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Ed Webb

Crisis Mapping Libya: This is No Haiti | iRevolution - 0 views

irevolution.net/...crisis-mapping-libya

Libya mapping ushahidi

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Libya this week which saw an established humanitarian organization specifically request a volunteer technical community for a live map of reports generated from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and mainstream media sources. Seriously, I have never been more impressed by the humanitarian community than I am today. The pro-active approach they have taken and their constructive engagement is absolutely remarkable. This is truly spectacular and the group deserve very high praise.
  • we are creating a live map of a hostile situation still unfolding. Haiti provided a permissive environment, politically and geographically. Libya couldn’t be more different. We experienced the serious challenges of crisis mapping a hostile environment when we created a crisis map of Khartoum at the request of local Sudanese activists. This was a stressful deployment but one that was able to provide an important window into what was happening in Khartoum. In the case of Libya, our humanitarian partner requested that the crisis map be password protected. We intend to make the map public after this phase of the humanitarian operations is over. In the meantime, the screenshots below provide a good picture of what the platform looks like. In the first 48 hours since the activation of the Task Force, over 220 individual reports have been mapped, many including pictures and some with video footage.
  • Ed Webb on 04 Mar 11
     
    Stunning application of social media. NB lessons learned in one crisis inform actions in teh next.
Ed Webb

"We are looking at the biggest reconstruction story since World War II" | EBU - 0 views

www.ebu.ch/...ction-story-since-world-war-ii

media politics analysis opinion climate science

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • A news organization’s climate journalism should be as all-pervasive as the consequences of the climate crisis itself are. It should be completely normal to have a paragraph on climate impacts in, let’s say, a sports story or a story about company earnings.
  • There is not a single area of journalism that will not be transformed either directly by climate impacts or by humanity's efforts to mitigate climate change or adapt to it.
  • First, free climate journalism from its organizational silo and make it all-pervasive. Second, localize it and bring it into the here and now as much as possible. Third, put it into context.
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  • climate change is a systemic challenge, but most news organizations are still treating it only as a topic
  • It is always a good start to build a climate desk, and news organizations need climate specialists. But they are no substitute for increasing the climate literacy, or climate fluency, of all desks.
  • many editors think of climate journalism as crisis reporting.  And while it is important to cover extreme weather events, they are still only the breaking news surface of something much more profound and systemic
  • There are so many important and interesting stories just on climate adaptation alone that you would overlook as an editor when you reduce climate journalism only to breaking news and crisis reporting.      
  • Public broadcasters in Europe have an unrivalled responsibility to get it right, because they are comparatively well-funded. In addition, they tend to be their country's most-trusted news organization. Especially when it comes to climate journalism, an audience’s trust in a news organization is a hugely important ingredient.  Sometimes I have been struck by the timidity of public service media. Yes, they are under growing political pressure in many countries. But to preemptively capitulate is not a strategy.
  • All it took for the last IPCC report to be washed out of the news cycle within hours was an actor misbehaving at the Oscars. It had taken seven years to produce that report.
  • energy literacy is a core aspect of climate journalism and it seems the war in Ukraine has also heightened the world’s awareness for just how integral energy is to our societies and economies. A next phase in this realization may be that the much-needed shift to renewable energies will come with its own new set of geopolitical dependencies
  • The location of the denial has shifted. It has shifted from denying climate science, and specifically that climate change since the pre-industrial age is human-made to denying how urgent our situation is and how little time we have left to avoid a much more dramatic course of events. The willingness to embrace the time pressure we are under is part of climate literacy. 
  • I have never heard a young journalist say ‘I am somehow glad I won’t live long enough to see the worst effects of climate change’ while I have seen quite a few older colleagues express such sentiments. Some of them were even middle-aged, which makes me think they never looked at an IPCC report.      
  • I have met the CEOs of very large global companies who had deep knowledge of the climate crisis while I have yet to meet just one chief editor with a similar degree of climate knowledge
  • It is the nature of the climate crisis, though, to move faster than most of us think. I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see a major news organization re-organize itself around the climate crisis as their organizational axis. 
Jared Bernhardt

What Israeli identity crisis? - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...an18-2009feb18,0,3488410.story

israeli crisis arab muslim

shared by Jared Bernhardt on 19 Feb 09 - Cached
  • This is not to say that Israeli Arabs have been completely happy with their treatment by Israel. In this regard, The Times explores whether Israeli government aid for the Arab population has been as generous as for the Jewish population. However, the editorial fails to consider ways in which Israeli Arabs benefit to the exclusion of Israeli Jews
  • Jared Bernhardt on 19 Feb 09
     
    Israel assumed identity crisis?
Ed Webb

Freelancing abroad in a world obsessed with Trump - Columbia Journalism Review - 0 views

www.cjr.org/...p-impact-foreign-reporting.php

journalism journalists journalist media MENA US USA

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • “I can’t make a living reporting from the Middle East anymore,” said Sulome in mid-December. “I just can’t justify doing this to myself.” The day we spoke, she heard that Foreign Policy, one of the most reliable destinations for freelancers writing on-the-ground, deeply reported international pieces, would be closing its foreign bureaus. (CJR independently confirmed this, though it has not been publicly announced.) “They are one of the only publications that publish these kinds of stories,” she said, letting out a defeated sigh.
  • Sulome blames a news cycle dominated by Donald Trump. Newspapers, magazines, and TV news programs simply have less space for freelance international stories than before—unless, of course, they directly involve Trump.
  • Trump was the focus of 41 percent of American news coverage in his first 100 days in office. That’s three times the amount of coverage showered on previous presidents
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  • Foreign news coverage has been taking a hit for decades. According to a 2014 Pew report, American newspapers even then had cut their international reporting staff by 24 percent in less than a decade. Network news coverage of stories with a foreign dateline averaged 500 minutes per year in 2016, compared to an average 1,500 minutes in 1988, according to a study by Tyndall. “Clearly it’s harder for international stories to end up on front pages now,” says Ben Pauker, who served as the executive editor of Foreign Policy for seven years until the end of 2017. He is now a managing editor at Vox. From his own experience, Pauker says, it’s simply an issue of editorial bandwidth. “There’s only so much content an editorial team can process.”
  • In October 2017, Sulome thought she had landed the story of her career. The US had just announced a $7 million reward for a Hezbollah operative believed to be scouting locations for terror attacks on American soil—something it had never done before. Having interviewed Hezbollah fighters for the last six years, Sulome had unique access to the upper echelons of its militants, including that specific operative’s family members. Over the course of her reporting, Hezbollah members told her they had contingency plans to strike government and military targets on US soil and that they had surface-to-air missiles, which had not been reported before. Convinced she had struck gold, she was elated when the piece was commissioned by a dream publication she’d never written for before. But days later, that publication rescinded its decision, saying that Sulome had done too much of the reporting before she was commissioned. Sulome was in shock. She went on to pitch the story to eight other publications, and no one was interested.
  • I’ll go back to the Middle East on trips if I find someone who wants a story, but I’m not going to live there and do this full-time, because it’s really taking a toll on me
  • According to Nathalie Applewhite, managing director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the lack of international coverage has become a real problem for Pulitzer grant recipients. Those grants, she says, were established to address the earlier crisis in which news organizations were closing foreign bureaus and could no longer fund big foreign reporting projects. “Now we’re seeing an even bigger challenge,” she says. “We’re providing the monetary support, but the problem is finding the space for it.” Grant applicants, Applewhite adds, are finding it harder to get commitments from editors to publish their work upon completion of their reporting. And stories that already have commitments are sitting on the shelf much longer, as they are continuously postponed for breaking Trump news.
  • As the daughter of two former Middle East-based journalists, Sulome knows what it used to be like for people like her. “I grew up surrounded by foreign correspondents, and it was a very different time. There was a healthy foreign press, and most of them were staff. The Chicago Tribune had a Beirut bureau for example. So when people say we’re in a golden age of journalism today, I’m like, Really?”
  • The divestment from foreign news coverage, she believes, has forced journalists to risk their lives to tell stories they feel are important. Now, some publications are refusing to commission stories in which the reporter already took the risk of doing the reporting on spec. Believing that this will discourage freelancers from putting their lives in danger, this policy adds to the problem more than it solves it.
  • “When people lose sight of what’s going on around the world, we allow our government to make foreign policy decisions that don’t benefit us. It makes it so much easier for them to do that when we don’t have the facts. Like if we don’t know that the crisis in Yemen is killing and starving so many people and making Yemenis more extremist, how will people know not to support a policy in which we are attacking Yemenis?”
  • “Whether it’s environmental, ethnic or religious conflict, these are issues that may seem far away, but if we ignore them they can have a very real impact on us at home. International security issues, global health scares, and environmental crises know no borders, and I think we ignore them at our own peril.”
Ed Webb

Climate migration in Iraq's south brings cities to crisis - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...q-climate-crisis-drought-basra

Iraq water energy urbanization urban migration economy unemployment politics climate

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • Iraq as the fifth-most-vulnerable country to climate change. Temperatures have increased by 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in three decades, according to Berkeley Earth, well above the global average, and in the summers, the mercury now regularly hits 50 Celsius (122 Fahrenheit)
  • burning crops and desiccating marshes
  • As upstream dams in Turkey and Iran weaken the flows of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a salty tide is creeping north from the Persian Gulf, poisoning the land
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  • changing climate is forcing families to sell off their livestock and pack up for urban centers such as the region’s largest city, Basra, in search of jobs and better services
  • As hotter, more-crowded cities become the future of a warming world, a lack of preparedness will only exacerbate the discontent already fraying the social fabric
  • decades of U.S.-backed sanctions and war, combined with the weight of corruption and neglect, have left Basra’s infrastructure unable to adequately support the 2 million people the city already houses — let alone the rising tide of newcomers.
  • According to official figures, Basra province has a population of over 3 million — an increase of at least 20 percent in 10 years. And most of that growth has been in its urban areas
  • nearly 40 percent of farmers across the country reported an almost total loss of their wheat crop.
  • Social media has been awash with photos showing water buffaloes lying dead on the cracked mudflats of southern Iraq’s dried-out marshlands
  • 12 percent of residents were newcomers who had settled in Basra over the past decade, mostly because of water scarcity and a lack of economic opportunities. The number is even higher in other southern Iraqi cities, such as Shatrah and Amarah.
  • water degradation in the province cost Iraq $400 million in lost animals, palm trees and crops in 2018 alone
  • As he saw it, migration was only making the situation worse, and he felt that the slow tide of arrivals was changing his city. “Their mind-set is different; we don’t know how to deal with them,” he said. “They don’t respect the laws here.”
  • Decades of government neglect in rural areas, particularly in the education sector, have left many of the migrants illiterate.
  • often struggle to access the city’s formal labor market and instead rely on temporary employment as construction workers or truck drivers, or hawking goods from carts in the street. And their habits and attitudes clash with those of their urban cousins.
  • political leaders in southern Iraq have started blaming the city’s crime rate — as well as other problems — on its migrants.
  • A few years ago, huge demonstrations decrying corruption and unemployment were crushed with deadly force. Since then, every summer has brought scattered daily protests over authorities’ failure to provide basic services.
  • “This is how you drive these people into criminality, by discriminating,” she said. “They move to irregular neighborhoods where there’s no proper public services and no employment. And then social issues will emerge.”
  • When a heat wave forced the shutdown of Basra’s power grid in August, the homes of newcomers and longtime residents alike were plunged into darkness as millions spent sleepless nights drenched in sweat
  • “My dreams in this country are being lived by a dog in Europe,”
Ed Webb

Column: Why click-bait will be the death of journalism | PBS NewsHour - 0 views

www.pbs.org/...bait-journalism-could-kill-you

journalism media digital future opinion business

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 03 Jun 16
     
    Journalism is once again in crisis, and this time, the sky really does seem to be falling. What went wrong?
Ed Webb

Once a beacon, Lebanese dailies lose regional sway - 2 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...es-lose-regional-sway-19938460

Lebanon press media newspapers finance economics politics KSA Saudi Syria Libya PLO

shared by Ed Webb on 31 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Its slogan was "the voice of the voiceless", but after four decades the prestigious Lebanese daily As-Safir is in danger of falling silent, illustrating the unprecedented crisis rocking the country's media.Lebanese newspapers, long seen as a beacon of freedom in a tumultuous region, are suffering because of the country's political paralysis and a slump in funding from rival regional powers.
  • As-Safir's main competitor, An-Nahar, is also struggling to survive and its employees have not been paid for months."Our ink has run dry," said Talal Salman, founder and editor-in-chief of As-Safir. "The Lebanese press, a pioneer in the Arab world, is undergoing its worst crisis ever."
  • He blames the country's political stalemate, with existing divisions exacerbated by the war in neighbouring Syria.Two main blocs dominate Lebanon: one backed by the West and Gulf kingdoms, and the other by Iran and Syria.The rift means there have been no parliamentary elections since 2009, and lawmakers have failed for nearly two years to elect a president."Without politics, there is no media, and there is no politics in Lebanon today,"
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  • Many of the region's most influential journalists have written their best stories for Lebanese newspapers, relishing the freedom to be critical that one could only dream of under other more oppressive governments.But the freedom was never complete.Some journalists have paid the ultimate price for their work, including An-Nahar's Samir Kassir and Gibran Tueini, who were both murdered as the Syrian army pulled out of Lebanon in 2005.As-Safir's Salman escaped an assassination attempt himself in 1984, when Lebanon was mired in civil war
  • long-standing reliance of Lebanese media on political financing from the Middle East's rival powers
  • advertising revenue slump
  • During the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the Palestine Liberation Organisation's Yasser Arafat were key financiers.As-Safir acted as the voice of Arab nationalists and defenders of the Palestinian cause, while An-Nahar stood for Lebanese pluralism.After the war, Saudi, Qatari and Iranian money took over, but a few years on, even Riyadh's oil-fuelled coffers ran dry.
  • regimes have taken to setting up newspapers on their own turf
  • The editors of An-Nahar, founded in 1933, have denied rumours that it may face closure, but its journalists have not been paid for seven months and several have been let go.Staff at the English-language Daily Star as well as the Al-Mustaqbal newspaper and television station owned by billionaire Sunni former Prime Minister Saad Hariri say they too are owed pay.
Ed Webb

Youth and Citizenship in the Digital Era: Critique of an Emerging Phenomenon - www.jada... - 0 views

www.readability.com/...tijebiht

socialmedia activism youth Arabs mediterranean analysis opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • how the young enacted their citizenship in the digital age as a way to both confront power and imagine a different future
  • While the economic benefits of globalization had bypassed the Middle East’s young generation, the information revolution did not (at least not to the urban centres). The children submerged in the information technology of the 1990s onwards are today’s youth.
  • El-Sharnouby analysed Egyptian news sources since the turn of twenty-first the century to examine how the government sought to accommodate the "youth bulge." The Mubarak government conceived of youth as prone to laziness and passivity. Moreover, El-Sharnouby highlights that many scholars erroneously thought that disenfranchised youth would turn either to drug abuse or religious extremism. It therefore came as a surprise to them when scores of the “problematic,” “apathetic” and “lazy” youth were the main actors and agents of dissent in the January 25 revolution
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  • a new generation of Arab artists who monetize their work directly online, not mediated through galleries or other parts of the artistic establishment
  • social media are increasingly becoming the space for transnational and global activism for Palestine
  • Hisham Soliman spoke of a pre-revolution identity crisis that permeated Egypt’s young population and made citizenship and national feeling count for very little. Scores of youth, especially young men, considered emigration as one of the only solutions. But the new media allowed them access to new spaces and empowered them with new techniques to redefine their senses of identity and belonging. Instead of keeping them in their private spaces, it allowed them virtual alternative spaces that compensated for the absence of an actual public space. It even provided them with the means to aggregate and to later claim back the actual public sphere
  • transposing the model of the salon to blogs on the Egyptian Internet
  • A limitation of virtual media is its inability to give rise to a coherent discourse and set of ideas. Online activism might even be inhibiting deeper thinking and analysis of complicated political and economic problems
  • Surian, drawing on arguments made with regard to “filter bubbles” argued that the individuals, through Google searches and Facebook filters, are being locked into patterns. Facebook and Google become familiar backyards, leading to reduced thinking and a closing rather than opening of ideas and social spaces.
  • Gramsci states in his Prison Notebooks: If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer leading but only “dominant,” exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Ed Webb

The right to resist is universal: A farewell to Al Akhbar and Assad's apologists - 0 views

maxblumenthal.com/...l-akhbar-and-assads-apologists

Syria Lebanon politics media Assad propaganda journalists

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • the mere existence of Western meddling does not automatically make Assad a subaltern anti-imperial hero at the helm of a “frontline resisting state,” as Ghorayeb has sought to paint him. Nor does it offer any legitimate grounds for nickel-and-diming civilian casualty counts, blaming the victims of his regime, or hyping the Muslim Threat Factor to delegitimize the internal opposition
  • The long history of sacrifice and courage by the Lebanese and Syrian people in support of the Palestinian struggle — and in defiance of self-interested autocrats — crystallizes an important fact that should not have to be repeated: Palestine will never be free as long as the Arab world lives under the control of dictators.
  • In his address to the Syrian People’s Assembly on June 3, the dictator tried to hammer the theme home by using the term “terrorists” or “terrorism” a whopping 43 times. That is a full ten times more than George W. Bush during his speech to Congress in the immediate aftermath of 9/11
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  • In joining the Assad regime’s campaign to delegitimize the Syrian opposition by casting it as a bunch of irrational jihadis (ironically, they seem to have little problem with Hezbollah’s core Islamist values), Assad’s apologists have unwittingly adopted the “war on terror” lexicon introduced by George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon, and the neocon cabal after 9-11. Not only have they invoked the scary specter of The Terrorists (gasp!) to justify morally indefensible acts of violent repression, like pro-Israel hasbarists, they have resorted to rhetorical sophistry to dismiss the regime’s atrocities as necessary evils, unfortunate accidents (what al-Amin called “mistakes”), or fabrications of the regime’s opponents (see Ghorayeb on “unsubstantiated allegations of war crimes.”)
  • Like the neocon chickenhawks who cheered on America’s invasion of Iraq from the offices of Washington’s American Enterprise Institute, none of Assad’s apologists appear to have done any journalistic fieldwork to support their opinions. Ghorayeb and Narwani seem to have confined themselves to Beirut, where Ghorayeb consults the writings of V.I. Lenin and Paulo Freire to back up her hallucinatory portrayal of Assad as a subaltern freedom fighter, while Narwani cobbles together a scattershot of YouTube clips and hearsay from journalists she hangs out with to justify the regime’s very own “war on terror.”
  • As a Christian who fiercely rejected sectarianism, Shehadeh’s very presence shook the Syrian regime. After he was killed, the army shelled the Christian neighborhood of Hamidyeh to prevent his funeral, then a gang of shabiha attacked a memorial service for him in Damascus that would have presented a rare display of Christian-Sunni solidarity. It was this sense of solidarity that appeared to threaten the regime the most. As Shehadeh’s mother reportedly said, “They feared him in life, and they feared him in death.”
  • A few years ago, while visiting the offices of the Nation Magazine, a publication I frequently write for, I reflected on what it might have been like to be working there during the 1930’s when its editorial leadership supported Stalin and willfully ignored his crimes. What were the internal debates like, I wondered, and how would I have reacted? The past few weeks at Al Akhbar have brought those questions back into my thoughts, and they are no longer hypothetical. The paper’s opinion pages have become a playpen for dictator enablers, but unlike the 1930’s-era Nation Magazine, there is less excuse for their apologia. Indeed, given the easy accessibility of online media produced by Syrian activists and journalists, there is no way for Assad’s apologists to claim they did not know about the regime’s crimes
Ed Webb

BBC News - World media offer divergent views on Ukraine crisis - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...blogs-echochambers-26441892

Ukraine media

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Speaking of Syria, comparisons between its civil war and the situation in Ukraine dominate commentary throughout the Middle East. "At a time when the drums of war are beating in Ukraine and the Crimea Peninsula, the Russians should note that they should not vote for the death of diplomacy because they won the Syrian crisis with the same trump card," writes Jalal Barzegar in Iran's conservative daily Iran. "If diplomacy backs down in the face of militarism, or in fact be forced to retreat, its consequences will not be limited to Ukraine; it will rather affect the international atmosphere." He argues: "Russia's insistence on going down the same road could have unpredictable consequences for Crimea, other areas in Ukraine and even other parts of the world such as Syria." Yosef Mowlai in the reformist Iranian daily Sharq also draws comparisons to Iraq and Afghanistan, predicting that things aren't going to end well for the Russians. "The main concern of Russian officials is not international law; rather it is their country's security in its own backyard which comes at the expense of ignoring the independence and sovereignty of other nations," he writes. "It seems that the Russian Federation has not learned enough from its costly defeat in Afghanistan and has not learned from America's struggle in Afghanistan and Iraq's quagmire. Russia has made another serious mistake and got involved in a dangerous game again."
  • Khamis al-Tubi in Oman's Al-Watan detects what he sees as an anti-Russian "Zionist" conspiracy.
  • Could Syria and Ukraine be horse-traded in some sort of geopolitical diplomatic deal? Urayb al-Rintawi in Jordan's Al-Dustur doesn't think so. "Some people think there is a chance of trading Syria for Ukraine if the Kremlin were to abandon Al-Assad in return for Washington and Brussels's abandonment of their allies in Kiev and vice versa," he writes. However, such a trade-off is not possible because in America's strategic calculations, Syria is relegated to bottom position compared to Ukraine."
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  • Meanwhile, the Syrian government's daily Al-Thawrah sees the situation as chickens coming home to roost for US President Barack Obama's foreign policy. "Perhaps it has not crossed America's mind that the terrorism it manufactures and exports to the rest of the world, including to Syria as is the case today, will in the end bounce back. But lately, this fact started to rob Obama's administration's sleep," they write. "Amid the feverish US -Western race to target Syria, developments in Ukraine have started to steal attention as the eyes of the world turn to the Russian Caesar and wait for his final decision on the issue."
  • In Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News, Verda Ozer notes comparisons between the Ukrainian uprising and her nation's Gezi protests, but she contends that there are "many differences". She calls Ukraine an "authoritarian democracy" without Turkey's record of recent stability. Turkey's government, she writes, has been in an ongoing dialogue with protesters, which has prevented the sort of escalation that happened in Kiev.
Ed Webb

Scenes from the recession - The Big Picture - Boston.com - 0 views

www.boston.com/...scenes_from_the_recession.html

boston.com Photography USA Crisis photos economy Recession

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Mar 09 - Cached
  • The Magen Abraham Synagogue sits at center of this photograph taken on Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2008, surrounded by the gleaming new skyscrapers in Wadi Abou Jmil, Lebanon - formerly Beirut's main Jewish neighborhood. One of Lebanon's sole remaining synagogues, this building was set for a restoration that has the rare blessing of all the factions in this divided country - but the global financial crisis has scuttled the effort for now, leaving the Magen Abraham chained, padlocked, badly damaged and overgrown with weeds.
Manon Latil

Abbas Seeks Greater Gaza Role for His Palestinian Authority - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...08turkey.html

Abbas Turkey

shared by Manon Latil on 08 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Manon Latil on 08 Feb 09
     
    Abbas went to Turkey this week end. Erdogan wants Turkey to have a main role in the Middle East as a crisis-solver. Is now involved in the Schalit release negociations.
Ed Webb

Egypt crisis: Hosni Mubarak loses control of state media - Telegraph - 1 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...es-control-of-state-media.html

Egypt #jan25 protests media

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 08 Feb 11
     
    Unprecedented
Michael Fisher

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Gaza conflict map - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...7812136.stm

shared by Michael Fisher on 29 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Michael Fisher on 29 Jun 09
     
    Map and timeline of the Gaza crisis that ended in January 2009.
Ed Webb

How a diplomatic crisis among Gulf nations led to fake news campaign in the United States - 0 views

www.pri.org/...ke-news-campaign-united-states

GCC KSA Saudi UAE Bahrain Qatar US USA Trump propaganda media

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • it’s not just Kremlin-produced disinformation that Americans may have stumbled upon recently. Browsing Facebook and Twitter — and even just perusing the magazine rack at their local Walmart — they may have also been exposed to propaganda supporting the ambitious goals of two oil-rich Arab Gulf countries
  • when Saudi Arabia and the UAE launched a boycott and blockade of the tiny peninsula state of Qatar last year, organizations with ties to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi tried something new: They worked to sway American public opinion through online and social media campaigns, bringing a complicated, distant conflict among three Washington allies to US shores
  • As they took steps against Doha, Saudi Arabia and the UAE also initiated propaganda efforts in the US aimed at weakening Washington’s alliance with Qatar — which hosts the largest American military base in the Middle East — while also enhancing their own images.
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  • The Saudi American Public Relation Affairs Committee (SAPRAC), a pro-Saudi lobby group not officially tied to the Saudi government, paid $2.6 million last year to the now-defunct, Washington-based lobbying firm the Podesta Group for public affairs services that included running the anti-Qatar website and its associated social media properties
  • Along with painting Qatar as a terror-friendly nation, The Qatar Insider encouraged the US to remove its Al Udeid Air Base, which is home to the forward headquarters of the US Central Command, from Qatar and lobbied against Qatar hosting the 2022 World Cup.
  • Last fall, a film billed as an “educational documentary” called “Qatar: A Dangerous Alliance” appeared online and was distributed to guests at an event hosted by the conservative Hudson Institute that featured Steve Bannon, a former senior adviser to President Donald Trump and the ex-chairman of Breitbart News
  • when Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, visited the US in March, a magazine bearing his face and celebrating his reign appeared at 200,000 outlets across the country. The Saudi Embassy denied knowledge of the magazine, and the company that published it, National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc., denied receiving guidance from the Saudis. Citing employees of American Media Inc, The New York Times later reported that the magazine was an attempt by the publisher’s CEO to win business in Saudi Arabia. Still, there was evidence that the Saudi Embassy and advisers to the Saudi royal family had received advanced copies of the publication, hinting that they were involved in its creation and fawning tone
  • Seeing Trump’s hostility toward Iran mirroring their own, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were eager to strengthen their relationship with the former reality TV host when he took office, despite his harsh campaign-trail criticisms of Islam and Saudis (who, he once said, “want women as slaves and to kill gays”). In May, The New York Times reported that an emissary of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed, held a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. ahead of the 2016 elections offering their support to Trump as well as social media help in winning the election.
  • “If you asked the average American about the Gulf and they see these commercials, they will not be able to tell the difference,” he said. “And for those who do know the difference, they will remember that Saudi Arabia, not Qatar, had its citizens participating in the 9/11 attacks.”
  • Qatar — or, at best, its friends — has been involved in the hacking and leaking of emails designed to embarrass the UAE and reveal its role in trying to influence the Trump campaign. Qatar has increased its spending on lobbyists while also trying to soften its image by wooing American Jewish groups, including the Zionist Organization of America, which previously called for Qatar to be listed as a state sponsor of terrorism. And in May, Qatar flexed its soft power muscles when it offered to pay to keep the Washington, DC, metro open after a Capitals playoff game.
  • “Instead of saying one country is better than the other, everyone looks really, really horrible,” he said. “It really raises questions about what kind of partners these countries are for the United States.”
Ed Webb

An industry under threat: Ramadan 2019, brought to you by Egyptian Media Group | MadaMasr - 0 views

madamasr.com/...to-you-by-egyptian-media-group

Egypt intelligence propaganda TV television ownership Ramadan monopoly

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Jan 19 - Cached
  • This time of year, the offices of TV production companies are usually bustling with stars conducting meetings in preparation for the upcoming Ramadan television season (which falls in May this year)
  • The local television scene is rife with talk about the implications of recent developments in the field, which entail an effective halt in almost all TV drama production
  • What we’re witnessing this year is not a marketing crisis, or a weakness in screenplays, or any of the other issues that have ailed the drama industry in the past; rather, the very existence of the industry is under unprecedented threat. The number of series being produced has plummeted, and is expected to amount to 18 series at most, the majority of which are  to be produced by Synergy, the production house owned by Tamer Morsy, head of the intelligence-affiliated Egyptian Media Group (EMG). It is the newest step in the state’s ongoing bid to monopolize all forms of media and artistic production in Egypt.
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  • one must go back to the outset of the crisis, nearly three years ago. Back then, there were over 30 series released every season, produced under a diverse range of production houses and addressing a wide array of subjects. The industry cycle was more or less stable, starting with producers in competition with each other, to satellite channels racing to purchase the best series’ screening rights and advertising revenues being the central source of profit. The main issues concerned increasing production budgets and the skyrocketing salaries of certain stars.
  • the state was preparing a plan to exert control over the entire market. The first signs of this plan emerged in June 2017, with statements by the president and a number of government officials voicing their displeasure with the content offered on Ramadan TV series, and their desire to remedy the situation. This remedy manifested in the form of extreme censorship measures, including the establishment of the Drama Committee within the Supreme Meda Regulatory Council, designed to monitor the TV drama industry.
  • The effects of these directives became apparent last year in the striking similarity of the content of the series released, as well as the ubiquity of police and army officers as characters in most of them
  • satellite channels, many of which — including ONtv and Al Hayah — are currently controlled by EMG, owned by Eagle Capital for Financial Investment, a private equity fund founded by Egypt’s General Intelligence Services (GIS)
  • Television channels, sources say, will fill up the remaining airtime — previously overflowing with series — with variety television shows, including talk and game shows, instead. Tawfiq Okasha, the controversial media personality who made his comeback in March — courtesy of  Synergy Productions and EMG — recently dedicated a segment on his show (which airs on Al Hayah) to criticizing actors and “the obscene sums of money they demand.” Okasha then proceeded to discuss a plan to bring down the number of series airing this Ramadan to 18, with each television channel airing only three.
  • as a result of this monopoly, many producers are out of work this year, including Beelink’s Mohamed Mashish, El Adl Group’s Maha Selim, and producer Ahmed Al Sobky, when the three of them combined had eight series screening last Ramadan
  • The initial outcome of Morsy’s monopoly over the Egyptian drama market became clear last year with the elimination of certain series from Egypt’s Ramadan season, including El Adl Group’s We Have Other Statements (starring Youssra) and Land of Hypocrisy (starring Mohamed Heneidy), which were only aired on non-Egyptian channels, as well as Beelink Productions’ What Came to Pass (starring Ruby), which was not broadcast at all. Now, with Morsy’s newly acquired control over more channels, in addition to EMG’s acquisition of shares in the CBC television network and Morsy’s partnership with D Media, it appears that other producers will no longer have access to air their series in Egypt. Both D Media and DMC, another prominent television network, are owned by the GIS.
  • difficulties the company faced when filming last year’s Eagle of the South, as a result of excessive military intervention in the series’ content and production process. Members of the Armed Forces were often present on set and would interfere in most details during the shoot, not to mention that the show’s star, Mohamed Ramadan, would often miss shoots because his military conscription service overlapped with shooting times. Sometimes, he would arrive to the shooting location in a military vehicle
  • Shaaban believes that the current setback in television production has been primarily brought on by declining economic conditions, which have led to a decrease in advertising budgets. The industry, he says, is built on the flow of money from advertising agencies to satellite channels to production companies. If channels were reaping advertising revenues, they would be able to buy series from producers, who in turn would be able to produce more series, and so on. However, given the current economic climate, corporations haven’t been spending as much on advertising as they used to, and this has definitely affected the production cycle.
  • prominent actor Adel Imam, who could potentially miss his first Ramadan season in seven years, due to alleged censorial objections to the subject matter of his new series, in which he was reportedly set to play the president’s physician
  • most seem to attribute it to the president, who appears to be irked by the scale the industry had come to operate on and the high salaries paid to TV stars
  • It is possible that, for the first time in history, the Egyptian drama sector will produce less work than its counterparts in Lebanon, Syria and Kuwait, who produce 10 to 20 works on average each Ramadan season.
  • 2 million Egyptian workers of all stripes who contribute to and depend upon this industry, patiently waiting for the Ramadan season from year to year
  • Medhat estimates that the industry spends about LE2 billion annually and brings in about LE4 billion in revenue — all of which, in the 2019 season, will go almost entirely to one entity
  • One interpretation of these recent developments is that the Egyptian state — nostalgic for the heyday of state television, when the state alone was in control of all television productions — is planning a comeback under new terms, tailored to fit the demands of the current moment. After exerting its control over satellite TV channels, it now seeks to control production as well, in order to keep the media and entertainment sectors securely under its wing, only for the state to emerge once again as the only player on the local scene.
Ed Webb

Gulf crisis sees new 'fake news' flurry online - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/s-flurry-online-070222817.html

Qatar KSA Saudi UAE socialmedia intermediate propaganda disinformation

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • In recent weeks, pro-Saudi Twitter accounts have been systematically spreading rumours of unrest in Qatar, AFP analysis of hundreds of tweets and twitter interactions shows.Many of the accounts amplifying the rumours had profile images of the Saudi leadership, mentioned them in their handles and retweeted or liked material featuring the royal family or gave their location as inside the kingdom.
  • "Anyone spreading this news is technically breaking Saudi law, it's illegal to spread rumours," Owen Jones of Qatar's Hamad bin Khalifa University told AFP."In order to be high-profile and get away with it, then it has to have the tacit approval of the regime."
  • Saudi observers say the kingdom itself is a victim of fake news alleged to originate from Qatar and its allies Turkey and Iran.The UAE, Saudi's principal ally, has also been the target of online disinformation campaigns, including one claiming Abu Dhabi's Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed had been assassinated, which Abu Dhabi blamed on Qatar.
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