Recommended Reading - Archive
- YouTube banned in Russia over racist video
A court in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Russia has demanded a Russian ISP block access to YouTube because the site hosted “Russia for Russians,” which was judged to be an extremist video. The court’s decision also applies to the Internet Archive and three online libraries, Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru, all of which were found to host writings by Adolf Hitler. With this ruling, Russian authorities join a long list of governments that have blocked access to YouTube (YouTube) at some point or another, including China, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates. YouTube material has also been censored in the U.S. and U.K.
- WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange on the 'War Logs': 'I Enjoy Crushing Bastards'
In a SPIEGEL interview, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, 39, discusses his decision to publish the Afghanistan war logs, the difficult balance between the public interest and the need for state secrets and why he believes people who wage war are more dangerous than him.
- EU: €757 million for Inter-regional cooperation with European Neighbourhood
The European Commission is making available €757.6 million across six priority areas under its ENPI Inter-regional Programme (IRP) for the period 2011-2013, up from €523.9 million for the period 2007-2010. The IRP provides effective support for the European Neighbourhood Policy and the Strategic Partnership with Russia through activities best organised and implemented at interregional level: “It will support initiatives which by their nature or size cannot be effectively supported through bilateral, regional or thematic programmes, while enabling specific commitments towards particular areas of policy interest.”
- Murdoch, Saudi prince team up to launch ‘Arabic Fox News’
Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch has partnered with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal to launch a new 24-hour news network for the Arab world, a move that has drawn mockery from Murdoch's critics and questions from media experts. First and foremost among those questions is whether a news service linked to the famously pro-Israeli Fox News will resonate among Arab viewers.
- Grimme Online Award Winners 2010
Im Jubiläumsjahr 2010 geht der Grimme Online Award an acht Web-Angebote, die durch außerordentliche publizistische Qualität im Netz hervorstechen. Einer der diesjährigen Preisträger ist: Soukmagazine. "Das Gesellschaftsmagazin für den Orient" wird von jungen Journalisten mit authentischem Inhalt gefüllt: In regelmäßigen Abständen berichten sie aus Syrien, der Türkei, Israel, der Westbank, Ägypten und weiteren Ländern der Region und lassen den Nutzer hinter die Fassaden schauen. Mit den Beiträgen gelingt es den Autoren, eine Brücke zu den Kulturen des Orients zu schlagen und mit Texten, Fotos, Videos und Multimediareportagen das Leben dort abzubilden: Vom Portrait des Schafhirten über eine Reportage aus einer islamischen Radiostation bis hin zu einem Hintergrundbericht über ökologische Nachhaltigkeit in Dubai werden hier Informationen aus erster Hand angeboten, die den Nutzer auf Entdeckungsreise schicken.
- BP OIL SPILL REPORTING: MEDIA LESSONS
Media has failed to cover, before, during and after, the Gulf spill in such a dramatic way that some lesson must be learned. 1. If you get too close to your sources, you follow their agenda. PR dominates and controls business and financial coverage more than ever. “Embedded journalists” get access but a high credibility cost.
- Middle East: Goodbye Saramago
Bloggers across the Middle East mourned the death of Portuguese writer Jose Saramago - the only Portuguese language Nobel Prize Winner in Literature, who has his own religious and political controversial views. People in the Lusosphere and all over the world reacted to his death, and the Arab world is no exception.
Jose Saramago
- The Palestinian vuvuzela
When Mexico scored against France in faraway Polokwane, the blaring noise of vuvuzelas was merely the background to the joyful screams and cheers that filled the open garden of the elegant Azure restaurant in Ramallah. My Palestinian friends sitting round the table responded to my question as to why on earth Mexico enjoyed such massive support by saying it had to do more with Nicolas Sarkozy and his alignment with Israel than any admiration of Mexican football. A few years ago, one elaborated further, France was a football favourite of Palestinians, but that was when Jacques Chirac was the country’s president and Zinedine Zidane (born of an Algerian family) its star player.
- Russia: New Initiatives Indicate Government’s Fear of the New Media
The Russian government gets more and more involved in the restructuring of the national cyberspace. On the one hand, it proposes new initiatives to overcome the digital divide [EN], while on the other hand, it extends its presence, and, more importantly, its repressive power, online. Two latest cases, originating from different state departments (Roskomnadzor and the Federal Security Service (FSB)), illustrate the trend of the government's ambition to control the cyberspace.
- BP sends fake journalist to cover the Gulf spill
s there no end to BP’s hypocrisies and ludicrous actions? Evidently not. Here’s the latest, in a long line of curious blunders and aggravating insensitivities: after being publicly chastised time and again for denying access to journalists, BP has evidently loosed its own “journalists” on the scene to really get to the meat of the story. The Wall Street Journal got access to Planet BP, the company’s in-house magazine, and discovered that it had evidently sent out a PR agent thinly disguised as a “BP journalist” to cover the spill and its consequences in Louisiana.
- In ordinary lives, U.S. sees the work of Russian agents
They had lived for more than a decade in American cities and suburbs from Seattle to New York, where they seemed to be ordinary couples working ordinary jobs, chatting to the neighbors about schools and apologizing for noisy teenagers. But on Monday, federal prosecutors accused 11 people of being part of a Russian espionage ring, living under false names and deep cover in a patient scheme to penetrate what one coded message called American “policy making circles.”
- Fighting talk: The new propaganda
Following the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It's Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror...
- Russia: Bloggers React to President Medvedev’s Silicon Valley Tour
The visit of the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to Silicon Valley in California drew a lot of media attention. The main goal of the visit was to study the U.S. experience and to attract American investments for the creation of the “Russian Silicon Valley” - Skolkovo . One of the major achievements [ENG] of the visit was a $1 billion contract with Cisco. One of the major scandals was the Russian president's failure to meet with one of the founders of Google, Sergey Brin, who was born in Moscow and is known for his skeptical attitude towards the Russian authorities.
- The evolving blogosphere: An empire gives way
Blogs are a confection of several things that do not necessarily have to go together: easy-to-use publishing tools, reverse-chronological ordering, a breezy writing style and the ability to comment. But for maintaining an online journal or sharing links and photos with friends, services such as Facebook and Twitter (which broadcasts short messages) are quicker and simpler.
- The Waiting Room
I’ve been shooting in Belarus since 2000. At first I was driven by simple curiosity about this place supposedly stuck in a Soviet-era time warp. But as I spent more time there and tried to grasp the situation on a more nuanced level, I realized that the underlying question was one of identity – namely, how Belarus’ historically weak sense of national identity is a big part of what has put it on a slower track of sociopolitical change than its neighbors.
