News broke at the end of last week that a slander verdict delivered last month against Russian journalist Mikhail Beketov has been overturned.
Beketov, who was left handicapped in 2008 by a beating thought to be provoked by his reporting, was convicted of defamation and fined in November.
But on Friday it was widely reported that a Russian court had overturned the verdict. Press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders said it welcomes the decision.
Mark Seddon, a journalist formerly with Al-Jazeera, responds to yesterday’s reports on US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks that suggested the Arabic arm of the broadcaster has been used as a “tool of foreign policy” by the Qatari government,
[T]he idea that al-Jazeera tempers its editorial content at the behest of the emir of Qatar, who mainly finances it, is possibly as fanciful as the WikiLeaks report that US diplomats believed their South Korean counterparts when they said that China might recognise a unified Korea under the aegis of Seoul. Conjecture does not always meet with reality. Al-Jazeera, in its swashbuckling and sometimes disorganised way, has shown itself quite adept at resisting pressure wherever it may come from.
Andrew Harding, the BBC’s Africa correspondent, on the dangers of working as a journalist in Somalia:
One man recognises me and cameraman Phil Davies from a previous trip we made about seven years ago. He used to be a journalist but not now.
“Too dangerous,” he says with a frown, then mimes the action of a saw, amputating his arm. He lives in an area of the Somali capital controlled by the Islamist militia, al-Shabab. “They lash people there. Every day – for the smallest thing.”
Author and English PEN deputy president Hari Kunzru has posted a tanscript of his address to the European Writers Parliament yesterday, in which he criticised the event’s host country Turkey over article 301 of its penal code which makes it illegal to insult Turkey, the Turkish ethnicity and Turkish government institutions.
I believe that the right to freedom of speech trumps any right to protection from offense, and that it underlies all the other issues I’ve been speaking about. Without freedom of speech, we, as writers, can have very little impact on culture.
According to the Daily Mail, a married sportsman has won an injunction from the high court banning reporting on his private life. The Mail says its possible that the injunction will be modified to allow reporting of the individual’s name but not the secret.
Russian journalist Mikhail Beketov, who was left handicapped in 2008 after a beating by unidentified assailants thought to be provoked by his reporting, has been convicted of defamation.
According to the Independent’s report, Beketov, who lost a leg in the attack and was left unable to speak, was issued with a fine of 5,000 roubles (£100) for defaming an official that he criticised in his coverage of the destruction of the Khimki forest near Moscow as editor of the Khimkinskaya Pravda newspaper.
Full story on Independent.co.uk at this link…
Related reading: ‘The problem with journalism in Russia is not censorship, that would be easy to deal with’ by Alexey Kovalev
Russian media outlets and the Committee to Protect Journalists have called on President Medvedev to deal with unsolved crimes against the media, following an attack on reporter Oleg Kashin this weekend which led to him being placed into an induced coma.
According to a report by AFP, 26 reporters and media outlets, as well as hundreds of others, have signed an open letter demanding protection for journalists’ rights.
“By demanding the protection of reports, what we are talking about is not only our own trade,” the letter said. “One must also protect the rights of our readers. The rights of reporters to fulfill their obligation in a normal fashion and not worry about their lives — this is the right of society to speak and be heard.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists has also called on the government to act. In a statement, CPJ executive director Joel Simon said:
We are outraged by the attack on Kommersant reporter Oleg Kashin. While it is important that President Medvedev has called for the perpetrators to be ‘found and punished,’ we also believe that the government itself has considerable responsibility. By failing to prosecute those who have carried out crimes against journalists in the past – including 19 murders committed in the Putin era – the Russian government has created a climate of impunity. Government statements and expressions of sympathy are simply not sufficient. Arrests, prosecutions and convictions are what are urgently needed.
The International Federation of Journalists announced at the end of last week that its affiliate in Palestine, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), is to develop a code of ethics for the region’s journalists and establish an independent press council.
This followed a meeting of Palestinian journalists and editors in Ramallah, to discuss ethics and media self-regulation. In a quote IFJ Treasurer Wolfgang Mayer said:
This is excellent news for both Palestinian Journalists and the Palestinian people who will ultimately benefit from structures that improve the ethical standards and independence of their journalism. It is also a tribute to the efforts of the new leadership of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate to set about a serious programme of reform and renewal of Palestinian journalism.
A bus carrying journalists who were reporting on the Haiti election campaign was attacked by gunmen on Monday night according to reports in the US.
Based on a report from the Associated Press, the Washington Post says the bus was carrying seven Haitian journalists to a campaign stop by candidate Jacques Edouard Alexis. The driver was killed and one journalist was injured in the attack.
Haitian National Television reporter Richardson Jordan told The Associated Press that the driver, an off-duty police officer with the prisons department, tried to rush past men armed with pistols, machetes and a homemade gun.
Jordan said the men opened fire and killed the driver with a shot to the head. The bus flipped, injuring one of the journalists, and the bandits rushed in to take money and a laptop computer.
Kigali-based blogger Graham Holliday reacts to this week’s release of the 2010 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Rwanda fell 12 places from its ranking in 2009 to 169th out of 178 countries.
The reasons behind its position are not all warranted, he says:
There are problems with the Rwandan press. Media emanating from Rwanda is almost universally uncritical of power, while the blogs and commentators outside the country are almost universally critical of power. The reality is that things are not all bad and they’re not all good. In that respect, Rwanda is just like anywhere else.
Self-censorship is probably the biggest and most unquantifiable problem here, which relates directly to a key question, especially for foreign correspondents – how do you write about this country and manage to remain fair and balanced?