Category: Access & Censorship

  • Cameras PermittedMaybe – Pogue’s Posts – Technology – New York Times Blog

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    Cameras PermittedMaybe – Pogue’s Posts – Technology – New York Times Blog: “Anyway, I brought my new Nikon D80 and my trusty image-stabilized, 18-200 millimeter (11X zoom) lens. This event absolutely screamed out for this camera: three frames per second, 11X zoom, image-stabilized. I was looking forward to getting some truly rockin’ shots, like the ones I’d taken at a monster-truck rally we saw last year in the same arena.

    Amazingly, the guard stopped me at the door. ‘You can’t take that in there,’ he said. ‘Detachable lens.’

    Say what?

    ‘You can bring pocket cameras, but no detachable lenses.’”

  • China: "citizen journalist" beaten to death – Boing Boing

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    China: “citizen journalist” beaten to death – Boing Boing: “Wei Wenhua was beaten to death after he snapped photos of a confrontation on the street between village residents and authorities. His death has sparked controversy in Chinese media, and the blogosphere:

    Wei Wenhua was a model communist and is now a bloggers’ hero — a ‘citizen journalist’ turned martyr. The construction company manager was driving his car when he witnessed an ugly scene: a team of about 50 city inspectors beating villagers who tried to block trucks from unloading trash near their homes.

    Wei took out his cell phone and began taking pictures. The city inspectors saw Wei and then attacked him in a beating that lasted five minutes. By the time it was over, the 41-year-old Wei was slumped unconscious. He was rushed to the hospital but was dead on arrival.”

  • Gang Leader for a Day – Sudhir Venkatesh – Book Review – New York Times

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    Gang Leader for a Day – Sudhir Venkatesh – Book Review – New York Times: “On a hot summer day in 1989, Sudhir Venkatesh, a callow sociology student with a ponytail and tie-dyed T-shirt, walked into one of Chicago’s toughest housing projects, clipboard in hand, ready to ask residents about their lives. Sample question: ‘How does it feel to be black and poor?’ Suggested answers: ‘very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, very good.’ Actual answers: unprintable.

    Mr. Venkatesh got rid of the clipboard and the questionnaire, but not his fascination with life in the Chicago housing projects. He stuck around, befriended a gang leader and for the next decade lived a curious insider-outsider life at the notorious Robert Taylor Homes on the city’s South Side, an eye-opening experience he documents in the high-octane ‘Gang Leader for a Day.’

    In a bit of bravado Mr. Venkatesh, who now teaches at Columbia, styles himself a ‘rogue sociologist.’ Dissatisfied with opinion surveys and statistical analysis as ways to describe the life of the poor, he reverted to the methods of his predecessors at the University of Chicago, who took an ethnographic approach to the study of hobos, hustlers and politicians. Much like a journalist, he observed, asked questions and drew conclusions as he accumulated raw data.”

  • House kicks up an investigation : Updates : The Rocky Mountain News

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    House kicks up an investigation : Updates : The Rocky Mountain News: “By resolution, the House said: ‘The special committee will investigate the circumstances surrounding the incident that occurred between Rep. Douglas Bruce and a member of the press on the floor of the House of Representatives on Jan. 14, 2008.’

    House Republicans on Monday had condemned Bruce for kicking the photographer and promised a tight rein on their new colleague to ensure such an outburst ‘never happens again.’”

  • Bruce kicks photographer, takes oath : Updates : The Rocky Mountain News

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    Bruce kicks photographer, takes oath : Updates : The Rocky Mountain News: “But his patience snapped as photographers from the Rocky and Denver Post crouched before him to shoot his picture as he stood for the House’s morning prayer.

    Bruce told Rocky photographer Javier Manzano ‘Don’t do that again,’ and then gave him a swift kick in the knee.

    Asked by reporters in his office about the incident, Bruce said his kick was warranted and that he had warned the photographers not to take his picture during the prayer and Pledge of Allegiance.

    ‘In 21 years, I don’t think there has ever been an instance where I had to do something to stop somebody from behaving in such a coarse and disgusting way,’ Bruce said.”

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  • Bjork assaults news photographer – 14 Jan 2008 – Journalism news – NZ Herald

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    Bjork assaults news photographer – 14 Jan 2008 – Journalism news – NZ Herald: “Iceland’s singing and songwriting sensation Bjork attacked a Herald photographer on her arrival at Auckland International Airport yesterday.”

  • Report: Iraqi Government Bans Journalists From Clash Sites

    From Iraqslogger via Editor and Publisher, a report that journalists will be banned from covering violent incidents by the Iraqi government. Among the reasons given by man with a long title Iraqi Interior Ministry Operations Director Brigadier General Abdul Karim Khalaf:

    — To protect journalists from being victims in follow on attacks (insurgents often target first responders).

    — “We do not want evidence disturbed before detectives arrive.”

    — “The respect of human rights by not photographing dead bodies who fall by bombings and other incidents.”

    — “The Ministry does not want to give terrorists information that they achieved their goals.”

    With tongue in cheek regarding the first point, this must be the first government in modern times that’s interested in protecting journalists. Maybe the next step is to ban all journalists from working throughout Iraq “for their own safety.”

    The last point is an interesting one. There is a war of information being fought, and terrorism needs publicity to fan its flames. And that’s why terrorist groups have taken to filming their own operations.

    You can say that desperate times call for desperate measures, but these restrictions will have larger effects than the stated goals. Shutting down the freedom of information over there is either a really bad idea or an illustration of how bad things are in Iraq.

    Links:

    Iraqslogger
    Editor and Publisher

  • Historians Fight Bush on Access to Papers

    NYT:

    In December 1989, one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Malta and, in the words of a Soviet spokesman, “buried the cold war at the bottom of the Mediterranean.”

    The Russian transcript of that momentous summit was published in Moscow in 1993. Fourteen years later American historians are still waiting for their own government to release a transcript.

    Now lawmakers and scholars are hoping to pry open the gateway to such archival documents by lifting what they say has been a major obstacle to historical research: a directive issued by the current Bush White House in 2001 that has severely slowed or prevented the release of important presidential papers.

    Here.

  • France bans citizen journalists from reporting violence

    MacWorld:

    The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.
    The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday on the night of March 3, 1991. The officers’ acquittal at the end on April 29, 1992 sparked riots in Los Angeles.

    Here.

  • Russian Police Beat Democracy Activists

    Washington Post:

    Several thousand people chanted “Shame!” as they marched down St. Petersburg’s main avenue to protest what they said was Russia’s rollback from democracy. The demonstration, called the “march of those who disagree,” was a rare gathering of the country’s often fractious opposition.

    …

    Mayor Valentina Matviyenko, a close ally of Putin’s, called the protesters “guest stars from Moscow” and “youths of extremist persuasion,” accusing them of stirring turmoil ahead of elections for the city legislature this month.

    Here.

  • Who's killing Putin's enemies?

    The Observer:

    One day, at the Ninth Municipal Hospital in Grozny, the Chechen capital, Anna Politkovskaya encountered a 62-year-old woman named Aishat Suleimanova whose eyes expressed ‘complete indifference to the world’, as she wrote in a typical piece. ‘And it is beyond one’s strength to look at her naked body. She has been disembowelled like a chicken. The surgeons have cut into her from above her chest to her groin.’ Two weeks earlier, a ‘young fellow in a Russian serviceman’s uniform put Aishat on a bed in her own house and shot five 5.45mm bullets into her. These bullets, weighted at the edges, have been forbidden by all international conventions as inhumane.’

    In the west, Politkovskaya’s honesty brought her a measure of fame and a string of awards, bestowed at ceremonies in hotel ballrooms from New York to Stockholm. At home, she had none of that. Her excoriations of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, ensured isolation, harassment, and, many predicted, death. ‘I am a pariah,’ she wrote in an essay last year. ‘That is the result of my journalism through the years of the second Chechen war, and of publishing books abroad about life in Russia.’

    Here.

  • Wires Reject Handout Photo Of Bush Speech

    Wires Reject Handout Photo Of Bush Speech

    PDN-

    The White House broke with tradition Wednesday night and refused to let photojournalists shoot still pictures of the president at the podium after his prime-time address on the Iraq war.

    As a result, newspapers and wire services had little choice but to run low-quality frame grabs from the video of the speech. An official handout photo from the White House, which most news outlets rejected, was the only other option. Caught in a bind on deadline, some newspapers ran the official White House photo with no disclosure that it was provided by the government.

    Here.

  • Afghan kidnappers 'want convert'

    Afghan kidnappers 'want convert'

    BBC:

    The kidnappers of an Italian journalist in Afghanistan have offered to free him in exchange for a Christian convert who fled the country, an aid agency says.
    Photojournalist Gabriele Torsello was seized last week while travelling on a bus in southern Afghanistan.

    The kidnappers will free Mr Torsello, a Muslim convert, if Abdul Rahman returns from Italy where he was granted asylum earlier this year, the aid agency says.

    Mr Rahman had escaped a possible death sentence for becoming a Christian.

    Here.

  • Journalist Kidnapped In South Afghanistan

    Washington Post:

    Italian photojournalist Gabriele Torsello was seized by five gunmen on the highway from Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, to neighboring Kandahar province, the independent Pajhwok news agency quoted Torsello’s traveling companion, Gholam Mohammad, as saying.

    Pajhwok said its call to Torsello’s mobile phone was answered by a man saying: “We are the Taliban and we have abducted the foreigner on charges of spying.”

    Here.

  • How Do You Photograph the Amish? Let Us Count the Ways

    CJR:

    The AP’s Carolyn Kaster appreciates this approach but has a slightly different philosophy: whenever possible, do no harm. “You can go through this business and try to make pictures of impact and importance but if an image is to have a journalistic purpose, to communicate something, if you can communicate it in a different way, without causing harm, then I think you’re obliged to do that,” Kaster said. She described a photograph that she declined to take last week because consent was not granted: She approached an Amish school in the area and “without my cameras explained who I was and what I’d like to do, to take a picture of kids on school grounds with no one singled out.” The teacher told Kaster that the children were “very wary” and asked her not to take the picture. “I said no problem. I did not make that photograph.”

    Kaster went to two other schools and got the same answer. “I had every right as an American to stand on public property and take that photograph,” she said. “I could’ve taken the picture and asked the teacher later. But that’s just how I approach this community.” Kaster added, “That might have been a key picture — children in the schoolyard of a one-room Amish schoolhouse,” and conceded that colleagues might criticize her for not having taken that photograph. “But,” she said, “I found another way to communicate what I wanted to communicate that I felt was within the boundaries of the [Amish traditions]” — by waiting for the children to get out of school and “be away from the school house environment,” finding a group of them walking home and talking to them and photographing them as they “hammed it up.” Said Kaster, “I could tell I wasn’t frightening them and causing them grief by photographing them. And I did have a job to do. I needed to make pictures of the Amish community, specifically children.” (As both Kaster and the Intelligencer Journal’s Dan Marschka pointed out, the Amish are baptized as adults and so children, not yet church members, are not under the same religious prohibitions regarding photography).

    Here.

  • In a Risky Place to Gather News, a Very Familiar Story

    In a Risky Place to Gather News, a Very Familiar Story

    NYT:

    Russia is unquestionably a dangerous place for journalists — less so than only Iraq and Algeria, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Thirteen of them have been killed since Mr. Putin came to power in 2000, a little more than two a year on average.

    The killings — and the failure to solve them — have created an atmosphere of impunity and violence that extends beyond those whose writings or broadcasts anger those in government or business. That was also lamented here, inside an airy white-stone hall at Troyekurovskoye Cemetery.

    Anna Politkovskaya’s killing was the third mob-style assassination of prominence in the last month alone. Andrei Kozlov, the first deputy chairman of the Central Bank, who led efforts to clean up the dirty money of the country’s banking system, was killed as he left a soccer game on Sept. 13. Less than two weeks later, Enver Ziganshin, the chief engineer of Kovytka, a potentially lucrative gas field in Siberia at the center of a dispute with the government, was shot in the back and head at his bathhouse in the countryside.

    Here.

  • Iraqi Journalists Add Laws to List of Dangers

    Iraqi Journalists Add Laws to List of Dangers

    NYT:

    Last month, more than 70 news organizations signed a nine-point pledge supporting the national reconciliation plan of Prime Minister Maliki, promising not to use inflammatory statements or images of people killed in attacks, and vowing to “disseminate news in a way that harmonizes with Iraq’s interests.” Days later, the police barred journalists from photographing corpses at the scenes of bombings and mortar attacks. Since then, policemen have smashed several photographers’ cameras and digital memory cards.

    At Al Arabiya, the Baghdad station shuttered by the Iraqi authorities earlier this month, the studio door handle is sealed in red wax and bound in police tape. (The door is adorned with a photo of Atwar Bahjat, who was kidnapped, tortured and killed in Samarra in February while reporting on the bombing of a Shiite shrine.)

    Some news executives express support for Al Arabiya’s closing.

    “It is the right of the Iraqi government, as it combats terrorism, to silence any voice that tries to harm the national unity,” said Mr. Sadr, of the Iraqi Media Network.

    Here.

  • U.S. Detains AP Photographer

    Wired:

    The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.

    Military officials said Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, was being held for “imperative reasons of security” under United Nations resolutions. AP executives said the news cooperative’s review of Hussein’s work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents, and any evidence against him should be brought to the Iraqi criminal justice system.

    Hussein, 35, is a native of Fallujah who began work for the AP in September 2004. He photographed events in Fallujah and Ramadi until he was detained on April 12 of this year.

    Here.

  • Filkins, 'NYT' War Reporter: 'Anarchy' Curtails Reporting in Iraq

    Editor & Publisher:

    He estimated that there are probably 50 murders and 20 to 30 kidnappings in Baghdad every day, and said that it had gotten to the point where it was no longer just Sunni-Shiite clashes or insurgent mayhem. “Nobody trusts anybody anymore,” he said. “There’s no law, and the worst people with guns are in charge.”

    According to Filkins, the New York Times is burning through money “like jet fuel” simply to securely maintain its operations in the country. In addition to the 70 local reporters and translators, the Times employs 45 full-time Kalashnikov-toting security guards to patrol its two blast-wall-enclosed houses — and oversee belt-fed machine-guns on the roofs of the buildings. The paper also has three armored cars, and pays a hefty premium each month to insure the five Times reporters working there.

    Here.

  • Iraq's Endangered Journalists

    NYT:

    I have experienced nearly all of these threats firsthand. In May 2004, a Canadian journalist and I were seized by insurgents inside Falluja. I was able to convince our captors that the Canadian, who spoke no Arabic, was not a Westerner but my older brother, and that he had suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak.

    A month later, National Public Radio sent me to Najaf to report on a protest against the fighting between the Americans and the Mahdi Army. Iraqi police officers handcuffed me, beat me and dragged me into the main government building. The governor’s deputy released me on the condition that I not take Mr. Sadr’s side in my reporting.

    The Mahdi Army then arrested me that September, in the Sadr City slum of northeastern Baghdad. I had been reporting from the hospital, where I was interviewing injured civilians. The militia men took me to a mosque, where a very young sheik questioned me. I lied about my employer, which was still National Public Radio, saying instead that I worked for a German station. He told me that I had better not be a spy, or else. My identity papers were copied and returned to me.

    Here.