The World Association of Newspapers' (WAN) "Media in Danger - Press Under Siege" two-day conference opened in Beirut on Sunday Dec 10th. More than 3,000 people attended the opening of the conference, which sought ways to support the development of independent, professional media in the Middle East and the Arab world. Presented here are some of the main points and quotes recorded during the conference.
As a result of our former survey about the number of newspapers which published the Danish Mohammed cartoons, it appears that there were not two or three but twelve different ways to cover the story:
1) No reproduction of the cartoons but a short text describing them and no link to the cartoons in the website. It was the choice of more than 1,400 American newspapers.
2) No reproduction of the cartoons but link to the cartoons (often Wikipedia) in the website. It implies a certain sense of hypocrisy - are the online readers more clever than the usual readers? - but many English newspapers thought it was relevant.
