The health-related scientific research has developed Cialis Cialis online Cialis side effects

Should you be looking for just Alternative to viagra Buy viagra online from canada Strangely enough, the keyword Hgh in orange county california Injection sites for hgh

The device of your FDA approved anti-erectile Electronic Cigarette Electronic cigarette price dysfunction drug treatments discovered until finally time Levitra Online Buy Levitra

Millions of adult men suffer with impotence across the world. Online Casino Online Casino Even though many of them try and address it with Online Casino Online Casino

Any dude who suffers from impotence problems or Impotence problems is within Sildenafil Sildenafil research for top level impotence treatment method. Online Casino Online Casino You'll find lots of drugs that are Electronic Cigarettes Best mini electronic cigarettes

As we age and people Fast online payday loans Small pay day loans that you sustain our intimate effectiveness and Electronic Cigarette Usb car charger for electronic cigarette passthrough increase our interest in sex by itself. Through the Electronic Cigarette Electronic cigarette brands use of intimate motivators and libido enhancers we VigRX Plus VigRX

Acquire the best for perfect erectile dysfunction pharmaceutical, the Cialis Cialis most prevalent labels we discovered are Viagra, Cialis, and Tadalafil What does generic tadalafil look like same way to provide enough erection toughness essential for adequate sexual intercourse. Levitra Buy Levitra had created a erotic expertise together with Sildenafil citrato Sildenafil

Media Freedom

Latin America / Media Freedom / Uncategorized — 1 Comment
13
Jul 12

Press freedom in Ecuador: it’s not getting any better, but worse

Press freedom in Ecuador: its not getting any better, but worseSo far as Ecuador has had any recent coverage at all in the European media, it’s been about Julian Assange and his sudden flit to the Ecuadorean embassy in London to ask for political asylum. This may have served to distract from the latest extraordinary episode in President Rafael Correa’s war against the country’s news media (that’s the Prez above).

To judge by Google Analytics, very few of even my most faithful readers bother with my occasional posts about Ecuador. Even though I’m not an expert, I will keep recording developments when I can. It’s a living example of a truth often forgotten in the pampered, plural, media-saturated lands of Europe and America. It’s perfectly possible for progress in press freedom to be stopped and go backwards, particularly if the government concerned can be confident that few people are watching or care at all.

This is what Ecuador’s President Correa seems to believe. I’ll allow that he may have some reason to complain of his coverage. He’s one of the continent’s new group of radical presidents and the established centres of power, news media included, are not all sympathetic. But mounting a full scale assault on media freedoms with the aim of trying to insulate his government and office from scrutiny is a policy with two tiny, but nevertheless significant, weaknesses: it’s undemocratic and it won’t work.

Here’s the latest absurdity, as reported by the Global Post: a law designed to prevent news coverage having any political effect at all.

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Media Freedom / World — Comments Off
28
May 12

The takedown of The Spear: necessary maybe, but sad all the same

The takedown of The Spear: necessary maybe, but sad all the sameThe picture here has been causing a storm in South Africa and one of the country’s papers, the City Press of Johannesburg, has just been forced to remove it from its website. The image, by a South African artist Brett Murray, portrays South African president Jacob Zuma in the style of Soviet artists painting Lenin, but with one significant difference below the waist. (New readers start here).
The story can be told in two columns by the City Press’s editor Ferial Haffajee. At first she stood out against the bullying and the threats; then, fearful of the threats to her own staff and to the paper’s street sellers, she took the image off the site “out of care and fear”. As she writes, she was sick of the personal abuse. I can’t imagine that being a single, Muslim woman newspaper editor in South Africa is easy at the best of times (she was the first Coloured South African to edit a major paper). Threats of violence and abuse won decisively in this ugly time.

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Leveson / Media Freedom / Standards / UK Press — 2 Comments
30
Apr 12

Leveson: how to avoid the pitfalls of “better mousetrap” press regulation

Towards the end of next month, the Leveson Inquiry into the British press will turn from its current, revelatory phase about media relationships with politicians and address again the knotty question of regulating journalism.

The inquiry’s most basic dilemma hasn’t changed: how to prevent and discourage the wrongs which have occurred without tipping over into state control of the news media. When he has grown bored and irritated with an editor waffling vaguely about how things will be improved by a few light adjustments to the present rules, Lord Leveson usually asks one of two questions and sometimes both: what would you actually do? will what you suggest command public confidence? Next month will bring forth a slew of ideas for regulation designed to work better than the much-abused self-regulation of the past. Legal and media experts are busy putting the finishing touches to better mousetraps.

The problems of “toughening” regulation are much greater than supposed, as I’ve argued here (£). Not least because regulation deals with sorting out things that have already gone wrong. What the Leveson Inquiry should also be concentrating on is how to encourage, in the culture of newsrooms, good practice which lowers the odds that bad things will be done. It should also look at whether the issue of regulation isn’t as much a question of legal process as much as one of regulatory machinery. That is to say that contributory factor in the accumulation of problems and resentment has been the cost and delay of taking legal action over libel or invasion of privacy. In this article I suggest that there is a way to interlock the rules of both law and a regulator to create a powerful incentive for journalism to rely less on tricks and illegalities.

If journalists were offered fuller and more consistent public interest defences in both criminal and civil law, those defences could be made available only to news publishers or broadcasters who could demonstrate transparent and enforceable editorial integrity and standards. With that incentive, websites and papers (broadcasters are separately regulated) would need to organise regulation among themselves which would show that they deserved the protection of a public interest defence. Trivial, sloppy or bad journalism which can’t claim a public interest justification gets no protection; better journalism at least has that line of defence available. That strikes me as the best way round the knotty dilemma: incentives not state-backed regulation.

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Law / Media Freedom / Middle East — 1 Comment
13
Mar 12

The release of Nedim Sener in Turkey – did an international fuss work for once?

From time to time the authorities intent on locking up journalists have second thoughts and we should mark it when they do. So it was this week when a Turkish court released Nedim Sener and three other journalists arrested in the Oda TV case connected to the (allegedly enormous) “Ergenekon” conspiracy.

Sener and several colleagues had been held for a year and had been the focus of a noisy international campaign, led outside Turkey by the International Press Institute. It’s easy for organisations like IPI to believe that while it may be their duty to protest and lobby when journalists are put in the slammer because of the opinions they hold, the results of such campaigns tend all the same to be meagre. So celebrations are in order when it seems to work. Sener was arrested a year ago this month, named a Press Freedom Hero by IPI in June 2010 and released nine months later. You can’t prove the causal connection, but….

It certainly seems to have made a difference to Sener’s time in jail. IPI director Alison Bethel Mackenzie said yesterday that Sener and his wife “today mentioned over and over and over again the impact of the letters that poured in from all over the world from IPI members and supporters, as well as the letters that were sent on behalf of the IPI board of directors and, separately, from the World Press Freedom Heroes. He also said that he had heard that board members sent letters to Turkish embassies in their home countries. He was very moved by that.”

The Ergenekon conspiracy trials are likely to run for years. Sener and three others are due back in court in June; six more defendants, mostly journalists, are still in custody (a taste of the arguments generated here) . Hundreds of people have been arrested for what is routinely described as a “conspiracy” to bring down the governing Justice and Development (AK) party led by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. I am not an expert on Turkey and no doubt there are no doubt parts of this complex story that I’m liable to misunderstand. But when I see a government arresting hundreds of people and constantly enlarging the scope of what cannot possibly have been any kind of efficient “conspiracy” – simply because the numbers claimed are so large – a warning light goes off in my head. Isn’t the alleged existence of this vast, all-connected conspiracy a bit too convenient to be plausible? (It predates Sener’s arrest and centres on the murder of Sener’s friend Hrant Dink, but there’s an excellent essay by British Turkey expert Maureen Freely on the complex politics of journalism and free expression in the country’s “embattled half-democracy”.)

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Investigative / Media Freedom — 3 Comments
13
Feb 12

Ecuador’s President Correa and the press: it just goes on getting worse

I drew attention a week or two back to the unsavoury campaign of intimidation being waged by President Rafael Correa of Ecuador against journalists whose reporting and opinions he doesn’t like.

As a president with five years in post after his three predecessors were ejected without a voter ever being consulted, Correa has some success to his credit. But it seems to be going to his head. He has just won court judgements which fine two journalists a million dollars each for insulting the dignity of both the presidency and the country. The case details are laid out here. One of the journalists, Juan Carlos Calderón, described the judgement as “disproportionate, absurd and irrational”.

 

ADD YOUR COMMENT
China / Media Freedom — 1 Comment
07
Feb 12

The Chinese squeeze on Hong Kong’s press: my mistake

I drew attention yesterday to two changes of editors, one in India and one in Hong Kong, which I thought important. One conclusion I drew was almost certainly wrong.

In the case of the new editor of the South China Morning Post, I thought that the tone of the commentary I read on Wang Xiangwei was overwrought. It seemed to be assumed that because he was born on the mainland, he would be the creature of the regime in Beijing. But I was writing from superficial knowledge and I sent a link to a journalist friend in Hong Kong. He rapidly corrected my opinion. He is pessimistic about what will now happen, even if the state’s influence over the paper takes the form of a slow squeeze rather than any sudden stifling.

My friend wrote:

“I think you underestimate the ruthlessness and determination of the Communist Party and its United Front Department to influence and manipulate the media in HK. It is not using the Propaganda Department and (powers of) confiscation as it does in the mainland, but the ‘capitalist’ means, like takeovers, mergers, pressure and lobbying.

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
China / Media Freedom / South Asia — Comments Off
06
Feb 12

India and Hong Kong: two new editors to watch

I normally rely on Twitter to keep me up to date on developments in journalism round the world but, reliable as this normally is as a quick check on what’s happening, I missed two watershed moments in the east. One retirement and one appointment.

India and Hong Kong: two new editors to watch

N.Ram

The retirement was of the editor of The Hindu who had always styled himself N. Ram. Narasimhan Ram is 67, so his retirement was hardly a surprise. But he has been so closely identified with The Hindu’s stubborn qualities for so long that it would be natural if readers worried about the future direction of the paper. Dubious as I am about much of its political philosophy (Ram, like many of his generation, flirted with communism when young), The Hindu stands out as a newspaper which cares about quality. I was in India last year when the newspaper began publishing the American diplomatic cables passed to Wikileaks. I can’t share Ram’s reverential attitude to Julian Assange, but his paper’s handling of the Wikileaks material was exemplary both for its journalistic care and political impact. Those disclosures still reverberate in Delhi today.

But The Hindu’s business is under pressure: while India is one of the largest countries in the world where newspaper circulations are still rising, those are not the circulations of the English-language titles but of the Indian-language papers. Business pressures have been part of the complex intrigue which has been played out at the group’s headquarters in Chennai (for a flavour of the passions aroused see here and here). I can’t pretend to explain the ins and outs of this internecine family/corporate struggle. So I hope that Ram has handed over to successors who will preserve his legacy. The Hindu is an important benchmark of what Indian journalists can achieve in print.

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Law / Media Freedom — Comments Off
24
Jan 12

Attacking journalists in the original banana republic

Attacking journalists in the original banana republic

President Rafael Correa

When press freedom is deteriorating in a country, there’s often one unmistakable sign of that downward slide: the use by the government of criminal defamation laws.

There have been well-aired concerns about the attempts by the Hungarian and South African governments to curtail news media. Less attention has been devoted to the steadily worsening situation in Ecuador, the country which gave the world the phrase “banana republic”. They grow a lot of bananas, do not always change governments by election and now the news media are under attack.

Coups have removed and installed presidents regularly and in 2010 there was a what Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa called an attempted coup. Correa, a politician with a sense of drama, complained that he had been held prisoner in a hospital by striking policemen and had been rescued amid rioting and fighting by the army. The exact truth of the events remains disputed.

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
← Older Entries
Newer Entries →