New York, July 12, 2023 – Two Bangladeshi social media outlets shuttered by authorities must be allowed to operate freely, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday, amid mounting indications of a pre-election campaign to silence critical voices.
On Sunday, June 25, the Chittagong district administration in southeast Bangladesh sealed the offices of the privately owned social media-based platforms CplusTV and C Vision and confiscated their equipment, according to a statement by Bangladeshi Journalists in International Media. The two outlets stand accused of “illegally operating without licenses.”
A person familiar with the case, who spoke to CPJ anonymously due to fear of reprisals, corroborated this account and alleged that the local authorities acted under the direct orders of Bangladesh’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
The outlets were being selectively targeted ahead of the country’s January 2024 national election due to their coverage of politics and human rights in Chittagong, this source added.
“Bangladesh authorities’ sealing of the offices of the social media-based news platforms CplusTV and C Vision and the seizure of their equipment are clearly selective targeting ahead of the upcoming January 2024 national election,” echoed Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director. “A free and fair election requires unhampered access to information. Authorities must allow both outlets to operate freely and without fear of reprisal.”
The targeting of CplusTV – which continues to broadcast – and C Vision appears to fit into a broader crackdown against media and other critical voices ahead of the polls.
Broadsheet Bengali-language newspaper The Dainik Dinkal stopped publishing in February after the quasi-judicial Bangladesh Press Council upheld a government suspension order.
On Monday, July 10, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina warned journalists not to publish news “that will malign the country’s image and hamper its ongoing advancement.”
Authorities shut down Chittagonian-language CplusTV’s office without any prior notice or written order, days before the Eid al-Adha holiday, the person familiar with the case said, adding that authorities did not provide a list of the items seized, contrary to legal requirements.
This source added that CplusTV, which has been active since 2016, is not required to register as an online media outlet under local regulations because it operates exclusively on social media and does not run through a cable operator. CplusTV filed two applications with the Chittagong district commissioner contesting the move, but has not received a response, the person said.
CplusTV continues to post on Facebook, where it has around 2.2 million followers, and on YouTube, where it has around 1.1 million subscribers.
Following CplusTV’s coverage of a gas crisis in Chittagong in May 2023, its owner and editor-in-chief Alamgir Apu was subjected to a smear campaign by state-aligned Bangladeshi media outlets, articles reviewed by CPJ show.
C Vision’s Bengali-language Facebook page, which has around 635,000 followers, last posted on June 24. C Vision did not respond to CPJ’s calls and messages requesting comment.
CPJ called and messaged Bangladesh’s Information Minister Hasan Mahmud for comment but received no reply.
Diyarbakır, July 11, 2023—In response to Tuesday’s opening of the trial of 17 Kurdish journalists and a media worker on terrorism charges in a court in Diyarbakır, Turkey, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued the following statement:
“Turkish authorities must immediately release the defendants and drop the terrorism charges, which are solely based on their journalistic work,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should also take necessary steps to ensure that pretrial arrest cannot be weaponized against the members of the press.”
The journalists and media worker were charged with membership in the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). They are employed by local ARİ, PEL, and PİYA production companies and produce Kurdish-focused shows and content, which the indictment alleged were propaganda for PKK. The government has designated PKK as a terrorist organization.
The defendants — 15 of whom have been under pretrial arrest for 13 months — have denied the charges and, if convicted, face up to 15 years imprisonment under Turkey’s anti-terrorism laws.
Junta officials are preparing to sue two independent media outlets, accusing them of not paying broadcasting fees imposed just before the military took power in a coup d’etat more than two years ago.
The Yangon offices of the Democratic Voice of Burma, or DVB, and the Mizzima news agencies were raided by junta security forces in March 2021 – a month after the Feb. 1, 2021, military coup d’etat.
The State Administrative Council, the official name of the military government, revoked the operating licenses of the outlets, which now operate online and underground.
The junta’s Ministry of Information announced the lawsuit on Saturday, saying they still must pay for using the state-owned Myanmar Radio and Television platform to air news and entertainment in the months before the military takeover.
According to the lawsuit, DVB owes a month’s fee of more than 20 million kyats, or about US$9,500, while Mizzima must pay 80 million kyats, or about US$38,000, for four months of services.
DVB and Mizzima told RFA on Monday that the lawsuit was illegal because it was brought by a junta that unlawfully seized power.
Mizzima News’ office in Thanlyin, Yangon, was raided by junta troops on Mar. 9, 2021, eight days after the military coup. Credit: Citizen journalist
‘Within minutes of the military coup’
That’s also why DVB doesn’t owe any fees to the junta, said Editor-in-chief Aye Chan Naing. Its broadcasting license contract was signed with a civilian government that was elected by the people, he said.
“We had to pay MRTV every three months,” he told RFA. “We were never late to pay. But within minutes of the military coup, our television channel was cut for exactly one month without any notice from them.”
Mizzima’s founder and chairman, Soe Myint, told RFA that the outlet would pay the bill if it could access its bank account, which had 90 million kyat (about US$42,000) when it was seized by the junta in March 2021.
He said he hasn’t received any emails or official paperwork about the lawsuit.
“If it is in an independent, judicially competent and safe situation, I am ready to defend this lawsuit in court at any time. Whether it is inside Myanmar or anywhere abroad,” he said. “I can present the fact that the military junta unlawfully seized my house and all my properties in any free and fair court of law.”
The junta has also charged seven Mizzima employees with violating Section 505(a) of Myanmar’s Penal Code, Soe Myint said. That part of the law pertains to the circulation of statements, rumors or reports with the intent to cause military officers to disregard or fail in their duties.
RFA attempted to contact junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for a response on the lawsuit, but his phone rang unanswered.
Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.
The death of a French teenager of African descent shot by police during a roadside confrontation has sparked public clashes with police and riots across France.
Coverage of the riots by Chinese language Twitter accounts are rife with misinformation accompanied by misleading videos not taken during the riots and fake images “corroborated” by other fake images.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) checked and disproved four such widely circulated stories about the riots.
In Depth
Are animals running wild on the streets?
An article publishedby Liu Hong, the former deputy editor-in-chief of the Chinese news outlet Huanqiu magazine, for the Wechat news column Jinri Toutiao on July 2 mentions that “several lions and elephants” were released from a zoo during the riots, without providing any visuals to support the claim.
A Jinri Toutiao article describing the riots in France. The title reads, “This is an ominous sign that all of Europe is now on edge.” Credit: dcreenshot taken from Jinri Toutiao
After running keyword searches for “riots in France” and “zoos” across both Twitter and Facebook, AFCL found several accounts making similar claims that included various videos as evidence. Two of the most widely circulated clips were of a zebra and lion escaping from the zoo. Image searches using screenshots taken from both videos provided no results due to poor image quality.
Chinese netizens on Twitter posted videos of animals escaping from the riots in France, including both a zebra (left) and a lion (right). Credit: screenshot from Twitter.
However, a follow-up search for related stories using the phrase “zebra escape france” showed that a similar video clip of the zebra was published in a report by the UK news outlet Daily Mail on April 13, 2020.
A keyword search revealed that a video released by the Daily Mail matches a clip purporting to show a zebra released during the recent riots. Credit: screenshot taken from Google
The report states that the zebra escaped from a zoo in the Paris suburb of Ormesson-sur-Marne during a COVID lockdown in 2020 before being filmed running on the road.
The clip circulating on Twitter is footage from the original Daily Mail video. Credit: screenshots from the Daily Mail and Twitter.
A separate video spread on Twitter and TikTok with the phrase “saint denis” in the title also purported to show lions let loose during the riots. AFCL searched Google using the phrase “saint denis lion” and found that a user had posted the same video on YouTube in 2020.
Search results showed that a video purportedly showing lions released during the recent riots across France was posted on YouTube three years ago. Credit: screenshot taken from YouTube
Despite the edited version of the video showing only the top half of the original video’s frame, both versions have an identical name of “mardi” located in the lower left frame. The two videos’ identical lighting, framing and content confirm that they come from the same source.
Comparing the similar sources of light in both videos proves that they come from the same source. Credit: creenshots taken from Twitter and YouTube.
Did armed French teenagers hijack a police car?
The same article on Jinri Toutiao that mentioned the animals also included a photo of armed youths driving a police car while holding a French flag, accompanied by a warning to all Chinese tourists in France to avoid areas already hit by the riots and to report any emergencies to the police.
This same photo was separately posted by a Chinese language Twitter account accompanied by a description that the protesters were armed with military weapons and had hijacked a police car during the course of the riots.
Copies of the same photo supposedly showing French teenagers hijacking a police car. On Jinri Toutiao (left) the caption tells Chinese tourists in France to take precautions and remain vigilant, while a Chinese netizen on Twitter (right) claims that the car was hijacked by youth armed with military weapons. Credit: creenshots taken from Jinri Toutiao and Twitter
Several accounts on the popular Chinese social media site Weibo also reposted the photo, claiming that the police have turned into bandits during the riots in France.
The photo of French youths hijacking a police car was also posted on Weibo. One of the post titles claims that the police in France have turned into bandits. Credit: screenshot from Google
After searching the photo through Google, AFCL found it had originally been posted online in January 2023, before the riots began. One of the results from the search was a link to the Chinese video sharing platform Douyin, where a suggested keyword “Athena movie” and a final search using the phrase found revealed that the photo was actually a still taken from the 2022 Netflix movie Athena.
Google search results show that the phrase “Athena film” appeared in the title of a video posted on Douyin in January 2023. Credit: screenshot taken from Google
The same image appears at 1:26 in the film’s official trailer, proving that the photo was not taken during the recent riots in France.
The same image appeared in a trailer for Athena. Credit: screenshot from YouTube.
Were French youths shooting like snipers from the tops of buildings?
A separate photo circulated by Chinese netizens on Twitter shows a young man in a black down jacket aiming down from a tall building while holding what appears to be a sniper rifle, with captions added by the netizens describing the person as a teenage sniper in the riots.
Chinese Twitter users reposted an image of a person who they all separately claim is a sniper amidst the riots in France. Screenshot from Twitter.
AFCL searched the photo on Google and found a video uploaded by a Twitter user on June 9, 2023 among the search results.
The photo matches a video posted by a Twitter user on June 9, 2023. The caption reads, “I’m hunting from the roof of the CDI during the 10am break to get ready for lunch.” Credit: screenshot from Twitter
The search also returned sources dated as early as 2022, however the links to these older search results were broken. AFCL was unable to further verify whether the video features a real sniper or is merely a prank. Regardless, the earlier posting dates of all these results verify that this image is unrelated to the recent riots in France.
Earlier online videos of the same person appeared in 2022, but the link is broken and the original content cannot be checked. Credit: screenshot from Twitter
Do French people enjoy sipping wine even during a riot?
Several Twitter accounts posted the same photo of a man and woman sipping wine on a street with a fire burning directly behind them, accompanied by nearly identical comments that read “French people have big hearts. …… Find a good spot to watch the action.”
Several Chinese Twitter users retweeted a photo of French people supposedly sipping wine during the riots. Credit: screenshot from Twitter
The photo in fact had nothing to do with the current riots. The photo appears in a March 2023 report from the British newspaper The Independent which notes that it was taken during separate protests launched that month against French President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform. Many Weibo discussions at the time commented on French people’s ability to maintain calm in the face of the riots.
The same photo was discussed on Weibo in March 2023. The accompanying caption reads, “On how the French can remain so calm when facing a riot.” Credit: screenshot from Weibo
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Dong Zhe for Asia Fact Check Lab.
This article originally appeared in Scheerpost on July 9, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
LONDON: The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent, but no longer attempts to shine a light into the inner workings of power. This failure is not only inexcusable, but ominous.
The U.S. government, especially the military and agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and Homeland Security, have no intention of stopping with Julian, who faces 170 years in prison if found guilty of violating 17 counts of the Espionage Act. They are cementing into place mechanisms of draconian state censorship, some features of which were exposed by Matt Taibbi in the Twitter Files, to construct a dystopian corporate totalitarianism.
The U.S. and the U.K. brazenly violated a series of judicial norms and diplomatic protocols to keep Julian trapped for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy after he had been granted political asylum by Ecuador. The CIA, through the Spanish security firm UC Global, made recordings of Julian’s meetings with his attorneys, which alone should invalidate the extradition case. Julian has been held for more than four years in the notorious Belmarshhigh-securityprison since the British Metropolitan Police dragged him out of the embassy on April 11, 2019. The embassy is supposed to be the sovereign territory of Ecuador. Julian has not been sentenced in this case for a crime. He is charged under the Espionage Act, although he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication. The U.K. courts, which have engaged in what can only be described as a show trial, appear ready to turn him over to the U.S. once his final appeal, as we expect, is rejected. This could happen in a matter of days or weeks.
Julian has not been sentenced in this case for a crime. He is charged under the Espionage Act, although he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication.
On Wednesday night at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Stella Assange, an attorney who is married to Julian; Matt Kennard, co-founder and chief investigator of Declassified UK, and I examined the collapse of the press, especially with regard to Julian’s case. You can watch our discussion here.
“I feel like I’m living in 1984,” Matt said. “This is a journalist who revealed more crimes of the world’s superpower than anyone in history. He’s sitting in a maximum-security prison in London. The state that wants to bring him over to that country to put him in prison for the rest of his life is on record as spying on his privileged conversations with his lawyers. They’re on record plotting to assassinate him. Any of those things, if you told someone from a different time ‘Yeah this is what happened and he was sent anyway and not only that, but the media didn’t cover it at all.’ It’s really scary. If they can do that to Assange, if civil society can drop the ball and the media can drop the ball, they can do that to any of us.”
When Julian and WikiLeaks released the secret diplomatic cables and Iraq War logs, which exposed numerous U.S. war crimes, including torture and the murder of civilians, corruption, diplomatic scandals, lies and spying by the U.S. government, the commercial media had no choice but to report the information. Julian and WikiLeaks shamed them into doing their job. But, even as they worked with Julian, organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian were determined to destroy him. He threatened their journalistic model and exposed their accommodation with the centers of power.
“They hated him,” Matt said of the mainstream media reporters and editors. “They went to war with him immediately after those releases. I was working for The Financial Times in Washington in late 2010 when those releases happened. The reaction of the office at The Financial Times was one of the major reasons I got disillusioned with the mainstream media.”
Julian went from being a journalistic colleague to a pariah as soon as the information he provided to these news organizations was published. He endured, in the words of Nils Melzer, at the time the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, “a relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation.” These attacks included “collective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his assassination.”
Julian was branded a hacker, although all the information he published was leaked to him by others. He was smeared as a sexual predator and a Russian spy, called a narcissist and accused of being unhygienic and slovenly. The ceaseless character assassination, amplified by a hostile media, saw him abandoned by many who had regarded him a hero.
“Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide,” Melzer concluded.
The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel, all of which published WikiLeaks documents provided by Julian, published a joint open letter on Nov. 28, 2022 calling on the U.S. government “to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.”
But the demonization of Julian, which these publications helped to foster, had already been accomplished.
Julian went from being a journalistic colleague to a pariah as soon as the information he provided to these news organizations was published.
“It was pretty much an immediate shift,” Stella recalled. “While the media partners knew that Julian still had explosive material that still had to be released, they were partners. As soon as they had what they thought they wanted from him, they turned around and attacked him. You have to put yourself in the moment where the press was in 2010 when these stories broke. They were struggling for a financial model to survive. They hadn’t really adapted to the age of the internet. You had Julian coming in with a completely new model of journalism.”
There followed a WikiLeaks-isation of U.S. media outlets such as The New York Times, which adopted the innovations pioneered by WikiLeaks, including providing secure channels for whistleblowers to leak documents.
“Julian was a superstar,” Stella said. “He came from outside the ‘old boys’ network. He talked about how these revelations should lead to reform and how the Collateral Murder video reveals that this is a war crime.”
Julian was outraged when he saw the heavy redactions of the information he exposed in newspapers such as The Guardian. He criticized these publications for self-censoring to placate their advertisers and the powerful.
He exposed these news organizations, as Stella said, “for their own hypocrisy, for their own poor journalism.”
“I find it very ironic that you have all this talk of misinformation, that’s just cover for censorship,” Stella said. “There are all these new organizations that are subsidized to find misinformation. It’s just a means to control the narrative. If this whole disinformation age really took truth seriously, then all of these disinformation organizations would hold WikiLeaks up as the example, right? Julian’s model of journalism was what he called scientific journalism. It should be verifiable. You can write up an analysis of a news item, but you have to show what you’re basing it on. The cables are the perfect example of this. You write up an analysis of something that happened and you reference the cables and whatever else you’re basing your news story on.”
“This was a completely new model of journalism,” she continued. “It is one [that] journalists who understood themselves as gatekeepers hated. They didn’t like the WikiLeaks model. WikiLeaks was completely reader-funded. Its readers were global and responding enthusiastically. That’s why PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Bank of America started the banking blockade in December 2010. This has become a standardized model of censorship to demonetize, to cut channels off from their readership and their supporters. The very first time this was done was in 2010 against WikiLeaks within two or three days of the U.S. State Department cables being published.”
While Visa cut off WikiLeaks, Stella noted, it continued to process donations to the Ku Klux Klan.
Julian’s “message was journalism can lead to reform, it can lead to justice, it can help victims, it can be used in court and it has been used in court in the European Court of Human Rights, even at the U.K. Supreme Court in the Chagos case here,” she said. “It has been used as evidence. This is a completely new approach to journalism. WikiLeaks is bigger than journalism because it’s authentic, official documents. It’s putting internal history into the public record at the disposal of the public and victims of state-sponsored crime. For the first time we were able to use these documents to seek justice, for example, in the case of the German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was abducted and tortured by the CIA. He was able to use WikiLeaks cables at the European Court of Human Rights when he sued Macedonia for the rendition. It was a completely new approach. It brought journalism to its maximum potential.”
“The things we hold dear, democracy, freedom of speech, free press, they’re very, very fragile, much more fragile than we realize. That’s been exposed by Assange. If they get Assange, the levies will break. It’s not like they’re going to stop. That’s not how power works.”
Matt Kennard, co-founder and chief investigator of Declassified UK
The claims of objectivity and neutrality propagated by the mainstream media are a mechanism to prevent journalism from being used to challenge injustices or reform corrupt institutions.
“It’s completely alien, the idea that you might use journalism as a tool to better the world and inform people of what’s happening,” Matt said. “For them it’s a career. It’s a status symbol. I never had a crisis of conscience because I never wanted to be a journalist if I couldn’t do that.”
“For people who come out of university or journalism school, where do you go?” he asked. “People get mortgages. They have kids. They want to have a normal life…You enter the system. You slowly get all your rough edges shorn off. You become part of the uniformity of thought. I saw it explicitly at The Financial Times.”
“It’s a very insidious system,” Matt went on. “Journalists can say to themselves ‘I can write what I like,’ but obviously they can’t. I think it’s quite interesting starting Declassified with Mark Curtis in the sense that journalists don’t know how to react to us. We have a complete blackout in the mainstream media.”
“There has been something really sinister that has happened in the last twenty years, particularly at The Guardian,” he said. “The Guardian is just state-affiliated media. The early WikiLeaks releases in 2010 were done with The Guardian. I remember 2010 when those releases were happening with The Guardian and The New York Times. I’d read the same cables being covered in The Guardian and The New York Times and I’d always thought ‘Wow, we’re lucky to have The Guardian because The New York Times were taking a much more pro-U.S. pro-government position.’ That’s now flipped. I’d much prefer to read The New York Times covering this stuff. And I’m not saying it’s perfect. Neither of them were perfect, but there was a difference. I think what’s happened is clever state repression.”
The D-notice committee, he explained, is composed of journalists and state security officials in the U.K. who meet every six months. They discuss what journalists can and can’t publish. The committee sends out regular advisories.
The Guardian ignored advisories not to publish the revelations of illegal mass surveillance released by Edward Snowden. Finally, under intense pressure, including threats by the government to shut the paper down, The Guardian agreed to permit two Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) officials to oversee the destruction of the hard drives and memory devices that contained material provided by Snowden. The GCHQ officials on July 20, 2013 filmed three Guardian editors as they destroyed laptops with angle grinders and drills. The deputy editor of The Guardian, Paul Johnson — who was in the basement during the destruction of the laptops — was appointed to the D-notice committee. He served at the D-notice committee for four years. In his last committee meeting Johnson was thanked for “re-establishing links” between the committee and The Guardian. The paper’s adversarial reporting, by then, had been neutralized.
“The state realized after the war in Iraq that they needed to clamp down on the freedom in the British media,” Matt said. “The Daily Mirror under Piers Morgan…I don’t know if anyone remembers back in 2003, and I know he is a controversial character and he’s hated by a lot of people, including me, but he was editor at The Daily Mirror. It was a rare opening of what a mainstream tabloid newspaper can do if it’s doing proper journalism against the war, an illegal war. He had headlines made out of oil company logos. He did Bush and Blair with blood all over their hands, amazing stuff, every day for months. He had John Pilger on the front page, stuff you would never see now. There was a major street movement against the war. The state thought ‘Shit, this is not good, we’ve gotta clamp down.’”
This triggered the government campaign to neuter the press.
“I wouldn’t say we have a functioning media in terms of the newspapers,” he said.
“This is not just about Assange,” Matt continued. “This is about all of our futures, the future for our kids and our grandkids. The things we hold dear, democracy, freedom of speech, free press, they’re very, very fragile, much more fragile than we realize. That’s been exposed by Assange. If they get Assange, the levies will break. It’s not like they’re going to stop. That’s not how power works. They don’t pick off one person and say we’re going to hold off now. They’ll use those tools to go after anyone who wants to expose them.”
“If you’re working in an environment in London where there’s a journalist imprisoned for exposing war crimes, maybe not consciously but somewhere you [know you] shouldn’t do that,” Matt said. “You shouldn’t question power. You shouldn’t question people who are committing crimes secretly because you don’t know what’s going to happen…The U.K. government is trying to introduce laws which make it explicit that you can’t publish [their crimes]. They want to formalize what they’ve done to Assange and make it a crime to reveal war crimes and other things. When you have laws and a societal-wide psyche that you cannot question power, when they tell you what is in your interest, that’s fascism.”
A study from North Carolina has found that social media use could be impacting brain development in children and young teens. Then, colleges have found a new way to make a quick buck – getting students addicted to gambling on sporting events. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software […]
The New York Times has a new article out with the headline “Cluster Weapons U.S. Is Sending Ukraine Often Fail to Detonate” and the subheading “The Pentagon’s statements indicate that the cluster munitions that will be sent to Ukraine contain older grenades known to have a failure rate of 14 percent or more.”
If you only read the headline — as the majority of people do — you would come away with the impression that the news story being reported here is that the US is giving Ukraine weapons that are sometimes defective. That sounds like a newsworthy story by itself, and it’s the only information provided in the headline.
If you read the subheading in addition to the headline, you would come away with the same impression. You could even read the entire first paragraph and the first part of the second and still think you were reading a story about the US sending Ukraine sub-par cluster munitions.
Not until you get to the final sentence of the second paragraph would you get to the vital piece of information which explains why the world is criticizing the Biden administration for sending Ukraine these weapons:
“Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children who stumble on them.”
The real story of course isn’t that the US has failed to send Ukraine its primo mint-condition cluster bombs, the story is that undetonated munitions will kill civilians and keep killing them even long after the fighting stops.
A correct headline for this report would have been something along the lines of “Cluster Weapons U.S. Is Sending Ukraine Will Kill Civilians for Years to Come,” but because The New York Times is a US propaganda outlet, we get a headline saying “Oopsie, sometimes the little bombies don’t go boom!”
We saw another interesting instance of war propaganda in the mass media on Saturday with two separate articles advocating NATO membership for Ukraine, one in The Washington Post and one in The Guardian.
In a Washington Post piece titled “Only NATO membership can guarantee peace for Ukraine,” Marc Thiessen and Stephen Biegun argue that once the war is over Ukraine must be added to the controversial western military alliance. They make the absurd claim that “Almost 75 years after NATO’s founding, the record is clear. NATO doesn’t provoke war; it guarantees peace,” which would certainly come as a surprise to the survivors of disastrous NATO military interventions in nations like Libya and Afghanistan.
“No serious person advocates NATO membership for Ukraine while the current fighting continues,” write Thiessen and Biegun. “That would be tantamount to a declaration of war with Russia. But it is equally true that after a cease-fire, a durable peace cannot be achieved unless that peace is guaranteed by NATO membership.”
This position in The Washington Post that “No serious person advocates NATO membership for Ukraine while the current fighting continues” was published just hours apart from a Guardian article by war propagandist Simon Tisdall explicitly advocating NATO membership for Ukraine while the current fighting continues.
Tisdall writes the following:
The main objection to this argument was summarised by the former US Nato ambassador Ivo Daalder. “The problem confronting Nato countries is that as long as the conflict continues, bringing Ukraine into the alliance is tantamount to joining the war,” he warned.
But there are precedents. West Germany gained Nato protection in 1955 even though, like Ukraine, it was in dispute over occupied sovereign territory — held by East Germany, a Soviet puppet. In similar fashion, Nato’s defensive umbrella could reasonably be extended to cover the roughly 85% of Ukrainian territory Kyiv currently controls.
Tisdall makes no attempt to address the glaring plot hole here that West Germany was not at war in 1955, or to explain how placing a NATO “umbrella” over 85 percent of a nation currently at war would be safeguarded against being drawn into the war.
And to be clear, this is not a news story. Reporting that John Bolton likes cluster bombs is like reporting that Snoop Dogg likes weed, or that Flava Flav is fond of clock necklaces. Obviously he’s going to be as enthusiastic about the prospect of children being killed by military explosives as a cartoon mascot for children’s breakfast cereal is for its company’s brand of sweetened starch. He’s cuckoo for war crimes.
As we’ve discussed previously, John Bolton’s presence in the mass media proves our entire civilization is diseased. We shouldn’t be looking to such monsters for analysis and expert punditry, we should be chasing them out of every town they try to enter with pitchforks and torches. The fact that we see his opinion mentioned as valid and relevant any time there’s an opportunity to kill more human beings with military violence shows that we are trapped in a madhouse that is run by the craziest among us.
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All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
A terrifying revolving door has emerged between intelligence agencies and social media companies. Also, the Federal Trade Commission has proposed a new rule to BAN non-compete clauses for workers. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Mike Papantonio: There’s a, this terrifying revolving door […]
If ever there was an instance of such a hideous failing in government policy and its cowardly implementation by the public service, Australia’s cruel, inept and vicious Robodebt program would have to be one of them.
Robodebt was a scheme developed by the Department of Human Services (DHS) and submitted as a budget measure by the then Minister for Social Services, Scott Morrison, in 2015. Its express purpose: to recover claimed overpayments from welfare recipients stretching back to the 2010-11 financial year. The automated scheme used a deeply flawed “income averaging” method to assess income and benefit entitlements, yielding inaccurate results. Vitally, the assumption there was that recipients had stable income through the financial year. The scheme also failed to comply with the income calculation provisions of the Social Security Act 1991 (Cth).
The results were disastrous for the victims in receipt of crude, harrying debt notices. The scheme induced despair and mental ruin. It led to various instances of suicide. It saw a concerted government assault on the poor and vulnerable. A remorseless campaign was waged by such unwholesome types as the former human services minister, Alan Tudge, ever keen to libel the undeserving. Media outlets such as A Current Affair were more than happy to provide platforms for the demonising effort. “We will find you,” he told the program, “we will track you down, and you will have to repay those debts, and you may end up in prison.”
The grotesque policy eventually caught the ire of the courts, which ruled the scheme unlawful. That, along with a change in government, eventually led to the establishment of a Royal Commission, whose findings by Commissioner Catherine Holmes were released on July 7. They make for grim reading.
While it will take time to wade through a report running over 1,000 pages, it is fitting to single out a few of the rogues who played starring roles of lasting infamy in the robodebt drama. Who better to start with than the former Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, whose relationship with the truth continues to be strained and estranged.
In December 2014, Morrison was appointed Minister for Social Services. He immediately wanted to impress with his promised scalping of alleged welfare cheats and scroungers. Wishing to make an impression he, unusually, held direct meetings with the secretary of the DHS, Kathryn Campbell, to tease out what would become the robodebt proposal. Concern from legal officers and senior staff within the Department of Social Services (DSS) about the legal compliance of the program were ignored or dismissed.
The Commission duly rejected “as untrue Mr Morrison’s evidence that he was told that income averaging as contemplated in the Executive Minute was an established practice and a ‘foundational way’ in which DHS worked.” The New Policy Proposal (NPP) that arose was utterly at odds with the legal position of the Department of Social Services stating that legislative change was required to implement the new income averaging approach.
Morrison assiduously ignored making any inquiries as to the reasons for that reversal. He “allowed Cabinet to be misled because he did not make that obvious inquiry.” The necessary information – that the scheme would require legislative and policy change to permit the use of income averaging – was not supplied. He accordingly “failed to meet his ministerial responsibility … to ensure that [the scheme] was lawful.”
Tudge comes in for special mention for the “use of information about social security recipients in the media”. This could only be regarded as an abuse of power. After knowing that the scheme had claimed the lives of at least two people from suicide, the minister also “failed to undertake a comprehensive review of the Scheme, including its fundamental features, or to consider whether its impacts were so harmful to vulnerable recipients that it should cease.”
Christian Porter, who also occupied the position of Minister for Social Services, “could not rationally have been satisfied of the legality of the Scheme on the basis of his general knowledge of the NPP process, when he did not have actual knowledge of the content of the NPP, and had no idea whether it had said anything about the practice of income averaging.”
The government services minister holding the robodebt reins in its final days also cuts a less than impressive figure. In Stuart Robert’s mind, he was a moral man coming late to a policy he wished to end, despite praising it publicly and using false figures. The Commission found that Robert had not unequivocally instructed the secretary of human services in November 2019 “to cease income averaging as a sole or partial basis for debt raising.” It was “reasonable to suppose that Mr Robert still hoped to salvage the Robodebt Scheme in some respects.”
The public service, supposedly famed for providing the frank and fearless advice treasured by ministers, also yields its clownish and cowardly rogues. The officers of the DSS and DHS, the Commissioner finds, failed to give Morrison “frank and full advice before and after the development of the NPP”, the result of “pressure to deliver the budget expectations of the government and by Mr Morrison, as the Minister for Social Services, communicating the direction to develop the NPP through the Executive Minute.”
Kathryn Campbell, Secretary of the DHS, is a true standout. “Her response to staff concerns, including those about income averaging and debt accuracy, was not to seek external assurance, or even to make inquiries about the matter with her chief counsel or other departmental lawyers.” What took place, instead, was a communication on January 25, 2017 to staff that there would be “no change to how we assess income or calculate and recover debts”.
The DHS also receives a stinging rebuke in its approach to the media’s coverage of the scheme’s evident defects. In 2017, when robodebt came under withering scrutiny, the department responded “to criticism by systematically repeating the same narrative, underpinned by a set of talking points and standard lines.” The policy of bureaucrats was to act as “gatekeepers” keen on “getting it [the media criticism] shut down as quickly as possible”.
The names of the robodebt architects and apologists should be blazoned upon a monument of execration for time immemorial. Even now, its perpetrators are resorting to extravagant acts of hand washing, gleefully claiming they have not been named as subjects of potential criminal or civil prosecution. Campbell, in a time-honoured tradition showing that gross failure rewards, continues to receive money from an advisory role in the Defence Department specific to implementing the AUKUS security alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom.
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, can only concede that “mistakes” had been made. Labor’s Minister for Government Services, Bill Shorten, had “politicised” the issue. But for the string of coalition governments whose existence only came to an end in May 2022, the politics and ideology of punishing welfare recipients remained central and, in the end, pathological.
Investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein . . . author of The Palestine Laboratory. Image: AL website
Asia Pacific Report: Locations Monday, July 17: Christchurch
Public meeting, 7pm
Knox Centre, Cnr Bealey Avenue & Victoria street, Christchurch (books available) https://www.facebook.com/events/813719740268177/
Thursday, July 20: Auckland
Public Meeting, 7pm
The Fickling Centre, 546 Mt Albert Road (The Women’s Bookshop will be at the meeting to sell books) https://www.facebook.com/events/285795137317711/
Two media outlets and a government accountability nonprofit won a settlement in their open records lawsuit against Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on June 21, 2023. The case was brought by the Bleeding Heartland blog, the Iowa Capital Dispatch and the Iowa Freedom of Information Council after their government records requests, including about the COVID pandemic, had gone unanswered for a year.
The ACLU of Iowa filed the lawsuit on behalf of the organizations in December 2021, after eight separate government record requests between April 2020 and April 2021, all renewed at least once, had been ignored by the governor’s office. The organizations claimed that in doing so Reynolds had violated Iowa’s open records law. Within days of the lawsuit being filed, the governor released the requested records, blaming the delay on COVID-19.
The government’s attorneys argued that the case should be dismissed because the governor isn’t obligated to respond in a timely manner and had ultimately released the records. When the judge denied their request for dismissal, they appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court. On April 14, 2023, the court unanimously denied the request and returned the case to the Polk County District Court, which approved the settlement agreement.
“The Iowa Supreme Court’s ruling was a significant victory not only for press freedom but for the public’s ability to access government records,” said Kathie Obradovich, editor-in-chief of the Iowa Capital Dispatch, in an email to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. “It made clear that the governor’s office is subject to Iowa’s open records law and that the law’s provision that records requests be fulfilled within a reasonable period of time is, in fact, enforceable.”
Randy Evans, executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, said the organization was pleased with the outcome of the legal challenge. “The governor and her staff cannot ignore their obligations under the public records statute,” said Evans in an email to the Tracker, “even when doing so might be inconvenient or embarrassing.”
Under the terms of the settlement, the governor’s office must pay the plaintiffs $135,000 to cover their legal fees (an amount approved by the State Appeal Board) and undergo a one-year period of judicial oversight to make sure it continues to comply with Iowa’s open records law.
“It's sad that we are still having to fight to make sure government officials follow those laws,” Laura Belin, lead author of Bleeding Heartland, told the ACLU of Iowa. "Journalists need to be able to report on what's happening in our state government without unreasonable delays, especially during a public health emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic."
New York, July 6, 2023—In response to Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko signing into law of a billstrengthening control on the media on Saturday, July 1, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued the following statement:
“Belarus’ new media law translates long-standing arbitrary practices of silencing dissent and independent reporting into the legal sphere,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “Authorities should reverse this law, stop adopting legislation that further restricts press freedom and isolates Belarus from the rest of the world, and let the media work freely.”
According to a statement published on the office of the president’s website, the amendments to the country’s media law are “aimed at improving the mechanisms protecting national interests in the media sphere, as well as at expanding the tools for reacting to unfriendly actions against Belarus.”
The Council of the Republic, the upper house of parliament, adopted the amendments on June 14, following passage by the lower house on May 31. The text of the law was published on July 6. It will enter into force in three months.
The new law enables the Ministry of Information to ban the activities of foreign media in Belarus “in the event of unfriendly actions by foreign states against Belarusian media,” such as the banning of a Belarusian media outlet abroad. Such bans can include barring the distribution of a media outlet, blocking its activities, canceling the accreditation of its journalists, and prohibiting it from opening offices in Belarus.
The law also broadens the basis for blocking foreign and local news websites and news aggregators, and empowers authorities to cancel a media outlet’s registration if its founder or legal entity is involved in activities deemed “extremist” or “terrorist.”
“These amendments are mainly technical in nature. They introduce into the law something that is already widely practiced by Belarusian authorities,” Barys Haretski, deputy head of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, a banned local advocacy and trade group, told CPJ via messaging app. He added that Belarusian authorities have already blocked websites without court orders.
“In practice, [the foreign media] are already unable to work, they do not receive accreditation, and a number of [foreign] media outlets are recognized as extremist formations,” Haretski said.
Since protests against Lukashenko’s disputed reelection in 2020, Belarusian authorities have cracked down on the local and international press. At least 26 journalists were imprisoned in the country at the time of CPJ’s 2022 prison census, all of whom were detained since late 2020.
A new language app developed for Gagana Samoa — the Samoan language — has been launched in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Samoa Capital Radio in Wellington, the oldest Samoan radio station in Aotearoa, is behind the production and development of the app.
Samoa’s Acting High Commissioner to New Zealand, Robert Niko Aiono, said it would help to bridge the gap for people wanting to learn more about the language.
“They’ve made this app available and it caters for a lot of Samoans who are born in New Zealand,” he said.
“Not only in New Zealand but everywhere else in the world.”
With Samoan being the third-most spoken language in New Zealand, Samoa Capital Radio initially thought language classes delivered on Zoom was the best way to draw in learners.
However, it was decided developing an app would be better as it was a tool that can be accessed anywhere, any time.
‘Labour of love’
Work on the software began in January and according to the radio station’s social media manager, Murray Faivalu, it was a “labour of love”.
“We started to get a team together; get an advisory panel to advise us because no one can claim that they’ve got the knowledge of everything in terms of the Samoan language,” Faivalu said.
“We had two lecturers from the National University of Samoa, one of them being Dr Niusila Eteuati who was able to bring an academic perspective to the language; we got one of the teachers from Samoa who’s teaching the language and the Language Commission.”
Faivalu said he hopes the app helps users overcome their shyness when trying to converse or pray in Samoan.
“We’ve got a big population of people who associate as Samoans and a lot of them are young,” he said.
“A lot of them may know some Samoan but being able to speak it is a whole different thing.
“Some of the young ones get embarrassed when they go up to do the prayer at family gatherings.”
Basic language
The app covers the most basic of the Samoan language — from the spelling, grammar, placement of macrons and glottal stops. Audio is also built in so users can hear how words are meant to be pronounced.
“When you read Samoan on its own, you lose the meaning of it — so unless you have those glottal stops, the macrons, you won’t get the actual meaning of what you’re trying to say.”
Samoa Capital Radio chief executive Afamasaga Tealu Moresi . . . Image: RNZ Pacific
At the launch, Pacific Peoples Minister Barbara Edmonds shared how she became distant from speaking Samoan.
“Like many of our families who crossed the Pacific Ocean to come to New Zealand, we too had many families come to stay with us, and my cousins came to live with us.
“My cousins, who could only really speak Samoan, became quickly frustrated when they went to school, and they started giving other kids beatings because they couldn’t understand what they were saying,” Edmonds said.
“So what my dad said to us was, we needed to speak English more, so we could help teach our cousins how to speak English. So unfortunately as time progressed, Gagana Samoa came less and less out of my mouth.
Youngest and fastest growing
“With the Samoan population being one of the youngest and fastest growing [in New Zealand], it’s clear that we need to do everything we can to support the next generation to understand and use our language.”
School student Ti’eti’e Frost is eager to improve his Samoan speaking skills, especially as he is the only member of his family who has yet to master the language.
“Sometimes I’ll be speaking Samoan and there will be people who grew up speaking it who will make a joke about my Samoan,” he said.
“Right now, I feel like I’m 60 percent with my Samoan, but hopefully by using this app I get to 100 percent.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Following the Wagner Group’s short-lived insurrection in Russia last month, several verified users of the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo claimed that the Russian mercenary army had accepted US$6.2 billion from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The users cited the Los Angeles Times as the source and circulated screenshots of the purported article in their posts.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) found this claim to be false. The LA Times published no reports on a U.S. allocation of funds to the Wagner Group.
Users on Weibo and Twitter circulated screenshots of an LA Times report that they claimed confirms the Wagner Group received $6.2 billion from the CIA. The original LA Times article does not mention the group, and the original lead picture has been changed to one showing Wagner’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. Photos taken from Weibo and the LA Times websites.
[Text – top left] Breaking news confirms that the current large-scale revolt by Wagner accepted $6.2 billion from the CIA.
[Text – bottom left] The Los Angeles Times: Wagner – the mercenary group staging the current revolt – is confirmed by Western media as taking $6.2 billion from the CIA. Beating the CIA at its own game, Putin and Prigozhin are both acting in order to net an easy $6.2 billion.
[Middle] Screenshot of altered version of the LA Times article on Weibo
[Text – Weibo post headline] The Los Angeles Times confirms that Breggogen dupes U.S. intelligence, netting $6.2 billion by feigning a revolt.
[Right Side] Screenshot of original LA Times article
The article that has been circulating actually reports on a $6.2 billion surplus in U.S. military funds that is expected to be sent to Ukraine, and does not mention the Wagner Group. The Weibo posts include an erroneous Chinese-language translation of the original article’s English-language headline and a photo of the Wagner Group’s leader that is not present in the original report.
In Depth
As the war between Russia and Ukraine entered its 16th month, the Russian private military company Wagner Group on June 24 launched a brief armed rebellion against the Kremlin. Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin ended the mutiny the next day following mediation by Belarus.
The dramatic turn of events attracted global attention. In China, the term “Wagner” was Weibo’s top-trending topic on June 24–25, with related posts generating a range of comments and speculation.
Verified Weibo users with hundreds of thousands of followers each soon set off a public frenzy by claiming U.S. media was reporting that Wagner had accepted $6.2 billion from the CIA before staging the rebellion. Their posts included screenshots of an LA Times article as alleged evidence.
What did the LA Times actually report?
AFCL found that these screenshots appeared to feature a doctored version of an LA Times article published on the newspaper’s website on June 21. The original article, headlined “Pentagon’s accounting error means an extra $6.2 billion in aid for Ukraine,” discusses an accounting mistake by the Pentagon that is expected to send an extra $6.2 billion in aid to Ukraine. The article is accompanied by a photo of U.S. Patriot missile launchers, and does not mention or show any images of the Wagner Group, Prigozhin or the CIA.
Indeed, a keyword search via Google for “Wagner” and “CIA” failed to find any U.S. media reports confirming rumors of a U.S. payment to the Wagner Group.
The altered version of the LA Times article spread by Weibo and Twitter users includes an erroneous Chinese translation of the headline: “The Los Angeles Times confirms that Breggogen [Prigozhin] dupes U.S. intelligence, netting $6.2 billion by feigning a revolt.” Below it, the article’s original headline and article, both in English, can be seen.
The doctored version also includes a different lead photograph accompanying the story of Wagner Group leader Prigozhin dressed in military gear, which AFCL found to be a still image from a video released on March 3, 2023.
Another netizen claimed in a separate post that billionaire businessman Elon Musk had also tweeted confirmation that Wagner had accepted money from the CIA.
However, the Twitter account referenced by the netizen is clearly labeled as a parody Musk account belonging to an anonymous user. Furthermore, the tweet itself only questions the $6.2 billion sent to Ukraine and makes no mention of the Wagner Group.
A verified Weibo user retweeting posts from a parody account of Elon Musk belonging to an anonymous user. Screenshot from Weibo.
[Text] Musk gives the answer: Why did the U.S. send $6.2 billion to Ukraine? A few days ago, the U.S. conducted an audit which found that an additional $6.2 billion in aid had been sent to Ukraine. In a blink, the atmosphere on U.S. social media turned joyful. It’s reported that Prigozhin wanted $6.2 billion from the CIA in order to start the revolt. Thinking it was cash well spent, the CIA agreed immediately and sent a deposit along. After receiving it, Prigozhin immediately set his three armies in motion, first capturing Rostov-on-Don before.
Where did the extra billions in aid to Ukraine come from?
The $6.2 billion in expected additional military aid to Ukraine results from an accounting error by the Pentagon. Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh explained in a June 20 news conference that the U.S. military had overestimated the cost of certain equipment and services promised to Ukraine over the last two years by using replacement cost value (the cost of replacing an item without accounting for depreciation) instead of net book value (the value of an asset less depreciation). She said the unexpected surplus would go into the pot of money used by the Pentagon for future stock drawdowns, such as for arming Ukraine.
Have U.S officials commented on the allegation?
President Biden has denied any U.S. involvement in the Wagner mutiny, stating that the White House views the development as “part of a struggle within the Russian system.” He said the U.S. and its allies would not give Russian President Vladimir Putin any excuse to blame the West or NATO for the incident.
Prigozhin and the Wagner Group have been subject to a variety of sanctions by the U.S., European Union, and other countries, for their involvement in the current war against Ukraine and other alleged human rights violations. The Treasury Department issued a statement on June 27 noting that four companies in Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and the Central African Republic suspected of engaging in illegal gold transactions and providing funds to the Wagner Group would be sanctioned. U.S. State Department officials said these sanctions were unrelated to the June 24 rebellion.
The CIA declined to comment on the Chinese netizen reports that it had funded the Wagner Group, while the State Department responded to AFCL’s queries on the issue by forwarding a White House statement on Biden’s denial.
Conclusion
AFCL found Chinese Internet rumors that the LA Times had confirmed a $6.2 billion transfer of CIA funds to the Wagner Group to be false. The U.S. newspaper did not publish any reports about this issue. Chinese netizens instead circulated a doctored LA Times article about $6.2 billion in expected additional aid to Ukraine—featuring a mistranslation of the original headline and an altered photo.
Translated by Shen Ke.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Zhuang Jing and Rita Cheng.
As China’s influence rises in the Pacific Islands, PNG Prime Minister James Marape is worried that the China-Solomon Islands Security Agreement will lead to the Solomon Islands surpassing PNG’s dominant position in Melanesia.
So the Marape government decided to negotiate separately with the US and Australia on two separate agreements they wished to conclude last May.
The US rapidly resolved negotiations and the PNG-US Defence Cooperation Agreement was officially signed before Australia had even concluded its draft Bilateral Security Treaty.
Marape has defended the US-PNG agreement several times in Parliament, while raising some constitutional concerns on an Australia-PNG treaty during his meeting with Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles.
PNG has chosen the US to be the first defence partner, although Australia is PNG’s closest neighbour and long-time partner.
Advance draft of treaty
To its advantage, the US had acquired an advance draft of the Bilateral Security Treaty and knew Australia intended to be PNG’s first security partner.
The US discovered that PNG would not cooperate with other countries in the Pacific Islands security area without Australia’s approval.
So the US then made adjustments to the Defence Cooperation Agreement, revising or deleting articles that concerned PNG in order to settle the agreement ahead of its treaty with Australia.
It was planned that the negotiation between Australia and PNG would be finished in April, but the US intervened and asked PNG to pause the talks with Australia and work on its own Defence Cooperation Agreement first.
The US made commitments during the negotiation with PNG to step up its security support and assistance and cover shortfalls in assistance that Australia had not fulfilled.
Marape and his cabinet had arrived at the belief that Australia was not fully committed to assisting PNG develop its defence force.
There was apparently an internal report revealing that Australia’s intent was not to enhance and elevate some areas of security cooperation but to ensure PNG continued to rely on Australia for all its security needs.
Australia’s process paused In its negotiation, considering that Australia was trying to prevent US dominance in the Pacific Islands region, the US asked PNG not to share the Defence Cooperation Agreement with Australia.
As a result, Australia’s negotiation process with PNG was paused.
The PNG government, frustrated by empty promises, considered the PNG Defence Force would never be developed in cooperation with Australia, so decided instead to work with a more powerful partner.
PNG knows that its own geopolitical position is becoming of increasing importance, but believes Australia has never respected its position. So PNG decided to use this opportunity to reduce its dependence on Australia.
It also seems the US has supported the Marape government in stifling opposition in PNG to assure the Defence Cooperation Agreement can be implemented smoothly.
For example, Morobe Governor Luther Wenge was initially opposed to the agreement but joined Marape’s Pangu Party and supported it after Marape gave K50 million to his electorate development fund.
Wenge later publicly criticised Australia, saying it did not want PNG to develop its own defence force.
Long mutual history
Australia is PNG’s long-term partner and closest neighbour and we have a long mutual history in economic, political and security cooperation.
My colleagues and I believe that Marape should not betray Australia because it has been tempted by the US, which seems to have intervened to dilute or even ruin our bilateral relationship.
Even though Marape explained to Australia that the Defence Cooperation Agreement would not affect the bilateral relationship, there is no doubt that the relationship with the US will have priority.
So Marape has tightened his control over the mainstream media, social media posts have been deleted for no reason and voices opposing the Defence Cooperation Agreement cannot be heard.
We hope some influential media and Australian friends will help us to protect PNG’s national interest and our bilateral relationship with Australia.
This correspondent’s anonymous article was first published by Keith Jackson’s PNG Attitude website and is republished here with permission.
Elon Musk recently challenged Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight, and Zuckerberg has accepted that challenge. The two billionaires might be duking it out soon, and the entire country is left to wonder just what the Hell is going on. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software […]
New York, July 3, 2023—In response to a South African High Court’s Monday judgment striking down a gag order against the amaBhungane Center for Investigative Journalism, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued the following statement:
“Today’s judgment is a massive victory for media freedom in South Africa and an important vindication of a journalist’s ethical duty to protect confidential sources in the public interest,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator. “Deputy Judge President Roland Sutherland’s judgment reaffirms that the country’s courts will not condone pre-publication censorship without appropriate notice and that investigative journalists have the right to hold and use leaked information in the public interest.”
Quintal has been an amaBhungane board member since October 2013.
A judge granted the original injunction against amaBhungane on June 1—following a secret application by the Moti Group, the subject of the outlet’s coverage—and the action was widely condemned as a threat to media freedom in the country. The injunction ordered the outlet to return leaked documents and refrain from publishing further articles based on them.
On June 3, amaBhungane launched an urgent application in the Johannesburg High Court to overturn the order, in which the parties agreed that the investigative outlet would not destroy or alter the documentation until the matter could be heard in open court.
AmaBhungane sought another urgent application seeking to overthrow the original order last week; the judgment in its favor was delivered Monday, July 3.
Sutherland called the Moti Group’s application an “abuse of the court process,” according to multiplenewsreports and a joint statement by the South African National Editors’ Forum, the Campaign for Free Expression, and Media Monitoring Africa, three local press freedom organizations who joined amaBhungane in its legal case. The judge ordered the Moti Group to pay amaBhungane’s and the three organizations’ legal costs.
The eminent journalist’s fearless reporting on India under Narendra Modi cost him his job and freedom. Now broadcasting to millions on YouTube, he is the subject of a new documentary
Ravish Kumar was born near the same Indian city – Motihari in Bihar – as George Orwell. In his early years as a TV journalist and nightly news anchor, Kumar did not imagine that he would live to be part of a modern-day Nineteen Eighty-Four nightmare. But that changed almost a decade ago with the election of Narendra Modi’s government in India. In the years since then, Kumar has become an increasingly lone voice of truth-telling in an Indian media landscape in thrall to the Hindu nationalist politics of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). Kumar’s one-man campaign to maintain journalistic integrity, as mainstream news organisations became promoters of politicised fake news, earned him the “Nobel prize of Asia,” the Ramon Magsaysay award, in 2019. It also led to an unending campaign of harassment and death threats from government supporters.
Kumar, the Indian equivalent of, say, Jeremy Paxman in his prime, finally resigned from his post at NDTV in New Delhi last November, after the station was taken over by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, a close friend of Modi. He now lives in virtual hiding with his family and broadcasts through a personal YouTube channel. His story, one of repression in modern India and of the existential crisis in truth-telling worldwide, is the subject of an urgently compelling documentary, While We Watched.
David Ignatius, a long-time Washington Post columnist on military intelligence topics, probably never dreamed his newspaper would fill over three full pages serializing his latest work of thrilling fiction, “The Tao of Deception.” On June 28, 2023, the “Breaking news and latest headlines” in the A section of the paper featured the first installment. Part II appeared today, Friday, June 30th.
What’s occurring at the WashingtonPost, the New York Times and big regional daily newspapers is a flight toward stupefying their material in a desperate plunge to retain readers – print and online. Maybe surveys show a tsunami of aliteracy from the rising iPhone generations.
To adjust to digital age readers, the New York Times has replaced much of its content with gigantic photographs, graphics and other visuals, not just in its regular sections on style/arts, sports and food, but also in the daily news departments as well as the Sunday Business and Opinion sections.
The influential New York Times Editorial Page – once featuring some fifteen or more editorials a week – is now down to three editorials a week. Moreover, this space is now largely taken up by a handful of regular opinion columnists, many predictably redundant and tired. Imagine a historic newspaper intentionally diminishing its editorial advice to this country. There is no precedent.
It gets worse. Various forms of its daily features – entertainment, sports and style/arts – are given enormous space, while coverage of daily local and national civic activity is severely restricted. What used to be reported about the findings, litigation, lobbying and regulatory advocacy of national citizen groups in the nineteen sixties and seventies – leading to major betterment of consumer, worker and environmental health and safety – now is sharply curtailed. As a result, good members of Congress, seeing virtually no news coverage of vital citizen concerns, become indifferent to necessary public hearings and legislation essential to addressing the needs of the public.
Right-wing politicians have learned to game the vulnerable-to-sensationalism New YorkTimes and WashingtonPost. Trump led the way in 2015-2016 with his presidential run. Most of his outrageous lies, deceptions and defamations were showcased by these two august newspapers. The Times would even reprint his tweets with their CAPITAL LETTERS verbatim without giving the falsely accused any right of reply. (Belated corrections by columnists could not keep up.)
This chronic tragedy has gotten worse in the last year. The Times can hardly resist making crazy politicians into Big Acts. The antics of switcheroo J.D. Vance was a regular news story, with huge photographs, while his Democratic opponent in prime position for the pivotal Ohio Senate race last year, Rep. Tim Ryan, was of little interest to the Times.
In 2021, the Times devoted eleven pages over three days to a mini-biography of Fox’s Tucker Carlson. As well, the Times seems strangely drawn to the profane and violent rhetoric of the ignorant junior Representative from rural Georgia, putting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on the cover of its Sunday New York Times Magazine, in addition to more frequent daily coverage of her outrages.
What’s wrong with this journalism? First, it does not give space to serious political opponents whose positions, by the way, are closer to the editorial stances of the Times. Second, these “in-depth” profiles, as well as regular columns, do not lay a glove on the featured miscreants who rush to use these articles in their publicity and fundraising. Third, the trivial crowds out more important, serious subjects with material that is mostly vacuous since it is about vacuous people that the Times grants greater celebrity status. (TV and radio pick up such coverage from the Times).
I remember years ago when members of Congress, working with civic leaders on important legislation, would drop their more expressive denunciations for fear that the Times and the Post would not cover them because they might appear too extreme. It is exactly the opposite today with crazed right-wing, political corporatists bellowing themselves into prime time.
The Washington Post Live podcasts long ago crossed the barrier between news and advertisers. The tilt toward corporatism, away from the liberal civic community, is pronounced. One example of many is Grover Norquist, the avatar of no-tax super-rich and corporations, who gets a big photo alongside the announcement of his interview by the Washington Post Live’s podcast while the paper ignores inviting civic leaders like Robert Weissman of Public Citizen, Jordan Davis or Marilyn Carpinteyro of Common Cause or Karen Friedman of the Pension Rights Center. Why? Because corporate advertisers do not find these people congenial to their sponsored topics. Sponsors get to approve or veto the participants, as with the participants in the recent Post podcast “Chasing Cancer: Equity and Disparities,” brought to us by the giant drug company AstraZeneca. You can be assured the discussion will not cover outsourcing cancer drugs to a single troubled corporation in India, now causing serious shortages in our country and risking people’s lives.
Both the Post and the Times reporters did report about the cancer drug crisis in their news pages, but didn’t deal with the question of why U.S. drug companies outsource such categories of drugs, which includes outsourcing virtually all antibiotic production to China and India. This is a national security risk if there ever was one. The Washington Post did, however, run an op-ed by Ezekiel J. Emanuel on this topic.
Business ads in newspapers have been around forever, but until recent years, such ads did not openly and brazenly sponsor, engage and shape the content of the “news side” of the papers.
Unfortunately, journalistic critics of these concessions are few, whether in the publications at journalism schools or in liberal magazines. Certainly, the media critics for NPR and PBS do not see this as part of their beat, with very few exceptions. In-house critics or an ombudsman are long gone from the Times and the Post.
Would that their editors have a greater estimate of their own significance to the unrepresented peoples of the United States. People deserve the empowering right to know about what the foundational civil society struggles daily to accomplish, at the local, national and international levels. (See, Reporters Alert).
Coverage of active citizenry from the neighborhoods on up might even increase circulation.
Jimuk will never forget the day dozens of national security police charged into the Apple Daily‘s editorial offices, separating staff from their computers, removing large quantities of confidential documents, freezing its assets and later arresting several executives and senior editors.
“The worst thing was that the day they arrested several high-level executives was actually my birthday, so I have felt very sad on my birthday these past couple of years,” he said.
“I feel very bad that they have been sitting in jail for the past two years,” he said.
The Apple Daily, founded by pro-democracy media magnate Jimmy Lai, was raided by national security police on June 17, 2021, becoming one of the biggest casualties of draconian national security law imposed by the ruling Communist Party in a bid to suppress the 2019 protest movement.
Five days later, as the paper shut down for good, a group of editors and reporters gathered outside the headquarters of Lai’s Next Digital media empire, bowing to their readers to show gratitude for their support over the years.
“We are the Apple Daily editorial team, including reporters, and we have something to say to the people of Hong Kong – thank you,” one said.
The last edition of the paper sold a record-breaking 1 million copies, with people lining up on the street from the early hours to get their piece of Hong Kong history, making a bittersweet end to 26 years of the paper’s sensationalist, hard-hitting style and its cheery apple logo.
Two years later, the doors of Next Digital’s former headquarters are boarded up, and the company’s name has been erased from the bus stop outside.
Leaving Hong Kong, journalism
Radio Free Asia caught up with four of its former journalists in recent weeks, marking the second anniversary of the raid.
Not many former Apple Daily staffers – who once numbered around 600 – are still in journalism, while an estimated 1 in 10, have left Hong Kong for a new life overseas.
Police officers from the national security department escort Chief Operating Officer Chow Tat-kuen from the offices of Apple Daily and Next Media in Hong Kong, June 17, 2021. Credit: Lam Yik/Reuters
Meanwhile, at least 15 other media outlets have since also shut down, either because they were also being investigated by the national security police, or as a pre-emptive decision.
Of the former journalists who spoke to RFA Cantonese, some have changed careers, others have emigrated, and some have gone back to school.
And some diehards have clung to their profession because they believe very strongly in the idea of a free press for Hong Kongers – wherever they are in the world.
Three former staff members, who gave only the pseudonyms Ah Y, Ah A, and Jimuk for fear of political reprisals against themselves or their loved ones, spoke to Radio Free Asia about their current plans and their memories of the crackdown, which proved so fateful not just for the Apple Daily, but for Hong Kong.
A fourth – Taiwan-based Photon News website founder Leung Ka Lai – agreed to speak on the record.
More than a job
All are still struggling in their own way to come to terms with the loss of their paper, which was so much more than a job, and which has become a symbol of the crackdown on dissent and peaceful political opposition in Hong Kong since the protest movement tried to take issue with the erosion of the city’s promised freedoms.
“I worked for the Apple Daily for more than 20 years – that place took all of my blood, sweat and tears. Anyone who says they don’t miss the place is lying,” Ah Y said.
Members of the press take photos as executive editor in chief Lam Man-Chung [center] proofreads the final edition of the Apple Daily newspaper before it goes to print in Hong Kong late on June 17, 2021. Credit: Anthony Wallace/AFP
For Ah A, it’s the openness of the interactions with colleagues he misses the most.
“That open atmosphere made me very happy to go to work,” he said. “I miss that rapport with my colleagues, and I miss the feeling of everyone working together.”
Jimuk said he still treasures every moment he spent working there.
“I haven’t forgotten anything about the paper over the last two years because I invested so much in it, both mentally and emotionally, and did some good work there,” they said.
For Ah Y, who now lives in the United Kingdom, there seems to be little point in staying in the industry at all. “These days being a journalist seems pretty pointless,” he said, adding that he hadn’t planned on leaving the profession, and isn’t sure what to do now.
“It’s not easy to just change careers after 20 years in journalism,” he said. “I’ve spent more than half of my working life doing this job, and I always thought I would keep doing it until I retired.”
Ah Y now does manual labor in Britain.
“Being a journalist has lost its meaning in this day and age,” he said. “It would feel like going through the motions, like a zombie. And there isn’t much of a future in it for young people.”
Keeping the spirit alive
Jimuk is carrying out academic research into the Apple Daily in Taiwan, and teaching students from Taiwan and the rest of the world about the demise of press freedom in Hong Kong and about the 2019 protest movement.
He feels that he’s still working as a communicator, only in a different venue and profession.
“I often think about how to keep the spirit of the Apple Daily alive,” he said. “Also about how we can help preserve its history. My aim over the next few years is to create an academic archive detailing more than two decades of Apple Daily history.”
Ah Y has also written about Hong Kong for some Taiwanese news organizations, something he has been grateful for because he feels as if he is helping Hong Kong from overseas.
Ah A decided to brave the chilly political climate and stay in Hong Kong, but hasn’t managed to find another reporting job, as his resume is now tainted by his association with his former paper.
Instead, he has worked in sales, data analysis and as an Uber driver since the paper’s demise.
He said media organizations in Hong Kong now appear reluctant to hire him.
“Journalists I have worked with from other media organizations have invited me to interview, and I went to more than one that was on the point of hiring me, but then didn’t get approval from the highest level,” he said.
“Each time it was because I was one of the last journalists to leave the Apple Daily,” he said.
Excluded
It seems that being a former Apple Daily journalist is now something akin to the Black Five Categories of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976 in mainland China – a recipe for vilification and exclusion, according to its former staffers.
Some former journalists at the paper have even been turned down for teaching positions in universities.
“It’s a shame, because I would never have done this job for so long if I didn’t really love it,” said Ah A, who was a journalist for 16 years. “But the industry is changing so rapidly that I probably wouldn’t be able to bear it. I’m getting a bit long in the tooth for that.”
“I prefer the challenge of trying a different career altogether,” he said.
As the ruling Communist Party tightened its grip on Hong Kong in the wake of the 2019 protest movement, it “gutted” press freedom in the city, according to journalists and overseas rights groups.
Since the national security law took effect on July 1, 2020, Hong Kong has plummeted from 18th to 140th in Reporters Without Borders’ annual press freedom index.
Last hurrah
The 2019 protest movement, which was covered round-the-clock by a dedicated press corps who braved constant street battles between protesters and riot police, may have been its last hurrah.
With daily drone footage, live-tweeting, live streams, running commentary, political debate and in-depth interviews with participants, Hong Kong’s journalists offered a depth and intensity of coverage that hasn’t been seen in the city since.
That year, they really fulfilled their role as the fourth estate that holds governments to account and speaks truth to power.
But by the following year, the National Security Law had put an end to the activities of its once-intrepid press corps, barring the depiction of any scenes or slogans seen as “glorifying” the protesters or their aims.
Jimmy Lai, who was initially arrested and released on bail at the time of the national security raid, was taken back into custody, where he remains awaiting trial on national security charges.
He was also convicted of “fraud” in connection with the alleged misuse of Next Digital premises under the terms of its lease agreement.
Meanwhile, six former Apple Daily executives have pleaded guilty to “conspiring and colluding with foreign powers” under the national security law.
Other casualties
Six months after the raid on the Apple Daily, the pro-democracy Stand News website was also forced to close, with two of its senior editors prosecuted. A month later, Citizen News followed suit, saying it needed to shut down to keep its journalists safe.
“Four years on, the transformation has been shocking,” Leung Ka Lai said. “Nobody thought this could happen, not even people with more than a decade of experience in Hong Kong media organizations.”
“I used to think it would be something like the frog in the gradually heating pan of water, but actually, things changed overnight,” she said.
Employees, executive editor in chief Lam Man-Chung [left] and deputy chief editor Chan Pui-Man [center] cheer in the Apple Daily newspaper office after completing editing of the final edition in Hong Kong, June 23, 2021. Credit: AFP
Leung, who worked for 16 years as a journalist in Hong Kong, the last three of them at the Apple Daily, tried to stay on after the paper closed, working as a citizen journalist covering protests and political opposition.
But she has since moved to the democratic island of Taiwan, where she founded Photon News, a service for Hong Kong readers anywhere in the world.
‘Be water’
Leaving felt like the Bruce Lee maxim used by the 2019 protesters to denote a fluid approach to political opposition, “Be Water.”
“I chose to leave because it turns out that there is some space to do my work here, enough freedom of expression,” she said.
“Resistance takes many forms, and refusing to put up banners can be a form of resistance, if that’s what the regime wants you to do,” Leung said. “I don’t want to put up protest banners — I’m a journalist.”
Yet Leung has found that self-censorship has dogged her shoestring news operation even in Taiwan, as people are reluctant to speak to the press due to risks under the national security law. There is also the need to protect her own employees.
“We are now overseas, in a place that isn’t threatened by Hong Kong’s National Security Law, but still have to consider the safety of anonymous colleagues, and sometimes there are decisions to be made about which stories to run, and how they should be written,” Leung said.
While some former colleagues have carried on reporting via social media, there are concerns about how effective an option this can be in the longer term.
“There are lot of like-minded colleagues in Hong Kong who have started their own news platforms, and there seems to be some room for them to do that,” Leung said, adding that while 12 media organizations have folded, 15 new services — albeit smaller and less well-funded — have sprung up to take their place.
“But Hong Kongers are pretty picky, and won’t just accept anything you feed them,” she said, adding that the prospects for what little press freedom remains are looking grim, with the government planning further national security legislation.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Edward Li for RFA Cantonese.
Stockholm, June 30, 2023—Azerbaijan authorities must ensure journalists can cover protests without obstruction and should investigate reports of police violence against members of the press, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.
Since June 22, Azerbaijani police have detained, beaten, threatened, or otherwise obstructed the work of at least six journalists reporting on environmental protests in the western village of Soyudlu, according to newsreports and the six journalists, who spoke to CPJ. None of the journalists remain in detention.
“Azerbaijani authorities’ attempts to stifle coverage of ongoing environmental protests and the police brutality in enforcing this censorship are abhorrent and must end immediately,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in Amsterdam. “Authorities should allow all journalists to report on newsworthy events and must transparently investigate all allegations of police violence and threats against members of the press.”
On June 22, police at a checkpoint into Soyudlu denied entry to Nargiz Absalamova, a reporter with independent news website Abzas Media; Nigar Mubariz, a freelance reporter with U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Voice of America’s Azeri service; and Elsever Muradzade, a reporter who covers sports and social issues on his Facebook and TikTok accounts where he has about 10,000 total followers, according to those reports and the journalists, who communicated with CPJ by messaging app.
The journalists entered the village by another route and were reporting when two uniformed police officers and seven or eight people in plainclothes detained them and took their phones, the journalists said.
When Mubariz repeatedly demanded her phone back, one of the men dressed in plain clothes covered her mouth with his hand, and a police officer twisted Absalamova’s arm and pushed her against a wall. Police then forced the journalists into an unmarked car and drove them to a nearby town, where they returned their phones and released them.
Separately on June 22, State Service for Mobilization and Conscription officers summoned Elmaddin Shamilzade, an independent journalist who publishes on Tiktok and Facebook where he has a combined 7,500 followers, after he published a video showing the faces of police officers in Soyudlu the previous day, according to newsreports and the journalist, who communicated with CPJ by messaging app.
The officers demanded evidence of his exemption from military service, which Shamilzade is awaiting as he requested the evidence from his university. He said he filed his documentation for four years of study in 2022, leading him to believe the sudden request is retaliation for his reporting, and he fears being drafted.
The following day, police in the Yasamal district of the capital city of Baku detained Shamilzade and demanded that he delete the video. When the journalist refused, three police officers punched him, struck him with a truncheon, pulled his hair, kicked him in the stomach, and threatened to rape him.
Shamilzade said he lost consciousness for around five minutes and, when he awoke, he deleted the video from Facebook. Police then took him to the Baku City Police Department, where a police official threatened to jail him if he spoke publicly about the attack. Shamilzade had bruising and scrapes on his neck, face, and body from the attack, according to photos reviewed by CPJ.
On June 23, police in the Binagadi district of Baku summoned Ulvi Hasanli, chief editor of Abzas Media, after he posted pictures of two police officers who detained Absalamova, Mubariz, and Muradzade on Facebook, according to those reports and Hasanli, who communicated with CPJ by messaging app. Police demanded he delete the post, but he refused and was released after four hours.
That evening, security staff at the U.S. Embassy in Baku removed Hasanli from the premises, and police detained him after he livestreamed three Azerbaijani activists protesting at the embassy over events in Soyudlu, according to newsreports, Hasanli, and footage of his arrest posted by the journalist on Facebook. Hasanli told CPJ that police took him to the No. 21 Police Station in the Nasimi district of Baku, ordered him to delete photos and videos of the event from his phone—which he did not have—and released him after an hour.
On June 25, Farid Ismayilov, a reporter with independent outlet Toplum TV, was interviewing residents in the village of Chovdar, which neighbors Soyudlu, when two people in plainclothes who identified themselves as police approached him and tried to take his camera, saying that local officials had forbidden reporting from the village, according to Ismayilov, who spoke to CPJ by messaging app, and a Facebook post by the journalist.
Ismayilov fled in his car but was followed out of the region by two vehicles, he told CPJ, adding that local officials threatened to have his relatives fired from their jobs if he published his video reports.
CPJ’s emails to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Azerbaijan, the Baku City police department, and the Yasamal, Binagadi, and Nasimi district police stations did not receive any replies.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in Baku replied to CPJ’s emailed inquiry about Hasanli’s removal from the premises by saying, “Only portions of the official program [of the June 23 event] were open to media and on the record” and “The U.S. Embassy supports fundamental freedoms including the right to protest and freedom of speech.”
On May 31, 2023, four security guards working for Gambia’s ruling National People’s Party grabbed, repeatedly punched, and poured water on Malick D. Cham, a presenter with the online broadcaster Jamano Media and Products, after the journalist tried to film an NPP politician and another man arguing at a mayor’s swearing-in ceremony in the capital city of Banjul, Cham told CPJ.
The guards also grabbed, slapped, and pushed Pa Ousman Joof, founder and global coordinator of Gambia Talents Television, when he attempted to film the men attacking Cham, according to a report by the privately owned The Standard news site, as well as Cham and Joof, who also spoke with CPJ. The guards also hit Cham’s camera operator, Sanneh Samba, on the waist with an electric shock baton, Cham and Joof said.
Cham told CPJ he was making his way out of the Banjul City Council building after covering the ceremony when he and Samba spotted an NPP politician arguing with a man. Shortly after Sambabegan filming the argument, one of the politician’s security guards knocked the camera out of his hand, causing the lens to hit the ground and crack, according to Cham and the chief executive officer of Jamano Media, Alhagie Mamat Janha, who spoke by phone with CPJ.
Cham and Samba tried to explain to the security guards that they were doing their job and should be allowed to freely cover what was happening. Another guard then grabbed Cham by the neck and punched his mouth, drawing blood, while a third guard splashed a bottle of water across the journalist’s body, Cham told CPJ, adding that he told the guards he would defend himself with his tripod if they continued to attack.
A fourth guard then joined the attack, hitting Cham on the nose with an electric shock baton, which also drew blood. Cham ran from the guards, according to the journalist and footage of the incident recorded by Joof, which CPJ reviewed. The guards chased him down, grabbed him, and tried to drag him, but bystanders intervened and allowed him to escape, Cham said.
The guards also briefly slapped and grabbed Joof until police intervened and allowed him to leave, Joof told CPJ.
Cham said he described the incident to other journalists at the scene and reported it to the local police station with Janha. He also went to a local hospital and received treatment to stop the bleeding and heal the wounds to his mouth and nose.
Cham also said that neither he nor his employer had heard from police as of June 26.
CPJ’s calls and text messages to Banjul police spokesperson Binta Njie went unanswered as of June 26.
NPP spokesperson Seedy Njie issued a public apology for the incident, but the journalists rejected the apology since it did not reference their names, according to a June 6 report in The Standard. CPJ’s messages to the NPP spokesperson went unanswered.
There is little evidence to suggest Aotearoa New Zealand’s mainstream news media critically evaluate their own reporting on issues about or affecting Māori and te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi).
This is concerning, given the negative framing of so much coverage, past and present.
The one exception to this general ambivalence has been the groundbreaking apology in 2020 by digital and print news organisation Stuff for a long history of monocultural and Eurocentric bias.
Informed by our research on how news about Māori and te Tiriti is often constructed, Stuff looked back at its legacy mastheads and found stories that ranged from “blinkered to racist”. It pledged to change and improve to reflect a commitment to Māori audiences and the principles of te Tiriti.
To date, no other media organisation has attempted to evaluate its reporting in this way — or, in fact, acknowledge this might be necessary.
It is hoped the framework will help media organisations develop strategies that promote more accountable and equitable practices in their day-to-day reporting and commentary.
Colonial and settler narratives The initiative is important because news is not some objective truth waiting to be reported. It is constructed through the lenses of news teams — and particularly senior journalists and editors — who are predominantly Pākehā.
The types of stories that are told, and the way people and subjects are represented, involve deliberate choices. This frequently means few Māori stories are told. And when Māori are represented, they can be framed in limiting and negative ways.
Our Truth, Tā Mātou Pono is a Stuff project investigating the history of racism. Part one, out today, focuses on Stuff & its newspapers, & how we have portrayed Māori.@ParahiCarmen & I did a cartoon together based on real headlines about Māori. @NZStuffpic.twitter.com/RfOCjtjBNj
Historically, this is common to news and media representations of Indigenous peoples everywhere. There is undoubtedly bias at work some of the time.
But as we have argued previously, these “negative ‘stories’ and representations of Indigenous peoples are strategic; tactical necessities rather than aberrations”.
In other words, they “play important roles in the ongoing colonial project, enhancing the legitimisation and naturalisation of the institutions, practices, and priorities of the colonising state”.
Early European colonists in the South Pacific founded newspapers and published material to serve their interests, institutionalising their preferred social order and norms. For example, an early handbook from the New Zealand Company in 1839 — “Information Relative to New Zealand, Compiled for the use of Colonists” — included some of the first representations of Māori as savage and lawless.
Settler newspapers recycled these themes from 1840 onwards. Variations of the same message persist to the present day. Recent research shows that in countries colonised by Britain, news consistently represents Indigenous peoples as violent, primitive and untrustworthy.
Fundamental questions Contemporary coverage of Māori activism still routinely misinforms and fails to capture nuance. Reporting of the 2020 Ihumātao occupation, for example, frequently reduced internal tensions to a clash between young and old.
On the other hand, there is evidence that both journalists and their audiences want to see change. This is where the new media framework can make a difference.
It provides detailed examples of more equitable news practices, and prompts news organisations to ask themselves several fundamental questions:
Commitment to te Tiriti: how do you enact responsibilities under He Whakaputanga and te Tiriti?
Societal accountabilities: how do you transform use of harmful, racist themes and narratives around Māori?
News media practices: who benefits from the kinds of stories you choose to tell?
Māori-controlled media: how do you represent diversity in Māori stories and in your own staffing?
Challenge and opportunity
We’ve seen some positive responses to the framework, as well as accusations that the Tiriti requirements of New Zealand on Air’s Public Interest Journalism Fund amount to “propaganda” that muzzles mainstream media.
Either way, media organisations are now operating in an environment where profit models require innovation, with increasing competition from social media and changes in audience behaviours.
While this is challenging, it also offers an opportunity to transform journalism and improve newsroom practices. The Stuff and New Zealand on Air initiatives show how it’s possible to tackle harmful representations of Māori in mainstream news media.
Our framework could also be adapted to other sectors and settings where systemic bias and disadvantage are felt. For now, though, it is up to media organisations, funders and policymakers to decide how they will respond.
The authors acknowledge Dr Jenny Rankine and Dr Ray Nairn who were authors on Te Tiriti Framework For News Media and contributed to this article.
A lot of nonsense is being spouted by a bevy of spontaneous “Russian experts” in light of the Prigozhin spray, a mutiny (no one quite knows what to call it), stillborn in the Russian Federation. It all fell to the theatrical sponsor, promoter and rabble rouser Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convict who rose through the ranks of the deceased Soviet state to find fortune and security via catering, arms and Vladimir Putin’s support.
In the service of the Kremlin, Prigozhin proved his mettle. He did his level best to neutralise protest movements. He created the Internet Research Agency, an outfit employing hundreds dedicated to trolling for the regime. Such efforts have been apoplectically lionised (and vilified) as being vital to winning Donald Trump the US presidency in 2016.
His Wagner mercenary outfit, created in the summer of 2014 in response to the Ukraine conflict, has certainly been busy, having impressed bloody footprints in the Levant, a number of African states, and Ukraine itself. Along the way, benefits flowed for the provision of such services, including natural resource concessions.
But something happened last week. Suddenly, the strong man of the mercenary outfit that had been performing military duties alongside the Russian Army in Ukraine seemed to lose his cool. There were allegations that his men had been fired upon by Russian forces, a point drawn out by his capture of the 72nd Motorised Rifle Brigade commander, Lieutenant Colonel Roman Venevitin. Probably more to the point, he had found out some days earlier that the Russian Defence Ministry was keen to rein in his troops, placing them under contractual obligations. His autonomous wings were going to be clipped.
The fuse duly went. Prigozhin fumed on Telegram, expressing his desire to get a number of officials, most notably the Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu, and Chief of the General staff Valery Gerasimov, sent packing. A “march for justice” was organised, one that threatened to go all the way to Moscow.
President Vladimir Putin fumed in agitation in his televised address on June 24, claiming that “excessive ambition and personal interests [had] led to treason, to the betrayal of the motherland and the people and the cause”. Within hours, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, whose diplomatic skills are threadbare, had intervened as mediator, after which it was decided that the Wagner forces would withdraw to avoid “shedding Russian blood”.
This all provided some delicious speculative manna for the press corps and commentariat outside Russia. Nature, and media, abhor the vacuum; the filling that follows is often not palatable. There was much breathless, excited pontification about the end of Putin, despite the obvious fact that this insurrection had failed in its tracks. John Lyons of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was aflame with wonder. Where, he wondered, was the Russian President? Why did the Wagner soldiers “get from Ukraine to Rostov, take control of Ukraine’s war HQ then move to Voronezh without a hint of resistance”?
John Lough of Chatham House in London claimed that Putin had “been shown to have lost his previous ability to be the arbiter between powerful rival groups.” His “public image in Russia as the all-powerful Tsar” had been called into question. Ditto the views of Peter Rutland of Wesleyan University, who was adamant in emphasising Putin’s impotence in being “unable to do anything to stop Prigozhin’s rogue military unit as it seized Rostov-on-Don”, only to then write, without explaining why, about uncharacteristic behaviour from both men in stepping “back from the brink of civil war”.
Then came the hyperventilating chatter about nuclear weapons (too much of the Crimson Tide jitters there), the pathetic wail that accompanies those desperate to fill both column space. The same degree of concern regarding such unsteady nuclear powers as Pakistan is nowhere to be seen, despite ongoing crises and the prospect of political implosion.
Commentors swooned with excitement: the Kremlin had lost the plot; the attempted coup, if it could even be called that, had done wonders to rattle the strongman. Those same commentators could not quite explain that Prigozhin had seemingly been rusticated and banished to Belarus within the shortest of timeframes, where he is likely to keep company with a man of comparatively diminished intellect: Premier Lukashenko himself. Prigozhin, for all his aspirations, has a gangster’s nose for a bargain, poor or otherwise.
As Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov put it, the original criminal case opened against Prigozhin for military mutiny by the Kremlin would be dropped, while any Wagner fighters who had taken part in the “march for justice” would not face any punitive consequences. Those who had not participated would be duly assimilated into the Russian defence architecture in signing contracts with the Defence Ministry.
The image now appearing – much of this subject to redrawing, resketching, and requalifying – is that things were not quite as they seemed. Assuming himself to be a big-brained Wallerstein of regime stirring clout, Prigozhin had seemingly put forth a plan of action that had all the seeds of failure. Britain’s The Telegraphreported that “the mercenary force had only 8,000 fighters rather than the 25,000 claimed and faced likely defeat in any attempt to take the Russian capital.”
Another reading is also possible here, though it will have to be verified in due course. Putin had anticipated that this contingently loyal band of mercenaries was always liable to turn, given the chance. Russia is overrun with such volatile privateers and soldiers of fortune. Where that fortune turns, demands will be made.
Ultimately, in Putin’s Russia, the political is never divorceable from the personal. Chechnya’s resilient thug, Ramzan Kadyrov, very much the prototypical Putin vassal only nominally subservient, suggests that this whole matter could be put down to family business disputes. “A chain of failed business deals created a lingering resentment in the businessman, which reached its peak when St. Petersburg’s authorities did not grant [Prigozhin’s] daughter a coveted land plot.” The big picture, viewed from afar, can be very small indeed.
There’s a frenzied rush by the Australian political/media class to both propagandise Australians as quickly as possible into supporting preparations for war with China, and to ram through legislation that facilitates the censorship of online speech.
Australia’s Communications Minister Michelle Rowland is set to release draft legislation imposing hefty fines on social media companies who fail to adequately block “misinformation” and “disinformation” from circulation in Australia, a frightening prospect which will likely have far-reaching consequences for political speech in the nation.
Under the proposed laws, the authority would be able to impose a new “code” on specific companies that repeatedly fail to combat misinformation and disinformation or an industry-wide “standard” to force digital platforms to remove harmful content.
The maximum penalty for systemic breaches of a registered code would be $2.75 million or 2 per cent of global turnover — whichever is higher.
The maximum penalty for breaching an industry standard would be $6.88 million, or 5 per cent of a company’s global turnover. In the case of Facebook’s owner, Meta, for example, the maximum penalty could amount to a fine of more than $8 billion.
Those are the kinds of numbers that change a company’s censorship protocols. We’re already seeing social media censorship of content in Australia that the Australian government has ruled unacceptable; here’s what the transphobic tweets embedded in a right-wing article about Twitter censorship looks like when you try to view them on Twitter from Australia, for example:
These tweets were reportedly hidden from Australians on the platform at the behest of the Australian government. Australians could wind up seeing much more of this sort of Australia-specific censorship from social media platforms if this “misinformation” legislation goes through. Or they could just start censoring it for everyone.
The problem with laws against inaccurate information is of course that somebody needs to be making the determination what information is true and what is false, and those determinations will necessarily be informed by the biases and agendas of the person making them. I can substantiate my claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was provoked by NATO powers using an abundance of facts and evidence, for example, but there’s still a sizeable portion of the population which would consider such claims malignant disinformation with or without the supporting data.
When the government involves itself in the regulation of speech, it is necessarily incentivized to regulate speech in a way that benefits itself and its allies. Nobody who supports government regulation of online mis- and disinformation can articulate how such measures can be safeguarded in a surefire way against the abuses and agendas of the powerful.
Under a Totalitarian Regime, your government censors your speech if you say unauthorized things. Under a Free Democracy, your government orders corporations to censor your speech if you say unauthorized things.
At the same time, Australian media have been hammering one remarkably uniform message into public consciousness with increasing aggression lately: there is a war with China coming, Australia will be involved, and Australia must do much more to prepare for this war as quickly as possible.
Australians are remarkably vulnerable to propaganda due to the fact that ownership of our nation’s media is the most concentrated in the western world, with a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment and Murdoch’s News Corp controlling most of the Australian press.
Both of these media conglomerates have been involved in the latest excuse to talk about how more military spending and militarisation is needed, this time taking the form of a war machine-funded think tanker publishing a book about how we all need to prepare for war with China.
The “military expert” who warns of the need to prepare for an imminent war with China is a man named Ross Babbage, who as Knott notes is “a non-resident senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.” What Knott fails to disclose to his readers is that the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments is funded by every war profiteer and war machine entity under the sun, the majority coming straight from the US Department of Defense itself.
As we’ve discussed many times previously, it is never, ever okay for the press to cite war machine-funded think tankers for expertise or analysis on matters of war and foreign policy, and it is doubly egregious for them to do so without at least disclosing their massive conflict of interest to their readers. This act of extreme journalistic malpractice has become the norm throughout the mainstream press, because it helps mass media reporters do their actual job: administering propaganda to an unsuspecting public.
All for a news story that (and I cannot stress this enough) is not a news story. A war machine-funded think tanker saying he wants more war is not a news story — it’s just a thing that happens when the war machine is allowed to pay people to be warmongers.
“War Machine-Funded Warmonger Wants More War.” That’s your headline. That’s the one and only headline this non-story could ever deserve, if any.
Propaganda and censorship are the two most important tools of imperial narrative control, and it’s very telling that Australia is ramping them both up as the nation is being transformed into a weapon for the US empire to use against China. Steps are being taken to ensure that the Australian populace will be on board with whatever agendas the empire has planned for us in the coming years, and judging from what we’re seeing right now, it isn’t going to be pretty.
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All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
A five-day Media, Elections and Democracy workshop wrapped up last week in the Marshall Islands capital Majuro with the first-ever Summit on Democracy: Public Engagement, Communications and the Media.
More than 40 students, journalists and public information officers from government and NGOs participated in the programme organised by the Pacific Media Institute in the Marshall Islands.
The workshop featured an experienced team of Pacific Island journalist trainers and resource people led by Honolulu-based writer and photographer Floyd K. Takeuchi.
Nearly 20 journalists and college students from the Marshall Islands participated in a morning track of the workshop, while close to 30 PIOs from the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau took part in an afternoon workshop track.
The workshop focused on learning to “write tight”, with techniques such as haiku (a Japanese poetic writing style) and the four-paragraph story employed.
Numerous special presentations were offered during the lunch hours, including:
• How media organisations support independent journalism and what they’ve accomplished in Tonga and the Solomon Islands, led by Kalafi Moala, president of the Media Association of Tonga, and Georgina Kekea, president of the Media Association of the Solomon Islands.
• Domestic violence and prevention initiatives, led by Kathryn Relang, Country Focal Officer, Marshall Islands, Human Rights and Social Development Division, Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC).
• Teieniwa Vision for Journalists: Anti-Corruption Reporting Toolkit for Journalists, led by Rimon Rimon, investigative journalist, Kiribati.
The workshop culminated in an all-day Summit on Democracy at the government’s International Conference Center.
It featured speeches by Marshall Islands President David Kabua and Nitijelā (Parliament) Speaker Kenneth Kedi, both of whom said they supported the summit concept from the time that Pacific Media Institute sought their endorsement early this year.
The Office of the Speaker co-sponsored the summit with Pacific Media Institute.
Guest speaker was Kalafi Moala who spoke about “Independent news media and traditional leadership: Can they live together?”
Each day of the workshop, including the summit, workshop participants, individually and in small groups, had writing assignments they delivered to the team of Pacific media trainers for review and editing.
Donor partners supporting the Media and Democracy workshops and Summit on Democracy include: AusAID, Republic of China/Taiwan Embassy in Majuro, USAID PROJECT Governance that is managed by the East-West Center and SPC, UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Pacific Anti-Corruption Journalists Network, New Zealand North Pacific Development Fund, and the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat.
Giff Johnson is editor of the Marshall Islands Journal and co-founder of the Pacific Media Institute in Majuro.
Marshall Islands President David Kabua (seated centre) was joined at the opening of the Summit on Democracy by (from left) Ambassador Neijon Edwards, Reverend Jeledrik Binejal, Nitijelā Speaker Kenneth Kedi, keynote speaker Andy Winer, lead workshop trainer Floyd K. Takeuchi, and Pacific Media Institute co-founder Giff Johnson. At back are elected leaders and media workshop participants. Image: Chewy Lin
It is becoming crystal clear that the Democratic Party wants to keep their thumb on the scale to protect President Biden, even as his approval rating continues to show that the public doesn’t love the guy. The other Democrats running for President are gaining traction with Americans, but the Party is still refusing to have […]
On May 28, 2023, five armed soldiers and three police chiefs on the Yemeni island of Socotra arrested freelance journalist Quentin Müller and Sylvain Mercadier, co-founder and director of the independent Iraqi news website The Red Line, at their apartment, according totweets by Müller and Mercadier, who communicated with CPJ via email. The authorities also confiscated the journalists’ passports, two laptops, two cameras, and several books.
The soldiers and police officers were affiliated with the Southern Transitional Council, a United Arab Emirates-backed secessionist group involved in Yemen’s civil war, which aims to establish an independent state in southern Yemen. The STC has been the de facto ruler of Socotra since April 2020.
At the central Socotra police station, officers insinuated that the request for their arrest came from “other Gulf states” and high-ranking officials who were not Yemeni, according to those tweets and Mercadier. The officers referenced the journalists’ reporting onYemen, specificallySocotra, demanded the journalists disclose the names of their sources and reveal meeting places, and told the journalists that their reporting on Yemen did not sit well with those Gulf countries.
French journalist Sylvain Mercadier was placed under house arrest in Socotra, Yemen between May 28 and June 1, 2023. (Photo Credit: Sylvain Mercadier)
Officers questioned Müller about his August 2021article regarding the UAE’s interference in Yemen and the brutality of its proxies, and an October 2021Al Jazeera documentary about Socotra and the UAE’s attempts to gain control of the island, which features interviews with Müller, according to Mercadier.
The officers also said Müller’s photo had been circulating in WhatsApp groups involving individuals working in security coordination between the STC and those Gulf countries. Officers compelled the journalists to unlock their laptops and searched them and their cameras for interviews with political figures who were anti-UAE or anti-STC, Mercadier said.
Müller has extensively reported on the political tensions in Socotra and the broader Middle East in media outlets, including the French monthly newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, the U.K. newspaper The Independent, and the French website Orient XXI, which denounced the arrest of the two journalists.
Mercadier has also reported on the region for outlets including the U.K. newspaper The Guardian, the London-based website Middle East Eye, and Orient XXI.
The journalists were placed under house arrest and questioned several times about their reporting between May 28 and June 1, according to Mercadier. On June 1, authorities returned the journalists’ equipment after requiring them to sign a document saying they had written politically sensitive articles that jeopardized the stability of Socotra without prior authorization from authorities.
On June 4, a national security officer affiliated with the STC pressured the journalists to leave the island, which they did, abandoning their reporting plans and returning to France, according to Mercadier. The officer presented it as “a sort of concern for our safety, but all they wanted was to prevent us from having any opportunity to work in Socotra. There was no danger to our safety apart from the local authorities,” Mercadier added.
“The French journalists were questioned in Socotra due to their lack of proper credentials,” Summer Ahmed, the STC’s U.S.-based representative, told CPJ via email. “We have advised them to register properly as journalists with the National Southern Media Authority (NSMA).”
The NSMA operates in all areas under STC control, including Socotra and the south of Yemen, and functions as an “arm of the STC,” Ahmed told CPJ.
Mercadier told CPJ that he believes their detention was “politically motivated,” adding that NSMA insists on being informed about all meetings and interviews before they occur, calling the request “drastic measures completely incompatible with the conduct of independent journalism.”
Following the arrest of the two journalists, NSMA issued adirective on June 7 urging all media outlets to register their outlets and journalistic employees. On June 13, a second directive urged foreign journalists and international media outlets to register and obtain licenses from NSMA before conducting any reporting activities.
Local journalists and press freedom advocates have named NSMA as one of the factors contributing to the deterioration of press freedom in Yemen. In September 2022, the Yemeni Journalists Syndicatedenounced the NSMA’s decision to prohibit certain journalists from conducting interviews with specific media channels.
Journalists reporting in areas under the control of the STC have facedassault and prolonged detention, especially when they report on abuses allegedly committed by militias loyal to the STC or critically report on the UAE.
In August 2022, STC security forces detained freelance Yemeni journalistAhmed Maher and his brother in Aden. Maher remains in custody, has endured harsh interrogations, and wasbanned multiple times from attending his own trial.
In February 2023, security forces affiliated with the STC took control of the Yemeni Journalists Syndicate’s headquarters in Aden and transferred control to a newly established STC entity known as the Southern Media and Journalists’ Syndicate, according to a statement by the syndicate. On June 9, the Yemeni Journalists Syndicate issued a statement that condemned the ongoing control of their headquarters by the STC and demanded its restoration.
On June 18, STC security forces arrested and detained journalist Akram Karem in Aden for criticizing the local authorities in the Al-Tawahi district and exposing corruption on his Facebook page. He was released on June 20 on the orders of the governor of Aden.
