. It needs inspirational political leadership and this could be given if President Barack Obama and President Putin sat down together to solve the Ukraine conflict through dialogue and negotiation and in a non-violent way.

We live in dangerous times, but all things are possible, all things are changing … and peace is possible. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

By Ernest Corea
WASHINGTON, Aug 25 2014 (IPS)

Where have all the flowers gone? Yes, of course, those are the opening words of a beautiful song made famous by such illustrious singers as Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Vera Lynn and the Kingston Trio, among others. It was a great number made greater by the different styles in which singers of different musical temperaments belted it out.

But what has that got to do with a news and feature service – Inter Press Service — which has survived in a relentlessly competitive field and become internationally known as the voice of the underdog?IPS not only reflects (in its coverage) the realities of the “other.” It is actually part of the other.

The flowers in the song whose first few verses were written by Pete Seeger have gone to their graveyards. Similarly, non-traditional news services, news magazines, features services, and other innovative and non-traditional purveyors of information and opinion have sprouted like seasonal flora only to disappear – presumably on their way to that great big information graveyard in the skies.

Numerous efforts have been made by information entrepreneurs, journalists, publishers, and others to create a lasting and relevant instrument of communication different from those already well established, but most have failed. Some have frayed, withered and died faster than one can say Rabindranath Tagore.

That is an exaggeration, of course. (It’s early in the morning as I write, when exaggerations come faster than ideas.) In more prosaic terms, many such efforts, launched with great enthusiasm and hope, have faltered and flopped.

A few have survived, demonstrating that given the right circumstances and resources, alternative forms of dissemination can survive and flourish. Prominent among them is Inter Press Service, much better known by its shortened form, IPS.

The story goes that several years ago a messenger in a South Asian capital entered the office of a newspaper publisher to announce that “a gentleman from IPS is waiting to see you.” The publisher, already overloaded with tasks, each of them potentially a crisis, growled in reply: “Why would I want to meet somebody from the Indian Postal Service. Those buggers can’t even deliver a letter to the address clearly written on the front of an envelope.”

Courtesy of Ernest Corea

Doggedly the messenger, pejoratively known as a “peon,” the imported term bestowed on messengers by sahibs representing His/Her (unemployed) Britannic Majesty, says: “Not postman. Pressman.”

Irritated by now to a point dangerously close to incipient apoplexy, the publisher looks as if he is going to burst like an over-inflated balloon when the peon announces:. “Sir, he is from Inter Press Service.”

Calm is restored. The danger of an apoplectic outburst passes on like a potential monsoonal shower that turns out to be not even a drizzle. The publisher composes himself and wears his welcoming look. The peon is instructed to let the visitor in and also order up some tea for him.

The representative of Inter Press Service (now internationally known and recognised as IPS) comes in and is welcomed in a businesslike fashion, but with obvious warmth. And well he should be, for IPS was and continues to be like a breath of fresh air entering a room whose windows have rarely been opened.

For many years, representatives of developing country media (this writer among them) complained bitterly at regional and international conferences that circumstances compelled them to publish or broadcast news and views about their own countries, towns and villages, and people – people, for goodness sake – written by strangers in far-off lands, many of whom had never visited the countries they were writing about.

They had no hesitation in writing, broadcasting or publishing advice on how such countries should be organised and governed.

Several efforts were made to correct this imbalance but nobody seemed able to design the appropriate model. Gemini news service? Gone. Lankapuvath? Reduced to the level of a government gazette. Depth News? Up there with the dodo. Pan Asia News? Difficult to locate even through the internet. Then,  IPS came along.

The founders of IPS dealt with reality, as IPS does even today, not with slogans. Politicians and political journalists could play around all they wanted with  a “new international information order” or whatever their pet formulation might be.

IPS would, instead, attempt to service media outlets, print and electronic, with material written by journalists mainly from the South writing about the South from the South. Authenticity, thus, is a key IPS strength.

Even in its U.N. Bureau which is not country specific but, in effect, covers the world,  the rich flavour of internationalism is seamlessly combined with national concerns of small and powerless countries. whose interests are insouciantly ignored by the  maharajahs of international news dissemination.

IPS is different. It is authentic, as already pointed out. It is also down-to-earth and makes a strenuous effort to cover events, processes and trends emanating from developing countries and intertwined with the interests of those countries – and their peoples.

Contemporary history has demonstrated that failure to identify those interests and meet them leads to societal disequilibrium, dysfunctional politics, and disjointed economic development.

Thus, IPS not only reflects (in its coverage) the realities of the “other.” It is actually part of the other, bringing to the attention of audiences, readerships, and so on, activities – or lack of opportunities for activities – that go to the very heart of human development.

IPS is capable of functioning as both a catalyst and monitor of development. Other efforts to create and nurture such an institution have failed, mainly because they lacked high professional standards as well as funding.

The standards side has now been well established and IPS is not merely “recognised” but has won prestigious awards for the style, content, and relevance of its coverage. Often, it covers the stories that should be covered but are ignored by media maharajahs.

This effort has continued for 50 years. Can IPS continue to survive and thrive? It could and should – but only if it has the resources required.  Even the most exquisite bloom cannot survive unless it receives the tender loving care it deserves.

IPS is too critically important a media institution to be allowed to languish for want of resources. Moolah should not trump media relevance.

Ernest Corea is a former editor of the Ceylon Daily News, and more recently, Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to the United States.

The first article in this series can be read here.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

The social role of journalists in Honduras is restricted under the official secrets law because they will not be able to report information that the state regards as “classified,” under the controversial new regulations. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Jul 9 2014 (IPS)

The new official secrets law in Honduras clamps down on freedom of expression, strengthens corruption and enables public information on defence and security affairs to be kept secret for up to 25 years, according to a confidential report seen by IPS.

The Law on Classification of Public Documents related to Security and National Defence, better known as the official secrets law, was approved on the eve of the conclusion of the last parliamentary term, on Jan. 24.

“It [information about corruption] would be classified for 25 years, by which time the statute of limitations for prosecuting public servants for corruption would have expired, and no one would be held accountable,” says the IAIP
In a marathon two-day session, Congress approved a hundred decrees and laws to smooth the path of the new government of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who took office Jan. 27 and belongs to the right-wing National Party, like his predecessor Porfirio Lobo.

“This law lets the government behave like a cat that covers its own dirt,” shopkeeper Eduardo Tinoco told IPS wryly. He pays 20 dollars a week extortion money to one of the gangs that control El Sitio, a neighbourhood in the northeast of the capital.

“I pay taxes here for everything, even to be allowed to live, and that secrecy law will only be used to cover up the diversion of funds used for security and other government business. There are no two ways about it,” said Tinoco, who owns a small grocery store.

The law was blocked in October 2013 because of opposition from the Honduran Community Media Association (AMCH) and international groups, which regard it as a violation of the right to information and freedom of expression.

But it was reconsidered in January. How this occurred is not really known, because there are no audio records in the parliament archives that indicate when the bill was reintroduced, legislature officials told IPS on condition of anonymity.

A report by a team of experts for the Institute for Access to Public Information (IAIP) says that the official secrets law lacks a clear definition of “national security” and this ambiguity opens the way to discretionality, so that anything considered sensitive may be classified as secret.

The IAIP is the autonomous state body responsible for ensuring transparency in Honduras, according to the Law on Transparency and Access to Public Information. IPS obtained the report, which is due to be made public in a few weeks.

Article 3 of the official secrets law indicates that the following can be classified as confidential, in the interests of “national security”: “matters, actions, contracts, documents, information, data and objects whose knowledge by unauthorised persons may harm or endanger national security and/or defence and the fulfilment of its goals in these areas.”

The law sets four classification levels: private, confidential, secret and ultra secret, with periods of secrecy of five, 10, 15 and 25 years respectively, which may be extended as determined by the National Security and Defence Council which is responsible for classifying and declassifying material.

This Council is made up of the three branches of state, the Attorney General’s Office, the ministers of Defence and Security, the national Information and Intelligence Office and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces.

Information classified as “private” is lower level information, documentation or strategic internal material within state bodies that could cause “undesired institutional effects” if they came to light.

“Confidential” is the term attributed to intermediate level information, which could cause “imminent risk” or a direct threat to security, national defence or public order if it were made public, the law says.

Materials classified as “secret” are high level information at the national level, in the strategic internal and external spheres of the state, revelation of which poses an imminent danger to “constitutional order, security, national defence, international relations and the fulfilment of national goals.”

Finally, “ultra secret” is the highest level classification and is described as material which, if in the realm of public knowledge, would provoke “exceptionally serious” internal and external harm, threatening security, defence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the achievement of national goals.

Omar Rivera, of the Civil Society Group (GSC), an association of political advocacy and human rights organisations, told IPS that the “broad discretionality provided by the law is very worrying, because it provides a cloak of secrecy that can cover everything.”

His main concern is related to the security tax that has been levied on businesses and individuals for the past two years, as a contribution to the fight against insecurity and violence. This law “will make it impossible to get factual information on how the millions of dollars the state collects are spent,” he said.

The IAIP report highlights the same discretionalities, pointing out that any information about a public official being implicated in corruption can be classified as “ultra secret”.

In this case it would be classified for 25 years, by which time the statute of limitations for prosecuting public servants for corruption would have expired, and no one would be held accountable, the report analysing the law says.

Meanwhile, human rights expert Roberto Velásquez told IPS that the law directly targets journalism and freedom of expression, by putting a stranglehold on investigating or disseminating information.

He was referring to Article 10 of the law, which establishes that “when it can be foreseen that classified material may come to the knowledge of the media, these shall be notified of the nature of the material, and shall respect its classified nature.”

Also, any person having knowledge of classified information is obliged to “keep it secret” and report it to the nearest civil, police or military authority.

The new law directly contradicts the Transparency Law, in force for the past five years, by removing the IAIP’s powers to classify information regarded as secret, and overriding guarantees for freedom of expression and investigative journalism.

Doris Madrid, the head of IAIP, told IPS that it is hoping that the official secrets law will be reformed, on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and violates international treaties, but a proposal to revise or repeal it was turned down in Congress in March.

IPS learned that Transparency International made the signing of an agreement with the government on Open Budgets conditional on a revision of the law.

Honduras is regarded as one of the Latin American countries with the highest perception of corruption and insecurity. In April, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) indicated that this country of 8.4 million people has the highest murder rate in the world.

The Observatory on Violence at the National Autonomous University of Honduras reported this rate as 79.7 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. But now the authorities have refused to give any more figures on violent deaths to the Observatory, its members have complained.

A commuter on the Circular Train in Yangon reads a copy of the newspaper Democracy Today. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS.

By Amantha Perera
YANGON, May 5 2014 (IPS)

Kyaw Kyaw Aung is just 22, but already has dark memories of days when information, sometimes of the mundane kind, could land you in a dark cell for a very long time in Myanmar, a Southeast Asian nation that was under military rule for decades.

“It is all different now, but there were days not so long ago when talking about the (opposition) National League for Democracy or just uttering the words ‘The Lady’ in public could send you to jail,” said Aung who works at Yangon’s main railway station. ‘The Lady’ is the nickname that ordinary Myanmar citizens use to refer to Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.Despite a highly competitive market, a dozen newspapers now hit the streets every day in Yangon.

It was in August 2012 that the army-backed but reformist Thein Sein government loosened decades of suppressive media laws, lifting pre-publication censorship. In April 2013, it also issued new licences for daily newspapers.

Despite a highly competitive market, a dozen newspapers now hit the streets every day in Yangon. Exiled media groups like the Irrawaddy, Mizzima and the Democratic Voice of Burma have all set up operations here.

“Now there is so much information and rumour that sometimes you need to read 10 different articles on the same incident to get the correct picture,” Aung told IPS, pointing to a newsstand at the railway station entrance lined with over a dozen daily newspapers.

Journalists and media watchers agree that the state of the media in Myanmar is in far better shape now than any time in the last half century.

“Journalists are not afraid to criticise,” Chit Win Maung, a member of the Myanmar Press Council said. Topics that had remained taboo, like the Nobel Laureate Suu Kyi, her political party, ethnic violence and corruption within government are readily reported today.

But activists like Maung are quick to hold back on their enthusiasm and not go overboard. “Media freedom and right to information are limited,” Maung told IPS.

The restrictions are multifarious – in the form of government pressure and restrictions, or business owners muzzling reporting, or ethnic tensions spilling into newsrooms. All these are amplified by a lack of professional capacity within the media brought on by decades of draconian censorship and isolation.

“Sometimes we feel like we miss censorship,” U Thiha Saw, who runs the English daily Myanmar Freedom told an audience of international journalists at a conference on media freedom in Yangon.

Despite its overall reformist agenda and engagement with the outside world, the Sein government has displayed signs of using old ways of dealing with the media.

In December 2013, a journalist from the Daily Eleven newspaper received a three-month jail sentence for trespassing and defamation. The reporter was investigating a corruption story. During the same month, four journalists from another newspaper, the Unity Journal, were detained while reporting on a chemical factory suspected to be linked to the government.

On Apr. 7, Zaw Pe, a journalist with the Democratic Voice of Burma, was sentenced to one year in prison for reporting a story on corruption in the education sector. The sentencing was based on a complaint by an education official that Pe trespassed on government property.

Pe had been jailed from 2010 to 2012 for filming without permission. Currently at least six journalists are in jail in Myanmar.

The government has also tried to muzzle foreign journalists, who have otherwise found entry relatively easy in the last two years. Following the reporting of an ethnic massacre in Maungdaw township in the restive western state of Rakhine in January, visa restrictions were imposed on at least one wire service. Its reporters found their visas limited to one month and put through lengthy renewal procedures.

“The government really put the squeeze on them. It made it clear that there was no carte blanche given to foreign correspondents,” a journalist with detailed knowledge of the incident told IPS.

Government spokesperson Ye Htut, however, denied any new restrictions. He said the government found that journalists who had applied for short reporting stints were using one-year multiple entry visas to stay longer. Htut said the government had come across over 100 such cases.

“We are revising our visa policy,” he said adding that wire services working in Myanmar did not face any restrictions.

Many say that with ethnic tensions rising, divisions are also beginning to show in the media.

“In the mainstream media, the ethnic voice is very low,” said Zin Linn, a consultant with Burma News International (BNI), a network of 12 news companies reporting on Myanmar, including those representing minority communities.

Linn said that the lopsided reporting was partly due to Yangon-based organisations lacking the resources to report from far-flung regions beset by ethnic tensions. But he also fears self-censorship as ethnic tensions have become a dominant factor in the upcoming 2015 national elections.

Government spokesperson Htut also acknowledged the crucial role the media would play in the national elections.

For those linked with the media, the fear is that pressures and lack of resources will force the media to renege on its role as an impartial observer at this critical juncture in Myanmar’s history.

Opposition leader Suu Kyi told a Yangon audience recently that one of the biggest drawbacks for the Myanmar media was lack of training for younger journalists.

Linn from BNI said one of the main tips he gives the BNI networks is to always double-check sourcing and not be swayed by unverified information floating around on social media.

He also warned that the media should be mindful of pressure coming from owners. He said governments all over the world routinely tried to get the media to toe their line by using financial and business incentives.

“Economic power and political power are two sides of the same coin,” he said.

Just hours after Ukrainian investigative journalist Tetyana Chornovil was beaten and left for dead last month at the side of the road by men she claims were acting on the orders of the country’s president, pictures of her battered and bruised face quickly made their way around the world.

News of the attack was used by critics of the country’s authoritarian regime as an example of the dangers faced by journalists who fall foul of the Ukrainian ruling elite.

But while what happened to her drew global media attention and was seized upon by opponents as an example of the government’s sanctioning of the brutal repression of a free press, it was just the latest episode in an ongoing crackdown on the independence of the country’s media.“For a long time we have seen a trend of independent media disappearing in Ukraine."

As well as physical intimidation of individuals, the government has been tightening its grip on the media through buy-outs of publishing houses and other media outlets.

And press watchdogs are warning that by 2015, the year of the next presidential elections, there could be virtually no independent media left.

Johann Bihr, head of the Eastern Europe and Central Asia Bureau at Reporters Without Borders, told IPS: “For a long time we have seen a trend of independent media disappearing in Ukraine, and it is perfectly possible that in just a few years there will be no independent media in the country.”

Ukraine’s media freedom has been steadily eroded in recent years, according to international media watchdogs. Ukraine languishes in 126th place out of 179 in Reporters Without Borders’s 2013 press freedom index. Just four years ago it was ranked 89th.

The most ostensibly visible threat to media freedom has been the increasing problem of violence against journalists. According to the Ukrainian NGO the Institute of Mass Information (IMI), 101 journalists were victims of physical attacks during their work in 2013. Of those, 64 were injured in assaults by police officers. The figure in 2012 was just eight.

Half of the attacks came during the recent Euromaidan protests, as the protests against the government are called. Riot police clashed with protestors, but other incidents have included the beating of reporters from a TV station covering a demonstration in the capital earlier this month who clearly identified themselves as journalists.

A high-profile case was that of Oleg Bogdanov, a journalist with the Internet-based newspaper Dorozhnyi Kontrol (Road Control) that reports on alleged corruption among traffic police. He was beaten and left with serious injuries after an attack near his home in July last year.

The level of violence against journalists in the country is shocking, even for organisations used to monitoring such abuses.

Bihr told IPS: “The recent beatings are just the tip of the iceberg. This is something which has been getting worse for years. Ukraine is not a dictatorship and the current situation there cannot be compared to, say, somewhere like Uzbekistan, or some war-torn African country.

“But having said that, the fact that it is at peace, not war, and that it is not a dictatorship makes it very unusual that there is so much violence against journalists.”

Within Europe, only Turkey reported more beatings of journalists than Ukraine last year, according to Reporters Without Borders.

When contacted by IPS, many local journalists either declined or were reticent to speak openly about the threat of violence faced by people working in their profession.

However, Yulia Sidorova, a journalist working for a newspaper in Donetsk, one of Ukraine’s largest cities, told IPS of the concern and growing paranoia among some of her colleagues about the threat of violence.

“Of course, there is pressure and repression over here… but [regarding violence against journalists] even if a journalist has an accident, many of their colleagues believe it was not an accident but because of the work they are doing,” she said.

“And conversely, those that are really victims of an attack because of their work may think that they have just had an accident. The problem is that it is so difficult to know what the truth is.”

But violence against journalists is far from the only threat to Ukraine’s media freedom. The last few years has seen media houses and broadcasting organisations bought up by people seen as close to members of the ruling elite – with consequences for editorial freedom in newspapers, other publications and broadcast media.

In one recent example, 14 journalists resigned from the Ukrainian edition of Forbes magazine in November over claims of censorship. The publication had recently been bought by Sergey Kurchenko, a businessman seen as having close ties to the family of President Viktor Yanukovych.

The country’s growing Internet media is also suffering, with numerous online news sites and websites of print publications regularly reporting cyber attacks. Some have involved sites being completely taken over and replaced with duplicates spreading false information.

Others have also been taken offline at specific times. During the recent anti-government Euromaidan protests the offices of three independent media outlets were raided by police. At the same time, the servers of some major national newspapers were shut down due to apparent cyber attacks, meaning there was a delay before news of the raids could be reported.

“Cyber attacks are a worrying practice that is on the rise,” Bihr told IPS. “Of course, because of their nature it is always hard to prove exactly who is behind them, but the attacks have always been on journalists supporting the opposition or who are independent.”

However, as bleak as the outlook may appear, there is some hope that independence in Ukraine’s media will not disappear completely.

Sidorova told IPS that despite the problems journalists face doing their jobs, criticism of the government in the media will continue.

She said: “Articles that are sharply critical of the government are published in media without any consequences and the journalists writing those articles have been doing so for many years. Therefore, they cannot see the risks to their health or their livelihoods as so great that it would keep them from publishing these articles.”

The Kremlin is tightening its grip on media. Credit: Pavol Stracansky/IPS.

By Pavol Stracansky
MOSCOW, Dec 14 2013 (IPS)

Russia is set to lose one of its few relatively objective news outlets as the Kremlin moves to tighten its grip on the country’s media.

In an unexpected move earlier this week President Vladimir Putin ordered the closure of the RIA Novosti news agency and the creation of a new global news agency – Rossia Segodnya – to be run by one of the most pro-government figures in the media.

The Kremlin said the decision was taken for financial reasons.

But critics say the development means that the new station will almost certainly become just a tool for government propaganda.

Tatiana Gomozova, a journalist and political analyst with Kommersant FM radio station, told IPS: “It’s another media outlet being turned into a propaganda bureau with all RIA’s facilities now to be used for propaganda.”“It’s another media outlet being turned into a propaganda bureau."

Although state-owned, RIA Novosti was seen as one of Russia’s most objective news services in a media landscape which is heavily regulated and largely under government control.

Almost all the country’s TV channels are controlled by the state, while most regional newspapers are, mainly because of financial ties, in the hands of local authorities.

Among national newspapers there is some degree of independent and critical reporting on various issues.

Johann Bihr, head of the Eastern Europe and Central Asia Bureau at Reporters Without Borders, told IPS: “The national press is slightly different in that it is probably the most critical of the government – i.e. some criticism can be found there at least, and certainly among some of the online news outlets.”

But individual journalists also face problems doing their work. While self-censorship is a problem among journalists – although Reporters Without Borders says that this practice has been waning in recent years – independent journalists reporting critically on the state, especially in areas such as human rights, can often find themselves facing intimidation, or worse.

According to the Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI), 62 journalists have been killed in Russia since 1997, making it the sixth deadliest country in the world for reporters in the last 16 years. But the group also warns that the real figure could be higher as impunity for attacks on journalists in Russia remains the general rule and the vast majority of cases go unsolved.

In an interview with the IPI earlier this year, Novaya Gazeta investigative reporter Elena Milashina explained the problems faced by some journalists in Russia.

She said: “I think there was a kind of political order or demand in the country when Putin came to power the first time; he kind of announced a war on free media….When such attacks on journalists happen, journalists go to the police and the police don’t want to investigate. When they have to do so, because of a murder, they do it slowly because no one is pushing. Impunity is the rule and they understand that nothing will happen to them if they don’t investigate.

“Behind murders, a high-level politician stands in almost all cases. Investigators understand that if they are digging around, they will have problems. When people try to criticise the regime – not just journalists, but human rights defenders too – at a high level they try to show that it’s not safe to do so, and that they [politicians] can get away with anything.”

The authorities’ iron grip on the media is highlighted by the fact that Russia currently ranks 148th in Reporters Without Borders’ Freedom of the Press Index. This puts it below countries such as Libya, Angola and Afghanistan.

The appointment of one of its most fervent supporters to the top position in the Rossia Segodnya agency suggests state control is not being relaxed in any way.

Dmitri Kiselyov is a TV host who is well-known for his pro-government and ultra-conservative views. He has previously praised Stalinist policies and recently called for the hearts of homosexuals to be burned when they die.

Speaking on state-owned TV channel Russia 24 just hours after his appointment he outlined the aims for Rossia Segodnya as “restoring a fair attitude towards Russia, an important country in the world that has good intentions, is the mission of the new organisation.”

And it is his appointment, directly by Putin, as head of the news agency that is a more worrying signal of the government’s intent towards the country’s media than the liquidation of a relatively objective news outlet, say experts.

Gomozova told IPS: “There’s not much media freedom in Russia already, so losing RIA won’t mean we’ve lost that much. But this is a very strong signal for journalists – nobody is safe now.

“The government doesn’t care even about its own media. They don’t respect any media with a story, nor its team, nor that team’s job. They need a resource so they just go and get it.”

Bihr added: “It sounds ominous for the future that Kiselyov has been made head of the new organisation, and the fact that its head has been appointed by the president directly says a lot about its possible future policy.”

Critics say Peru's new law on cybercrime is vaguely worded and threatens access to information. Credit: Public domain

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Nov 27 2013 (IPS)

A new law against cybercrime that restricts the use of data and freedom of information in Peru clashes with earlier legislation, on transparency, which represented a major stride forward in citizen rights.

The advances made in the law on transparency and access to public information have been undermined by the hastily passed law on computer crimes, which restricts and penalises the use of online databases, according to experts consulted by IPS.

The new law was put into effect to crack down on cybercrimes, including sexual harassment of minors. But civil society organisations complain that elements attacking the right to information were incorporated without debate or public input.

The Defensoría del Pueblo or ombudsman’s office says the transparency law, which entered into force in 2002, has a few shortcomings, but is important because of the creation and use of government databases – which would be hindered, however, by the law on cybercrime.

The transparency law was passed with the aim of making government more transparent, to comply with the 1993 constitution, which guaranteed the right of people to request and obtain public information, and established the right of habeas data, under which any government official or civil servant who denies that right can be sued.

Since then, the Defensoría del Pueblo has received 6,714 complaints about requests for public information that did not receive a satisfactory response from the authorities, according to a report to be published in the first week of December, to which IPS had access.

Based on those complaints, the assistant ombudsman on constitutional affairs, Fernando Castañeda, told IPS that his office identified and interviewed 122 public employees responsible for turning over the information, to find out why the requests had not been met.

The main conclusion reached by his office was that an independent authority was needed to monitor and oversee responses to information requests, because civil servants are limited by the orders of their superiors, and in some cases have been punished when they provide information to members of the public.

And things do not get any better when citizens take legal action to complain about the lack of response to their requests for information, especially in rural areas.

Between January 2007 and March 2013, 841 habeas data actions were handled in the justice system, where cases can take up to a year in the first instance court, another year in the second instance court and two more in the Constitutional Court, Castañeda pointed out.

In other words, a four-year journey to try to obtain public information that has been denied.

The official said that the most significant aspect of the law was the creation of tools to facilitate citizens’ access to information, with websites and open access to databases, under the concept of open data.

However, that access will be directly restricted by the new law on computer crimes, which was given fast-track treatment in Congress and signed into law a few weeks later, on Oct. 22, by President Ollanta Humala.

Protests by experts and civil society groups forced Justice Minister Daniel Figallo to state on Nov. 13 that he would study proposed reforms to the law. “We will revise some articles of the law,” he said.

But Figallo defended the legislation, saying the aim was to fight data interference or interception rather than the dissemination of information. His ministry argues that Peru is thus accepting the guidelines of the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime, the first international treaty of its kind, which since 2001 has provided global guidelines for the adoption of laws against computer crimes.

The president of the congressional justice commission, Juan Carlos Eguren, also said he was open to suggestions.

The law creates a three- to six-year sentence for people found guilty of capturing computer information from a public institution, to find out, for example, what is spent on social programmes and to complement that with the introduction of new data or alteration to analyse the information, lawyer Roberto Pereira of the Press and Society Institute (IPYS) told IPS.

That is based on article three of the law, which penalises those who use computer technologies to “introduce, delete, deteriorate, alter or suppress data, or render data inaccessible.”

The law also establishes a three- to five-year sentence for creating a database on an identified or identifiable subject to provide information on any aspect of his or her personal, family, financial or labour life, whether or not it causes harm.

A common practice by journalists is to create databases on companies that are subcontractors for the state, in order to monitor public spending. But under the new law, doing that would automatically make them “cyber criminals,” Pereira explained.

The IPYS stated in a communiqué that the law poses “a serious threat to the freedom of journalistic information, and to research and investigation in general.” The majority of the local media, regardless of their ideological bent, agree with that criticism.

The law on cybercrime could “end up criminalising legal behaviour in cyberspace,” said Pereira.

It also creates “an unacceptable framework of discretionality in its application,” because of the broad, ambiguous criteria it contains, and ends up undermining other basic rights, he said.

There has been a great deal of speculation in Peru on what lay behind the passage of the controversial law.

Pereira cited three explanations: the legislators’ ignorance about cyberspace; the interest on the part of some public figures in criminalising digital freedom and thus blocking investigations of corruption; “and the genuine interest of sectors of the government in improving penal legislation on cybercrime.”

The non-governmental organisation Hiperderecho, which defends digital rights, noted in a communiqué that Congress passed the law “in less than five hours, with their backs turned to the public.”

The organisation criticised the fact that on Sept. 12, Congress suddenly began to debate a bill that had just been introduced by the government, without incorporating in the discussion a long-debated justice commission ruling on another cybercrime bill.

The executive branch presented its bill after a telephone conversation by Defence Minister Pedro Cateriano was made public, and after progress was made towards a common regional code against cybercrime during a technical level meeting of experts of the Ibero-American Conference of Justice Ministers (COMJIB), held in Lima in June.

Miguel Morachimo, a representative of Hiperderecho, admitted to IPS that it was reasonable for the government to fight cybercrime. But he said that when the bill was debated in Congress, “it was completely overhauled.”

In his view, the government was pressured by COMJIB and the banking association – which is worried about card cloning – and ended up acting in haste as a result.

The Defensoría del Pueblo’s office on constitutional affairs has not yet taken a stance on the details of the new law, said Castañeda. But it did acknowledge that it runs counter to some objectives of the transparency law.

Hiperderecho has sent suggestions to Congress for improving the law on cybercrime. Meanwhile, what one law defends, the other blocks.

A young black street vendor selling "acarajé", a traditional type of fritter, in Salvador, Bahia in Brazil’s Northeast. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Walter García and Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 21 2013 (IPS)

Carla Vilas Boas is of mixed-race descent – African, European and indigenous – like a majority of the population of Brazil. But she spends hours straightening her hair, trying to look more like the blond, blue-eyed women she sees in the mirror of television.

The 32-year-old domestic worker acknowledges that Brazil’s popular telenovelas have started to include characters like her – people from the country’s favelas or shantytowns, who work long workdays for low wages.

But among the actors and the models shown in ads, “there are only a few darker-skinned people among all the blue-eyed blonds. And you wonder: if I buy that shampoo and go to the hairdresser, can I look like that?” she remarked to IPS.

But her hair “never looks that way,” even with the new shampoo or the visit to the hairstylist, and Vilas Boas said that makes her feel “really bad.”

More than half of the women in this country of 200 million people – where over 50 percent of the population identified themselves as black or “mulatto” in the last census – do not identify with the images they see on TV.

Experts say that because of the prejudices reflected in the choice of actors and models, advertisers potentially lose a large segment of consumers.

A survey by the Data Popular polling firm and the Patrícia Galvão Institute (IPG), a women’s rights organisation, interviewed 1,501 women and men over the age of 18 in 100 towns and cities spread across every region of the country.

In the study “Representations of women in TV advertising”, 56 percent of those surveyed said ads did not show “real” Brazilian women.

For 65 percent of the respondents, the model of beauty in TV ads has little to do with the way Brazilian women really look, and 60 percent said they think women get frustrated when they do not feel reflected on TV.

Most ads show “young, white, thin, blond, straight-haired upper-class women,” the study says.

At the age of 17, Karina Lopes feels insecure as a woman. Her body has changed, but not into the shape she sees in the ads offering her clothes, make-up and low-cal yogurt.

“Even if I eat that yogurt every day, I’ll never be thin like that woman selling it,” she told IPS. “You feel bad because that image is so different from the way you look. Normal women aren’t shown on TV.”

Mara Vidal, assistant director of IPG, said “women come in all colours and shapes. We aren’t stereotypes. That’s what the public is saying – it’s not something that women’s organisations or academic studies came up with.

“It’s the public who are saying ‘we want to be better represented in society, not just by one single, universal type’,” Vidal told IPS.

She said she also suffered in the past. As a girl, she didn’t want to go to school because other kids called her “black girl with broom-bristle hair” because of her brown skin and red hair.

“I didn’t start liking my hair till I got to university, when I stopped straightening it,” she said. “My generation wasn’t as aware as people are today. The concept of someone who was ‘good-looking’ didn’t include people with our hair and colouring.”

In the study, 51 percent of those surveyed said they would like to see more black women in ads, and 64 percent said they would like to see more women from lower-income sectors.

Brazilian TV and the country’s world-famous telenovelas have gradually started to overcome prejudice and today black or brown-skinned characters are less limited to the traditional discriminatory roles of domestics, family drivers, or criminals. Some have even cast darker-skinned women as central characters.

But advertising, unless it specifically targets that segment of the population, still does not represent blacks.

“In an ad for margarine we don’t see black women or happy black families. But in the area of cosmetics we’re starting to see a change,” Vidal said.

For example, there are now lines of products specifically designed for darker-skinned women and shampoos for “curly” or “dark-coloured” hair.

Meanwhile, advertising by the government and public enterprises has become increasingly “politically correct,” reflecting the country’s ethnic diversity.

But that is not happening yet “as much as we would like,” said Vidal. “Brazil, because of its tradition of excluding blacks, has not yet dared to fully show that reality.”

Renato Meirelles, director of Data Popular, said that exclusion is now hurting advertisers. According to the polling firm, women in Brazil represent 500 billion dollars a year in income and are the ones who decide on 85 percent of what families consume.

Women are not just a “niche market but the main consumer market, and advertisers don’t know how to reach out to them,” Meirelles told IPS.

The idea that “Brazilian women want to be like Europeans is old,” he said. “Now women are proud of their new identity.”

Factors that have helped boost this newfound self-esteem include laws aimed at fighting racial discrimination that have been adopted in recent years and the fact that some 30 million people have left poverty behind and have moved up into the middle class.

According to Meirelles, “the big problem of advertisers and advertising agencies is that they belong to the elite and their decisions emerge from an elite mind-set. That’s why they fail to understand that a new consumer market has emerged.

“Their fear is that white women won’t buy a product if the girl in the ad is black. Few of them worry that black women won’t buy products because the model in the ad is white,” he said.

“Aspiration has given way to inspiration, where the model represents successful black women. Companies should understand this process of achievement that we have experienced,” he said.

By Roberto Savio
SAN SALVADOR, Sep 4 2013 (IPS)

Few people today know that when the first news agencies were created in the 19th century, the French Havas and the British Reuters divided the world between themselves.

The division followed the borders of the two colonial empires, and Latin America, for example, basically went to Havas while Reuters had the United States.

Roberto Savio

United Press International (UPI) was the first American agency to break the monopoly, claiming that America could not be seen through British eyes (very much the same cry from the Third World against the North’s monopoly of information) and, for many years, UPI was considered one of the media world’s giants.

So it came as a shock when a Mexican millionaire, Mario Vázquez Raña, bought UPI in 1986 for 41 million dollars, famously declaring: “I had two Falcon jets. I sold one and I bought UPI.”

Since then, the concentration of the media in the hands of millionaires and billionaires has continued unabated. The cases of Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi are the most famous.

But concentration of the media in fewer and fewer hands is a global phenomenon. Some media observers see in this a turn to the right, propelled by those with money. It is not a plot; it is simply that 100 people who own a Ferrari tend to have a more similar view of things than, for example, 100 people who own a Volkswagen.

The United States is a good observatory on the world of information. It was in the U.S. that the expression “mass media” was coined in the wake of the attempt to sell a very large number of newspapers in order to be viable. In Europe, on the other hand, newspapers were for a small elite, not for the masses.

The famous Times of London (now owned by Murdoch), for example, sold only an average of 50,000 copies, all for the British Empire’s elite. In fact, European newspapers were “cultured”, with long articles and lots of analysis, and language was very important. Media in the U.S. went in the opposite direction, and the mass media were born.

In the last few weeks, an impressive number of prestigious U.S. newspapers have been bought by billionaires. The most famous case is the Washington Post which, along with the New York Times, was considered a leader among U.S. media.

The Post had been held by the same family, the Grahams, for 80 years. It was bought by Jeffery Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, for 250 million dollars. This represents one percent of his personal wealth (Amazon has a market capitalisation of 135.2 billion dollars). But the Post sold several others local papers in the package, which was evaluated 10 years ago at five billion dollars.

This is one final nail in the coffin of family-owned newspapers. The Chandler family once owned the Los Angeles Times, the Copley family the San Diego Tribune, the Cowles the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Bancrofts the Wall Street Journal; these families defended the independence and identity of their newspapers.

But all that is changing, or has already changed. A good example comes from comparing the WSJ during the time of the Bancrofts and now that it is under the ownership of the ubiquitous Murdoch. It is now practically aligned with Fox TV, another Murdoch acquisition. The Boston Globe was purchased by another billionaire, John Henry, for a mere 70 million dollars. The New York Times paid 1.1 billion dollars for the Globe in 1993.

The question is how long the New York Times will last as the last iconic family newspaper, owned by four generations of Sulzbergers since 1896. It is not losing money, but it is a butterfly fish in a world of sharks.

It has a market capitalisation of 1.69 billion dollars against Murdoch’s News Corporation’s 56.66 billion, the Bloomberg family’s 27 billion, Facebook’s 93.86 billion and Google’s 282.04 billion. In other words, big money is now doing the talking and, in that sense, the future of the battle is online.

The Alliance for Audited Media has reported a dramatic reduction in sales of magazines. Newsweek was bought for one dollar in 2010, and magazines from Vogue to Vanity Fair and from People to Metropolitan have all suffered a similar fate. On the other hand, the AAM reports that online subscriptions reached 10.2 million in the first half of 2013, almost double the 5.4 million for the same period in 2012.

The New York Times has aggressively started online subscriptions, and has already reached more than 60,000 subscribers. It is confident that this will make the newspaper viable for a long time, and has announced that it is not for sale. But what is becoming clear is that the distinction between media producers and systems of distribution is disappearing.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo are looking for more news to transmit, to increase advertising. By buying YouTube and Zagat, Google has squarely moved into the content arena. Yahoo has now bought a new medium, a micro-blogging system that today allows 119 million users to quickly post words and pictures, for 1.1 billion dollars, more than three times the combined sale prices for the Post and the Globe. So, prestigious names come cheap!

The problem is that the online subscribers represent an anthropological change from the old-style readers. They are restless minds, who love to shift from page to page, and long articles and analysis will progressively shrink. Increasingly, this is going to be the case as the next generations grow up.

A major study on young people between 14 and 16, carried out at the University of Paris Sorbonne, shows that they have an attention span much shorter than that of their parents (as any teacher today can confirm).

And for those young people, the borderline between traditional professional journalism and so-called citizens’ journalism, practised by anyone who wants to post news and photos on the web, is disappearing.

As a result, anything over 850 words (like this very summary article, which is over 1,000 words) is no longer considered fit for printing … does this bode well for a better informed and more aware world?

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

Today’s new world of digital communications presents public media outlets with a complex challenge: to conquer loyal and active audiences, with programming that is beholden neither to governments, their main funders, nor to market imperatives.

This was the conclusion reached on the first day of the 4th Latin American Forum on Public Media, held Thursday Aug. 29 and Friday Aug. 30 in Brasilia, organised by the World Bank and the Empresa Brasil de Comunicaçao (EBC) with the support of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and the secretariat for social communication of the presidency of Brazil.

“There is no single recipe, but the important thing is that public media outlets must have an audience,” Sergio Jellinek, the World Bank’s external affairs manager in Latin America and the Caribbean, told IPS. “The main challenge is to identify the audience you want to attract and offer a really interesting service.”

To make this happen, however, there is a longstanding problem to overcome: public media outlets need alternative means of financing themselves to avoid dependence on state resources.

For instance, EBC, a Brazilian government-owned corporation created in 2007 to manage the government’s radio and TV stations, controls two TV channels, eight radio stations and Agência Brasil, which publishes news and videos on the Internet. It has an annual budget of 211 million dollars, 90 percent of which comes from the state coffers.

“Our hands are tied, we are hostages to the availability of budget funds,” said Nelson Breve, EBC’s president. “No business model is sustainable with a single source of revenue, because if it dries up one day, there is nowhere else to turn.”

This year, for example, EBC has had to cut its budget by nearly 17 million dollars, and will not be investing in new technology, according to Breve.

This kind of constraint does not only operate in Brazil. Dependence on state funding also occurs in Mexico, where a recent constitutional reform allows public media outlets to sell advertising.

The head of public broadcaster Once TV, journalist Enriqueta Cabrera y Cuarón, said: “Up to now, Once TV had been considered an official corporation and was not allowed to air commercials. Only now when it is regarded as a concession, will it be able to do so.”

Cabrera y Cuarón advocates a mixed model of financing, limiting revenue from commercials to a maximum of 30 percent of the budget, and with the option of banning advertising of products harmful to health and the environment, or that incite violence.

Breve told IPS: “The problem is that when we talk about diversifying income sources, we end up competing with private companies for the advertising pie, and there is a lack of dialogue between public and private media outlets.”

More complex still is the case of Telemedellín, the local TV channel in the Colombian city of Medellín, which receives nearly its entire annual budget of 18 million dollars from the city government.

But there are strings attached. Fabián Berro, the programming director, said: “The Secretariat hand over the money, but they demand programming tailored to their wishes. With the little time that is left to spare, we try to do something different.”

But some innovative solutions have emerged. Early this year, Telemedellín suspended its programming for 24 hours. Its team held a meeting and decided to film a mega-documentary, from noon on Feb. 22 to noon the next day, in order to portray life in the city.

With images they filmed themselves, footage from surveillance cameras placed in different locations, and above all, home videos sent by the general public via internet, Telemedellín produced M24, Colombia’s first collaborative programme.

The initiative, recently awarded a prize by the Centro Internacional de la TV Abierta (International Open TV Centre), was presented at the Forum Thursday as an example of the use of new platforms to attract and interest the public, and engage it in direct participation.

Berrío said, “At first we thought 300 user-generated videos would be enough. In the end, we received 1,900 clips of people dancing, eating, celebrating birthdays. We changed the trend of Twitter use in Colombia, and because of the large number of responses, we aired those images during the whole of the following week.”

But this initiative is still an exception. “I searched worldwide for a similar experience, and could not find one,” Berrío told IPS.

In Brazil there are many hurdles. “We came late to public communications,” said Breve, referring to EBC’s six-year history. “”We still have to explain to society what we are and why we are important.”

In the view of Carlos Tibúrcio, a special adviser to the cabinet of the Brazilian presidency, the issue is that there is a lack of awareness of public television programmes.

“I recently met with a communications director for a foundation in São Paulo. She did not know what the TV Brasil programmes were, or even what the channel number was. We have to improve our information,” he said.

IPS Director General Mario Lubetkin highlighted the need for dialogue between media outlets to avoid wasting efforts. “We don’t need to reinvent everything. We need an alliance, an effort that is not just of one agency, but of media outlets in general, that includes civil society and the private sector,” he said.

Communications also need to be handled differently, Lubetkin said. “The Internet completely changed our scope as a news agency. We no longer have a monopoly on technology, nor on content. What we need is to know what the added value of our enterprises is. It’s no longer a technological problem, but one of knowing what we are writing, and for whom,” he concluded.

One year after the government officially struck down laws obstructing free press in Myanmar, a parliamentary bill could allow previous censorship practices to re-surge.

When Thein Sein’s Union Solidarity and Development party government ended the last of the censorship laws in August last year, many hailed a new era of free expression and an end to the pressures placed on journalists over the previous half century.

Still, many journalists are concerned by the state of media reform in the country. Currently, a publishing bill that critics say gives the Ministry of Information (MOI) overly broad powers to issue and revoke publication licenses has been passed by the lower house of parliament and is set for consideration by the upper house.

Myint Kyaw is secretary for the Myanmar Journalist Network (MJN), which has been protesting the proposed bill, known as the Printing and Publishing Enterprise Bill. He told IPS that the MJN’s main criticism of the bill was in its conception of a printer and publisher registry system, which would essentially allow a ministry-appointed registrar to issue or deny publication licences and thus leave control over these licences in the hands of the government.“[Previously], all publications, private journals and magazines, arts, music, films and TV programmes were heavily censored by the government.”
-- Aye Chan Naing, chief editor of Democratic Voice of Burma

This situation is reminiscent of when the ministry used to control journalists and editors through the threat of license revocation, Myint Kyaw described. Such a possibility, combined with the threat of imprisonment and aggression, would lead to self-censorship, particularly when speaking critically of the military or when investigating corruption, notably that of former dictators and their family businesses.

Myint Kyaw also spoke of the need for a law guaranteeing access to information and ensuring safety for journalists in conflict areas. Earlier in August, MJN also collected thousands of signatures from around Yangon, the country’s former capital city, for a petition that demonstrated the public’s discontent with the state of media reform.

The current parliamentary bill comes at a time when many human rights groups remain critical of Myanmar’s attitude towards the media. In June, the government banned Time magazine after it featured a piece on the radical Buddhist 969 movement.

“It’s a disgraceful decision to ban the issue and indicates recidivism in official censorship in Burma [also known as Myanmar],” David Mathieson, a senior Asia researcher with Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

Benjamin Ismaïl, head of Reporters Without Borders’ Asia-Pacific desk, expressed a similar viewpoint. “The reflex of censoring news has not disappeared, but this is not a surprise since the government is composed in majority by the same persons who were already in power before 2011.”

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), however, did not denounce this case of censorship, telling IPS that the organisation aims to help develop an independent media, but that “[we] usually confine our advocacy to issues around the protection of journalists.”

Myanmar’s Interim Press Council, which is a body appointed by the government, has submitted its own, separate press bill to parliament. However, 17 of the recommendations in the bill have been contested by the Ministry of Information.

Despite possessing the constitutional right to a free press, in practice the media in Myanmar were tightly controlled by the establishment, from Ne Win’s coup of 1962 until August 2012. Censorship reached such levels in those fifty years that many publications were not able to effectively report from inside the country and were forced to relocate outside its borders.

One such organisation is Democratic Voice of Burma, which was set up in Norway in 1992. Its chief editor, Aye Chan Naing, told IPS that DVB was established “to counter one-sided propaganda by the Burmese military government.”

“All publications, private journals and magazines, arts, music, films and TV programmes were heavily censored by the government,” he said. “We were to counter them by airing unbiased and independent news programmes.”

“We could not do our job independently without getting arrested,” Aye Chan added. “There are a lot of difficulties [in reporting on] a country where our journalists can’t be present or work as undercover reporters. As in any closed country, it is hard to verify what is fact and what is rumour while the government refuses to answer any kind of questions or verification.”

Seventeen of DVB’s reporters were put in prison from 2007 to early 2012 for their work for DVB, Aye Chan said, although DVB has made moves to return to Myanmar since the opening up of the media. The organisation has an official office there now and has registered as a media production house.

Many media organisations and their employees are hoping for a positive resolution to the argument over media reform in the country – ideally, a law that would guarantee both protection for journalists and the ability to report without fear of retaliation by the authorities.

“Now that the government has removed the censorship board and allowed our journalists to work freely and independently…we decided to move back to Burma,” Aye Chan said. “As a media organisation, we need to be on the ground where we are reporting and get the firsthand news.”

A street fight in Cairo over ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi. Credit: Hisham Allam/IPS.

By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
CAIRO, Aug 16 2013 (IPS)

As Egypt’s political crisis escalates, supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi accuse the local media – both state-run and private – of ignoring pro-Morsi demonstrations and covering up massive rights abuses.

“Egyptian television is desperately trying to cover up the murder of hundreds of unarmed protesters in Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya Square,” leading Muslim Brotherhood member Qutb al-Arabi told IPS. “It’s even trying to portray slain demonstrators as ‘terrorists’.”

On Wednesday, Aug. 14, security forces in Cairo violently dispersed two six-week-old sit-ins staged by protesters demanding Morsi’s reinstatement. Using live ammunition and teargas, they eventually managed to clear both protest sites."After the coup, the state press immediately stopped publishing anything by Islamist-leaning writers, while all state-run television channels – and most private ones – stopped hosting Islamist-leaning guests." -- leading Muslim Brotherhood member Qutb al-Arabi

As of Thursday night, Aug. 15, Egypt’s health ministry put the number of those killed in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square – the larger of the two pro-Morsi sit-ins – at 288. The pro-Morsi National Alliance for the Defence of Legitimacy, however, puts the number in the thousands.

The veracity of either figure remains impossible to verify at this point.

At least four journalists – including a foreign cameraman for British Sky News – were killed in the violence.

The move ignited nationwide clashes between pro-Morsi demonstrators and security forces, the latter often in plainclothes. A number of police stations throughout the country were ransacked and torched.

The state press, meanwhile, along with most private Egyptian media outlets, praised the security operation against the “terrorists” who had “threatened national security.” Egyptian television showed weapons it claimed had been found at the two protest sites.

“Local media has consistently tried to paint peaceful demonstrators as violent terrorists without producing credible proof of its claims,” said al-Arabi. Reports of alleged weapons found at the two sit-ins, he asserted, had been fabricated by security forces in cooperation with a compliant media.

Since Morsi’s Jul. 3 ouster by the military, nationwide demonstrations demanding his reinstatement have remained largely peaceful in nature, with protesters frequently repeating the chant “Salmiya”, which means “Peaceful”.

Egyptian media has also tried play down the numbers of – or entirely ignore – the ongoing series of demonstrations by the ousted president’s supporters.

“Massive numbers of Egyptians are on the streets nationwide to demand the restoration of democratic legitimacy and to condemn Wednesday’s massacre,” al-Arabi said. “But exact numbers are impossible to gauge because pro-Morsi rallies, especially those outside Cairo, aren’t getting any media coverage.”

Hasan Ali, professor of media at Cairo University, supported al-Arabi’s view.

“Since Morsi’s ouster, the Egyptian media has scrupulously ignored pro-Morsi rallies and marches, regardless of their size, and focused exclusively on anti-Morsi activity,” he told IPS. “In this regard, it has lost any semblance of objectivity or professionalism.”

“Egyptian television is completely ignoring our demonstrations in hope of convincing the public there’s no popular opposition to the military coup,” Mahmoud Sallem, a 30-year-old engineer and pro-Morsi demonstrator told IPS from the Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in shortly before its dispersal.

On Aug. 5, authorities banned Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakul Kerman – who had planned a solidarity visit to Rabaa al-Adawayia – from entering Egypt. The following day, she declared: “Only those that support Egypt’s military coup are given a voice in the media.”

According to the Brotherhood’s al-Arabi, who is also a member of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Journalism (responsible for the administration of the state press), said the ongoing news blackout on pro-Morsi activity was part of a larger media campaign against Egypt’s Islamist camp.

“After the coup, the state press immediately stopped publishing anything by Islamist-leaning writers, while all state-run television channels – and most private ones – stopped hosting Islamist-leaning guests,” he said.

Following Morsi’s ouster last month, authorities immediately closed all Islamist television channels, accusing them of “inciting violence”. Security forces also raided Al Jazeera’s Cairo offices, similarly accusing the channel of broadcasting “incitement”.

Prominent private channels known for pursuing a vehemently anti-Islamist line, were left untouched. Based in Egypt’s Media Production City on Cairo’s outskirts, these channels are owned largely by prominent businessmen known to have close associations with the ousted Hosni Mubarak regime.

“These channels, especially ONtv and CBC, are owned by the same forces that led the smear campaign against President Morsi before his ouster,” said al-Arabi. “They also played a central role in mobilising the public for the anti-Morsi rallies on Jun. 30 that preceded the coup.”

Early this month, dozens of pro-Morsi demonstrators were arrested when they attempted to stage a sit-in outside the MPC to demand a “purge” of the media.

Meanwhile, the small handful of non-Egyptian television channels covering the pro-Morsi demonstrations has been subject to frequent harassment and interference.

On Tuesday night, Aug. 13, the Gaza-based Al-Quds television channel reported that its Cairo office had been raided and an employee detained by Egyptian security forces. Al-Quds, one of very few channels covering pro-Morsi demonstrations, is run by Palestinian resistance group Hamas, an ideological offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

Last year, Morsi – the Brotherhood’s candidate – became the country’s first-ever freely elected president. On Jul. 3 of this year, he was ousted by Egypt’s powerful military establishment after massive protests against his administration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Morsi’s detractors call his ouster a “second revolution” along the lines of Egypt’s January 2011 uprising that ended the Mubarak regime. Morsi’s supporters call it a “military coup” against Egypt’s elected president; a “counter-revolution” waged by Mubarak’s “deep state.”

Aside from Al-Quds, the few other channels covering pro-Morsi rallies – including Al Jazeera, Jordan-based Al-Yarmouk and London-based Al-Hiwar – have all seen their signals scrambled in recent weeks. The Al Jazeera channels that frequently cover pro-Morsi rallies, especially the network’s 24-hour live Egypt channel, Jazeera Mubasher, all remain subject to frequent interference.

The fight for the airwaves has taken on an international dimension.

Ali pointed to an ongoing “media war” between Al Jazeera, based in Muslim Brotherhood-friendly Qatar, and the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya, based in the staunchly anti-Brotherhood United Arab Emirates (UAE). On Wednesday, the UAE voiced its full support for the “sovereign measures” taken by Egyptian authorities against the pro-Morsi sit-ins.

Despite a government-declared state of emergency, the Brotherhood-led National Alliance for the Defence of Legitimacy has called for more demonstrations on Friday, Aug. 16.

Along with Morsi’s reinstatement, demonstrators demand the restoration of Egypt’s suspended constitution and dissolved Shura Council (upper house of parliament) and the prosecution of those responsible for killing peaceful protesters.

Following the amendment of a long-standing U.S. law, people in this country will now be exposed to news which is produced by the U.S. government.

On Jul. 2, a change to the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act, also known as the Smith-Mundt Act, came into effect, reversing a ban on the State Department and U.S. international broadcasting agencies which had prevented them from disseminating their programme materials within U.S. borders."The nature of news is that it influences public opinion, so how do you prove or prevent news that seeks to do that?" -- Lisa Graves of the Center for Media and Democracy

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the U.S. federal government agency which oversees all U.S. government-supported media internationally, notes that individuals residing in the U.S. will now have access to vast amounts of new information.

“This is quality, award-winning journalism,” Lynne Weil, a spokeswoman for BBG, told IPS, “so why shouldn’t Americans be able to see and hear it in broadcast quality?”

The BBG will now be able to respond positively to requests for content from “U.S.-based media, universities, non-governmental organizations, and individuals.” This means that local and national news providers in the U.S. can relay material produced by BBG sources if they so desire.

Opponents complain government-sponsored news being delivered domestically is akin to propaganda, but the BBG argues that it actually represents an advance for U.S. transparency, as citizens now will have a better understanding of what kind of information its government propagates abroad.

It deserves noting, however, that U.S. citizens have always had access to BBG material through the internet.

BBG agencies include the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa), Radio Free Asia, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and TV Marti).

Weil points out that even prior to the change, U.S. independent media could cite reports from these organisations and even rebroadcast them if they were pulled from the internet or by other means.  The difference is that now these media can request and receive entire government-sponsored reports in broadcast quality, which they can then relay to U.S. audiences.

Propaganda?

In its mission statement, the BBG says it seeks to “engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.”

Unlike traditional, independent news sources, the BBG has on its board representatives from the State Department and is funded entirely with tax dollars designated for “public diplomacy”.

“[P]ublic diplomacy,” according to the University of Southern California (USC) Center on Public Diplomacy, “was developed partly to distance overseas governmental information activities from the term ‘propaganda’, which had acquired pejorative connotations.”

The Smith-Mundt Act was established in 1948, at the outset of the Cold War, to authorize the government to conduct public diplomacy abroad, and it has faced significant opposition ever since.

In the 1970s, toward the end of the Vietnam War, U.S. Senator William Fulbright led the move to block U.S.-sponsored news agencies from having access to domestic consumers. He wrote a book in which he denounced government news as propaganda and said the agencies “should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.”

Weil rejects outright accusations that BBG organisations engage in propaganda.

“Propaganda is a pejorative term and should not be applied to what our journalists do. They report the truth and apply proper journalistic standards to the work they do,” Weil told IPS.

She asserts that the term “propaganda” is limited to information which is untrue or inaccurate, but media watchdog groups note that not all propaganda is made up of falsehoods.

“There can be subtle propaganda, as well as less subtle propaganda which actually ‘spins’ the facts,” Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, a non-profit investigative reporting group, told IPS.

Dictionary definitions seem to support Graves’ position. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, for example, includes a definition of “propaganda” as “ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause.”

Semantics aside, the agencies under BBG do have a mandate to present accurate news and are prohibited from acting as mouthpiece for the government.

“VOA reporters and broadcasters must strive for accuracy and objectivity in all their work. They do not speak for the U.S. government. They accept no treatment or assistance from U.S. government officials or agencies that is more favorable or less favorable than that granted to staff of private-sector news agencies,” the VOA code states, for example.

The BBG agencies are also prohibited from producing material in order to influence U.S. public opinion.

Graves says she “appreciates” these guidelines but is not confident they will be enforced.

“The nature of news is that it influences public opinion,” Graves says, “so how do you prove or prevent news that seeks to do that?”

According to Weil, the BBG agencies are “tasked with presenting accurate information in places where this is otherwise difficult or impossible.” She notes that BBG journalists have died or gone missing because of their work.

Graves says she also appreciates the importance of public diplomacy in areas where access to information is limited, but she is sceptical that the U.S., with its vast array of media sources, qualifies.

Also, she is concerned that many citizens do not pay close attention to the ultimate source of the news they receive.

“Some people are very specific about how they get their news, but others won’t necessarily realise where the information is coming from,” she told IPS.

“I don’t know that many people will recognise or even know what Voice of America is.”

Since the change went into effect, Weil says the BBG has received a multitude of requests for content, including some from major media outlets.

Increasing U.S.-Iran cultural exchanges could lay the groundwork for better relations between the two countries, believes a prominent think tank here, despite the prevalence of stereotypical memes of the United States as the “Great Satan” and Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil”.

According to an issue brief released today by the Washington-based Atlantic Council, the United States should reach out to Iran’s people through a variety of cultural exchanges, even as the Jun. 14 election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s next president may present an opportunity for the United States and Iran to mend their decades-long cold war.

Experts suggest that cultural exchanges could help improve U.S.-Iranian relations. Above, members of Kiosk, one of Iran’s underground rock bands. Credit: Credit: Shoja Lak/IPS

“Cultural and academic exchanges between the U.S. and Iran are a low-cost, high-yield investment in a future normal relationship between the two countries,” said the brief, authored by the council’s bipartisan Iran Task Force.

Recommendations from the task force, comprised of an array of U.S. national security experts, included creating a non- or quasi-official working group “comprised of bilateral representatives from academia, the arts, athletics, the professions, and science and technology” and an U.S. Interests Section in Tehran.

“When it comes to countries that have no diplomatic channels like the U.S. and Iran, people-to-people diplomacy is the only route available to us,” Reza Aslan, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told IPS.

Scepticism towards cultural diplomacy

Major roadblocks stand in the way of the kind of diplomacy that led to improved U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War.

“Yes, cultural diplomacy is good and has been tried before with decent results during the Khatami presidency,” Farideh Farhi, an independent scholar at the University of Hawaii, told IPS.

“But note that the context was different. The United States had not yet fully embarked on its ferocious sanctions regime which makes cultural exchanges quite difficult and reliant on the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control granting exceptions to literally every exchange,” she said."People-to-people diplomacy is the only route available to us.”
-- Reza Aslan

The council conceded that conducting U.S.-Iran exchange programs between nations without bilateral diplomatic channels is “challenging”.

It also stressed that “selling such programming as a means to drive a wedge between the Iranian government and people makes any successful execution problematic”.

But the “goodwill of the Iranian people is ultimately the biggest U.S. asset in changing the direction of the Islamic Republic” and “maintaining active people-to-people linkages during periods of strained bilateral relations has many benefits for U.S. national security, particularly over the long term”, according to the brief.

Addressing animosity

Even so, decades of mutual mistrust between U.S. and Iranian governments, fuelled by what both consider consistent acts of hostility from the other side, has also filtered into the media of both nations.

“The media in Iran is obviously state media which just espouses the propaganda of regime and that’s not going to change,” Aslan told IPS.

“On the U.S. side, the media is a commercial enterprise…As with any soap opera, the only thing the media cares about is eyeballs, which are attracted by sex, violence, fear and terror, and right now, the biggest boogie man is Iran and nothing change is going to change that,” he said.

“While public diplomacy is absolutely vital and really the only outlet we have, the question of whether it’s going to change the larger media perception in the two countries of each other remains a complex one,” said Aslan.

In his first press conference as Iran’s president-elect, the reformist-backed Rouhani appeared as a stark contrast to Iran’s current controversial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“Our main policy will be to have constructive interaction with the world,” Rouhani, Iran’s nuclear negotiator during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, during a televised broadcast on Jun. 17.

“We will not pursue adding to tensions. It would be wise for the two nations and countries to think more of the future. They should find a solution to the past issues and resolve them,” said Rouhani said regarding future U.S.-Iran relations.

Rouhani, who served on Iran’s Supreme National Security Council for 16 years and is known as the “diplomatic sheik”, has elicited much commentary in the United States about his possible impact on Iran’s nuclear negotiating stance.

How his new position will affect Iran’s interactions on the world stage, including its controversial nuclear program and its backing of the Assad regime in Syria, remains to be seen.

On Jul. 1, tough new sanctions to which President Barak Obama has already committed will also take effect. Among other provisions, they will penalise companies that deal in Iran’s currency or with Iran’s automotive sector.

The Republican-led House is expected to pass legislation by the end of next month (on the eve of Rouhani’s inauguration) that would sharply curb or eliminate the president’s authority to waive sanctions on countries and companies doing any business with Iran, thus imposing a virtual trade embargo on Iran.

Other sanctions measures, including an expected effort by Republican Senator Lindsay Graham to get an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) resolution passed by the Senate after the August recess, are lined up.

“Unless there is a change in the overall frame of Washington’s approach to Iran, cultural exchanges will be perceived with suspicion in Tehran and effectively undercut by powerful supporters of the sanctions regime in Washington,” Farhi told IPS.

Dear Reader:

TerraViva, a special publication of the IPS news agency, the leader in coverage of development issues, civil society and the emerging South, is once again circulating, this time in the meeting rooms and hallways of the FAO building.

The print version of TerraViva was available early this year at the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week in the United Arab Emirates, and a few months before that, in June 2012, at the Rio+20 global conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro. Now, in Rome, our independent publication is dedicated to food.

We are producing it in an extraordinary setting: the 38th FAO conference, which will focus on the challenges facing agriculture, emerging global scenarios and, naturally, the new balances of power arising from them.

Mario Lubetkin, Director General of IPS

As in dozens of TerraViva editions produced over the last 20 years at U.N. or civil society conferences, our publication hopes to be an instrument of reflection and reporting with a critical eye on the crucial issues facing humanity.

In terms of food and agriculture, this means raising adequate funds to provide the current FAO leadership with the conditions that would make it possible for the agency to fulfil its mandate with regard to a strategic plan for the future.

During the conference, a significant number of countries that have met the Millennium Development Goals and World Food Summit hunger reduction targets will be recognised.

A critical focus on the limitations and difficulties encountered along the road is necessary, but we must also be capable of recognising progress.

We have brought together in Rome a team of top-level journalists from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, who represent more than 400 colleagues from our network spread across 140 countries, and who will give TerraViva a multicultural and pluralistic perspective.

In this regard, I would like to thank the FAO authorities for their continuous support in the preparation of this publication.

TerraViva is also available on-line, in several languages, to millions of readers around the world.

At the same time, TerraViva will follow the impact of the Media Talks organised by IPS TV in its pilot phase, from Monday, June 17 to Friday, June 21 in the Sheikh Zayed Conference Hall. The debates will focus on the MDGs, the new scenario in Africa, food waste, price speculation, and the role of the media in development.

These debates will be reproduced on thousands of web sites so they are not limited to a FAO conference room.

We hope TerraViva lives up to your expectations.

Welcome!

IPS Director General Mario Lubetkin

In an extraordinary move, a civilian has been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for posting a picture on Facebook of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dressed in a Real Madrid soccer outfit and kicking a ball. The sentencing is among several instances of a targeting of media in Palestinian areas.

Anas Saad Awad, 26, from the northern West Bank village of Awarta near Nablus, was sentenced in the Nablus magistrate’s court, that convicted him of “criticising the government.”  Awad was unable to address the court as the conviction was carried out while he was elsewhere in the court building.

Awad’s lawyer Rima Al Sayed said her client has been accused of photo-shopping a picture of Abbas wearing a Real Madrid shirt with the caption: ‘A new striker’. According to Sayed, the Palestinian judiciary had applied Article 195 of Jordan’s penal code, which criminalises criticism of the Jordanian king.

The use of Jordanian law by Palestine’s judiciary is not unusual. In addition to the Basic Law established in 2002, Palestinian law is an amalgam of Egyptian and Jordanian law and the codes left over from the era of the British Mandate. But the application of Jordanian law can frequently be used against Palestinians in labour disputes and “honour” crimes and speech.

“My son only commented on Facebook,” said Awad’s distressed father. “You know how young people comment. He didn’t mean to insult the president. I ask the president to intervene personally to cancel the court’s decision.”

IPS was unable to speak to the family directly considering the likelihood of Palestinian intelligence agencies monitoring the family’s phones, and creating more trouble for them.

Awad had been in trouble with Palestinian intelligence previously for criticising the Palestinian Authority (PA), and he was arrested but then fined and released.

“This is unprecedented. This is the first time this kind of sentence has been imposed on an ordinary citizen merely for commenting on Abbas. The Facebook comment was not even rude or critical,” said Riham Abu Aita from the Palestinian Centre for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA).

“Last year 10 Palestinian journalists from Gaza and the West Bank were arrested and interrogated for criticising both Hamas and the PA. Media freedom in the Palestinian territories has got off to a bad start in 2013 already,” Abu Aita told IPS.

“Hamas has arrested dozens of journalists in Gaza, and the Israeli security forces are increasingly targeting both Palestinian and foreign media as they have tried to cover the growing protests in the West Bank.

“However, the PA has become overly sensitive in the last few months. This is related to its hyper sensitivity to international criticism following its upgrade at the UN to non-member observer status and the pressure being exerted on it by Palestinian and international human rights organisations,” said Abu Aita.

One of the PA’s strategies towards implementing its goal of an independent Palestinian state is joining the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a way of bringing pressure to bear on Israel, which is in violation of a number of human rights issues under international law over its treatment of Palestinians.

The PA’s status at the UN is only that of a non-observer state, but it could ratify core human rights treaties including the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) – Article 19 of which guarantees freedom of expression.

The PA has pledged to uphold human rights and ratify various conventions, but has failed to do so in a number of areas. Human Rights Watch noted that “it’s commendable that the Palestinian leadership is studying the treaties; its delay in ratifying them inspires little faith in their commitment to upholding fundamental rights and freedoms.”

“Another issue is the fear of the PA of a popular uprising in the West Bank following the Arab Spring which has swept through the region, threatening dictatorships in its wake,” Abu Aita told IPS. “Abbas’s government would also like to appear to be taking the higher moral ground in regard to Hamas which has recently been slammed in the press for its crackdown on the media in Gaza.”

While Abbas’s security apparatus has been able to control journalists and media publications in the West Bank to a certain extent, social networks have proven far harder to control despite intensive monitoring.

Last year Palestinian security forces jailed at least three people accused in separate incidents of criticising the government on social networking websites. A Palestinian university lecturer was one of those detained for insulting Abbas on Facebook .

Ironically while the PA has encouraged Palestinians to report on corruption, in April last year blogger Jamal Abu Rihan was arrested for launching a Facebook campaign demanding an end to corruption.

Ma’an News agency has uncovered evidence of the blocking of eight websites critical of Abbas, while columnist Jihad Harb was imprisoned for two months on charges of libel and slander for raising questions about cronyism within Abbas’s office.

“However, the PA’s efforts to crush journalistic dissent is backfiring,” Abu Aita said. “What we are finding is that Palestinian journalists are becoming stronger supporters of media freedom and more determined to support it the more they are targeted and harassed.”

By Joan Erakit
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 4 2013 (IPS)

The fact that women are underrepresented in the media industry should surprise few. The severity of this imbalance and its consequences, however, are less obvious. In a new report, the Women’s Media Centre exposes these disparities and their effects on society.

The WMC‘s 2013 annual report on the Status of Women in the U.S. Media also suggested ways to tackle these imbalances, as the WMC itself aims to change the face of media through diversity and powerful content. The report was compiled by Diana Mitsu Klos, an executive media strategist.

Julie Burton, president of Women’s Media Centre, discusses the underrepresenation of women in media. Photo courtesy of WMC.

The report should serve as “a wake-up call to the media industry — and to consumers — that we are not seeing, hearing, or reading the whole story,” Julie Burton, president of the WMC told IPS. “It is time for a change.”

If the culture of democracy is to be protected, WMC believes that audiences need to understand the severity of this issue. An unequal representation of women in the fields of journalism, film and TV production, radio and even in obituaries curtails efforts to give audiences fair and diverse perspectives.

“Women often aren’t given the opportunity for those plum roles and positions because the tendency is for people in positions of power – generally men – to work with those they know,” Burton added.

To tackle this problem, WMC works to close a persistent gender gap by training women to become media ready, monitoring sexism and unfair media practices, as well as organising campaigns and petitions to keep those in power accountable.

Burton spoke with IPS correspondent Joan Erakit about the report’s findings as well as the challenges facing the media industry in 2013. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What is the relationship between diversifying media and building a healthy democracy?

A: We know women are more than half of the population, but in media, we don’t see or hear them in equal numbers to men. There is a crisis of representation for women. This also holds true for people of colour, who by 2050 will also be a majority in this country.

By deciding who gets to talk, the media defines the story for us. It also presents a picture of what our role is in society. We want media to tell the whole story — and everyone benefits from that. It is also a matter of credibility. Our media and society must fully represent everyone’s voices and contributions if we are to be a healthy democracy.

Q: When a woman graduates from college with a degree in journalism but does not follow up with a job in that field, what do you believe is happening? Are women being encouraged to apply for journalism positions?

A: The report shows that women are landing jobs in public relations and advertising, and that’s good news. But when it comes to newsroom positions, the challenge continues. Landing a job is not only just talent, but also, sometimes, who you know. Those contacts and networks matter. By deciding who gets to talk, the media defines the story for us. It also presents a picture of what our role is in society.

Our hope is that young women do not get too discouraged and continue to seek opportunities in journalism. In addition, it must be noted that the news industry as a whole is shrinking as more people get their news electronically. Yet women still continue to struggle to gain parity in online media platforms.

Q: Is our current media industry diverse and supportive of women?

A: Right now, 96 percent of all positions of clout in U.S. businesses, including media, are held by men. We can – and we must – do better. We’ve made progress, but there’s still much work to be done.

Media is one of the most powerful forces in our culture and in our economy. It tells us who we are and what we can be. We need to make sure that who defines our story, who tells the story, and what the story is about represent women and men equally.

Q: Do you think our society is built to take a man’s opinion more seriously than a woman’s? Is it a matter of credibility or preference?

A: This week we celebrated the release of the documentary “Makers – Women Who Make America”, which tells the story of how women have shaped America over the past 50 years and the visionary and revolutionary women who have led and written our collective history.

We have made progress, but we have a long way to go. The bad news when it comes to women and media is that even though we know women are more than half of the population, we don’t see or hear them in equal numbers to men. This holds for by-lines by gender and for sources quoted in stories, for women in front of the camera and behind the camera.

It took women 144 hard-fought years to obtain the right to vote. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” And men have held virtually all power in our society for a long time. That is changing, but too slowly. The Women’s Media Centre is working very hard to make the status quo one that values women’s and men’s voices equally.

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