Category: Access & Censorship

  • 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.

  • The War You See, and the War You Don't

    CJR:

    On July 25, Fox News reporter Bill Hemmer stood on a balcony and pointed to a hilltop on the Lebanon side of Israel’s border. The camera zoomed in. “It’s possible the latest Katushya rocket round left that high point,” Hemmer said, the camera following his sweeping hand over the hazy landscape, “and went down valley to the lower point of the Golan Heights.”

    Later, Fox News reporter Greg Palkot provided an update: Hezbollah had issued a directive to “the American media,” starting with Fox. “We have been advised by the Hezbollah militia here not to show the exact positions where those rockets are launched from.” Under Palkot’s long face, a graphic read, “Hezbollah’s Request.”

    Here.

  • Open Season on Journalists in the Middle East

    CJR:

    The Israeli government said it bombed three sets of telecommunications towers deep in the Christian heartland to cripple Hezbollah cell phone communications. But the attacks, which killed one technician and injured another, came just days after Israeli helicopters rocketed the Beirut headquarters of al-Manar, the controversial Hezbollah television station, wounding seven people. At about the same time, a convoy of reporters from several Arab satellite channels was attacked by Israeli jets. “Their cars were clearly marked ‘Press’ and ‘TV,’” Nabil Khatib, executive editor of Dubai-based pan-Arab channel al-Arabiya, told the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel says it was “targeting the roads because Hezbollah uses those roads.”

    Here.

  • Lifting the Cover of the Hezbollah PR Effort

    From CJR:

    Anderson Cooper followed up this past Monday with a similar report, telling viewers that “we found ourselves with other foreign reporters taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah … They only allowed us to videotape certain streets, certain buildings.”

    “This is a heavily orchestrated Hezbollah media event. When we got here, all the ambulances were lined up. We were allowed a few minutes to talk to the ambulance drivers. Then one by one, they’ve been told to turn on their sirens and zoom off so that all the photographers here can get shots of ambulances rushing off to treat civilians … These ambulances aren’t responding to any new bombings. The sirens are strictly for effect.”

    Here.

  • Photographers Face Danger, Limited Mobility in Lebanon

    From PDN:

    Getty Images photographer Spencer Platt says photographers in Beirut have been scrambling to the scene of explosions whenever they hear them, but doing so isn’t easy because Hezbollah is keeping photographers at arms length. “They’re very suspicious of our motives,” he says, explaining that they suspect there are Israeli spies among the Western journalists. Moreover, Platt says, Israeli aircraft are targeting cars in some places, so if you go on certain roads, “There’s a high probability that you’ll be attacked.”

    Here.

  • White House Photo Op

    White House Photo Op

    From the Chicago Tribune, via Rob Galbraith:

    A real-time presentation of a photo-op in the Oval Office of the White House with President Bush and Australia Prime Minister John Howard. (30 seconds.)

    Here.

  • Miller's family to meet attorney general

    From the Guardian:

    Relatives of James Miller, the British cameraman shot dead by Israeli soldiers in Gaza three years ago, will today meet the attorney general.

    The jury at last month’s inquest in London into Miller’s death decided the shooting was unlawful and that the 34-year-old the father of two had been murdered.

    Miller was shot by an Israeli soldier as he filmed in the Gaza strip in 2003.

    Here.

  • Media banned from red light district

    From the Guardian:

    Robert Kilp, the head of the city’s public affairs department, said if a journalist was caught filming in the area the tape would be removed and a warning issued, but if he or she was caught a second time the consequences would be more serious.

    “The second time we will be really angry. This zone is owned by the city of Cologne and is not considered a public street,” Mr Kilp said.

    “Anyone filming or taking pictures there will be liable to prosecution. Prostitutes are having sexual intercourse in cars there, it is not a good thing to be filming.”

    Here.

  • No, I do not need permission to photograph in a public place

    From Journal of a Photographer:

    That made this lady furious and she said “I will call the cops now” and took out her cell phone. It was a bizarre situation and the only think I could say in that moment was “Alright, go ahead and call the police. Then we can speak about that again.” She looked a little confused, I guess she wasn’t expecting such an answer. She didn’t call the cops but went over to one of the workers in the amusement park telling him that I photographed his son, that I refuse to delete the images and that he should call the security. Nick and me were just looking at each other finding this situation more and more obscure.
    Here.