04 May 11 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
At last night’s UNESCO’s 2011 World Press Freedom Day event, a distinguished panel examined the freedom to report in light of the Arab Spring.
One of the panelists was Shahira Amin, the brave Egyptian news anchor who quit in protest at Mubarak spin. She made it clear that the Arab Spring won’t change the situation on the ground for many local journalists. “The media in the Arab world has pretty much always been controlled by the state,” she said. “Autocratic regimes use state media to tighten their grip on power and this of course has been particularly true in the case of Egypt and Mubarak; even before Mubarak, Egypt has lived for 60 years under military rule.”
Amin had a stockpile of horrifying stories about the propaganda run by the Egyptian media. One tale in particular stood out. During the protests, one of the “independent” channels hosted a young girl, whose face was covered, who claimed she’d received training outside the country before joining the protests in Tahrir Square. It was later discovered that she was a producer working for that same channel. The level of control exercised over the country’s media was absolute, so how to transform the Egyptian media into a credible source of information?
Amin said: “[At] the start of the uprising the media in Egypt was in denial and ignored the protest. You would switch on the telly and find a programme on tourism to Sinai. Then the media attacked the protesters. In the final week of the protests there was outside pressure on the new government that Mubarak had put in place to free up the media and do away with censorship. Google executive Wael Ghonim, a founder of one of the Facebook groups who had summoned the protesters to Tahrir, was hosted on one of the independent channels and he told the story of how he had been blindfolded and locked up behind bars for 12 days for starting the uprising. That was a turning point in the revolution. The next day, the number of protesters more than doubled and this says a lot about the power of a free media.
But Egypt is a country where 40 per cent of the population live below the poverty line of two dollars a day. These people have no access to the internet, nor satellite channels. The state media is their main source of information. The day Mubarak fell, the media shifted 180 degrees — they backpedalled furiously, falling over themselves to be on the side of the revolution, but their credibility had already been lost. It will take a long time for them to regain public trust. And yes, they are now hosting opposition figures who weren’t allowed to appear before, but these are the same employees with the same mindset. There needs to be a complete change in recruitment policies and a restructure of editorial practices and training for journalists.”
“Flashback” Shahira Amin, the number two at Nile television, explains why she resigned from Egyptian state television. “I am on the people’s side, not the regime’s”
03 May 11 | Uncategorized
Freedom House’s annual Freedom of the Press Index, released Monday at World Press Freedom Day events in Washington, show that press freedoms are on the decline throughout the world as authoritarian regimes tighten their control over new media forms of communication and as worsening violence in countries like Mexico has pushed more journalists into self-censorship. (more…)
29 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
UNESCO will convene its annual World Press Freedom Day conference this weekend in Washington against the backdrop of rapidly evolving revolutions throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa that are changing long-held views of who’s in the media, how it uses technology and what access to information means.
The United States is hosting the conference — which Index on Censorship will attend and cover — for the first time, in conjunction with more than a hundred events internationally celebrating press freedom and focusing attention on the corners of the world where it does not yet exist.
“Until recently, when we were talking about freedom of expression and the media, we were talking also about monopolies and the concentration of ownership of some media,” UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova said in a conference call with attending media this week. “Now with new technology we have an entirely different picture.”
Even in the few months since UNESCO first unveiled plans for this year’s events, news around the world has dramatically altered the range of issues at stake. Bloggers are now jailed alongside professional journalists. New-media tools that have helped connect dissidents are now just as likely to be used to track and crack down on them by repressive regimes. Technology has made possible both more sophisticated firewalls and circumvention tools that can be funded and developed from afar. And social media sites have become a live source for worldwide news – but in a world where access to digital information can be blocked with the pull of a plug.
Millions of people around the world who possess neither television, nor computer, nor newspaper subscription are also now accessing information in the palm of their hands.
“In Africa, it’s well-known for a fact that they may not have electricity as widely as they have mobile phones,” Bokova said. “New technologies are not only changing the media landscape, they’re changing the way we look at teaching and all of our access to knowledge in general.”
The conference in Washington — focusing on “21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers” — will also examine censorship in the digital age and global access to the Internet. Imprisoned Iranian journalist Ahmad Zeidabadi will also be honored with the UNESCO Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. Zeidabadi has been in jail since mass protests following Iran’s 2009 disputed election first presaged the uprisings now sweeping the region.
“What we saw was the fact that one single person can make history with a kind of very direct impact on political developments,” Bokova said of events over the last three months that give this year’s World Press Freedom Day additional urgency. “Who would have thought some months ago that one single young unemployed Tunisian in the market in a small town, that his reaction would have such an enormous wave of revolutions and repercussions. It was exactly because of these of social media, these new technologies.”
Index will blog here throughout the discussion, but you can also follow along with Twitter hashtag #WPFD.
28 Apr 11 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost
Al-Jazeera suspended its Arabic services in Syria yesterday (27 April) in response to attacks on its staff and government restrictions. The authorities have pressured Syrian nationals into resigning from the organisation and have prevented journalists from entering and reporting in Daraa, the city where the Syrian uprising began on March 15. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, unknown assailants have attacked the Al-Jazeera offices with eggs and stones for the past three days. The events mirror those in Egypt, where Al-Jazeera journalists were also subject to abuse and intimidation.
