AKA "Bush gets away with murder!"
Journalism at Risk
A New Power Rises Across Mideast
Advocates for Democracy Begin to Taste Success After Years of Fruitless Effort
By Scott Wilson and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 17, 2005; Page A01
First of two articles
BEIRUT -- Early this year, a small group of advertising executives, journalists and political operatives began meeting around the crowded tables of a popular cafe here to plot an opposition media strategy for Lebanon's spring parliamentary elections.
Among them was Said Francis, whose urbane crew cut and black turtleneck sweater suggested his position as the regional creative director of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Employing reams of scratch paper, cigarettes and coffee, the group members argued over color schemes and slogans.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58609-2005Apr16.html
Judge expects Supreme Court to decide confidentiality of journalists' sources
By CHELSEA DEWEESE for the Missoulian
Thomas Hogan, chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, speaks to students, faculty and community members Tuesday afternoon at the University of Montana School of Law's Castles Center. Judge Hogan discussed the First Amendment and journalists' privilege to keep sources confidential when subpoenaed to testify in court.
Photo by LIZ GRAUMAN/Missoulian
The U.S. Supreme Court may soon be in a position to determine whether to create a federal shield law for reporters, a U.S. District Court judge said Tuesday during a guest lecture at the University of Montana.
"It may well be an opportunity to adopt a common-law privilege," U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan said during a presentation at the UM School of Law entitled "Protecting Deep Throat."
http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2005/04/14/news/local/znews04.txt
Zim court acquits British journalists
A Zimbabwean court on Thursday acquitted two British journalists from the Sunday Telegraph newspaper accused of illegally covering last month's parliamentary elections.
"I find both of them not guilty and I will acquit them," said Magistrate Never Diza.
"All in all, the state failed to produce evidence for the accused to answer," she said.
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=234976&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/
Journalists facing increase in government meddling, challenges
Published: Monday, April 18, 2005
There are a few cardinal rules in journalism:
1) Tell the truth; this means delivering a balanced, fair accounting of what happened.
2) Report what's newsworthy in a timely fashion; in other words, give the readers or viewers what they need and when they need it in order to make sound decisions about their lives.
3) And perhaps above all, engender trust.
If a newspaper or a television news station can't make good on the latter, then the first two issues are likely out the door. Does it matter if you tell the truth and do so in a timely fashion, if the audience doesn't trust you? If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it make a sound?
http://www.wilkesbeacon.com/news/2005/04/18/Opinion/Journalists.Facing.Increase.In.Government.Meddling.Challenges-927418.shtml
Journos jailed for libel
18/04/2005 08:18 - (SA)
Egypt boosts free speech
Cairo, Egypt - The Cairo Criminal Court on Sunday sentenced three journalists to one year in prison for libelling the housing minister, despite a year-old announcement by the president that he would scrap the law that allows such imprisonment.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/News/0,,2-11-1447_1691596,00.html
Sophy Miller is taking on the might of an entire army
BILLY BRIGGS
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/37238.html
Uzbekistan: Deputy Interior Minister Addresses Allegations Of New Dissident Repressions
The Uzbek public was recently shaken by a series of Internet articles alleging the country's interior minister was set to unleash a new wave of antidissident repressions. The articles featured the supposed text of the new order as well as a blacklist of people targeted and the preferred method of repressions. A group of prominent independent journalists wrote to the minister, Zakir Almatov, demanding an explanation. Today, Almatov's deputy met with the journalists.
Prague, 15 April 2005 (RFE/RL) -- The meeting between the journalists and the deputy interior minister was an unprecedented event in Uzbekistan.
The subject of the talks were a series of Internet articles written under the name of Safar Abdullaev.
The articles referred to the existence of a confidential document drafted by the Interior Ministry and detailing a plan for new state repressions for the years 2005-07.
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/04/f6d8a2e5-6a96-4725-9556-23f1b5304a72.html
Jailed Yemeni editor symbolises problems faced by fellow journalists
(AFP)
17 March 2005
SANAA - Newspaper editor Abdul Karim al-Khaiwani, who was sentenced to one year in jail last September after harshly criticizing the Sanaa regime, has become a symbol of the problems facing journalists in Yemen.
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/todaysfeatures/2005/March/todaysfeatures_March36.xml§ion=todaysfeatures
Free speech groups demand freedom for jailed journalists
EU envoy's Easter visit a chance to raise the cases of prisoners of conscience. By Rohan Jayasekera
Louis Michel and
Felipe Pérez Roque
International supporters of free expression urge a senior European envoy to call for the immediate freeing of 21 journalists and writers jailed by the Cuban authorities two years ago while in Havana for talks at Easter.
European Commissioner for Development Louis Michel meets with senior Cuban officials in Havana on 24-27 March. He will be considering how approach a trade-off deal on human rights offered by Cuba's foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, the last time the two met, earlier this month.
Perez Roque has said that Havana is prepared to make "clear gestures" if the European Union withdraws its threat to table a resolution condemning Cuba's human rights record at this year's UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.
http://www.indexonline.org/en/news/articles/2005/1/cuba-eu-envoy-urged-to-raise-cases-of-prison.shtml
Zimbabwe expels British journalists after 14 days in jail
Andrew Meldrum in Pretoria
Saturday April 16, 2005
The Guardian
Two British journalists were deported from Zimbabwe yesterday after being acquitted of working without accreditation and overstaying their visas.
Toby Harnden, 35, chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, and Julian Simmonds, 45, a Telegraph photographer, were due to fly to South Africa last night after a magistrate gave them "the benefit of the doubt" on the visa charge and handed them over to immigration officials.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/zimbabwe/article/0,2763,1461102,00.html
A royal mess
By Tom de Castella
Published: April 15 2005 18:25 Last updated: April 15 2005 18:25
At what point do journalists working in the shadow of a repressive regime give up? There will be a few people asking themselves that question in today’s Zimbabwe. Another rigged victory for Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party - this time by a landslide that gives him the power to change the constitution and select his successor as president - is disastrous for most Zimbabweans. For objective journalism it is a catastrophe.
If things were not depressing enough, last week came the state media’s triumphalist coverage of Mugabe’s appearance at the Pope’s funeral - and that handshake. Just at a time when the independent press had the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission on the ropes over the discrepancy between turnout and party results, Prince Charles changed the news agenda with an absent-minded squeeze of tyrannical flesh.
The future is bleak, then. But that has been the case for some time -over the past 18 months more than 70 journalists have been arrested and four newspapers forced to close. Many foreign correspondents have been deported, and at the time of going to press, two Sunday Telegraph journalists were on trial for entering Zimbabwe without accreditation and overstaying their visas. They could be jailed for two years.
Welshman Ncube, a constitutional lawyer and secretary-general of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), says Mugabe has been clever with the media. Just as he has allowed parts of the judiciary to remain independent, preserving a semblance of legitimacy, he has tolerated a degree of dissent from the press. “You can have your weeklies - the Independent and the Standard - because they are not seen as influencing the mass of the people,” Ncube says. “But an independent media in the sense of mass circulation daily papers? Forget it, it’s not possible as long as this dictatorship’s in place.”
Mugabe’s media manipulation reached its apogee in the hands of former information minister Professor Jonathan Moyo. “Prof” is hated by journalists for his ruthless remoulding of the media, and mocked for his comical tirades on state television. In January he was sacked after he angered Mugabe by secretly plotting against Zanu-PF’s old guard. But the structures and laws he put in place live on: above all, the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), which requires newspapers to be licensed and every journalist to be accredited. It also bans the publication of “falsehoods”, which includes news that is “prejudicial against the state”. It was AIPPA that finished off the Daily News, a newspaper that had become a morning fixture for young, urban Zimbabweans.
In most countries the idea that one newspaper can determine a nation’s fate would be melodramatic and unwelcome. But in Zimbabwe this idea was plausible and hopeful. The Daily News launched in March 1999 and was soon selling more than 100,000 copies a day, far more than any other paper, and two or three times that of the state’s flagship, The Herald. Five years later it was shut down by the government. Since then, most of the 167 journalists have left the country or turned freelance. Only a skeleton online service survives. The Daily News arrived in the same year the MDC was set up and the fortunes of the two have been closely linked. Without a daily paper willing to give it space, the MDC will always struggle to get its message across. It did succeed in mobilising people during the election campaign but in between polls it struggles to remain visible and fight off Zanu-PF’s crude misinformation machine.
Propaganda is everywhere in the state media and can sound bizarre to foreigners, such as the Sunday News’ headline “Zanu PF tsunami buries MDC”. An analysis piece in December’s Herald shows the nature of political coverage: “The MDC used the resentment against the escalating prices and shortages of basic commodities as its launch pad. It was thus couched in violence and went on to base its whole campaign on the transient politics of the stomach, the strategy being economic sabotage to ensure the continuation of protest votes.”
That chilling phrase - “the transient politics of the stomach” - in a country where thousands are starving because of Mugabe’s fast-track land resettlement programme, says it all. Meanwhile, television schedules are interspersed with scenes of happy peasants hoeing fields in time to traditional music with lyrics written by government ministers.
In this war on truth, the journalists of the independent press must man the trenches. Vincent Kahiya, editor of the weekly Independent, was arrested twice last year, the first time for a story about Mugabe’s holiday to Malaysia. He and his colleagues were jailed for two nights in a cell with 30 others, a blocked toilet, no blankets and no room to sleep. In January, after a year of uncertainty and numerous court visits, they were taken off remand as the state had failed to produce a case. Kahiya says arrest, imprisonment and legal harassment, rather than prosecution, are the government’s tools. “All independent journalists have had to become paralegals,” he says. Many others say this results in self-censorship.
There is hope. Last month a court ordered the government’s media commission to license the Daily News to start publishing again. Whether the commission honours this, and whether the paper can repeat its past heroics with a staff of fewer than 30 journalists, remains to be seen. The miracle is that despite everything Mugabe’s regime has done, Zimbabwe’s independent journalists show no signs of giving up.
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/282cede8-aca7-11d9-ad92-00000e2511c8.html
Michael Moore Today
http://www.michaelmoore.com/
Bolton Often Blocked Information;
Allegedly kept information vital to U.S. strategies on Iran
from Powell, Rice
Bolton Often Blocked Information, Officials Say
Iran, IAEA Matters Were Allegedly Kept From Rice, Powell
By Dafna Linzer / Washington Post
John R. Bolton -- who is seeking confirmation as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations -- often blocked then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and, on one occasion, his successor, Condoleezza Rice, from receiving information vital to U.S. strategies on Iran, according to current and former officials who have worked with Bolton.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=2270
Senate Republican May Vote Against Bolton
GOP Lawmaker May Vote Against U.N. Nominee
By Siobhan McDonough / Associated Press
WASHINGTON - A top Senate Republican raised the possibility Sunday that he might vote against President Bush's nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations if more accusations surface about John Bolton's alleged harassment of analysts who disagreed with his views.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=2268
"His behavior back in 1994 wasn't just unforgivable, it was pathological."
U.N. Nominee Faces New Bullying Allegations
By Sonni Efron and Richard A. Serrano / Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — A Texas businesswoman has written to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that John R. Bolton is unfit to serve as U.N. ambassador because he threatened, berated and harassed her in a dispute over an overseas contract.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=2266
Reports Rock Support for Bush's U.N. Nominee John Bolton
Reports Rock Support for U.N. Nominee
By Sonni Efron / Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska signaled Friday that his support for the nomination of John R. Bolton as U.N. ambassador was wavering after new reports that Bolton ordered an intelligence analyst removed from his job.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=2255
Saturday, April 16th, 2005
Wassup?
Friends,
How's it going? Ready for the next step?
Let me know what you've been up to and any ideas you have about what our next move should be (write me at the addresses below).
Meanwhile, I'll be in conclave this week handing out goodie bags and running for pope. Wish me well!
Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
Mike@michaelmoore.com
www.michaelmoore.com
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=182
