Newspaperindex - the blog | Newspapers of the world, media and free speech

DANISH Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen expressed alarm today at the wave of anger in the Muslim world prompted by caricatures in a Danish newspapper depicting the prophet Mahommed.

“Our diplomats are currently attempting to repair the misunderstandings that have surfaced,” he said.

Meanwhile, Muslim leaders in Denmark called for a more conciliatory tone from the Muslim world, saying the row had gone too far.He said his government considered the growing dispute “extremely serious”.

“We have from the beginning said that these drawings are making Muslims angry and hurt. But we honestly never thought that this case would develop to the point where Danish products in the Middle East are being threatened to this extent,” Ahmed Abu Laban, a prominent imam in Denmark’s Muslim community, said in a statement.

Update:

The Danish defence ministry says a fatwa appears to have been issued against Danish soldiers stationed in Iraq.
“I can confirm that we’ve heard about the fatwa from a reliable source in Iraq … so we believe it’s true,” Defence Minister Soeren Gade’s spokesman Jacob Winther said. The fatwa comes as the offices of Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that have caused uproar across the Muslim world, had to be evacuated due to a bomb threat.

German publisher Zendot has announced plans to distribute the German-language print version of the free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. The amount of information is so large that it is expected to fill 8,000 pages printed in a hundred volumes. Each volume is expected to cost EUR 14 and will be published at the rate of two a month, spread over a release period of four years. Zendot will use 25 workers and 15 editors for the project and an independent scientific adviser will be appointed to examine the content before it reaches a printed form. But observers believe the public contribution nature of the Wikipedia database, where updates and additions occur daily, makes it outdated as a printed version as soon as it comes out. Despite this criticism Zendot has already successfully marketed DVD versions of the website and published several paperback excerpts from the encyclopaedia. Wikipedia recently attracted criticism for the ease in which contributors can add information that is not checked for accuracy. And recent revelations of the addition of copyrighted text have damaged the website’s reputation. (Media Guardian,January 31, 2006)

Broadcaster Mediaset, controlled by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s family, is being probed by Italy’s anti-trust agency for its acquisition of frequencies to broadcast TV to mobile phones, the watchdog said on Friday. The investigation is the third to be opened in barely a month involving Berlusconi and his empire and returns to the public glare accusations about the media tycoon prime minister’s potential conflict of interest just as he faces an election in April. It also throws into doubt Mediaset’s plans to broadcast cutting-edge Digital Video Broadband Handheld (DVBH) television to mobile phones in the second half of this year. Mediaset is Italy’s biggest private broadcaster and the anti-trust said its December purchase of broadcast frequencies from Europa TV could have pushed it above its antitrust limit. The authority said it would conclude the investigation by March 13, less than a month before the April 9 vote. (Reuters,January 30, 2006)

The Al Jazeera TV network has announced the launch a new channel, Al Jazeera Urdu, targeting over 110m Urdu speakers globally. ‘Initially we are targeting the Urdu-speaking population in Pakistan, then the dubbed service will spread to the Indian subcontinent as well as Urdu speakers in the United States and Europe’, said Hamad Yehya Al Nuaimi, Al Jazeera’s Marketing Director. The Urdu service in a joint venture with Dubai based ARY Digital Network, the world’s largest Urdu Television Network that has 11 channels covering the Sub Continent, Europe, North America and the Middle East. The channel will provide Urdu-speaking viewers with hourly news bulletins, breaking news, exclusive programmes and interviews in addition to other contents dubbed into Urdu. (AME News,January 30, 2006)

Denmark’s Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Sunday his government could not act against satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed after Libya closed its embassy in Copenhagen amid growing Muslim anger over the dispute. The newspaper Jyllands-Posten had not intended to insult Muslims when it published the drawings, Rasmussen said, referring to an editorial on the paper’s website in Danish and Arabic. Since Jyllands-Posten published the drawings in September, the Danish government has repeatedly defended the right of free speech. The newspaper has not apologised for publishing the drawings, which have caused widespread anger among Muslims around the world. Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador from Denmark and Saudi religious leaders have urged a boycott of Danish products. In a demonstration on the West Bank, members of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades threatened Danes in the area and told them to leave immediately, the Danish news agency Ritzau reported on Sunday. The demonstrators burnt the Danish flag and called on the Palestinian authorities to cut diplomatic ties with Denmark, Ritzau said. The Danish government has broad public backing for it stance on the cartoons. An opinion poll showed that 79 per cent of Danes think Fogh Rasmussen should not issue an apology and 62 per cent say the newspaper should not apologise. (Reuters,January 30, 2006)

The chief editor at the danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten has written an open letter to the Saudi public. The action came after several days of boycott of danish goods in the Middleeast. The boycott was started because Jyllands-Posten published 12 caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in the fall 2005.
Jyllands-Posten has in the last couple of days been under pressure from industry organizations and politicians. Here is the newspapers response: Link to pdf
More about the cartoon affair from Newspaper Index:

Danish goods boycotted in Saudi

New Mohammed drawings published in book

UN to investigate Jyllands-Posten racism (here you can see the drawings)

Newspaper threatened after Mohammed cartoons

Mohammed cartoons on the agenda of Mecca Summit

Price on the head of the men who drew Mohammed

Danish Muslims denounce newspaper

Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Denmark on Thursday in a row about cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published by a best-selling newspaper. A Saudi government spokesman said the ambassador had been recalled for talks following Denmark’s failure to deal with the insults to the Prophet. Some of the cartoons in Jyllands-Posten last September depicted him as a stereotype of an Islamic terrorist. Ambassadors from several Muslim countries complained to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who had earlier said he could not tell papers what to print, or not to. Danish food producers Arla Foods said the anger sparked by the cartoons had prompted a boycott of its dairy products in Saudi Arabia. Arla director Finn Hansen said there had been calls for boycotting Danish products in Friday prayers and on Saudi television and in newspapers. (BBC News,January 27, 2006)

Chinese journalists have been ordered to stay away from a media seminar, organised by the British Embassy in Beijing, marking a new extension of the campaign against freedom of expression. The embassy had invited more than 40 guests, including journalists, broadcasters and ministry officials, to a workshop on media regulation in Britain. Diplomats saw it as a low-key and uncontroversial way of encouraging debate on media reform, which until recently the authorities had seemed to want to encourage. But the embassy has now been told by some of those invited that they have been refused permission to attend, with the Communist Party Propaganda Department apparently behind the ban. Reports in Hong Kong also say newspapers have been ordered not to cover the event. Sources said the embassy and the Thomson Foundation, the media training organisation, intended to press ahead with the workshop. (The Telegraph,January 27, 2006)

Amnesty International UK is to send spoof weapons catalogues through the post and email inboxes to highlight the shocking ease with which weapons can be bought. The pressure group is launching a campaign to raise awareness of the need for an international arms trade treaty to create legally binding arms controls and to regulate the sale of guns. The UK campaign includes a glossy mail order ’small arms catalogue’ from the fictitious Teleshop company featuring models posing with machine guns and automatic pistols. An email campaign will surprise internet users with fake special offers for weapons, while a roadshow tour of shopping centres across the UK will be manned by fake salespeople demonstrating the ease with which an AK47 machine gun can be assembled and fired.

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Unesco collaborated with the Thomson Foundation and Commonwealth Broadcasting Association to produce a handbook for journalists of developing countries on the use of internet for journalistic purposes. The ‘Net for Journalists’, which is written by a journalist and trainer Martin Huckerby, is a resource (with a printed manual and a CD) designed for both print and broadcast journalists and journalism students in developing countries around the globe. The accompanying CD contains some software, other extra resources and lesson plans for trainers. The handbook aims to provide journalists, especially from developing countries, with some practical skills in exploring and exploiting the internet for day-to-day journalistic assignments. It teaches how to search the net more effectively and efficiently, not only for facts and figures, but also for images, audio and video. An important feature of the handbook is that it does not only tell where and how to get the information one needs, but also how to evaluate and verify the information gathered. (UNESCO,January 25, 2006)

The Mohammed drawing story began when a danish children book writer, was trying to find artist to illustrate his new book about Mohammed. It was not possible for him to find any artists who dared to do the job. Journalists at Jyllands-Posten heard about this and asked a dozen artists to draw Mohammed support the artist.

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A Turkish court on Monday dropped charges against the country’s best-known novelist for insulting ‘Turkishness,’ ending a high-profile trial that outraged Western observers and cast doubt on Turkey’s commitment to free speech. Orhan Pamuk went on trial for telling a Swiss newspaper in February that Turkey is unwilling to deal with two of the most painful episodes in recent Turkish history: the massacre of Armenians during World War I, which Turkey insists was not a planned genocide, and recent guerrilla fighting in Turkey’s overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast. Olli Rehn, the EU commissioner in charge of expansion, said the decision to drop the case against Pamuk was ‘good news for freedom of expression in Turkey,’ but said that ‘Pamuk is not the only case of a person prosecuted for having expressed a non-violent opinion in Turkey’, noting that ’several journalists, editors, writers and academics still face similar charges today.’ (AP, ABC News,January 24, 2006)

A fierce public debate about journalistic ethics has begun in Iceland in response to the suicide of a former school teacher after a newspaper reported he was being investigated for sexually abusing two boys. Two senior editors at DV, Iceland’s fourth-largest daily newspaper, have resigned, and more than 10 percent of Iceland’s population of 300,000 people has signed an online petition demanding that the paper review its editorial policies. The intensity of the nation’s response reflects a discomfort among some Icelanders with the newspaper’s approach in a small island nation that values privacy. “People in Iceland rose up and said, ‘We don’t want this. We don’t want this paper. We don’t want these ethics,’” said Arna Schram, chairwoman of the Icelandic Journalists Union. Last week, DV ran a cover story about former teacher Gisli Hjartarson, alleging that he was being investigated for sexually abusing two boys. The same day, Hjartarson, 58, who had not been formally charged, killed himself at his home in the small town of Isafjordur in northern Iceland. The victim’s brother, Sigurdur Hjartarson, told the media that the former teacher had left behind a letter saying he could not cope with the media attention he believed he would receive.

Source: Krista Mahr, The Associated Press via The Washington Post

In a letter about pay-rises to staff at the Sun last year, Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper, Rebekah Wade, its editor, remarked that in future the paper’s success would probably depend more on free CDs and DVDs than on its journalists. British newspapers are frenziedly giving things away, and in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and throughout Latin America papers are also increasingly relying on freebies to try to attract new readers. In Britain the circulation of national newspapers fell by 3 percent in 2005, following a 2 percent decline in 2004. The same pattern of falling circulation is being repeated across Europe and the United States. So are all the free gifts a sign of desperation from newspapers, or an entirely sensible new marketing strategy? Ideally, a giveaway attracts brand-new readers who keep on buying the paper. Newspapers particularly hope that CDs and DVDs will appeal to the young — who are increasingly getting their news online.

Source: The Economist

Silvio Berlusconi might own half of Italy’s TV channels, but he now seems determined to appear on every station in an effort to saturate the media with his feel-good message ahead of an April 9 general election. Berlusconi, who built a business empire around his three Mediaset television stations, has surprised broadcasters by shifting seamlessly, and often unannounced, from serious political interviews to lightweight chat shows. Since January 9, not a single day has gone by without the tycoon politician appearing on at least one TV or radio show, except for December 14, when he called an impromptu news conference, which was broadcast on TV. The election campaign officially will start when Parliament is dissolved, provisionally expected for January 29. At that point, Italian broadcasters will have to give equal air time to the various parties under a restrictive election law that bans all forms of paid TV political adverts. Italy’s leading daily, Corriere della Sera, said Berlusconi’s media blitz was an attempt to get as much coverage as possible before the election rules come into force. (Houston Chronicle, Reuters,January 23, 2006)

Hamas is paying a spin doctor USD 180,000 (EUR 149,000) to persuade Europeans and Americans that it is not a group of religious fanatics who relish suicide bombings and hate Jews. The organisation, also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, has hired a media consultant, Nashat Aqtash, to improve its image at home and abroad because it expects to emerge from next week’s Palestinian general election as a major political force, and wants recognition and acceptance by the US and EU. Aqtash, who also teaches media at Birzeit University in Ramallah, is attempting to persuade influential foreigners that Hamas is essentially a peaceful organisation that was forced to fight, but is now committed to pressing its cause through politics, not violence. Next week Aqtash says he will address the former US president Jimmy Carter and former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, and other prominent foreigners monitoring the election. But he admits he and his small team working from an office in Ramallah have their work cut out. Hamas is responsible for scores of suicide bombings, killing and maiming hundreds of civilians (many of them children), although not for yesterday’s attack in Tel Aviv. (Media Guardian,January 20, 2006)

The Israeli media failed the test of covering the disengagement - according to a new report released Tuesday by Keshev, The Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel. An extreme portrayal of settlers, and a marginalisation of the Palestinians and of the political and historical implication of the process, are the two issues sited in the report as the media’s most glaring failures. ‘The disengagement was portrayed as an internal Israeli tragedy that had almost no context, and at whose centre stood two groups of victims, the evacuating forces and the evacuees. The threats of both the disengagement opponents and the Palestinians were magnified, despite the fact that they did not take place in reality,’ the Keshev report states. On Monday, Keshev appealed to Hebrew-language newspapers and TV channels in Israel to take care to report on the upcoming elections in a full and critical manner. (The Jerusalem Post, January 19, 2006)

Medecins Sans Frontieres has today published its annual report “Top ten under-reported stories of 2005″
According to Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the online media-tracking journal The Tyndall Report, the 10 stories highlighted by MSF accounted for just eight minutes of the 14,529 minutes on the three major US television networks’ nightly newscasts for 2005. Even though there was a general increase in international reporting, insecurity in war zones again contributed to preventing journalists from reporting on some of the world’s most dangerous regions.

1. Congolese ravaged by war and disease
The extreme deprivation and violence endured by millions of Congolese goes virtually unnoticed to the rest of the world.

2. Staggering needs, insecurity, and dismal response for Chechens living in fear
Caught in a stranglehold between Russian Federation forces and Chechen armed groups, traumatized civilians continue to bear the brunt of this conflict of attrition and find they have nowhere to go to be safe.

3. Haiti’s capital wracked by waves of violence
Many people in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, are trapped by the widespread violence that has hit the city in waves since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was pressured into exile in February 2004.

4. No R&D for HIV/AIDS tools adapted to impoverished settings
The overall picture is well-known. More than 40 million people worldwide have HIV/AIDS, and every day, 8,000 people die of AIDS-related illnesses - 1,400 of them children.

5. Clashes in northeastern India take a heavy toll on civilians
Civilians in India’s northeastern Assam and Manipur states continue to be affected by recurring outbreaks of political violence along religious and ethnic lines, as well as by long-lasting conflicts between the Indian government and militant groups.

6. War is officially over, but urgent needs go unmet in southern Sudan
When the government of Sudan and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) signed a peace agreement in January 2005, Africa’s longest-running civil war officially came to an end. But hope - as well as media attention - was short-lived.

7. Somalis endure continuing conflict and deprivation
Since 1991, Somalia has been a state without a functioning central government. Fourteen years of conflict has precipitated the collapse of public health structures and a total absence of health care services.

8. Colombians trapped by violence and fear
The situation for Colombians affected by the country’s 40-year-old civil conflict did not improve in 2005. For decades, government military forces, paramilitary groups, and armed guerrillas have fought against the backdrop of the narcotics trade and conflict over natural resources, terrorizing and targeting civilians in both rural and urban areas.

9. Insecurity worsens already desperate situation in northern Uganda
For nearly 20 years, people in northern Uganda have suffered from brutal conflict, including attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and forced displacements by the government.

10. Crisis deepening in Ivory Coast
The war that started in the Ivory Coast in 2002 has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and forced hundreds of thousands of desperate residents to flee their homes.

Discuss this at the forums: Link 

It’s hammered into every aspiring reporter’s head from the first day on the college paper or at J-school: There’s nothing better than beating the pants off the competition. And it’s basically the reigning ethos in the news biz today, especially since the industry tends to attract highly competitive folks. But is it time to rethink the scoop mentality? The second-by-second approach you sometimes see played out on cable TV can clearly be counterproductive, when everyone shouts “the miners are alive!” without having the facts nailed down. But what about newspapers and magazines? In an age of real-time blogging, does it make sense for them to handle some stories with the utmost secrecy? Consider this post from Business Week’s Stephen Baker: “I’ve been leading a secret life on this blog. For months and months I worked on this math cover story. I was talking to mathematicians and people who use math, and it was dominating my thinking. It was in many ways the most interesting thing going on–and I couldn’t blab about it in the blog.” … That led to a long rant, at Buzz Machine world headquarters, by Jeff Jarvis: “Is it better for Steve and Business Week to have held back their story from public view until it was packaged and polished and delivered in print, or to have sought out the best advice on it from an informed public by seeking collaboration via Steve’s blog as the story was being formed? Which produces a better product and a better business?

Source: Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post

Link: My secret life: Keeping the math cover story out of the blog; by Stephen Baker, Business Week

Link: The value of scoops vs. collaboration; by Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine

The U.S. military freed two Iraqi journalists who work for Reuters on Sunday after holding them for several months without charge. Ali al-Mashhadani, a television cameraman who was arrested in August, and Majed Hameed, a correspondent for Reuters and Al Arabiya television who was detained in September, are both based in Ramadi, one of the centres of Sunni Arab insurgency. They were freed from Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison after being held there and at Camp Bucca, a U.S. jail in southern Iraq. Some 500 other detainees were released at the same time. At least three other Iraqi journalists for international media, including a freelance cameraman working for Reuters in the northern town of Tal Afar, remain in custody.

Source: Alastair Macdonald, Reuters AlertNet

Reporters Without Borders has voiced outrage at the news blackout imposed by the Chinese authorities on a visit by North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, which no Chinese news media has mentioned. One official after another at every level has repeatedly denied that any such visit is taking place. Kim arrived in China in his armoured train on 10 January 2006 (he has like his father a profound fear of flying) . There are many accounts confirming the visit, despite the denials by Chinese and North Korean diplomats. On 13 January 2006 a Japanese TV station broadcast footage shot clandestinely that showed Kim outside a luxury hotel in Guangzhou. Agence France-Presse reporters meanwhile confirmed the existence of extraordinary security measures around the hotel. A North Korean diplomat told the Russian news agency Interfax that, ‘none of our government figures is currently in China.’ At a press briefing on 12 January, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said: ‘I know that you are all very interested in knowing [where Kim is] but for the time being I have nothing. Each country has its own way of giving out information.’ (IFEX, Reporters without Borders,January 17, 2006)

Kim’s armoured pimpdaddy train as he entered Moscow in 2002.The train was a gift from the Soviet Union to his father.

Set aback by rebellious MPs and an outcry by consumer groups, the French government is reworking a digital copyright protection bill to lighten restrictions on CD- and DVD-copying and mete out smaller penalties to small-time downloaders. The culture ministry issued a statement Saturday saying the bill was being amended on the orders of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to notably enshrine the right of consumers to make private copies of music and film disks. It would also make a distinction between people illegally downloading for profit and the estimated eight million individuals in France who occasionally add to their music and movie collections via internet peer-to-peer sites. (AFP, Expatica France,January 17, 2006)

Lawyers representing al-Jazeera yesterday demanded to see a Downing Street record of a conversation between Tony Blair and George Bush in which the US president said he wanted to bomb the Arabic satellite television station based in the Gulf state of Qatar. The document is said to be a transcript of a conversation between the two leaders in April 2004. ‘Any thought of bombing al-Jazeera … would be both morally wicked and legally indefensible,’ said Mark Stephens, the TV station’s lawyer. Downing Street has already said it has information ‘relevant’ to the issue. (Media Guardian,January 17, 2006)