Index is one of four public benefit organisations which have today made an urgent application to the Leveson Inquiry regarding Government ministers’ new status as ‘core participants’ in the Inquiry (more…)
In its annual report published on World Press Freedom Day (3 May), the National Syndicate for Tunisian Journalists (SNJT) announced that it had registered 60 physical assaults against journalists over the last year.
The syndicate criticised the “passivity and silence of the government” in response to the alarming increase in the number of assaults.
Multiple assaults were recorded in April alone. The most recent act of violence recorded took place on 30 April, when militants belonging to the Ennahda Movement, assaulted a journalist working for the collective blog Nawaat.
Ennahda is the largest party in Tunisia’s governing alliance and Emine M’tiraoui was attacked while he was at the headquarters of the party, after he conducted an interview with a party member.
In testimony published on Nawaat.org, M’tiraoui said:
at the lobby of the party’s headquarters there was a fight and a woman was screaming. I had my camera with me, and it seems that my assaulters thought that I was filming what was going on. Though I had my press card, with my name and the name of Nawaat on it, a young militant in the movement circulated that I was “a leftist dog, and a police officer loyal to one of Tunisia’s leftist figures.
The attack continued outside the party’s headquarters. “Outside I fell to the ground…there were police officers who witnessed the assaults but they did not interfere to stop [it]” he told Index.
In less than a month M’tiraoui has been assaulted twice. On 9 April, militants of another prominent political party in Tunisia, the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP) beat him while he was covering the party’s conference.
According to the estimates from Aymen Rezgui, member of the press syndicate’s executive board, one assault is registered every week. This increase in the number of assaults is due to “police’s laxity, and to the attempts of a number of political parties to incite public opinion against journalists,” Rezgui explains.
Leaders of Ennahda, which heads the three-party coalition government, have often expressed their dissatisfaction with the media’s coverage of the government. In an interview with Radio Express FM on 25 April, Rached Ghannouchi, Ennahda’s president, accused state television station, Wataniya 1 of having “an anti revolutionary and biased editorial line which rejoices at the defeat of the legitimate government”.
“There is a clear hostility towards the government” he added.
The SNJT, on the other hand, accuses the government of seeking to tighten control over the media sector. In its report the SNJT denounced attempts to force “the media sector to follow the political vision of the government”.
The twists and turns in the fate of “barefoot lawyer” Chen Guangcheng have held all in its thrall. Despite the vigilance of web censors, China’s netizens — particularly its social media users — have found inventive new ways of discussing the case.
China’s web nannies have been on high alert ever since Chen fled his home in his native Shandong province. To bypass the censors, netizens concocted nicknames for Chen, including “Shawshank” (a reference to the film, The Shawshank Redemption) and “Sunglasses” (denoting Chen’s trademark black sunglasses). But within days, these search terms were also blocked .
Tea Leaf Nation, a blog that “makes sense of China through social meda”, rounded up the memes and graphics that people used to express their support for Chen, including photos of girls on Weibo with “Free CGC” tacked onto their bare legs. The pictures are now likely to be deleted.
Blocking on Sina Weibo (China’s hugely popular version of Twitter) has been systematic in the Chen case. “Chaoyang Hospital” the facility where Chen received treatment, is now an illegal term. When you search for it, Weibo tells you that “according to the relevant regulations, search results cannot be shown.”
The authorities are also using soft blocking – Beijing-based film-maker and writer Charles Custer explored how Weibo hides content from users. For Tech in Asia Custer wrote:
What we found is that while Sina did not block “left of his own volition” as a search term … the company clearly took steps to smother discussion of the term by disabling the indexing of new posts containing the term. … While you can still search for posts with “left of his own volition,” you will only see results from before 16:50 this afternoon, which is approximately when Sina blocked the indexing.
Hong Kong University’s China Media Project, has been, as always, the most reliable source of information on what’s been censored. A post by Xiong Peiyun, a journalist and fellow of the centre, is on the Weibo ban list. Links to Xiong’s piece which criticised China for asking for an apology from the US for sheltering Chen in its embassy have been deleted.
Although overtaken by Chen case, China’s crackdown on “rumour-mongering” in the sensitive Bo Xilai affair continues. On 24 April it was reported that the Chinese government shut down at least four Sina Weibo accounts — “Li Delin,” “Guangzhou Wu Guanchong,” “Yangguang de yuanshi” and “Longyitian—945″ — and several reports claim people running these Weibo handles have disappeared.
The Financial Times report that Wu Guanchong was an entrepreneur and avid internet user based in Guangzhou who allegedly used Weibo to circulate rumors about a coup in Beijing. He has been missing for about a month, it is being claimed he was taken away at the end of March by officials from the capital.
Meanwhile, when one searches on Weibo in Chinese for Li Delin, a financial journalist who also blogged extensively on the case, the following notice appears:
Recently, some lawless individuals have used Sina microblog to make up and spread rumors for no reason, which has had a bad effect. They are now being dealt with by Public Security according to the law.
There were a few comments on Weibo about these notices. A student called Zhang Shaoyan wrote:
This [notice] made me think of how our textbooks had described the Kuomintang [Chinese Nationalist Party]. It’s been eighty years, but now the mountains are on our own heads.
Zhang’s comparison of the tactics of the ruling party with the Kuomintang (defeated by the Communist Party during the Chinese civil war) is hardly original. There was a reason he felt so strongly: one of his microblogs had just been deleted.
Cross-posted at Hacked Off
Peter Hill was editor of the Daily Express for seven years, from the end of 2003 to early 2011. Among his claims to fame is that he edited the newspaper throughout the Madeleine McCann affair in 2007-8, overseeing coverage that led to a £550,000 libel pay-out by the group and to grovelling front-page apologies.
Before he became its editor the Express had made its mark in the Motorman files, with seven of its journalists listed by the Information Commissioner as having employed the private investigator Steve Whittamore 36 times to carry out searches or inquiries.
But when Hill appeared before the Leveson inquiry in January, he did so after writing in a sworn statement: “I am not aware of ever having used a private investigator at the Daily Express.” Giving evidence under oath, he also declared: “I didn’t follow any of those practices. The regime completely changed when I became the editor.”
Another answer was less categorical, however. Hill was asked: “Is it your evidence that a number of people left, and therefore, because they left, you could be sure that private investigators were no longer being used? Or is it your evidence that you have no idea at all as to whether private investigators were ever used?” He replied: “I have no idea.”
Consider now the evidence to the inquiry of Nicole Patterson, the Express group’s legal chief. She said that after 2005 (and therefore when Hill was in charge at the Express) the papers had made use of no fewer than five companies in the field of data acquisition, of which one was Whittamore’s firm, JJ Services. In 2005 alone, she revealed, the papers spent £110,700 with these five firms, and though she said she saw no evidence of illegality it is not clear how closely she looked.
Besides answering questions at the inquiry, Patterson submitted documents giving details of the use of private investigators and search agencies by the Express papers. Those documents have not been made public, though some were displayed on screens at the hearings and seen by reporters.
The veteran investigative reporter Mark Hosenball has been able to piece together some details of these transactions in an article for Reuters. Notable among these is the case of ‘P Wilby’.
Peter Wilby is a former editor of the Independent on Sunday and the New Statesman and is now an award-winning comment writer. On 17 September 2007, in an article for the Guardian about the McCann case, he referred to the Daily Express as “a hopeless newspaper that couldn’t tell you the time of day”.
A cheap shot, you might say, but no more. Yet it appears to have had consequences, for according to Hosenball the Patterson documents “show that in September 2007 the Express group paid £963.50 to JJ Services [Whittamore] for information on ‘P Wilby’. This is an apparent reference to Peter Wilby. . .”
“According to the records,” Hosenball continued, “the payment was made shortly after Wilby published an article in the Guardian castigating British newspapers, including the Daily Express, for excesses in their coverage of the saga of Madeleine McCann. . .”
Wilby himself has written about this and is not inclined to make a fuss, but on the basis of Patterson’s public evidence we can say that £963,50 must have been a relatively large payment. Most payments to Whittamore and others in this period were for less than £100, she said. In other evidence it emerged that in 2007 Whittamore charged a daily rate of £240, so £960 would have neatly bought four whole days of investigating time, with the £3.50 added on for stationery perhaps.
If ‘P Wilby’ is indeed Peter Wilby (and it would be a remarkable coincidence if two people called P Wilby crossed the path of the Express in those same few days in 2007), then what we have here is a national newspaper commissioning a private investigator (and convicted criminal) to do four days work, or the equivalent in value, on a distinguished journalist.
Stop and think about that. The Express trades on criticism, frequently dishing out abuse worse than Wilby’s and often in a meaner spirit. The paper would say it has a right to do so. But what happens to someone who criticises the Express? It seems the critic gets investigated, and what could be the objective of such an investigation if not to find some means of demeaning or silencing him?
The paper had the right to criticise, in short, but no one had the right to criticise the paper.
Is there any evidence that the Express took such grave exception to Wilby’s jibe? It so happens that there is. On 19 September 2007, two days after the article appeared, the Guardian’s Media Monkey gossip column reported the following:
‘The Guardian has been banned from the offices of the Daily Express after editor Peter Hill blew his top over a column by Peter Wilby in Monday’s MediaGuardian section. . . Mr Hill has responded by banning the morning delivery of 18 copies of the Guardian to the Express offices on the banks of the Thames near Tower Bridge.” Monkey’s man on the inside explained: “He was deeply offended by a thoughtless remark by Peter Wilby, especially as the latter had met him only a couple of weeks previously and had been perfectly cordial. . .”
So this is what we know: on 17 September 2007 Wilby had a go at the Express in print; on 19 September Hill was reported to be so “deeply offended” that he banned the Guardian from the Express offices; ‘shortly after’ the Wilby jibe, someone at the Express commissioned Whittamore to carry out almost £1,000 worth of work on Wilby.
Two questions leap to mind. First, what was Whittamore commissioned to do? No article appeared in the paper subsequently to give any clue. Could he or an employee of his have spent four days engaged in entirely innocent inquiries about Wilby? By Patterson’s account the Express only employed investigators to do jobs journalists would not normally do, so we can presumably rule out a trawl of Wilby’s past journalism or research for a profile article that was never published.
We can also rule out a four-day search for Wilby’s contact details, since those can be found in the published telephone directory. It is an extraordinary thought (though we know it happened at News International), but is it possible that, for £240 a day, Wilby was placed under surveillance?
The other question is, who at the Express did the commissioning? It can’t have been Peter Hill since he is the man who wrote in a sworn statement: “I am not aware of ever having used a private investigator at the Daily Express.” Hill also had “no idea” whether his subordinates used them, so presumably it was one of them – just as it must have been subordinates who continued to commission work from Whittamore, a convicted criminal, right up to 30 July 2010.
Will we ever know the answers to these two questions? Probably not in this part of the Leveson inquiry, where the caravan has moved on. Perhaps it’s a job for a private investigator.
Read more about Steve Whittamore and the Motorman files here.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London and is a member of Hacked Off. He tweets at @BrianCathcart