Alphabet soup spells “Donald”
Take That star Howard Donald has seen a superinjunction against an ex-girlfriend lifted. Is this another nail in the coffin for these restrictive measures, asks Mark Lewis
(more…)
Making editors look lazy, cheap and dumb
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
Ups and downs: World Press Freedom Index 2010
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published its ninth annual World Press Freedom Index today, with a mixed bag of what secretary-general Jean François Julliard calls “welcome surprises” and “sombre realities”.
Six countries, all in Europe, share the top spot this year — Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland — described as the “engines of press freedom”. But over half of the European Union’s member states lie outside the top 20, with some significantly lower entries, such as Romania in 52nd place and Greece and Bulgaria tied at 70th. The report expresses grave concerns that the EU will lose its status as world leader on human rights issues if so many of its members continue to fall down the rankings.
The edges of Europe fared particularly badly this year; Ukraine (131st) and Turkey (138th) have fallen to “historically low” rankings, and despite a rise of 13 places, Russia remains in the worst 25 per cent of countries at 140th. It ranks lower than Zimbabwe, which continues to make steady — albeit fragile — progress, rising to 123rd.
At the very bottom of the table lie Eritrea, North Korea and Turkmenistan, as they have done since the index first began in 2002. Along with Yemen, China, Sudan, Syria, Burma and Iran, they makes up the group of worst offenders, characterised by “persecution of the media” and a “complete lack of news and information”. RSF says it is getting harder and harder to distinguish between these lowest ten countries, who continue to deteriorate. There are particular fears about the situation for journalists in Burma ahead of next month’s parliamentary election.
Another country creating cause for concern in the run-up to elections is Azerbaijan, falling six places to 152nd. Index on Censorship recently joined other organisations in a visit to Baku to assess the health of the country’s media. You can read about their findings in a joint mission report, ‘Free Expression under Attack: Azerbaijan’s Deteriorating Media Environment’, launching this Thursday, 28 October, 6.30 pm, at the Free Word Centre. Belarus, another country on which Index is campaigning, languishes at 154th.
It is worth noting, though, that relative press freedom rankings can only tell so much. Cuba, for example, has risen out of the bottom 20 countries for the first time, partly thanks to its release of 14 journalists and 22 activists this summer, but journalists still face censorship and repression “on a daily basis”. Similarly, countries such as South Korea and Gabon have climbed more than 20 places, only to return to the position they held before a particularly bad 2009. It seems, then, that the struggle for press freedom across the world must continue to be a “battle of vigilance”.
Free Microsoft licences to help combat censorship
Microsoft is extending its program of giving free software licences to non-profit organisations. The initiative was first applied to Russia, after it was discovered that authorities were using software piracy inquiries as a method of suppressing independent media outlets and advocacy groups. The program will now include 500,000 NGOs in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Prior to the announcement NGOs could only obtain a free licence if they were aware of the program and followed the necessary procedure. According to Microsoft’s official blog announcement, the unilateral licence will last until 2012.