Google censors itself in China

Leading internet company Google has said it will censor its search services in China in order to gain greater access to China's fast-growing market.

Google has offered a Chinese-language version of its search engine for years but users have been frustrated by government blocks on the site.

The company is setting up a new site - Google.cn - which it will censor itself to satisfy the authorities in Beijing.

Google argued it would be more damaging to pull out of China altogether.

Critics warn the new version could restrict access to thousands of sensitive terms and web sites. Such topics are likely to include independence for Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

The Chinese government keeps a tight rein on the internet and what users can access. The BBC news site is inaccessible, while a search on Google.cn for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement directs users to a string of condemnatory articles.

Google's move in China comes less than a week after it resisted efforts by the US Department of Justice to make it disclose data on what people were searching for.

Google hopes its new address will make the search engine easier to use and quicker.

Its e-mail, chat room and blogging services will not be available because of concerns the government could demand users' personal information.

Google said it planned to notify users when access had been restricted on certain search terms.

The company argues it can play a more useful role in China by participating than by boycotting it, despite the compromises involved.

"While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission," a statement said.Julian Pain, internet spokesman for campaign group Reporters Without Borders, said Google's decision to "collaborate" with the Chinese government was "a real shame".

The number of internet search users in China is predicted to increase from about 100 million currently to 187 million in two years' time.

A survey last August revealed Google was losing market share to Beijing-based rival Baidu.com.

Last year, Yahoo was accused of supplying data to China that was used as evidence to jail a Chinese journalist for 10 years.

(Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4645596.stm)

Danish cartoons

Muslims angry at new Danish cartoon scandal 

By Brian Whitaker

The world's largest international Muslim body complained of shrinking tolerance in the west yesterday as a new row erupted over Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad.

The 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference said in a statement: "Muslims have noted with concern that the values of tolerance are eroding and there is now shrinking space for others' religious, social and cultural values in the west."

The statement followed the airing on Danish state television of amateur video footage showing members of the anti-immigrant Danish Peoples' party (DPP) taking part in a contest to draw images ridiculing the prophet. "The running of the footage affected the sensibilities of civilised people and religious beliefs of one fifth of humanity," the OIC said.

Just over a year ago violence ensued after the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of the prophet. The protests led to the deaths of more than 50 people in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Yesterday, the foreign ministry in Copenhagen cautioned against travel to Gaza, the West Bank, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.

In the latest incident, a video initially posted on the internet showed members of the DPP youth group at a summer camp last August. They appeared to have been drinking alcohol and one woman was seen presenting a cartoon showing a camel with the head of Muhammad and beer cans for humps. A second drawing showed a bearded man wearing a turban next to a plus sign and a bomb followed by an equals sign and a nuclear mushroom cloud. The video was produced by an artists' group, Defending Denmark. In a message posted along with the video, the group said it had infiltrated the DPP's youth wing, known as DFU, "to document [their] extreme rightwing associations".

"This is not an example of something that is meant to provoke. This is an example to show how things are in Danish politics," artist Martin Rosengaard Knudsen told Danish public radio.

Portions of the video were shown by two Danish television channels, DR TV and TV2.

The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, condemned the youth group's actions.

"Their tasteless behaviour does in no way represent the way the Danish people or young Danish people view Muslims or Islam," he said on Sunday.

The DPP, which advocates tighter anti-immigration controls, is allied with Mr Fogh Rasmussen's centre-right coalition but holds no government positions. The youth wing's leader, Kenneth Kristensen, said two of the people who figured in the video had gone into hiding. "They are very shaken by the huge reaction the drawings have had," he was quoted as saying on the website of the newspaper Politiken.

Indonesian Muslim groups have said they were insulted by the video and Egypt's largest Islamic group, the Muslim Brotherhood, denounced what it called "new Danish insults".

In Iran, the president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad commented: "If someone enjoys an iota of humanity and wisdom then he will not insult and offend the shining holy presence of Muhammad," according to national television.

(Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/oct/10/broadcasting.cartoonprotests)

Embedded journalism

Pros and Cons of Embedded Journalism

A partnership between the military and the media has changed the nature of war journalism.


Journalists are experiencing unprecedented access to the battlefield thanks to a partnership between the military and the media that has embedded journalists within specific military units. The embedded reporters have to follow several agreed upon rules as they live with the soldiers and report on their actions.

New rules in a new arrangement

The new arrangement was formed out of meetings between the heads of news organizations and the Defense Department officials aimed at allowing journalists to report on war with the least possible danger. 
Before joining their battalions, the embedded journalists had to sign a contract restricting when and what they can report. The details of military actions can only be described in general terms and journalists agreed not to write at all about possible future missions or about classified weapons and information they might find.

In addition, the commander of an embedded journalist's unit can declare a 'blackout,' meaning the reporter is prohibited from filing stories via satellite connection. The blackouts are called for security reasons, as a satellite communication could tip off a unit's location to enemy forces, the Pentagon explains.

Seeing "a slice of the war"

At the beginning of the experiment, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the embedding of journalists "historic," but cautioned that the close-up view is not always complete.

"What we are seeing is not the war in Iraq; what we're seeing are slices of the war in Iraq," he said. 
"We're seeing that particularized perspective that that reporter or that commentator or that television camera happens to be able to see at that moment, and it is not what's taking place. What you see is taking place, to be sure, but it is one slice, and it is the totality of that that is what this war is about."

Thus far, editors of many large papers are pleased with the quality of journalism coming from embedded journalists, according to Editor and Publisher magazine. Susan Stevenson of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said the embedded reporters give a "sense of immediacy and humanity" that make the stories very real. "From what a blinding sandstorm feels like to reporting how one of our embeds broke his unit's coffee pot, we're giving readers a better sense of the field."

How embedding can distort

However there have been instances when the embedded reporters transmitted inaccurate information. On Wednesday, embedded correspondents for several news organizations reported seeing a convoy of up to 120 Iraqi tanks leaving the southern city of Basra, and most news outlets reported a large troop movement.

The next day, a spokesman for the British military said the "massive movement" was really just 14 tanks.

Additionally, some journalism professors have warned that the embedding process can distort war coverage. Syracuse University Professor Robert Thompson warns, "When you are part of the troops that you're going in with, these are your fellow human beings. You are being potentially shot at together, and I think there is a sense that you become part of that group in a way that a journalist doesn't necessarily want to be."

Final results unknown

The results of the embedding experiment will not be known for some time. Bob Steele, from the Poynter Institute, an organization for journalists, says the access "has allowed reporters and photographers to get closer to understanding (the complexities of war), to tell the stories of fear and competence, to tell the stories of skill and confusion. I think that's healthy."

But, Steele cautioned that while "closeness can breed understanding," journalists must remain objective and not write about "we" or "our," but about "they."

"There's nothing wrong with having respect in our hearts for the men and women who are fighting this war, or respect for the men and women who are marching in the anti-war protests. The key is to make sure those beliefs don't color reporting," Steele said.

(Source: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june03/embed_3-27.html).

Free market media

Free market generates (some) media freedom

By James Borton - www.atimes.com

China's free-market economy is generating unprecedented but not unlimited press freedoms, and there's momentum. As Beijing embraces a market economy, its proliferating news media too are becoming privatized, more commercial, combative and fiercely competitive. This gives rise to some of the best investigative journalism that truly sheds light and serves the people, and some of the worst sensationalism.

Hu Shuli, the crusading editor of Caijing magazine, China's high-profile, successful business publication, recently returned from Qatar, where she joined 120 Middle Eastern and Western journalists in a program called "Changing Media Perceptions: Professionalism and Cultural Diversity". There was plenty of jousting, as well as thoughtful discussion and debate on the media's role, duties and responsibilities. The issue of the role of media has gained traction in the past few years, sparked by the globalization of information reflected in the emergence of "new" media. And China, where the media used to be totally subservient, has taken on a more activist role.

With increased deadlines, the twice-monthly publication Caijing (the name means "finance and business") is soon to become a newsweekly, in which young breathless staffers, including two foreigners, write their articles and fact-check in preparation for the next issue. They work in untidy cubicles, in the same Beijing office building as Dow Jones.

Caijing and other Chinese media understand all too well that the development of the country's media industry is not a smooth process. Political policy fluctuations and cycles of repression and censorship have been the norm over the past two decades.

Never mind, China watchers know that with the rapid shift to a market economy, the Middle Kingdom's state-owned enterprises have been stained with almost inevitable corruption and scandal. No wonder the peripatetic editor has gleefully remarked, "In China there is more news than journalists." Caijing's crusade against corruption and its unstinting journalistic enterprise has netted Hu the moniker, "the most dangerous woman in China". (Repeated efforts to interview Hu were unsuccessful, as her staff said she was too busy.)

The central government's decentralization policies have dictated that the news media commercialize, since state subsidies have been dramatically curbed. The resulting news-media privatization and commercialization have forced China's information gatekeepers to distinguish themselves from keen competition. A proliferation of news media has brought higher standards of compelling reporting in the form of investigative articles, exposes of environmental degradation and also has yielded, at the other end of the spectrum, some of the worst offenses in sensational media coverage, reminiscent of British, US and other tabloids.

Some of these media developments were examined by Ashley Esarey, PhD candidate in the political science department at Columbia University, who interviewed scores of Chinese publishers and journalists. His research confirms that one of the major results of China's decentralization policies is an explosion in the number of news media, in the value of media advertising revenues, in competition for advertising revenue, and in newly found freedom of media companies to report the news - as opposed to party propaganda pablum.

"Caijing is well known for relatively objective reporting on key events in China - not merely for economic reporting," Esarey said in a recent online interview with Asia Times Online. "Its editors are successful because they stay ahead of censors by printing stories that are off the Propaganda Department's radar screen. They have a strong sense of professionalism and an obligation to report the news, but not at any cost. Because the magazine is a profitable commercial venture, its operators want to remain viable and therefore must follow the explicit wishes of the [Communist] Party concerning content."

Media leaders an elite, educated crew

Hu Shuli is one of a small elite of Chinese journalists, strengthened by a Chinese orthodox media education: she graduated from People's University of China, majoring in journalism and classic Western journalism training, and earned a master of communication degree from Stanford University.

All Chinese journalists generally graduate from college and many have bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism. New reporters are mandated to receive a license from the Chinese General Administration of Press and Publications or the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television. However, the protocol for securing the coveted license involves undergoing political indoctrination and a party examination in order to be employed in the state-controlled media.

China's media policy shapers are caught in a quandary in the ongoing dialogue that somehow permits new media and conventional media to report critically on business abuses, for example, and no longer adopt the People's Daily propaganda reporting model. For Caijing this relaxation of media guidelines has translated into a paid circulation base of more than 85,000 readers. This is a remarkable achievement given that the magazine's newsstand price remains at a premium of US$1 a copy, while the average annual income for a farmer remains around $100 and that of an urban resident the equivalent of $1,000 a year.

Hu, 51 and seasoned in China's propaganda/journalism disputes, understands the government media policy since she previously worked for more than a decade as a reporter for the Worker's Daily. She generously compensates her more than 40 staffers for their long hours and professionalism.

Caijing, a genuinely gutsy publication, was established in 1998 by Wang Boming, the son of a former deputy minister, who previously created China's stock markets and was responsible for the early launch of Securities Market Weekly, which was published for a retail and institutional market and reached a paid circulation of almost a million readers. His corporation, the Stock Exchange Media Council (SEMC), has realized 20-30% growth each year in revenues, so it's no surprise that Wang's publications reflect China's new media transformation.

"In the past, the Chinese media were either official or semi-official; however, today market-driven media have become China's fastest-growing information sources, as well as some of the more prosperous companies," editor Hu said of the media's role, in a speech to the China Business Summit in Shanghai last year.

The Chinese news media are the official voice of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), transmitting its political will to the people. Ninety-eight percent of Chinese households, or almost 1.167 billion Chinese out of a total 1.3 billion, watch broadcasts beamed by more than 1,600 television stations. Millions more read 2,137 daily and weekly newspapers.

New political reforms mean bolder journalism

With the Middle Kingdom's political landscape ushering in even newer reforms, the media seem to be willing to take bolder actions, which sometimes place editors and reporters in jail or under house arrest at the very least. The questions remain: Are the laws and policies securely in place to allow China's new media to continue their march toward independence, adopt stringent investigative-reporting standards and offer critical commentary? Can China's new news media create a public debate and present options for resolving the country's pressing social, economic and political problems? To what extent are ethical and professional standards being pursued and taught at China's journalism programs?

In the 1980s, leader Deng Xiaoping's motto, "seek truth from facts", set the tone for all kinds of reportage. This year's lively discourse among Beijing's policy shapers has become intense because of the changing communication environment in China. The advent of new technologies and media convergence are generating new opportunities for people to get more connected in the information society. Press systems are opening up, allowing for more creativity, more choices and access to information critical to the demands of development. This was evident last year in China during the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak and in the response of the online Chinese media and brazen bloggers.

The media were very tightly controlled in China during the SARS epidemic until mid-April 2003 when Caijing found a discrepancy between the information on the epidemic released by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the central government. (This revelation came after Time magazine's article on the SARS victims hidden in Beijing military hospitals.) Caijing gambled successfully that the CCP could not continue to suppress news on the epidemic once it got on the Internet, and it decided to prepare the cover story "The Beijing files", claims communications Professor Joseph Chan from Chinese University in Hong Kong.

Few dispute that Caijing is a pioneer in professional journalism and is a model for emulation, generating new competition. According to a newly released policy white paper commissioned by the International Committee of American Business Media, Chinese authorities have closed down almost 700 periodicals because of new policy shifts, ending "command subscriptions" and transferring party control to publishing companies.

Despite the considerable restrictions on the news media, the role of the Chinese press has changed from a CCP propaganda conduit to a provider of news for emerging middle-class consumers. Even Chinese web portals have encouraged competition among news organizations. News often appears on the Internet either exclusively or before it is disseminated by mainstream traditional print and broadcast media.

"What is unique in China is that the news Internet websites have become primary sources of news," wrote Caijing editor Hu Shuli in Journalism Asia, published by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility in Manila. "If we want to find out what happened recently in China, we would log on to news websites such as Sina. The major websites such as Sina, Sohu, Netease, especially Sina, own almost all the copyrights for traditional media news broadcasting, and have thus become the leading news websites with an extremely large news platform."

While publishing and other media may still be considered ideologically sensitive, some enterprising Chinese publishers know that a pragmatic brand of self-censorship (knowing how far to push the envelope), coupled with major media initiatives, proliferating media and morphing communication technology, may very well set them free for a short march to commercial growth and press liberalization.

James Borton is a freelance journalist and director of Asia Pacific Projects for Foreign Affairs. He can be reached at asiareview@yahoo.com.

(Source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FG21Ad01.html) 

Newspaper markets ethics

During the seventh session of the 15th World Editors Forum, Raju Narisetti's, Managing Editor at Mint, India, asked the question, "Can ethics sell papers?" using the story of his recently launched paper as the answer.

Mint is a business newspaper which launched in February 2007, in a market that already had five national business papers. How was Mint suppose to survive this competition and establish itself in the market and among the readers? The answer was ethics.

Before the launch of Mint, Mr Narisetti and others working at the newspaper to be, spent six months talking to potential readers. According to their findings, readers noted the lack of credibility and clarity in Indian newspapers as their biggest problems.

So Mr Narisetti and Mint set out to change this by bringing transparency and accessibility to Indian news media. Policies were created, an extensive code of conduct written, all viewable on the website. Mistakes were corrected and analyses of how those were made was published at the end of the year in the paper. Adverts are always clearly depicted as that and nothing else.

So how has Mint managed in a competitive market? In only a year and a half the paper sells 120,000 copies a day. 87% of these are subscriptions. It has become the second biggest business paper in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. 

(Source: http://www.editorsweblog.org/special.php?tag=new%20launches&IncludeBlogs=1)

Posting: Martin Huckerby

CIME at Deutsche Welle GMF

Journalism Training and Conflict in West Africa.

Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum, Bonn, Germany, June 3rd 2008.

1) Journalism ethics in conflict situations 

Every country depends on media professionals to report the news to inform, educate and entertain their various audiences. Most of us as journalists have found ourselves in situations where we are left with no answers to the numerous questions before us. Especially in conflict situations where the political and security issues are particularly complicated, the ethical questions that come up are not always easy to resolve. For example,

• In Iraq, the controversy over embedded journalists pointed straight at the issue of journalism training: are journalists embedded in the U.S army properly trained or allowed to report on the facts objectively in the Iraq war?

• Just these past weeks in Myanmar: is it permissible for international journalists to disseminate media coverage on Myanmar, even though they have been prohibited to do so by the Myanmar authorities?

• In China, leading up to the Beijing Olympics: should the Chinese government grant journalists unlimited access to sources and locations? In cases like Myanmar's or China's, do issues of national sovereignty apply to journalists?

• What of cases when reporters need to be partisan to a given side of the conflict in order to gain access the field? A prime example of this might be in West Africa where the Nigerian government restricts journalists' access to conflict zones in the north of the country. But of course, any explicit partisanship on the part of the journalist will tend to undermine the objectivity of reporting.

• In terms of the security issue in conflict zones, a whole series of questions also arise: what levels of anonymity in reporting are acceptable in order to preserve the journalist's security? This is especially an issue in authoritarian regimes (including in certain African countries, e.g. under Mugabe or other regimes). And at some point, in collecting critical information, where is the border between reporting and investigative journalism? If a journalist comes across key information on a terrorist attack, for example, he/she might have to choose between protecting sources and protecting a people or a government. How to deal with all these people involved?

These and many other questions have probably been asked to you or your colleagues in the past. Seeking some types of solutions to these issues might even be the rationale behind your coming here today.

The International Federation of Journalists and other organizations have developed over the years many efforts in an attempt to resolve and to initiate reflection over these matters. It is worth mentioning an IFJ poster in one of the meeting rooms of Ghana International Press Center – it is a favorite and it reads like this: THERE CAN BE NO PRESS FREEDOM IF JOURNALISTS EXIST IN CONDITIONS OF CORRUPTION POVERTY OR FEAR. The most difficult ethical issues in journalism tend to arise in these conditions of "corruption, poverty or fear" – which are typical of conflict situations, or any difficult situations that a journalist may face because of political strife, low levels of development, etc.

2) Typical challenges for journalism training in developing countries

We strongly believe that gatherings such as the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum will help in making this world a better place for the profession of journalism. The theme of our panel this morning “Journalistic training in conflict-related settings” can be simply put to mean journalistic training in difficult situations. One thing that we might all have in common is that we are trying to find ways of educating journalists in difficult situations or in countries where the environment is not conducive for such training.

Journalists are seen as threat or nuisance for most regimes in the world, especially on the African continent. When we talk about conflict-related situations, it can refer to situations where gun shots are heard and children soldiers are trying their new tools on an innocent population. But there are many types of conflict situations including in areas that are not officially "at war" – for example, during election times. Elections times can be seen in some countries as happy situations bringing about festivities for the winning team. But in other countries, elections times can be really frustrating and even set off violence.

Take one country, Benin: it is a little country of roughly 8.5 million people located in the western part of Africa. It has borders with Nigeria, Togo, Niger, Burkina Faso and the Atlantic Ocean. The majority of the population is still uneducated. There are over fifty political parties each wanting to get to the highest office in the land. Elections there are complicated for a journalist to handle. In the Republic of Benin election times are so fragile and so sensitive and full of tension that a little confusion from one side can easily generate hazardous situations especially when this is from the few leading political parties.

Examples abound of election times triggering violence in many parts of the world: Six years ago, the assassination of law Minister Mushtaq Lone in India installed fear in voters; Last year the Philippines mourned the death of hundreds of innocent victims in local and congressional elections, in which 18 000 positions were being contested; Pakistani former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’ was assassinated nearly six months ago just before the elections; The disputed elections in Kenya with its band of violence and chaotic life for the populations are a few examples of elections triggering violence in many parts of the world.  In order to avoid these types of situations, authorities in many countries have focused on journalists and how their training can help mitigate some of the unfortunate consequences of elections situations.

One of the main challenges facing journalists in Benin is the lack of adequate professional training. The country as a whole does not have a communications school that can train people in journalism. The nearest school is in Senegal where most Benin-educated practitioners earned their degree. When CIME's President who is from Benin wanted to learn journalism, he had to move to Ghana and took the challenge of learning a new language (English) before entering Ghana Institute of Journalism.

Today, there are two new private schools that offer some type of training for young people who are interested in the field, but at a price that is equivalent to a ten-month salary for most Benin workers. This premium price of tuition puts the profession in danger, especially in a country where most of the population is poor and unemployment rate is high. That puts the “Haute Autorité de l’Audiovisuelle et de la Communication (HAAC)”, the governmental institution that regulates the media profession in Benin, in a position of having to provide training to journalists especially during the months preceding election times. These training workshops have become in some cases the only formal education that some journalists have been exposed to in the country. During CIME's recent visit to Benin, most of the journalists we met literally begged CIME to bring them more training courses in journalism. The director of the "Maison des Médias" (the main journalists' association in Benin) said during one of our meetings that most people tend to ignore Benin because the country has been known to be relatively peaceful. But that is no reason to disregard proper journalism ethics and training: until the journalists are trained to be professional, they will be unable to handle the fair elections reporting that ensures democracy or the violence that can erupt at any time.

3) Radio Ecole Benin: an innovative training initiative

To conclude, it is worth sharing an example of innovative journalism training in Benin. Faced with the numerous problems enumerated above, a group of professionals got together in Benin to find ways of educating any person interested in the profession but who has no means of paying the high tuition offered by the two private institutions that exist in the country. Through determination, hard work and few donations, these journalists were able to open a school of journalism called Radio-Ecole in the city of Porto-Novo (www.radioecole-apm.org). Their mission is to provide high-standard training to students at less or no costs. They rely fully on their own donations and teach the classes themselves with the help of professionals whom they have invited from other parts of the world.

The school defines itself as an "associative structure appropriate for young people aspiring to the media profession". The goal is to teach journalists to function in a competitive media environment where cultural industries and training centers are not available for people from more difficult socio-economic backgrounds. Their website says "we should not forget that Radio, TV and written Press play a very important roles in the life of our society. The awakening to liberty and democracy and the extraordinary effervescence of new media in our continent is a proof that free press can reinforce the process of change and even accelerate history."

The Radio-Ecole/APM has partnerships with associative and community radios of Benin and Togo. Since 2004 it has contributed so far to training more than a hundred students and media professionals. This is a kind of local structure that can be implemented anywhere in the world with some effort and cooperation, to improve training conditions for journalists – especially to equip them to deal with conflict situations.

CIME President,  Kayeromi Gomez

CIME Director, Melisande Middleton

 

David Astley from ABU

Excerpts from

KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY DAVID ASTLEY

SECRETARY-GENERAL, ASIA-PACIFIC BROADCASTING UNION

TO THE DEUTSCHE WELLE GLOBAL MEDIA FORUM

BONN, GERMANY, 2 JUNE 2008.

 

The Role of Broadcasting Unions in Peace Building and Conflict Prevention

 

(…)

I have been with the ABU for six years now, and in that time I have attended many conferences on the role of the media in conflict prevention and peace building; and the role of media in HIV/AIDS prevention; and the role of media in achieving the Millennium Development Goals; and the role of media in creating awareness of climate change; and so on; but what I notice about all these conferences as far as the industry participants are concerned, is that it’s predominantly the same people who are attending them, and they are mainly people at management level - not the people who are working on a daily basis behind the camera and behind the microphone, and who need to be educated about the practices of peace journalism.

So that’s why I am wondering whether we are reaching the journalists, editors and producers who are responsible for what goes to air.  They are the people that need to understand what peace journalism is all about.  They are the people who need to be educated about the background to the conflicts that they are covering so that their reports can be objective and so that they can put into practice some of the principles of peace journalism.

To ensure that I am not misunderstood, I must emphasise that I am not criticising events like this forum.  There is certainly a need for these issues to be debated at this level, where we can bring together industry professionals and decision makers with academics, researchers, politicians and representatives of international agencies.

What I am saying is that is organisations like the broadcasting unions, and other capacity building institutions, that have to critically evaluate how we can best translate this dialogue into behavioural changes at the day-to-day working level in the broadcasting organisations that make up our membership.

I tried to work out how many journalists, editors and producers there are working in the electronic news media around the world.

It’s not a figure that you can obtain by googling – I tried that unsuccessfully – but using my knowledge of the countries in which I have worked, and then applying some averages on some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I came up with a figure of between 700,000 and 800,000.

But how many of those do we reach each year with all of the training, workshops and seminars that the broadcast unions and other organisations undertake – that’s events apart from conferences like this where we are reaching only a limited number of professionals at the day-to-day working level.

I think the figure would be quite a few thousand when you take account of all the training on this topic that is undertaken by the various training institutions around the world.  Maybe around 5,000.  But even if it was a few thousand more, that would still only less than one per cent of the professionals working in this field.

So if outcomes of the dialogues that we engage in, and conclusions of the research that academics undertake, don’t reach more than one per cent of the practitioners on the ground in our industry – the men and women who produce the daily news reports and the background documentaries – how can we expect the role of the media in this field to have any impact on preventing conflicts or contributing to peace?

(...)

After all, we can’t bring three quarters of a million editors and journalists to conferences, like this every year.

The answer is yes, we can make a difference, but we need to do it not just by trying to bring more people to more workshops and seminars, but by taking the information that is the output of events like this, and of research that is undertaken by academics and some of the media research organisations working in this field, and translating that information into practical guidelines and codes of conduct that can be utilised on a daily basis by broadcasters and news agencies.

Many of the larger public broadcasters around the world – as well as many of the international news channels – have already done this, and have done it well.  But even they need to keep updating their manuals, to take account of analysis and research into the impact that the media may be having on particular conflicts.

For smaller broadcasters, and especially those in developing countries who have limited resources, the ABU and other organisations can assist in providing material that can be incorporated into in-house training programmes, editorial guidelines, and the like.

There are already some very good publications that have been produced in this regard, but I have to say that the content of some of them tends to be too academic to be of practical value in some of the countries in our region where there are journalists who have been trained on-the-job, straight out of high school, or have drifted into a reporting role with little formal media training.

Even those more qualified, with university degrees, sometimes find it hard to translate an academic perspective into what they are doing on a day-to-day basis.

I remember at one of our workshops on the subject of peace journalism, an academic defined peace journalism as “A use of conflict analysis and transformation to renew perceptions of balance, fairness and accuracy in journalistic interventions”.

I recall seeing a lot of blank faces amongst the workshop participants.  I guess some were probably thinking: “What on earth is this man talking about?”

With due respect to all the academics amongst us today, sometimes they do forget that the average journalist is not a university professor, and most don’t think and write like they are preparing a thesis.

For those organisations, like the ABU, that are involved in capacity building, we can play a vital role in helping broadcasters to prepare material in plain, simple language, that can effect changes in the way that conflict situations are interpreted and reported on - but utilising the research, findings and recommendations that can be made available to us by the many experts working in this field.

In theory, that sounds quite simple, but I have to caution that we do face some challenges in achieving this.

(...)

If we can achieve that; if we can reach the editors and journalists who have to make the choices of what stories to report, and how to report them, in such a way that they create opportunities for their audiences to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict; then we should be able to claim that we have made a useful contribution to facilitating a positive and pro-active role for the media in conflict prevention and peace building.

Thank you.

 

The press in eastern Europe

Less free speech

Apr 24th 2008 | BRATISLAVA, BUCHAREST AND SOFIA
From The Economist print edition

Tough laws and interfering politicians are shrinking media freedom 

PICK up a Slovak newspaper, and you will find it a quick, if depressing, read. The main dailies have in recent weeks been appearing with blank, black-framed front pages, in protest at a new media law that will give anyone mentioned in an article sweeping rights to an equally prominent rebuttal. International media watchdogs have sharply attacked the law. They are worried by declining media freedom across eastern Europe.

Slovakia's new law comes into force on June 1st. If somebody referred to in a newspaper story complains, the onus will be on the editor to print their response unless he can persuade a court to rule otherwise. A rebuttal may not be accompanied by additional editorial comment. A refusal to print one can lead to big fines. Right-of-reply rules are common in several European countries, but Slovakia's law is the most punitive and, potentially, arbitrary.

The government, a populist-nationalist coalition, insists that the law will make the media more responsible. “It does not jeopardise freedom of the press. It merely upgrades the interest of the public above the interest of the publishers,” says Marek Madaric, the culture minister. The Slovak media are not above reproach. A forthcoming report by the Open Society Institute, a group financed by George Soros, talks of “plagiarism, refusal to make corrections and hidden conflicts of interest.”

Yet there is reason to worry about how Slovakia's prime minister, Robert Fico, may use the law. He has a prickly relationship with the media, which have harried his government for inertia and alleged corruption. He declines to give interviews and sometimes even to take questions from critical journalists, and he has called some daily newspapers “prostitutes”. Some journalists recall the dark days of the 1990s, when the authoritarian government of Vladimir Meciar (who is now Mr Fico's junior coalition partner) jeopardised the country's accession to the European Union and NATO. (To be fair, Mr Fico's predecessor, Mikulas Dzurinda, who was lionised abroad for his reforms, clashed with the press, and was once accused of bugging media opponents.)

Slovakia's new law is the most conspicuous in the region. But arbitrary legal constraints on press freedom are worrisome elsewhere, too. In Bulgaria defamation of public figures (a broad category that can include prominent businessmen) is a crime that can be punished with a fine. Journalists can also be sued for infringing somebody's “honour and dignity”. As many as 60 cases went to court in 2006, and a further 100 in 2007.

In Romania the constitutional court last year restored a tough defamation law that criminalises “insult”, though the effect on press freedom pales beside the ownership of most of the mainstream media by three politically active tycoons, plus political interference in public broadcasting. America's ambassador to Bucharest, Nicholas Taubman, has suggested that “legislators should strengthen their own accountability...rather than try to hamper the efforts of a free media to exercise its legitimate role in Romania, either through criminalising journalistic efforts or otherwise intimidating independent media.”

All this is bad news in a region that used to take pride in its reborn freedom. And bad laws are only part of the picture. In the annual report of Freedom House, a New York-based lobby group, to be published on April 29th, the ex-communist countries show the biggest relative decline in media freedom in the world, chiefly because of a perceived politicisation of public broadcasting. The drop is larger than in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Thus Latvia's score slips from 19 to 22, after the government appeared to lean on public television to cover Russia more politely. Slovakia's falls from 20 to 22, Slovenia's from 21 to 23, and Poland's from 22 to 24. Mr Soros's media-watchers echo Freedom House's judgment. “Politicians think these public broadcasters should be ‘theirs’,” says Marius Dragomir, who is publishing a clutch of detailed reports on public-service broadcasting in the region. With EU accession safely negotiated, politicians now feel able to exploit the fruits of power more freely. Politicised public broadcasting is a useful tool to manipulate the voters, especially when commercial television is run by friendly tycoons.

Such trends are troubling. But everything is relative. Recently a Russian newspaper, Moskovsky Korrespondent, published a widespread rumour about the supposed relationship of President Vladimir Putin with a comely gymnast, Alina Kabaeva. After Mr Putin lambasted the tabloid, which is a sister publication to Novaya Gazeta, an opposition paper, it was promptly shut down by its publisher. Such an event would be unimaginable in the new EU members from central and eastern Europe. For now, at least.