Posts Tagged ‘media freedom’
May 17th, 2013
Brazil loves football – and it loves the game so much it’s hosting next year’s World Cup finals. But a huge number of fans from the state of Paraná are having a very hard time following their team this year because of media restrictions imposed by directors of the local club, Rafael Spuldar reports.
Atlético Paranaense from Curitiba, one of Brazil’s top flight teams and Brazilian champions in 2001, banned press conferences and independent media work during their weekly activities and on match days.
On top of that, no staff member — including players and managers — of Atlético is officially allowed to speak to the media. The club says that radio stations and newspapers should pay for the right to report on the club, along the lines of fees television stations pay to broadcast matches.
However, a 2011 federal law forbids football clubs from charging money for radio broadcasts.
The club’s policy is that all information about the team will be funneled through official channels ike the team’s website, online radio and TV. Independent journalists will be limited to background information and off-the-record statements.
It’s a common practice in Brazil’s football industry to have at least two press conferences a week with players and managers and regular media activity on match days. It’s also usual in the country to have people from clubs on sport shows airing on TV and radio, which makes Atlético’s move a rare one in Brazilian football.
“The content we offer is not of a primary importance to the audience, it’s pure entertainment. So we don’t feel obliged to let anyone enter the club’s premises and profit from our business without paying for it, like radio stations do”, says Mauro Holzmann, Atlético’s director of communications and marketing.
“Less than thirty years ago it was OK for televisions to broadcast football matches without paying for it, but now it’s unthinkable to do so. So why don’t the other media pay for it? We know it’s a paradigm shift, but maybe other clubs will do this too”, Holzmann told Index on Censorship.
Broadcasting of matches became another problematic issue. Atlético did not reach an agreement for Paraná’s State Championship with TV rights holders RPC – a local affiliate of national media giant Rede Globo. Because of that, fans were not be able to watch the games unless they bought tickets and went to the pitch.
“This is a complete enclosure that ends up damaging everybody”, says Leonardo Bonasolli, reporter at Gazeta do Povo, Curitiba’s biggest newspaper.
“The club loses exposure at the media, and exposure means more sponsorship money. The press loses the chance of providing a different, independent point of view and, of course, fans also lose because they are not interested only on the team’s monolithic media work”, Bonasolli told Index on Censorship.
Atlético’s chairman Mário Celso Petraglia said the State Championship – which runs from January until early May – is not profitable, so he would not only deny TV broadcasting but would also put the Under-23 team on the pitch, while the main squad would have an extended pre-season in Europe until the start of the Brazilian Championship.
About the media ban, Petraglia said in a rare interview that the club “reached a limit” in its relationship with the press, and that journalists “should be neutral and conduct [their work] in an ethical and moral way”, something he believes does not happen in Paraná.
Petraglia’s disturbed relationship with the press has a long history – it started in the late 1990s, when he was involved in a bribery scheme with referees to fix match results. He was neither convicted nor banned because of the episode.
Atlético first tried to charge money from radios to broadcast its games in 2008. However, a judge ruled the fees were illegal and radio stations have since been given stadium access on match days.
Atlético’s media ban was effectively shut down in early May, during the State Championship finals against historic rivals Coritiba. Rede Globo, which also owns the TV rights of the Brazilian Championship, made a deal with Atlético to allow both matches to be aired. It also closed an agreement for broadcasting the State Championship in 2014 and 2015.
After the game, Atlético’s players gave interviews normally, even to outlets other than Globo, as if there was no ban.
Paraná’s Sports Journalists Association believes Atlético’s attitude towards general media won’t change much, even with the upcoming Brazilian Championship, which draws national attention to all clubs.
“When the Brazilian championship starts, Atlético will be forced to speak to Globo, and they will also feel pressed to hold conferences after matches, because there will be so many journalists from the whole country. But I doubt they will allow other radio or TV stations inside the club during the week, so Globo will do all interviews and share their material to the other outlets”, says the Association’s president, Isaías Bessa.
Local journalists also say the club’s lack of transparency damages Curitiba’s position as one of the host cities of the 2014 World Cup – Atlético’s stadium will a venue. Renovations on the stadium are said to be the most behind schedule of any of the 12 World Cup venues, but independent media was never allowed inside after the works began.
Atlético’s Mauro Holzmann firmly says the stadium will be ready by the end of 2013, like FIFA demands, and blames all delays on “Brazil’s bureaucracy” to deal with public financing.
May 8th, 2013
The discovery of a financial scam at a company in India’s West Bengal state is shining a light on the relationship between politicians and media owners, Mahima Kaul reports.
The firm in question, Saradha Group, had risen to become a financial empire over the past eight years under boss and owner Sudipta Sen. The company has business interests ranging from construction to travel to exports and agriculture. When the “chit fund” scandal came to light — with an estimated loss of $4-6 billion (US) to investors — Sen fled to Jammu and Kashmir, where he was ultimately arrested.
A chit-fund scandal, or “cheat fund” as some sections of the media are calling it, operates like a ponzi scheme. Sen duped many small and middle class investors into giving him their life savings, with promises of great returns. He managed to evade the regulators by using a nexus of companies to launder the money. The money collected was used to recklessly invest in a range of industries — including a mismanaged media empire. The government of West Bengal has had to set up a $2.5 million fund to ensure that the small investors are not bankrupted.
In a letter to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Sen claims to have been misled by a group of individuals who cheated investors by using his name, unbeknownst to him. However, the letter also shows how political patronage is obtained through acquiring media houses.
Saradha Group owns 18 newspapers and TV channels in West Bengal and Assam. These include Bengal Post, Sakalbela, Kalam, Paroma, Azad Hind, Prabhat Varta, Seven Sisters Post – and the TV channels, Tara Musik, Tara Newz, South Asia TV, and Channel 10, all under the umbrella of Saradha Printing and Publishing Pvt Ltd.
As Indian media blog the Hoot reports, “many senior journalists then suspected that media ownership was a matter of business strategy to establish the company’s credentials and also a bid to emerge as the mouthpiece of the major political party and perhaps get benefits in return.”
This view is supported by BBC journalist Sudhir Bhowmik, who says he left a job with the Saradha Group after he was told to “go soft on some leaders.”
It appears that Sen bought and built a media empire, allegedly on the behest of politicians of the ruling Trinamool Congress party, to play the part of a proganda-spinning machine for the government. This is no small feat – the net worth requirement of an applicant seeking to launch a news channel had been raised by the government from approximately $555,500 to $3,703,000, ostensibly to keep away “fly by night” operators away. But since Sen had already raised his financial portfolio, by dubious financial practises as we know now, he was able to take this step to becoming a media baron.
The curious case of the Saradha Group media empire gets murkier as the story unravels. In his letter to the CBI, Sen also claims to have been regularly blackmailed by Kunal Ghosh and Srinjoy Bose — two sitting Trinamool Congress members of the Upper House — into setting up his news channels. He also says he paid Ghosh $28,000 USD a month. Ghosh, now on the back foot, claims that he was simply a “salaried employee” and that he had “no authority to sign cheques.”
Sen’s use of the media empire to build political clout and protection is now being outlined by the national media. Influential members of West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress party have been closely aligned with the media group. But some politicians are now distancing themselves from the group, despite having benefited from positive propaganda from its media outlets.
In India, which now has over 800 private satellite channels, media houses often favour particular political parties, and many are actually directed owned by politicians themselves. Amid growing unease, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has asked all channels to furnish details of their shareholding patterns and equity share. Both the ministry and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) have been looking to ways to ensure pluralism and diversity in the Indian media, and curbing monopolistic growth. They feel tracking ownership patterns might be one way of finding out which groups and individuals are involved in unethical behaviour like corporate and political lobbying, biased analysis and forecast in the political arena and sensationalism of news. The ministry has made it clear that if it finds any media group in violation of its license agreement – including shareholding patterns – it is ready to cancel licenses.
Meanwhile, another unfortunate result of the scandal is that more than 1,400 journalists are out of jobs, while some of Sen’s Channel 10 employees have filed a complaint with the police over non-payment of salaries by Sen and Ghosh.
May 2nd, 2013
“Tunisians are clearly aware of the heavy responsibility they hold with regard to the future of democracy in the region. They do know that the entire world is watching carefully, that their success, or failure, will have a significant impact in the Arab world. It is here, indeed, that the democratic renewal of the Arab world is unfolding.”
– Journalist and human rights activist Sihem Bensedrine From the anthology, Fleeting Words, edited by Naziha Rjiba, published in cooperation with PEN Tunisia and Atlas Publications, with the support of Index on Censorship and IFEX.
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May 2nd, 2013
More than two years after mass protests in Egypt demanding “freedom” among other things, the media in Egypt, post revolution, is a lot more vibrant and freer than it was under toppled President Hosni Mubarak. But it is a sensational, tabloid and segmented media, reflecting the deep polarization in the country, Shahira Amin reports.
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May 2nd, 2013
The European Union on World Press Freedom Day should be celebrating continuing press freedom across its member states and championing press freedom abroad. But instead today there is less to celebrate and more cause for deep concern that the EU is failing to protect this core element of its democracies, Index on Censorship CEO Kirsty Hughes writes.
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April 16th, 2013
Poverty can restrict your access to basic human rights. This is neither a controversial nor revolutionary statement — it is clear that access to food and shelter is diminished by poverty. But poverty also blocks the less tangible rights many of us nonetheless take for granted, among them, the right to freedom of expression.
Poverty can be a very powerful barrier to accessing the abilities and tools to communicate your interests, ideas and needs, and as such, your rights to fully participate in society. This lack of access to freedom of expression manifests itself in a number of different areas, including in education, online and in the arts.
Poverty remains the biggest block to access to education, with young people from the poorest households globally being three times as likely to be out of school compared to the richest households. Direct costs connected to education, such as tuition fees, school materials, uniforms and transportation can constitute huge barriers to education. In addition to this, many poor people live in rural areas with fewer schools. For poor families there can also be significant opportunity costs connected to sending children to school rather than work. Among other things, this explains the higher levels of illiteracy among the poor globally. The damaging effect illiteracy has on your ability to express yourself, and subsequently fully participate in civil society, cannot be overstated. If you can’t read newspapers, write to your politicians or even fill out the necessary paperwork to apply for national identification documents to vote, your voice is severely limited. This is without even considering the many costs connected to the above.
But poverty doesn’t only block participation offline. The internet, mobile phones and other modern communication tools provide some of the biggest potential platforms to freedom of expression. New technology can be used to take part in debates, organise large-scale campaigns, monitor elections and hold those in power to account. However, the gap between rich and poor in this sector is big enough to warrant its own term — the digital divide. While developed states can boast 71.6 internet users per 100 inhabitants, the corresponding figure for developing states is only 21.1. On the African continent it drops 9.6/100. This phenomenon also exists within states, along gender, geographical social, and significantly, financial lines. The latest figures from the UK show that 15 per cent of the population has never used the Internet. Of those, 15 per cent cite equipment costs as a reason; while 14 per cent cite access costs. Tellingly, 5.7 per cent of those earning less than £200 per week had never used the internet, while the corresponding figures for those earning £600 and above is less than 1 per cent.
Less has been said about access to artistic freedom of expression among poor people in development terms. However, the Millennium Development Goal Achievement Fund has recognised access to culture and arts as a significant factor in combating poverty. A study by the European Commission also concluded that cultural activities can be instrumental in helping people overcome poverty and social exclusion, through “building skills and self-confidence” and “enhancing self-esteem and identity”. The same study stated the groups like the long-term unemployed and poor families are often excluded from access to and participation in arts and cultural activities. Barriers include basic costs, as well as the daily struggle of surviving leaving little spare time to participate in cultural activities.
This example cuts to the core of the problem. As explained above, poverty often means that you generally have fewer channels through which to communicate your interests on international, national or even local levels. While lack of freedom of expression is a violation of human rights in itself, this inability to raise your voice and speak for yourself can have devastating spill-over effects. As the UN Communication for Development UN Communication for Development panel pointed out in 2004, “challenges of poverty alleviation (…) must be designed and implemented with active participation of the communities in question”. How can the programmes meant to help the poor hope to effectively do that, if the poor themselves do not have a say in them? The lack of participation in policies that affect them and their communities means poor people are made vulnerable to misguided policy-making misguided policy-making . Or, as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights put it in a recent statement: “Lack of participation in decision-making is thus a defining feature and cause of poverty, rather than just its consequence.” The outcome is that the people with potentially the most to gain from freedom of expression are the ones who lack the access to it.
The idea that freedom of expression can help lift people out of poverty is has been recognised in development circles for decades, often masked in less politically charged development jargon like “voice”, “empowerment” and “participation”. But action based on this idea has left much to be desired. The Millennium Development Goals, widely recognised as the biggest global push to eradicate poverty, have thus far put very little focus on freedom of expression. The term isn’t included once in the MDG progress reports from 2005 to 2012.
However, there are reasons to be cautiously positive about recent progress on the matter. In 2012, the UN appointed a high-level panel to determine a new development agenda to take over from the MDGs when they “run out” in 2015. A number of actors involved in this process have signalled they would like an increased focus on human rights human rights, among other things calling for media freedom to be included in the agenda. The Institute of Development Studies also recently launched their Participate project which aims to “put cameras in the hands of the poor”, to have their own stories be part of the post-2015 development agenda. DFID, USAID and the Swedish government are launching Making All Voices Count, a project to help the global poor access new technology to help them participate in society and the political process. These are important steps, but the momentum must be maintained.
March 4th, 2013
Opposition protesters in Minsk in 2010. Kseniya Avimova | Demotix
Europe’s last dictatorship plans even tighter controls over citizens’ access to the digital world, Index shows in a new report (more…)
January 31st, 2013
A recently released report from a European Union group contains recommendations that would endanger media freedom, says Kirsty Hughes
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