The retrial of Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad has been postponed to 14 December, making this the fifth time his case has been rescheduled. Maikel, who has been on hunger strike for over 100 days, was sentenced to three years in prison by a military court on charges of “insulting the armed forces” and “spreading false news” in a blog post published last March.
Six media offices have been attacked, and 16 journalists have been threatened and assaulted in Iraqi Kurdistan during widespread riots. The offices of a number of media organisations owned by opposition group the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU) were set on fire. KIU offices in the cities of Dohuk, Zakho, and Simel were also attacked. Local reports stated that between six and 10 KIU journalists had been arrested since 2 December.
Zimbabwean police stormed the offices of a daily newspaper, and arrested one of it’s journalists last week. Xolisani Ncube of Daily News was arrested on December 2, in connection with an article about a government minister that appeared in the paper last month. Newspaper editor, Stanely Gama handed himself over to the police after being summoned for the same investigation. Police sources said it is likely the pair will be tried for criminal defamation following the article, “Chombo brags about riches”, in which they said Ingatius Chombo had bragged about his wealth.
The new boss of CCTV, China’s state TV network, Hu Zhanfan, says it like it is.
He believes Chinese journalists should first and foremost be the Chinese government’s mouthpiece and those that don’t play ball won’t go far.
“The first social responsibility and professional ethic of media staff should be understanding their role clearly and be a good mouthpiece.”
Hu, a former newspaper editor, made these comments several months ago, but they only started causing a stir among Chinese web users over the weekend when the original Xinhua News report was posted on Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging site.
One web user compared Hu to Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels.
Below are pasted some of Hu’s comments from that Xinhua report, translated by the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project.
“A number of news workers have not defined their own role in terms of the propaganda work of the Party, but rather have defined themselves as journalism professionals, and this is a fundamentally erroneous role definition. Strengthening education in the Marxist View of Journalism and raising the quality and character of news teams is not just very necessary, it is a matter of extreme urgency.
“Concerning social responsibility and professional ethics, editor-in-chief Hu Zhanfan believes that the first and foremost social responsibility [of journalists] is to serve well as a mouthpiece tool. This is the most core content of the Marxist View of Journalism, and it is the most fundamental of principles.”