Doris Ebong "boogie trip" is a nice backdrop to a grim tale of journalists being bumped off in Nigeria. read on here but first a hat tip to Africa Express

British actor, comedian and tv presenter Stephen Fry sings the praises of Twitter which has just won the New Media award at the 10th annual Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards in London

Documentary maker Erik Gandini tells Giulio D'Eramo why appearance matters more than truth in Italy

Erik Gandini is the acclaimed documentary maker of Surplus: Terrorised into Being Consumers and Sacrificio: Who Betrayed Che Guevara. He was born in northern Italy and now lives in Sweden. His new documentary Videocracy is a critical portrait of the Italian broadcast media and its impact on the country's culture. The film's release last year coincided with embarrassing revelations aboutSilvio Berlusconi's romantic escapades and went on to win the Toronto film festival award for best documentary and the special jury award at the Sheffield film festival. It has also been a surprise hit at the Italian box office.

Videocracy is an overview of the past 30 years of Italian television, starting 

'The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India's Gravest Internal Security Threat. I'd been waiting for months to hear from them. I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days. That was to take care of bad weather, punctures, blockades, transport strikes and sheer bad luck. The note said: "Writer should have camera, tika and coconut. Meeter will have cap, Hindi Outlook magazine and bananas. Password: Namashkar Guruji."' Read on at Outlook

The acclaimed Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy spoke to Democracy Now's Amy Goodman about President Barack Obama, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, India and Kashmir and much more. Roy also spoke about her journey deep into the forests of central India to report on the Maoist insurgency.

How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?

• Why is Europe so two-faced about repression of the media in Cuba?
• Watch this video - to see how Cuba treats the wives and widows of dissidents
• Ask yourself why the European Commission and several EU governments financially underwrite Cuban propaganda from the Inter Press Service which reports only "balanced news" from Cuba 
  
• A Good Old Age in Old Havana typical propaganda from IPS, funded by EU taxpayers
• European Parliament finally condemns Cuba for 'avoidable' death of Hunger striker
• European Commission and individual countries subsidize Cuba's propaganda machine

• Spain (the EU Presidency) coddles the Cuban dictatorship, but a US diplomat joined a march by the womens' opposition protest group that was set upon by a pro-government mob
  

An open Letter to Europe on behalf of jailed Cuban journalists

March 18, 2010

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
President of the Government of Spain
In charge of the presidency of the European Union
Palacio de Moncloa
Madrid, Spain

Via facsímile: 34-913- 900-217

Dear President Rodríguez Zapatero:

On the seventh anniversary of the Cuban government's massive crackdown on dissidents and the independent press, the Committee to Protect Journalists calls on you as leader of the European Union to take the forefront in defending human rights by urging President Raúl Castro to immediately release 22 journalists now jailed in Cuba.

Comment

Trevor Ncube and Charlayne Hunter-Gault

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For too long, news about and for Africans has come predominately from outsiders. International media portrayals of Africans have often been unrecognizable to Africans.

The continent's journalists have tried - with increasing success - to present a more accurate and nuanced picture of their home and its myriad peoples and cultures. They have striven at the same time to hold their governments accountable by exposing corruption and airing the views of the opposition, civil society, the poor and the marginalized

Freelance journalist Takashi Uesugi claims he has been blacklisted for exposing the secrets of Japan's big media and the press-club system.
A former aide to political LDP bigwig Kunio Hatoyama and researcher with The New York Times, Uesugi recorded his frustrations with reporting in Japan in his book The Collapse of Journalism (Gentosha, 2008). Here he talks exclusively to David McNeill and Number 1 Shimbun about the book and his experiences as a reporter.

New feature film "Four Lions" debut from Brass Eye's Chris Morris, premieres at the Sundance film festival on Saturday. In this exclusive clip, we see how not to buy a dozen bottles of bomb-making bleach....

A spoof ad for "Forehead Tittaes," starring Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard, complete with "scientific" evidence ("Lab tests prove that Forehead Tittaes actually redirect the male gaze from the chest to the general area of the brain"), and William Fichtner as lecherous boss...

After battling with EMI over the right to embed the video, it took more than 50 takes to get it right. The NPR story is worth a listen

Taking the piss may be the most powerful tool at the disposal of journalists and bloggers facing scrutiny. So say our friends at the Tactical Technology Collective, who have seen tools from karaoke to comedy aid in organizing.

Hugh Pope on Dining with Al-Qaeda
Uploaded by thomascrampton. - Up-to-the minute news videos.

While in Istanbul, social media guru Thomas Crampton had an impromptu video discussion with Hugh Pope about his new book Dining with al-Qaeda. A touch raw and unedited, it is nonetheless compelling for the home truths Hugh tells about the editing process of the US mainstream media.

In addition to covering the region as a foreign correspondent, for among others The Independent and the Wall St Journal, Pope has written some excellent books about Turkey and the Turkic peoples. Sons of the Conquerors is a must-read.

Pope describes the book as a reflection on his meeting with the Middle Eastern society; how he learned that it is not all about caravans, poetry and desert oases. Instead, it is a region of concrete buildings, violence and shattered societies.

By Fareed Zakaria 

Toward the end of his 118-day ordeal inside Tehran's Evin prison, Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari had a bizarre exchange with his interrogator. Bahari had been held in solitary confinement since his arrest after Iran's disputed presidential election in June; he had been subjected to near-daily beatings and interrogation sessions that stretched for hours. But his jailers had not been able to prove their accusation that Bahari was a spy for Western intelligence agencies. So they had an ominous-sounding new charge to levy against him: "media espionage."

Fewer in future: American foreign correspondents  becoming a rarity as their numbers dwindle. Here US  journalists in Mombasa, Kenya interview a crew member of the Maersk Alabama, a ship that was seized and then released by Somali pirates in April 2009. (Antony Njuguna/Reuters)

By Tom Fenton
Recently, I sadly said goodbye to former colleagues who were fired in another round of cost cutting by CBS News. The CBS London bureau now stands half empty, and the dwindling band of survivors wonder who will go next.
Now ABC News has announced much deeper cuts. Hundreds of employees will be let go in a wave of corporate bloodletting that will decimate its worldwide staff. The opening announcement of ABC World News still boasts that it comes "from the global resources of ABC News," but does not mention how thin they now are. NBC News has already cut its overseas operations to the bone.
Even the mighty BBC is said to be planning widespread spending reductions which include closing several radio stations and slashing output on its websites. But these cuts seem minor compared to what is being done to the American news media.
Coverage of foreign news for American audiences has been one of the major casualties and is in danger of disappearing. Each of the mainstream American news broadcasters (with the exception of CNN) now maintains only a handful of full-time foreign correspondents, and does very little original news gathering abroad. Few American newspapers have any foreign correspondents at all....

By Naomi Klein
Just two days after Chile was struck by a devastating earthquake, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens informed his readers that Milton Friedman's "spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile" because, "thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse.... It's not by chance that Chileans were living in houses of brick--and Haitians in houses of straw--when the wolf arrived to try to blow them down."

According to Stephens, the radical free-market policies prescribed to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet by Milton Friedman and his infamous "Chicago Boys" are the reason Chile is a prosperous nation with "some of the world's strictest building codes."

There is one rather large problem with this theory: Chile's modern seismic building code, drafted to resist earthquakes, was adopted in 1972. That year is enormously significant because it was one year before Pinochet seized power in a bloody U.S-backed coup.

There were important statements out yesterday from two of the administration's most pivotal actors on Sudan policy, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and Special Envoy Scott Gration. There is great deal of interesting material in both statements, but the comments are most striking in their sheer, sharp, and ultimately disconcerting contrast.

Rice's comments, coming as she emerged from a meeting of the Sanctions committee on Sudan, are blessedly forthright. 

Actress Nicole Richie, Kimberly Pinkson of the EcoMom Alliance, John Prendergast of The Enough Project talk about the conflict minerals from Congo that are used to produce our electronics, and fuel the deadliest war since World War II.

Provocatively headlined "Come, let's discuss the burqa once again"......an article by the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin cost two lives on Monday when it was used without her permission

Reposted from Sans Serif

The front page of Saptahika Prabha, the weekly magazine section of the Kannada daily Kannada Prabha of the New Indian Express group, carried a controversial piece on the burqa by Taslima Nasrin, which led to protests and riots in Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa's hometown, Shimoga, killing two people on Monday.

The story titled Purdah hai purdah begins on page one of the section with the clarion call "Come, let's discuss the burqa once again" and spills over to page 5, occupying nearly half the broadsheet page. The article states upfront that it has been translated from the original English by "Sindhu" but does not mention the source.

By John Prendergast and Omer Ismail of the Enough Project