Erdogan rarely makes himself available to the media — especially for foreign reporters who are freer than Turkish journalists to criticize his government. So when Adam Sharon, a Washington-based public relations executive, contacted me and several other reporters last month and offered interviews with Erdogan and other top Turkish officials, it held out a chance, however remote, for American reporters to assess face-to-face whether top Turkish officials had any evidence for their claims about Gulen.
If the goal of the trip was to convince reporters that the Turkish government’s case against Gulen was based on facts, rather than innuendo and conspiracy theories, it backfired spectacularly.
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in title, tags, annotations or urlOsama bin Laden death: The conspiracy theories | World news | The Guardian - 0 views
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shared by Ed Webb on 14 Mar 17
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I Went To Turkey To Interview The President And (Almost) All I Got Was A Meeting With A... - 0 views
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Turkey AKP Erdogan politics media conspiracy Gulen coup
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Academic publisher removes conspiracy theorist's chapter from new book | by Brian Whita... - 0 views
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Behind Jeers for Clinton in Egypt, a Conspiracy Theory With U.S. Roots - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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shared by Ed Webb on 25 Sep 10
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Ahmadinejad and the 9/11 attacks - Americas - Al Jazeera English - 0 views
english.aljazeera.net/...201092484215227248.html
Ahmedinejad Iran US USA conspiracy WTC terrorism UN opinion
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About 46 per cent of the world's people believe that al-Qaeda launched the 9/11 attacks, while 15 per cent think the US government was behind the assault, and seven per cent blame Israel, according to a2008 world public opinion study carried out by the Program on International Policy (PIPA) Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which interviewed 16,063 people worldwide. But Ahmadinejad views himself as a leader in the Arab and Muslim worlds. And, in these regions, surveys show significant sectors of the population believe that the US and Israel launched the 9/11 attacks to meet their own geopolitical goals. In Jordan, 31 per cent of those polled by PIPA believe Israel was behind the attacks, while only 11 per cent blame it on al-Qaeda. Likewise, 43 per cent of Egyptians blame Israel, and 12 per centthink the US was responsible, while only 16 per cent think al-Qaeda brought down the towers. A 2006 poll from Scrippsnews says 36 per cent of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that US government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried or launched the attacksthemselves.
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Ahmadinejad is speaking to a significant global constituency. There is little evidence to suggest that they include "the majority of the American people, as well as most nations and politicians around the world", as the Iranian leader said in his UN speech. But the 9/11 "conspiracy theories" are not a fringe phenomenon either.
Propaganda and the Saddam Statue 'Conspiracy' - 0 views
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shared by Ed Webb on 21 Mar 16
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Denying the obvious in Egypt: Sisi regime fights back over Regeni's death - 0 views
www.al-bab.com/...egypt-regeni-sisi.htm
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The regime has also been engaging in some rather transparent diversionary tactics which, again, don't look like the actions of an innocent party.
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Apparently based on the time-honoured principle that nobody ever criticises Egypt unless paid to do so, claims also began circulating that the 588 MEPs who voted for the European parliament's resolution had been bribed to support it by the Muslim Brotherhood. Ahmed Moussa, the TV host who had earlier interviewed fake witness Mohammed Fawzi, suggested this on his show and others joined in – including Hamdy Bakhait (a prominent MP, conspiracy theorist and former army general). Egyptian blogger Zeinobia commmented: "I got tons of MPs' statements in my inbox full of similar claims." Meanwhile, the semi-official al-Ahram newspaper published an article telling readers how the European parliament had "fallen into the trap" of the Muslim Brotherhood.
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Like social scientists, the Egyptian authorities developed theories for the explosion of popular unrest in 2011. While political scientists have emphasised the spontaneity, courage and agency of ordinary citizens ... Egyptian security forces believe that the unrest was steered by well-organized political forces capable of manipulating the average citizen for political ends ... In the United States, these views are often dismissed as classic authoritarian propaganda. However, my research suggests that such anxieties are real and inform the way the Egyptian regime perceives threats. In particular, they make security forces highly attentive to ties between “foreign elements” and “mobilisable” sectors of society. It is possible that Regeni’s research activities were misinterpreted as groundwork for preparing a new uprising. He had built ties with local actors, attended meetings with labour activists and spoke excellent Arabic — an essential skill for a researcher, yet one that unfortunately tends to raise suspicions.
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Turkey escalates crackdown on dissent six years after Gezi protests | Reuters - 0 views
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the people originally prosecuted over the 2013 protests - which began against the redevelopment of central Istanbul’s Gezi Park and grew into nationwide anti-government unrest - were acquitted.
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But in November, Yigit Aksakoglu was detained and is now facing trial with 15 other civil society figures, writers and actors. For a while Aksakoglu’s family hoped he would soon be released, but then on March 4, a 657-page indictment was released saying they had masterminded an attempt to overthrow Erdogan’s government.
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Supporters of the detainees say the indictment contains no evidence and many bizarre accusations, and marks a new low for a country where 77,000 people already been jailed in a crackdown following a failed military coup in 2016.
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assertions that rights groups have dismissed as fanciful conspiracies. It says the protests were organised by local extensions of “forces which control global capital”, singling out billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Erdogan has vilified Soros as “the famous Hungarian Jew ... who assigns people to divide nations”. The indictment says the “Gezi Uprising” was fuelled by Osman Kavala, a well-known civil society leader and businessman who has been in jail since October 2017. A picture from Kavala’s phone taken from an academic book showing how different types of bees are distributed across the Middle East was described in the indictment as showing Turkey’s borders violated and redrawn. It said the fact that defendants discussed bringing milk, juice and pastries to Gezi, as well as gasmasks to counter the effects of tear gas, showed they were financing the protests.
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The demonstrations, the indictment says, were inspired by the worldwide “Occupy” protests and Arab uprisings starting in 2011 and a book by Boston-based academic Gene Sharp called ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy’. The indictment cites Gezi protest acts that matched Sharp’s non-violent protest methods, such as Roger Waters’ “The Wall” concert in Istanbul in August 2013 when photos of people killed in the protests were displayed on a huge stage backdrop.
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the request for life sentences without parole represented a “massive escalation” in Turkey’s crackdown on civil society. “What we are facing is an existential crisis for independent civil society in Turkey,” he said. “It is a blatant attempt to scare and pursue critics on completely trumped-up, fanciful conspiracy theories.”
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“You hold these people responsible for all the windows that were broken in June 2013... but provide no evidence. This is not something that can be done legally,”
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Istanbul Bilgi University law professor Yaman Akdeniz said the indictment lacked legal detail and reasoning, with only 1-1/2 pages of legal issues in the 657-page document. “Basically, it is shambolic and if it was written by one of my law students, he or she would get a clear F mark,” he said.
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investigation was originally launched by prosecutor Muammer Akkas, himself now a fugitive accused of membership of what Ankara terms a terrorist group led by U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, which Ankara blames for the failed 2016 coup.
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shared by Ed Webb on 14 Feb 19
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Thread by @_amroali: "Since 2011, I've noticed anti-Semitic books, eg Protoco... - 0 views
threadreaderapp.com/...1095715132028657669.html
Egypt Israel books antisemitism culture Jews history
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Since 2011, I’ve noticed anti-Semitic books, eg Protocols of the elders of Zion etc have greatly decreased in popularity among Cairo’s book sellers. This is not to mention anti-Jewish conspiracies significantly declining in everyday discourse. A big contrast with the 1990s/2000s.
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The Mubarak regime banked on keeping the population focussed on external matters (and imaginary threats), to distract them from internal failings. If it meant the conflation of Zionism with Judaism, then so be it. The 2011 Arab uprisings were a watershed moment because it turned Arab heads from the direction of the external to the internal. The Arab tyrant was now seen as the worst conspiracy imposed on the population.
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On the cultural level, Egypt underwent a reconciliation with its Jewish past, which spawned films and an unusual but welcome enthusiasm with Egyptian Jewry.
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Anti-Israel sentiment is still strong on a popular level, and for obvious good reason. The slow but gradual positive restoration of Jews back into the Egyptian imaginary shows that the fruits of the Arab Spring cannot always be measured in election victories and constitutions.
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shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jun 19
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The Making of a YouTube Radical - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...youtube-radical.html
US USA technology youtube radicalization nazis alt-right socialmedia
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Mr. Cain, 26, recently swore off the alt-right nearly five years after discovering it, and has become a vocal critic of the movement. He is scarred by his experience of being radicalized by what he calls a “decentralized cult” of far-right YouTube personalities, who convinced him that Western civilization was under threat from Muslim immigrants and cultural Marxists, that innate I.Q. differences explained racial disparities, and that feminism was a dangerous ideology.
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Over years of reporting on internet culture, I’ve heard countless versions of Mr. Cain’s story: an aimless young man — usually white, frequently interested in video games — visits YouTube looking for direction or distraction and is seduced by a community of far-right creators. Some young men discover far-right videos by accident, while others seek them out. Some travel all the way to neo-Nazism, while others stop at milder forms of bigotry.
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YouTube and its recommendation algorithm, the software that determines which videos appear on users’ home pages and inside the “Up Next” sidebar next to a video that is playing. The algorithm is responsible for more than 70 percent of all time spent on the site
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YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism by combining two things: a business model that rewards provocative videos with exposure and advertising dollars, and an algorithm that guides users down personalized paths meant to keep them glued to their screens
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94 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 use YouTube, a higher percentage than for any other online service
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YouTube has been a godsend for hyper-partisans on all sides. It has allowed them to bypass traditional gatekeepers and broadcast their views to mainstream audiences, and has helped once-obscure commentators build lucrative media businesses
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Bellingcat, an investigative news site, analyzed messages from far-right chat rooms and found that YouTube was cited as the most frequent cause of members’ “red-pilling” — an internet slang term for converting to far-right beliefs
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The internet was an escape. Mr. Cain grew up in postindustrial Appalachia and was raised by his conservative Christian grandparents. He was smart, but shy and socially awkward, and he carved out an identity during high school as a countercultural punk. He went to community college, but dropped out after three semesters. Broke and depressed, he resolved to get his act together. He began looking for help in the same place he looked for everything: YouTube.
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they rallied around issues like free speech and antifeminism, portraying themselves as truth-telling rebels doing battle against humorless “social justice warriors.” Their videos felt like episodes in a long-running soap opera, with a constant stream of new heroes and villains. To Mr. Cain, all of this felt like forbidden knowledge — as if, just by watching some YouTube videos, he had been let into an exclusive club. “When I found this stuff, I felt like I was chasing uncomfortable truths,” he told me. “I felt like it was giving me power and respect and authority.”
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YouTube’s executives announced that the recommendation algorithm would give more weight to watch time, rather than views. That way, creators would be encouraged to make videos that users would finish, users would be more satisfied and YouTube would be able to show them more ads.
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A month after its algorithm tweak, YouTube changed its rules to allow all video creators to run ads alongside their videos and earn a portion of the revenue they generated.
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Many right-wing creators already made long video essays, or posted video versions of their podcasts. Their inflammatory messages were more engaging than milder fare. And now that they could earn money from their videos, they had a financial incentive to churn out as much material as possible.
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Several current and former YouTube employees, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, said company leaders were obsessed with increasing engagement during those years. The executives, the people said, rarely considered whether the company’s algorithms were fueling the spread of extreme and hateful political content.
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Google Brain’s researchers wondered if they could keep YouTube users engaged for longer by steering them into different parts of YouTube, rather than feeding their existing interests. And they began testing a new algorithm that incorporated a different type of A.I., called reinforcement learning. The new A.I., known as Reinforce, was a kind of long-term addiction machine. It was designed to maximize users’ engagement over time by predicting which recommendations would expand their tastes and get them to watch not just one more video but many more.
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YouTube’s recommendations system is not set in stone. The company makes many small changes every year, and has already introduced a version of its algorithm that is switched on after major news events to promote videos from “authoritative sources” over conspiracy theories and partisan content. This past week, the company announced that it would expand that approach, so that a person who had watched a series of conspiracy theory videos would be nudged toward videos from more authoritative news sources. It also said that a January change to its algorithm to reduce the spread of so-called “borderline” videos had resulted in significantly less traffic to those videos.
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the bulk of his media diet came from far-right channels. And after the election, he began exploring a part of YouTube with a darker, more radical group of creators. These people didn’t couch their racist and anti-Semitic views in sarcastic memes, and they didn’t speak in dog whistles. One channel run by Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, posted videos with titles like “‘Refugee’ Invasion Is European Suicide.” Others posted clips of interviews with white supremacists like Richard Spencer and David Duke.
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As Mr. Molyneux promoted white nationalists, his YouTube channel kept growing. He now has more than 900,000 subscribers, and his videos have been watched nearly 300 million times. Last year, he and Ms. Southern — Mr. Cain’s “fashy bae” — went on a joint speaking tour in Australia and New Zealand, where they criticized Islam and discussed what they saw as the dangers of nonwhite immigration. In March, after a white nationalist gunman killed 50 Muslims in a pair of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mr. Molyneux and Ms. Southern distanced themselves from the violence, calling the killer a left-wing “eco-terrorist” and saying that linking the shooting to far-right speech was “utter insanity.” Neither Mr. Molyneux nor Ms. Southern replied to a request for comment. The day after my request, Mr. Molyneux uploaded a video titled “An Open Letter to Corporate Reporters,” in which he denied promoting hatred or violence and said labeling him an extremist was “just a way of slandering ideas without having to engage with the content of those ideas.”
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Unlike most progressives Mr. Cain had seen take on the right, Mr. Bonnell and Ms. Wynn were funny and engaging. They spoke the native language of YouTube, and they didn’t get outraged by far-right ideas. Instead, they rolled their eyes at them, and made them seem shallow and unsophisticated.
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“I noticed that right-wing people were taking these old-fashioned, knee-jerk, reactionary politics and packing them as edgy punk rock,” Ms. Wynn told me. “One of my goals was to take the excitement out of it.”
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Ms. Wynn and Mr. Bonnell are part of a new group of YouTubers who are trying to build a counterweight to YouTube’s far-right flank. This group calls itself BreadTube, a reference to the left-wing anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s 1892 book, “The Conquest of Bread.” It also includes people like Oliver Thorn, a British philosopher who hosts the channel PhilosophyTube, where he posts videos about topics like transphobia, racism and Marxist economics.
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The core of BreadTube’s strategy is a kind of algorithmic hijacking. By talking about many of the same topics that far-right creators do — and, in some cases, by responding directly to their videos — left-wing YouTubers are able to get their videos recommended to the same audience.
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What is most surprising about Mr. Cain’s new life, on the surface, is how similar it feels to his old one. He still watches dozens of YouTube videos every day and hangs on the words of his favorite creators. It is still difficult, at times, to tell where the YouTube algorithm stops and his personality begins.
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It’s possible that vulnerable young men like Mr. Cain will drift away from radical groups as they grow up and find stability elsewhere. It’s also possible that this kind of whiplash polarization is here to stay as political factions gain and lose traction online.
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I’ve learned now that you can’t go to YouTube and think that you’re getting some kind of education, because you’re not.
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Egyptian activists bemoan 'attack on media' - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 3 views
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Journalist Khaled El Balshy — a keen defender of freedom of expression and a democracy advocate, deputy head of the Egyptian Press Syndicate and head of the syndicate’s Freedom Committee — has been vigorously campaigning for the release of jailed journalists in Egypt. This week Balshy himself faced prosecution and risked being imprisoned on charges of “inciting protests, insulting the police and inciting to overthrow the regime.”
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On April 6 the Interior Ministry, which had filed the legal complaint against him, was forced to withdraw the lawsuit following an outcry from fellow journalists, free speech advocates and rights organizations
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Minutes after hearing of the warrant for his arrest, he boldly declared in a Facebook post: “If they want to arrest me, I’m in my office. I’m not better than those who are imprisoned.”
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he hoped that his prosecution would “throw the spotlight on the cases of others unjustly detained in Egypt, especially the jailed journalists." Since the military takeover of the country in July 2013, tens of thousands of political opposition figures have been arrested and detained as part of a sweeping security crackdown on dissent that has targeted Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters as well as secular activists, researchers, journalists and intellectuals
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Balshy on April 4 published a list of some 40 journalists in Egypt who were either imprisoned or under threat of being detained
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While there has hardly been any noise over the jailing of journalists with alleged links to the Muslim Brotherhood, the verdicts against Naaot and Nagy and the arrest warrant against Balshy provoked outrage in Egypt. After an outcry in Egyptian media over the conviction of Naaot, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi last week urged parliament to review the country’s blasphemy laws, which critics have denounced as outdated and harmful. Meanwhile, in an outpouring of anger on social media over Nagy’s conviction, activists have campaigned for the novelist’s release using the Arabic hashtag that translates into #CreativityOnTrial.
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Twenty-two rights organizations, six political parties and nearly 100 individuals signed a strongly worded petition condemning the warrant for Balshy’s arrest as “an attack on the media.”
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Until recently, much of the Egyptian media and the majority of Egyptians had also rejected international criticism of the restrictions on the media in Egypt, perceiving the criticism as “part of the foreign conspiracy to destroy Egypt.” Lately however, there has been an almost abrupt turnabout with more journalists — including regime loyalists and those who had previously practiced self-censorship — becoming increasingly vocal in their criticism of “the muzzling of journalists through intimidation tactics” and “the unfair detention of writers and researchers.”
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The regime clearly has not learned the lesson from Mubarak’s unplugging of the Internet during the 2011 uprising — a move that fueled the anger against the former dictator, leading to his ultimate overthrow. The government must acknowledge that the right to information and freedom of expression are basic human rights.
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Brian Whitaker's blog, April 2011 - 1 views
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the Syrian Bar Association has "asked a legal committee to study the situation of crimes perpetrated by a number of Arab and international TV stations and individuals who have contributed to the media forgery and acts of instigation to destabilise Syria".
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"Nasrallah spoke of the ongoing disinformation and fabrications campaign against Syria and of huge amounts of money paid by US bodies and by others to some Syrian figures and sections under the pretext of supporting democracy as to destabilise Syria."
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a generous helping of foreign conspiracy theory from the Tehran Times in Iran. Quoting a Syrian writer, Colette Khoury, it says Syria is paying the price "for saying no to Israel and America for a long time". "We are proud of belonging to Syria, the only independent state that refused to give up resistance," Khoury says. "It isn’t a matter of reform, not any more. It is about Syria and the Syrian people."
Blog - Londonstani - Aid and the US-Egyptian psycho drama - 0 views
www.londonstani.com/...-us-egyptian-psycho-drama.html
Egypt opinion aid blog media conspiracy military
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Egyptian Journo Who Warned Of Killing Americans Says He Was "Totally Misunderstood" - 1 views
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Off the record? Why online publishers should be careful with the delete key - 1 views
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When I noticed their disappearance a few weeks ago I wrote to Huffington, asking the reason, and so far I have had no reply. Although deleted web pages can sometimes be retrieved from web archives such as Wayback, that is only feasible if you know they once existed and have the relevant URL. I'm not suggesting that articles on the internet should never be deleted or changed but that it should not be done lightly, and when it does happen, publishers should be prepared to justify their decisions in public. When I worked at the Guardian there were strict rules about this because it understood the need to have a record of published material that was as complete and un-tampered-with as possible. Once published, articles could be removed only in very special circumstances (such as legal requirements) and if something was changed (because of factual errors, for example), readers had to be made aware of the change and when it happened. If we don't want to end up in book-burning territory, that is how it should be.
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When I noticed their disappearance a few weeks ago I wrote to Huffington, asking the reason, and so far I have had no reply. Although deleted web pages can sometimes be retrieved from web archives such as Wayback, that is only feasible if you know they once existed and have the relevant URL. I'm not suggesting that articles on the internet should never be deleted or changed but that it should not be done lightly, and when it does happen, publishers should be prepared to justify their decisions in public. When I worked at the Guardian there were strict rules about this because it understood the need to have a record of published material that was as complete and un-tampered-with as possible. Once published, articles could be removed only in very special circumstances (such as legal requirements) and if something was changed (because of factual errors, for example), readers had to be made aware of the change and when it happened. If we don't want to end up in book-burning territory, that is how it should be.
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There's no doubt that today's social media contain a welter of trivia, often of no interest to anyone except the person who is posting. To view social media entirely in that light, however, is to grossly underestimate their power and importance. Social media also provide a running commentary on major events – through the eyes of ordinary people rather than elites. There is no precedent for this. For the first time in history we have a vast public record of what masses of people are saying and thinking. This can be a valuable resource for current and future generations of researchers – if we preserve it intact.
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Visitors to Huffington's website last May could have seen this page (preserved here by the Wayback Machine) which lists Narwani's articles. Look at the same page today and they have all been deleted except for one which she co-authored with someone else. It's as if the other articles never existed.
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concern about Facebook's deletion of various pages connected with the Syrian opposition, possibly at the behest of pro-Assad elements. Some of them have been listed by Felim McMahon of Storyful and the blogger, Brown Moses. McMahon points out that some of these have helped Storyful to corroborate (or not) various claims about the Syrian conflict, while Brown Moses notes that "nearly every Facebook page" reporting on the chemical attacks in Damascus last August has now gone. Alongside the fighting on the ground, there's also a propaganda war being fought over Syria – mostly via the internet. At first sight this might seem like a sideshow but, as in all wars, it's an integral part of the conflict. One individual heavily involved in the Syrian propaganda war on the pro-Assad side, through Twitter and various websites, is Sharmine Narwani (who I have written about previously, here, here, here, and here). Among other things, Narwani wrote a dozen highly contentious articles for Huffington Post, some of them about Syria. Whether you like them or agree with them is beside the point. Whatever their merits or de-merits, they were examples of the sort of arguments being used by Assad supporters and the fact that Huffington, a major American website, saw fit to publish them at the time is also interesting and relevant.
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I'm not suggesting that articles on the internet should never be deleted or changed but that it should not be done lightly, and when it does happen, publishers should be prepared to justify their decisions in public.
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BBC News - World media offer divergent views on Ukraine crisis - 0 views
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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."
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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."
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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.
Silly season in Egypt: Hounding the Muppet Brotherhood | The Economist - 0 views
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Egyptian army takes upper hand in media war over killings - News - Aswat Masriya - 0 views
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When 55 people protesting against the military overthrow of Egypt's first freely elected president were killed after the army opened fire on Monday, you might have expected the country to unite in condemnation.A surprisingly subdued public reaction, and the independent media's outright vilification of protesters, reflects in part the depth of political opponents' distrust of Mohamed Mursi and his Muslim Brotherhood.But it also represents a triumph for the military's public relations machine which, aware of its fumbled handling of the turbulent aftermath of Hosni Mubarak's overthrow in 2011, has moved decisively, and successfully, to gain the upper hand.
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Independent newspapers, many of which were fiercely opposed to Mursi when he was in power, have been, if anything, more partisan. Daily Al-Masry Al-Youm wrote the bloodletting was "the Brotherhood's responsibility." Al-Watan decried a "conspiracy by the 'Armed Brotherhood' against the army."
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With television stations sympathetic to the Brotherhood shut down, senior leaders arrested and its newspaper appearing only intermittently, Mursi's supporters have struggled to convey their view of the killings - that security forces, unprovoked, fired on them while they conducted dawn prayers."The military coup has showed its hideous face after just six days," said a flyer handed out by young men at the main pro-Mursi sit-in at a mosque in northeastern Cairo."Were these people firing bullets while they bowed upon their mats in prayer?"
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Heba Morayef, Egypt director at Human Rights Watch, said the army had improved its public relations machine markedly since the tumultuous 17 months the military spent running the country after Mubarak's fall.At that time, many people blamed the army for violent crackdowns on protests and activists, which led the military to make several ill-judged responses.This time, a new army spokesman - the urbane, British-trained Colonel Ahmed Ali - called a press conference to make the military's case plainly and clearly, using videos taken during the clashes to try to prove his point.Journalists applauded when he finished."They weren't under any public pressure, and they knew there wouldn't be any push back," Morayef said.
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WikiLeaks hoax hits Pakistan media - Central & South Asia - Al Jazeera English - 0 views
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A couple Pakistani papers and TV networks were deceived by false US diplomatic cables [EPA] Several leading Pakistani newspapers have acknowledged that they were hoaxed, after publishing reports based on fake WikiLeaks cables that contained crude anti-India propaganda. The reports, which featured prominently in several papers on Thursday, cited alleged US diplomatic cables as confirming many right-wing Pakistani views and conspiracy theories about the country's arch enemy India and the disputed Kashmir region. Much of Pakistan's media toes a pro-military, anti-Indian line, which was reflected by the papers' extensive coverage of the fake memos. The instigators of the hoax remain unclear, though the material appeared to have originated on a news website that features anti-Indian and pro-Pakistani articles.