21 Mar 2012 | Russia
Opposition activists have sued Russian television station NTV after the channel aired the documentary “Anatomy of Protest”, which claimed people were paid to participate in recent mass protest rallies.
Eleven years ago thousands of people gathered in Moscow in support of Russian private NTV channel, protesting against state-owned Gazprom’s subsidiary — Gazprom Media Holding — buying it from media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky. He had faced pressure from Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin to sell NTV (as well as “Echo of Moscow” radio station). That rally didn’t influence the transaction; NTV was passed into the hands of Gazprom-Media, which later fell under control of Yury Kovalchuk who is considered a close friend of Putin.
Eleven years have passed and Vladimir Putin has returned to power, ignoring mass protests against his third presidential run. Now NTV is the focus of another rally. This time some 300 people gathered near Ostankino TV tower on Sunday, protesting against NTV policy and particularly the documentary, which was aired twice last week suggesting people received money and cookies for protesting against Vladimir Putin.
Many of the protesters held placards reading “NTV lies”, flowers and old broken televisions “to mark NTV’s funeral as mass media”. Dozens of people were arrested, including opposition leaders Sergey Udaltsov and Boris Nemtsov. All were released by the following morning.
The arrests angered many, with complaints on NTV’s Facebook page, and “NTV Lies” hashtag trending on Twitter.
The Democratic Choice opposition movement has filed two lawsuits against NTV. One is for libel — the movement is demanding NTV withdraw statements in the documentary about opposition leaders hiring people to attend rallies and aiming to arrange provocations and bloody revolution in Russia.
The other lawsuit relates to Democratic Choice authors’ rights — the documentary included a video showing citizens of Kenya attending a rally in support of Vladimir Putin, who didn’t seem to understand the Russian language and could not explain at all why they supported Putin.
“Democratic Choice” activists claim the video was shot by them to show that Putin’s assessments of how many people actually supported him on rallies were controversial. The NTV documentary claimed that the Kenyans interviewed might have been hired by opposition activists.
A libel lawsuit against NTV was filed by politician Boris Nadezhdin, and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov has called for a boycott of all NTV programmes. Bloggers have called on advertisers including Proсter & Gamble to pull the plug on the company. The company responded, saying it respects freedom of expression, but prefers to stay out of politics and doesn’t see itself as a party in this conflict.
Expert magazine editor-in-chief Valery Fadeev, who appeared in the NTV documentary, said his words were taken out of context. He added that not only his magazine, but the whole Expert publishing house is ending any cooperation with NTV.
Gazprom Media Holding denied the allegations, issuing a statement from the group head Nikolay Senkevich.
Senkevich said that NTV “covers each aspect of social life” and that calls to boycott the channel go against democratic principles. Andrey Isaev of Putin’s United Russia party called the opposition reaction to the documentary “hysterical”.
Russia’s journalists are divided by the controversial documentary. To some, working on NTV is still seen as a normal journalistic activity, as far as it doesn’t concern making Kremlin propaganda movies about Russian opposition. To others, it is no longer acceptable.
21 Mar 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
The crime editor of the Times has said the “chilling effect” of the Leveson Inquiry and the Metropolitan police’s “internal clampdown” has led to there being “virtually no social contact with officers”.
“In the current climate, if you arranged to meet an officer you’d be looking over your shoulder the whole time,” Sean O’Neill told the Inquiry this morning.
He expressed his fear that building up a relationship of trust with contacts would be “seriously inhibited” if it were impossible to meet them for coffee, noting that he had “bought officers and staff cups of coffee, pints of beer, lunches and evening meals”.
He emphasised the need for crime correspondents to be able to talk freely and openly with officers. “You’re in this game not just for five minutes; you need to talk to people for years and years and years,” he said.
In his written evidence, O’Neill added that the Met’s institutional instinct was to be “closed, defensive and secretive”, adding that such an attitude “is reflected in a tense relationship with the media.”
He told the Inquiry: “the last time I met an officer we met a very, very long way from Scotland Yard because he was so nervous abut meeting me and that anyone would see him,” adding that the officer in question was “perfectly honourable”.
O’Neill also slammed the Filkin Report into press-police relations as “patronising and ultimately dangerous for future accountability of the police”. He compared a passage of the report to “an East German Ministry of Information manual”, arguing that the document has “already created a climate of fear in which police officers —who may want to pass on information that is in the public but not the corporate interest — are afraid to talk to the press.”
He added that report was insulting to female reporters, saying that it implied crime correspondents were “a bunch of women in short skirts flirting”.
“An aggressive and inquisitive press is one of the mechanisms society has for holding the police to account and contact between journalists and officers is just one of the ways we do that,” O’Neill wrote in his witness statement.
“Allowing chief officers to clamp down in a draconian manner on the flow of information, as Filkin recommends, would be a retrograde step.”
O’Neill said he felt now was the time for more information and scrutiny around policing and more open channels of communication.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
20 Mar 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
Crime reporters across the regional and national press have expressed fears that contact between press and police will be restricted further in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry.
Highlighting the current climate, Tim Gordon of the South Wales Echo revealed that one of his reporters was told that Gwent police were “tightening up” rules in place for dealing with the media due to the Inquiry and the recent Filkin Report into press-police relations.
He added he was “concerned” that Gwent police had announced that their officers could not talk to the media unless they had been given prior permission from their press office. He described the difficulty in getting information from official channels, noting that the force’s press office was closed on weekends.
“I would much prefer that we could move forward trusting each other,” Gordon said, ” that my reporters could build and develop relationships with police officers on a professional basis, so there’s no fear or favour granted on either side, but that the information is free-flowing.”
“I would much prefer if the police were encouraged to give as much information as they possibly could,” he added.
Similar concerns were voiced at the Inquiry last week, with the Guardian’s Sandra Laville lamenting what she called an “over-reaction” by the Metropolitan police in response to the Inquiry, and that “open lines of communication, which have been there for many years, are being closed down”.
Gordon also had reservations about suggestions made by Elizabeth Filkin that contact between reporters and police officers be recorded. “My fear with a written record,” Gordon said, “is that it already suggests something is wrong with talking to a journalist.”
His view was shared by Wolverhampton Express and Star Editor Adrian Faber, who questioned whether or not what he called a “codification” would necessarily make police officers “more open”.
He said recording contact would lead to an officer “slightly looking over your shoulder and saying ‘should I be saying this?'”.
Faber added that such a measure “would lead to extra dimension that isn’t necessary locally”, noting that the regional press operates on a basis of trust with the communities they serve — a theme also raised by Gordon. “If we don’t have their trust we can’t go back to them,” he said.
Sunday Mirror crime correspondent Justin Penrose added that there was now a “state of paralysis” in police-press relations, noting that police officers are less forthcoming or willing to talk to the media.
Tom Pettifor of the Daily Mirror echoed this, saying there may be “more reticence” among officers to talk to him if he did not go through a force’s press office, and that “informal contact” was now more difficult.
Logging press-police contact, in Pettifor’s view, “is obviously not going to eliminate the problem of corruption”, but would “freeze up” the information flow.
The Inquiry also heard from Metropolitan police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe, who replaced Sir Paul Stephenson last summer following his resignation amid speculation over the Met’s links to News International after the phone hacking scandal. Hogan-Howe conceded that public confidence in the Met had been “damaged” and he accordingly had to “set the boundary high” in terms of press-police relationships.
“I’d rather be criticised for setting the bar too high than too low,” he said, adding later that his aim is to build a “positive” relationship with the press, but accepted there might be “restrictions” when crime was being investigated.
He praised press coverage of the murder of schoolboy Rhys Jones in Liverpool in 2007. While he said the press interest was at times “challenging”, it ultimately led to more witnesses coming forward.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
20 Mar 2012 | Middle East and North Africa
It is very difficult to imagine what life is like for Ali Abdulemam, the blogger turned fugitive. How can anyone hide for a year on an island that is 55 kilometres by 18 kilometres, and that has turned into a police state, where the state conducts nightly raids on homes, and where the secret police are everywhere?
As we mark the one year anniversary of Abdulemam’s forced disappearance, the online community needs to do more to raise the plight of one of the pioneers of blogging in the Arab world. His work over a decade ago in establishing one of the foremost political forums in the country, bahrainonline.org, paved the way for the biggest revolution in the history of the country, and he is the one now paying the price. He is also paying the price for using his real name, but in targeting Abdulemam, the government has now created multiple anonymous Abdulemams.
Abdulemam was sentenced in absentia to 15 years imprisonment on charges of attempting to overthrow the monarchy. A bizarre charge to make against someone who spent hours in coffee shops with a laptop smoking a sheesha, flipping through Ali Wardi’s books, listening to Iraqi music or mingling with the blogger community of Cairo and Belarus. There is a reason why he is considered one of the most dangerous men in the country and one of the biggest threats to the state, and that reason is that his forum offered dissidents a voice. During his second arrest, his torturers, digitally illiterate at the time, forced him to take down the site. Abdulmam’s colleagues, thankfully managed to restore the site.
He would not have known or even expected this at the time from his prison cell, but his forum was pivotal in the call for a Day of Rage on 14 February, and in fact, it was there that the Pearl Roundabout was proposed as gathering point, and was subsequently occupied. It should have been no surprise then, that when the uprisings took place in Egypt, Bahrain and Syria, historically active bloggers such as Ala’a Abd El Fattah, Ali Abdulemam and Razzan Ghazawi, would be top of the list of the most wanted people in their country.
We hope that Ali Abdulemam is still alive. He left his home just hours before it was raided last March, leaving behind his wallet and passport, his friends and family have not heard or seen him since. It is extremely worrying that he has not contacted anyone for so long. Even if he is still alive, family have grave concerns about his mental well-being.
I was one of the last people who spoke to Ali just hours before he disappeared last March when the Saudi troops invaded Bahrain. I needed his advice. Worried about what was going to happen to the country, and to us, we decided to prepare for imminent arrest. Do we sit at home and wait for the masked men, or leave? Abdulemam was not going to take the risk. He had already spent 6 months in jail where he was tortured, humiliated and completely shielded from the outside world. Did Abdulemam have a lucky escape or did he inadvertently enter a dark abyss much worse than we can know or imagine? None of us know. All we can do is pray and ask, where is Ali?
Ala’a Shehabi is a British-born economics lecturer, activist and writer in Bahrain. She has a PhD from Imperial College London, and is a former policy analyst at Rand Europe. She is also a founding member of BahrainWatch.org and the Bahrain Rehabilitation and Anti-Violence Organisation
