industryterm:media organizations

Who’s reporting Africa now?
▻https://africasacountry.com/2019/02/whos-reporting-africa-now

NGOs have responded swiftly to widespread cost-cutting in Western media organizations by recruiting former journalists as

Judge to rule next week on disclosing claims about Purdue Pharma - STAT
▻https://www.statnews.com/2019/01/25/judge-to-rule-on-disclosing-allegations-against-purdue

https://www.statnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/AP_19015766558742-1024x576.jpg

BOSTON — A Massachusetts judge said Friday she would rule by early next week on a request from media organizations, including STAT and the Boston Globe, to make public redacted portions of a lawsuit brought by the Massachusetts attorney general’s office against Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin and other opioid painkillers.

The Connecticut company’s aggressive and misleading marketing of OxyContin has been blamed by addiction experts for helping spawn the opioid addiction crisis. Outside the Boston courthouse Friday, families of people who became addicted to opioids after taking Purdue’s medications rallied, with some calling for criminal charges against the company.

“Every day that goes by where this document is substantially under seal is a day that the public does not have access to newsworthy and important information,” Jeffrey Pyle, a lawyer representing the media organizations, argued before Judge Janet Sanders in Suffolk County Superior Court.

Attorney General Maura Healey accused Purdue of misleading doctors and patients about the addiction and overdose risks of its medications in a lawsuit originally filed in June, which also named current and former Purdue executives and members of the Sackler family, which controls the privately held Purdue, as defendants.

An updated, 300-plus-page complaint from Healey’s office filed last week contained newly public portions that showed Purdue executives and the Sacklers demanding greater sales of their medications despite the risks and pressuring salespeople to push physicians to prescribe higher doses of their drugs for longer periods of time to more patients.

#Opioides #Procès

EXCLUSIVE : Meet the Reporters Whose Pages Were Shut Down By Facebook - Sputnik International
▻https://sputniknews.com/us/201810121068814924-Reporters-Pages-Shut-Down-By-Facebook

https://cdn5.img.sputniknews.com/images/104783/50/1047835031.jpg

C’est mon beau-frère américain qui m’a transmis l’info : sous couvert de lutte contre les #fake_news, les réseaux sociaux des #GAFA (Facebook et Twitter, notamment) ont fermé des centaines de pages et de comptes appartenant à des journalistes indépendants ou juste plutôt critiques sur la société américaine. À l’approche des #élections de mi-mandat, il s’agit d’une #censure brutale et inquiétante.

Signalons que mon beau-frère est un Républicain plutôt progressiste, mais un Républicain quand même, même s’il n’a jamais pu blairer Trump.

Facebook purged hundreds of pages from its platform on Thursday. But instead of the usual targets - namely Russia and Iran - Thursday’s ban shut down accounts operated by independent American reporters and activists, Sputnik News has learned.

Facebook said the pages were “working to mislead others about who they are, and what they are doing,” but the co-founder of one of the pages, The Free Thought Project, tells Sputnik News Facebook’s claim couldn’t be further from the truth.

Most of the pages that were banned and viewed by Sputnik News were independent media outlets and pages that advocated for marijuana legalization or shined a light on police brutality.
Anti-Trump Facebook event posted by the Resisters page, which has been accused of being set up by the alleged Russian troll farm Internet Research Agency.
Facebook
The Kremlin Line? Facebook’s Latest Ban Nets Resistance Pages, Anti-Trump Events

In total, Facebook removed 559 pages and 251 personal accounts “that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the social media giant said. “Given the activity we’ve seen — and its timing ahead of the US midterm elections — we wanted to give some details about the types of behavior that led to this action,” Facebook said, going on to accuse the accounts of manipulating the platform to make their content appear more popular, hawking fake products or functioning as ad farms that tricked “people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.”

— Jon Ziegler “Reb Z” (@Rebelutionary_Z) October 12, 2018

The founder of one of the pages — The Anti-Media — said he had no knowledge of his page engaging in any such behavior. The Free Thought Project co-founder similarly denied Facebook’s accusations. Rachel Blevins, a reporter for RT America whose personal journalism page was nixed, also denied inauthentic behavior.

Just hours after its ban from Facebook, Twitter suspended Anti-Media from its platform, following a pattern of social media companies successively banning users that has been demonstrated in the past. For example, Facebook, YouTube and Apple all banned the far-right conspiracy theory site InfoWars around the same time. And after the CIA-funded cybersecurity firm FireEye contacted Facebook, Google and Twitter, each company banned a number of accounts allegedly linked to Iran.

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) September 6, 2018

In the case of InfoWars, Twitter eventually followed suit.

While many warned that the ban of InfoWars from social media would establish a slippery slope, they were often mocked and ridiculed. Thursday’s onslaught on independent media appears to have confirmed their suspicions, however.

— Anya Parampil (@anyaparampil) August 6, 2018

Facebook has been partnering with the Digital Forensics Lab, an arm of the Atlantic Council think tank — a neoconservative group funded by Gulf monarchies and defense giants like Raytheon — to weed out inauthentic users from its platform. Similarly, it has been partnering with the neoconservative Weekly Standard magazine to fact check so-called fake news.
Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.
© AP Photo / Ben Margot
Facebook Bans Russia-Linked Social Media Firm for Alleged ’Scraping’ of Users’ Data

Journalist Abby Martin, who hosts “The Empire Files” on TeleSur English, told Sputnik News after TeleSur’s page was temporarily removed from Facebook, “The shuttering of progressive media amidst the ‘fake news’ and Russiagate hysteria is what activists been warning all along — tech companies, working in concert with think tanks stacked with CIA officials and defense contractors, shouldn’t have the power to curate our reality to make those already rendered invisible even more obsolete.”

Sputnik News contacted a number of journalists caught up in the ban. Below is what they had to say, edited extremely lightly for clarity.

Independent reporter John Vibes, who contributes to The Free Thought Project and other websites:

This signifies a re-consolidation of the media. Cable news media controlled the narrative for most of modern history, but the internet has lowered that barrier to entry and allowed the average person to become the media themselves. This obviously took market share and influence away from the traditional media, and it has allowed for a more diverse public conversation. Now it seems the platforms that have monopolized the industry are favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices. So now, instead of allowing more people to have a voice, these platforms are creating an atmosphere where only powerful media organizations are welcome, just as we had on cable news.

People think that we are just providing an activist spin on the news, but they don’t see the families struggling to have their voice heard. For example, when someone is shot by police, mainstream media sources often just republish the press release from the police department, without presenting the victim’s side of the story. We give the victims and their families a voice, which is essential to keep power in check. This also goes for bigger issues like foreign policy as well; multiple full-scale invasions of Syria have been prevented because of information that the alternative media made viral.

“Information exchange” activist Jason Bassler, who co-founded The Free Thought Project and solely founded Police the Police, both of which were banned:

We were verified by Facebook with a little check mark next to our name, so they know we are a legitimate organization/outlet. They have seen our “Articles of Organization” which was issued by the state of Louisiana, which is where my partner and The Free Thought Project co-founder lives.

We have even paid Facebook to boost our posts and for likes in the past, meaning they gladly took our money for a product that they ended up manipulating and backing out on. It wasn’t much, maybe $1,200 over the past 6 years. Do we get that money back now?

We have already had the lawyers at Rutherford Institute (a nonprofit civil liberties organization) send them a letter late last month about unfair treatment by third-party “fact checkers,” which they ignored and never responded to.

I was motivated [to start The Free Thought Project] by the injustices I saw on social media during Occupy Wall Street in 2011. I knew I had an obligation to get involved somehow and to share information critical for liberty and peace. I never thought I would have built fan pages of 5 million fans, nor did I ever think we would employ and give jobs to nine other activists (at one point), but I was inspired to do what I could to plant seeds and combat the mainstream media’s bullsh*t narratives, to keep police and government accountable, to make sure people knew their rights and how to interact with police.

All that’s gone now with a click of a button. Six years of hard work, literally seven days a week, working our as*es off finding stories, researching them, writing them, making thumbnails and titles for them, making graphics and videos for them, sharing them on various social media outlets.

What’s next? I will fight this until I am utterly exhausted. We will fight back tooth and nail. I don’t care if that means protesting in front of Facebook headquarters (which I’ve already considered doing many times in the past two years), I will make sure people know how corrupt and untrustworthy Facebook is if it’s the last thing I do. You can’t just steal years of hard work from someone and not expect there to be consequences. I will do everything I can to make their lives miserable. That’s a promise.

Rachel Blevins, a correspondent for RT America:

Today I was locked out of my Facebook account for four hours, and my public page was “unpublished.” There appears to be no explanation for this other than the vague claim from Facebook that my page was taken down because it was “administered by a fake account, misleading users or violating the Facebook spam policies.” I am the only person who publishes posts on my page; the only posts I publish are articles I have written or videos of my reports, and I only post one or two times a day — which rules out all of the claims that I have violated Facebook’s policies.

My page had nearly 70,000 followers before it was taken down. I have poured the last four years into building my page as a journalist, and I have noticed recently that the reach seems to have been stifled and that the engagement on my posts was down significantly. I know that I am not the only one who has become a victim of this purge, and there are hundreds of other pages — many of which had millions of followers — that have been taken down with no warning and no explanation.

Ford Fischer, the founder of the media startup News2Share, had a number of his live streams removed during the purge, although they were later restored:

This attack was a long time coming. Facebook has been slowly clamping down on independent media. First, they removed more extreme pages and made it harder for the surviving ones to make a living by hurting their algorithms (unless they paid, of course!). Then they started purging those that didn’t quickly respond to their ID requests. Today, hundreds of pages belonging to the family of independent media, especially those that question state authority, were removed without explanation. This is just one step further toward the total state and corporate takeover of what you’re allowed to think.

Nicholas Bernabe, founder of The Anti-Media:

Our approach generally is to cover stories and angles that corporate media underreport or misreport and to amplify activist and anti-war voices and stories. All of our content is professionally fact-checked and edited.

I got into this line of work because I felt there was a need for media that challenged mainstream assumptions and biases in politics. I wanted to shed light on corruption and wrongdoing against oppressed peoples and cover the harsh truth about American foreign policy.

Over the last 28 days, we reached 7,088,000 people on Facebook.

The timing of this purge is rather dubious in my view, coming shortly before the midterm elections. This could be an attempt by Facebook itself to affect the outcome of the coming elections. The Twitter suspension caught me by surprise. I can only speculate that these suspensions were a coordinated effort to stifle our message ahead of the coming elections.

By Alexander Rubinstein.

#démocratie

India makes U-turn after proposing to punish ’fake news’ publishers - CNN
▻https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/03/asia/india-fake-news-intl/index.html

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(CNN)The Indian government is shelving a rule to punish journalists for publishing “fake news” just 48 hours after its introduction.
The proposed order would have given the government the authority to strip individuals and media organizations of their accreditation — which is needed to go to government functions and makes access to government offices easier — if they received a complaint of reporting so-called fake news, a term that was not specifically defined.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government said the measure was meant to help stop the spread of misinformation throughout the country, but critics swiftly condemned it as an attack on free speech in the world’s most populous democracy.
“Make no mistake: (T)his is a breathtaking assault on mainstream media,” Shekhar Gupta, one of India’s most prominent journalists, tweeted to his nearly 2 million followers. He is the editor-in-chief of ThePrint, an Indian website focusing on politics and policy.

The measure’s introduction was troubling to some who saw it as the latest effort among powerful leaders of Asian democracies to target the free press under the guise of combating so-called fake news, a term popularized by President Donald Trump in his effort to fight negative press coverage.
Malaysia’s Upper House passed a bill criminalizing the spread of fake news this week, the first step in it becoming law. Singapore is also planning legislation to tackle online misinformation. Journalists in Myanmar and Cambodia — two countries the West has invested heavily in to ensure successful transitions to democracy — have been arrested in recent months.
And Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has railed against the media by employing the term on a regular basis. His government has come under fire for reportedly targeting the online news site Rappler over its negative coverage of the Duterte administration’s bloody war on drugs. A presidential spokesman denied the allegations.
India appears to be following a similar path, said Prem Panicker, a prominent journalist who used to be Yahoo India’s managing editor
“There is a worldwide leaning toward hard-right governing style and hard-right leaders, and the corollary to that is that there’s increasing stresses on the press,” Panicker told CNN.
“The single biggest problem is that this is when you want a very free, very vibrant press.”
Despite the fierce criticism of New Delhi’s proposed rule, some of its opponents do believe there’s a need for either more regulation or greater responsibility on the part of publishers.
India has one of the world’s most saturated and fastest-growing media markets, boasting thousands of options in print, television and online journalism.
With that freedom and booming market has come a thriving tabloid culture, which has frustrated mainstream journalists who get lumped in with those peddling misinformation and flouting common standards.

#Fake_news #Asie #Censure

India makes U-turn after proposing to punish ’#fake_news' publishers - CNN
▻https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/03/asia/india-fake-news-intl/index.html

The Indian government is shelving a rule to punish journalists for publishing “fake news” just 48 hours after its introduction.

The proposed order would have given the government the authority to strip individuals and media organizations of their accreditation — which is needed to go to government functions and makes access to government offices easier — if they received a complaint of reporting so-called fake news, a term that was not specifically defined.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government said the measure was meant to help stop the spread of misinformation throughout the country, but critics swiftly condemned it as an attack on free speech in the world’s most populous democracy.

Ouaouh, à la première plainte on te sucre ton accréditation… Bon, ben, apparemment, il faudra faire plus subtil…

Les principales chaînes mondiales d’information en continu, par Cécile Marin (@mdiplo, avril 2017)
▻https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/chaines-info

https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/IMG/png/Infographie-RT.png

FBI, DOJ Eye Russian Media Outlets as ’Foreign Agents’
▻http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=19989

Alyona Minkovski : (…) I used to work for #RT. I hosted a show at RT America. And they all exist under this kind of umbrella structure of Russian government-funded media organizations. Sputnik and RT both have offices in DC. Sputnik now has an FM station that they’ve taken over. RT America, the DC, New York, Miami bureau, they have their own programing that’s different from what RT International does, that airs just in the United States. (…) So I think that something like this raises a lot of questions because there are a lot of good people who are trying to do good journalism at those organizations, and there’s a lot of questionable journalism at those organizations, too. But whether or not you should use a World War II era law that makes these entities register as foreign agents, I think should make us ask a lot questions because then there’s a certain precedent being set because normally that’s not actually enforced from what I understand here in the United States. When Russia actually kicked out a lot of NGOs because they had a same foreign entity law that was passed, human rights organizations widely criticized it.

RT trouble le concert de l’information internationale, par Maxime Audinet
▻https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2017/04/AUDINET/57379

https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/IMG/jpg/RT.jpg

Fort de 2 100 employés et disposant de bureaux dans 19 pays, le groupe s’est développé grâce aux moyens importants mis à sa disposition par l’État russe. Selon un sondage de l’institut Ipsos conduit en novembre 2015 dans 38 pays, ses chaînes sont regardées par 70 millions de personnes chaque semaine ; une audience qui se situe derrière celle du service international de la British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), mais devant celle de la Deutsche Welle et de France 24. Avec respectivement 8 et 36 millions de téléspectateurs hebdomadaires, RT est en outre la cinquième chaîne internationale la plus regardée aux États-Unis et en Europe, ses cibles prioritaires. Depuis son lancement, son budget a décuplé, passant de 29 à 290 millions d’euros — près d’un quart des dotations publiques accordées aux médias. RT s’est adaptée rapidement à la promotion des contenus sur Internet, en utilisant massivement les technologies numériques virales (retransmission vidéo en direct, images à 360 degrés). Le groupe a ouvert de multiples comptes sur les réseaux sociaux, ainsi que sur YouTube, où il se présente comme la première source d’information du monde, avec 4,5 millions d’abonnés toutes chaînes confondues.

#médias #information #télévision

“Firefox is now going to censor the internet and decide for you what is true and what isn’t because you’re an idiot.”

–--------------------

The Mozilla Information Trust Initiative: Building a movement to fight misinformation online

▻https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/08/mozilla-information-trust-initiative-building-movement-fight-misinform

#mozilla #firefox #censorship #fakenews

via ▻https://diasp.eu/posts/5909871

Killing the Public Editor, NYT Deals Another Blow to the Public’s Trust | FAIR
▻http://fair.org/home/killing-the-public-editor-nyt-deals-another-blow-to-the-publics-trust

http://fair.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/NYTEliminatePublicEditor-Featured.jpg

This move by the Times is tragically short-sighted, though admittedly not uncommon. (As of next week, among major outlets, only NPR and ESPN will have full-fledged ombuds on staff.) But for media organizations that shape our country’s discourse, to have a staff ombud offered a strong signal that they accept, own and take responsibility for that daily failure to arrive at the whole truth.

3月9日のツイート
▻http://twilog.org/ChikuwaQ/date-170309

http://img.twi-log.com/img-dir/r/rt-icon.gif

Top story: Meet the Hundreds of Officials Trump Has Quietly Installed Across th… www.propublica.org/article/meet-h…, see more tweetedtimes.com/ChikuwaQ?s=tnp posted at 09:37:02

RT @nekojournal: 猫ジャーナル過去記事： 岐阜の猫カフェで始まる、ビジネスと猫保護活動の素敵な関係 nekojournal.net/?p=2641 posted at 09:13:38

The latest Papier! paper.li/ChikuwaQ/13277… Thanks to @TheJazzSoul @BugsGroove @Nevin_Thompson #internationalwomensday #ycrazymind posted at 09:13:28

RT @risaku: 小泉八雲原作、杉野希妃監督・主演、公開中『雪女　Snow Woman』レビュー書きました。www.facebook.com/risaku.kiridos… …　「これはファム・ファタールの映画である」 posted at 08:27:12

Top story: Yes, ma’am. Here are 21 women running U.S. media organizations now. … www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/styl…, see more tweetedtimes.com/ChikuwaQ?s=tnp posted at 07:38:02

Top story: NYT Metro Desk on Twitter: "A Wall Street firm put up a statue of a … (...)

Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine — The New York Times, 28/08/2016
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/magazine/inside-facebooks-totally-insane-unintentionally-gigantic-hyperpartisan-poli

The #Facebook product, to users in 2016, is familiar yet subtly expansive. Its algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video produced and posted by established media organizations large and small, local and national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there’s also a new and distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss: political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook, uniquely positioned and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the news feed. These are news sources that essentially do not exist outside of Facebook, and you’ve probably never heard of them. They have names like Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle; Addicting Info; RightAlerts; Being Liberal; Opposing Views; Fed-Up Americans; American News; and hundreds more. Some of these pages have millions of followers; many have hundreds of thousands.

#médias «#information»

The Record
Your guide to the criminal justice system
The Marshall Project
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/records?ref=hp-1-100

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Prosecutorial Misconduct • Juvenile Justice • Sentencing Reform
↓
What are records? Since 2014, The Marshall Project has been curating some of the best criminal justice reporting from around the web. In these records you will find the most recent and the most authoritative articles on the topics, people and events that are shaping the criminal justice conversation.

The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organization that focuses on the American criminal justice system. Our mission is to create and sustain a sense of urgency about criminal justice in America. We aim at all times for accuracy, fairness, and impartiality. Our repertoire includes deep investigative projects, narratives and profiles that put a human face on criminal justice, explanatory and contextual pieces, along with guest commentary and voices from inside the system. And we partner with a diverse array of media organizations to amplify our message.

The Marshall Project represents our attempt to elevate the criminal justice issue to one of national urgency, and to help spark a national conversation about reform. I named our organization after Justice Marshall simply because he embodies the principles we hold dear. He was scholarly, he was courageous, and he fiercely believed that the U.S. Constitution was the template to secure civil rights for all.

The seeds of The Marshall Project were planted a few years ago after I read two books. The first, Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” argues that mass incarceration — which dates roughly from President Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs in the 1980s to the present—represents the third phase of African-American oppression in the United States, after slavery and Jim Crow. Alexander documents how the United States came to be the world’s biggest jailer by enacting policies that represented a bipartisan shift in how we address addiction, mental illness, and other non-violent forms of misconduct. Fueled in part by a reaction to civil rights gains and in part by fear of escalating crime, Alexander claims, we enacted tough drug laws, imposed greater mandatory minimum sentences, and ignited a prison boom. Intent can be difficult to prove; impact is irrefutable.

Creators of Fake Instagram Account Showing a Migrant’s Journey Speak Out
▻https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/abdou-diouf-instagram-migrant1.jpg?quality=65&strip=colo

An #Instagram account that purported to show the tribulations of a Senegalese #migrant embarking on an illegal journey to Spain turned out to be a campaign set-up to promote a photography festival.

Launched a week ago, the account claimed to show how “Abdou Diouf” left his native Dakar in Senegal to find a better life in Europe. The pictures – all self-portraits – showed Diouf at various stages of his “trip”. In one image, he’s seen embarking on a small floating device, while another showed him reach Spanish shores.
▻http://time.com/3982506/immigrant-instagram-migrant-journey-abdou-diouf
The account went viral this weekend after the Huffington Post wrote about Diouf’s journey. However, as international attention turned to Diouf’s mysterious postings and his use of popular, yet unrelated hashtags, the account was revealed as fake. “It’s a campaign for an international festival of photography in Getxo in Spain” Oriol Caba of Volga, a Spanish production company, tells TIME.

The #Getxophoto festival hired Volga and the Barcelona studio Manson to produce a series of videos and images that would promote the event as well as raise questions about the use of #photography in today’s #society.

“In developed countries, there’s a use of the self-image that is not common to other parts of the globe,” says Caba. “[We wanted] to show how the banality of the treatment of the self-image could be used to produce an image of the self but in a very different context, like the dangerous and traumatic trips people embark on to get a better life. We thought it was strong and powerful enough to make a statement and to raise questions.”

The fake account was also a way for the festival’s organizers to show how the “narration of reality is always in the hands of people with power, not in the hands of people living that reality,” says Caba.

But all involved say they never expected the account to garner such international attention. “We were shocked to see it published on the Huffington Post and to see other media organizations follow it up,” Caba tells #TIME. “We never thought about this question on the power of the [fourth estate]. I think that the necessity of selling, having hits and being the first to publish is lowering the standards of news.”

The end result, the festival said in a statement, offers “a reflection on the way we process and share images of displacement and migration in established media and on #social_networks.”

Now, the festival is ready for the potential backlash. “It won’t be surprising to us if we’re accused of trivializing this issue,” says Caba. “But we can see it every day already in the passivity of the people and governments who [are confronted] to the issue of #immigration in every European city.

“We are very respectful of these people going through such unbelievable struggles,” he adds.

#migration

Menaces sur la presse en Mongolie

Fight for Freedom of the Press | The UB Post
▻http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/?p=14467

The draft [of the National Program for Fighting Corruption and Strengthening Accountability and Justice, set to be discussed by Parliament], concocted by the President of Mongolia, obliges media organizations to publish press releases of state organizations and the speeches of government officials, and disclose agreements with private companies, the state, and individuals.

Media officials view the mandatory publication of state press releases and official speeches, reportedly on anti-corruption related actions, as reverting to policies under a socialist regime – when the state had total control over media. B.Galaarid said that if media is mandated to publish and broadcast content that they have no control over, it will affect their businesses badly and chip away at the audience and readership of media outlets.

They also said that the state should have no power over the disclosure of agreements and contracts between private parties, and that disclosure would drive away investors in the sector.
Aside from the President’s draft bill, there are numerous laws and legislation that pose serious threats to press freedom and freedom of speech.

During a roundtable meeting of media representatives, D.Munkhburen, a lawyer from Globe International, listed and explained some laws that strangle the press.

One of the most criticized aspects of legislation was the fact that defamation and libel are viewed as criminal offenses in the Criminal Code of Mongolia, punishable by up to six months of detainment and two to five years of prison time. Other democracies around the world view defamation and libel cases as civil offenses and impose monetary fines. But Mongolian law allows journalists and individuals to be imprisoned on charges of defamation, as demonstrated in the case of Ts.Bat, the aviation engineer and blogger who was detained and investigated for criticizing former Minister of Transportation A.Gansukh on social media.
(…)
The UB Post, as the first independent English newspaper in Mongolia, has always supported freedom of the press and ethical journalism, and strives to shed light on critical issues in Mongolia on a timely basis. We believe that the draft on the National Program for Fighting Corruption and Strengthening Accountability and Justice, regardless of its initial intentions, poses a major threat to press freedom, which is the most powerful tool available to fight corruption and bureaucracy. It should not be passed by Parliament, and other laws that hinder this freedom should be reviewed and revised with urgency.

Facebook Announces Facebook Media — A Resource For Media Organizations & Public Figures
▻http://marketingland.com/facebook-media-support-page-100239

Facebook today rolled out Facebook Media, a new resource to help media organizations and public figures with their Facebook efforts. Facebook Media is modeled after Facebook for Business, a hub for advertisers on the social network.

Facebook director of media partnerships Nick Grudin explained the purpose of the effort in a blog post:

Every day, content creators around the world — from digital publishers, to public figures, to video producers — use Facebook to connect with their audiences in innovative ways. They reach new fans, start conversations and drive discovery of new stories. In the process, they make Facebook more vibrant.

At Facebook, we are committed to building a platform to make these connections broader, richer and more dynamic. That’s why today we are introducing Facebook Media — to highlight great examples and new trends illustrating how public figures, organizations and media are using Facebook to connect with their audiences.

#facebook #facebookmedia

In Russian-ruled Crimea, a crackdown on journalists and activists who don’t toe Kremlin line
▻http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/in-russian-ruled-crimea-a-crackdown-on-journalists-and-activists-who-dont-

The center, financed through grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development and other foreign donors, was one of the first media organizations to receive such unwanted attention in Russia-controlled Crimea. If Russian President Vladimir Putin remains in control of Ukraine’s peninsula and follows the same policy for Crimea that he does with the rest of the Russian Federation, then foreign-funded projects — in particular those with USAID funding - will be targets for shutdown.
(…)
The only other independent agencies left, the Center for Investigative Journalism and the Radio Liberty-supported project Crimean Reality, both have regular problems with the self-defense militias.

#censure (aussi) avec quelques pincées de #USAID et #RFE-RL (Radio Free Europe - Radio Liberty)…

#Film : Don’t shout too loud

Leading up to the 2010 #FIFA_World_Cup, media organizations reported that 40,000 sex workers would be trafficked into South Africa. The prediction was a gross overestimation based on unsubstantiated evidence. So why was it made and what was the effect? “Don’t Shout Too Loud” offers the harsh and unsettling theory that special interest groups are manipulating public policy in order to promote their agendas by inflating the scope of human trafficking. In doing so, they cause public panic and resources to be directed away from those who require the most help.

http://www.dontshout2loud.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/slider71.jpg

▻http://www.dontshout2loud.com

#Afrique_du_Sud #trafic_d'êtres_humains #sexe #prostitution #football #championnat_du_monde

Trailer :
▻http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JqFGoKL7E4

Muzzling the Egyptian media

Over the last few month, we have witnessed a bitter campaign in Egypt directed against those Arab and Western media organizations that the interim government and military authorities have described as ’misleading’, writes the editorial in the London- based pan-Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi (6th of September)

CRITICISM OF AMBASSADORS: This campaign was accompanied by some strong criticism of foreign ambassadors. The [leading pro-government daily] Al-Ahram even accused U.S. ambassador Ann Paterson of being ’part of a plot by the Muslim Brotherhood and foreign militants designed to undermine Egypt’s stability and divide the country in two.’

With the growing complexity of the political crisis in Egypt, Egyptians have turned against some countries just because they have called for moderation or defended the legitimacy of an elected president [Mursi]. In this polarized climate, journalists began trying to exclude their colleagues just because they worked for certain news organizations.

The Egyptian judiciary has recently moved to underwrite this erroneous behavior on the part of some political parties and official circles against certain media outlets. A few days after its office was raided by the police, a court issued a ruling closing down [Qatari-based] Al-Jazeera’s ‘Egypt Direct’ channel. Al-Jazeera English had already been raided and three of its foreign journalists expelled.

To be sure, that was not the first time that al-Jazeera has been targeted by the Egyptian authorities. The channel was also targeted at the beginning of the Egyptian revolution in 2011 before president Mubarak was overthrown. At the time, the Mubarak authorities also targeted other channels such as [Saudi] al-Arabiya and the BBC. Al-Jazeera was also targeted by the Syrian and former Libyan regimes.

The ongoing campaign against freedom of speech in Egypt has been joined by many Egyptian media outlets, which have been raising crude slogans such as ’Egypt is fighting terrorism.’ It seems that the Egyptian media, whether public or privately owned, is becoming more and more one-eyed. This does not serve the truth, or the final goal of establishing a civil state that embraces all Egyptians. On the contrary, such a policy increases the very divisions that every Egyptian has complained about since the last presidential election. What we are witnessing now is a process of strengthening one side at the expense of the other. It is also an attempt to recreate the old [Mubarak] order, albeit in a new and ‘improved’ form.

What is even more dangerous is the fact that this media exclusion conceals an attempt to silence certain political views. This has never succeeded anywhere, and will certainly not succeed in Egypt. This policy will certainly not figure as a high point in the interim government’s record; quite the contrary. While pretending to pursue a policy of national reconciliation, the government has been gagging the opposition. How can the interim government make people believe that it wants to draft a constitution that respects public liberties while it is so obviously against alternative opinions? Besides, is the blocking of broadcasts not now a relic of the past, which only used to be practiced by tyrannies?

This is not the way to counter alternative opinions, nor is it the best way to settle scores with al-Jazeera or any other outlet. Far better to allow all opinions to be aired freely. Let the people decide.

For a military or political authority to muzzle media outlets or drive them off the air means that it does not feel secure in its position nor in the choices it is offering the Egyptian people.

In AP surveillance case, the real scandal is what’s legal
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/14/in-ap-surveillance-case-the-real-scandal-is-whats-legal

U.S. law allows the government to engage in this type of surveillance—on media organizations or anyone else—without meaningful judicial oversight.

The key here is a legal principle known as the “third party doctrine,” which says that users don’t have Fourth Amendment rights protecting information they voluntarily turn over to someone else. Courts have said that when you dial a phone number, you are voluntarily providing information to your phone company, which is then free to share it with the government.

Un amendement de la constitution US fait donc l’objet d’une sur-interprétation loufoque quand il s’agit de légaliser la corruption des représentants de la nation par des affairistes véreux (exemple du premier amendement dans l’affaire Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission), et d’une sous-interprétation non moins loufoque quand il s’agit de légaliser l’aliénation des citoyens.

Et il apparaît que les seules fuites garanties par le quatrième amendement sont celles dont le divulgateur est le gouvernement lui-même.