1 Nov 2010 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features
Today (Nov 1) marks two years since the arrest of Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan in his parents’ home in Tehran. 
Index on Censorship joins in condemnation of Iran’s treatment of Derakhshan, sentenced to 19 and a half years for his writing
Index on Censorship has joined with ARTICLE 19, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE), Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and PEN Canada to express dismay at the sentence of 19 and a half years handed down to blogger Hossein Derakhshan. Although the prosecutor’s call for the death penalty was not approved, the sentence against Hossein Derakhshan represents a serious violation of Iranian obligations under international law. It is clear that Derakhshan, charged with cooperating with hostile countries, spreading propaganda and insulting religious figures, was sentenced for merely enjoying the right to freedom of expression.
Reports from former cellmates indicate that Derakhshan has been tortured while in prison and subjected to harsh interrogations. Index on Censorship, ARTICLE 19, CJFE, CPJ and PEN Canada believe that Derakhshan remains at risk for as long as he is in prison, and that the extreme length of the sentence adds to the danger that he faces. Derakhshan has been held in Evin prison for almost two years, but his case only went to trial last summer.
The 19 and a half year prison sentence was announced on the conservative website Mashreghnews.ir this morning. The sentence also includes several fines – €30,750, US $2,900, and £200.
The free speech groups call on the Iranian government to release Derakhshan immediately and meet its commitment to protect basic human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of expression. The groups also ask the international community to continue to hold Iran to its obligations and to support Iranian bloggers, journalists and writers to do their work without fear of imprisonment or reprisal.
Prison is no place for Hossein Derakhshan or for the dozens of other writers, journalists, academics and bloggers who continue to languish in Iran’s jails.
Sign a petition to free the blogfather
1 Nov 2010 | Uncategorized
Foreign news coverage is in steep decline in the national press and we are turning our backs on the rest of the world. That, in a sentence, is the message of a simple and impressive study published today by the Media Standards Trust.
“Shrinking World” compares four national dailies over a given week in 1979, 1989, 1999 and 2009 and finds a 40 per cent drop in the number of international news stories published. In 1979, on average, foreign news took up one-fifth of a daily paper; in 2009 the figure is 11 per cent.
Editors won’t like this because it makes them look lazy, cheap and dumb. They will either ignore it, or they will have a go at the trust (‘Who are these people anyway?”) or they will look for little holes in its methodology.
But the report is shocking and the declines are far, far steeper than I for one had expected. You might think, for example, that wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would have boosted the 2009 figures; well the truth is that they did, but the effect was only to raise them above even more appalling depths.
I gather that one newspaper executive, asked about these low levels of coverage of events abroad, remarked that his staff would write about China if only there were more celebrities in China. Heaven help us.
As the veteran Daily Mail foreign correspondent Harry Edgington points out, we in Britain are used to the idea that Americans are ignorant of the world because their news media are so insular. That, we tell ourselves, is why their politics are so xenophobic and why, for example, they could so easily be persuaded to link Iraq with 9/11.
Well that beam is now in our eye. Why are the British still so comically/tragically un-European, despite nearly 40 years of EU membership? Well, maybe it is because they aren’t told anything about other Europeans that isn’t written in London by people with little or no understanding of what they are describing.
The trust didn’t explore the content of the reporting, but my bet is that, of the rump of foreign journalism that survives, the biggest slice is about America (where they speak English and have lots of celebrities) while much of the rest deals with wars and disasters. What sort of world view is that?
And don’t let’s kid ourselves that this is just an old media problem. The Mail, Guardian, Times, Sun, Telegraph, Mirror and so forth remain the dominant organs of news in this country both in print and online. The general public is not reading Reuters online every day, nor is it dabbling in Le Monde or the Washington Post, or even the Drudge Report and Perez Hilton.
And those papers shape the broadcast news agenda. Sky and ITN (with the exception of C4 news) provide foreign coverage which is overwhelmingly America-plus-disasters too. Only the BBC (which the Murdoch/Mail press naturally hate with a passion) stands up for a wider world view, though even it is normally led by the big papers.
Editors responding to Shrinking World may plead (if they are unusually frank) that it’s the readers’ fault, that people just aren’t interested in what happens in Egypt or Russia or France. They may also plead that it’s all too expensive: they can’t afford foreign bureaux any more. These are the counsels of failure. Journalists and editors are supposed to provide some kind of meaningful reflection of the real world: they are not supposed to hide in some cheap, shiny corner of it.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University London, he tweets @BrianCathcart
29 Oct 2010 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features
Political uncertainty pushes the government to roll recent free speech gains and muzzle independent voices. Ashraf Khalil asks, will Facebook be next?
(more…)
29 Oct 2010 | Egypt
These are uncertain times in the Arab world’s most populous nation. President Hosni Mubarak is 82, fresh from major gall bladder surgery and in uncertain health. There’s a parliamentary election coming next month, a crucial presidential vote next year and a general sense of uncertainty about everything.
It’s an unfamiliar feeling in a country where politics is generally plodding, stage-managed and extremely predictable. The latest evidence of that uncertainty: a multi-level government push to tighten its control of information.
The past month has witnessed a number of incidents that analysts and activists say amount to a comprehensive effort to roll back limits on freedom of expression and muzzle independent voices.
First came the abrupt cancellation of two popular public affairs television talkshows, one of them featuring maverick journalist Ibrahim Eissa. Then came Eissa’s abrupt firing as editor in chief of the daily newspaper Al-Dostour. Eissa was fired by the paper’s brand new owners, just days after prophetically writing that the government would begin targeting troublesome journalists more extensively.
Blogger Baheyya, an anonymous but deeply respected commentator on the Egyptian political scene, wrote at the time that, “The regime’s goal is clear: to control the flow of political information at an exceptionally sensitive time, limiting the public’s exposure to alternative constructions of political reality.”
Eissa himself said in a television interview (in Arabic here) that the government “requires total silence” and “a return to where we were in 2004” before the explosion in independent media and the efforts of the Kefaya movement succeeded in pushing through longstanding redlines.
Within days came more government actions. The broadcast licenses of 12 satellite channels, most of them religiously themed—were cancelled. A government statement declared that the channels were guilty of “inciting religious hatred” or selling unlicensed medical products. Information minister Annas Al-Fiqi ominously described the moves as “corrective measures.”
A second government decree effectively restricted the ability of satellite news channels to do live broadcasts from the field.
Now there’s concern that the government will turn its attention to Facebook, the social networking platform that has become an effective tools for activists to connect, disseminate information and organise protests. Guests on a recent state television talk show railed against Facebook as a danger to domestic stability.
“We need to prevent problems, strikes and vandalism in the country by regulating it,” said one guest.
Commentor Ossama Diab, writing in the Guardian said, “The recent media crackdown — and the talk of ‘regulating’ Facebook in Egypt — is an indicator that the regime does not have the slightest intention of playing the political game fairly and freely.”
Ironically, the current campaign takes place at the same time that Egypt is being credited with an overall improvement in press freedom. The organisation Reporters Without Borders released its annual press freedom index, last week, moving Egypt up 16 spots to 127.
