Tunisia: Private TV Channel Shut Down

This is what happens when people in power feel threatened.

Even after promising freedom of expression last week, Tunisia’s interim government took the predictable step Monday of closing the largest privately owned TV channel. Can you guess that the channel, Hannibal TV, was carrying messages critical of the direction of the caretaker government?

Here is a report from The New York Times.  And another from Reuters-Africa that reports that the owner of the TV channel has been arrested for treason. The government says Hannibal TV was not supporting the revolt and was, in fact, obscuring things.  Which makes us wonder: To whom was the channel showing treason? To the people in power in the interim government or to the protesters in the street who are objecting to the make-up of the interim government?

Given that the TV channel was about to interview a major critic of the old government — and he was not fond of the chemistry of the interim government — we can guess why the owner was arrested and the station shut down.

 

Tags: Hannibal TV, Tunisia

Arab Impatience: Economics, not Religion?

If more societies in the Arab World bubble over with frustrations, as in Tunisia, the cause will be economics rather than religion.  That is the suggestion in this report from Al-Jazeera from the Arab League summit taking place in Egypt.

Watch for strong top-down initiatives from Arab leaders to improve the quality of life in many of the troubled Middle East nations.  Those initiatives, though, may not include much in the way of more lenience for free speech.  Giving critics public platforms to rally protesters may be a little too dangerous.

Now What? In Beirut, Saudi Negotiators Pull Out

This video news segment from Al-Jazeera, in English, suggests a dire and perhaps violent outcome in Lebanon as various political and sectarian groups face off over control of the country.

The report captures a common line about the tensions in Lebanon: the country is vulnerable because outside powers are involved in a so-called proxy war.  Among the outsiders supporting some factions: Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and, yes, the United States and other Western powers.

And, of course, interested neighbors Israel, Turkey and Jordan have a stake in the outcome, since violence has a way of spilling beyond borders and inviting secondary consequences.

Once again here, the line gets blurry between media organizations and sponsoring (or protecting) political/cultural groups.

On Tunisia’s Revolt: Promising Post from The Guardian

Today’s story in The Guardian suggests that Tunisia’s protesters are toning down their demonstrations after winning some, if not most, of their demands.  Can a revolution end quite this well?

The story says that a local TV station has reported that 33 members of the deposed president’s family have been arrested for crimes against the state, which probably means for enriching themselves by dipping illegally into the state treasury.

I’m curious about the TV station and hope we can trace this news.  Seems likely that this is rather new territory for local TV; I’d like to know how the journalists are adapting.

Meanwhile, here is a worthy related story on Egypt from the same newspaper.

Protests for the Pope

When Pope Benedict XVI issued a call for Pakistan to repeal its anti-blasphemy law, some unhappy protestors in Islamabad were inflamed at the suggestion of his intervention.  National leaders say the laws are not going to change.

Are these political differences or cultural — or a mix of all of the conditions, including economic distinctions,  that have set groups of people apart?

Burning for anti-blasphemy laws

Tunisians Topple Authoritarian Leader

This could not have seemed more scripted, but it’s real in all of its breaking consequences.

Just as we’ve been studying the ways that authoritarian leaders hold power in the Middle East and Northern Africa, along comes the student-led revolt in Tunisia, now called the Jasmine Revolution, to force out longtime President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and to offer a surprising case entirely worthy of our careful attention.

Remember the concept of stability?  Well, here is the opposite as sudden change has led the country’s people into at least temporary chaos.  Actions like this can seem politically grand, but they also cause ugly outcomes.  People die.  Groups fight groups.  The most humane policies and promises do not immediately trump the dangers on the street.

On Monday, those in the government and some opposition leaders agreed to set up a so-called caretaker government — a term we’ve also noted lately in Lebanon — that reportedly will run the country until later elections.  Caretaking is easy to say; hard to do.  Meanwhile, some protests continue with a goal to force a complete ejection of top officials who are aligned with the Ben Ali government.

Media in the Middle

What sort of media forms did the protesters use?  Try the latest digital form, Twitter, for starters.  This was a medium the government couldn’t co-opt or control.  Too decentralized.  Too spontaneous.  And it was this capacity to build a spontaneous and sustained push that forced change.

We can study how the world’s elite media covered the event by examining stories Monday by the Wall Street Journal on the political situation,  the BBC on the European Union’s involvement.  Here is a thoughtful commentary from the Indian Express, noting the significance of the event in its lead:

This should be marked carefully: it is the first successful Arab overthrow of an authoritarian government, many of which are still ruling countries in Middle East and North Africa.

The author of that line is Shadan Farasat, a lawyer from Delhi who worked in Tunis, the capital city of Tunisia, with an international organization the African Development Bank, an organization we mentioned briefly (along with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) on Friday.

Shock Waves

We might also hope to explore how the regional media has dealt with the tumult.  Here is a piece Monday from UAE-based Al-Arabiya TV, with video, capturing a promise for “total freedom of information” in a new Tunisia.

Al-Jazeera’s English-language website is carrying a real-time Twitter feed that is constantly moving on the screen, thanks to the deluge of messages.  Take a look, if you can keep up with it.

As we’ve noted, Al-Jazeera loves to spar with power and rarely shies from taking on U.S. policy-makers.  Take a look at this commentary by Mark LeVine, an American professor and Middle East expert who usually stakes out a position concerned with the welfare of the local residents, a kind of thinking that fits AJ’s approach.  He makes a point we’ve been considering:

Indeed, the problem with most post-colonial nationalisms – whether that of the first generation of independence leaders or of the leaders who replaced (often by overthrowing) them – is precisely that they have always remained infected with the virus of greed, corruption and violence so entrenched by decades of European colonial rule. Tunisia’s nascent revolution will only succeed if it can finally repair the damage caused by French rule and the post-independence regime that in so many ways continued to serve European and American - rather than Tunisian - interests.

Keep reading and thinking.  In a global story like this, the information just keeps coming.

Will ‘The Daily’ Go Global?

Those following digital developments may have marked Jan. 19 on your calendar — the day Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation will team with Apple to unveil its new application called The Daily. Here for background is a story from The Guardian.

The goal is to deliver news and information in a newspaper-style format for electronic tablet readers, such as the iPad. Seems likely Murdoch eventually will want to move its content to other tablets as well, such as  Kindle and Nook, among others.

This qualifies for our course blog because, as this story reports, one of the key players is Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who operates holdings such as the Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, The Sun, Fox TV Network, Sky Television satellite holdings). Murdoch’s involvement makes this a global issue, given that his influence and holdings span the oceans and continents.  And his won’t be the only interested media outfit.

Murdoch has been a proponent for devising web systems that require subscriptions to access content.  In other words, he has decided the news industry needs to charge for online news — if experts can devise a successful way to block out the aggregators and others who would grab-and-repackage the information.  Special programs exclusive for tablets may help.  Imagine spending a dollar a week for access to a news site

.

Think iTunes for news.  It’s coming, in some form.

The publisher of The New York Times and leaders of several other big organizations, such as Pearson (Financial Times, The Economist) also have hinted that they are likely to set up pay-for-news digital systems, too, to emulate the financial transactions that are traditional for print products.  Fair to speculate that publishers in many countries are considering the same. In Japan, the national newspaper association has been tinkering with tablet and mobile-phone formats for a year or two.

Keep an eye on this.  We’re in the midst of a digital revolution that will change society not unlike the way Gutenberg’s press did in 1450.  This is just one more development of the sort that will keep occurring throughout your lives.

Guardian’s Story on Pakistan ‘Blasphemy’

For a deeper look at the events behind Gov. Salmaan Taseer’s killing in Pakistan, read this story from The Guardian, perhaps the best of Great Britain’s elite daily newspapers.

One of the many issues wrapped into this post is this:  What is the value of having a foreign correspondent “on the ground” in Pakistan to explore this episode and explain it to a Western audience?

More Questions

How much does this article add to your understanding of events surrounding the assassination?  And how would you rate the perspective of the piece?

If the article does a fair job of explaining the political, economic and social situation in this Punjabi area, what can you conclude about the desire to prosecute people — in this case a Christian — on blasphemy laws?  Does the correspondent actually try to embrace the reasoning for such firm laws governing what people can say? Or is such a law simply too impossible for a Westerner to treat as legitimate?

Universal Ethics in International Reporting

Are there ethics or universal laws involved here that ought to span any civilization, any culture or place?  In other words, are certain rules of behavior so obviously right, no matter where you are in the globe, that any reporter ought to be able to sift through a story and arrive at basic truths?  Or are cultural rules and behaviors always contextual to time and place?

How might Samuel Huntington depict this incident, at least as it is described in the Guardian story?

How about Edward Said?

Time Mag’s Search for Aung San Suu Kyi

Suu Kyi

Thanks to classmate Caitlin O’Donnell for this link to Time magazine’s cover story this week on Aung San Suu Kyi.

A stylish, descriptive essay-feature, the article doesn’t hide author Hannah Beech’s high regard for “the lady” as it aims to portray the sense of surveillance not only on the political figure but on media professions covering her.

Thus, Beech opens the story describing her rush to avoid the government watchers who followed her across the “haunted, betel-nut-stained streets of old Rangoon, past street-side tailors hunched over ancient sewing machines and open-air bookstalls selling worm-eaten copies of Orwell and Kipling.”

Yes. So Orwell and Kipling, a couple of old British writers, here evoke the musty scent of the colonial British era, or rather the remains and discards from it.  Add this to today’s video on Burma/Myanmar, and we gain some sense of how repressive governments aim to limit — or, at the least, monitor — unwanted media attention.

The magazine also provides this related photo gallery.

Burma: Politics after 63 Years of Independence

Here is a story from The Irrawaddy magazine, which is clearly no friend of the existing military regime in Myanmar, on the attitude of the nation’s rulers as they behold their sovereignty.

Of course, one of the more remarkable developments lately has been the release from house arrest of democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, who since then has been continuing her call for improvements in human rights in Myanmar, also traditionally known as Burma.

The magazine’s website does not indicate its political support, though the fact that it publishes in both English and Burmese suggests that it aims to reach both internal and international audiences.  An editorial offers a rebuke to government censors, saying this:

“The temporary suspension of at least nine Burmese journals for carrying news about Aung San Suu Kyi is a huge setback for the growing number of privately owned weekly publications who sought a small but enduring space to bring fresh air to a news-hungry Burmese readership.

“Burma’s censorship board, the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD), announced the suspensions on Monday morning.”

The article about independence day also  offers this overview about the state of governance in Burma today:

But while many of Burma’s ethnic minorities continue to consider the Burmese army a brutal occupying force, the military regime harped on once again, as it has for every one of its 22 years in power, about the evil designs of the Western powers.

Taseer also was a Publisher

The Daily Times, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan’s Punjab state, has been busy covering the shooting of Gov. Salmaan Taseer, and for a good reason: among the highly successful leader’s enterprises, he was the paper’s publisher.

You can see here on the paper’s website that Taseer is listed as publisher, and this editorial explains his post, though not at the top of the story.  Clearly, the Daily Times is not playing up the relationship, for any number of reasons. This presents an interesting ethical consideration for journalists.  The political leader whose death they are investigating also is their boss. They have twice the reason to grieve, and yet they must cover a dangerous story about intolerance and violence.

Perhaps objectivity, always a hard-to-identify concept, goes out the window at a time like this. Or not. Make your own judgment as you read this piece quoting the country’s president and this opinion piece that makes this strong and disapointed claim:

The assassination of Taseer is not just the death of an individual. It is a murder of sanity against insanity.

A Bombing in Egypt Tests Religions, State

An issue worth following is media coverage of the New Year’s Day suicide bombing of a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, Egypt.

One question here: How do news organizations cover such potentially inflammatory stories, carrying facts but somehow avoiding too-simple conclusions pitting one religion against another?

The Associated Press published this story Monday suggesting that al-Qaeda messages may have prompted members of a radicalized Islamist group to attack the resident Christians during a special ceremony.

The Daily Star is an English-language newspaper in Beirut, Lebanon. Its story here carries a conciliatory tone, citing sources who want to make room for Christians in the Arab world.  It serves primarily an expatriot readership of native English-speakers.  Of course, Lebanon also has seen its share of sectarian violence, particularly in conflicts involving members of Arabic Christian and Muslim groups.

Here is an editorial from the Globe and Mail in Toronto arguing for a logical linkage of the Coptic church bombing and the recent assassination of a Pakistani governor,  Salmaan Taseer, who had acted against anti-blasphemy laws.  In both cases, the paper argues, minorities and those who swim against majority currents, need to be better protected.

Who Will Preside in Cote d’Ivoire?

Another international story to watch follows negotiations in the West Africa nation of Cote d’Ivoire, where incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo has so far refused to leave office even though most observers believe he lost the presidential elections to challenger Alassane Ouattara.

Leaders from other West African nations have been pressing Gbagbo to step down and ensure a peaceful change of power in a country that has been struggling since a horrendous civil war early last decade.

Here is a story from China’s Xinhua news service, publishing in English. So if you wonder whether we operate in a global world, consider that a Chinese news agency is publishing in English about a West African leadership change where the question is whether a democratic structure will hold up. And citing U.S. diplomats.

Check out coverage from Afrik.com, a 10-year-old website that says it is a leading portal for news about daily issues in Africa. Just two years ago, it began to publish in English.  The publishers, some of whom are French, say this:

The African continent has long been shunned by the international media, which has turned a blind eye to the continet’s everyday life and realities: 52 countries with difficult access to the internet, left out from a global agenda, except in crisis periods. Afrik.com’s main goal is to provide accessible information to all and sundry with respect to the Kaleidoscopic range of African cultures and its society at large.

Latest news is that Gbagbo will at least negotiate with the other West African rulers.  The United Nations wants to see Ouattara take over as a legally elected president.