The media celebrated Julian Assange and is now too afraid to defend him

It has become easier over the last month for governments to kill or imprison journalists whom they want to silence. But the most sinister aspect of this assault on freedom of speech is that it is facing such limited resistance from the very media that is under attack.

US intelligence agencies concluded in a report declassified by President Joe Biden that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Biden began by treating him as a pariah, but is now reversing this policy in the run-up to his visit to Saudi Arabia next month which is aimed at persuading MBS to pump more crude to replace Russian exports and bring down the oil price.

In other words, the murderers of Khashoggi have got what they wanted and shown with grisly brutality that no Saudi dissident journalist is safe, a precedent that will be taken to heart in Turkey, where MBS has been visiting this week. All is now forgiven by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, newly allied to Saudi Arabia, while the trial in absentia of the 26 alleged murderers of Khashoggi had already been transferred from Ankara to Riyadh.

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/the-media-celebrated-julian-assange-and-is-not-too-afraid-to-defend-him-1706271

 

Between Jamal Khashoggi and Shireen Abu Akleh

Jamal Kashoggi and Shireen Abu Akleh were well-known journalists who were killed in the line of duty. There are many differences between the horrific, premeditated murder of the Saudi journalist and the killing of the Palestinian one, the circumstances of which have not yet been fully established. But more than a month after Abu Akleh’s death it can be said with near certainty that her killers knew that she was a journalist and killed her for it, just like the people who killed her Saudi colleague.

For this reason, we mustn’t allow her death to sink into oblivion, as is now happening, without finding the people responsible for it. The crime was less shocking in its circumstances than the murder of Khashoggi, but it was a serious crime nevertheless. It must not remain one devoid of guilty and responsible parties.

There is no chance that the person who knew to aim his weapon at the only exposed spot on Abu Akleh’s neck, between her helmet and her protective vest, did not see the prominent letters on her chest, and that of her colleagues, identifying them as journalists. He meant to kill a journalist, even if the IDF spokesperson tries to argue otherwise. Like the IDF, Saudi Arabia denied for a long time that it had murdered Khashoggi, claiming that he had died in a “brawl.”

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/between-jamal-khashoggi-and-shireen-abu-akleh/

 

From Sandy Hook to Uvalde, the Violent Images Never Seen

After Lenny Pozner’s six-year-old son Noah died at Sandy Hook, he briefly contemplated showing the world the damage an AR-15-style rifle did to his child.

His first thought: “It would move some people, change some minds.”

His second: “Not my kid.”

Grief and anger over two horrific mass shootings in Texas and New York only ten days apart has stirred an old debate: Would disseminating graphic images of the results of gun violence jolt the nation’s gridlocked leadership into action?

From the abolition movement to Black Lives Matter, from the Holocaust to the Vietnam War to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, photographs and film have laid bare the human toll of racism, authoritarianism and ruinous foreign policy. They prompt public outcry and, sometimes, lead to change. But the potential use of these images to end official inertia after mass shootings presents new, wrenching considerations for victims’ families — many of whom adamantly reject such an idea.

“It is true that shocking photos of suffering occasionally do make an imprint,” said Bruce Shapiro, executive director of Columbia University’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, citing the photographer Nick Ut’s famous photo of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack in 1972.

 

We Don’t Need Billionaires Like Elon Musk

On Thursday, ten days after revealing his 9.2 percent stake in Twitter to the public, Elon Musk delivered an ultimatum: either the board accept his offer to buy the company for $43 billion and take it private, or he’d “reconsider” his position as a shareholder. Such an acquisition could have huge implications for how we communicate online, and the entire affair presents troubling questions about the power Musk is able to exert over our society.

For all its problems, Twitter is central to cultural and political life in the United States and beyond, and Musk has long been one of its most prominent users. He wields it to preach to his adoring supporters, slam his critics, manipulate financial markets, and provide the media with fodder for endless clickbait. But his attempt to use his power to capture Twitter and reshape it for his own ends is serious cause for concern. Despite the recent revelation of Musk’s stake in the company, he’s been buying shares since the end of January. In March, he began publicly criticizing the company for supposedly limiting free speech. Musk adopted this language from the right-wing provocateurs he’s increasingly associating himself with, but neither truly care about free speech: they just want speech that better serves their interests. Musk himself has a history of slandering his critics, getting impersonators banned from Twitter, firing employees who disagreed with his ideas, and even reportedly having a whistleblower framed as a mass shooter.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-shareholder-purchase

 

Irish Times view on Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter: Big tech’s version of democracy

Although it’s hard to gauge how serious tech billionaire Elon Musk’s $43 billion bid for social media platform Twitter is, it raises enormous questions not only for Twitter users but for all democratic societies. Musk’s jocular, will-I-won’t-I approach to buying the entire platform, signals the problem.

Extraordinary, unprecedented profits from technology-related companies have created a handful of individuals so breathtakingly wealthy that, solo, they can take control of global communication platforms and media companies.

Among them, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos now owns the Washington Post, while Salesforce founder and chief executive Marc Benioff has Time Magazine. Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple’s Steve Jobs, owns a major stake in The Atlantic magazine.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorial/irish-times-view-on-elon-musk-s-bid-for-twitter-big-tech-s-version-of-democracy-1.4855276

 

Why Are There So Few Marina Ovsyannikovas — in Russia and Everywhere Else?

You’d need a heart made of granite not to be moved by Marina Ovsyannikova, the Russian television producer who on Monday jumped onto the set of the state-run network Channel One during a live broadcast and shouted, “Stop the war, no to war!”

Perhaps the most touching aspect of Ovsyannikova’s action was the nature of the sign she held, which featured small Ukrainian and Russian flags and the words “No war. Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They lie to you here. Russians against war.”

It wasn’t a slickly designed placard, produced by graphic designers paid by an NGO funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Instead, it was hand-drawn, with some letters getting narrower near the right margin as she realized she was running out of space. Did she make this at home on her dining room table? Did she have an office at work with a door she could lock? At some point the paper had clearly been rolled up in a tube because as Ovsyannikova held it up, it was trying to curl back on itself.

So this was a single solitary person — maybe with a small support network — realizing that she had the means (an understanding of reality), the motive (telling the truth about matters of life and death), and the opportunity (access to a live TV broadcast) to take a stand, making international news. And while it’s impossible to know how many Russians know what Ovsyannikova did, given the severe clampdown currently taking place there, it seems implausible that the video has been completely prevented from filtering back from overseas.

Why Are There So Few Marina Ovsyannikovas — in Russia and Everywhere Else?

 

Fleeing Putin’s wartime crackdown, Russian journalists build media hubs in exile

Sergey Smirnov sat on the floor of a dark and dirty Airbnb, leading an editorial meeting of the Russian news organization that continues to work even as he and his staff are on the run from the Kremlin’s crackdown on a free press.

Smirnov, the editor in chief of Mediazona, was in an apartment above a fried chicken restaurant in this Baltic capital, surrounded by two dogs and the half-dozen stuffed shopping bags he was able to fling into his car on March 4. That was the day Russian President Vladimir Putin approved draconian prison terms for journalists who stray from Kremlin propaganda. Smirnov’s wife and two sons, including a 4-week-old newborn, remain in Moscow.

The 22 Mediazona reporters on the Zoom call were in Tbilisi, Prague, Istanbul — whatever city they could reach after international sanctions dried up flights from Moscow and rendered their Russian credit cards useless at gas stations around Europe. Where to get visas, apartments, funding, sympathy — these are the challenges they face in an unprecedented exodus of journalists from their homeland.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/13/russia-media-putin-lithuania/

 

History by Decree

Song Gengyi, a journalism teacher in Shanghai, was fired last month for doing her job. She had encouraged her students to verify official accounts of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, the orgy of mass murder and rape perpetrated in the then-Chinese capital by the Imperial Japanese Army. Another teacher, Li Tiantian, who protested against the firing, was punished by being committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Verifying facts is what journalists are supposed to do. But because the atrocity in Nanjing during the Sino-Japanese War has become a cornerstone of Chinese nationalism, and thus of the Communist Party of China’s propaganda, any critical scrutiny of what precisely happened is seen as criticism of the Chinese government.

Perhaps this needs some explanation. Until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, official Chinese accounts paid little attention to the Nanjing Massacre. History under Mao was instead a heroic tale of communist victory over fascist and bourgeois oppressors. Nanjing had been the Chinese Nationalist capital at the time of the Sino-Japanese War. The massacre was thus a story of Nationalist defeat, not communist heroism.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/official-histories-danger-of-triumphalism-victimhood-by-ian-buruma-2022-01

 

Assange’s legal torment has gone on long enough

The British High Court’s decision to unblock the process of extraditing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the US to face espionage charges has reopened a debate about whether Australia should play a more active role in the long-running case.

Lord Justice Holroyde overturned a previous judge’s ruling that Mr Assange should not be deported because of the high risk he could take his own life in a US jail. Lord Holroyde accepted US assurances that it would guarantee Mr Assange’s safety.The decision comes as a further blow to Mr Assange, who has already spent almost a decade either in jail or holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He has been fighting extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges – which were dropped in 2019 – and then extradition to the US for publishing in 2010 the contents of US military and diplomatic cables.

https://www.theage.com.au/world/europe/assange-s-legal-torment-has-gone-on-long-enough-20211212-p59gx6.html

 

A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms

The Tribune Tower rises above the streets of downtown Chicago in a majestic snarl of Gothic spires and flying buttresses that were designed to exude power and prestige. When plans for the building were announced in 1922, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the longtime owner of the Chicago Tribune, said he wanted to erect “the world’s most beautiful office building” for his beloved newspaper. The best architects of the era were invited to submit designs; lofty quotes about the Fourth Estate were selected to adorn the lobby. Prior to the building’s completion, McCormick directed his foreign correspondents to collect “fragments” of various historical sites—a brick from the Great Wall of China, an emblem from St. Peter’s Basilica—and send them back to be embedded in the tower’s facade. The final product, completed in 1925, was an architectural spectacle unlike anything the city had seen before—“romance in stone and steel,” as one writer described it. A century later, the Tribune Tower has retained its grandeur. It has not, however, retained the Chicago Tribune.

To find the paper’s current headquarters one afternoon in late June, I took a cab across town to an industrial block west of the river. After a long walk down a windowless hallway lined with cinder-block walls, I got in an elevator, which deposited me near a modest bank of desks near the printing press. The scene was somehow even grimmer than I’d imagined. Here was one of America’s most storied newspapers—a publication that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and collected dozens of Pulitzer Prizes—reduced to a newsroom the size of a Chipotle.

Spend some time around the shell-shocked journalists at the Tribune these days, and you’ll hear the same question over and over: How did it come to this? On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. Craigslist killed the Classified section, Google and Facebook swallowed up the ad market, and a procession of hapless newspaper owners failed to adapt to the digital-media age, making obsolescence inevitable. This is the story we’ve been telling for decades about the dying local-news industry, and it’s not without truth. But what’s happening in Chicago is different.

In May, the Tribune was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund that has quickly, and with remarkable ease, become one of the largest newspaper operators in the country. The new owners did not fly to Chicago to address the staff, nor did they bother with paeans to the vital civic role of journalism. Instead, they gutted the place.

Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. In the ensuing exodus, the paper lost the Metro columnist who had championed the occupants of a troubled public-housing complex, and the editor who maintained a homicide database that the police couldn’t manipulate, and the photographer who had produced beautiful portraits of the state’s undocumented immigrants, and the investigative reporter who’d helped expose the governor’s offshore shell companies. When it was over, a quarter of the newsroom was gone.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/alden-global-capital-killing-americas-newspapers/620171/