28 Jun 16 | Magazine, Magazine Contents, mobile, Volume 45.02 Summer 2016
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Index on Censorship has dedicated its milestone 250th issue to exploring the increasing threats to reporters worldwide. Its special report, Truth in Danger, Danger in Truth: Journalists Under Fire and Under Pressure, is out now.”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]
Highlights include Lindsey Hilsum, writing about her friend and colleague, the murdered war reporter Marie Colvin, and asking whether journalists should still be covering war zones. Stephen Grey looks at the difficulties of protecting sources in an era of mass surveillance. Valeria Costa-Kostritsky shows how Europe’s journalists are being silenced by accusations that their work threatens national security.
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Kaya Genç interviews Turkey’s threatened investigative journalists, and Steven Borowiec lifts the lid on the cosy relationships inside Japan’s press clubs. Plus, the inside track on what it is really like to be a local reporter in Syria and Eritrea. Also in this issue: the late Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell explores colonialism in Africa in an exclusive play extract; Jemimah Steinfeld interviews China’s most famous political cartoonist; Irene Caselli writes about the controversies and censorship of Latin America’s soap operas; and Norwegian musician Moddi tells how hate mail sparked an album of music that had been silenced.
The 250th cover is by Ben Jennings. Plus there are cartoons and illustrations by Martin Rowson, Brian John Spencer, Sam Darlow and Chinese cartoonist Rebel Pepper.
You can order your copy here, or take out a digital subscription via Exact Editions. Copies are also available at the BFI, the Serpentine Gallery, MagCulture, (London), News from Nowhere (Liverpool), Home (Manchester) and on Amazon. Each magazine sale helps Index on Censorship continue its fight for free expression worldwide.
Index on Censorship magazine was started in 1972 and remains the only global magazine dedicated to free expression. It has produced 250 issues, with contributors including Samuel Beckett, Gabriel García Marquéz, Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and many more.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”SPECIAL REPORT: DANGER IN TRUTH, TRUTH IN DANGER” css=”.vc_custom_1483444455583{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 15px !important;padding-bottom: 15px !important;border-bottom-color: #455560 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;}”][vc_column_text]
Journalists under fire and under pressure
Editorial: Risky business – Rachael Jolley on why journalists around the world face increasing threats
Behind the lines – Lindsey Hilsum asks if reporters should still be heading into war zones
We are journalists, not terrorists – Valeria Costa-Kostritsky looks at how reporters around Europe are being silenced by accusations that their work threatens national security
Code of silence – Cristina Marconi shows how Italy’s press treads carefully between threats from the mafia and defamation laws from fascist times
Facing the front line – Laura Silvia Battaglia gives the inside track on safety training for Iraqi journalists
Giving up on the graft and the grind – Jean-Paul Marthoz says journalists are failing to cover difficult stories
Risking reputations – Fred Searle on how young UK writers fear “churnalism” will cost their jobs
Inside Syria’s war – Hazza Al-Adnan shows the extreme dangers faced by local reporters
Living in fear for reporting on terror – Ismail Einashe interviews a Kenyan journalist who has gone into hiding
The life of a state journalist in Eritrea – Abraham T. Zere on what it’s really like to work at a highly censored government newspaper
Smothering South African reporting – Carien Du Plessis asks if racism accusations and Twitter mobs are being used to stop truthful coverage at election time
Writing with a bodyguard – Catalina Lobo-Guerrero explores Colombia’s state protection unit, which has supported journalists in danger for 16 years
Taliban warning ramps up risk to Kabul’s reporters – Caroline Lees recalls safer days working in Afghanistan and looks at journalists’ challenges today
Writers of wrongs – Steven Borowiec lifts the lid on cosy relationships inside Japan’s press clubs
The Arab Spring snaps back – Rohan Jayasekera assesses the state of the media after the revolution
Shooting the messengers – Duncan Tucker reports on the women investigating sex-trafficking in Mexico
Is your secret safe with me? – Stephen Grey looks at the difficulties of protecting sources in an age of mass surveillance
Stripsearch cartoon – Martin Rowson depicts a fat-cat politician quashing questions
Scoops and troops – Kaya Genç interviews Turkey’s struggling investigative reporters
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”IN FOCUS” css=”.vc_custom_1481731813613{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 15px !important;padding-bottom: 15px !important;border-bottom-color: #455560 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;}”][vc_column_text]
Rebel with a cause – Jemimah Steinfeld speaks to China’s most famous political cartoonist
Soap operas get whitewashed – Irene Caselli offers the lowdown on censorship and controversy in Latin America’s telenovelas
Are ad-blockers killing the media? – Speigel Online’s Matthias Streitz in a head-to-head debate with Privacy International’s Richard Tynan
Publishing protest, secrets and stories – Louis Blom-Cooper looks back on 250 issues of Index on Censorship magazine
Songs that sting – Norwegian musician Moddi explains how hate mail inspired his album of censored music
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”CULTURE” css=”.vc_custom_1481731777861{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 15px !important;padding-bottom: 15px !important;border-bottom-color: #455560 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;}”][vc_column_text]
A world away from Wallander – An exclusive extract of a play by late Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell
“I’m not prepared to give up my words” – Norman Manea introduces Matei Visniec, a surreal Romanian play where rats rule and humans are forced to relinquish language
Posting into the future – An extract from Oleh Shynkarenko’s futuristic new novel, inspired by Facebook updates during Ukraine’s Maidan Square protests
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”COLUMNS” css=”.vc_custom_1481732124093{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 15px !important;padding-bottom: 15px !important;border-bottom-color: #455560 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;}”][vc_column_text]
Index around the world: Josie Timms recaps the What A Liberty! youth project
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”END NOTE” css=”.vc_custom_1481880278935{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 15px !important;padding-bottom: 15px !important;border-bottom-color: #455560 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;}”][vc_column_text]
The lost art of letters – Vicky Baker looks at the power of written correspondence and asks if email can ever be the same
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”SUBSCRIBE” css=”.vc_custom_1481736449684{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;padding-bottom: 15px !important;border-bottom-color: #455560 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;}”][vc_column_text]Index on Censorship magazine was started in 1972 and remains the only global magazine dedicated to free expression. Past contributors include Samuel Beckett, Gabriel García Marquéz, Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and many more.[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”76572″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]In print or online. Order a print edition here or take out a digital subscription via Exact Editions.
Copies are also available at the BFI, the Serpentine Gallery, MagCulture, (London), News from Nowhere (Liverpool), Home (Manchester), Calton Books (Glasgow) and on Amazon. Each magazine sale helps Index on Censorship continue its fight for free expression worldwide.
SUBSCRIBE NOW[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row]
27 Oct 15 | Europe and Central Asia, mobile, News and features, Romania
Romania has a lot of high-calibre journalists to its name. However, many media outlets are now fighting to survive while maintaining professional standards due to judicial investigations, political scandals and struggles with high debt loads. This is according to the authors of The Men Who Bit the (Watch) Dogs, which explores the media landscape in the country.
The report focuses on transparency and ownership of the media — particularly the most influential medium, television, over the past 25 years — from post-communist enthusiasm to today’s chaotic mix of business models.
While journalists in the early 1990s were independent of the pressures that marked the Soviet age, most of the 1,200 newspapers that were established at the time didn’t take off. Speaking to Index on Censorship, one of two Romanian academics behind the report, Manuela Preoteasa from think tank The Centre for Media Transparency, explains that at the time, well-known international media companies just weren’t interested in quality journalism.
“As we demonstrated in the report, the market was kept half-closed during the early 90s, which means that it was not open to foreign investors,” Preoteasa says. As the report highlights, the “market that was inhospitable to the promotion of professional journalism” and so “foreign investors had to focus solely on commercial success”.
The ethos of the era seemed to be: “We don’t sell our country to foreigners.” Foreign investors could not own a licence without a Romanian partner, and apart from state-owned channels, no other private entity could apply. For nine years, only local licences for each of the 41 counties and Bucharest were available.
With ownership of the media confined a handful of tycoons, many outsiders would have lost interest. “Show me a serious TV investor who would have been willing to invest in such an unfriendly market,” Preoteasa says. “I strongly believe that the media market was intentionally kept closed to serious investors.”
Print was different. “The history of the last decade shows that print media could not exist on its own, but only as part of a conglomerate, and the conglomerates were formed around TV stations,” Preoteasa explains. “That is why the TV industry has such a strong influence.”
Economically, many of these media outlets relied on state advertising. Some TV stations — already benefiting from debt cancellations and debt rescheduling — started to receive public money as state-owned companies began to advertise. The scheme was introduced by the government led by former Prime Minister Adrian Năstase (2000-2004) and was soon adopted by local politicians and businessmen.
Romania’s unfriendly business environment, high taxes, bureaucracy and a chronic economic instability also challenged the viability of commercial models within the media, the report says. Other challenges include “the lack of a clear distinction between information and opinion and the absence of marketing- and sales-related knowledge”.
These days, the media industry faces serious legal problems that involve either the owners of the main media groups or the groups themselves. Media owners such as Adrian Sârbu, Dan Voiculescu, Sorin Ovidiu Vântu, Sebastian Ghiţă and Dinu Patriciu have all been on trial or are under various criminal investigations.
In a young democracy, the media should play a key role in holding the powerful to account. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case in Romania.
So are there any signs of hope? “I believe the initiative will come from the telecom industry,” Preoteasa says. As to whether the telecom industry will swallow the existent media or would it invent a new one, the answer lies somewhere in between. “I am sure the online media started to have a say and the pressure from the interactive medium is high,” she says, offering an open suggestion: “Someone should look carefully at what young people are looking for and perhaps this will reveal the answer about what might come next.”
This article was posted on 27 October 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
Mapping Media Freedom
Click on the bubbles to view reports or double-click to zoom in on specific regions. The full site can be accessed at https://mappingmediafreedom.org/
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28 Aug 15 | Mapping Media Freedom, mobile, News and features, Romania
Vasile Luca (Photo: Zoltan Sipos)
Vasile Luca, a veteran journalist working at Radio Cluj, a Romanian public radio station based in Cluj-Napoca, was fired in May 2015 as a result of a disciplinary committee hearing.
Two months before his termination, Luca, who had been with the station for 25 years, went public with internal documents showing that a station employee, Debreczeni Hajnalka, who was also the press secretary for the head of a political party, was not actually completing any work despite an unusually high salary. Luca filed a complaint at the public prosecutor’s office and, after media coverage, Hajnalka resigned from the station. The station refused to disclose what Hajnalka’s job title had been.
At the time of the resignation, Hajnalka said her role had been to coordinate media strategies, internal communication between public stations and media monitoring. She denied that she had broken any laws or acted inappropriately.
“The case of Debreczeni Hajnalka was surely not the sole reason for my dismissal”, Luca told Index during an interview. “However, after the Debreczeni scandal, there was a lot of pressure, and multiple phone calls were made because the party she works for, the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR), is very influential in the upper echelons of public radio”.
Luca had a long track record of conflicts with station management. He had previously documented illegalities and misuse of public funds at the radio station. In 2010, Luca was granted whistleblower status by Transparency International Romania after he gathered evidence that Florin Zaharescu, director of the station at the time, was embezzling funds.
Luca was subjected to his first disciplinary action in January 2015. Station management accused him of being the author of caricatures of the radio station’s directors. The images were found in the office he shared with six other journalists.
“When Ovidiu Miculescu, the general director of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company, was showing his solidarity with the murdered editors of Charlie Hebdo at the French Embassy, editor-in-chief at Radio Cluj, Bogdan Rosca, was trying to impose disciplinary actions against me for a couple of ironic quotes and some pictures of a bristly kitten”, the journalist said.
Along with the “bristly kitten”, the disciplinary committee also weighed a private letter the journalist had written to Vasile Dancu, a local politician and sociologist. In the letter, Luca criticised Dancu for supporting Rosca, his former student, calling him “incompetent”, “unprepared” and “resentful”.
The committee also considered a letter that Luca wrote to Miculescu that criticised Rosca’s managerial performance by citing research that showed that the radio station’s audience numbers plummeted after Rosca took over in February 2014.
As a result of the hearing, Luca’s salary was cut by 10 per cent for one month.
Immediately after the first disciplinary hearing, the editor-in-chief filed a complaint against Luca accusing him of collaborating with a privately-owned television station while he was on sick leave.
“My work ended well before I took a couple of months of sick leave. Even the disciplinary committee had to admit that I had management’s approval for a one-year collaboration with Argo TV which began in April 2013”, Luca said.
Months after the series of documentaries were shot and aired, the television station uploaded the documentary onto their website. The web publication date coincided with the period Luca was on leave. He also appeared on an Argo TV talk show during his leave.
“Luca had an appearance on television as an editor he could not account for”, Attila Szász, the head of the disciplinary committee told Index. “We did not recommend he be dismissed. The dismissal was the decision of the general director”.
According to Luca, the hearing of the disciplinary committee was unlawful because he was not granted the right to be represented by a lawyer. In a written request sent to the committee just before the hearing, Luca pointed out that the exact time and place of the hearing was not set and when they finally made the decision, his lawyer was unable to be present.
Luca said he did not receive copies of the medical records used as evidence against him and, he believes, that the process did not meet standards required by Romanian labour law. As a whistleblower, Luca said, there are legal requirements for transparency that were not met. For example, the time and location of the hearings were supposed to be publicised three days in advance and members of the press should have been granted access.
He has filed a legal complaint and a judge will decide whether he has grounds to challenge the disciplinary actions.
Mapping Media Freedom
Click on the bubbles to view reports or double-click to zoom in on specific regions. The full site can be accessed at https://mappingmediafreedom.org/
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Related:
• Romania: Whistleblowing journalist fired by public radio station (28 May 2015)
• Romania: 52 reports since May 2014
This article was published at indexoncensorship.org on 28/8/2015
08 Oct 14 | Mapping Media Freedom, News and features, Politics and Society, Romania
In November, Romanians are set to head to the polls to elect a new president from a field of 14 candidates during two rounds of polling. But one important participant, the National Audiovisual Council of Romania (CNA), will be sidelined as it loses its legally mandated quorum.
According to the CNA’s website, its role is to “ensure that Romania’s TV and radio stations operate in an environment of free speech, responsibility and competitiveness.”
While the first round of voting is set to get underway on 2 November, the CNA’s quorum of eight will be halved on 4 November when four members of the council step down at the end of their terms. If no candidate wins a majority in the first poll, the top candidates will compete in a second round on 16 Nov.
“Without a quorum, the CNA cannot function, and thus it cannot sanction the eventual abuses of television or radio stations during the election campaign,” said Narcisa Iorga, a CNA board member. Iorga believes politicians will benefit from this, as it is in their best interests to have an inactive CNA. Television stations will also use the situation in their favor, though they are already accustomed to breaking the audiovisual legislation, she added.
According to some members of the council, it could be January before the CNA regains its quorum and the ability to make decisions on issuing sanctions, well after the election campaign and the two rounds of voting.
The CNA is Romania’s only regulatory body overseeing television and radio programmes. In its watchdog role, the regulator ensures that legislation governing programming is respected. It’s a key role in a country where television is the dominant media among the population. Political parties and interest groups use the country’s live television shows to get their message across to the public.
By law, the CNA is supposed to have 11 board members. To maintain a quorum, eight members need to be present at the proceedings. The members, who have a mandate of six years, are nominated by the senate (three members), the chamber of deputies (three), the president (two), the government (three), and are confirmed by the parliament.
This is where politics comes into play: the parliament, controlled by a coalition led by the party of Victor Ponta, the prime minister who is the best-placed candidate at the presidential elections, did not vote to confirm the new members before the parliamentary vacation began. Therefore in less than a month, the CNA will have only seven members, one member short of the quorum.
Not having enough members to be able to take decisions is nothing new for the regulatory body. When there are politically sensitive issues on the table, some of its members usually go on a vacation.
For example, on 9 October a number of complaints against the Antena 3 news television will be debated, but it is more than likely that will be no quorum. Two CNA members are currently on vacation, and another two just announced their absence, wrote Iorga on her Facebook wall.
Media violation reports from mediafreedom.ushahidi.com
Penal code change could ensnare journalists
Falun Gong practitioner detained during interview
Journalists denied access to government building
Director of public television receives “warnings”
Jurnalul National editor assaulted and threatened
This article was published on 8 Oct 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
