Reportage / War 05.11.2020

Andy Rocchelli: Shooting at Memory

It was August 2017 when the soldier Alexander Vladimirovich Rakityansky and his commander “Zhora” agreed to meet us in a public park on the outskirts of Donetsk, in Eastern Ukraine. Rakityansky and “Zhora” – both militiamen of the pro-Russian army…

Alfredo Bosco

Andrea Sceresini

Partly on the basis of these statements (also confirmed by the local driver who accompanied the three reporters that day), on 15 October the deputy prosecutor Nunzia Ciaravolo asked for confirmation of the first degree sentence. However, it will not be an easy sentence. The climate in the courthouse is more heated than ever. Recently the lawyer for the Rocchelli family, Alessandra Ballerini, has received volleys of insults and threats via Facebook: “They accuse us of being in the pay of Putin,” says Elisa Signori, Andy’s mother. “They did the same during the first trial in Pavia. They said that the city was infiltrated by Russian agents, that our judiciary was subservient to the Kremlin. But here, we are simpòy talking about the death of two journalists, whose only crime was doing their job. We want to start from this fact. The rest is just slander.”

Slander seems to be an essential constant in the case of Andy, Andrei and the many jourmalists active in Donbass in recent years. Since 2014, the Ukrainian authorities have drawn up lists of “unwelcome” reporters – complete with comtact details and personal data – and posted them on the web. Writers have also met with the same treatment. Branded “terrrorists”, we were banned from the Ukrainian territory for five years, from 2015 to 2020. Our fault: having tied to recount the war in Ukraine from both sides of the front, by venturing into both the government and separatist trenches.

Clearly they see it as something which just sopuld not be done. And no matter that the only ones who actually arrested us during our ventures into the front lines, in the summer of 2016, were the pro-Russian Donetsk militia, to whom we owe the only night we’ve ever spent in jail in our lives. In Kiev, even today, we are classified as “cooperating with pro-Russian terrorist organizations”. On the same list, with us, are dozens of other Western journalists, including Andy and Andrei, whose names still appear on the website of the “Myrotvorets Center”, a “control centre” linked to the SBU, the Ukrainian secret services. The page is easily accessed with a few clicks. Just write the name of the person you want to find in the “Purgatory” section of the special search engine.

L'articolo Andy Rocchelli: Shooting at Memory proviene da InsideOver.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) issued their annual global round-up of deadly violence and abusive treatment against journalists on December 17, reporting that a total of 49 journalists having been killed this year, with 389 being currently in prison and 57 being held hostage.

Putting Violence Against Journalists In Context

Compiled on an annual basis since 1995, the round-up is based on detailed information and reaffirms “with certainty or a great deal of confidence that the death, detention, abduction or disappearance of each journalist was a direct result of their journalistic work”.

The number of journalists killed during the past twelve months has fallen by 50% compared to an annual average of 80 journalists killed during the last twenty years, mainly the result of fewer media workers dying in war zones.

At the same time, it is noted that journalism remains an extremely dangerous occupation. Out of the 49 journalists killed while practicing their profession around the world in 2019 (46 men, 3 women), 36 were professional journalists, 10 non-professionals and 3 media associates.

The Most Deadly Conflicts This Year For Journalists

Covering conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan was two times less deadly for journalists in 2019, with a combined total of 17 journalists killed in these three countries compared to 34 in 2018.

This unprecedented fall in Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan must not however hide the fact that the number of journalists killed in countries at peace continues to be as high as in previous years. In Mexico, for example, 10 journalists were killed in 2019, the same number as last year. With a combined total of 14 journalists killed, Latin America is now as deadly for journalists as the Middle East, a region riddled with fratricidal clashes.

As a result of these parallel developments, more journalists (59%) are now being killed in countries at peace than in war zones. There has been a 2% increase in journalists being deliberately murdered or targeted, with 29 of them murdered in countries where peace prevails and more than 60% deliberately targeted. No journalist lost their lives while reporting abroad: all casualties were victims of attacks that took place within a journalist’s own nation.

The Percentage Of Journalists In Jail Has Increased

RSF’s “barometer” also records the number of journalists imprisoned internationally for simply doing their job, which numbered 389 this year (+12% compared to 2018). This increase is even more alarming because it does not include journalists who were arbitrarily recruited and detained for a few hours, a few days, or even a few weeks.

Almost half of jailed journalists (186 out of 389) are incarcerated in only three countries: China (120, almost one-third), Egypt (34) and Saudi Arabia (32). In the cases of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, most prisoners have not even been officially charged. In China, many detainees are minority Uyghurs and many others are citizen journalists who have tried to oppose the government’s censorship over the Internet. In Turkey, many imprisoned journalists were released, only to be re-arrested at some later point. According to the report, at least 57 journalists are being held hostage internationally, a number almost unchanged compared to 2018. Hostages are concentrated this year in the same four countries: Syria (30), Yemen (15), Iraq (11) and Ukraine (1).

As 2019 draws to a close, continuing demonstrations and protest movements have emerged more or less everywhere in the world, especially in Algeria, Hong Kong, Chile and Bolivia. This has contributed to a proliferation of attacks against journalists and brings up serious concerns about the uncertain conditions and protections in place for media professionals worldwide.

L'articolo Unprecedented Fall in the Number of Journalists Killed in 2019 proviene da InsideOver.

The Global Editors Network (GEN) confronts the problems and the opportunities of the world of media, looking to respond to a simple – but at the same time difficult – question: where is journalism headed in the future?

(Athens) – Writing well is not enough. To produce good journalism online requires much more. In the era of artificial intelligence, of 360° video and smart speakers in order to keep up with the times, with technology and, obviously, with the desires of readers who today do not just read, but expect to be able to interact with information content through animated infographics, listening to podcasts and watching videos and photo galleries that can bring them closer to the topics being covered.

In order to respond to these needs, the Global Editors Network (GEN) organised a three day event (taking place from the 13th to the 15th of June) with the most important experts in media and communication. The most recurring questions – and those asked during the connected workshop and masterclass – were: where is journalism heading? And, above all, where do publishers go from here? What should they be doing for their readers? What should editorial offices be doing in order to improve?

Not only occasional readers, but also their most loyal subscribers

In the past few years the perception of a publications role has changed. It is only with print editions, that there is value placed on the “selection of quality” for content and the reliance of publications to satisfy the selection requirements that are of interest to the reader. Now, with the growth in traffic created by social networks and with news being accessed in a fragmented manner, would seem to have spread the idea that for news happening in the moment in which it is given, its source and where it comes from is secondary and of less importance. Journalists need to confront this new cultural paradigm by creating content that is more informative than than that of the competition writing on the same topic and having a better understanding of the specific interests of their readers.

Matthias Kretschmer, founder and CEO of Desk-net, in fact explained how the way in which journalists work has changed, having thus evolved:

• Don’t select content based on the interests of the public
• Schedule content correctly
• Schedule the right content at the right time

These points, which are entering into the practices of modern online publications, have only been adopted in the past ten years, in response to the dizzying rise of particular news websites and the diversification of the competition. Because of this, for the first time, it is possible to understand what are the true interests of readers. 

From data to the presentation of the content

“Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.” The quote, which opened the masterclass of Dmitry Shishkin, editor in chief of Culture Trip, was made by W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician, lecturer and management consultant. Data is therefore fundamental and can help us to better structure our homepages and satisfy our readers. To do this, use these four principles as a guide. 

• Get attention with the title
• Choose the photos with care
• Keep checking on it with your mobile
• Offer a varied and balanced selection of content

By analysing our homepage, and the content displayed, helps us to create content more suited to our readership. That way they can choose us every day with greater interest. 

L'articolo The New Frontier of Journalism proviene da InsideOver.

As William Davies wrote in a 2016 New York Times Op-Ed, “Facts hold a sacred place in Western liberal democracies”. It is certainly the case and an often-repeated truism that a well-functioning democracy requires a well-informed public. However, the combination of (mainly right-wing) populist movements, alongside the spread of misinformation or disinformation on channels such as social media, are often held as responsible for the rise of “post-truth” politics – where appealing to emotions is dominate, at the expense of factual accuracy. Misinformation specifically refers to information that is false, but not created with the intention of causing harm; disinformation, on the other hand, refers to the deliberate creation and sharing of false and/or manipulated information with the intention to deceive and mislead audiences, either for the purpose of causing harm, or for political, personal or financial gain.

In 2016, the UK’s decision to leave the European Union through the vote for Brexit, and Donald J. Trump’s election as President of the United States, are not only the two events that heralded the rise in so-called “post-truth” politics. This has also been regarded as a populist backlash against “out-of-touch” political “elites”, and a challenge to the traditional institutions of liberal democracy. Jane Suiter argues that “Arguably, what we are witnessing is a toxic combination of policy blunders on austerity, war and globalisation, couple with a new hybrid media and political system dominated by reality TV, social media and filter bubbles.”

Beyond misinformation and disinformation is also the more sidelined issue of what Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall term “industrial propaganda” in their book The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread. Industrial propaganda can refer to advertising, but can also refer to campaigns spearheaded by corporations to undermine reliable evidence that may affect the bottom line. A classic example that Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway provide in the book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming is the case of tobacco companies. During the second half of the 20th century, tobacco companies orchestrated a strategy to discredit scientific evidence demonstrating a clear link between smoking and lung cancer. Similar tactics have been used by those in the energy industry and others to foster the impression of uncertainty surrounding the severity and causes of anthropogenic global warming.

Within the context of Western liberal democracies at the very least – the role of the journalistic profession seems all the more crucial. It is true that no written work can ever be truly and fully “objective” so far as it can be entirely divorced from gender, class, race, ethnicity, or other social and structural factors. However, what journalism can at the very least do for democracy, as Rasums Kleis Neilsen argues, is “provide people with […] accurate, accessible, diverse, relevant, and timely independently produced information about public affairs.”

L'articolo The Modern Day Importance of Journalism proviene da InsideOver.

2018 was a bloody year for journalists. Including the brutal murder of the Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi, 95 media professionals were killed, either as a result of targeted killings, crossfire incidents, or bomb attacks. This is 13 more than were killed in 2017, and while it doesn’t beat the record of 155 set in 2006 at the height of the Iraq conflict, there has been a steady upwards trend since the ‘90s.

Such deaths go hand-in-hand with the persecution of journalists. In December, the Committee to Protect Journalists announced that 2016, 2017 and 2018 set consecutive records for the number of reporters jailed worldwide, with all three years seeing 251 or more imprisoned for doing their jobs. And while such authoritarian governments as those in Turkey, China and Egypt are generally the worst offenders on this account, recent events have shown that journalists are also being bullied in Western nations.

Recently, this has been underlined most starkly in France, where a growing number of journalists are being investigated and summoned by police and intelligence services. Between February 15 and the end of May, eight journalists were called to testify and give evidence before the General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), under the pretext that they’d jeopardised national security by reporting on either the sale of French arms to Saudi Arabia or the Benalla affair.

These eight cases aren’t the only indication of an increasingly hostile environment for French journalists. At the beginning of April, three journalists from three separate news outlets were summoned before police after reporting on the theft of a portrait of Emmanuel Macron from the Rouillon town hall, with the local authorities initially suggesting that these three had been complicit in the robbery. Also in April, two independent journalists covering the “gilets jaunes’ protests were arrested, at a time when numerous others have complained of being denied press passes.

For the media professionals trying to operate within this rising anti-journalistic tide, the situation couldn’t be more ominous. The lawyer of Gaspard Glanz – one of the journalists arrested in April – called Glanz’s detention “an attack on the freedom of the press.” Meanwhile, the Syndicat National des Journalistes (SNI) said in May that “something very unwholesome is happening in this country. We’re witnessing a willingness to intimidate journalists and their sources, and it’s completely outrageous.”

And like France, other ostensibly free nations have been chipping away at the freedom of the press. In the US – the joint fourth deadliest country for journalists – authorities recently raided the San Francisco home of a freelancer who’d leaked a police report on the death of a public defender. In Spain, journalists were subject last May to questionable criminal charges related to defamation for covering the alleged corruption of the then-President of the Community of Madrid, Cristina Cifuentes. And in the UK, the National Union of Journalists declared in April that it was “shocked and concerned by the actions of the [UK] authorities … in relation to Julian Assange,” who was arrested for breach of bail conditions, largely so that he could be indicted by the US for leaking thousands of secret government documents in 2010.

There is, then, a very palpable sense that journalists are being increasingly persecuted and bullied, regardless of where they are in the world. As the International Press Institute (IPI) noted on World Press Freedom Day, much of this growth stems from the parallel growth in authoritarian, right-wing governments, which oppose challenges to their power more harshly than liberal counterparts. “Press freedom globally is under intense and growing pressure, as illiberal-minded governments seek to shut down critical voices and, in many cases, deliberately erode the credibility of independent media,” said the IPI’s executive director, Barbara Trionfi.

On the other hand, it’s clear that the rise in persecution has also been boosted by the emergence of a journalistic culture of whistleblowing, which increasingly calls authority to account and challenges abuses of power. For example, the US Office of Special Counsel reported that it had received 1,559 new whistleblower disclosures in 2018, the fifth year they’d received more than 1,500 and just over 1,000% more than they received in 1988.

There is reason to take heart in such figures, which indicate that more journalists have been willing to go deeper in service to their profession. At the same time, upswings in arrests in repressive nations such as China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are arguably a result in part of globalisation, as these countries increasingly enter the international spotlight and as more of their local journalists seek to report on injustices for a wider global audience. In a strange kind of way, it’s therefore encouraging that persecution has been on the rise, since at the very least it’s a sign that governments are slowly losing their monopolies on information.

L'articolo Reporters Persecuted in France as Part of Global War against Journalists proviene da InsideOver.