Archive for October, 2010
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
Thursday 18 November 2010, 6.15pm
Hosted by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television on the Heslington East campus
Greg Dyke now chancellor of the University of York will chair a panel of leading industry experts, including:
- Ian Bloom (Partner, Head of Corporate and Media at Ross & Craig)
- Helen Boaden (Director of News, BBC)
- Dr David Levy (Director of the Reuters Institute for Journalism at the University of Oxford)
- Steve Richards (Chief Political Commentator at The Independent)
- Simon Singh (author, journalist, TV producer)
The debate will open to the audience, with opportunities for questions and input.
Reserve tickets by contacting Nik Miller on nm19
york
acuk (nm19yorkacuk)
Location: Theatre Film and Television building, Heslington East
Telephone: 01904 432622
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
A radio commentator renowned for his popular satirical broadcasts
was stabbed in Luanda last Friday. António Manuel Manuel Da Silva is a government critic and his Friday broadcast attacked the Angolan president’s failure to address crime and corruption. The stabbing occurred after Da Silva’s assailant confronted him about his programme. Alexandre Neto, his station’s director, claims Da Silva had recently received two death threats. Since September two other Angolan journalists have been attacked,
one fatally, for criticising the government.
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
Juan Williams, a senior news analyst at National Public Radio (NPR), has had his
contract terminated following comments he made on Fox News. Last Monday (October 18), Williams told Bill O’Reilly that aeroplane passengers “in Muslim garb” made him nervous. He also made remarks about the Pakistani immigrant who attempted to plant a car bomb in Times Square. Whilst
Republicans have accused NPR of censorship, an
NPR statement said Williams’ remarks were “inconsistent with their editorial standards”. In September,
CNN sacked anchor Rick Sanchez after he suggested that everybody who ran the network was Jewish.
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
Guillermo Farinas has
won the 2010 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, the European Union’s most prestigious human rights award. Farinas has spent much of the last 15 years in jail and has gone on hunger strike more than 20 times. His most recent hunger strike ended in July when the government
agreed to release 52 political prisoners. At the same time as the EU bestowed the accolade, Cuba authorised the
release of a further five prisoners, who were not among the originally specified 52. The released men are due to be transferred to Spain. 39 have already been released, but 13 have refused the deal and remain behind bars.
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
A political blogger
was arrested on Monday. Phan Thanh Hai, who blogs as Saigon Brother Three, was taken from his home in Ho Chi Minh after a police raid. His wife says that he has been detained for the “publication of false information”. Another blogger, Nguyen Van Hai, who had reached the end of his
two and a half year prison sentence for tax evasion, has been hit with
new charges. He is now accused of campaigning against the one-party communist state.
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
A veteran investigative journalist
has been killed in the city of Caico.
Francisco Gomes de Medeiros was shot five times outside his house last Monday. One line of police enquiry is focusing on reports the murder could be linked to Medeiros’ investigation of state assembly candidates running a crack-for-votes scheme in the 3 October general election. However a former prison inmate, Joao Francisco dos Santos, has been arrested he claimed to have committed the murder. This is the second high-profile media killing this month following
16 October murder of the owner of a small Sao Paulo newspaper.
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
A local politician and and chairman of an agricultural commission is
suing journalist Ilia Martkoplishvili for degrading his honor. Gela Tetrauli requests 10,000 GEL as a compensation for moral damage. Tetrauli claims the journalist erroneously blamed him for misuse of budget funds.” Martkopishvili claim the official’s accusations are unjustified.
Monday, October 25th, 2010
By harnessing the internet to expose the hidden mechanics of war, WikiLeaks puts governments on notice — obsessive secrecy cannot be sustained. Emily Butselaar reports
The most interesting element of WikiLeak’s publication of almost 400,000 leaked secret Iraq war files has been the lack of criticism. This time, military claims that the leaks threaten security and will put the lives of coalition troops in Afghanistan and Iraq in danger have been widely ignored.
There is clearly a public interest in the conduct of wars by our armies and governments and the files reveal that the US did — despite earlier denials — record civilian casualties. They also confirmed the existence of the now infamous Frago 242, the 2004 US army order that directed coalition troops not to investigate allegations of abuse unless US forces were involved. Some of the documents detail thousands of incidents of often stomach-turning torture, abuse and molestation. And others demonstrate governments’ excessive reliance on secrecy.
The anodyne nature of many of the documents demonstrates the over-classification of sensitive material. Secrecy rather than transparency is the norm — national security the justification even where that argument has no validity. If governments are to seek some secrets, they must cultivate a greater culture of transparency as the convention. The US Department of Defence has admitted that July’s unauthorised release of the so called war logs — 91,731 classified US military records from the war in Afghanistan — has not resulted in the disclosure of sensitive intelligence sources.
Julian Assange, Wikileaks’ founder and spokesman, and his band of hacker activists set up the whistleblower site in 2006. With its simple “keep the bastards honest” ethos, Wikileaks was carefully designed to be an “uncensorable system for untraceable mass leaking”. It aimed to discourage unethical behaviour by airing governments’ and corporations’ dirty laundry in public, putting their secrets out there in the public realm.
But with its success — and its many exposés — has come criticism. Earlier this year it released a shocking video of a 2007 US attack in Iraq. Alongside the unedited footage it released an edited 17-minute version that critics claimed was misleading. The release and the title they gave it, “Collateral Murder”, marked WikiLeaks’ move from reporting to advocacy: it was actively protesting the war in Afghanistan.
Handwringing began over the site’s move from objectivity. No longer would it be just a repository of raw source documents. Assange expressed surprise that the site had ever been cast as a bastion of impartiality, describing the concept as idiocy. But a politically active stance made it easier for outsiders to attack the site’s integrity. It could no longer be seen as an objective, neutral spokesman, a change of image that may have long-term ramifications.
The site was also damaged by failures in WikiLeaks “harm minimisation” system, the system by which they redact information. When Reporters Without Borders accused Julian Assange of “incredible irresponsibility” after the release of the Afghan War logs, he cited a lack of resources, an argument it is difficult to find sympathy with when the safety of individuals is involved.
For an organisation on a mission for total transparency the organisation is notoriously secretive about its own activity. It maintains its cloak and dagger antics are necessary to protect its sources, but the very questions that WikiLeaks was set up to address, power without accountability or transparency, can be applied to its own operations.
Today’s Independent focuses on internal rows that have been long-rumoured within WikiLeaks amidst claims that the focus on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan has subsumed the rest of the organisation’s activities.
It’s easy to forget just how many stories WikiLeaks has broken. Its tremendous success has meant the site has often struggled under the volume of users. It has faced down corrupt governments, investment banks and the famously litigious Church of Scientology, made public top-secret internet censorship lists and broken injunctions — as in the case of the press gag granted to UK solicitors Carter Ruck in the interests of their client, Trafigura.
It’s possible the site will eventually force governments world wide to re-examine concepts of privacy, transparency and secrecy. WikiLeaks is just the vehicle, in the internet age leaks will continue. All governments can do is strive towards a greater culture of transparency if they want to keep their legitimate secrets under wraps.
Emily Butselaar is online editor of Index on Censorship
