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Putin’s Fear of the Internet
In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Brezhnev’s Soviet Union introduced a law aimed at stifling ideological dissent. Article 190, Part 1 of the Soviet Criminal Code criminalized “the dissemination of the intentionally false insinuations defiling the Soviet state and social order.” The post-Stalin regime was not the sort of dictatorship that exterminated its own citizens, but it insisted that public expression be in full compliance with the Communist Party line. It was not uncommon for people to be sentenced to years in work camps for “disseminating” three or four copies of underground literature.
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Media Caught Between Extremes In Mideast
Since the 2011 Arab uprisings, there has been little doubt that enhanced access to information and news contributed to political and social activism, pushing the boundaries of free speech, even for a short period of time, to beyond anything that had been seen regionally.
Today, however, there has been a regression in media growth and censorship shows little signs of receding. Media and free speech in the Middle East today are caught between two extremes: radical extremists and government crackdown.
Free speech and journalism are vital tools to inform the public and hold governments accountable. It gives citizens a medium to ask for their rights. When they feel threatened, dictators and extremists take away freedom of speech because it’s the platform to ask for all other rights like access to information, justice, rule of law and better economic conditions.
When ISIS extremists took over the town of Raqqa last year in northern Syria one of the first things they announced was that any political opposition to ISIS was banned.
Media and freedom of speech are inevitably intertwined.
Indeed, momentum for political reform was catalyzed by the regional uprisings in 2011 but for the most part it produced a reactionary crackdown on media freedom, with a particular focus on the Internet.
Since 2011, Egypt, Libya, Iraq and Syria witnessed Internet shut downs. In Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain bloggers were arrested.
One of the reasons some youths in the region took to the streets across the region three years ago was because their economic and political systems were no longer tolerable. Today, answers to these demands have stalled, if not regressed. They will not go away either.
As a member of Leaders of Tomorrow, a youth led organization based in Jordan, I have seen over 400 people gather earlier this year in the historical city of Petra to debate local politics. One year ago, over 1000 people from all walks of life gathered in downtown to discuss press and publications laws.
Political development is an element of stability but in the short term it is on the sliding scale of US interests. It seems the international community is even willing to see development and reform — including media reform — in the Middle East repressed if they believe states like Egypt are going to produce short-term stability.
Despite Egypt’s crackdown on journalists, civil society organizations and the Muslim Brotherhood, US Secretary of State John Kerry voiced strong support for Egypt’s new president and signaled that the US administration would continue with the flow of military aid.
Still, since 2011, utilizing social networking sites as venues to have debates on social issues, and to influence public opinion pushed the boundaries of free speech beyond anything seen so far. In the past years, mainstream news outlets in the region continued to steer away from serious political scrutiny, the task was left to the burgeoning social media sector where the boundaries between news, comment, and activism had been dismantled.
In early 2011, in Jordan, there were successful digital campaigns on environmental and social issues, including an online petition in 2011 to save over 2,000 trees, marked for felling to make way for a new military academy. The campaign achieved a postponement of the project. In doing so, it became a symbol of the empowering potential of digital activism, especially when combined with offline initiatives and actions.
Digitization has made it difficult for governing regimes to prevent Arabs from seeking stories and news content about their community and country from social media and online news. By using Facebook to interact and join groups, Twitter to join debates and find links and having access to Internet sites across the world, it is now nearly impossible to prevent them from gathering news and information.
But digital divides and censorship remain significant obstacles to building outreach and awareness. The spread of social media as a key vehicle for information sharing has also meant that certain communities off the grid have been excluded from the benefits of technological media.
In June 2013, the government in Jordan blocked access to more than 250 news websites under new legislation causing local protests. What seems clear is that since 2011, media reform in the region has become embedded in the wider struggle for political change.
Self-censorship may also be spreading among citizen journalists, bloggers and online reporters. During a recent press conference to announce the cancellation of his comedy show, Bassem Youssef, Egypt’s satirist declared: “The Program doesn’t have a space. It’s not allowed.”
Today many citizens in the region are also looking around and see failed uprisings filled with sectarian bloodshed. They seek stability and safety; emboldened governments are passing restrictive press legislation and the underlying grievances that spurred the 2011 uprisings are buried yet once again.
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Scrivener 2 – a tool for writers
Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.
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The Ghosts of Iraq
On a morning in late April 2013, Peter Gelling, the Middle East and Africa editor at GlobalPost, arrived at his office on the Boston waterfront to find a story filed by one of his reporters, Tracey Shelton. She was one of the few international reporters then working inside Syria. She had just been to Sheik Maqsoud, a neighborhood on the northern edge of Aleppo. Her emailed file reported that the area had been struck by chemical weapons, possibly sarin gas, two weeks earlier.
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5 tips for managing investigative journalism projects
At the Polis conference today, three experienced investigative journalists shared practical advice and tool recommendations to help support investigative journalism with limited resources
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Multimedia-rich native advertising from The NYTIMES
A story on the rise of women serving time in prison in the U.S. is the sort of thing you might expect to see from the national desk at The New York Times. If you followed a link to it off Twitter or Facebook, seeing the story’s multimedia features would only support that idea.
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Animated journalist survival guide looks ahead
A new English/Arabic online tool is available for citizen journalists who have no previous journalism experience or training but are reporting dangerous frontline stories. It uses animation–a novelty for such guides–and its arrival is timely.
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Death of Homepages & Future of News
This is the clearest illustration of the demise of homepages I’ve seen. (Well, not literally the clearest; it’s somewhat grainy, in an apropos way.) News used to be a destination, and you would go find it on your driveway and in your browser. Now you’re the destination, and “information—status updates, photos of your friends, videos of Solange, and sometimes even news articles—come at you; they find you,” Quartz’s Zach Seward writes.
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Immediacy vs. importance
The tension underlying how the NYTimes.com homepage gets made
In this excerpt of her new book — based on months spent observing the inner workings of the Times’ newsroom — Nikki Usher shows how some of digital news’ most important real estate gets allocated, minute by minute.
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Back to square one for Egypt’s media?
In the sprawling desert west of Cairo, a huge complex of studios for the Arab world’s largest media market beams content to NileSat, the Egyptian state-owned satellite provider. Despite the size of the market and all the strata of its consumers, not to mention the dynamism of uprisings that have unseated two presidents, the structure and nature of Egypt’s media landscape remains fairly unchanged compared to three years ago.
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Evaporated
Syria is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. More than 60 have been killed there since the war began, and many others have been kidnapped, becoming pawns in the conflict. The author picks up the trail of two colleagues, Austin Tice and Jim Foley, who vanished in 2012.
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Does Digital Media Mean Better Media?
Back in 2005, we launched Television Across Europe, a study that examined the state of broadcast regulation in 20 countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, in an attempt to nail down problems in the way broadcast media was regulated and to recommend ways to improve the regulatory environment in which journalists and media operated.
The findings were rather grim. Pressures on journalists from mighty owners, ailing public service broadcasters, and politicized regulators were making the work of journalists in this region a painful enterprise.
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Triumph of the will: Putin’s war against Russia’s last independent TV channel
Away from Ukraine, Kremlin is fighting a campaign that is part of rehashed agenda that sees media as propaganda automatons.
“We didn’t have to do anything particularly cunning to achieve this – we just filmed the kinds of things that had disappeared from Russian TV over the previous 15 years: live broadcasts, cutting-edge interviews with politicians and public figures, live feeds from different parts of the world. We interviewed not just opposition figures, but also the leadership, including Dmitry Medvedev, asking them uncomfortable questions live that simply wouldn’t get asked on state TV.”
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What’s The Point Of Journalism School?
Callie Schweitzer is a one-woman counterargument. She’s a 21-year-old senior from Westchester, N.Y., and she’s already had internships at People magazine and The New York Times. Schweitzer used to write for the independent student paper, . Now she’s the editor-in-chief of , the 24-hour online news website for USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
“I don’t believe it when people say journalism is dead,” Schweitzer says. “I’m the one raising my hand saying, ‘No it’s not!’ I think it will always exist.”
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Yehia Ghanem: From Cage To Exile
Yehia Ghanem, one of Egypt’s most respected journalists, is living in exile in New York, separated from his family and uncertain of his future. If he returns to Egypt, he faces two years of hard labor in prison after a sham trial that convicted several dozen Egyptians with connections to international NGO’s of illegally taking money from foreigners. A Dart Center exclusive.
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Why Free Speech Loses in India
The news from India these days is rarely cheery. The country’s long-overdue winning streak in the international press, which saw old clichés upgraded to shiny new high-tech models, ended around 2010. Since then, the headlines have been relentlessly grim: corruption, poverty, political dysfunction, violence against women, mistreatment of maids, and the criminalization of homosexuality. On Thursday morning, the big story was a brawl inside the Indian Parliament, during which a lawmaker used a can of pepper spray against his colleagues.
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Search Wikileaks
Searching WikiLeaks for documents about a particular topic, event or individual just got a little bit easier. The whistle-blowing site now offers a search engine where you can query its entire database of published documents for a specific phrase or keyword of your choosing.
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The NSA files and the network effect
The modern leak needs a new kind of reporting, and news organisations are adapting by finding collaborations of scale.
“The impact of the NSA files will reverberate for a generation. It has already forced a re-evaluation of the relationship between powerful technology and telephone companies, the government and the consumer. It has raised the issue of digital human rights and how to control a covert surveillance state. It has made the internet potentially unstable and untrustworthy.”
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WikiLeaks and the Espionage Act of 1917
Can Congress make it a crime for journalists to publish classified information? A thorough article by Emily Peterson on threats that face journalists and their industry for the use of classified documents published by whistleblowers.
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Lodestars in a Murky Media World
Margaret Sullivan is the fifth public editor appointed by The New York Times. In this op-ed, she asks:
“ARE today’s college-age journalists doomed, entering a business in free fall that is incapable of allowing most of them to earn a living? Or are they lucky, coming into a media world bursting with new possibilities?
And given the strange new territory, still largely unnavigated, are there any stars to steer by?”
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The Future of Internet Freedom
We have the technology to defeat censorship. But do we have the will?
“OVER the next decade, approximately five billion people will become connected to the Internet. The biggest increases will be in societies that, according to the human rights group Freedom House, are severely censored: places where clicking on an objectionable article can get your entire extended family thrown in prison, or worse.
The details aren’t pretty.”
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Covert Drone War
In this investigation, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism tracks CIA drone strikes and other US covert actions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Browse through stories on operations, analysis of drone use, complete data sets and more.
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The 40 Best Blogs for Journalism Students
Because journalism as a whole constantly ebbs and flows along with the currents of new technologies, students hoping to graduate and enter into the industry need to understand how its myriad facets change over time. Seeing as how blogs — one of the cornerstones of digital media and citizen reporting — inherently boast a current, updated structure, they provide an ideal conduit through which to trace all the most timely trends, concerns, and opinions. No matter their specialty or area of interest, at least one of the following will provide some nourishing food for thought and effective supplements to classroom lesson.
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Covering global health with integrity
“With global health and human rights coverage increasingly funded by foundations that organize reporting trips, Western journalists who don’t understand the nuances of a place are parachuting in for a week, charged with covering some of the most complex and distressing aspects of human existence. These trips are invaluable resources, and global health reporting would simply not have the reach it does without them. But this setup also has many potential pitfalls that can prevent well-meaning reporters from accurately conveying the subtleties of their sources’ experience, and it’s our professional obligation to address them. Admitting our own fallibilities can be terrifying, but remaining alert and self-aware can help mitigate the problem.”
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6 Powerful Communication Tips from Some of the World’s Best Interviewers
Writers, journalists and others who interview sources regularly have developed tried and true techniques that help them connect deeply with people.
Not only can interviews with thought leaders in your field provide a great source of content for your blog or website, the skills honed while interviewing are useful in many types of communication.
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