CJA E-letter
from the Commonwealth Journalists
Association www.cjaweb.com
Headquarters: 305
Executive director: Josanne Leonard miribai@tstt.net.tt
Newsletter editor: David Spark david@dspark.fsnet.co.uk, who would like to hear from you. Views
expressed in this newsletter are those of contributors, not the CJA
The CJA thanks the Commonwealth Foundation
for its financial support
Issue No
Page 2 World Press
freedom:
Page 3 Gambian regime bans The Independent
Page 5 Media coverage at a price in
Page 6
Page 7 Rattling Mr Mugabe’s cage
Page 8 Radios promote recovery
from Pakistani quake
Page 9 A well-loved
broadcaster: News from round the world
Page 10 Books – Pharming,
phishing and bitmapping
100
apply for CJA’s Thomson course place
About
100 journalists from ten countries applied for the CJA-sponsored place on this
summer’s three-month print journalism course at the Thomson Foundation,
.
Two shot dead at
Tamil newspaper
Two
staff members of
Maldives
among Asia’s worst countries for press freedom, says ARTICLE 19
Abdullah Saeed, a journalist working for the opposition
paper Minivan in the
Minivan
subeditor Nazim Sattar faces a six month sentence on a charge relating to an
article published last year. Mohammed Yushau, a Minivan correspondent, was
arrested in April for allegedly ignoring a summons.
The
freedom of expression organisation ARTICLE 19 says the
WORLD PRESS FREEDOM DAY
Mahathir’s daughter defies
press curbs
As World
Press Freedom Day, May 3, approached, press freedom found an unexpected
champion. Marina Mahathir, daughter of ex-prime minister Mahathir who kept
The CJA’s
president, Hassan Shahriar, issued a Press Freedom Day statement in which he
pointed out that nearly 500 journalists were arrested
and jailed around the world last year. In some Commonwealth countries, he
wrote, journalists have been protesting against violations by governments and
others. “The media cannot sit idle. They will continue to highlight
governments’ incompetence, corruption, mismanagement, lack of transparency and
accountability.”
In
Every
year headlines and breaking news are reported in both the electronic and print
media, with graphic accounts of events at front lines and of the suffering of
local populations and combatants. These and many other news items arise out of
the hard and courageous resolve of journalists working under the most harsh and
perilous conditions without a gun but armed with tools that bring reality to
everyone’s doorstep and living room.
In
The same point was made by a district
government chief at a seminar organised by the Rural Media Network
Seminar in
Gambian regime bans The Independent
In May,
The
Independent’s general manager, Madi Ceesay, and editor Musa Saidykhan were also
detained when police closed the paper on March 28. They were held three weeks,
well beyond the legally permissible 72 hours.
Fatty
wrote an article headed “23 ‘Coup Plotters’ Arrested”, about an attempted coup.
He incorrectly reported the arrest of a former minister.
Demba Jawo writes:
The closure of The Independent came immediately
after the foiled military coup against the government of President Yahya
Jammeh.
With the detention of Madi Ceesay and Musa
Saidykhan, who are also president and vice president of the Gambia Press Union,
the government seemed to have killed two birds with one stone. They not only
silenced The Independent but
also crippled the GPU, which has been acting as the voice of Gambian
journalists.
The independent media in The Gambia have
endured all types of harassment and intimidation since this government came to
power, but The Independent has
had more than its fair share of that harassment. Since it was founded in 1999, it has never
been far from trouble, culminating in the torching of its printing press in
2004 by still unidentified arsonists.
Everyone is speculating as to why The Independent was arbitrarily
closed down by the authorities without their going through the legal process.
There is no shortage of possible reasons. The
Another possible reason was to silence it
during the aftermath of the foiled coup when the government has been using
arbitrary methods to deal with those suspected of complicity in the coup.
The authorities no doubt know that The Independent has been the most
popular alternative to government propaganda among Gambians at home and abroad.
Many people have expressed their anger against the closure. A retired civil
servant, Ousman Jatta, remarked: “The
Independent has been the only newspaper reflecting the views of the
common people of this country and any attempt to close it down is tantamount to
gagging the people.”
Media cover at a price in
Most
candidates had to pay journalists to get media coverage in
Some candidates paid up to 100,000 Ugandan
shillings a day. Radio and TV presenters allegedly received up to two million.
The Human Rights Network criticises media employers for not paying journalists
well enough, and businesses for not using the media to advertise their wares.
Government broadcasters are supposed to treat
candidates equally but did not do so. The New Vision newspaper covered
opposition candidates, on inside pages. President Museveni (the election
winner) got the front.
However, in addition to independent newspapers,
The government put pressure on the radio
stations, posting soldiers there on polling day It
came down hard on two airing opposition views. Choice FM in Gulu, heartland of
the impoverishing civil war, was closed down.
A government functionary injured a Daily
Monitor reporter in the eye. Before the election, the government expelled from
the country Blake Lambert, a Canadian journalist whose coverage it disliked. It
gave BBC correspondent Will Ross a work permit for only four months, but
extended this to a year when the BBC and the British Foreign Office protested.
Cameroon
Eric
Motomu, publisher and editor of the Chronicle newspaper, was beaten unconscious
in May by the driver and bodyguard of the chairman of the SDF,
Where press freedom is excuse for licence
By Asong Ndifor
A visiting diplomat once asked a Cameroonian minister if
there was press freedom in
The diplomat joked that, if the papers he read had been
published in
Some 200 newspapers are registered in
It was no surprise when some newspapers published a list
of 50 government ministers, Catholic priests, businessmen and sports stars and
accused them of homosexuality, a criminal offence in
The Cameroon Association of Commonwealth Journalists has
been campaigning for criminal libel to be abolished. But government apologists
say it is necessary to deter reckless journalism, especially as the
Many of the 200 papers have no offices, only mobile phones. Print runs average 2000. A lame-duck economy provides little advertising. Many who pass as journalists have no training in journalism.
Except for the criminal libel law,
Rattling Mr Mugabe’s cage
Wilf Mbanga, editor and publisher of The
Zimbabwean, has been depicted, in cartoons in
Fifteen thousand copies reach
Reporters, who write unpaid and
under pseudonyms for The Zimbabwean, risk up to 20 years in jail. The regime is battling to stop anyone writing for papers abroad,
including The Zimbabwean which Wilf runs from his dining room in
In April, The Zimbabwean reported the
beating-up of a journalist whom the government suspected of writing for foreign
media. Another journalist suspected of working for foreign media was locked up
for four days.
The Zimbabwean is backed by the Open
Society Institute and a Dutch donor, not by the British and American
governments as the state-run Herald alleges. It is beginning to earn money from
advertising.
Wilf Mbanga, once a friend of Mugabe,
was first managing director of The Daily News, which Mugabe silenced in
2003.
Commenting on a plan to set up a Zimbabwe Human Rights
Commission, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights says this will be a white
elephant unless laws and practices introduced by the Mugabe government are
reviewed; These include the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act
and the Broadcasting Services Act which, says ZLHR, have been used to close
independent media houses, harass, arrest and intimidate journalists and close
independent radio stations and printing presses, ZLHR also complains about the
state’s defiance and non-enforcement of court decisions in human rights cases,
Reporter Beauty Mokoba and a cameraman from
Since the October 2005 earthquake that killed over 73,000
people and left 3.5 million homeless in
They
have produced over 120 daily, hour-long, Urdu-language programmes known as
Jazba-e-Tameer (Desire to Rebuild). The show, produced
by Internews, an international agency that supports media development
worldwide, is funded by
Every
day the journalists report on relief and reconstruction work by UN, local and
international organisations, and they tell these agencies about local needs.
They provide information about health and sanitation, shelter, education and
women’s issues.
The
show has helped dispel rumours. It countered a widespread belief that the quake
was divine punishment. It also ended rumours about a possible mass evacuation
after a seismic report, and it prompted authorities to restore telephone and
power lines in affected communities.
The
reporters have stimulated public discussion about the disaster and the
international community’s response. Each programme is followed by an hour-long,
phone-in.
Displaced
people are now returning to their home communities. The reporters will continue
to serve as a link between them and the relief and reconstruction agencies.
For more information, Aaron Goodman aaron@internews.org.pk
The broadcaster who focused on
Israel Wamala, well known throughout
The Times records that he was a polite but insistent
interviewer and an extraordinary boss, always engulfed in tobacco smoke. He
wrote scripts on cigarette packets. He could not type and was hopeless at
editing tape but he employed aggressive and hard-working young producers. The
Focus office was a cauldron of noise as guests popped in from
News from round the world
A ruling party MP and his
supporters forced a press club east of
The newly elected Canadian
government banned coverage of the homecoming of four soldiers killed in
Afghanisatan.
Six daily paper editors in
Manipur state, near the
Senior South Asian
editors, meeting in
Alfred Egbegi, publisher
of a weekly in the Niger delta, was arrested in April and faces criminal
charges, over a report of trouble between a state governor and his deputy.
The Rural Media Network of
Pakistan held a one-day training workshop (picture above) for 33 writers
and students at Ahmedpur East in March. The
About 150 TV sets, 210
video recorders and 6000 cassettes were torched by members of a banned movement
in Swat,
Troops in March silenced
with a mortar shell the pirate radio of Mufti Munir Shakir who .has been
battling for control in the Khyber agency.
According to the Rural
Media Network
A photographer lost an eye
and six other journalists and a driver were also injured when a bomb went off
at a
Munir Mengal, head of
the TV station Baluch Voice, disappeared when he went to
Lee Kuan Yew and Prime
Minister Lee Hsein Loong have brought criminal libel charges against 12
opposition members who form the executive of The New Democrat, which is
published once or twice a year. An article questioned the government’s handling
of a corruption scandal at the National Kidney Foundation. The government
commonly uses libel actions to silence criticism.
Musa Ndlangamandla, chief
editor of the Swazi Observer, reported threats to his life in April because of
a campaign against loan sharks. Moneylenders have threatened to stop lending to
Observer staff members.
BOOKS
Phishing, pharming and bitmapping
Do you have problems with tiffs, jpegs and bitmaps? Can
you tell a pharmer from a phisher? All is explained in Tech Terms, a 280-page
directory of computing and communications words by Jeff Rutenbeck of
A bitmap is what the name suggests: an electronic file mapping a picture bit by bit. If the picture has been scanned at 300 dots per inch, the resulting bitmap can be megabytes long. A tiff (tagged image file format) is a similarly large picture file. These big files can be compressed into a jpeg (Joint Photographic Experts Group), from which unnecessary information has been weeded out. The file then becomes easier to store and transmit.
Pharming and phishing are forms of ‘social engineering’ – getting people to give away passwords and account details without their intending to do so. Pharmers reroute queries to spoof websites. Phishers use e-mail as bait.
And, by the way, http stands for hypertext transport protocol.
Tech Terms by Jeff
Rutenbeck (Focal Press and National Association of Broadcasters
http://books.elsevier.com)
VOA seeks African
development reporters
Bill Eagle of Voice of
Our thanks
Once
again, we would like to thank our contributors and sources, including the
International Freedom of Expression Exchange and its affiliates, ARTICLE 19,
the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Free Media Movement (