Kathlyn Clore

As lawmakers around the world return to their posts after summer holidays, expect to see renewed attempts to either pass or overturn restrictive media laws.

While compiling the EJC’s daily roundup of media news over the past weeks, several ongoing proposals and debates stood out. The following is a non-exhaustive roundup of proposed or recently passed laws that could either curtail public access to information and/or to cast a chilling effect on the production of various content:

EUROPE
Great Britain
The government has proposed a law to limit peer-to-peer filesharing. If detected, illegal downloaders would initially receive warning letters ordering them to stop. If they persist in downloading, enforcement officials could require Internet Service Providers to sever their Internet connection.

The proposal is strongly reminiscent of the failed Hadopi law in France.

France

Earlier this year, the French government prompted the ire of Internet activists when it attempted to pass the Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet, or Hadopi.

The law would have allowed French authorities to cut off Internet access to computers whose users were previously caught and warned about illegal downloading. It also addressed other matters, such as giving online media status similar to that enjoyed by printed media.

It did not pass France’s Constitutional Council, which demanded judicial oversight before Internet access was denied.

But officials have said they plan to re-introduce the bill in the upcoming session with some oversight built in.

Italy
The Alfano proposal, so called for its author, Angelino Alfano, the Minister of Justice, requires bloggers to edit posts about which a complaint of defamation is filed with the government – within 48 hours. Bloggers who refuse may be sued.

Italian bloggers went on strike in mid-July to protest the right-of-response law.

According to Global Post, the Alfano proposal has been approved by Parliament and is moving on for Senate approval.

Czech Republic

Lawmakers put the “Muzzle Law” into effect on 1 April. It criminalises the publication of material gathered from police wiretaps. The law is dangerous because it prevents, for example, police departments from giving journalists information about potentially corrupted investigations. The law also bans the press from releasing the names of victims of violent crimes.

The punishment for breaking the law, which Czech president Vaclav Klaus signed in mid-February, is a five-year term in prison and a fine of around 170,000 euro.

A group of Czech journalists led a campaign called Prison For Journalists, prompting a group of senators to challenge the muzzle law in court. Some stories say lawmakers are perhaps considering an amendment to the law.

Slovakia

In April, 2008, the Fico government passed the Press Act. Challenges to the law are expected in the latter half of 2009.

According to Reporters Without Borders, the ministry of culture is allowed, by way of the law’s Article 6, “direct control over the media on a number of issues seen as sensitive.” Anyone who makes a complaint to the government about defamation is granted a right to respond. Papers who do not grant the request are subject to fines.

The law also allows the ministry of culture to penalise 16 different forms of hate speech.

LATIN AMERICA

Venezuela

Starting in mid-July, Hugo Chavez’ government began taking more than 200 radio stations off the air. Both AM and FM frequencies came under fire.

Also, as the Economist reported, the government has plans to “restrict radio stations from sharing programming so that local broadcasters would no longer be able to relay national news programmes.”

During the same week, regional newspapers were threatened when “government delays in providing foreign currency needed to import paper,” Editor & Publisher reported.

The first week of August saw pro-Chavez activists barge into Globovision, an opposition TV network, and attack staff there.

It’s all leading up to attorney general Luisa Ortega Díaz’ proposed Media Crimes Law. The purpose of the law is to curtail freedom of expression, which Ortega Diaz says has of late been abused in Venezuela.

MIDDLE EAST

Iraq

In mid-August, active Iraqi academics, parliamentarians, booksellers and journalists gathered in Baghdad to protest a series of government measures meant to limit the amount of “immoral” information to which Iraqis have access.

The government is requiring Internet cafes to register with the government. And according to a recent New York Times report, “In July, a government committee recommended that the drafting of a law allowing for official Internet monitoring and the prosecution of violators be expedited.”
Banned material would include Facebook, pornography, negative materials on Islam and content about gambling, terrorism or drugs, the NYT reported.

Some books will also be banned.

Saudi Arabia

This state’s censorship of the Internet is well documented. But it managed to make headlines over the summer with its restrictive practices.

In early August, Saudi Arabia yanked a satellite TV station after it broadcast a show in which a host spoke candidly about sex.

A few weeks later, Saudi Arabia blocked the Twitter accounts of activists inside the kingdom.

One of them, Khaled al Nasser, told AFP that he “had sent tweets about several human rights cases that he and other lawyers are pursuing, most recently that of rights lawyer Sulaiman al-Rashudi, detained by police for two years without being charged or tried.

Nasser said the action on Twitter accounts could reflect CITC taking note of the use of Twitter by Iranian democracy activists to provide people inside and outside the country information on their protests in June and July.”

In coming months, the government may require websites to have a license to operate inside the kingdom and privatise more television stations.

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Flickr images from users calamur, quecomunismo and albazi

My ride on Fat Albert airlines was a lot more exciting than I imagined.

When the editors at the Herald asked if I’d like to ride on an airplane during a local airshow and write about it, I said, “Sure!”

When they told me later that the plane I’d ride aboard was a transport plane, I said “Cool!” but was secretly disappointed that I wasn’t assigned to a sexier-sounding plane. A transport plane called Fat Albert didn’t really conjure a thrilling image.

Oh, how naive! I ended up being weightless three times and seeing the city of Salinas turned sideways. It was fast and it was loud. And I probably gripped a hole through my seatbelt.

Here’s my story. It was a challenge to write because while the paper asked me to do the ride-along, they asked me to try and avoid a first-person account of the ride. Hopefully they liked this hybrid approach.

As I was getting ready to write this, though, I was afflicted with some kind of hippie-esque revulsion at what everyone’s favorite component of an airshow (watching the Blue Angels) really is: a demonstration of planes used in wars.

Basically, the military aspects (quite significant at this airshow) of an airshow are a huge glorification of wars and fighting. In particular, fighting in and with really fast airplanes.

The airshow is essentially a celebration of those airplanes and a celebration of the men and woman capable of working with them.

So the smiling men I met in their tight Blue Angels flightsuits (not a bad touch, heh) have been, prior to joining the Blue Angels, using these super fast, expensive, high-tech airplanes to drop what they call “ordinances” on a group of enemies on the ground in places to which they assign acronyms like OAF and OIF.

And now they display for large crowds the maneuvers they use during these wartime operations. The crowds watch, oo and ahh. All the young boys go home wanting to be fighter pilots and all the girls go home thinking everyone in the military is a fighter pilot who looks sexy in a flightsuit.

It’s a huge, expensive, PR stunt. A three-day advertisement for the military.

And yes, I know countries need a good military. Countries need workers whose job it is to drop bombs (er, ordinances) from really fast airplanes. And I guess we have to entice people to sign up to train for those kind of jobs somehow.

I just don’t know if glorifying war is for me.

Heading to the California International Airshow tomorrow for a story - and ride on Fat Albert, a C-130 (transport) plane.

I know, it’s the sexiest name for an airplane that you’ve heard of.

I’ll go early in the day to check out what’s going on, catch some demonstrations before my flight, at 3 p.m. Tricky part with the flight is, I’m advised by my editor to stay away from first-person accounts. Apparently the paper has had several first-person ride-along stories in recent years.

Any ideas for what angles I could take? I’m bringing my secret weapon, the boyfriend, along for the assignment. He has worked in aviation in the military and can help me understand what’s happening.

So, what would you want to read about your local airshow?

Sad to see the six Gambian journalists I mentioned in yesterday’s roundup were sentenced to two-year jail sentences and fines of $20,000 each.

I urge anyone who is following the story about the two American journalists who were recently brought home from North Korea to shift their attention slightly to include this story.

Why? A Google News search for “Gambian Press Union” shows there are 42 news articles about these six journalists.

A search for “Laura Ling” (one of the journalists Bill Clinton brought home this week) turns up more than 10,000 stories.

There will be a lot of attention on the latter case for a while, and not so much, I fear, on the cases of non-American journalists doing important work in dangerous situations in places. I think it’s important to pay attention to these cases so we remind ourselves of the dangers still faced by colleagues around the world. Cases like these are so often overlooked as journalists in the West scramble to find the next business models for journalism, learn mobile reporting skills, excel at video editing and master social networking.

For more, check out IFJ and CPJ coverage.

Bill Clinton 2, Kim Jong Il 0.

The former American president is landing in California right now after securing the release of CurrentTV reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee.

The duo was arrested in March and subsequently sentenced to 12 years of hard labor in North Korea while

reporting about human rights issues near the China-North Korea border.

But many journalists who have become entangled in the lairs of oppressive regimes aren’t coming home today. In fact, today is a particularly busy day in the world of disturbing news about threatened journalists:

Africa
In Gambia today, six journalists charged with “sedition, defamation and conspiracy” are facing judgment. If they are found guilty, they face fines and jail time of up to two years.

Elsewhere in Africa, two journalists who have been held in police custody since Saturday may be formally charged today. The pair of editors from Niger are detained after publishing reports about “corruption charges involving the national human rights commission.”

Russia
In a courtroom in Russia today, the four men charged with the 2006 murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya are being retried after a successful appeal by the prosecution. According to Reporters Without Borders, “The Russian justice system’s inability to punish those who use murder to silence critics and protect their interests just feeds the cycle of violence and serves as licence for the killers to continue killing.”

China
AsiaMedia, a daily digest of media news from that region, is reporting today that a Chinese journalist has been sentenced to three years in prison on charges of corruption. It is a “rare case of a female journalist working for the powerful state broadcaster, CCTV, being sent to prison.”

Iran
Good news today from Iran, though, the world’s leading jailer of journalists with 36 in jail. The Islamic state released five journalists from its prisons today. One of the quintet had been in prison for a year; the rest were arrested in the protests following the June elections in Iran.

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Suddenly, the “furloughcations” facing many a journalist in the United States and Europe don’t look so bad.

Check out this CPJ report for more information on detained reporters.

Jessica Simpson’s PR people seem to really like circulating the oft-repeated story about her boobs being too big for the Christian music circuit.

After covering the Spirit West Coast music festival here in Monerey, California, on Saturday, I realized this story is a load of baloney.

Because people playing the Christian music circuit are actually, um, pretty hot. Like Christy Johnson. She’s the stand-up keyboardist and singer in the morbidly-named bandWorth Dying For. And for sure the crowd here really dig her breathy calls to worship as well as the band’s sometimes punky, sometimes Evanescence-esque sound.

I think she def has cross-over appeal.

I learned a few other things at this festival, too:

1. Christian music is a unique niche. It is a genre that includes everything from hip-hop to heavy metal. It’s basically the same music that’s on the rest of the airwaves, only repurposed with lyrics that don’t have any any “bad stuff.”

At least four teenagers I interviewed insisted adamantly that Christian music is “better because it doesn’t have any bad stuff”… And they seemed entirely uncomfortable when I asked what exactly they meant by “bad stuff.”

“You know… like cussin’.”

2. More seriously, while I was pretty entertained by these super psyched believers, I struggled internally with an unexpected aspect of reporting a simple man-on-the-street story from the festival: People asking me my religious beliefs.

My mind isn’t really made up about how to handle this issue.

Is it only fair that I reveal my religious beliefs if I’m asking my sources to talk about theirs? That’s the kind of premise I normally would operate under. If I’m asking a source to share his thoughts, then it seems right that I should be equally open (if asked and time permitting). However, this kind logic once saw me strip down while interviewing a (fellow?) Dutch nudist at a nude beach in the Netherlands. So perhaps my approach needs another thought.

But then again, I was not really there to do anything other than a man-on-the-street story. I was not at all asking interviewees about their beliefs when they asked about mine. So perhaps it would have been OK for me to refrain from answering the question. To beg off.

But would that only draw more attention to the issue? I’m not sure.