15 Dec 14 | Awards, News and features, Turkey
Şanar Yurdatapan is a songwriter and composer who campaigns for freedom of expression, particularly against the prosecution of publishers in his home country, Turkey.
Yurdatapan won the 2002 Index award for Circumvention of Censorship, to his amusement this was the same year former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi won the award for Services to Censorship.
In 2013, Yurdatapan and Index met at the IFEX General Meeting and Strategy Conference, which he attended on behalf of Initiative for Freedom of Expression; he talked to Index about the Gezi Park protests which were going on at the time. Now, Yurdatapan speaks about the positive effects of international recognition.
Explore the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards
This article was posted on 15 Dec 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
16 Feb 11 | Index Index, minipost
The Italian police have seized the Savona e Ponente blog after it ran a satirical piece entitled “I want to kill Berlusconi”. Journalist Valeria Rossi heavily criticised the Italian prime minister, writing that: “You can’t feel guilty of wishing him death, because he’s not human: he’s an alien with incredible psychic powers.” The article condemns Berlusconi for his sexual affairs and abuse of power. He has been repeatedly accused of restricting press freedom in Italy.
08 Dec 10 | Uncategorized
Lucia Annunziata, one of Italy’s most renowned TV journalists, who famously took on Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi during a heated interview, took part in a lecture organised by the Italian Society of the London School of Economics last night.
Questioned about the future of freedom of expression in Italy, she disputed the widely held assumption that Italian journalists are limited in their power of speech. Annunziata argued that “being a journalist is deciding day by day what to write and what to say. Nobody ever prohibited me from doing that.” About the Italian national broadcaster she declared: “RAI have always been linked with politics and always will. When Berlusconi’s government will be replaced with a new one, they will have plenty of people who will sing for them just as well”. “There is no lack of freedom of expression in Italy”, she concluded.
RAI Berlin Correspondent Marco Varvello, who attended the event as well, took an altogether different stance on the issue. “Editorial policies have changed for the worse. You can say what you want, that’s true. But if you do it, you don’t know whether you will be asked to write or speak again next time. As a foreign correspondent, I can tell that there are some issues which are being totally ignored by Italian media”. Asked how long will it take for the media scenario in Italy to change: “I don’t know”, he stated. “Even if we take Berlusconi out of the picture, we now have this stigma. It will be very difficult to get rid of it.”
12 Feb 10 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
Prime minister Silvio Belusconi’s party has pushed through rules which will drastically circumscribe political content during the run-up to Italy’s regional elections. State broadcasters must now either accommodate over 30 political parties on their talk shows or be transferred away from their prime-time slots. Belusconi has previously attacked state television, claiming the programme Annozero was a ‘criminal use of public television’ when it interviewed the call-girl Belusconi had allegedly slept with. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) criticised Italy’s new rules as the latest ‘nail in the coffin of media freedom‘.
