Journalism

Judge Tells Jury: Informing Public May Be Criminal Conspiracy

December 16, 2017 Jim Naureckas, fair.org Resist! Freedom of Press, Journalism, Repression

Reporting the news can be punished as criminal conspiracy, federal Judge Lynn Leibovitz told jurors at the so-called J20 trial in Washington, DC, where journalists and protesters alike are being prosecuted for property damage that they didn’t commit during the Donald Trump inauguration. According to an account by the Real News‘ Baynard Woods (12/14/17), Leibovitz’s instructions to the jury singled out defendant Alexei Wood, an independent journalist who was livestreaming the January 20 protests: “With respect to Mr. Wood, a reasonable juror could find that he was a principal and an aider and abettor of the riot,” Leibovitz said. “Yes, he was there filming. There is no evidence in the record that that was for a purpose inconsistent with participation in the riot.”…

Judge In J20 Case Drops Inciting Riot Charge

December 15, 2017 Baynard Woods, therealnews.com Educate! Courts, Journalism, Protests, Resist J20

The judge in the trial of six of the 193 people to face decades in prison under the federal Riot Act for protesting on Inauguration Day, dismissed one of the most serious charges Wednesday. Judge Lynn Leibovitz noted that “personal enthusiasm” for destruction is different than incitement. She refused to throw out the remaining charges, however, leaving the jury to decide whether those who were present at a protest should be held responsible for any destruction of property that happens there. Alexei Wood, a journalist, is among the six people whose fate will not be determined by a jury. The government has been using a livestream video taken by Wood as part of its evidence against protesters.

U.S. Media Suffered Most Humiliating Debacle In Ages

December 11, 2017 Glenn Greenwald, theintercept.com Educate! Corporate Media, Journalism, Propaganda, Transparency

Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened. The spectacle began on Friday morning at 11 a.m. EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News™ spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.

Reporters Without Borders Tries To Shut Down Press Event

December 6, 2017 Brandon Turbeville, transcend.org Resist! Journalism, Propaganda, Protests

By Brandon Turbeville for Transcend Media Service - 28 Nov 2017 – Self-proclaimed “press freedom watchdog” Reporters Without Borders launched a new campaign that it deemed of urgent importance – shutting down a short panel discussion by journalist Vanessa Beeley and Swedish Doctors for Human Rights. The USAID/NED-funded RWB wrote an open letter published in the Tribune de Geneveaddressed to Guy Mettan, Executive Director of the Swiss Press Club, the organization that was hosting the event, where it dismissed Beeley as a “so-called” journalist who is cited only by “Russian media propaganda” and claimed that Doctors for Human Rights is merely “a tool of Russian propaganda.” The letter urged Mettan to cancel the event or risk tarnishing the image of the Swiss Press Club. The event was entitled “They don’t care about us: About White Helmets True Agenda,” where Vanessa Beeley, who has reported extensively from inside Syria would present alongside fellow panel members Richard Labeviere’ and Marcello Ferranda De Noli editor of the Proche et Moyen Orient and Swedish Doctors For Human Rights respectively were scheduled to present. As the title suggests, the event was merely a platform to discuss the possibility that the reputation of the White Helmets in Western countries may be different from the reality on the ground. Beeley was included not only because of her expertise in terms of research but also because of her extensive on-the-ground experience in Syria, her length of time in country, and her numerous interviews and investigative reports from Syria itself.

Lawsuit Sheds Light On Justice Department’s Surveillance Of Journalists

December 5, 2017 Kevin Gosztola, mintpressnews.com Resist! Department of Justice, DOJ, Journalism, Lawsuit, Surveillance

By Kevin Gosztola for Mint Press News - The Justice Department has twenty-seven ongoing leak investigations, according to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. That is a staggering number, and now, the Knight First Amendment Institute and Freedom of The Press Foundation are suing for records on how those investigations may infringe upon the First Amendment rights of journalists. In a filing submitted to the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York, the two organizations seek “the immediate release of agency records concerning the restrictions imposed by statute, regulation, or the First Amendment on government surveillance targeting members of the news media,” as well as those regulations or laws that implicate “freedoms of speech, association, or the press.” The two organizations requested records from the Justice Department, National Security Agency, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, CIA, and other agencies in October but received only two documents in response. Particularly, the Knight Institute and Freedom of the Press Foundation would like records on the Justice Department’s “Media Guidelines” and the media subpoena policies Sessions pledged to review. “The apparent hostility toward the press from senior government officials combined with increasing government surveillance create a dangerous environment for reporters and whistleblowers,” Knight Institute Staff Attorney Carrie DeCell stated. “The public has a right to know if the limits on surveillance of journalists are sufficient to ensure a free press.”

Media Freedom Threatened Throughout The World

December 2, 2017 Staff, article19.org Educate! Corporate Media, Fascism, Freedom of Press, Journalism, Media, Repression

By Staff of Article 19 - “For the first time, we have a comprehensive and holistic overview of the state of free of expression and information around the world. Unfortunately, our findings show that freedom of expression is under attack in democracies as well as authoritarian regimes. “The XpA Metric is a tool for understanding where governments are succeeding and failing in their duty to promote and protect our rights. We hope that it will help journalists, activists and policymakers to monitor free speech, challenge the threats to it and hold governments and companies to account. “But it also offers us a positive guide for how freedom of expression and information can be realised so that we can all participate in public life, enjoy a private life, and exercise our right to free speech.” Global media freedom at lowest level for a decade 17 years. One of the most serious findings of the Expression Agenda (XpA) is that global media freedom is at its lowest level for a decade. The rise of citizen journalists, bloggers and information activists has put more individuals and groups at risk than ever before. The threats they face include state repression, organised crime, business interests and religious fundamentalism. There has been an alarming rise in attacks on journalists, human rights defenders and activists who seek to expose corruption and abuse. A decline of media pluralism has been accompanied by a parallel decline in democratic freedoms. Brazil, Turkey, Burundi, Egypt, Poland, Venezuela and Bangladesh have seen particularly disturbing drops in a diverse and independent media.

How Unicorn Riot Covers The Alt-Right Without Giving Them A Platform

November 27, 2017 Baynard Woods, cjr.org Create! AltRight, Journalism

By Baynard Woods for CJR - Three members of Unicorn Riot were in a rental car headed to Charlottesville the night before the August 12 white supremacist rally when one of them, Wendy Parker, started getting messages from a source. Parker was receiving screenshots of real-time communications between alt-right individuals and groups who helped plan the Charlottesville rally. The communications were sent on Discord, a chat app often used by gamers and included a “general orders” document created by an alt-right organizer, along with audio recordings of a planning meeting ahead of the rally. “That was all brand-new information, and that’s when we first heard about the torchlit rally plans,” Parker says. Unicorn Riot was among the first media outlets to arrive at the rally, where one member, Chris Schiano, had a camera knocked from his hand and Parker, who got the tip, was shoved, tripped and cursed. The screenshots kept coming throughout the following day’s rally and its violent conclusion. After August 12, the same source helped Unicorn Riot gain access to Discord’s internal logs, which enabled the collective members to better see the scope of plans for the Unite the Right rally. On August 14—two days after rally attendee James Fields, Jr., drove his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring more than a dozen—the collective published its first story about the Discord logs.

Harvard Experiment Finds Large Effects From Small News Outlets

November 21, 2017 Jason Alcorn, mediashift.org Strategize! Journalism, Media, News

By Jason Alcorn for Media Shift - Even small publishers have a large effect on the national discourse, according to a new paper published in Science on the effects of news. “Exposure to the news media,” the study states, “causes Americans to take public stands on specific issues, join national policy conversations, and express themselves publicly.” The research aims to quantify the effect of news media. Put in terms that are increasingly common when talking about journalism: What is the impact of news organizations? The act of publishing news is influential in still-surprising and robust ways. The study by Harvard professor Gary King and collaborators found that a few, mostly small news outlets publishing simultaneously in a broad area of public policy concern increased the volume of conversation on social media by 19 percent the day after publication. Over a full week, the volume was increased 63 percent relative to the average day’s volume. The number of unique authors increased as well, and the composition of opinion changed in the direction of the published articles. News outlets it appears, even in the face of social media algorithms, the echo chambers of political polarization and a barrage of digital information, have a profound and measurable effect on national discourse.

Charges Against Journalists Covering Inauguration Protest

November 15, 2017 Chip Gibbons, www.rightsanddissent.org Resist! Freedom of Press, Inauguration, Journalism, Repression

By Chip Gibbons for Defending Rights & Dissent - Defending Rights & Dissent was joined by a number of press freedom groups, including Freedom of the Press Foundation, Free Press, Pen America, and the Nation Institute, in sending a letter to the Department of Justice calling for an end to the prosecutions of Aaron Cantú and Alexei Wood. Both Cantú and Wood are journalists who were covering a protest march on Inauguration Day 2017, in Washington, DC. They face a number of charges, including engaging in a riot, conspiracy to riot, inciting a riot, and property damage. Since some of the charges are felonies, they face potentially decades in prison. Cantú and Wood were arrested and charged for simply doing their jobs as reporters. Their prosecution endangers press freedom in the United State.

RT America Torched In Witch Hunt ’17

November 14, 2017 Chris Hedges, truthdig.com Educate! Journalism, Media, Repression

By Chris Hedges for Truth Dig - In one of the most horrendous blows to press freedom since the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Justice has forced the news broadcaster RT America to file under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The assault on RT America, on which I host the show “On Contact,” has nothing to do with the dissemination of Russian propaganda. It is driven by RT America’s decision to provide a platform to critics of American capitalism and imperialism, critics who lambast a system of government that can no longer be called democratic. And it is accompanied by the installation of algorithms by Google, Facebook and Twitter that divert readers away from left-wing, progressive and anti-war websites, including Truthdig. The World Socialist Web Site has seen its search traffic from Google fall by 74 percent since April. Google, in a further blow, this month removed RT from its list of “preferred” channels on YouTube. Twitter has blocked all advertising by the channel. Put the censorship campaigns together and the message is clear: Left-wing critics, already marginalized by the state, must be silenced. It would seem, given how we are locked out of the corporate media and public broadcasting, that the assault is overkill. But the ideology that sustains the corporate state, the “free market” and neoliberalism has lost all credibility. The corporate state has no counterargument to its critics.

Using Worker Buyouts To Counteract Retaliatory Closings

November 7, 2017 Peter Gowan, peoplespolicyproject.org Create! Journalism, Labor, Repression, Unions

By Peter Gowan for People's Policy Project - There has been much understandable outrage at the closure of Gothamist and DNAinfo, a mere week after the publications voted to unionize. The closure of these publications was a move that will cause huge hardship to the journalists and staff at those publications, and should never have happened. It is also probably legal. United States labor law is exceptionally favorable to employers who would prefer to shut down their business rather than recognise a union. This precedent isn’t about to change because of a persuasive legal argument under the current Supreme Court and NLRB – but there are policy options which would significantly reduce the incentives for owners to close businesses in response to unionization, and protect workers where such actions are attempted. The first part of such a platform would be a version of the Italian “Marcora Law”, introduced in 1985. The law established a state investment fund for “phoenix cooperatives” in businesses or workplaces that were shutting down. Workers were given the right to collectively use up to three years of future unemployment benefits to instead buy the shares in their former workplace. These funds would then be matched three times over by the state investment fund, creating a sizeable sum of capital which could be used to revitalise the company.

Journalists Who Want Online Privacy Need To Read This Guide

November 4, 2017 Chris Paulus, occupy.com Resist! Digital, Internet, Journalism, Privacy

By Chris Paulus for Occupy - We live in a time of journalistic prosecution, as investigative journalists get increasingly targeted for simply doing their job. The Obama Administration prosecuted more individuals under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined; in fact, it used the law to prosecute journalists almost exclusively. It is imperative that journalists protect themselves as they continue to pursue their important work in the face of growing government control. That is why Michael Dagan, a former deputy editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaertz, and Ariel Hochstadt, a former security expert as well as a marketing expert for Google, have created a guide, Online Privacy for Journalists, to help journalists protect both themselves and their sources. “Many journalists whom I have spoken with recently expressed concern for whatever lies ahead for the freedom of the press. All encryption systems can be compromised, if someone has the perseverance to track them,” writes Dagan in an introductory paragraph. “The good news is that it is nevertheless possible to make it difficult for anyone to try and intercept your emails, the text messages you’re sending or your phone calls.” One may be surprised by the extreme measures the guide suggests are necessary as preventive steps to ensure the highest likelihood of a journalist maintaining privacy.

Lawmakers Demand Tech Corps Censor Journalists And Conduct Surveillance

November 4, 2017 Andre Damon, wsws.org Educate! Congress, Freedom of Speech, Internet, Journalism, Mass Surveillance

By Andre Damon for WSWS - Wednesday’s hearings by the House and Senate Intelligence committees on “extremist” political views served as the occasion for members of Congress to urge technology companies to flagrantly violate the US Constitution by censoring political speech, carrying out mass surveillance, and muzzling journalists in pursuit of the government’s geopolitical aims. The hearings revolved around allegations, promoted ceaselessly in recent months by the intelligence agencies, leading figures within the Democratic Party, and newspapers such as the New York Times, that social opposition to the political establishment results from “fake news” promoted by Russia. As Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff put it, “Russia” promoted “discord in the US by inflaming passions on a range of divisive issues” and sought to “mobilize real Americans to sign online petitions and join rallies and protests.” The basic problem, however, as Schiff put it, is “not just foreign.” The algorithms used by Facebook and Twitter have the “consequence of widening divisions among our society.” Schiff complained: “What ends up percolating to the top of our feeds tends to be things we were looking for,” as opposed to US government propaganda disseminated by the establishment media, which he referred to as “true information.”

Empower Communities Through Stories And Mobile Journalism

October 20, 2017 Staff, www.lawatthemargins.com Create! Digital, Journalism, Media

By Staff of Law at the Margins - Join Law at the Margins in collaboration with Evrybit, veteran journalists and social justice innovators as we discuss how mobile journalism can strengthen marginalized communities by amplifying voices, stories and images that are often underrepresented, misrepresented or ignored. Mobile journalism—where reporters use portable technologies to gather news—provides a unique opportunity to share stories from local communities in the United States and around the world. Can these tools be used to help strengthen historically marginalized communities? Law at the Margins in collaboration with the Evrybit mobile storytelling platform, veteran journalists, and social justice innovators will discuss existing tools that residents can use to document what's happening in their neighborhoods and become their own trusted news source.

Malta Car Bomb Kills Panama Papers Journalist

October 17, 2017 Juliette Garside, www.theguardian.com Educate! Journalism, Panama Papers

By Juliette Garside for The Guardian - The journalist who led the Panama Papers investigation into corruption in Malta was killed on Monday in a car bomb near her home. Daphne Caruana Galizia died on Monday afternoon when her car, a Peugeot 108, was destroyed by a powerful explosive device which blew the vehicle into several pieces and threw the debris into a nearby field. A blogger whose posts often attracted more readers than the combined circulation of the country’s newspapers, Caruana Galizia was recently described by the Politico website as a “one-woman WikiLeaks”. Her blogs were a thorn in the side of both the establishment and underworld figures that hold sway in Europe’s smallest member state. Her most recent revelations pointed the finger at Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and two of his closest aides, connecting offshore companies linked to the three men with the sale of Maltese passports and payments from the government of Azerbaijan. No group or individual has come forward to claim responsibility for the attack. Malta’s president, Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca, called for calm. “In these moments, when the country is shocked by such a vicious attack, I call on everyone to measure their words, to not pass judgment and to show solidarity,” she said. After a fraught general election this summer, commentators had been fearing a return to the political violence that scarred Malta during the 1980s.

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