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Morocco’s on-again off-again ban on the Al Jazeera satellite news channel is apparently on again. The kingdom is famously touchy about certain issues — last year it banned a magazine for publishing an opinion poll about King Mohammed II’s popularity. The poll actually showed a 91 per cent approval rating, but the palace felt it was disrespectful to even ask the question.
This time around, there doesn’t seem to be one specific incident that prompted the latest Al Jazeera ban. Communications minister Khalid Naciri, in announcing the ban, said the channel’s editorial line, “systematically tarnishes Morocco’s image,” whatever that means, and accused it of “transmitting a caricature of Moroccan reality.”
One news report quoted an anonymous Moroccan government official as saying the regime was reacting “to the way Al Jazeera handles the issues of Islamists and Western Sahara.” The 2003 Casablanca bombings prompted a sweeping crackdown on fundamentalist Muslim groups that continues to this day. Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, was annexed by Morocco in the mid-70s and remains home to a vibrant separatist movement.
Turkey has once again banned YouTube after the site refused to remove footage linked to a political sex scandal. Access to the site had already been blocked since 2008 over videos that made fun of Turkey’s venerated founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. That ban was lifted just last week, but within days a new 30-month ban was levied over a video showing the country’s main opposition leader Deniz Baykal in a romantic hotel room tryst with a female staffer. Baykal resigned in May over the scandal. Here’s a link to a (safe for work) excerpt from the video in question.
From the self-censorship file, Egypt’s most prominent modern novelist, Alaa Aswany, is working to PREVENT one of his books from being made available in Hebrew. An Israeli research center translated The Yacoubian Building (an excellent read by the way) against Aswany’s will in the interest, they said, of “expanding cultural awareness”. Aswany, like many Egyptian writers and intellectuals, wants no part of what he considers “normalisation” with Israel until there’s a fair resolution to the Palestinian issue. Aswany, by the way, recently announced he was giving up writing his regular column in the independent daily Al-Shorouk. The reason: the government, as part of its ongoing press crackdown, was raiding and shutting down unrelated businesses owned by Shorouk owner Ibrahim Al-Muallem to pressure him to tone down criticisms by Aswany and other columnists. Also worth reading is the Guardian’s always perceptive Brian Whitaker, here he points out one of the ways Egypt’s government controls information: by monopolising statistics.
In Libya, the government has shut down the weekly Oea newspaper. Coverage of the incident in a Qatari newspaper (in Arabic here) pins the ban to a recent editorial that, “claimed that the government had failed to handle the problem of corruption”. The twist: the paper is partially controlled by Said Al-Islam Qaddhafi, son of the Libya’s leader Col. Muammar Qaddhafi. The paper was already banned for six months earlier this year and only resumed normal publication in July.
In Lebanon, the country’s General Security office censored a five-minute scene from a recent play. The scene in question dealt a little too flippantly with Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The play’s Shia writers claim they meant no disrespect to Nasrallah and say they are mystified by the decision. Lebanon is known as a bastion of comparative liberalism in the Middle East, but the General Security office in the Ministry of Interior still has broad powers to ban works of art that could upset the country’s delicate political sensitivities.
Courtesy of the +972 blog, here’s a useful guide to the political line of the major Israeli newspapers, for those seeking to unravel the often bewildering complexities of Israeli politics.
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.
It’s not going well for maverick, boundary-pushing journalists this month.
In Morocco edgy magazine Nichane closed its doors, with the publisher claiming it was the victim of an advertising boycott ordered by the royal palace.
In Syria, a young female blogger who was mysteriously arrested 10 months ago, has officially been accused of being a spy for an unnamed foreign power. It remains unclear whether Tal al-Mallohi’s arrest or the espionage accusation has anything to do with her blogging activity.
Several journalists are facing jail time in Turkey, and the murder of a prominent journalist three years ago remains unresolved with no convictions.
In Saudi Arabia, the religious police have ominously started training on how to monitor Facebook, Twitter and other digital forms of social media. The Saudis, along with fellow Gulf monarchy the United Arab Emirates, continue to block the Blackberry messaging service.
Finally in Egypt Al-Dostour newspaper publisher Ibrahim Eissa, Egypt’s best and most provocative political columnist, was abruptly pushed out of his job and potentially blackballed.
There are two national Egyptian elections on the horizon — parliamentary next month and a crucial presidential vote next year. The authorities seem to be tightening the screws in preparation. The latest sign: new restrictions on SMS text messaging, which is frequently used as a mobilisation tool by activists. Independent newspaper Al Masry Al Youm (disclosure, I work for its English language edition) speculated that the new restrictions would,
hinder the logistical capabilities of Egypt’s political opposition, which has come to depend on SMS messaging to mobilise supporters for public protests and demonstrations.
A government spokesman’s priceless response? “We are not making life difficult. We are making life organized, that is all.”
The very next day, the exact same telecommunications regulatory agency struck again. This time it moved to establish firmer control over all live television news broadcasts from Egypt.
It’s not going well for maverick, boundary-pushing journalists this month.
In Morocco edgy magazine Nichane closed its doors, with the publisher claiming it was the victim of an advertising boycott ordered by the royal palace.
In Syria, a young female blogger who was mysteriously arrested 10 months ago, has officially been accused of being a spy for an unnamed foreign power. It remains unclear whether Tal al-Mallohi’s arrest or the espionage accusation has anything to do with her blogging activity.
Several journalists are facing jail time in Turkey, and the murder of a prominent journalist three years ago remains unresolved with no convictions.
Finally in Egypt Al-Dostour newspaper publisher Ibrahim Eissa, Egypt’s best and most provocative political columnist, was abruptly pushed out of his job and potentially blackballed.
There are two national Egyptian elections on the horizon — parliamentary next month and a crucial presidential vote next year. The authorities seem to be tightening the screws in preparation. The latest sign: new restrictions on SMS text messaging, which is frequently used as a mobilisation tool by activists. Independent newspaper Al Masry Al Youm (disclosure, I work for its English language edition) speculated that the new restrictions would,
hinder the logistical capabilities of Egypt’s political opposition, which has come to depend on SMS messaging to mobilise supporters for public protests and demonstrations.
A government spokesman’s priceless response? “We are not making life difficult. We are making life organized, that is all.”
The very next day, the exact same telecommunications regulatory agency struck again. This time it moved to establish firmer control over all live television news broadcasts from Egypt.
In Saudi Arabia, the religious police have ominously started training on how to monitor Facebook, Twitter and other digital forms of social media. The Saudis, along with fellow Gulf monarchy the United Arab Emirates, continue to block the Blackberry messaging service.