02 Jul 13 | Volume 42.02 Summer 2013
The current issue of Index on Censorship magazine features a special report on the shifting world power balance and the implications for freedom of expression.
“The multipolar world can be one where universal human rights and freedom of expression are kept firmly on the agenda, and increasingly respected, if these democracies hold themselves and each other to account — and are held to account — at home and internationally,” write Index CEO Kirsty Hughes and London School of Economics professor Saul Estrin.
The issue also looks at press freedom in Italy, Burma, Mexico, Columbia and India as well as violence against journalists and arrests of those who expose uncomfortable truths. “Worldwide, on average only one in ten cases of murders of journalists ends in a conviction,” says Guy Berger, author of an article on the threats and dangers journalists encounter around the world. Instead of being reassured that the rule of law will be upheld, “the take-away lesson for everyone is: journalists can be killed with impunity”.
From the current issue
Global view: Who has freedom of expression? | The multipolar challenge to free expression | Censorship: The problem child of Burma’s dictatorship | News in monochrome: Journalism in India
Also in this issue:
- John Lloyd on how party politics have skewed Italian journalism
- Yavuz Baydar says Turkey’s media moguls must defend free speech
- Htoo Lwin Myo tells what was it is like to work as a writer in Burma
- Bharat Bhushan on “paid-for” news and the absence of marginal voices in the Indian media
- Lawrence Freedman and Benedict Wilkinson on the opportunities — and limits — of online activism
- A new play from Turkmenistani writer-in-exile Farid Tukhbatullin, whose wit offers a glimpse of life inside one of the world’s most closed and repressive countries.
- Find out more here | Subscribe now
Did you know you can read the magazine on your iPhone/iPad? Download for FREE then upgrade to a 30 day subscription for only £1.79.
13 May 13 | Americas
In Argentina, media organizations take sides: for or against the government. Graciela Mochkofsky tells the story behind the turf war between President Fernández de Kirchner and Grupo Clarín.
Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner Photo: Demotix
Argentina has an extraordinary number of newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations. Greater Buenos Aires, the largest urban centre where 13.5 million people live has 18 newspapers, 37 TV channels (five analogue and 32 digital), seven news channels, and 550 AM and FM radio stations. Does this mean that it is a thriving market, with highly educated, enlightened audiences, where the development of the media is directly linked to prosperity?
No. The reason Argentina boasts a huge proliferation of media organisations is strictly political.
(more…)
09 Jun 09 | Index Index, minipost
Monthly magazine L’Essentiel has been suspended for disturbing public order, after the cover page reportedly insulted the President. Read more here
15 Aug 80 | Magazine Editions, Volume 9.04 August 1980
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
USSR, the August 1980 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
By Michael Scammell
Ever since Index on Censorship started publication eight years ago (and of course for many decades before that) the Soviet Union has been the world’s leading exponent of techniques of censorship and of total control over the communications media. The importance of its example and the extent of its influence, as one of the world’s two superpowers, is impossible to overestimate. Within its vast empire and its many satellites, from Cuba to Vietnam, its model is applied totally, with only minor regional variations. In many parts of the third world, its attractiveness as a shortcut for those with their hands on the levers of power has proved virtually irresistible.
Throughout these eight years the Soviet government’s control of the media and of its citizens’ access to them has if anything increased, so that it is almost as great now as during Stalin’s rule — the Khrushchev ‘ thaw’ has been completely eradicated. At the same time, a policy of controlled deportation, carefully managed emigration and secret police surveillance has led to a situation where a good half of the Soviet Union’s best writers (including its greatest) have been either driven abroad or forced into official silence, together with more than half of its best artists and many scientists, social scientists, critics, ballet dancers, film makers and other members of the intelligentsia.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_icon icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left” color=”black” size=”xl” align=”right”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]
Index has never forgotten that it came into existence as the result of an initiative by Soviet intellectuals (see Pavel Litvinov in Index on Censorship 1/1975), and it has repeatedly exposed the despotic grip in which the Soviet government holds the intellectual and spiritual life of its people.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
At the same time we have remained faithful to our progenitors’ request to cast our gaze equally on other parts of the world. Indeed we see it as part of our duty to demonstrate that in matters of censorship and despotism, General Pinochet and Mr Brezhnev, the Shah of Iran and Mr Husdk, have more in common than they have differences. Labels of ‘left’ and ‘right’, ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism ‘, are not so much meaningless in this context as positively misleading.
Although the Soviet Union has figured prominently in Index, we have never stood back to take a wider look at the comprehensive machinery of repression and control that has been perfected there. Even now, what we are offering is fragmentary and impressionistic – it would take a fat volume to cover the entire subject. But the holding of the Olympic Games in Moscow, and the attention that this will draw to Soviet society and Soviet achievement, offer an opportunity for Index to examine one of the most outstanding of those achievements, although not one that is widely advertised or thoroughly known.
In the following pages a variety of authors examines various aspects of that achievement. Many of them have lived most or all of their lives in the Soviet Union and know the system intimately from inside, others have closely studied the system from outside and describe what they have seen. Some describe how the mechanism works, others what the purpose of the mechanism is or the ways in which the mechanism is evaded and some free discussion achieved.
In all cases, as is customary with Index, readers are left to draw their own conclusions. They are invited to take this information and set it side by side with what they hear from elsewhere, particularly during the Olympic season. Properly understood, it should assist them to a better knowledge of the type of society in which the Olympic torch is being invited to burn in this summer of 1980.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”94484″ img_size=”full” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064227808532738″][vc_column_text]
A letter by Elie Sriegirov to US President Carter
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”94773″ img_size=”full” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064227508532389″][vc_column_text]
Pavel Litvinov writes about the complications in society in the USSR
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”94286″ img_size=”full” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064228208533458″][vc_column_text]
Letters to and from prisoners, and visits by relatives, are in effect
being blocked
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
