Raza Rumi, director of the Park Institute for Independent Media at Ithaca College in NY, joins Mickey for a wide-ranging conversation about the importance of non-corporate media and media literacy.…
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A new report from The Intercept has revealed that the Pentagon is scrolling through social media trying to identify people making mean tweets about military generals. They claim they’re doing this for safety reasons, but they’re actually trying to keep tabs on anyone that is critical of the US war machine. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: […]
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Dakar, July 17, 2023—Burkinabè authorities should immediately reverse the suspension of French television news channel La Chaîne Info (LCI) and stop censoring local and foreign media coverage of the jihadist insurgency in Burkina Faso and the Sahel region, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.
On June 23, Burkina Faso’s media regulator, the Superior Council for Communication (known by its French acronym CSC), suspended LCI, which is part of private broadcaster TF1, for three months for allegedly airing false information about deteriorating security conditions in the country on its current affairs show, “24H Pujadas,” according to several media reports and a copy of the decision.
“We call on the Burkinabè authorities to reverse their decision and immediately lift the suspension of LCI’s broadcasting,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator in New York. “The latest suspension of a French media outlet over its insurgency reporting appears retaliatory rather than grounded in fact and robs the people of Burkina Faso of their right to know what is happening in their country.”
Thousands of Burkinabè citizens have died and millions have been displaced in the eight-year insurgency led by militants affiliated with Al-Qaeda and Islamic State, who currently control large areas of the country. Soured relations between France, the country’s former colonial power, and Burkina Faso’s ruling military junta led to the February withdrawal of French troops helping to fight the insurgents.
LCI is the third French outlet to be suspended since December 2022 in Burkina Faso after France 24’s suspension in March and the radio station RFI in December. In addition, two French journalists working for Le Monde and Libération were expelled from Burkina Faso in April.
The CSC suspension decision said commentary by LCI’s popular “24H Pujadas” host, Abnousse Shalmani, on an April 24 segment titled “Sahel, the lost zone” was “not based on any concrete evidence” and “lacked objectivity and credibility.” It also said the report exaggerated the scale of the insurgency and “seditiously” exposed “unverified” failures in Burkina Faso’s military response to the insurgency, Reuters reported.
Blahima Traoré, CSC general secretary, told CPJ by messaging app that the three satellite television providers that carry LCI for subscribers, were formally notified of the decision on June 23.
Canal+ Burkina, Neerwaya Multivision, and Stars Médias Burkina—the three providers—would be “liable for penalties” if they failed to suspend LCI for three months from the notification date, a CSC notification sent to Canal+ Burkina’s general manager said. At least one of the three—Canal+ Burkina—has suspended LCI broadcasts, but the channel is still available online, Guézouma Sanogo, president of the Association of Journalists of Burkina, told CPJ via messaging app on July 10. CPJ was not able to immediately confirm whether Neerwaya Multivision and Stars Médias Burkina have suspended LCI broadcasts.
According to Article 46 of the 2013 law that establishes the regulator and sets out its powers and composition, the CSC can suspend the broadcasting of a program “for a maximum of three months” depending on the seriousness of the breach.
CPJ tried unsuccessfully to contact LCI and Shalmani for comment via their social media accounts.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
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Media organisations in Papua — including the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) of Jayapura City, the Indonesian Journalists Association (PWI) of Papua and the Indonesian Television Journalists Association (IJTI) of Papua — have lambasted intimidation against Abdel Gamel Naser, a reporter with the Cenderawasih Pos.
The incident occurred while he was covering the issue of mangrove forest destruction in the Youtefa Bay Nature Park conservation area in Jayapura City last Tuesday.
Gamel, as he is commonly known, allegedly faced intimidation from two police officers who were present near the location.
The officers approached Gamel and questioned why he was photographing the area.
Despite explaining that he was a journalist, the officers forced him to delete three images from his reportage.
“To avoid further conflict so I can continue my reporting elsewhere, I deleted the photos,” he explained.
“As I was leaving the location, [the police officers] issued further threats,” Gamel said in a press release issued by the media groups.
A halt to logging
Gamel was among a group of about a dozen journalists who were covering the halt of logging and material stockpiling in the mangrove forest area of Youtefa Bay Nature Tourism Park.
The halt was carried out by the Papua Forestry and Environment Service, the Papua Natural Resources Conservation Center, and the Papua Police Special Crimes Unit.
According to Gamel, the intimidation occurred while he was capturing images near a location where police lines had been established, and several police officers were nearby.
Lucky Ireeuw, chair of the AJI Jayapura, strongly condemned the alleged intimidation faced by Gamel during his work. he said such repressive actions hindered the exercise of press freedom in Papua.
“The intimidation suffered by Gamel obstructs press freedom and violates Law No. 40/1999 on Press,” Ireeuw said.
He called on the Papua police to take decisive action against the officers implicated in the alleged intimidation.
“We urge the police to ensure press freedom in Papua,” Ireeuw added.
‘Arrogant’ display
Meanwhile, PWI Papua deputy chair Ridwan Madubun strongly condemned the “display of arrogance” that resulted in the intimidation of his fellow journalist Gamel. Madubun saoid such actions were unjustifiable, especially when they happened while journalists were carrying out their responsibilities in the public domain.
He also expressed dismay at the ongoing repressive acts against journalists in Papua.
Journalists are safeguarded by law in carrying out their coverage duties to inform the public.
Papua police spokesperson Senior Commander Ignatius Beny Ady Prabowo said efforts had been made within the police institution to educate officers about press freedom since their training at the National Police School.
“I have just been made aware of the alleged intimidation against Gamel,” Prabowo said. “Journalists who encounter such incidents can report them to our Internal Division.”
Republished from Jubi with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Police violence against African-Americans. Poverty in the United Kingdom. Widespread pollution. An oligarchy controls the U.S. government.
In recent weeks, China’s state media has been pumping out a slew of negative news reports about the United States and Europe in recent weeks – even as many middle-class and wealthy Chinese flee the country.
A June 24 video feature on U.S. politics by state news agency Xinhua in English warned: “The rich have power, while the poor have weak rights.”
“Under the veneer of American democracy, it’s actually the rich who rule the country,” the report said. “Behind the mask of one person one vote is actually one dollar, one vote.”
It said Abraham Lincoln’s promise of government “of the people, by the people and for the people” had fallen into the hands of an oligarchy. “U.S. elections have become a fig leaf for capitalists to exercise power,” the report said.
Across the Atlantic, one in seven British people went hungry in 2022 due to lack of money to buy food, state news agency Xinhua reported on June 29, citing a report from the Trussell Foundation.
“Government figures estimate that British households are in the midst of the two-year decline in living standards that has been the biggest since comparable records began in the 1950s,” the report said. It was widely picked up by mainland Chinese news sites and bloggers, with photos of restrictions on the sale of bell peppers at a Manchester supermarket.
‘It’s not Mars’
While China’s state media — which is registered under legislation governing the agents and representatives of foreign governments in the United States — has long been subject to stringent political controls on what it can publish at home, Xinhua and other overseas organizations have much freer rein when reporting from foreign countries.
And there is a stark variation in the type of language state media use when reporting on bad news — depending where it’s happening.
A keyword search for “wildfires” on the Global Times website in English on July 12 turned up around a dozen stories using negative language like “worst ever,” “losing face” and “rampant wildfires” to describe the fires and air pollution in the United States, Canada and further afield, while around five use more neutral language about global climate change.
“It’s not Mars, it’s the U.S.!” begins one article, with a picture of New York city enveloped in orange haze.
The language contrasts with last year’s coverage of wildfires outside Chongqing, which use language like ‘vanquished’ and ‘heroes’ and ‘all flames put out’ to portray the heroic struggle of the firefighters. The same search on the China Daily website yields similar results.
Yet coverage of Canadian wildfires from 2009 offers a much more balanced picture, with two using heroic language about firefighting efforts and two focusing on evacuations and damage.
‘Run’
While is is unclear whether the apparent flurry of bad news out of the West is deliberate, the grim and sometimes downright snarky coverage comes amid news of the “run” movement, a steady flow of Chinese people leaving the country who are worried about their economic future, tired of the restrictions in daily life and disenchanted with their leaders and political system.
Some desperate Chinese are trekking through the jungles of Latin America to get to Mexico, where they cross into the United States and apply for political asylum.
Meanwhile, a June 17 report from state broadcaster CCTV focused on police violence against Black people in the United States.
“Three years after the death of George Floyd, violent law enforcement in the US police system is still widespread,” the headline reads, referring to a recent Department of Justice investigation into racism in the police force.
“Violent law enforcement exists widely in the American police system,” the report said. “The reality is that a large number of social problems in the United States have become bargaining chips for politicians from both parties to compete for political interests.”
A day earlier, the China Daily reported on a court ruling that two police officers in Oklahoma, who are facing manslaughter charges for the 2021 killing of Quadry Sanders, an African-American, were unjustifiably terminated and must be reinstated.
“The deceased’s mother filed a lawsuit, but the local police and the government denied any wrongdoing by the officers,” the report said.
In a recent commentary, the Global Times accused U.S. media of using “this ‘losing-face’ moment to smear China for its pollution in the past, which prompted Chinese netizens to fight back with pictures of clear-sky Chinese metropolises, advising the U.S. to learn from China’s great achievements in improving air quality in the past years.”
The overseas Chinese news service Qiaobao took up the police violence and racism theme with its reporting of the French riots over the killing of Nahel Merzouk, a teenager of North African descent.
“The riots in many places caused by the French police shooting and killing teenagers are still continuing, and have attracted a lot of attention,” the paper wrote, drawing a parallel with the killing of George Floyd.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hwang Chun-mei and Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Facebook has made the decision to stop allowing news articles to be posted on their platform in Canada, after they were told they would have to start paying them. The efforts to force Facebook to pay outlets is being driven by corporate media outlets who know that they will win no matter what happens. Mike Papantonio & Farron […]
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It should be called for what it is. The recent apoplectic, lurid coverage of what was, at best, a matter for a corporation’s human resources department dominating several news cycles even as drownings continued in the Mediterranean, war continued being waged in Ukraine and climate change continued issuing ominous reminders of its existence.
The issue at hand? Allegations that a BBC presenter, said to be a “household name”, had paid £35,000 to a youth over a period of several years in return for sexually explicit photos. The payments are said to have started when the young person in question was 17, leading to questions about whether a crime had taken place in the making, sharing or possessing of incident images.
The story made its debut in that king of rags, The Sun. The howls followed. As an article headline read: “Top BBC star who ‘paid child for sex pictures’ could be charged by cops and face years in prison, expert says.”
Within a few days, three issues started to thump and pulsate in the mediascape: whether the as yet unnamed presenter had solicited the images in the first place; whether the BBC had shown indifference in ignoring the complaints of that behaviour by a concerned family member; and whether the entire matter was, according to the lawyer representing the young person, “rubbish”.
The whole affair led to various episodes of sheer terror within the BBC itself, with Jeremy Vine, a colleague of the still unnamed presenter, demanding the identity be revealed in order to stop “yet more vitriol being thrown about at perfectly innocent colleagues at his”, placing the broadcaster “on its knees”.
The BBC found itself in a bizarre, masochistic bind of constantly covering itself, repeatedly running stories on the matter, including a report on July 11 that a second young individual had supposedly received abusive messages from the presenter via a dating app. Much of this was put down to journalistic integrity, not wishing to sweep such matters under the carpet.
More details emerged, even as the NATO summit in Vilnius continued. The unnamed person was outed as BBC anchor Huw Edwards. On July 12, it was revealed by his wife, Vicky Flind, that he had been hospitalised, suffering a mental breakdown – the handiwork, it was claimed, of The Sun’s lurid coverage. But what also emerged was that the police had found no evidence or grounds to suggest that a crime had been committed. The whole matter had been an issue of outing the private life of a public figure.
The excuses and apologias are thickening over the reasons for the coverage, fed by platoons of analysts, journalists, and pundits. The BBC, reasons former president of CBS, Howard Stringer, is “always at the centre of the storm because of its power.” It’s seen, like the monarchy, “as a symbol of continuity in a polarised society.” Edwards, having himself broken the news of Queen Elizabeth II’s death, having led BBC coverage of King Charles III’s coronation, and having been an anchor of BBC News at Ten, “captured that sense of stability.”
A far better reading of this was that the BBC had fallen for the bait crudely laid out by Murdoch’s less savoury publications. In its self-policing zeal, the corporation had effectively done the bidding of a tabloid. In doing so, former editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger suggested it had “lost its sense of proportion”. The BBC, he observed, “gets into this mindset where it feels it must make up for sluggishness in handling issues by showing a clean pair of hands in covering them.” Such a mindset was well aided by the conduct of previous employees, such as the late comedian and predatory Jimmy Savile, whose conduct was only exposed after his death in 2011.
While its own management regarding complaints was hardly beyond rebuke – the BBC director-general, Tim Davie, did only involve himself in the matter after The Sun put additional allegations from the mother to the broadcaster on July 6 – the colossal canvas here is obvious. This was a salvo fired by the Murdoch Empire.
Since the 1980s, Murdoch has done venomous battle with public broadcasters through his various press outlets, with the BBC being foremost among his targets. In his own, revealing words, “A monopoly is a terrible thing – until you get one.”
In 1985, a sense of Murdoch’s attitude to the corporation was made clear in a January leader in The Times. “The BBC,” it went, “should not survive this parliament in its present size, in its present form and with its present terms of reference intact.” The implications were all there: cutting, trimming, slimming.
Again, the same view is to be found on July 17, 2015 in the paper’s leader titled “Slimming Auntie,” this time in response to the DCMS Green Paper on BBC Charter renewal. The nub of the issue: the BBC’s boggling power, aided by public funds. “The corporation is a broadcaster, not a publisher. It cannot expect a renewed charter to endorse a status quo that lets it trample on private sector rivals with public funds. Technology has allowed the BBC to expand as if on steroids.”
Such opinions stem from an individual who presided over the now defunct News of the World, a central outlet in the phone-hacking scandal that eventually saw the demise of Britain’s most popular lavatory reading. It catalysed the Leveson Inquiry, which managed to at least get a confession from Murdoch that the paper had been engaged in a cover-up over the extent of the phone hacking.
On May 1, 2012, a UK parliamentary select committee report found that the media mogul “exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications” and concluded that he was “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”. Such an exemplary steward for public interest journalism.
The Sun, for its part, denies ever suggesting the need for a criminal inquiry in the Edwards saga. Just see its journalism as doing a public duty, aiding desperate parents. “From the outset, we have reported a story about two very concerned and frustrated parents who made a complaint to the BBC about the behaviour of a presenter and payments from him that fuelled the drug habit of a young person.” How very noble of them.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
America’s Lawyer E60: Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign seems to be going under faster than any other campaign at the moment, and the Florida governor has no idea how to get things turned around. If you’ve ever spoken out about the US military, then you can bet that the Pentagon is keeping tabs on your social […]
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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.
Turkey was the world’s fourth-worst jailer of journalists, with 40 behind bars at the time of CPJ’s December 1, 2022, prison census. Of those, more than half were Kurdish journalists.
CPJ’s email to the Diyarbakır chief prosecutor’s office did not receive a response.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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.
‘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.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
In Brief
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 published by 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AFCL searched the photo on Google and found a video uploaded by a Twitter user on June 9, 2023 among the search results.
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.
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.”
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 post was originally published on Radio Free.
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 Belmarsh high-security prison 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.”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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 post Study Finds Social Media Impact On Children & College’s Want To Create Gambling Addicts appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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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.
Lastly we’ve got an article from The Hill titled “Bolton hails Biden decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine as ‘an excellent idea’” about professional warmonger John Bolton’s enthusiastic support for the latest cluster munitions development.
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.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
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 […]
The post Former Intel Agents Control Facebook Censorship & FTC Looks To Ban Corporate Non-Compete Clause appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
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.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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/
Tuesday, July 18: Wellington
7pm
St Andrews on the Terrace, 30 The Terrace (Unity Books will have a rep there)
https://www.facebook.com/events/644521054258279/
Wednesday, July 19: Hawkes Bay
8pm
Greenmeadows Community Hall, 83 Tait Drive, Napier
https://www.facebook.com/events/6474977775923813/
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/
TRT World News interviews Antony Loewenstein on this week’s Israeli attack on Jenin refugee camp.
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."
This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
By Susana Suisuiki, RNZ Pacific journalist, and Moera Tuilaepa-Taylor, RNZ Pacific manager
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.”
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.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
In Brief
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.
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.
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.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Chrissy Stroop.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
COMMENTARY: A special correspondent in Port Moresby
As an officer of the Department of Foreign Affairs in the Papua New Guinea government, I have to write anonymously to secure my safety.
I am writing to reveal interference by the United States in PNG’s internal affairs which is undermining the bilateral relationship between Australia and PNG.
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 […]
The post We Are Inundated With The Stupidity Of Billionaires appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.
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 multiple news reports 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.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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 Washington Post, 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 N
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.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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.
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.
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.
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.