Results matching “jordan western”

Russian Information Agency Novosti, a state-owned news agency based in Moscow, has denied allegations of cooperating with a Western PR company in an attempt "to justify Russia's great power ambitions" and improve the reputation of former Soviet Union dictator, Joseph Stalin.

Following EUobserver's online publication of an article entitled "New pro-Russia campaign comes to EU capital," in which a journalist states that the news agency is attempting to secure a contract with one of Europe's top PR firms, RIA Novosti deputy general director, Valery Levchenko, dismissed the claims as nothing more than "utter rubbish". According to Levchenko, when interviewed by the EUobserver.com journalist, he was never asked about plans concerning RIA Novosti's cooperation with the RJI Company and has since questioned the journalist's level of professionalism. 

The blog L'Observatoire des Médias posted world maps of attention paid to the media in 164 countries in the world and received links from Gawker and Boing Boing.  The numbers included the blogosphere as a whole and 10 media organizations, including the New York Times and the Economist.

Each country is either stretched or shrunk on the map, depending on its share of media attention. The cartogram to the left is an analysis for the Wall Street Journal, showing a flattened Africa and South America and an augmented Western Europe.


Blogger Nicolas Kayser-Bril retrieved the numbers by manually searching the Web sites of 10 news organizations and Google Blog Search for articles containing the names of countries. He also counted and mapped the search results. He expects this process to be automated in a few months, using data scraping, to run more trials.

The numbers ran for each country against a model that Kayser-Bril constructed to approximate that country's importance, including: the country's Human Development Index, area, population, GDP, budget expenditures and number of U.S. soldiers present, accounted for more than half of the variation in countries' media coverage, according to Kayser-Bril. 

There were challenges, for example distinguishing new stories about the African nation of Chad from the rock singer Chad Kroeger. Kayser-Bril instead used capital cities for Chad, Georgia, and Jordan, and then multiplied the results by five (the typical ratio between search-engine hits for a country and for its capital, according to Kayser-Bril.). Another example: Not every article about the U.S. contains the search term  United States."

Kayser-Bril concedes that the algorithm is not very accurate:
- It counts each article equally, no matter the length or prominence.
- Search engines are not reliable. He noticed that "when you do the same search twice, you don't [get] the same numbers."
- The maps can be misleading, because it "makes countries with low population density, such as Mongolia and Canada, appear to be getting short shrift."

Ethan Zuckerman, research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said the work is important for showing how undercovered some countries are: "When you're not paying attention to a country, you don't trade with it; you don't send relief to it; you don't have to intervene in it."

Source: WSJ through Cyberjournalist.net

According to a poll conducted for the BBC World Service, 56% of the 11,344 people interviewed in 14 countries thought that freedom of the press was very important to ensure a free society. But 40% said it was more important to maintain social harmony and peace, even if it meant curbing the press's freedom to report news truthfully.

 The Editors' Weblog has compiled a provisional list of the newspapers that have printed some or all of the cartoons since 30 September 2005, date of publication of 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. Even provisional, this list is the most exhaustive on the internet, thanks to members of the World Editors Forum and to bloggers close to the EW.

The main conclusions are:

- to our knowledge, more than 130 national or local newspapers (excluding the student newspapers and online publications) published some or all of the 12 cartoons (sometimes just a pohtography) in approximately 50 countries . It also means that around 1,7% of the dailies around the world - 8,300 paid-for dailies according to World Press Trends 2005 - made the difficult decision to publish the cartoons.

- Europe was the continent where the most newspapers published the cartoons: at least 70 papers. It is not surprising that the Netherlands was the country most involved in the controversy (after Denmark)... a few months after the assassination of the film maker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist activist. Same thing in France after the veil debate and the November 2005 riots.

- Within Europe, the first publications to reprint the cartoons in January-February 2006 were in general right-wing publications, for example ABC in Spain, Die Welt in Germany and Corriere della Sera in Italy. Then more leftist publications followed suit, for example Libération and Le Monde in France.

- Surprisingly, Arab and Muslim newspapers were also involved in the controversy from the very beginning, with the first reprint on 17 October 2005 (see below)! More than 12 Arab and/or Muslim newspapers published the cartoons. The decision to publish provoked terrible consequences for the editors-in-chief of these publications. Same consequences for some directors of television in Sudan and Algeria. 

- How to define the position adopted by American, British, Canadian and Australian newspapers? Media responsability, political correctness or self-censorship? The most surprising is not the position defined in many editorials (from The New York Times to The Guardian), but this strange impression of unanimity and consensus: only three regional newspapers on more than 1,400 newspapers in the States and zero newspaper, but a student daily in the UK for taking the risk...

- And what in the rest of the world? Nothing. Almost the desert for the publication of the cartoons in the Americas (apart Brazil), Africa (apart South Africa) and above all Asia (apart New Zealand). As if this controversy was only between Europe and the Arab world and if blasphemy was still relevant in regions as Asia and the Americas: not only about Mohammed, but about all religious issues.

My conclusion: the geography of the publication of the Danish cartoons tells us a lot about our democracies: what is allowed, what is forbidden... and what is taboo. In fact, it's more geopolitics than geography!

Strange article from David Schlesinger, global managing editor and head of editorial operations for Reuters in the International Herald Tribune. Schlesinger doesn't believe that journalists have been targeted by U.S. military and his position is shared by a large majority of media analysts (see below excerpts of his article). So, what's the issue?

What is not acceptable is to generalize the word "journalists" as if there was no difference between Western journalists (or Arab journalists working for Western media) and Arab journalists. That is not the case. When reporters from Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya were killed in very specific conditions in Irak, who cared? The media and the organizations to ask for serious inquiries were scarce: the issue is that, almost systematically, double standard is applied!. It explains why - as Schlesinger does - you can consider that the community of journalists is not targeted. And in fact you forget that, in this "community", some journalists are seen as "friends" and some others as "hostile reporters". On the battlefield, ask Arab journalists or editors, they know that this idea of "community" is a myth...

I regret that David Schlesinger doesn't mention that, but I appreciate this first reflexion on journalists' safety. Here are some quotes of his article: "With Eason Jordan's resignation from CNN, newly powerful bloggers reveled in their unseating of another mainstream-media powerhouse. The term "Easongate" briefly entered the English language. And world attention was distracted from the serious issue of journalists' safety... I personally do not believe that journalists have been targeted... I know that too many journalists have been killed and kidnapped, and I know that to keep the vital flow of news out of that country going, we need to do everything in our power to make the situation safer.

Strange article from David Schlesinger, global managing editor and head of editorial operations for Reuters in the International Herald Tribune. Schlesinger doesn't believe that journalists have been targeted by U.S. military and his position is shared by a large majority of media analysts (see below excerpts of his article). So, what's the issue?

What is not acceptable is to generalize the word "journalists" as if there was no difference between Western journalists (or Arab journalists working for Western media) and Arab journalists. That is not the case. When reporters from Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya were killed in very specific conditions in Irak, who cared? The media and the organizations to ask for serious inquiries were scarce: the issue is that, almost systematically, double standard is applied!. It explains why - as Schlesinger does - you can consider that the community of journalists is not targeted. And in fact you forget that, in this "community", some journalists are seen as "friends" and some others as "hostile reporters". On the battlefield, ask Arab journalists or editors, they know that this idea of "community" is a myth...

I regret that David Schlesinger doesn't mention that, but I appreciate this first reflexion on journalists' safety. Here are some quotes of his article: "With Eason Jordan's resignation from CNN, newly powerful bloggers reveled in their unseating of another mainstream-media powerhouse. The term "Easongate" briefly entered the English language. And world attention was distracted from the serious issue of journalists' safety... I personally do not believe that journalists have been targeted... I know that too many journalists have been killed and kidnapped, and I know that to keep the vital flow of news out of that country going, we need to do everything in our power to make the situation safer.