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.
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.
If you ever imagined that, over time, British journalism would inevitably adjust to the society it serves by becoming less white and less middle class, now is probably the time to abandon that idea.
For a few exciting years it looked as though improvement might be on the way, but sharp increases in university fees will surely put paid to that. Like it or not, for at least another generation your news and current affairs will continue to come to you through that white, middle-class filter.
The window of hope that is now closing was opened by the universities, which over the past 20 years quietly took over responsibility for most journalism education after the big news organisations, national and regional, cut down or shut down their training schemes to save money.
At first the media studies departments did the teaching, but now universities teach journalism as a subject in its own right, often at both undergraduate and MA levels. This transformation has been almost entirely state-funded, which means the news industry pulled off the clever trick of nationalising its own training.
But if this change has given employers a free, trained talent pool (they ask for their applicants to be “newsroom-ready”, like so many supermarket chickens), it has also had the potential to bring valuable long-term change to the industry.
For one thing, universities teach students to think about journalism as well as do it; they teach about the ethics, responsibilities, history, politics and social function of the job – never high priorities when the industry was training its own. Call me an idealist, but I think that could only improve the news culture in this country.
For another, the universities have operated open, transparent recruitment and admissions policies which gave applicants from ethnic minorities and from poorer backgrounds a far better chance than before of getting an education in journalism.
There are drawbacks. Experience of the workplace is important in journalism education, as was recognised in the old sandwich courses. Universities can’t provide that themselves, or at least they can’t provide enough of it, and the result is the journalism work experience phenomenon, a powerful filter that halts the progress of many who can’t afford to work for several months for no pay.
None the less, university journalism departments have been quietly turning out able, independent-minded, thoughtful graduates who, though they are by no means a perfect reflection of the society they live in, collectively reflect it far, far better than the industry itself does. In other words, more people from poor backgrounds, more people from the ethnic minorities, more disabled people, more women…
The idealist in me fondly imagines this generation, over time, moving through the system and helping to change the way that British society sees and understands itself.
Of all the professions, journalism is surely among the most vulnerable when it comes to the kind of touch cost-benefit analysis that school leavers and parents will have to do in a world of higher fees. Undeniably, the news industry is in existential crisis: yes, it offers thrilling new possibilities, but it is distinctly short on security.
In this environment, whatever Vince Cable and Nick Clegg may say, poorer students — by which I mean students who are not middle class — are more likely to back away than risk the big debts that will accompany a journalism degree.
The next generation of journalists, therefore, will probably have just the same social profile as the generation currently supplying us with news, even though the country around us will have changed.
It reminds me of those generals in the Crimean War whose mindset equipped them to fight only in the way that Wellington had fought Napoleon 40 years earlier. They made a terrible hash of it.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University London.
The drug war continues to challenge the ways in which news and stories are disseminated in Mexico. While the newsmedia in many regions of this country work under the extreme censorship, organized crime has begun to taken it upon themselves to create news, by posting it on YouTube.
That was what happened last July when traffickers kidnapped four journalists and refused to release them until a local television channel aired a video that showed the director of the local prison worked with a competing drug gang. The video had been placed earlier on YouTube.
Today, Mexico´s media is abuzz because of yesterday morning´s release of a video in which a lawyer from Ciudad Juarez, Mario Angel Gonzalez Rodriguez, confesses that he and his sister, Patricia Gonzalez, the former state attorney general in the embattled state of Cihuahua (Ciudad Juarez), were on the payroll of the Cartel de Juarez. The video shows Rodriguez, who was kidnapped from his office a few days ago, surrounded by armed men in military garb and with face masks (a la Iraq). He claims the siblings ordered a number of high profile murders, including that of Armando Rodriguez, aka Choco, the journalist for the local daily El Diario de Juarez, murdered in 2008.
Legal experts have asked the government to investigate the veracity of the accusations. Hector Gonzalez Mocken, of the National Confederation of Lawyers said the video is a police issue and that the former attorney general should be investigated, without assuming that the allegations are true.
Rather than clearing the air, the video raises many questions which can only cause more uncertainty in the embattled city of Ciudad Juarez (which today encompasses 20 per cent of all the gangland slayings in the country) and Mexico as a whole. Do the armed men belong to paramilitary groups? Do they work for the Cartel de Sinaloa, which is today challenging the Juarez Cartel for the territory of Ciudad Juarez? (This city stands next to one of the most profitable US —Mexico border crosspoints, with roads that connect it to both the eastern and western coasts in the United States.) Are the cartel henchmen that well equipped—AK 47s, military uniforms and boots? If so, it illustrates not just their cartels power but their increasingly militaristic ambitions.
The release of the video shows how important a free and safe media is to a society. In an upcoming report my organisation, The Fundacion Mexicana de Periodismo de Investigation (MEPI) reveals that local media in Ciudad Juarez is only airing two or three stories out of ten dealing with narco-related violence. This even include investigations. No newspaper in Ciudad Juarez could give itself the luxury of investigating the charges alleged in the video, even though they are incendiary.
