Sky TV has agreed to fully acquire TV3 owner Discovery New Zealand for $1.

Discovery NZ is a part of US media giant Warner Bros Discovery, and operates channel Three and online streaming platform ThreeNow.

NZX-listed Sky said the deal would be completed on a cash-free, debt-free basis, with completion expected on August 1.

• READ MORE: Other TV3 reports

Sky expected the deal to deliver revenue diversification and uplift of around $95 million a year.

Sky expected Discovery NZ’s operations to deliver sustainable underlying earnings growth of at least $10 million from the 2028 financial year.

Sky chief executive Sophie Moloney said it was a compelling opportunity for the company, with net integration costs of about $6.5 million.

“This is a compelling opportunity for Sky that directly supports our ambition to be Aotearoa New Zealand’s most engaging and essential media company,” she said.

Confidential advance notice
Sky said it gave the Commerce Commission confidential advance notice of the transaction, and the commission did not intend to consider the acquisition further.

Warner Bros Discovery Australia and NZ managing director Michael Brooks said it was a “fantastic outcome” for both companies.

“The continued challenges faced by the New Zealand media industry are well documented, and over the past 12 months, the Discovery NZ team has worked to deliver a new, more sustainable business model following a significant restructure in 2024,” Brooks said.

“While this business is not commercially viable as a standalone asset in WBD’s New Zealand portfolio, we see the value Three and ThreeNow can bring to Sky’s existing offering of complementary assets.”

Sky said on completion, Discovery NZ’s balance sheet would be clear of some long-term obligations, including property leases and content commitments, and would include assets such as the ThreeNow platform.

Sky said irrespective of the transaction, the company was confident of achieving its 30 cents a share dividend target for 2026.

‘Massive change’ for NZ media – ThreeNews to continue
Founder of The Spinoff and media commentator Duncan Greive said the deal would give Sky more reach and was a “massive change” in New Zealand’s media landscape.

He noted Sky’s existing free-to-air presence via Sky Open (formerly Prime), but said acquiring Three gave it the second-most popular audience outlet on TV.

“Because of the inertia of how people use television, Three is just a much more accessible channel and one that’s been around longer,” Greive said.

“To have basically the second-most popular channel in the country as part of their stable just means they’ve got a lot more ad inventory, much bigger audiences.”

It also gave Sky another outlet for their content, and would allow it to compete further against TVNZ, both linear and online, Greive said.

He said there may be a question mark around the long-term future of Three’s news service, which was produced by Stuff.

No reference to ThreeNews
Sky made no reference to ThreeNews in its announcement. However, Stuff confirmed ThreeNews would continue for now.

“Stuff’s delivery of ThreeNews is part of the deal but there are also now lots of new opportunities ahead that we are excited to explore together,” Stuff owner Sinead Boucher said in a statement.

On the deal itself, Boucher said she was “delighted” to see Three back in New Zealand ownership under Sky.

“And who doesn’t love a $1 deal!” Boucher said, referring to her own $1 deal to buy Stuff from Australia’s Nine Entertainment in 2020.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior has sailed into Auckland to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the original Rainbow Warrior in 1985.

Greenpeace’s vessel, which had been protesting nuclear testing in the Pacific, sank after French government agents planted explosives on its hull, killing Portuguese-Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira.

Today, 40 years on from the events on July 10 1985, a dawn ceremony was held in Auckland.

• READ MORE: Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior is a timely reminder
• Other Rainbow Warrior reports

Author Margaret Mills was a cook on board the ship at the time, and has written about her experience in a book entitled Anecdotage.

The 95-year-old told TVNZ Breakfast the experience on board “changed her life”.

“I was sound asleep, and I heard this sort of bang and turned the light on, but it wouldn’t go on.

She said when she left her cabin, a crew member told her “we’ve been bombed”.

‘I laughed at him’
“I laughed at him, I said ‘we don’t get bombs in New Zealand, that’s ridiculous’.”

She said they were taken to the police station after a “big boom when the second bomb came through”.

“I realised immediately, I was part of a historical event,” she said.

Journalist David Robie. who travelled on the Rainbow Warrior and wrote the book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior published today, told Breakfast it was a “really shocking, shocking night”.

“We were so overwhelmed by the grief and absolute shock of what had happened. But for me, there was no doubt it was France behind this.”

“But we were absolutely flabbergasted that a country could do this.”

He said it was a “very emotional moment” and was hard to believe it had been 40 years since that time.

‘Momentous occasion’
“It stands out in my life as being the most momentous occasion as a journalist covering that whole event.”

Executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa Russel Norman said the legacy of the ship was about “people who really stood up for something important”.

“I mean, ending nuclear testing in the Pacific, imagine if they were still exploding bombs in the Pacific. We would have to live with that.

“And those people back then they stood up and beat the French government to end nuclear testing.

“It’s pretty inspirational.”

He said the group were still campaigning on some key environmental issues today.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

How Pacific live media communications have changed in the past 21 years.

In May 2004, the live broadcast of Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara’s funeral from Lau required a complex and resource-intensive setup.

Fiji TV relied on assistance from TVNZ, deploying a portable satellite installation to transmit signals from Lau to a satellite up in the sky, then to Auckland, back to another satellite, and finally down to Suva.

This set-up required approval from FINTEL.

• READ MORE: Tongan royals on historic visit to Fiji, strengthening ties and celebrating heritage

This intricate process underscored the technological limitations of the time, where live coverage from remote Fiji areas demanded significant logistical coordination and international support.

Fast forward to 2025, 21 years later, and the communication and media landscape in Fiji has undergone a remarkable transformation.

Today, I see video production houses, TV stations, radio stations, and newspaper media outlets delivering live coverage directly from Lau.

This shows how high-speed internet, mobile networks, and portable streaming devices like Starlink has eliminated the need for cumbersome satellite relays. No approval from any authority.

Where once international partnerships were essential, today’s media teams in Fiji can operate independently, delivering seamless live coverage of cultural, political, and social events from even the most isolated areas.

Republished from Fiji Times managing digital editor Anish Chand’s social media post with permission. He is a former Fiji TV news operations manager.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Taieri MP Ingrid Leary reflected on her years in Fiji as a television journalist and media educator at a Fiji Centre function in Auckland celebrating Fourth Estate values and independence at the weekend.

It was a reunion with former journalism professor David Robie — they had worked together as a team at the University of the South Pacific amid media and political controversy leading up to the George Speight coup in May 2000.

Leary was the guest speaker at a gathering of human rights activists, development advocates, academics and journalists hosted at the Whānau Community Centre and Hub, the umbrella base for the Fiji Centre and Asia Pacific Media Network.

• READ MORE: Young and brave: In Pacific island paradise, journalism students cover a strange coup attempt for a course credit

She said she was delighted to meet “special people in David’s life” and to be speaking to a diverse group sharing “similar values of courage, freedom of expression, truth and tino rangatiratanga”.

“I want to start this talanoa on Friday, 19 May 2000 — 13 years almost to the day of the first recognised military coup in Fiji in 1987 — when failed businessman George Speight tore off his balaclava to reveal his identity.

She pointed out that there had actually been another “coup” 100 years earlier by Ratu Cakobau.

“Speight had seized Parliament holding the elected government at gunpoint, including the politician mother, Lavinia Padarath, of one of my best friends — Anna Padarath.

Hostage-taking report
“Within minutes, the news of the hostage-taking was flashed on Radio Fiji’s 10 am bulletin by a student journalist on secondment there — Tamani Nair. He was a student of David Robie’s.”

Nair had been dispatched to Parliament to find out what was happening and reported from a cassava patch.

“Fiji TV was trashed . . . and transmission pulled for 48 hours.

“The university shut down — including the student radio facilities, and journalism programme website — to avoid a similar fate, but the journalism school was able to keep broadcasting and publishing via a parallel website set up at the University of Technology Sydney.

“The pictures were harrowing, showing street protests turning violent and the barbaric behaviour of Speight’s henchmen towards dissenters.

“Thus began three months of heroic journalism by David’s student team — including through a period of martial law that began 10 days later and saw some of the most restrictive levels of censorship ever experienced in the South Pacific.”

Leary paid tribute to some some of the “brave satire” produced by senior Fiji Times reporters filling paper with “non-news” (such as haircuts, drinking kava) as act of defiance.

“My friend Anna Padarath returned from doing her masters in law in Australia on a scholarship to be closer to her Mum, whose hostage days within Parliament Grounds stretched into weeks and then months.

Invisible consequences
“Anna would never return to her studies — one of the many invisible consequences of this profoundly destructive era in Fiji’s complex history.

“Happily, she did go on to carve an incredible career as a women’s rights advocate.”

“Meanwhile David’s so-called ‘barefoot student journalists’ — who snuck into Parliament the back way by bushtrack — were having their stories read and broadcast globally.

“And those too shaken to even put their hands to keyboards on Day 1 emerged as journalism leaders who would go on to win prizes for their coverage.”

Speight was sentenced to life in prison, but was pardoned in 2024.

Leary said that was just one chapter in the remarkable career of David Robie who had been an editor, news director, foreign news editor and freelance writer with a number of different agencies and news organisations — including Agence France-Presse, Rand Daily Mail, The Auckland Star, Insight Magazine, and New Outlook Magazine — “a family member to some, friend to many, mentor to most”.

Reflecting on working with Dr Robie at USP, which she joined as television lecturer from Fiji Television, she said:

“At the time, being a younger person, I thought he was a little but crazy, because he was communicating with people all around the world when digital media was in its infancy in Fiji, always on email, always getting up on online platforms, and I didn’t appreciate the power of online media at the time.

“And it was incredible to watch.”

Ahead of his time
She said he was an innovator and ahead of his time.

Dr Robie viewed journalism as a tool for empowerment, aiming to provide communities with the information they needed to make informed decisions.

“We all know that David has been a champion of social justice and for decolonisation, and for the values of an independent Fourth Estate.”

She said she appreciated the freedom to develop independent media as an educator, adding that one of her highlights was producing the groundbreaking documentary Maire about Maire Bopp Du Pont, who was a student journalist at USP and advocate for the Pacific community living with HIV/AIDs community.

She later became a nuclear-free Pacific parliamentarian in Pape’ete.

Leary presented Dr Robie with a “speaking stick” carved from an apricot tree branch by the husband of a Labour stalwart based in Cromwell — the event doubled as his 80th birthday.

In response, Dr Robie said the occasion was a “golden opportunity” to thank many people who had encouraged and supported him over many years.

Massive upheaval
“We must have done something right,” he said about USP, “because in 2000, the year of George Speight’s coup, our students covered the massive upheaval which made headlines around the world when Mahendra Chaudhry’s Labour-led coalition government was held at gunpoint for 56 days.

“The students courageously covered the coup with their website Pacific Journalism Online and their newspaper Wansolwara — “One Ocean”.  They won six Ossie Awards – unprecedented for a single university — in Australia that year and a standing ovation.”

He said there was a video on YouTube of their exploits called Frontline Reporters and one of the students, Christine Gounder, wrote an article for a Commonwealth Press Union magazine entitled, “From trainees to professionals. And all it took was a coup”.

Dr Robie said this Fiji experience was still one of the most standout experiences he had had as a journalist and educator.

Along with similar coverage of the 1997 Sandline mercenary crisis by his students at the University of Papua New Guinea.

He made some comments about the 1985 Rainbow Warrior voyage to Rongelap in the Marshall islands and the subsequent bombing by French secret agents in Auckland.

But he added “you can read all about this adventure in my new book” being published in a few weeks.

Biggest 21st century crisis
Dr Robie said the profession of journalism, truth telling and holding power to account, was vitally important to a healthy democracy.

Although media did not succeed in telling people what to think, it did play a vital role in what to think about. However, the media world was undergoing massive change and fragmentation.

“And public trust is declining in the face of fake news and disinformation,” he said

“I think we are at a crossroads in society, both locally and globally. Both journalism and democracy are under an unprecedented threat in my lifetime.

“When more than 230 journalists can be killed in 19 months in Gaza and there is barely a bleep from the global community, there is something savagely wrong.

“The Gazan journalists won the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize collectively last year with the judges saying, “As humanity, we have a huge debt to their courage and commitment to freedom of expression.”

“The carnage and genocide in Gaza is deeply disturbing, especially the failure of the world to act decisively to stop it. The fact that Israel can kill with impunity at least 54,000 people, mostly women and children, destroy hospitals and starve people to death and crush a people’s right to live is deeply shocking.

“This is the biggest crisis of the 21st century. We see this relentless slaughter go on livestreamed day after day and yet our media and politicians behave as if this is just ‘normal’. It is shameful, horrendous. Have we lost our humanity?

“Gaza has been our test. And we have failed.”

Other speakers included Whānau Hub co-founder Nik Naidu, one of the anti-coup Coalition for Democracy in Fiji (CDF) stalwarts; the Heritage New Zealand’s Antony Phillips; and Multimedia Investments and Evening Report director Selwyn Manning.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

On May 22, the Fafen Zone High Court in Jigjiga, the capital of Ethiopia’s eastern Somali Region, sentenced Ahmed, whose legal name is Ahmed Abdi Omar, to two years in prison. He had been detained since his April 23 arrest on incitement charges related to an interview he conducted with a man whose son died following an alleged police beating, as well as for commentary on Ahmed’s Facebook page. The charge was later changed to “propagation of disinformation and public incitement,” under the 2020 anti-hate speech law, according to the charge sheet, which was reviewed by CPJ.

“Ahmed Awga’s conviction and two-year prison sentence, based on a Facebook post he didn’t write, is outrageous and a stark illustration of Ethiopia’s escalating assault on press freedom,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa regional director, from Durban. “Ethiopian authorities must cease using the legal system to silence critical voices.”

The charge sheet alleges that on April 17, Ahmed posted statements on his Facebook page, describing a regional election as a “so-called election,” accusing regional government officials of holding the population hostage, and claiming specific districts were seized by certain individuals. He was also accused of inciting residents by allegedly stating, “we have no justice — only killing and death.”

A CPJ review of the prosecution’s evidence, corroborated by an analysis by VOSS TV, an online media outlet, shows his conviction was primarily based on a post he didn’t write. His account was merely tagged in an April 20 post, which clearly originated from another Facebook page, not Ahmed’s. None of Ahmed’s April 17 posts appeared to reference the allegations in the charge sheet, according to CPJ’s review.

Ahmed’s conviction is part of a broader crackdown on media in Ethiopia. At least six other journalists were arrested in the month of April alone, as the government tightened its control over the media regulator, the Ethiopian Media Authority (EMA).

In a May 27 interview with BBC’s Somali service, Somali Region President Mustafa Mohammed Omar rejected suggestions that people were being jailed simply for what they posted online. The four people currently in custody — “a journalist, a former official, and two activists” — face charges of “harming the reputation of security agencies, spreading false information about jail conditions, and exploiting the death of an inmate to incite the public,” he said, adding that the regional judiciary is independent.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, television producer Rob Worsoff, the man behind the Duck Dynasty reality show, comes clean in his monstrous intentions behind this proposed series he hopes to call The American: he has been pursuing this seedy project since the days of the Obama administration, hoping for some amoral stakeholder to bite. Worsoff, in true fashion, denies that such a project is intended as malicious (“this isn’t the ‘The Hunger Games’ for immigrants”), let alone denigrating the dignity of human worth. In the grand idea of full bloom, optimistic America, it is intended as hopeful, but most of all, competitive. Forget equal protection and a fair evaluation of merits; here is a chance for Social Darwinism to excel.

Worsoff insists he is free of political ideology. “As an immigrant myself, I am merely trying to make a show that celebrates the immigration process, celebrate what it means to be American and have a national conversation about what it means to be American, through the eyes of people who want it most”. He proposes to do this by, for instance, sending immigrants to San Francisco where they find themselves in a mine to retrieve gold. Another would see the contestants journey to Detroit, where they will be placed on an auto assembly to reassemble a Model-T Ford chassis.

The winners would end up on the Capitol steps, presumably to receive their citizenship in some staged ceremony for television. The losing contestants would go home with such generous prizes as a Starbucks gift card or airline points.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin has apparently spoken to Worsoff on this steaming drivel, with the producer describing the response as “positive”. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, it is said, has not officially “‘backed’ or even reviewed the pitch of any scripted or reality show. The Department of Homeland Security receives hundreds of television show pitches a year.” The mind can only dissipate in despair at such an observation, unsurprising in a land where the television, or televisual platforms, remain brain numbing instructors.

That the DHS is considering this is unremarkable. The department has already participated in television projects and networks, To Catch a Smuggler being a case in point. Noem has also made much of the camera when it comes to dealing with immigrants. An ad campaign costing US$200 million promises to feature her admonishing illegal immigrants to return to their countries. No doubt the hairdressing and makeup department will be busy when tarting her up for the noble task.

Broadcasters in a number of countries have also found the unsuspecting migrant or foreign guest captured by television irresistible viewing. It’s not just good, couch potato fun, but also a chance to fan prejudice and feed sketchy stereotypes. The reality TV show Border Security, which first aired on Australia’s free-to-air Channel 7 in 2004, proved to be a pioneering model in this regard. Not only did it provide a chance to mock the eating habits of new arrivals as food stuffs were confiscated by customs officers with names like “Barbs”, the program could also impute an intention to attack the Australian agricultural sector with introduced pests and diseases. These depictions went hand in hand with the demonising strategy of the Australian government towards unwanted asylum seekers and refugees (“Stop the Boats!” was the cry), characterised by lengthy spells of detention in an offshore tropical gulag.

The plight of the vulnerable immigrant has also become a matter of pantomime substitution, an idea supposedly educative in function. Why not act out the entire migrant experience with reality television individuals with particularly xenophobic views?

In February, this is exactly what took place in a reality television show vulgarly titled Go Back to Where You Come From aired on the UK’s Channel 4, running four episodes where selected, largely anti-immigration participants, according to Channel 4, “experience some of the most perilous parts of the refugee journeys”. It comes as little surprise that the series is modelled on an Australian precursor made in the early 2010s.

Even pro-immigrant groups were reduced to a state of admiring stupor, with the Refugee Council, a British charity, praising the worth of such shows to “have huge potential to highlight the stories behind the headlines”. Gareth Benest, advocacy director at the International Broadcasting Trust charity, also thought it instructive that the participants “face the reality of irregular migration and to challenge their preconceptions.”

French politician Xavier Bertrand failed to identify similar points, calling the program “nauseating”. In his attack on the experiment, he saw the deaths across the English Channel as “a humanitarian tragedy, not the subject of a game”. But a game it has become, at least when placed before the camera.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

After his April 23 arrest in eastern Somali Region, Ahmed, the founder of Jigjiga Television Network, appeared in court on incitement charges on April 25, and was remanded in custody pending investigations, the journalist’s relative, who declined to be named, citing fear of retribution, told CPJ.

In the interview, Abdikarim Ali Ahmed demanded justice for his son’s death, saying that an officer kicked the teenage boy’s head, while wearing boots, after which he was hospitalized and died from his injuries. Regional police commander Abdi Ali Siyad told the BBC’s Somali service, “The boy simply died. There is no one to be held accountable.”

Meanwhile, on April 17, parliament passed a widely criticized amendment to the 2021 media law, increasing government control over the regulatory Ethiopian Media Authority (EMA), which is responsible for issuing sanctions against news outlets that violate press ethics, including by revoking their licenses. Press and human rights groups have warned that this shift in power “opens the door to undue influence” from politicians. 

“Ethiopia’s hostility to the press has been evident in the frequent arrests of critical journalists, and now the country is well on its way to reversing the gains it made in passing its 2021 media law, once considered progressive,” said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Muthoki Mumo. “Authorities should release journalists detained for their work and amend or repeal laws that can be used to undermine press freedom.”

More April arrests

In the month of April, in addition to Ahmed’s detention and the brief arrest of three Addis Standard employees as part of a raid on their newsroom, CPJ also confirmed:

• On April 5, police arrested Muhyidin Abdullahi Omar, an editor at the state-owned Harari Mass Media Agency and founder of the YouTube channel Biyyoo Production, in eastern Harari Region, his wife Helen Jemal and a person with knowledge of the case, who declined to be named, citing fear of reprisal, told CPJ.

On April 28, Omar was charged with defamation and disseminating disinformation in connection with two Facebook posts, according to the charge sheet, reviewed by CPJ, in which he alleged mismanagement at a local mosque and corruption at the regional attorney general’s office.

He could face up to three years imprisonment for defamation under a 2016 law and another three years for incitement under an anti-hate speech law, which broadly defines the crime.

Muyhidin had been on administrative leave from Harari Mass Media Agency since 2022, following an arrest over his social media activity, but on April 7, 2025 — two days after his latest arrest — his employer suspended his salary pending a disciplinary meeting, according to Helen and documents reviewed by CPJ.

• On April 10, Fanuel Kinfu, founder of the online outlet Fentale Media, was taken from his home in the capital Addis Ababa. The journalist told CPJ that police questioned him over alleged defamation in relation to commentary videos, published between April 2023 and June 2024. On April 13, he was released on bail of 15,000 birr (US$113).

• On April 23, Abebe Fikir, a reporter with the weekly newspaper The Reporter, was arrested. Abebe told CPJ that he was seeking comment from city officials about a housing dispute but the police accused him of filming without permission — an allegation he denied. On April 25, he was released on bail of 10,000 birr (US$75), without charge.

Increased government power over the press

Ethiopia’s 2021 media law won praise for progressive provisions, including for reclassifying defamation as a civil rather than criminal offence. But the amended law, passed with only one dissenting vote, increases the government’s power over the press. Sections that allowed the public to nominate candidates to the media authority’s board and four slots reserved for media and civil society representatives have been repealed, with board members instead being chosen from “relevant” bodies.

It also removed a ban on board members being members of a political party — a rule that the government had been criticized for breaking in parliament and transferred power to nominate the authority’s director general from the board to the prime minister.

Ethiopia is sub-Saharan Africa’s second worst jailer of journalists, after Eritrea, according to CPJ’s latest annual prison census, with six behind bars on December 1, 2024. One of these, Yeshihasab Abere, was released in January.

In March, seven journalists from the privately owned Ethiopian Broadcasting Service were detained. All have since been freed. Two are awaiting trial on charges of dissemination of hateful disinformation.

CPJ did not receive any responses to queries sent via email and messaging app to federal, Harari and Somali regional police and government spokesperson Legesse Tulu.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“We are critically concerned that the chaos in Haiti makes it nearly impossible for anyone — journalists included — to safely go about their daily lives,” said CPJ U.S., Canada, and Caribbean Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “Order must be restored, not least so that media outlets such as Radio Panic FM can provide news to Haitians and the world, rather than being hijacked to become mouthpieces for gangs.”

Privately owned Radio Panic FM’s director Joseph Allan Jr. told the Haiti-based SOS Journalists group, that the station in the central city of Mirebalais has been under the control of gang members since April 20.

“The gunmen have their own producer to operate the radio station and they played repeatedly a song recently released by their boss Jeff Larose,” the Haitian-Caribbean News Network reported.

Larose heads the Canaan faction of Viv Ansanm, or Living Together in Creole — an alliance of former rival gangs who joined forces in 2023 and took control of most of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince.

Viv Ansanm attacked Mirebalais in March, forcing residents to flee. Journalist Roger Claudy Israël was taken hostage along with his brother. Both were later released; another journalist, Jean Christophe Collègue, was reported missing by his family.

Panic FM is the fourth Haitian broadcaster to be struck by gangs in the last month, following attacks on Radio Télévision Caraïbes (RTVC) and Mélodie FM, and TV Pluriel, in Port-au-Prince.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Between March 12 and 13, armed gangs from the Viv Ansanm (Living Together) coalition attacked independent stations Radio Télévision Caraïbes (RTVC) and Mélodie FM, setting fire to both buildings, which had been previously abandoned due to insecurity in the area. No casualties were reported.

On March 16, heavily armed Viv Ansanm members also ransacked and set fire to the privately owned TV channel Télé Pluriel in the Delmas 19 neighborhood, according to staff members who spoke to CPJ and wished to remain anonymous out of concern for their safety.

Separately, at least 10 journalists were physically attacked and had equipment stolen during a large street demonstration on March 19, according to the Haitian Online Media Association (CMEL).

“Journalists, particularly those in radio broadcasting, have long played a vital role in keeping Haitians informed about what is happening in their communities,” said CPJ U.S., Canada, and Caribbean program coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “The arson attacks on these three radio stations are the latest attempt from Haitian gangs to sow chaos and destruction and weaken the media’s ability to work. The security situation in the country must be stabilized to allow journalists, and all citizens, to live without fear of violence.”  

Haitian Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé called the attack on RTVC “a despicable act” against freedom of expression and issued a statement promising to reinforce security for media institutions.

“The losses were enormous,” Télé Pluriel staff said in a report, adding that they have been unable to access the area due to ongoing violence. Télé Pluriel is owned by Pierre-Louis Opont, a former head of Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council, and his award-winning journalist wife Marie Lucie Bonhomme. They were each separately abducted and subsequently released in 2023.

RTVC is the oldest radio station in Haiti. Mélodie FM is owned by Marcus Garcia, a renowned Haitian journalist who was exiled during the Duvalier dictatorship in the 1980s.

Violence, instability, and impunity in journalist killings have plagued Haiti since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

I think part of it is that [standup] is what I’ve wanted to do for so long. It took a lot of years of working up the courage to do it.

When I was a kid I was super shy. I’d write jokes and hide them under my bed.

There’s something really nice about finding something that you love putting the work into. It doesn’t feel like labor or the labor is way more enjoyable. I’m always trying to follow the excitement of whatever thing (standup, animated project, short film) that I’m excited about. Even if only 50 people see it, that’s something.

Did going from no-budget web series to having a budget for a broadcast show change your creative practice?

Not really. I guess the thing that changed was we had permits which I’d never had before. Before we were sneaking onto the subway and bribing a janitor to let us into a school. So it’s definitely a change in that sense where it’s like, “Oh, it’s legal that we’re filming here.”

Flatbush only got to Showtime because we made it as a zero budget web series. So it had that proof of concept.

We still worked with the same comedians, filmed in Brooklyn, and kept it small and local. If you can create independently it helps.

It just shows you how to keep a producer’s hat in mind. Then, when you’re given a little more budget and they’re like, “You need to rewrite this scene. It can’t take place in a hospital” or whatever. You’re like, “Okay, fine.” And you just change it because you’ve dealt with those curveballs before.

Does finding funding get easier with success, or is it always starting over from zero?

It’s always a challenge. I think it’s easier to have the initial conversations with people because maybe they liked the show or they know that they’re supposed to have liked the show.

The thing that gets easier is your confidence that you can get it done.

Especially for people who’ve made stuff independently—whether it’s sketches or shorts or features, it’s so hard to make a thing. If you have the ability to do that and pull something together, the next one will be easier then the next one will be easier.

It’s just that confidence and also finding those people at each stage where you’re like, “Cool, you are my person and anything I’m fortunate to try to do again you’re going to be the first person I ask.”

Flatbush was one of Showtime’s lowest-budget comedies, and they greenlit it because they saw what we could do independently.

Do you treat your art practice like a business? How did you figure out how to make a living through your creative work?

I’m very regimented. I have hours every day that I write. I am big with to-do lists and I make them the night before.

I teach undergrads at college once a week. I teach a grad school class once a week and that’s also just helpful for making a living in between projects when stuff is in development, whether it’s TV or feature.

Before that, when I was doing standup, I worked all these different temp jobs. I worked at a radio show. I tutored for years. I sold mattresses at a Costco. I was a proctor on law school exams, just sitting there on my phone. I had a million different gigs and then would go and bomb doing stand-up at night.

Finding that balance can be tricky. I think that’s why it’s so important to stay motivated by working on stuff that you actually like.

In the traditional Hollywood model, success is less about what you want to be making and more about how you can have the biggest career possible. Do you think that focusing on what you want to make is hard advice to follow?

A thing that’s kind of overstated is when people say, I had an idea to write this thing but my manager said don’t do that because people aren’t looking for that right now. They’re looking for the next Ted Lasso.

I always feel like that’s silly advice because by the time you write the thing, they’re not looking for the next Ted Lasso anymore. They’re looking for the next The Bear, Shōgun, or whatever it is. It changes so quickly.

For so many people whose work we love. There’s years in between. You look at directors we love and there’s maybe years in between their first feature and their second feature. People who’ve won Oscars.

Something’s happening in between. I totally get that nobody wants to come out and be like, “Boy, I was really doubting myself for a while.” You just want to paint yourself like it’s all smooth sailing.

There are certain people where they had a thing hit and the rocket ship pulled them up. For many of us, it’s like a slog and you have good runs and you have times where you can’t control the external.

Beyond money, what does it actually cost to be creative?

All through my 20s, I did stand-up every night. Multiple times a night. I didn’t really take nights off. A lot of it was probably good and needed. A lot of it was not.

I’ve learned in an ongoing journey how to balance work and life.

That’s why it’s so important to find positive dynamics within work. So you’re living a life and respecting other people’s lives as well.

So it’s like we all care about this thing but also you should have a weekend where you don’t think about this. We’ll be back Monday to get going again.

You seem to really enjoy working with people you know, whether it be someone you’ve known from high school or an interesting character that you’ve met along the way. Do you view collaboration as a valuable resource? How has collaboration contributed to you being able to make works?

If you’re trying to write, direct, or create in any sort of form, it’s nice to be able to decenter yourself or your own point of view and work with people you trust who might have different experiences.

I think it is so helpful to make things. Finding those people who you have this kind of shared language with I think is fun and makes the thing better.

Last question, fun question. You’ve auditioned for notable scripted series roles. Do you now identify as an actor?

I guess I don’t identify as an actor but It’s fun to act.

I’ve been fortunate to work with amazing actors and I see what they put into it. And that ain’t me. But that’s what I put into the other stuff like all of my writing in the margins of a billion different emotions.

I view myself as a comic more than an actor. As a comedian, you have a sense of your own voice and I know what jokes I can hit in my voice.

I think for a lot of roles I’ve been sent, like to read for Yellow Jackets, I’m like, I wouldn’t cast me as that guy. Not in a million years. Just cast some handsome actor man.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Taylor K. Shaw.

In 2022, steady followers and dedicated fanatics of this program of irritating suburban geniality were met with the news that Channel 5 would be concluding its support for a series that had incubated such Australian performers and thespians as Margot Robbie, Guy Pearce and Kylie Minogue.  Fremantle Media, the program’s producer, had failed to secure another broadcaster in the UK as a replacement, despite the 1.5 million regular viewers that would tune in each day it was run.

Then came Amazon MGM Studios, which decided to give a blast of oxygen to the 37-year-old relic that had already passed 9,000 episodes.  It took a mere four months to do so, possibly helped by the ratings for what was meant to be a farewell episode studded with stars.  The streaming service Prime Video became the conduit, the new program returning as Neighbours: A New Chapter.

Salvation jobs tend to be rare in show business, and the whole industry remains inherently and manically brutal.  A sure signal that Neighbours might be in trouble was the 2024 move by Amazon to cease its Freevee service, which had been responsible for broadcasting the revived variant globally.

The language being used in this latest withdrawal of support is an object study in euphemistic endings.  “We are sad to announce that Neighbours will be resting from December 2025,” read an official statement on the program on February 21.  But the viewers were assured that the axe, while inevitable in its deployment, would not do away with those episodes scheduled to run on the global Amazon Prime Video channel, and Australia’s Channel Ten four times a week until then.  These would still have “all the big soapie twists and turns that our viewers love”.

A spokesperson for Amazon, in confirming the company’s withdrawal of support, stood by the remit in saying little on the reasons behind the decision.  The language used was that of putting down a beloved pet that had endured that bit longer because of a noble intervention.  “Forty years is an incredible milestone and we are proud that Amazon MGM Studios was able to have a small part of bringing further episodes to Freevee and Prime Video customers over the last two years, spanning 400 episodes.”

Things were left to Neighbour’s executive producer, Jason Herbison, to soften matters and offer a sliver of hope.  First, there was the soap’s enduring popularity in the UK.  There was also the show’s first Daytime Emmy nomination in 2024.  “As this chapter closes, we appreciate and thank Amazon MGM Studios for all they have done for Neighbours – bringing this iconic and much-loved series to new audiences globally.  We value how much the fans love Neighbours and we believe there are more stories of the residents of Ramsay Street to tell in the future.”

These stories will remain either in cold storage or floating in purgatory unless an international backer can be found.  It fills barrels of irony that Australia’s longest running soap drama would need the broadcasting heft from overseas to sustain it.  The Australian backer, Channel Ten, claims that funding it alone will not pass muster.

Placed in that precarious situation, the program’s success does not merely depend on a steadfast series of ratings in one market.  Neighbours, with its sedate, soft treading approach to human relations in a fictional Melbourne suburb, appeals in a very specific way to British audiences.  For them, this is Australia imagined as sun, pools and conviviality.  Disputes irk but are eventually resolved.  As the BBC press release described it in October 1986, the show “is down-to-earth, centres on ordinary families, with a particular emphasis on young people and the problems they face.”

When the wedding of Scott and Charlene, played respectively by Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue, aired in 1988, 19.7 million British viewers tuned in.  This was stupendous for a production that had initially been savaged for its corniness, comical awfulness and its seeming inertia.  It was also the sort of success that enraged critics for challenging the enduring supremacy of Britain’s own EastEnders and Coronation Street.

The actual city of the program’s setting is irreverent in terms of weather, teasing, toying and frustrating the visitor with lengthy spells of overcast doom, occasional spits of rain, and then, variable temperatures.  The latter phenomenon drives the local resident to travel equipped with a wardrobe of clothing options: raincoat, warm jacket, short sleeved shirts.  Ramsay Street, with its particular pretentious brand of sunny friendliness, should have been located in Sydney, though this remains the unmentionable heresy.

Taking the temperature of the broader public reaction to the decision, and bafflement abounds.  Why would, asked one follower of the program, take away “YOUR number one show!” screeched one at Amazon.  But Amazon, according to The Sun, was not happy with its broader returns.  It is a global beast with global appetites, a coded way of saying that success, to be genuine, had to be an American one.

An unnamed source (of course), told the paper that Fremantle had been given “two years to see if it worked, but sadly, they just didn’t get the viewers.”  Fremantle’s hunt for the cash for continued production will have to start in earnest, but short of returning to a British backer, the prospects look decidedly final for a show that has lasted well beyond its time.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

In 2022, steady followers and dedicated fanatics of this program of irritating suburban geniality were met with the news that Channel 5 would be concluding its support for a series that had incubated such Australian performers and thespians as Margot Robbie, Guy Pearce and Kylie Minogue.  Fremantle Media, the program’s producer, had failed to secure another broadcaster in the UK as a replacement, despite the 1.5 million regular viewers that would tune in each day it was run.

Then came Amazon MGM Studios, which decided to give a blast of oxygen to the 37-year-old relic that had already passed 9,000 episodes.  It took a mere four months to do so, possibly helped by the ratings for what was meant to be a farewell episode studded with stars.  The streaming service Prime Video became the conduit, the new program returning as Neighbours: A New Chapter.

Salvation jobs tend to be rare in show business, and the whole industry remains inherently and manically brutal.  A sure signal that Neighbours might be in trouble was the 2024 move by Amazon to cease its Freevee service, which had been responsible for broadcasting the revived variant globally.

The language being used in this latest withdrawal of support is an object study in euphemistic endings.  “We are sad to announce that Neighbours will be resting from December 2025,” read an official statement on the program on February 21.  But the viewers were assured that the axe, while inevitable in its deployment, would not do away with those episodes scheduled to run on the global Amazon Prime Video channel, and Australia’s Channel Ten four times a week until then.  These would still have “all the big soapie twists and turns that our viewers love”.

A spokesperson for Amazon, in confirming the company’s withdrawal of support, stood by the remit in saying little on the reasons behind the decision.  The language used was that of putting down a beloved pet that had endured that bit longer because of a noble intervention.  “Forty years is an incredible milestone and we are proud that Amazon MGM Studios was able to have a small part of bringing further episodes to Freevee and Prime Video customers over the last two years, spanning 400 episodes.”

Things were left to Neighbour’s executive producer, Jason Herbison, to soften matters and offer a sliver of hope.  First, there was the soap’s enduring popularity in the UK.  There was also the show’s first Daytime Emmy nomination in 2024.  “As this chapter closes, we appreciate and thank Amazon MGM Studios for all they have done for Neighbours – bringing this iconic and much-loved series to new audiences globally.  We value how much the fans love Neighbours and we believe there are more stories of the residents of Ramsay Street to tell in the future.”

These stories will remain either in cold storage or floating in purgatory unless an international backer can be found.  It fills barrels of irony that Australia’s longest running soap drama would need the broadcasting heft from overseas to sustain it.  The Australian backer, Channel Ten, claims that funding it alone will not pass muster.

Placed in that precarious situation, the program’s success does not merely depend on a steadfast series of ratings in one market.  Neighbours, with its sedate, soft treading approach to human relations in a fictional Melbourne suburb, appeals in a very specific way to British audiences.  For them, this is Australia imagined as sun, pools and conviviality.  Disputes irk but are eventually resolved.  As the BBC press release described it in October 1986, the show “is down-to-earth, centres on ordinary families, with a particular emphasis on young people and the problems they face.”

When the wedding of Scott and Charlene, played respectively by Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue, aired in 1988, 19.7 million British viewers tuned in.  This was stupendous for a production that had initially been savaged for its corniness, comical awfulness and its seeming inertia.  It was also the sort of success that enraged critics for challenging the enduring supremacy of Britain’s own EastEnders and Coronation Street.

The actual city of the program’s setting is irreverent in terms of weather, teasing, toying and frustrating the visitor with lengthy spells of overcast doom, occasional spits of rain, and then, variable temperatures.  The latter phenomenon drives the local resident to travel equipped with a wardrobe of clothing options: raincoat, warm jacket, short sleeved shirts.  Ramsay Street, with its particular pretentious brand of sunny friendliness, should have been located in Sydney, though this remains the unmentionable heresy.

Taking the temperature of the broader public reaction to the decision, and bafflement abounds.  Why would, asked one follower of the program, take away “YOUR number one show!” screeched one at Amazon.  But Amazon, according to The Sun, was not happy with its broader returns.  It is a global beast with global appetites, a coded way of saying that success, to be genuine, had to be an American one.

An unnamed source (of course), told the paper that Fremantle had been given “two years to see if it worked, but sadly, they just didn’t get the viewers.”  Fremantle’s hunt for the cash for continued production will have to start in earnest, but short of returning to a British backer, the prospects look decidedly final for a show that has lasted well beyond its time.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

“CPJ is concerned by the repeated attacks on SVT, Sweden’s public broadcaster,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “This fourth attack of vandalism in six months creates a climate of fear for journalists. Authorities must take these attacks very seriously, swiftly investigate them, hold those responsible accountable, and act to prevent future attacks.”

Late Monday night, unidentified perpetrators threw red paint on SVT’s entrance and smashed a window, marking the fourth time the broadcaster was vandalized since last September.

In a similar attack last September, red paint was thrown on the door and side windows of the building. In October and December, foul-smelling substances were sprayed at the entrance.

After the December attack, SVT security chief Camilla Josephson said it was an “attack on public service, a protected site, and by extension, on our democracy.”

CPJ emailed questions to SVT’s and the Swedish Prosecutor Authority’s press offices but received no reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

From being the headline to creating them, Moana Maniapoto has walked a rather rocky road of swinging between both sides of the media.

Known for her award-winning current affairs show Te Ao with Moana on Whakaata Māori, and the 1990s cover of Black Pearl, the lawyer-by-trade doesn’t keep her advocacy a secret.

Her first introduction to news was at the tail end of the 1980s when she was relaxed in the guest seat at Aotearoa Radio — Auckland’s first Māori radio station — but her kōrero hit a nerve.

• READ MORE: Other Te Reo Māori media reports

“I said something the host considered radical,” she said.

“He quickly distanced the station from my remarks and that got the phones ringing.”

It became a race for listeners to punch numbers into the telephone, the first person to get through was New Zealand filmmaker, producer and writer Merata Mita, who ripped into the host.

“How dare you talk down to her like that,” Maniapoto recalled. The very next day she answered the call to host that show from then on.

No training, no worries
Aotearoa Radio was her first real job working four hours per day, spinning yarns five days a week — no training, no worries.

“Oh, they tried to get us to speak a bit flasher, but no one could be bothered. It was such a lot of fun, a great bunch of people working there. It was also nerve-wracking interviewing people like Erima Henare (NZ politician Peeni Henare’s father), but the one I still chuckle about the most was Winston Peters.”

She remembers challenging Peters over a comment he made about Māori in the media: “You’re going to have to apologise to your listeners, Moana. I never said that,” Peters pointed out.

They bickered in true journalist versus politician fashion — neither refused to budge, until Maniapoto revealed she had a word-for-word copy of his speech.

All Peters could do was watch Maniapoto attempt to hold in her laughter. A prompt ad break was only appropriate.

But the Winston-win wasn’t enough to stay in the gig.

“After two years, I was over it. It was tiring. Someone rang up live on air and threatened to kill me. It was a good excuse to resign.”

Although it wasn’t the end of the candlewick for Maniapoto, it took 30 years to string up an interview with Peters again.

Short-lived telly stints
In-between times she had short-lived telly stints including a year playing Dr Te Aniwa Ryan on Shortland Street, but it wasn’t for her. The singer-songwriter has also created documentaries with her partner Toby Mills, their daughter Manawanui Maniapoto-Mills a gunning young actress.

Maniapoto has featured on the cover of magazines, one in particular she remembers was Mana magazine in 1993.

“Sally Tagg photographed me in the shallow end of a Parnell Baths pool, wrapped in metres of blue curtain net, trying to act like it was completely normal,” she said.

Just 10 years ago she joined Mana Trust which runs the online Sunday mag E-Tangata, mentored by Gary Wilson (co-founder and co-editor) and print journalist Tapu Misa who taught her how to transfer her voice through computer keys.

“Whakaata Māori approached me in 2019, I was flattered, but music was my life and I felt wholly unequipped for journalism. Then again, I always love a challenge.”

Since jumping on board, Te Ao with Moana has completed six seasons and will “keep calm and carry on” for a seventh season come 17 February, 2025 — her son Kimiora Hikurangi Jackson the producer and “boss”.

It will be the last current affairs show to air on Whakaata Māori before moving the TV channel to web next year.

Advocating social justice
Her road of journalism and music is winding. Her music is the vehicle to advocating social justice which often landed her in the news rather than telling it.

“To me songwriting, documentaries, and current affairs are all about finding ways to convey a story or explore an issue or share insights. I think a strength I have are the relationships I’ve built through music — countless networks both here and overseas. Perfect for when we are wanting to deep dive into issues.”

Her inspiration for music grew from her dad, Nepia Tauri Maniapoto and his brothers. Maniapoto said it was “their thing” to entertain guests from the moment they walked into the dining room at Waitetoko Marae until kai was finished.

“It was Prince Tui Teka and the Platters. Great vocal harmonies. My father always had a uke, gat, and sax in the house,” she said.

Born in Invercargill and raised in Rotorua by her māmā Bernadette and pāpā Nepia, she was surrounded by her five siblings who some had a keen interest in kapa haka, although, the kapa-life was “too tough” for Maniapoto. Instead, nieces Puna Whakaata, Mourei, and Tiaria inheriting the “kapa” gene. Maniapoto said they’re exceptional and highly-competitive performers.

Blending her Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, and Tūhourangi whakapapa into song was no struggle.

The 1990s was filled with soul, R’n’B, and reggae, she said, singing in te reo was met with indifference if not hostility.

‘Labelled a radical’
“If you mixed in lyrics that were political in nature, you were labelled a ‘radical.’ I wasn’t the only one, but probably the ‘radical’ with the highest profile at the time.”

After her “rare” single Kua Makona in 1987, Moana & the Moahunters formed in the early 1990s, followed by Moana and the Tribe which is still going strong. Her sister Trina has a lovely singing voice and has been in Moana & The Tribe since it was formed, she said.

And just like her sixth television season, Maniapoto has just churned out her sixth album, Ono.

“I’m incredibly proud of it. So grateful to Paddy Free and Scotty Morrison for their skills. Looks pretty too on vinyl and CD, as well as digital. A cool Xmas present. Just saying.”

The microphone doesn’t seem to be losing power anytime soon. All albums adequately named one-to-six in te reo Māori, one can only punt on the next album name.

“It’s kinda weird now morphing back into the interviewee to promote my album release. I’m used to asking all the questions.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

“The Taliban’s latest ban on television and filming and photography in Takhar should trouble anyone who cares about media freedom worldwide” said CPJ’s program director, Carlos Martínez de la Serna, in New York. “The citizens of Afghanistan deserve fundamental rights, and the international community must cease its passive observation of the country’s rapid regression.” 

The ban was approved by senior officials from the Taliban’s provincial General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), directorates of Information and Culture, and the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, as well as the governor’s office of Takhar province.

Takhar is the second province in Afghanistan to institute such a ban. Previously, the Taliban implemented a similar ban in Kandahar province, its unofficial capital and the residence of the group’s leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, according to a Kandahar-based journalist who also spoke to CPJ under the condition of anonymity for fear of Taliban retaliation.

Saif ul Islam Khyber, a spokesman for the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, confirmed to the Associated Press that media outlets in the provinces of Takhar, Maidan Wardak, and Kandahar had been “advised not to broadcast or display images of anything possessing a soul—meaning humans and animals,” according to the AP. Khyber said the directive is part of the implementation of a recently ratified morality law. 

Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada signed the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice bill into law on July 31, though the news was not made public until August 21, when it was published on the Ministry of Justice’s website.

Article 17 of the law details the restrictions on the media, including a ban on publishing or broadcasting images of living people and animals, which the Taliban regards as un-Islamic. Other sections order women to cover their bodies and faces and travel with a male guardian, while men are not allowed to shave their beards. The punishment for breaking the law is up to three days in prison or a penalty “considered appropriate by the public prosecutor.”

On October 14, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, the director of Taliban-controlled Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA), informed senior management of Kabul’s national TV station that a phased strategy to implement the new law had already begun. TV stations across Afghanistan’s provinces will be gradually closed and converted to radio stations, with plans to eventually extend the ban to Kabul, where RTA and other major national broadcasters operate, according to two journalists familiar with the meeting and a report by the London-based independent outlet, Afghanistan International. 

On October 19, during a visit to Sheikh Zahid University in Khost province, Neda Mohammad Nadim, the Taliban’s Minister of Higher Education, barred the filming of the event, according to the London-based Afghanistan International.

On October 23, the Taliban’s Ministry of Defense launched the broadcast of Radio Sada-e-Khalid, which is managed by the ministry and operates from the 201st Corps of the Taliban army.

Since taking power in Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, the Taliban has employed a gradual strategy to suppress media activity in the country, with the General Directorate of Intelligence forcing compliance with stringent regulations.  These include bans on music and soap operas, bans on women’s voices in the media, the imposition of mask-wearing for female presenters, a ban on live broadcasts of political shows, the closure of television stations, and the jamming or boycotting of independent international networks broadcasting to Afghanistan. To enforce these policies, the Taliban have detained, assaulted, and threatened journalists and media workers throughout the country.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Mohammed is one of at least 56 journalists who were assaulted or harassed by security forces or unidentified citizens while covering the #EndBadGovernance demonstrations in Nigeria, one of several countries across sub-Saharan Africa that have experienced anti-government protests in recent months.  

In Kenya, at least a dozen journalists have been targeted by security personnel during weeks of youth-led protests since June, with at least one reporter shot with rubber bullets and several others hit with teargas canisters. Meanwhile, Ugandan police and soldiers used force to quash similar demonstrations over corruption and high living costs, while a Ghanaian court banned planned protests.

Globally, attacks on the press often spike during moments of political tension. In Senegal, at least 25 journalists were attacked, detained, or tear gassed while reporting on February’s protests over delayed elections. Last year, CPJ found that more than 40 Nigerian journalists were detained, attacked, or harassed while reporting on presidential and state elections. In 2020, at least a dozen journalists were attacked during the #EndSARS campaign to abolish Nigeria’s brutal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) police unit.

CPJ’s documentation of the incidents below, based on interviews with those affected, local media reports, and verified videos and photos, are emblematic of the dangers faced by reporters in many African countries during protests – and the failure of authorities to prioritize journalists’ safety and ending impunity for crimes against journalists.

All but one of the journalists – a reporter for government-owned Radio Nigeria – worked for privately owned media outlets.

July 31

• In western Lagos State, police officers harassed Bernard Akede, a reporter with News Central TV, and his colleagues, digital reporter Eric Thomas and camera operators Karina Adobaba-Harry and Samuel Chukwu, forcing them to pause reporting on the planned protests at the Lekki toll gate.

August 1

• In Abuja, police officers arrested Jide Oyekunle, a photojournalist with the Daily Independent newspaper, and Kayode Jaiyeola, a photojournalist with Punch newspaper, as they covered protests.

• In northern Borno State, at least 10 armed police officers forcefully entered the office of the regional broadcaster Radio Ndarason Internationale (RNI) and detained nine members of staff for five hours. Those held said that police accused them of publishing “fake news” in the arrest documentation and RNI’s project director David Smith told CPJ that the raid was in response to the outlet’s reporting via WhatsApp on the protests.

The detained staff were: head of office Lami Manjimwa Zakka; editor-in-chief Mamman Mahmood; producer Ummi Fatima Baba Kyari; reporters Hadiza Dawud, Zainab Alhaji Ali, and Amina Falmata Mohammed; head of programs Bunu Tijjani; deputy head of programs Ali Musa; and information and communications technology head Abubakar Gajibo.

• In Abuja, police officers threw tear gas canisters at Mary Adeboye, a camera operator with News Central TV; Samuel Akpan, a senior reporter with TheCable news site; and Adefemola Akintade, a reporter with the Peoples Gazette news site. The canisters struck Adeboye and Akpan’s legs, causing swelling.

• In northern Kano city, unidentified attackers wielding machetes and sticks smashed the windows of a Channels Television-branded bus carrying 11 journalists and a car carrying two journalists.

The journalists were: reporters Ibrahim Ayyuba Isah of TVC News broadcaster, whose hand was cut by glass; Ayo Adenaiye of Arise News broadcaster, whose laptop was damaged; Murtala Adewale of The Guardian newspaper, Bashir Bello of Vanguard newspaper, Abdulmumin Murtala of Leadership newspaper, Sadiq Iliyasu Dambatta of Channels Television, and Caleb Jacob and Victor Christopher of Cool FM, Wazobia FM, and Arewa Radio broadcasters; camera operators John Umar of Channels Television, Ibrahim Babarami of Arise News, Iliyasu Yusuf of AIT broadcaster, Usman Adam of TVC News; and multimedia journalist Salim Umar Ibrahim of Daily Trust newspaper.

• In southern Delta State, at least 10 unidentified assailants opposed to the protest attacked four journalists: reporters Monday Osayande of The Guardian newspaper, Matthew Ochei of Punch newspaper, Lucy Ezeliora of The Pointer newspaper, and investigative journalist Prince Amour Udemude, whose phone was snatched. Osayande told CPJ by phone that they did not make a formal complaint to police about the attack because several police officers saw it happen, but added that the state commissioner for information, Efeanyi Micheal Osuoza, had promised to investigate. Osuoza told CPJ by phone that he was investigating the matter and would ensure the replacement of Udemude’s phone.

August 3

• In Abuja’s national stadium, masked security forces fired bullets and tear gas in the direction of 18 journalists covering the protests, several of whom were wearing “Press” vests.

The journalists were: Premium Times reporters Abdulkareem Mojeed, Emmanuel Agbo, Abdulqudus Ogundapo, and Popoola Ademola; TheCable videographer Mbasirike Joshua and reporters Dyepkazah Shibayan, Bolanle Olabimtan, and Claire Mom; AIT reporter Oscar Ihimhekpen and camera operators Femi Kuku and Olugbenga Ogunlade; News Central TV camera operator Eno-Obong Koffi and reporter Emmanuel Bagudu; the nonprofit International Centre for Investigative Reporting’s video journalist Johnson Fatumbi and reporters Mustapha Usman and Nurudeen Akewushola; and Peoples Gazette reporters Akintade and Ebube Ibeh.

Kuku dislocated his leg and Ademola cut his knees and broke his phone while fleeing.

• In Abuja’s Wuse neighborhood, unidentified men robbed Victorson Agbenson, political editor of the government-owned Radio Nigeria broadcaster, and his driver Chris Ikwu at knifepoint as they covered a protest.

August 6

• In Lagos State, unidentified armed men hit four journalists from News Central TV and their vehicle with sticks. The journalists were News Central TV’s Akede, camera operator Adobaba-Harry, reporter Consin-Mosheshe Ogheneruru, and camera operator Albert David.

Abuja police spokesperson Josephine Adeh told CPJ by phone on August 16 that police did not carry out any attacks on the media and asked for evidence of such attacks before ending the call. She also accused CPJ of harassing her.

Police spokespersons Bright Edafe of Delta State and Haruna Abdullahi of Kano State told CPJ that their officers had not received any complaints about attacks on the press.

Lagos State police spokesperson Benjamin Hundeyin referred CPJ to the state’s police Complaint Response Unit, where the person who answered CPJ’s initial phone call declined to identify themselves and said they had no information about attacks on journalists. CPJ’s subsequent calls and messages went unanswered.

CPJ’s repeated calls and messages to Borno State Commissioner for Information Usman Tar requesting comment were unanswered.

See also: CPJ’s guidance for journalists covering protests  

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Evelyn Okakwu.

CPJ is investigating multiple incidents including one in the capital Abuja on August 3, where masked security forces fired bullets and teargas at several journalists wearing “Press” vests and their media-branded cars at the national stadium.

Attacks on the press have been reported across the country since July 31, including by unidentified assailants who smashed the windows of a Channels Television-branded bus carrying 11 journalists and a car carrying two journalists in the northern city of Kano and others who assaulted journalists while they were reporting in southern Delta State, as well as police arrests of reporters in Maiduguri in northeastern Borno State.

“Nigerian authorities must identify and hold accountable all those responsible for shooting at, attacking, harassing, and arresting numerous journalists while covering the #EndBadGovernance protests,” said Angela Quintal, head of CPJ’s Africa program, in New York. “The Nigerian public and the world deserve to be informed about the nationwide protests, but too often, journalists covering demonstrations are met with violence. Nigerian security forces must prioritize the safety of the press.”

Abuja police spokesperson Josephine Adeh told CPJ via messaging app that police did not carry out any attacks on the media. Delta State police spokesperson Bright Edafe told CPJ by phone that police in the state had not received any official complaints about attacks on the press.

CPJ is working to confirm whether the journalists that it interviewed filed police complaints.

CPJ’s calls to Borno State Commissioner for Information Usman Tar and Kano State police spokesperson Abubakar Zayyanu Ambursa requesting comment went unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Chinese police arrested Domalin and Koben in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang region, in April, according to the U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Asia (RFA). The arrests were first reported by Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, a human rights organization based in Kazakhstan’s biggest city, Almaty, in June.

They both worked as Kazakh-language television journalists for the local state-run television network Xinjiang Television in Urumqi.  

CPJ was unable to confirm what, if any, charges the pair face or other details about their arrest. According to RFA, Koben’s arrest may be linked to his work on a historic building in Xinjiang that the government has intentionally neglected.

“Chinese authorities must free Kazakh journalists Kairat Domalin and Kuandyk Koben,” said Iris Hsu, CPJ’s China representative. “It’s time for China to cease its campaign of harassing and arbitrarily detaining press members of the Muslim ethnic minorities and release all imprisoned journalists.”

Domalin was a TV presenter for the program “Zholaushy” (Traveler) on Xinjiang Television network, and Koben produced, directed, and presented Kazakh-language documentaries and more than 20 award-winning television programs.

CPJ’s call to the Public Security Department of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region went unanswered. 

Serikzhan Bilash, founder of Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, told CPJ that Koben’s brother asked the organization to remove a May 10 YouTube video asking for information from the public about Koben’s arrest, fearing that the video would “complicate” Koben’s detainment. 

According to the RFA report, “several” Kazakh journalists for the state-owned newspaper Xinjiang Daily, along with a few Kazakh editors from different magazines, were also arrested. CPJ could not independently verify these arrests.

China was the world’s worst jailer of journalists, according to CPJ’s latest annual prison census, with at least 44 behind bars as of December 1, 2023. Many journalists held were ethnic Uyghurs from Xinjiang.

Human rights groups, the United Nations, and foreign governments have accused Chinese authorities of crimes against humanity and genocide in the Xinjiang region as authorities harshly repress the region’s Muslim ethnic groups.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

But now, Tito’s voice is beamed into Baeza from abroad.

After investigating drug gangs in and around Baeza, he received several death threats last year. So, in October, he and his wife and show producer Elvira del Pilar Nole, and their two children jammed their suitcases into the back of a borrowed car and escaped from Baeza in the dead of night. 

“We were absolutely sure that within the next 24 to 48 hours they were going to attack us,” Nole said. “So, we had to escape.”

Now, they transmit their two-hour morning program, “Buenos Días, América,” from the kitchen table of their cramped apartment in a smoggy, traffic-choked Latin American city which they declined to name out of fears for their safety.  Explaining why she and Tito continue to broadcast from abroad, Nole, 42, says: “We are like an umbilical cord for Baeza because we are the only ones providing local news.”

Tito and Nole have joined a growing exodus of journalists from the South American nation. An outbreak of drug-related violence has led to a surge in threats against journalists, César Ricaurte, the director of Quito-based press freedom group Fundamedios, told CPJ. He said that 16 members of the press have fled Equador since 2023, according to Fundamedios records.

“It has become a regular occurrence due to the rise of organized crime,” Ricaurte said in a phone interview. “Any reporting that that these groups think will hurt their businesses leads to threats and attacks on journalists.” 

Ecuadorian journalists are not the only ones on the run. Across the world, journalists are fleeing direct threats, war, and repressive regimes. Between 2020 and 2023, CPJ’s support to exiled journalists jumped by 227%, with journalists from Afghanistan, Iran, and Nicaragua making up the largest shares of exiled media members to receive help. 

“When a journalist is forced into exile, journalism suffers,” wrote CPJ Emergencies Director Lucy Westcott last year. “Many journalists cease reporting when they relocate, and readers, viewers, and listeners are robbed of the information they need to make informed decisions about their lives.” 

One recent prominent Ecuadorian journalist to pack his bags is José Luis Calderón, a reporter and on-air host for TC Televisión who was held hostage by masked gunmen when they briefly occupied the public TV station in Guayaquil on January 9. During a live newscast, viewers watched as Calderón, 48, tried to reason with the intruders who pointed guns at the journalist, placed a stick of dynamite in his jacket pocket, and threatened to kill his colleagues if police intervened.

“I was trying to calm down the gunmen because we were all in danger,” Calderón told CPJ in a phone interview. “My coworkers were pleading for their lives.” 

Eventually, police arrested the gunmen, but the episode had a devastating impact on Calderón. He told CPJ that he became anxious and paranoid, sought psychiatric help, and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Maintaining that TC Televisión could not guarantee his safety, he quit his job and in April left Ecuador for the United States, where he is seeking political asylum.

“I had to leave because I was in really bad shape,” Calderón said. “My mental health was at stake.”

A CPJ special report published last year found that political turmoil combined with rising organized crime in Ecuador have put journalists at much greater risk, leading to self-censorship among reporters working in high-risk areas, and prompting some to leave the country.

Over the past decade, the country’s drug-trafficking gangs have become increasingly violent while turning Ecuador into a major transit point for cocaine from neighboring Colombia, according to Insight Crime. Between 2019 and 2023, the homicide rate increased by more than 500 percent, according to the independent Ecuadorian Observatory on Organized Crime. 

Following the armed takeover of TC Televisión in January, President Daniel Noboa, who was elected last year on a law-and-order platform, declared a state of “internal armed conflict” against 22 criminal gangs. Since then, overall killings have decreased but extortions and kidnappings have risen and “the security situation remains dire,” according to Human Rights Watch.

Ecuador’s two main gangs, known as Los Choneros and Los Lobos, control many of the country’s prisons and work in concert with Colombian and Mexican cartels as well as corrupt Ecuadorian officials. Ecuadorian prosecutors say that members of Los Lobos planned last year’s assassination of presidential candidate and former journalist Fernando Villavicencio, who had vowed to crack down on gangs.

Journalists reporting on gangs are usually the ones who get threatened, says Karol Noroña, who used to write for the Ecuadorian news site GK. Her troubles began when she began investigating how gang leaders control penitentiaries and run illicit businesses from behind bars. After one of her sources told her that a gang leader was threatening to kill her, Noroña fled Ecuador in April 2022.

“The gangs realized I was not on their side,” Noroña told CPJ in a phone interview. “That’s why I had to go into exile.”

She has split her time between Bogotá and Buenos Aires but says life in exile is sad, depressing, and expensive. 

“The hardest part is getting uprooted,” she said. “I never wanted to leave the country. Not being able to work took away the most important thing in my life.” 

Noroña and other Ecuadorian journalists who have gone into exile told CPJ they’ve received some help from independent groups, like Fundamedios. (CPJ has also provided journalists assistance grants to reporters from Ecuador.) But these journalists complain that government officials in Ecuador have shown zero interest in their plight.

Last year, Ecuador’s government created a “protection mechanism” made up of government officials, civilians, and independent media workers to support at-risk journalists. But Ricardo Rivas, president of the mechanism, told CPJ that the government has so far refused to provide it with any money despite a budget request for about $66,000 to protect media workers. 

“The government talks about the importance of freedom of expression and respect for the press, but in practice it’s not interested,” said Rivas, whose brother, photographer Paúl Rivas, was kidnapped and killed by Colombian guerrillas in 2018. 

Carlos Lauria, author of the CPJ special report on Ecuador and currently executive director of the Inter-American Press Association, said it’s imperative for Ecuador’s government to fund the protection mechanism. In a phone interview with CPJ, he added that the forced exodus of so many journalists — as well as self-censorship by those who remain in the country — had badly damaged press freedom in Ecuador. 

“This is a huge blow for Ecuadorians who need access to vital information in order to debate the country’s problems and make informed decisions,” Lauria told CPJ.

Irene Vélez, the government’s secretary of communications, did not respond to CPJ’s text messages seeking comment. 

The longer journalists remain in exile, the harder it can be for them to remain in the profession, says Ricaurte of Fundamedios. Calderón, for example, is living in Miami, unemployed, and wondering if he’ll ever again find work as a journalist.

“I feel more at peace living in the U.S.,” he says. “But now I have to start my career over, from scratch.”

For Tito and Nole, the husband-and-wife team running Radio Selva from exile, the station keeps them linked to Ecuador and doing the work they love. That’s why from Monday through Friday, they rise at dawn to gather information via phone interviews, chat groups, and social media to keep their morning news show alive.

One subject they no longer cover is drug trafficking. Indeed, their problems began two years ago when Tito, at the urging of local residents whose children were becoming addicting to cocaine, began investigating who was selling drugs in and around Baeza. 

Soon after, burglars broke into Tito and Nole’s house in Baeza and stole their laptops and cell phones. A lawyer who defends gang members warned that they should leave Baeza. To emphasize the point, a man on a motorcycle threatened Tito.

“He lifted up his shirt and showed me his gun,” Tito said. “He called me a ‘toad’ [a police informer] and said: “If you keep publishing this stuff, you will see what will happen.” 

When the family, which includes two daughters ages 13 and 8, decided to flee, they initially moved to another town in Ecuador last October. But when the menacing phone calls didn’t stop, they left the country in January. 

Few people know their whereabouts. Indeed, Baeza residents and town officials are sometimes puzzled when Tito and Nole insist on telephone rather than in-person interviews for their radio program. But they prefer to be discreet about their location. Should people in Baeza find out that the journalists were forced out, they may feel too afraid to speak with them, Nole says. 

It’s unclear how long the family can keep up the charade. They will have to return to Ecuador by the end of the year if they want to renew their government license to operate Radio Selva. It’s also difficult to drum up advertising when they can’t go door-to-door to win over prospective clients. 

But Tito and Nole acknowledge that it’s unlikely security will improve in Ecuador anytime soon or that the drug gangs in and around Baeza will go away. Meanwhile, the journalists have applied for political asylum in the country where they are staying and are mulling proposals from the U.N. refugee agency to relocate to a country even farther away from Ecuador.  

However, such a move would mean unplugging Radio Selva for good. And if that happens, Nole said, “it means that the bad guys win.” 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by John Otis.

Russian authorities revoked the accreditation of Knips-Witting, a journalist with the Moscow bureau of public broadcaster Austrian Radio and Television (ORF), on Monday, June 10. In a Monday statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Knips-Witting, who had been reporting from Moscow since January, was ordered to surrender her accreditation and leave Russia immediately.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said Knips-Witting’s expulsion was a response to Austrian authorities’ expulsion of Ivan Popov, a Vienna-based correspondent of the Russian state news agency TASS.

“The Kremlin’s openly tit-for-tat policy concerning Austrian journalist Maria Knips-Witting shows what little regard Russia holds for journalists,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Journalists should not be used as a tool to retaliate against another country when there are appropriate diplomatic avenues available. Russia should reinstate the credentials of Knips-Witting and allow her and other foreign journalists to report from Russia without fear of reprisal.”

The Austrian Foreign Ministry told CPJ that Knips-Witting’s expulsion “has no basis” and was “completely unjustified.” “This is yet another blatant attack on the freedom of the press in Russia,” the Austrian Foreign Ministry said in an emailed statement.

“ORF regrets the decision and cannot understand it,” the Austrian broadcaster said in a Tuesday statement, adding that it will take “all necessary steps to ensure that ORF audiences continue to receive independent and comprehensive reporting from Russia.”

News reports said that in April, Austrian authorities expelled two Russian TASS correspondents due to security reasons. The Russian Foreign Ministry’s statement said that Austria revoked Popov’s accreditation in late April, forcing him to leave the country on June 7. CPJ was unable to confirm further details about the second correspondent.

“These are not some draconian methods,” Zakharova said on the Russian state-funded Sputnik radio, adding later in a social post: “If you touch our journalists, other foreign correspondents will be sent home too.”

In March, independent Austrian weekly Falter reported that Russian intelligence was surveilling politicians in Vienna under the guise of working as journalists for TASS. The report also mentioned an unnamed foreign correspondent, based in Vienna since 2023, as being closely affiliated with the Russian foreign intelligence service (SVR).

Zakharova said on Sputnik radio that about two weeks before the expulsion of Popov, the Austrian ambassador was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry to discuss Vienna’s move regarding Russian journalists, adding that there was no substantive response.

“He (Austrian diplomat Werner Almhofer) was asked to convey the following message to Vienna: leave Russian journalists alone, we do not want any exchanges, let the media representatives work normally. But Austria, naturally under pressure from the ‘big brother,’ decided otherwise,” Zakharova said on her Telegram channel.  

In March, Russian authorities refused to renew the visa of Spanish journalist Xavier Colás, a Moscow-based correspondent of Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo, and gave him 24 hours to leave Russia after working in the country for 12 years. 

Russia has a history of expelling foreign reporters, including The Guardian’s Luke Harding in 2011 and the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford and Tom Vennink of the Dutch daily de Volkskrant in 2021. Since the start of Ukraine’s full-scale invasion, Russian authorities have failed to renew the visas and accreditations of Finnish journalists Arja Paananen and Anna-Lena Laurén, and Dutch journalist Eva Hartog.

CPJ emailed the Russian Foreign Ministry requesting additional comment on both the TASS correspondents’ and Knips-Witting’s expulsions but received no immediate response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Brian Felsenthal, a news photographer for WPRI-TV, was attacked alongside other members of the press while reporting outside a courthouse in Taunton, Massachusetts, on June 3, 2024. His alleged assailant was charged with multiple counts of assault later that day.

According to a police report shared with the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a man identified as Louis Chaves was being arraigned at the Taunton District Court on unrelated assault charges and was released on a $250 bond. Following his hearing, Chaves and his wife exited through a side door of the courthouse and were approached by a gaggle of broadcast journalists from multiple local stations seeking comment on the allegations against him.

“Louis appeared to be overcome with rage at the sight of the reporters and started advancing on a cameraman,” the report stated. After striking and kicking the first photojournalist, identified in the report as James Cullity of the Boston-based station WFXT, Chaves directed his attention and aggression toward Felsenthal.

In footage aired by Rhode Island-based WPRI-TV, Chaves’ wife can be seen attempting to hold him back while he slaps at Felsenthal and his camera. Felsenthal told police that he was not injured and his equipment was not damaged.

According to the police report, WPRI-TV reporter Alex Torres-Perez was working alongside Felsenthal that day. She told officers that while Chaves threatened her and the other journalists when they attempted to ask him questions, he did not assault her.

After walking a short distance away, Chaves also picked up a branch from a nearby tree and attempted to throw it at the group of journalists but it struck the tree in front of him instead.

Chaves was arrested several hours later and booked on three charges: assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and assault with a dangerous weapon for his alleged attacks on Cullity, and assault and battery for his alleged attack on Felsenthal.

He was arraigned at 10 a.m. the following day and released on the same bond, but was issued a warning and ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation.

According to court records reviewed by the Tracker, Chaves has a pretrial hearing on Aug. 8.

Neither Felsenthal nor WPRI-TV responded to requests for comment.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Well it started twenty years ago so it’s an odd thing to consider. I wanted to do a project with a flawed narrator that could love an American hero too much and make the subject all about themselves. I wanted someone lesser known, yet consequential to American history. And I wanted someone who was a “good guy” with flaws. But honestly, I live for projects that are funny on the level of “Why did this person even decide to do this?” If it kinda glows for me and provides the practical needs for structure and theme, tone and setting, then I can’t resist. Grant did all that initially. and then across the two decades he and the project became much more.

It’s already in the past enough for me to start unfaithfully narrating it when recollecting. In order for me to share my past with you I must convert it into shareable forms. Memory fades. Memory is relative, memory morphs the more you mess with it. Imagine a photo being changed by your eye each time you look at it. That’s memory. It’s hard (or impossible?) to access the raw sense data without subjective alteration, consciously done or not.

I’m answering these questions so my past is going to be filtered toward that goal and not, say, the goal of talking to a therapist or to myself, or even as an aspect of the book we’re discussing. I can try to be honest and objective but even that is an altering directive to memories if they are ambiguous or ambivalent. Objectivity itself can lead away from accuracy. Forgetfulness and loss happens to memory across time but we pretend it hasn’t. We “predict the past.” We feel good that we, in the present, are what we’re supposed to be or even if we’re the result of some bad things we can feel a false certitude from the narration we apply to the gaps of past times. We assume we are the cumulative effect of the past’s causes, and this seems right. But when we look back and explain our past through present day contexts, we are the cause, and the past-facts get lined up in our created effect of a story.

We can’t ever say exactly, nor completely, how it was. So we say how we feel about what we can talk about. We can only use what we can recall (or collect, and even then we must wonder about the accuracy of the process of whomever took down whatever from whichever POV, always subjective even if first hand). Put on top of that the demands of narrative structure, and publishing and reading norms, and the vast past gets reduced to childishly simple chains of cause and effect based on storytelling sense, on present day sense. Our biographies might have correct facts but our presentations are subjective. Even if only editorial. Even if only in what we choose and choose not to include.

How can we really know what it was like to be there? How can we really recall what it was like to be ourselves 20 years ago when we have all these 20 years worth of other experience (including continuous accessing and altering the same memories, which mixes things up).

Biopics are my real bugbear. How dare we?! I love them and hate them. Oppenheimer. I’ve watched it a few times. Everyone is great. The movie is great. But come on. The poison apple controversy is just a perfect example of the needs of narrative overriding the ethics of historical objectivity. Both in American Prometheus and in the film Oppenheimer, an actual person, is depicted as a would-be murderer if he hadn’t rushed to correct his own mistake. He is depicted as having injected his professor’s apple with cyanide and left it on his desk overnight. It’s compelling and thematically supports the narrative themes of doing without considering the consequences until it’s too late. The Oppenheimer family refute this bit of history as it was based on some loose talk with considerable character repercussions if true. But here’s my problem: doesn’t matter if it’s true, from now on everyone will assume it is because it was told so convincingly via the powers of narrative.

That’s what I tried to do on purpose with my book. It’s one big poison apple.

I can see this even in The Professor Brothers! Thank you for taking it in this direction. You’ve got me thinking about how complex your book is, despite what you called it in the first email you sent (you called it “silly,” maybe?) And you’ve got me thinking about how complex humor is, how complicated our relationship is to the truth right now, and the way the truth and a sense of humor interact. Like what does it even mean to be funny right now? Usually a quick shortcut to something being funny is bending the truth and playing with it, but like you say, it’s a poison apple, and right now we’re kind of being poisoned to death. So where do we go from here? Where do humor and the truth go from here?

I know a lot of funny people, professionally and not, and the funniest are as serious as they are silly. I like things to be balanced. I agree, it’s possible to be drowning in distractions. My phone. My TV. Everyone is trying to make me laugh and it’s easy to get sick of it. I won’t pretend to have an answer for all that, but personally I like works of art that feel personal and balanced with all sorts of silly and serious, profundity and profanity, with anything in there that feels like it was urgent to the artist. There is a long list line of literary laughers. Voltaire. Rabelais. Etc. I’m a big admirer of the modernists as much as the postmodernists and I like the pastiche mixing pot approach. Perfect example are the Beatles—I like the silly stuff as much as the serious. It makes it feel human, alive and deep.

So for my book—which for me is an avenue of self expression whereas my TV work is more of a sport with rules for general audience approval—I tried to bury a bunch of heavy themes under a bunch of layers of silly so it would work for lots of different moods. It’s a comedy for sure, but the best comedies have sound philosophy and psychology underneath. We might be underwater with all this comedy coming at us 24/7 but I don’t think funny is dead; just because we’re forever drowning doesn’t mean we don’t need a drink now and then.

Definitely agree with you that underneath humor is always something serious, something weighty. You mention literary laughers—do you have favorites who are still alive and writing today?

Who writes funny lit now? Well, Since Richard Rorty died, the obvious answer is Pynchon, natch. Hahaha. Admittedly I’m still catching up to the living, and don’t have a lot of contemporary names on hand, but Percival Everett is obviously great, and Beatty’s The Sellout was fun. But Pynchon is the Jordan/LeBron of our time. Those works are dear to me. He connects to the past and future. American yet a citizen of the world. Deep and funny. Wide and varied. He’s earned the hype.

I’d add Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport to that short sample of funny lit. It’s such a funny idea, but a big idea. and it cooks. Just such a fun and deep and surprising work. Way beyond the 1000p sentence but also totally living up to it in a way that made it easy to forget.

I haven’t read it! I have been extra careful with my reading time these past few years because it’s so rare to have free time. Do you have a writing routine? How was it with writing this book? Was there a point when it really took on a life of its own and just started writing itself?

This book took twenty years. I wrote a version in 2004-5 ish after initial research, but it was not good. Then I fell backwards into cartoon work, which was never a plan. I am a book person. So this Grant book was one of many spinning plates that I like to keep warm. As I go about my day doing whatever I’ve promised myself and others, I collect epiphanies and jokes, insights and facts for a variety of projects. I jot them down and throw them into neat little files, which swell until something is feeling lived-in and as well known as I might achieve. I’ve got quite a few books pretty near completion, some ten year projects, some more, some less. When I felt like finally this Grant book was ready, I relied on the high-pressure story-making process from TV writing. I love a good outline. Often I’ll linger on an outline for years, just throwing details into the spots as they come to me. But for the Grant book it went fast: outline, sentence focus, revisions, revisions, revisions. Themes and Passes are big for me; going over the whole, or section by section with one thing in mind, then another, then another. I do Punch ‘N’ Scrunch which is a kind of punch up and slim down pass. I did the audiobook for this so I wanted to make sure it was sound in the sound. I whispered it out loud, catching bad music, moving little things for the words to feel like a match to the content. But this being based on a real life of facts, I worked between the marks of the timeline. I had to stay close to the real events, just play with the presentation and interpretation of everything.

When you’re stuck and you aren’t sure where to go next with a project, what do you do? What helps? What doesn’t help?

I don’t usually have the problem of not knowing where to go with a project. If there are unknown aspects to a project those are exciting areas that I get to push into. I never see the missing parts as a problem, more of the reason to do this. The unexplored unknown that will become something real.

My problem is the opposite: too many options. I get option paralysis. Analysis paralysis is a real thing if you have a deadline sooner than 20 years. I usually am fast and sound with the concept, with the outline, with the plan. TV writing was like boot camp for this kind of thing. Working on a series of stories at a time on a schedule with a room full of writers is a no BS zone. I’m thankful for the experiences there. What gets me is when you’ve got all the big blocks sketched in on the canvas: the composition works. But it’s not enough to just work. It’s gotta sing. So, that’s when things start getting spooky.

I can start doubting the choices. And often there is positive negativity here. I’m open to that. Destruction can be useful. Negativity is great. Sometimes you don’t need a cheerleader, you need a coach to tell you the hard destructive truths that something isn’t as great as it needs to be. It can freak people out when you start taking apart a car that can go. In my mind I’m always wondering if it can go better, faster, farther, and into places that people might be excited to see for the first time. It’s not enough to just work.

When I’m stuck? I have to tell myself to stop mulling and testing variations. That realization comes from embarrassment. It’s like, oh I’ve taken too long. Time to actually prove to myself that this wasn’t a waste of time. When it’s time to really draft it out then I put on a very different persona: scheduled berserker.

“Scheduled berserker feels” right to me too. Like you’re in some kind of trance, but with a heightened awareness of time.

I make a schedule of daily quotas and I work through it bit by bit. Schedules and reasonable expectations get me across the finish line. I use a big physical calendar with post-its. It’s not for anyone else but for me, to be a good worker and to rise above hobbyist or amateur or tinkerer.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lindsay Lerman.

Television New Zealand has breached its collective agreement with the E tū union when deciding on discontinuing programmes, the Employment Relations Authority has ruled.

It was announced in March that 68 staff members who work for news programmes Midday and Tonight, consumer justice programme Fair Go, current affairs programme Sunday, and the youth programme Re: and in-house video content production were affected by redundancy.

Last month, the company confirmed the axing of Fair Go and Sunday, along with its midday and late night news bulletins.

• READ MORE: Other TVNZ programme, staff cuts reports

Yesterday, the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) ordered the broadcaster to go into mediation with E tū union.

“The Authority finds that TVNZ has breached cl 10.1.1 of the collective agreement,” the ruling stated.

It said that if after mediation, matters were not resolved, an order would be made against TVNZ to comply with its collective agreement.

Executives, staff gave evidence
TVNZ executives and staff were among those giving evidence in an investigation meeting at the ERA in Auckland on Monday relating to the state broadcaster’s alleged breaches in its redundancy process.

E tū union took the case against TVNZ, arguing the company did not follow the consultation requirements under its collective agreement with its members.

E tū wants more of a role in the initial decision-making, which it said TVNZ was obliged to do under the collective agreement.

But TVNZ opposed the application, claiming there had been no breach and that the company had clearly communicated to staff and unions that redundancies would take place.

In a statement, TVNZ said: “We are disappointed by the decision today from the Employment Relations Authority. We will now take the time to consider the decision and our next steps”.

Staff still employed
E tū negotiator Michael Wood told RNZ Checkpoint yesterday that the determination was a very clear one and any redundancy notices that had been issued were therefore not valid.

Staff still continue to be employed during this mediation because “there has not been a legitimate process to result in their redundancies”, Wood said.

It had been a “botched process”, he said.

“If you have an agreement with someone that says you’re going to work through something in a particular way, you need to follow it and TVNZ did not follow it in this case and the ERA has affirmed that.”

It had been an incredibly disruptive time for stuff and they were “really happy about this outcome”, Wood said.

The ERA said the clause that TVNZ had breached was an uncommon provision, but Wood said the company signed off on it.

“We would like to meet as soon as we reasonably can.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Former Fiji Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama has been sentenced to one year in prison, Fiji media are reporting.

Bainimarama, alongside suspended Fiji Police Commissioner Sitiveni Qiliho appeared in the High Court in Suva today for their sentencing hearing for a case involving their roles in blocking a police investigation at the University of the South Pacific in 2021.

Qiliho has been sentenced to two years jail.

• READ MORE: Other Bainimarama case reports

Bainimarama and Qiliho jailed.      Video: Fiji Village

Bainimarama, the 69-year-old former military commander and 2006 coup leader, had been found guilty of perverting the course of justice.

Qiliho had been found guilty of abuse of office by the High Court Acting Chief Justice Salesi Temo, who upheld the state’s appeal.

Bainimarama and Qiliho walked out of the High Court in Suva in handcuffs, and were escorted straight into a police vehicle.

“The former PM and the suspended COMPOL were found not guilty and acquitted accordingly by Resident Magistrate Seini Puamau at the Suva Magistrates Court on 12 October 2023,” the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions said.

“The State had filed an appeal against their acquittal where the Acting Chief Justice, Salesi Temo then overturned the Magistrate’s decision and found the two guilty as charged. The matter was then sent back to the Magistrates’ Court for sentencing.

“In sentencing the duo, Magistrate Puamau announced that both their convictions would not be registered. The former PM was granted an absolute discharge while the suspended COMPOL received a conditional discharge with a fine of $1500 on 28 March 2024 by the Suva Magistrates Court following which the State had filed an appeal and challenged the discharge for a custodial sentence.

“The Acting Chief Justice quashed the Magistrate Court’s sentence and pronounced the custodial sentences respectively.”

Earlier today, local media reported an increased police presence outside the Suva court complex.

“There is more pronounced police presence than usual with vehicles being checked upon entry. A section has been cordoned off in front of the High Court facing Holiday Inn,” broadcaster fijivillage.com reported.

State broadcaster FBC reported that police only allowed close relatives and Bainimarama and Qiliho’s associates, along with the media, to sit in the courtroom.

MPs from the main opposition FijiFirst party in Parliament, including opposition leader Inia Seruiratu, Faiyaz Koya were present in court.

Brief timeline:

• The duo were sentenced by the Magistrates Court on 28 March.
• Magistrate Seini Puamau gave Bainimarama an absolute discharge — the lowest level sentence an offender can get and no conviction was registered.
• Qiliho was fined FJ$1500 and without a conviction as well.
• The 69-year-old former military commander and 2006 coup leader was found guilty of perverting the course of justice in a case related to the University of the South Pacific; and suspended police chief Qiliho was found guilty of abuse of office by the High Court Acting Chief Justice Salesi Temo.
• Magistrate Puamau’s judgement had left many in the legal circles and commentators in the country perplexed.
• The State – through the Office of the Director of Public Prosecution – had appealed the sentencing straightaway to the High Court.
• They were back in court 7 days later — during the court appearance at the High Court, the Acting Chief Justice Salesi Temo, gave time until the 24 April for the respondents to file their submissions and for the State to reply by the 29th.
• The sentencing hearing was last Thursday, 2 May.
• Acting Chief Justice Salesi Temo sentences Bainimarama to one year in jail and Qiliho for two years.

Bainimarama’s attempt to pervert the course of justice charge had a maximum tariff of five years while Qiliho’s charge of abuse of office carried a maximum tariff of 10 years.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.

― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

“Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

Everything becomes entertainment fodder.

As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.

Yet look behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest propagandists today is the U.S. government.

Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

You may not hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media.

However, when you have social media giants colluding with the government in order to censor so-called disinformation, all the while the mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation (the U.S. government), the Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control.

This has been in the works for a long time.

Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece “The CIA and the Media,” reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

In some instances, as Bernstein showed, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news.

If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

The government’s fear-mongering is a key element in its mind-control programming.

It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

Fear not only increases the power of government, but it also divides the people into factions, persuades them to see each other as the enemy and keeps them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.

This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

It was almost 100 years ago when Bernays wrote his seminal work Propaganda:

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

To this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

All of the distracting, disheartening, disorienting news you are bombarded with daily is being driven by propaganda churned out by one corporate machine (the corporate-controlled government) and fed to the American people by way of yet another corporate machine (the corporate-controlled media).

“For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it,” writes investigative journalist Nick Davies.

So where does that leave us?

Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.

A populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

The announced closure of Television New Zealand’s last primetime current affairs programme seems to be the final nail in the coffin for New Zealand’s television credibility. Coming a day after the announcement of the closure of Newshub, it shows that Kiwis have the worst television and video media in the Western world.

Let’s compare ourselves with our mates across the ditch. Australia’s ABC TV features a nightly current affairs show called 7.30. The blurb for it reads:

“Sarah Ferguson presents Australia’s premier daily current affairs program, delivering agenda-setting public affairs journalism and interviews that hold the powerful to account. Plus political analysis from Laura Tingle.”

• READ MORE: Stuff to provide news bulletins to replace Newshub on Three
• Silent majority must speak out to save vital journalism — Gavin Ellis
• Other Newshub reports

Clearly 7.30 is far more serious than our Seven Sharp with its fluffy stories and advertorials. The ABC also screens six weekly current affairs shows and documentaries this week. Shows like Australian Story, Four Corners and Media Watch.

But Australia has five times as many people as we do so that’s why they can afford it, right?

Ireland has five million people, like NZ, but they still have primetime current affairs. In fact, the Irish enjoy quite a lot of it. The Irish version of TVNZ is RTÉ and features a nightly current affairs show called Nationwide and three weekly current affairs programmes on serious topics.

There are several other human interest factual programmes too, on subjects like history, gardening, dance and more. It’s the same in other countries with similar populations such as Norway, Denmark, Finland and so on.

It’s true that in New Zealand, there’s still the off-peak studio politics programmes like Q+A, and current affairs in te ao Māori are well examined on Whakaata Māori. But what about the rest of NZ?

Some people might say television is dead, and everything is online now. But nearly all online current affairs videos start out as television programmes. The only exceptions are Newsroom’s video investigations with Melanie Reid, and Stuff Circuit which is now disbanded. And for younger audiences there is Re: which TVNZ is also making cuts to.

Death of current affairs TV
The death of New Zealand’s prime-time current affairs television has been a long time coming. At first it was documentaries that dwindled and then disappeared off our screens.

Other genres that are expensive to produce have also become extinct or rarer than a fairy tern — drama, science programmes, kidult, arts programmes, wildlife documentaries, chat shows. Now we can add consumer affairs and prime-time current affairs to the list.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. If other countries can do it, why not NZ?

On Wednesday, the Minister for Media and Communications, Melissa Lee, said “I don’t think I can actually save anything. I’m trying to be who I am, the Minister for Media and Communications.”

This suggests either a lack of understanding of her role or a lack of ambition. She also let slip that there was no way she could save Newshub.

The only substantive solution to come from the minister is her promise to review the Broadcasting Act. But that review process was initiated by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage years ago and started under the Labour government.

Moreover, the Broadcasting Act does little more than lay out the rules for broadcasting complaints, election broadcasting, and establish NZ On Air, the BSA and Te Māngai Pāho.

Minister just tweaking
The minister says she is reviewing the Broadcasting Act to create a “more level playing field” and allow media businesses to “innovate”. That doesn’t sound like it will do much for television and video current affairs, which will take much more than just tweaking how NZ On Air and the BSA work.

Perhaps she intends something much more comprehensive, such as a new funding stream for public media, perhaps through a levy, a compulsory subscription, or even a licence fee.

Despite her protestations, there are several options available to the minister. To save TVNZ’s Fair Go and Sunday, she could provide TVNZ with an interim cash injection (which is actually what governments often do in disasters) until the comprehensive long-term funding is sorted out.

To save Newshub she could promise to remove advertising from TVNZ, or partially on weekends only. This would throw Warner Bros Discovery a lifeline in the form of advertisers looking for a television station to advertise on. She does not have to stand by and watch while our media burns.

Sunday is only with us for a few more weeks. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Myles Thomas is a trustee for Better Public Media Trust. This article was first published by The New Zealand Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Warner Bros Discovery has done a deal with Stuff to provide news to replace Newshub. It will keep news on TV channel Three from July 6 and help Three retain some viewers.

It also means important income for Stuff, but it will also stretch the company’s staff, finances and technology.

Stuff will provide a one-hour bulletin each weekday and a half-hour on weekends.

• READ MORE: Other Newshub reports
• Silent majority must speak out to save vital journalism — Gavin Ellis

Stuff will also retain a live Newshub website.

Warner Bros Discovery chief executive and Stuff publisher Sinead Boucher confirmed the arrangement at a joint news conference today.

Boucher had told her staff the company will “definitely be bringing some Newshub staff” to produce the 6pm bulletins.

She then told reporters she was unsure how many staff would be required, but it would be fewer than “40 to 50” specified in a “stripped back” proposal from Newshub’s own staff.

‘We are digital first’
“We’re not getting into the TV business. We are a digital first multimedia company building a new 6pm product for Warner Brothers,” she said.

Mediawatch understands many media companies approached WBD with proposals to provide news after the company first proposed the cost-saving closure in late February.

However, by the time of the confirmation earlier this month most of those had been rejected by WBD.

Sky TV was also reported to be in the running. It currently runs a Newshub-produced bulletin at 5:30pm each weekday on the free-to-air channel Sky Open and would require a replacement. It also had plenty of TV production facilities.

Sinead Boucher said a Sky bulletin was not included in the deal, but she hoped there would be discussions about that.

Negotiations were carried out in secret both before and after Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) confirmed the complete closure of Newshub on July 5, leaving the company with no news presence.

Stuff refused to comment during the process and Stuff journalists told RNZ Mediawatch on Monday night they were unaware of an impending announcement.

“We didn’t want to raise expectations for Newshub staff when we weren’t sure what would be required,” Boucher told reporters today, explaining that the deal had been done in haste.

Why do the deal – and what’s it worth?
The money WBD is putting into the deal is confidential but it is certain to be just a fraction of the current cost of running Newshub, which would run to tens of millions of dollars a year.

WBD was clearly determined to carve that cost off the bottom line of its loss-making local operation. The financial benefit for Stuff may not be great taking the set-up and running costs into account.

WBD’s Glen Kyne said neither company would comment on specific commercial details, but when asked about the possible profit margin for Stuff, Boucher said: “Both parties are satisfied with where we have ended up.”

But while the audience for TV news bulletins is declining — and the ad revenue has fallen accordingly — it is still substantial for TVNZ 1 and Three. The “appointment viewing” time of 6pm creates a viewing peak which the TV broadcasters use to hold viewers for the entertainment or factual programmes that follow.

Former Newshub chief Hal Crawford told Mediawatch the overall audience for Three could collapse without news in the evening.

“There’s still a reason that the 1 and the 3 on remotes around the country are worn down. News is the one programme that runs 365 days a year . . .  which the schedule is going to rely on to lead into prime time. So the rest of your schedule is going to dwindle. Ratings are gonna fall off and everything is going to go to pieces,” Crawford told Mediawatch.

“The loss of the newsroom represents the loss of the ability to respond to any event in real time. That is the heart and soul of a traditional TV broadcaster.”

Why Stuff?
Stuff has journalists in more places around the country than any other news publisher.

Stuff’s publisher Sinead Boucher recently told a parliamentary committee it had journalists in 19 locations, even after years of cuts and successive retrenchments.

“We have replatformed our business and have new ways of working. We look at this as starting this bulletin afresh rather than using the broadcast-heavy technology of today,” she told reporters at today’s news conference.

It also has audio and video production facilities at some sites and some senior journalists with TV reporting and presenting experience, such as former Newshub political editor Tova O’Brien, former TV3 current affairs reporter Paula Penfold and senior journalist Andrea Vance.

But Stuff video ventures have not endured. It launched its own free online video platform Play Stuff in mid-2019. It also hired key former TV3 current affairs staff for its own longform video productions but disbanded the Stuff Circuit team earlier this year.

When the Stuff app and website were refreshed recently, short vertical videos were added as a feature, called Stuff Shorts.

Stuff’s weakness has in the past been a dependence on newspaper advertising. It was only last year that Stuff launched its first paywalls for online news for three of its mastheads.

Stuff’s main rival NZME has half the country’s radio networks in addition to newsrooms supplying its newspapers and websites. NZME’s New Zealand Herald has been getting revenue from “premium content” digital subscriptions for four years.

After Boucher acquired Stuff in 2020, Stuff embarked on a digital transition creating more digital audio and video content. It has hired executives from multimedia companies such as Nadia Tolich (ex-NZME now Stuff Digital managing director) and former NZME digital leader Laura Maxwell, now Stuff’s chief executive.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Many observers said this had been coming but few seemed to have a plan for it, including the government. 

Mediawatch looks at what viewers will lose, efforts to resist the cuts and talks to the news chief at Newshub which is set to close completely.

By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter

On the AM show last Wednesday, newsreader Nicky Styris suffered a frog in the throat at the wrong time.

Host Melissa Chan Green took over her bulletin while Styris quickly recovered. Minutes later Styris had to take the place of no-show panel guest Paula Bennett.

Just before that, viewers saw co-host Lloyd Burr on his knees fixing the studio flat-pack furniture with a drill.

Three hours later they were at an all-staff meeting at which executives from offshore owner Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) confirmed the complete closure of Newshub by midyear.

On TVNZ’s Midday news soon after, reporter Kim Baker-Wilson was live from the scene of the announcement of Newshub’s demise.

The previous day the roles were reversed, with Newshub’s Simon Shepherd outside TVNZ’s building reporting TVNZ’s Midday had been scrapped, along with the late news Tonight and Fair Go. 

On Wednesday TVNZ also confirmed flagship current affairs show Sunday will cease next month.

So as things stand, it’s the end of the line for all news bulletins on TVNZ other than 1 News at 6, though the news-like shows Breakfast and Seven Sharp survive because they accommodate lucrative sponsored content (“activations” in the ad business) as well as ads.

And TV channel Three will be entirely news-free for the first time in its 35-year history.

Senior journalists led by investigations editor Michael Morrah presented a proposal for a stripped-back and shortened news bulletin to keep the Newshub name alive (and some jobs) but while WBD took it seriously, it eventually turned the idea down.

Another media player to fill the Newshub void?
There have been rumours and reports that other media companies were talking to WBD about filling the Newshub at 6 news void.

Initially light-on-detail reports of lifelines suggested a possible sale of Newshub to another media company. Then there were reports of other media companies pitching to make news for WBD on a much-reduced budget.

Among the names mentioned in media despatches was NZME, which has radio and video studios and journalists around the country, though most of them are north of Taupo.

NZME told Stuff “it was not currently part of the process”.

The Herald’s Media Insider column reported on Tuesday that Newshub was “set to receive a lifeline” and understood Stuff was “among the leading contenders.”

However when Stuff itself reported on Wednesday that Stuff was “understood to be a likely contender,” a spokesperson for Stuff declined to comment to Stuff’s reporter on whether Stuff had been in talks with WBD — or not.

RNZ said it wasn’t in the frame for this. (It recently killed off the video version of its only daily news show with pictures, Checkpoint).

Sky TV has production facilities galore and its free-to-air TV channel Sky Open currently runs a Newshub-made news bulletin at 5:30 each weekday. Sky has only said it was an “interesting idea” — or words to that effect.

“At this point there is no deal,” WBD local boss Glen Kyne told reporters after confirming the closure of Newshub on Wednesday.

Kyne also said the company’s “door has been open to all internal and external feedback and ideas, and we will continue to be”.

But anyone opening that door clearly isn’t willing to do it in daylight — or  tell the rest of the media about it.

Lifelines likely?

If there is to be any kind of “Newshub-lite” lifeline, a key question is: what is WBD prepared to pay for the programme?

Presumably not much, given that they said they had no choice but to carve the cost of Newshub — amounting to tens of millions a year — from its bottom line in line with its reducing revenue.

So is it worth any major media company’s while to commit to making news in video for another outlet? And it would have to be done in a hurry because the last Newshub bulletins screen on July 5.

When Newshub’s owners first announced they wanted to get rid of it in late February, its former chief editor Hal Crawford told Mediawatch the problem with finding a buyer was that minimum viable cost for a credible TV news operation was greater than anyone here was prepared to spend.

Longtime TV3 news boss Mark Jennings (now co-editor of Newsroom) said any substitute service on the fraction of the current budget would have another problem — TVNZ’s 1 News.

“You’re up against a sophisticated TVNZ product so viewers will have an immediate comparison. Probably that won’t be favorable for Warner Brothers,” he told RNZ.

TVNZ has its own news production problems after the cuts they confirmed this week.

“We’re proposing to establish a new long-form team within our news operation, which would continue to bring important current affairs and consumer affairs stories to Aotearoa in a different way on our digital platforms.”

TVNZ declined Mediawatch‘s request to speak to TVNZ’s news chief Phil O’Sullivan about that at this time.

Newshub’s news boss responds

One who did though is Newshub news boss Richard Sutherland — appointed as interim senior director of news at Newshub in January.

It was his second spell at Newshub, during a career in broadcast news spanning four decades at almost every significant national news outlet in the country, including RNZ, where he stepped down as head of news a year ago.

In that time he’s experienced many a financial crisis in the business — but did he see this one coming?

“The last couple of weeks has been coming for quite some time. I think that the so-called legacy news operations have almost done too good a job of keeping the lights on and papering over the cracks. And we just got to a point [the industry] couldn’t paper over the cracks any longer.

“But when you look at audience behaviour and the fall off and revenue, particularly in the advertising market, then that doesn’t surprise me that we’ve got to where we’ve got to.”

But if the audience was big, the ad revenue would be too?

“It’s certainly by no means as big as it once was simply because people have other options available to them. The cliche is that you’re not in a war with the other media, but in a war for people’s attention.”

“It’s not so much the audience has changed so much as the dynamics of the advertising market that has really changed over the last sort of 10 to 15 years. The digital advertising — and the big two main players in that space, Facebook and Google — are eating everybody’s lunch.”

TV ad income on the slide
Annual advertising stats that came out this very week show media in 2023 attracted $3.36 billion across the whole of the media industry — about the same as in 2022.

But TV advertising revenue of $517 million in 2022 slumped to $443 million last year.

“That’s why what the TV industry has found is that can’t cut its costs fast enough to meet the falloff in the advertising income,” Sutherland told Mediawatch. 

Digital-only ad revenue rose by $88 million in 2023 — but it’s Google and Facebook which secures the vast bulk of that.

But if this has been coming for a number of years, as Sutherland says, has there been enough planning for it?

After the closure of Newshub was mooted by its owner last month, seven of Sutherland’s colleagues led by investigations editor Michael Morrah put together a transition plan to keep Newshub on air in a few days.

Shouldn’t this sort of transition planning have been done at high levels over recent years right across the television business?

“Every media company that I’ve worked for or have observed over the last few years has been trying to innovate and get to a more sustainable level. The revenue was just collapsing far faster than anyone ever anticipated.”

“It annoys me when I hear people say older media haven’t innovated enough. We’ve done a lot of innovation. That’s pretty lazy politics to just say: ‘You need to innovate.’

“It’s also lazy politics to say, the government should just come in and bail everyone out. New Zealand Incorporated needs to have a big conversation about what it wants to do with the media and how it wants to fund it.

“For the past few years the industry has been like so many rats in a sack, fighting with each chasing a smaller and smaller amount of ad dollars. We need to get together and work out how we get ourselves collectively out of the sack,” Sutherland told Mediawatch.

Shortly before TVNZ and Newshub announced their cuts, there was a meeting of chief executives including Newshub’s owners Warner Bros Discovery to discuss a shared new service. TVNZ rejected the idea.

“But a lot has changed in the last couple of months. And I would like to think that eventually we’ll get to a point where we can actually have honest and productive conversations about what we can do to help each other as well as maintaining a degree of competition, but also realising that if we just keep fighting with each other, we’re not going to have a sustainable industry,” Sutherland said.

Would Sutherland want to work for a low-budget alternative to Newshub stave off the complete closure? And would Kiwis want such a service?

“There is a segment of the audience that appreciates a very highly produced, well-curated news bulletin every night. And there’s large numbers of people who no longer see that as part of their media diet.

“The trick is to provide options so that people can get what they want when they want it.

“It’s not really for me to say what a possible replacement for Newshub might look like. I’m well away from those negotiations.

“If we reach a stage where the media scene here withers away to nothing, there’ll be no-one to tell the stories. The media uncovers a lot of shady stuff in this country.

“And the fear of media coverage prevents people in positions of power and authority at all levels doing a lot of shady stuff. So it is important to document the ructions of the New Zealand media scene just like we do in other parts of the country.”

Minister in a corner

The day the axe fell at Newshub and at TVNZ, New Zealand’s screen producers’ guild Spada said “while the newsroom cuts have dominated media coverage to date, it is actually the whole production sector being impacted”.

“While TVNZ and Three aren’t giving definitive numbers at this time, Spada has calculated that we are looking at around $50 million coming out of our sector,” said president Irene Gardiner.

Spada is also asking the government to exempt screen funding agencies from the percent public spending cuts and to force the international streaming platform to support local production.

Spada called for” swift and decisive action” from the government on this.

Should they be holding their breath?

When confronted by reporters for a response to the current TV news crisis, Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee said: “If only I was a magician, if I could actually just snap up a solution, that would be fantastic.

“But I’m not a magician, and I’m trying to find a solution to modernise the industry . . .  there is a process happening.”

But the media are not expecting magic — just a plan rather than assertions of a process with no timeline.

She has repeatedly said she’s preparing policy in a paper to take to cabinet, but refused to give any details.

On RNZ’s Checkpoint, persistent and pointed questions from Lisa Owen yielded few further clues.

Newstalk ZB Drive host Heather du Plessis-Allan told Melissa Lee she was being “weird and shady” and the next morning ZB’s Mike Hosking told her she was using “buzzwords that don’t mean anything” and was doomed to fail.

Stuff’s Tova O’Brien reported that the need to consult coalition allies on policy means it can’t be progressed until after Winston Peters returns from overseas at the end of the month.

The under-wraps media policy is also not in the government’s recently-released quarterly action plan.

Meanwhile this week, our two biggest TV news broadcasters ran out of time.

Ex-minister leading resistance to cuts

After his unenlightening on-air interview with minister Melissa Lee on Thursday morning, Mike Hosking’s ZB listeners told him she reminded them of ministers in the last government.

Coincidentally, one of them was also one of few people who did speak out about the crisis while it was unfolding.

Michael Wood represented TVNZ journalists from the E tū union as its negotiations specialist.

E tū  is now taking legal action against TVNZ, claiming it failed to abide by the conditions of their employment agreement.

Could that reverse or wind back any of the cuts TVNZ has announced?

“That does remain to be seen. The collective agreement has very clear processes around what should happen if TVNZ wants to move forward and make changes. It requires [staff members] to be involved throughout the process, and for the company to try and reach agreement with them. Our very strong view is that that hasn’t happened.”

“Staff have said: ‘Look, five years ago, we came to you and said we want to do these things with our shows to make sure they have a sustainable future to make sure that they have a strong online platform.’ And [TVNZ] frankly has not demonstrated strategy and leadership around those things.”

“These are still shows that are very, very popular. Canceling them will reduce costs, but based on TVNZ’s own information that they’ve provided, it will reduce revenue by more.”

It’s been difficult to get any media company executives or even journalists at the two companies affected by these cuts to talk about them, even off-the-record.

Wood is one of the few people who has spoken frankly to broadcasters’ executives, albeit confidentially behind closed doors.

“There is a bit of a delicate dance which has to happen when media companies themselves are making these decisions. And media need to report on that.

“So I have some sympathy, but these aren’t just individual employment issues. This is a public policy issue . . .  about whether we have a functioning and vibrant Fourth Estate.”

Wood was until last year a minister in the Labour government which could have averted the TVNZ cuts.

It spent more than $16 million planning a new public media entity to replace TVNZ and RNZ with a not-for-profit public media entity — but then scrapped it weeks before it was due to begin.

“You’ve just identified one of the core things that we’ve got to deal with. TVNZ, in terms of its statutory form, is neither one thing nor the other. It has a commercial imperative and it also has some other obligations in terms of public good.

“News and current affairs should be at the heart of that — and that is something that we should be much clearer about.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Fasan, regional bureau chief for the privately owned Galaxy Television, told CPJ that he was using his phone to film people and soldiers arriving at the site of a planned protest over economic hardship in Uvwie, part of the city of Warri, when a soldier demanded that he hand over his phone.

Fasan said he refused and presented his press identification, but one soldier hit him in the chest with a gun and ordered him into their van. The journalist said the soldiers accused him of resisting arrest, handcuffed him, and drove him around for an hour, during which time they took his phone and deleted the images that he had shot that morning.

When the military van returned to the site, a senior military official directed the soldiers to release the journalist without charge, which they did, according to Fasan and Gbenga Ahmed, a camera operator with ITV, who witnessed the event and spoke with CPJ. 

Disrupted vote counting

Separately, on February 17, unidentified men disrupted vote counting for a governorship election primary for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party in a hotel in Benin City, capital of southern Edo State, attacked at least three journalists covering the event, and destroyed an unknown number of cameras, laptops, and tripods, according to news reports, a journalist who was at the event, and Festus Alenkhe, chairperson of the Nigeria Union of Journalists in Edo State, both of whom spoke with CPJ.

Two APC factions were simultaneously collating votes and announcing results when one group’s process was violently disrupted, according to media reports.

Fortune Oyem, a reporter with the state-owned Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria, told CPJ that he was slapped and lost his digital voice recorder as he ran from the assailants. He also said he witnessed a reporter with the state-owned Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) being beaten. CPJ phoned the NTA reporter who declined to comment.  

Bernard Akede of News Central TV said in an interview with his outlet that he was hit, causing his lip to bleed, his phone was seized, although later retrieved, and his tripod was damaged. He said at least two other reporters fled the assailants, and several had their cameras, laptops, and tripods destroyed.

A video by AIT Live showed chairs overturned and journalists’ equipment strewn on the floor and reported that the damage occurred in the presence of armed policemen who did not intervene.

At a news conference, Alenkhe of the Nigeria Union of Journalists condemned the violence and called on the APC to apologize, replace the damaged equipment, and compensate any injured journalists who had sought medical treatment.

Alenkhe told CPJ on March 11, that the APC had apologized and pledged to pay for damages by March 16. At the time of writing, Alenkhe told CPJ that the APC was yet to make the payment.

CPJ’s calls and texts to Nigerian army spokesperson Onyema Nwachukwu requesting comment on the attack on Fasan did not receive any response.

APC’s national spokesperson Felix C. Morka declined to comment and directed CPJ to the party’s Edo State chapter. CPJ’s calls and texts to APC’s Edo State spokesperson Peter Uwadia-Igbinigie did not receive any replies.

Edo State police spokesperson Chidi Nwabuzor declined to comment and referred CPJ to the police’s earlier statement, without providing further details.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The New York-based media watchdog Committee to Protect Journalists says the announcement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of his intention to ban Al Jazeera follows a similar pattern of media interference, including the killing of media workers.

“We’ve seen this kind of language before from Netanyahu and Israeli officials in which they try to paint journalists as ‘terrorists’, as ‘criminals’. This is nothing new,” Jodie Ginsberg told Al Jazeera.

“It’s another example of the tightening of the free press and the stranglehold the Israeli government would like to exercise. It’s an incredibly worrying move by the government.”

• READ MORE: Other Gaza media freedom reports

Netanyahu wrote on X on Monday that “Al Jazeera harmed Israel’s security, actively participated in the October 7 massacre, and incited against Israeli soldiers.

“The terrorist channel Al Jazeera will no longer broadcast from Israel. I intend to act immediately in accordance with the new law to stop the channel’s activity.’

The Israeli parliament approved a law granting the government authority to ban foreign news networks, including Al Jazeera. PM Netanyahu pledged to “act immediately” to close the network’s local office pic.twitter.com/L2RXOzVi5t

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) April 2, 2024

The Qatar-based network rejected what it described as “slanderous accusations” and accused Netanyahu of “incitement”.

“Al Jazeera holds the Israeli Prime Minister responsible for the safety of its staff and network premises around the world, following his incitement and this false accusation in a disgraceful manner,” it said in a statement.

‘Slanderous accusations’
“Al Jazeera reiterates that such slanderous accusations will not deter us from continuing our bold and professional coverage, and reserves the right to pursue every legal step.”

Netanyahu has long sought to shut down broadcasts from Al Jazeera, alleging anti-Israel bias, the network reports on its website.

The law, which passed in a 71-10 vote in the Knesset, gives the prime minister and communications minister the authority to order the closure of foreign networks operating in Israel and confiscate their equipment if it is believed they pose “harm to the state’s security”.

White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said that an Israeli move to shut down Al Jazeera would be “concerning”.

“The United States supports the critically important work of journalists around the world and that includes those who are reporting in the conflict in Gaza,” Jean-Pierre told reporters.

“So we believe that work is important. The freedom of the press is important. And if those reports are true, it is concerning to us.”

The legislation’s passage comes nearly five months after Israel said it would block Lebanese outlet Al Mayadeen. It refrained from shutting Al Jazeera at the same time.

Move with closure
After the vote on Monday, Israel’s Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said he intended to move forward with the closure. He said Al Jazeera had been acting as a “propaganda arm of Hamas” by “encouraging armed struggle against Israel”.

“It is impossible to tolerate a media outlet, with press credentials from the Government Press Office and offices in Israel, acting from within against us, certainly during wartime,” he said.

According to news agencies, his office said the order would seek to block the channel’s broadcasts in Israel and prevent it from operating in the country. The order would not apply to the occupied West Bank or Gaza.

Israel has often lashed out at Al Jazeera, which has offices in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

In May 2022, Israeli forces shot dead senior Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while she was covering an Israeli military raid in the West Bank town of Jenin.

A UN-commissioned report concluded that Israeli forces used “lethal force without justification” in the killing, violating her “right to life”.

During the war in Gaza, several of the channel’s journalists and their family members have been killed by Israeli bombardments.

On October 25, an air raid killed the family of Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, including his wife, son, daughter, grandson and at least eight other relatives.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 32,782 people, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian authorities.

Pacific Media Watch and news agencies.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Rana was held in jail for a week after police arrested the journalist on March 5. Rana, who works for the Bangla-language newspaper Desh Rupantor, was arrested at a local government office in the northern Sherpur district after he filed a right to information (RTI) application regarding a government-run development program, according to news reports, the local press freedom group Bangladeshi Journalists in International Media, and Mustafa Mamun, acting editor of Desh Rupantor.

Later that day, an assistant land commissioner, who is also an executive magistrate, sentenced the journalist to six months in prison on charges of disobeying an order by a public servant and insulting the modesty of a woman. The action was taken through a mobile court, which is empowered to try offenses instantly.

Mohammad Ali Arafat, state minister for information and broadcasting, stated that the country’s information commission would investigate the incident and told CPJ that he would receive a copy of the commission’s investigative report on Monday, March 18.

Arafat did not immediately respond to CPJ’s subsequent requests for comment on the report’s findings. Mamun told CPJ that as of Wednesday, he had not received a copy of the report.

Separately, at around 12 p.m. on March 14, employees at an assistant land commissioner’s office in Lalmonirhat held Mahfuz Sazu, a correspondent for the broadcaster mytv and the newspaper The Daily Observer, after the journalist filmed a land dispute hearing allegedly conducted by an unauthorized official, according to news reports, Bangladeshi Journalists in International Media, and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ.

Twenty minutes later, four members of the Lalmonirhat Press Club arrived to help Sazu and were also confined within the premises. After a district revenue commissioner arrived at the scene, the five journalists were released around 12:50 p.m.

“CPJ welcomes a government investigation into the retaliatory jailing of Bangladeshi journalist Md Shofiuzzaman Rana. Journalists should not face reprisal merely for seeking information,,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Authorities should launch a transparent probe into the confinement of five correspondents in a  government office in Lalmonirhat and ensure that journalists are not harassed with impunity.”

Rana’s arrest unfolded after an office assistant refused to provide the journalist with a receipt for his RTI application. Rana then called the Sherpur deputy commissioner, or district magistrate, to resolve the issue, Mamun told CPJ, citing Rana. The chief of the local government office arrived at the scene and shouted at Rana, saying, “You are a broker journalist” (an insult used to refer to a media member who makes money through one-sided stories).

Police then arrived at the scene, arrested the journalist, and seized his two mobile phones. Rana was held for one week in Sherpur District Jail and released on bail on March 12. A local magistrate court is scheduled to hear Rana’s appeal against the verdict on April 16.

Separately, Sazu told CPJ that after filming the land dispute hearing, he interviewed three people connected to the case in the corridor of the assistant land commissioner’s office when an official unsuccessfully attempted to confiscate his phone.

The official then called the assistant land commissioner. At the same time, the office staff escorted the three people he interviewed out of the building and locked the entrance, leaving the journalist confined within the premises, Sazu said.

Sazu told CPJ that the journalist’s four colleagues later entered the building with the assistance of a local ward councilor but were also locked inside the premises. The journalists were:

• Mazharul Islam Bipu, a correspondent for the broadcaster Independent Television
• SK Sahed, a correspondent for the newspaper Daily Kalbela
• Neon Dulal, a correspondent for the broadcaster Asian TV
• Liakat Ali, a correspondent for the newspaper Daily Nabochatona

The assistant land commissioner then arrived at the scene and shouted at the journalists, calling them “brokers” and threatening to send them to jail via a mobile court, Sazu said, adding that the journalists also heard him telling an unidentified individual on the phone that he would file legal cases against them.

Later that day, the divisional commissioner of Rangpur, which encompasses Lalmonirhat, issued an order transferring the assistant land commissioner to another locality. As of Wednesday, the order had not been executed, and no further legal or administrative action had been taken, Sazu told CPJ.

Arafat did not immediately respond to CPJ’s request for comment on the incident in Lalmonirhat.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The future of Aotearoa New Zealand television news and current affairs is in the balance at the two biggest TV broadcasters — both desperate to cut costs as their revenue falls.

The government says it is now preparing policy to modernise the media, but they do not want to talk about what that might be — or when it might happen.

On Monday, TVNZ’s 1News was reporting — again — on the crisis of cuts to news and current affairs in its own newsroom.

• READ MORE: Other TVNZ and Newshub reports

The extent of discontent about the proposed cuts had been made clear to chief executive Jodi O’Donnell at an all-staff meeting that day.

The news of cuts rocked the state-owned broadcaster when they were announced four days earlier.

In fact, it rocked the entire media industry because only one week earlier the US-based owners of Newshub had announced a plan to close that completely by mid year.

No-one was completely shocked by either development given the financial strife the local industry is known to be in.

But it seems no-one had foreseen that within weeks only Television New Zealand and Whakaata Māori would be offering national news to hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who still tune in at 6pm or later on demand.

Likewise the prospect of no TV current affairs shows (save for those on Whakaata Māori) and no consumer affairs watchdog programme Fair Go, three years shy of a half century as one of NZ most popular local TV shows of all time.

Yvonne Tahana’s report for 1News on Monday pointed out Fair Go staff were actually working on the next episode when that staff meeting was held on Monday.

All this raised the question — what is a “fair go” according to the government, given TVNZ is state-owned?

Media-shy media minister?
After the shock announcements last week and the week before, Minister of Media and Communications Melissa Lee seemed not keen to talk to the media about it.

The minister did give some brief comments to political reporters confronting her in the corridors in Parliament after the Newshub news broke. But a week went by before she spoke to RNZ’s Checkpoint about it — and revealed that in spite of a 24-hour heads-up from Newhub’s offshore owner — Warner Bros Discovery — Lee did not know they were planning to shut the whole thing.

By the time the media minister was on NewstalkZB’s Drive show just one hour later that same day, the news was out that TVNZ news staff had been told to “watch their inboxes” the next morning.

In spite of the ‘no surprises’ convention, the minister said she was out of the loop on that too.

After that, it was TV and radio silence again from the minister in the days that followed.

“National didn’t have a broadcasting policy. We’re still not sure what they’re looking at. She needs to basically scrub up on what she’s going to be saying on any given day and get her head around her own portfolio, because at the moment she’s not looking that great,” The New Zealand Herald’s political editor Claire Trevett told RNZ’s Morning Report at the end of the week.

By then the minister’s office had told Mediawatch she would speak with us on Thursday. Good news — at the time.

Lee has long been the National Party’s spokesperson on media and broadcasting and Mediawatch has been asking for a chat since last December.

Last Sunday, TVNZ’s Q+A show told viewers Lee had declined to be interviewed for three weeks running.

Frustration on social media
At Newshub — where staff have the threat of closure hanging over them — The AM Show host Lloyd Burr took to social media with his frustration.

“There’s a broadcasting industry crisis and the broadcasting minister is MIA. We’ve tried for 10 days to get her on the show to talk about the state of it, and she’s either refused or not responded. She doesn’t even have a press secretary. What a shambles . . . ”

A switch of acting press secretaries mid-crisis did seem to be a part of the problem.

But one was in place by last Monday, who got in touch in the morning to arrange Mediawatch’s interview later in the week.

But by 6pm that day, they had changed their minds, because “the minister will soon be taking a paper to cabinet on her plan for the media portfolio”.

“We feel it would better serve your listeners if the minister came on at a time when she could discuss in depth about the details of her plan for the future of media, as opposed to the limited information she will be able to provide this Thursday,” the statement said.

“When the cabinet process has been completed, the minister is able to say more. That time is not now.”

The minister’s office also pointed out Lee had done TV and broadcast interviews over the past week in which she had “essentially traversed as much ground as possible right now”.

What clues can we glean from those?

Hints of policy plans
Even though this government is breaking records for changes made under urgency, it seems nothing will happen in a hurry for the media.

“I have been working with my officials to understand and bring the concerns from the sector forward, to have a discussion with my officials to work with me to understand what the levers are that the government can pull to help the sector,” Lee told TVNZ Breakfast last Monday.

A slump in commercial revenue is a big part of broadcasters’ problems. TVNZ’s Anna Burns Francis asked the minister if the government might make TVNZ — or some of its channels — commercial-free.

“I think we are working through many options as to what could potentially help the sector rather than specifically TVNZ,” Lee replied.

One detail Lee did reveal was that the Broadcasting Act 1989 was in play — something the previous government also said was on its to do list but did not get around to between 2017 and 2023.

It is a pretty broad piece of legislation which sets out the broadcasting standards regime and complaints processes, electoral broadcasting and the remit of the government broadcasting funding agency NZ On Air.

But it is not obvious what reform of that Act could really do for news media sustainability.

Longstanding prohibitions
The minister also referred to longstanding prohibitions on TV advertising on Sunday mornings and two public holidays. Commercial broadcasters have long called for these to be dumped.

But a few more slots for whiteware and road safety ads is not going to save news and current affairs, especially in this economy.

That issue also came up in a 22-minute-long chat with The Platform, which the minister did have time for on Wednesday.

In it, host Sean Plunket urged the minister not to do much to ease the financial pain of the mainstream media, which he said were acting out of self-interest.

He was alarmed when Lee told him the playing field needed to be leveled by extending regulation applied to TV and radio to online streamers as well — possibly through Labour’s Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill.

“Are you seriously considering the government imposing tax on certain large companies and paying that money directly to your chosen media companies that are asking for it?” Plunket asked.

“I have actually said that I oppose the bill but what you have to do as the minister is listen to the sector. They might have some good ideas.”

When Plunket suggested Lee should let the market forces play out, Lee said that was not desirable.

Some of The Platform’s listeners were not keen on that, getting in touch to say they feared Lee would bail the media out because she had “gone woke”.

That made the minister laugh out loud.

“I’m so far from woke,” she assured Sean Plunket.

A free-to-air and free-to-all future?
At the moment, TVNZ is obliged to provide easily accessible services for free to New Zealanders.

TVNZ’s Breakfast show asked if that could change to allow TVNZ to charge for its most popular or premium stuff?

The response was confusing:

“Well ready accessibility would actually mean that it is free, right? Or it could be behind a paywall — but it could still be available because they have connectivity,” Lee replied.

“A paywall would imply that you have to pay for it — so that wouldn’t be accessible to all New Zealanders, would it?” TVNZ’s Anna Burns-Francis asked.

“For a majority, yes — but free to air is something I support.”

When Lee fronted up on The AM Show for 10 minutes she said she was unaware they had been chasing a chat with her for 10 days.

Host Melissa Chan-Green bridled when the minister referred to the long-term decline of linear real time TV broadcast as a reason for the cuts now being proposed.

“To think that Newshub is a linear TV business is to misunderstand what Newshub is, because we have a website, we have an app, we have streaming services, we’ve done radio, we’ve done podcasts — so how much more multimedia do you think businesses need to be to survive?

“I’m not just talking about that but there are elements of the Broadcasting Act which are not a fair playing field for everyone. For example, there are advertising restrictions on broadcasters where there are none on streamers,” she said.

Where will the public’s money go?
On both Breakfast and The AM Show, Lee repeated the point that the effectiveness of hundreds of millions of dollars of public money for broadcasting is at stake — and at risk if the broadcasters that carry the content are cut back to just a commercial core.

“The government actually puts in close to I think $300 million a year,” Lee said.

“Should that funding be extended to include the client of current affairs programs are getting cut?” TVNZ’s Anna Burns-Francis asked her.

“I have my own views as to what could be done but even NZ on Air operates at arm’s length from me as Minister of Media and Communications,” she replied.

It is only in recent years that NZ On Air has been in the business of allocating public money to news and journalism on a contestable basis.

When the system was set up in 35 years ago that was out of bounds for the organisation, because broadcasters becoming dependent on the public purse was thought to be something to avoid — because of the potential for political interference through either editorial meddling or turning off the tap.

That began to break down when TV broadcasters stopped funding programs about politics which did not pull a commercial crowd — and NZ started picking up the tab from a fund for so-called special interest shows which would not be made or screened in a wholly-commercial environment.

Online projects with a public interest purpose have also been funded by in recent years in addition to programmes for established broadcasters — as NZ on Air declared itself “platform agnostic”.

Public Interest Journalism Fund
In 2020, NZ on Air was given the job of handing out $55 million over three years right across the media from the Public Interest Journalism Fund.

That was done at arm’s length from government, but in opposition National aggressively opposed the fund set up by the previous Labour government.

Senior MPs — including Lee — claimed the money might make the media compliant — and even silent — on anything that might make the then-Labour government look bad.

It would be a big surprise if Lee’s policy plan for cabinet includes direct funding for the news and current affairs programmes which could vanish from our TV screens and on-demand apps within weeks.

This week, NZ on Air chief executive Cameron Harland responded to the crisis with a statement.

“We are in active discussions with the broadcasters and the wider sector to understand what the implications of their cost cutting might be.

“This is a complex and developing situation and whilst we acknowledge the uncertainty, we will be doing what we can to ensure our funding is utilised in the best possible ways to serve local audiences.“

They too are in a holding pattern waiting for the government to reveal its plans.

But as the minister herself said this week, the annual public funding for media was substantial — and getting bigger all the time as the revenues of commercial media companies shrivelled.

And whatever levers the minister and her officials are thinking of pulling, they need to do decisively — and soon.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Television New Zealand’s proposals to balance its worsening books by killing news and current affairs programmes mean New Zealanders could end up with almost no national current affairs on TV within weeks.

It is a response to digital era changes in technology, viewing and advertising — but also the consequence of political choices.

“I can see that I’ve chosen a good night to come on,” TVNZ presenter Jack Tame said mournfully on his stint as a Newstalk ZB panelist last Wednesday.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MEDIAWATCH: ‘Apocalypse now – take 2’
• READ MORE: NZ media facing an apocalypse now?
• Other NZ media reports

The news that TVNZ news staff had been told to “watch their inboxes” the next morning had just broken.

It was less than a week since Newshub’s owners had announced a plan to close it completely in mid-year and TVNZ had reported bad financial figures for the last half of 2023.

The following day — last Thursday — TVNZ’s Midday News told viewers 9 percent of TVNZ staff — 68 people in total — would go in a plan to balance the books.

“The broadcaster has told staff that its headcount is high and so are costs,” said reporter Kim Baker-Wilson starkly on TVNZ’s Midday.

On chopping block
Twenty-four hours later, it was one of the shows on the chopping block — along with late news show Tonight and TVNZ’s flagship weekly current affairs show Sunday.

“As the last of its kind — is that what we want in our media landscape . . . to have no in-depth current affairs show?” said Sunday presenter Miriama Kamo (also the host of the weekend show Marae).

Consumers investigator Fair Go — with a 47-year track record as one of TVNZ’s most popular local shows — will also be gone by the end of May under this plan.

If Newshub vanishes from rival channel Three by mid year, there will be just one national daily TV news bulletin left — TVNZ’s 1News — and no long form current affairs at all, except TVNZ’s Q+A and others funded from the public purse by NZ on Air and Te Mangai Paho.

Tellingly, weekday TVNZ shows which will carry on — Breakfast and Seven Sharp — are ones which generate income from “partner content” deals and “integrated advertising” — effectively paid-for slots within the programmes.

TVNZ had made it known cuts were coming months ago because costs were outstripping fast-falling revenue as advertisers tightened their belts or spent elsewhere.

TVNZ executives had also made it clear that reinforcing TVNZ’s digital-first strategy would be a key goal as well as just cutting costs.

Other notable cut
So the other notable service to be cut was a surprise — the youth-focused digital-native outlet Re: News.

After its launch in 2017, its young staff revived a mothballed studio and gained a reputation for hard work — and then for the quality of its work.

It won national journalism awards in the past two years and reached younger people who rarely if ever turn on a television set.

Reportedly, the staff of Re: News staff is to be halved and lose some of its leaders.

The main media workers’ union E tū said it will fight to save jobs and extend the short consultation period.

Some staff made it plain that they weren’t giving up just yet either and would present counter-proposals to save shows and jobs.

In a statement, TVNZ said the proposals “in no way relate to the immense contribution of the teams that work on those shows and the significant journalistic value they’ve provided over the years”.

Money-spinners
But some were money-spinners too.

Fair Go and Sunday still pull in big six-figure live primetime TV audiences and more views now on TVNZ+. Its marketers frequently tell the advertisers that.

TVNZ chief executive Jodi O’Donnell knows all about that. She was previously TVNZ’s commercial director.

So why kill off these programmes now?

Mediawatch’s requests to talk to O’Donnell and TVNZ’s executive editor of news Phil O’Sullivan were unsuccessful.

But O’Donnell did talk to Newstalk ZB on Friday night.

“I’ve been quite open with the fact that there are no sacred cows. And we need to find some ways to stop doing some things for us to reduce our costs,” O’Donnell told Newstalk ZB.

“TVNZ’s still investing over $40 million in news and current affairs — so we absolutely believe in the future of news and current affairs. But we have a situation right now that our operating model is more expensive than the revenue that we’re making. And we have to make some really tough, tough decisions,” she said.

“We’ll constantly be looking at things to keep the operating model in line with what our revenue is. Within the TVNZ Act it’s clear that we need to be a commercial broadcaster, We are a commercial business, so that’s the remit that we need to work on.

“Our competitors these days are not (Newstalk ZB) or Sky or Warner Brothers (Discovery) but Google and Meta. These are multi-trillion dollar organisations. Ninety cents of every dollar spent in digital news advertising is going offshore. That’s 10 cents left for the likes of NZME, TVNZ, Stuff and any of the other local broadcasters.”

Jack Tame also pointed the finger at the titans of tech on his Newstalk ZB Saturday show.

Force of digital giants ‘irrepressible’
“Ultimately the force of those digital giants is irrepressible. Trying to save free-to-air commercial TV, with quality news, current affairs and local programming in a country with five million people . . .  is like trying to bail out the Titanic with an empty ice cream container. I’m not aware of any comparable broadcast markets where they’ve managed to pull it off,” he told listeners.

But few countries have a state-owned yet fully-commercial broadcaster trying to do news on TV and online, disconnected from publicly-funded ones also doing news on TV and radio and online.

That makes TVNZ a state-owned broadcaster that serves advertisers as much as New Zealanders.

But if things had panned out differently a year ago, that wouldn’t be the case now either.

What if the public media merger had gone ahead?
A new not-for-profit public media entity incorporating RNZ and TVNZ — Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media (ANZPM)  — was supposed to start one year ago this week.

It would have been the biggest media reform since the early 1990s.

The previous government was prepared to spend more than $400 million over four years to get it going.

Almost $20 million was spent on a programme called Strong Public Media, put in place because New Zealand’s media sector was weak.

“Ailing” was the word that the business case used, noting “increased competition from overseas players slashed the share of revenue from advertising.”

But the Labour government killed the plan before the last election, citing the cost of living crisis.

The new entity would still have needed TVNZ’s commercial revenue, but if it had gone ahead, would that mean TVNZ wouldn’t now be sacrificing news shows and journalists?

“Nobody’s surprised. Surely nobody is surprised that this ecosystem is not sustainable any longer. Something radical had to change,” Tracey Martin — the chair of the board charged with getting ANZPM up and running — told Mediawatch.

“I don’t have any problem believing that (TVNZ) would have had to change what they were delivering. But would it have been cuts to news and current affairs that we would have been seeing? There would have been other decisions made because commerciality . . . was not the major driver (of ANZPM),” Martin said.

“That was where we started from. If Armageddon happens — and all other New Zealand media can no longer exist — you have to be there as the Fourth Estate — to make sure that New Zealanders have a place to go to for truth and trust.”

What were the assumptions about the advertising revenue TVNZ would have been able to pull in?

“[TVNZ] was telling us that it wouldn’t be as bad as we believed it would be. TVNZ modeling was not as dramatic as our modeling. We were happy to accept that [because] our modeling gave us a particular window by which to change the ecosystem in which New Zealand media could survive to try and stabilise,” Martin told Mediawatch.

The business case document tracked TVNZ revenue and expenses from 2012 until 2020 — the start of the planning process for the new entity.

By 2020, a sharp rise in costs already exceeded revenue which was above $300 million.

And as we now know, TVNZ revenue has fallen further and more quickly since then.

“We were predicting linear TV revenue was going to continue to drop substantially and relatively quickly — and they were not going to be able to switch their advertising revenue at the same capacity to digital,” Martin said.

“They had more confidence than we did,” she said.

The ANZPM legislation estimated it as a $400 million a year operation, with roughly half the funding from public sources and half from commercial revenue.

TVNZ’s submission said that was “unambitious”.

“If the commercial arm of the new entity can aid in gaining more revenue to reinvest into local content and to reinvest into public media outcomes, all the better,” the chief executive at the time Simon Power told Mediawatch in 2023.

“It was a very rosy picture they painted. They had a mandate to be a commercial business that had to give confidence to the advertisers and the rest of New Zealand but they were very confident two years ago that this wouldn’t happen,” she said.

In opposition, National Party leader Christopher Luxon described the merger as “ideological and insane” and “a solution looking for a problem”.

He wasn’t alone.

But if that was based on TVNZ’s bullish assessments of its own revenue-raising capacity — or a disregard of a probable downturn ahead, was that a big mistake?

“I won’t comment for today’s government, but statements being made in the last couple of days about people getting their news from somewhere else; truth and trust has dropped off; linear has got to be transferred into the digital environment . . . none of those things are new comments,” Martin told Mediawatch.

“They’re all in the documentation that we placed into the public domain — and I asked the special permission, as the chair of the ANZPM group, to brief spokespersons for broadcasting of the Greens, Act and National to try and make sure that everybody has as much and as much information as we could give them,” she said.

Media and Communications Minister Melissa Lee said this week she was working on proposals to help the media to take to cabinet.

“I don’t give advice to the minister, but I would advise officials to go back and pull out the business case and paperwork for ANZPM — and to look at the submissions and the number of people who supported the concept, but had concerns about particular areas,” Tracey Martin told Mediawatch.

“Don’t let perfection get in the way of action.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Police opened an investigation into the journalists, who have since been released, under Section 47 of the Electronic Transactions Act, 2008, those sources said. The law criminalizes the electronic publication of content deemed illegal under existing laws or “contrary to public morality or decent behavior” with a penalty of up to five years in prison and a fine of 100,000 rupees (US $754). CPJ has repeatedly documented the use of the Electronic Transactions Act to detain and investigate journalists for their work.

Kamal Thapa, superintendent of the Kanchanpur police, told CPJ that the case registered against the journalists was in relation to their social media posts, not their news coverage. On February 5, the Kanchanpur police said in a statement that those who “write such misleading news/status” would be punished under the law.

Binod Bhatta, the journalists’ lawyer, told CPJ that his clients’ social media posts and news coverage should be considered as interrelated because they reported on the same topic in the public interest.

On February 5, Bhatt published an interview on his Facebook page with a police officer who said that he resigned from his job after he was beaten by a female inspector, whom he named. Bhatt also commented on the allegations on his Facebook page.

On February 5, Kunwar’s news website Nigarani Khabar reported the same allegations against the female officer, while a second article made four allegations of misconduct by the same policewoman, including her involvement in detaining Kunwar in 2023 while the journalist was reporting on a clash between police and locals. Kunwar also commented on the allegations on her Facebook page.

Bhatt and Kunwar were released at around 10 p.m. on February 14 and 1 a.m. on February 15 respectively, on personal guarantee, which requires them to remain present in the area while the investigation is carried out, according to Media Action Nepal, Bhatta, and a person familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

While in police custody, the officer asked the journalists to apologize by touching her feet, a sign of respect in South Asian culture, but Kunwar refused, which delayed her release, those sources said.

As of February 20, the journalists’ phones, which were seized during their arrest, remained in police custody, according to Bhatta and the person familiar with the case.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Around 20 journalists were arrested and briefly detained in the Russian capital of Moscow on February 3 while covering a protest led by a movement of Russian women demanding the return from Ukraine of their men, who were mobilized following a September 2022 decree by President Vladimir Putin, according to multiple media reports and human-rights news website OVD-Info.

The journalists were local and foreign reporters working with multiple international and local media outlets, including global wire service Reuters, French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP), German weekly Der Spiegel, Dutch public television NOS, Japanese broadcaster Fuji Television, local independent online outlets Sota.Vision and RusNews, the news Telegram channels Ostorozhno Novosti and Mozhem Obyasnit, and the Russian newspaper Kommersant.

Those detained included Sota.Vision reporter Mikhail Lebedev, Kommersant photojournalist Evgeny Razumnyy, Fuji Television journalist Andrei Zaikov, and RusNews reporter Aleksandr Filippov. Most of the other journalists chose not to disclose their names “to avoid problems,” Aleksei Obukhov, exiled editor with independent news outlet SOTA, which covered the protest, told CPJ.

“An AFP journalist was indeed among a group of journalists arrested last Saturday, even though he was duly accredited to cover the protest. We prefer not to give his name,” an AFP representative told CPJ via email.

“Russia’s latest mass detention of journalists in Moscow is an attempt by the authorities to conceal from the population any dissenting voices on the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Journalists are doing their jobs covering the protests and should not be targeted for exposing people’s discontent.” 

Around 1 p.m., 20 police officers arrested 13 journalists, who were all male, in Manezhnaya Square, near Red Square, and brought them to the Kitay-Gorod police station in the center of Moscow, one of the detained journalists told CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal. According to OVD-Info, 27 people were detained at the Square, “most of them journalists.”

“They were interested in men, especially in yellow vests [which are required by law for journalists reporting from protests],” the journalist told CPJ. “It was fast. The policeman didn’t say a word, he just took me by the shoulder and led me towards the avtozak [police transit vehicle]. At the entrance, we were forced to hand over our documents, mobile phones, and cameras.”

Police refused to give the journalist access to the lawyer sent by his outlet, he told CPJ, adding that he was released a few hours later after authorities photographed his press card and editorial assignment document, questioned his professional activities, and required him to sign a document warning him about “participating in public events.” This document, which states that the police “have information” that he could “violate the law in the future,” can be used as a basis to prosecute him if he is again detained while covering a protest, he told CPJ.

Later, as protestors headed towards President Vladimir Putin’s political headquarters for the upcoming March 2024 presidential election, police arrested seven additional male journalists and took them to the Basmanyy police station in the east of Moscow.

“It was clear they [the police] went after specific people, all men and mostly journalists,” an unnamed witness told POLITICO. “Probably to discourage journalists from covering such events in the future.”

During their detention, the police seized all the journalists’ telephones, OVD-Info reported. CPJ was unable to confirm if all the phones were returned, but the journalist who spoke to CPJ said he believed all had been returned.

After being detained for two to three hours, each of the journalists were released without charge. 

“All detained journalists were wearing PRESS jackets and had documents proving their special status, so they should not be detained,” OVD-Info spokesperson Dmitrii Anisimov told CPJ. “We think that this strategy was applied because detaining relatives of Russian soldiers would be rather politically weird for Russian authorities. So they decided to decrease media coverage of these rallies by physically removing journalists from there.”  

CPJ did not receive a response to its email to the Moscow police asking for comment on the arrests. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

“There’s something about the sound of a mothers scream, you just never forget.” That was a comment from actress Ellen Moore when interviewed about her role in a recently released documentary about the 1982 movie The Day After, a spellbinder that had over a hundred million Americans glued to their TV sets, watching how a nuclear bomb devastated a rural community in Lawrence, Kansas.

And that’s how director Jeff Daniels opens his new documentary, modestly titled Television Event. The camera pans in on a quiet suburban neighborhood, then suddenly we hear the soul-chilling screams of a distraught mother, who, in The Day After, is forced into the family cellar by her husband while resisting the notion that lives are at risk, that guests may not be coming and her daughter may not get married the next day.

Next comes a giant ear-shattering explosion as a Minuteman nuclear missile blasts off next to her back yard, headed for Russia.

Some real-time 1983 news footage follows of Americans nervously sitting around their TV, hands clenched, eyes glued to the unfolding horror in The Day After as whole neighborhoods are reduced to rubble.

Enter Nicholas Meyer, the director of The Day After, interviewed by Daniels in his California home about the making of this TV event. “In case you didn’t see it,” Meyer puts it bluntly, “ it’s about a bunch of people in the Midwest going about their daily business and then they get nuked” Nuclear war, he warns, is “the most devastating possibility ever confronting the human race — short of climate change –and yet so terrifying that no one can bear to think about it.”

I interviewed both filmmakers, and was impressed by their sense of mission, their dedication to informing people — 40 years apart — that nuclear war is an existential threat to be taken very seriously. These interviews occurred while the US is involved in arming two major wars, one in Ukraine, the other in Israel-Gaza. Meyer told me he believes we are already involved in World War III. A discomforting thought, to be sure. But he’s used to tackling discomforting thoughts.

Back in 1982, after being chosen director of The Day After by Brandon Stoddard, head of ABC’s Circle Films, Movie of the Week division, Meyer’s challenge was this: how was he going to get regular people to watch such a mind-bending spectacle as nuclear annihilation in one sitting? Not exactly a promising career change, he figured, for a director of feature films (most famously Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). As he sat on his analyst’s coach trying to rationalize his way out of making the film, his normally silent shrink weighed in with a crack that left him no wiggle room. “Well, we will find out who you are.” Meyer found out, and the movie would end up making history and changing the course of the Cold War. And it did so by focusing on the altered lives of ordinary people hailing from the Midwest.

“You’re treading on an aesthetic, intellectual and emotional minefield,” Meyer told me, when describing his thinking 40 years ago about how to present such a delicate subject. “You have to go slow. You have to start from the premise that people will do anything to not think about the topic.” At the same time, “it could not be so terrible that people would reach for the clicker and turn it off.” He was determined to be dry-eyed, and not political, in presenting the nuclear menace.

As it turned out, The Day After to this day remains the most watched television film in US history and had an enormous impact on public opinion. “No one had ever seen anything like it,” he says.

A new book has come out on the book’s impact by David Craig, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, titled Apocalypse Television: How the Day After Helped End the Cold War.” Sadly, 40 years later, the Cold War has now been rekindled, making both films highly relevant and worth watching.

The Day After wades into its theme very carefully, involving the viewer in the lives of a farming community in Lawrence Kansas before delivering its message, one hour into the film, of nuclear war with Russia becoming a reality.

Television Event, on the other hand, begins with a bang, with both Daniels and Meyer determined to send a wakeup call to a somnolent viewership about the imminent dangers of nuclear war. The documentary achieves this handily, while also educating viewers on what it took to produce The Day After, from researching archival footage of America in the early 1980s at the National Archives and creating the visual effect of a mushroom cloud (kudos to Stephanie Austin for her researching skills) to being true to The Day After’ssetting (Lawrence’s rural landscape is host to hundreds of underground missile sites) and honoring the people who starred in the original film (from Jason Robards to everyday people from Lawrence.)

Its footage chronicling the 1983 premier of The Day After and its aftermath is remarkable.

Television Event shows Nancy and Ronald Reagan watching a requested advance copy of The Day After at Camp David, ahead of its screening. Reagan wrote in his memoirs that he found it very depressing. He began to worry about its impact on the American people…and possibly on himself. The White House asked for edits, but ABC producer Brandon Stoddard refused.

The film became hugely controversial even before it aired. The New York Postran a headline, “Why are you doing [Soviet premier] Yuri Andropov’s job?” Producer Stoddard got threats on his life. All the other networks were asking why ABC wanted to scare the hell out of people. Advertisers wouldn’t touch it — with a notable exception of Orville Redenbacher of popcorn fame, who put down $11,000 and ecstatically saw his popcorn being viewed by 100 million people.

The day after the film ran, ABC hosted a panel discussion on Viewpoint, led by Ted Koppel and featuring such luminaries as Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, William Buckley Jr, Carl Sagan and Elie Wiesel. Remarkably, former Defense Secretary (1961–68) Robert McNamara came to its defense. “It’s stimulating discussion on exactly what we should be discussing,” he said. “There’s a million times the Hiroshima destruction power out there. We must make sure it isn’t used.” And Ronald Reagan, famous for previously arguing “peace through strength” and railing against the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” came to a similar conclusion, declaring in a speech that “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be used.” He ended up meeting with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 and signing the Intermediate Range Nuclear Weapons Treaty, in what was the largest reduction of nuclear weapons in history.

Last month, both directors converged on Lawrence for the first screening of Television Event (It will screen on PBS in April) Most of the actors and actresses in The Day After were local people who were deeply affected by the experience. Now, on the film’s 40th anniversary, they had come together to honor the artists who produced both films. to recall what the film meant to them, and to reflect on the times we are living in today.

For this reviewer (and chronicler of endless, post-911 wars, including the Israel-Gaza war ), the film’s scenes of demolished homes and neighborhoods triggered day-old images of Gaza under siege as Israeli war planes dropped highly destructive bombs weighing 2,000 pounds (provided by the US) on buildings housing civilians reportedly forced into being human shields for Hamas. By November, 2023, a European human rights group declared that Israel “had dropped more than 25,000 tonnes of explosives on the besieged Gaza Strip since the start of its large-scale bombardment on 7 October, equivalent to two nuclear bombs.”

I couldn’t help thinking that the whole world was, in fact, now watching genocide live on TV — no television event needed in 2023 — with the threat of escalation into nuclear war a hauntingly realistic prospect. Various media commentators kept bringing up what the end result would be — “the day after.” As with the psychic numbness that Dr. Helen Caldicott famously referred to regarding popular aversion to thinking about nuclear war, so with the Israel-Gaza war it seemed no one wanted to think about, let alone discuss, the unthinkable possibility of nuclear war in the Holy Land. For Jews, contemplating the brutality of Hamas’s October 7 attacks, followed by Netanyahu’s vengeful genocidal attacks against Palestinians, has been wrenching enough. Yet we have witnessed American destroyers moving into the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea, drone attacks by Iranian-supported Houthis launched from Yemen against Red Sea ships, Israeli bombings of Iranians in Syria and Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon, and now U.S. retaliation against the Houthis, with emotions hardened on all sides. The horrific events of October 7 have understandably triggered memories of the Holocaust, while others (most notably in the Muslim world) compared Israel’s bombing of Gaza to Hiroshima.

Nick Meyer recalls downtown Lawrence evoking images of Hiroshima.

A Japanese woman told him, “That’s how it was.” Some of the cast, he told me, had “nuke-mares.”

It’s as if some unexpected forces of destiny have converged on planet earth to remind us humans how close were are to causing our own annihilation. And, appropriately (if not eerily) enough, The Day After has people expressing fears of war in the Middle East. “If we’re talking about oil in Saudi Arabia, I’d be real worried,” says a student watching TV as news breaks of growing tensions with the Russians. An hour later, this becomes a reality. “The Russians just hit one of our ships in the Persian Gulf,” says a grocery shopper hoarding food. “And we hit them back!” In Television Event, we see a woman asking Ted Koppel’s famous panelists if war in the Middle East is a possibility.

In The Day After, we see a whole series of Minuteman missiles taking off from underground silos in Kansas on their way to Russia, triggering fears on one missile base that “we are sitting ducks,” and comments from a Kansan who happens to live next to a missile base that in his state, “there’s a lot of bulls eyes.”

Meyer suggested to me that a first step to banishing nuclear war would be to “get rid of all those land-based missiles.” In Television Event, he comments that “We have enough nukes to kill everyone 54 times over,” and to me, “There are a lot of nuclear weapons around the world and a lot of people with their fingers on the buttons. Pakistan, India, Russia, Israel, the US and for all we know, others that are not under government control.”

How and Why Television Event happened

Three years ago, Meyer got a call from Jeff Daniels about doing an interview about the making of The Day After. They ended up spending a day together. Two years later Meyer got a phone call from Daniels. “You’re a star in the film.”

Daniels was five years old when he watched The Day After with his family. As with so many others who viewed the film, it left a lasting impression. “They put me to bed before the iconic bomb sequence. But the idea that you could die a horrible death by someone pressing a button horrified me.”

As an adult, he read Meyer’ book, The View from the Bridge, that “describes the making of the Day After so well.”

The more the two directors talked, the more they realized they had a shared mission. “We spoke for hours,” Daniels explained. “It’s a midlife story, a David v Goliath story, it’s about a bunch of people who become accidental heroes in some ways. In the end, the true heroes are the people of Lawrence Kansas.”

When I interviewed Daniels, he had recently returned from a UN meeting in New York sponsored by ICAN (The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) ICAN is a coalition of non-governmental organizations aimed at “stigmatizing, prohibiting and eliminating nuclear weapons” while promoting adherence to the United Nations nuclear weapon ban treaty, adopted in 2017.So far, 69 countries have signed on. Its website is worth checking out for the amazing amount of activity going on now to educate the public about the dangers of nuclear war.

“It was great to see how ICAN had created opportunities for artists to show our work,” Daniels explained, “and to connect with others, all of us seeking ways to achieve results from a complicated topic by creating something that elicits an emotion, a personal connection to this subject so people can connect and act. That’s what artists do. There was a great deal of interest from all over the world.”

Would Television Event create the same sensation as The Day After? Clearly, this was the two directors’ hope. “At a time when the world seems to be sleepwalking toward nuclear disaster,” says Meyer, “a new documentary aims to shake us into recognizing the danger –just as The Day After did 40 years ago.” Daniels recalls having to overcome similar challenges confronting Meyer: “Anything that requires a second, third or forth layer of understanding is too much for people, especially about their impending doom,” Daniels told me. His goal was, like Meyer’ four decades ago, to “create a conversation where people could forget their differences and come together and talk about issues that are more urgent.”

The Day After would be shown in 35 countries in 17 languages. It became the first American film to be shown in Russia, and again, the response was positive with a message to Russian viewers: “It is the hoped that the events shown in this film will inspire people to find a way to avoid this day.”

Clearly, as the world holds it breath once again for fear that the Israel-Gaza war — or the war in Ukraine — will escalate into a world war among nuclear powers, the timing of Television Event could not be more…eventful. It is a masterful work of historical reflection while courageously bringing forth, once again, the pressing danger of nuclear annihilation. If you care to watch it before its release in April, you can see the full version here for a nominal fee of $5.00. Television Event is a must-see, worthy of holding discussions with your neighbors, schoolmates, colleagues, families and friends, as is, of course The Day After, easily available on Youtube.

Watch both films…and be blown away.

The post When Nuclear War is No Longer Unthinkable: Honoring Two Television Events appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Charlotte Dennett.

CPJ has documented a number of attacks on journalists in the run-up to the January 7 polls, and on Thursday joined its partners in the #KeepItOn coalition in calling on authorities to ensure unfettered access to the internet throughout the election.

Separately, CPJ is investigating reports that foreign journalists were denied access to Bangladesh to cover the polls.

“Bangladesh authorities must conduct swift and impartial investigations into all recent attacks on journalists in the lead-up to the national election and hold the perpetrators accountable,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, on Friday. “Our access to information depends on the ability of journalists to cover the polls independently and without fear of reprisal at this critical juncture.”

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has been in power since 2009, is Bangladesh’s longest-serving leader and is seeking a fourth term in the polls. The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) has announced a boycott of the vote and the government has deployed troops nationwide, amid fears of violence. At least 27 journalists covering political rallies in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, in October were attacked by supporters of the BNP and the ruling Awami League and police.

On December 10, Amir Hamja and Niranjan Goswami, district correspondents for the privately owned broadcasters Desh TV and mytv, respectively, were covering an opposition protest in the Shayestaganj sub-district of northeast Habiganj district when they were hit by metal splinter bullets fired by police to disperse protesters, according to news reports and the journalists, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

Goswami said he was hit by around 30 splinters and was having trouble with his vision after a doctor determined it was too risky to remove one from his right eye. Hamja said he would undergo surgery to remove a splinter from his left eyebrow.

Separately, on November 30, Awami League parliamentary candidate Mostafizur Rahman and around 15 to 20 of his supporters assaulted Rakib Uddin, a correspondent with the privately-owned broadcaster Independent Television in the southeastern city of Chittagong, according to news reports and the journalist, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

Uddin told CPJ that Rahman punched him in the face and, with his supporters, kicked him, after the journalist questioned him about a potential violation of Bangladesh’s electoral code of conduct at a local government office. He said unidentified men that he believed to be Rahman’s supporters had followed him since the attack.

CPJ’s text messages to Rahman, Habiganj Police Superintendent Md Akhter Hossain, and Krishna Pada Roy, commissioner of the Chittagong Metropolitan Police, did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

CPJ has tracked attacks or threats against at least four journalists since the formal election campaign period began November 19, and the closure of at least one broadcast station.  

“Attacks on journalists Jerry Lombo Alauwa, Mao Zigabe, and Neyker Tokolo, threats against reporter John Kanyunyu Kyota, and the closure of Radio Top Lisala are stark examples of the various dangers faced by Congolese press covering ongoing election campaigns,” said Muthoki Mumo, CPJ’s sub-Saharan Africa representative, in Nairobi. “The safety of journalists is absolutely critical as the DRC approaches its nationwide elections on December 20, and authorities must ensure reporters are able to cover campaign events and voting without fear of reprisal.”

• Since November 22, freelance reporter John Kanyunyu Kyota  told CPJ he has received at least four death threats from anonymous callers purporting to be members of DRC intelligence agents. Kanyunyu has worked for the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle in the country’s Beni city and runs a WhatsApp group called “Habari Moto Moto,” which serves as a forum for local political news. The anonymous callers suggested that content Kanyunyu shared on “Habari Moto Moto”, including old videos of Tshisekedi, have been overly supportive of opposition presidential candidate Moïse Katumbi. Kanyunyu told CPJ that he was not or against working for any candidate, but rather in favor of the population who have the right to information relating to the election, and that he had gone into hiding as a result of the threats.
  
  Sébastien Kauma, the Beni police commander, told CPJ on December 8 that he was not aware of the threats and promised to instruct his officers to investigate.
  

• On November 27, a security agent working for the Union for the Congolese Nation (UNC) and around 10 of its supporters punched Jerry Lombo Alauwa, who works as a reporter with the privately owned Canal Congo Télévision (CCTV) and Radio Liberté Kisangani (RALIK) broadcasters, in the head and arm, and pulled his clothes as he covered a presidential campaign event for opposition politician Moïse Katumbi, in Kisangani, the capital of the DRC’s eastern Tshopo province, according to media reports and Lombo who spoke to CPJ. Lombo said the supporters did not want him covering the opposition campaign, and the attack left his hand injured and his camera damaged.
  
  The UNC supporters who attacked Lombo had been waiting for the arrival of Vital Kamerhe, the UNC party president and political ally of Tshisekedi, who was scheduled to arrive for a separate campaign event, when they spotted and attacked the journalist, Lombo said in a letter to the National Press Union of Congo (UNPC), which CPJ reviewed.
  
  CPJ’s calls to Kamerhe went unanswered and calls to UNC Secretary General Billy Kambale did not connect.
  

• On November 28, Desis Koyo, the mayor of the Mongala province’s capital, Lisala, issued an order banning all programs of the private Radio Top Lisala broadcaster for “incitement to hatred and serious harm to the process current election in the DRC,” according to Koyo who spoke on the phone with CPJ and director of this media Ernest Ngasa who spoke with CPJ. The outlet ceased broadcasting the same day and remains closed, they said.

• Two days earlier, on November 26, Radio Top Lisala had broadcast information suggesting Rwandan influence over certain political parties and that these actors had tried to dissuade voters in Lisala from supporting Tshisekedi and his political ally Jean-Pierre Bemba, according to CPJ’s review of the content.
  
  Koyo had previously closed Radio Top Lisala from October 6 until November 14.
  
  The general rapporteur of the official Congolese media regulatory body, known as the High Council for Audiovisual and Communication (CSAC), Oscar Kabamba, told CPJ that he was not informed of the banning, that he would contact Koyo, who does not have the power to close a media outlet without input from the regulator.

• On December 9, around 20 supporters of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS), Tshisekedi’s political party, attacked and punched Mao Zigabe, a correspondent with the privately owned television broadcaster Digital Congo, at a hotel in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, according to media reports and Zigabe who spoke to CPJ. The attackers carried UDPS party flags and wore t-shirts with images of Tshisekedi, who was scheduled to visit the city the next day. Zigabe said he had gone to the hotel to work and was editing footage of other campaign events when the supporters recognized him and accused him of regularly publishing information in favor of the opposition.

• Zigabe said that he had sought treatment at a local hospital for pain in his leg and planned to file a complaint to police.

CPJ called the secretary general of the UDPS, Augustin Kabuya, but he did not answer.

• On December 5, four armed soldiers arrived outside the home of Neyker Tokolo, a reporter with the privately owned Radio Liberté in Lisala fired their guns into the air, and threw four tear gas canisters inside, according to Tokolo, and the president of the local human rights organization Youth Action for Social Welfare (AJBS), Roger Nzumbu, who both spoke to CPJ.

Tokoko said he contacted the head of the Lisala military prosecutor’s office, who sent inspectors who found bullet casings and traces of military boots outside the home and promised to investigate further and identify those responsible.

The police commander of Mongale province, General Jean Yav Mukaya, told CPJ that he had not been informed of the Tokolo attack. Jacques Ebengo Kisombe, the military prosecutor of Lisala, did not pick up CPJ’s calls. In addition to these actions, on December 6, the Kinshasa/Gombe court rejected Stanis Bujakera’s fourth request for provisional release, one of his lawyers, Ndikulu Yana, told CPJ.

On December 1, the court denied Bujakera’s request for an independent expert to give a second opinion on evidence presented against him, instead imposing an expert of its choosing, Yana said. Bujakera, who works as a correspondent for the privately owned Jeune Afrique news website and Reuters news agency, and is also a deputy director of publication for the DRC-based news website Actualite.cd has remained in detention since September 8. In late November, a group of media outlets published findings that called technical evidence presented against Bujakera “false.” Yana said Bujakera’s next court date is scheduled for December 22.

In the DRC’s elections set for next week, President Felix Tshisikedi is running for a second term against one of the leaders of the opposition  Martin Fayulu, who claimed victory in the 2018 vote, and Nobel-winning gynecologist Denis Mukwege, among others.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

On November 13, a group of uniformed police officers and other security personnel in civilian clothes arrested Belay in the capital, Addis Ababa, near the offices of Ethio News, a private YouTube-based news outlet, Belay’s wife Belaynesh Nigatu and Ethio News co-founder Belete Kassa told CPJ.

The officers took Belay to the Federal Police Crime Investigation Center, where he remains in detention, without informing him of the reason for his arrest or taking him to court, they said.

“Belay Manaye has spent three weeks behind bars without any explanation from Ethiopian authorities. This sends a grave message to other Ethiopian journalists—that they can be deprived of their liberty at any time,” said CPJ’s sub-Saharan African Representative, Muthoki Mumo. “Authorities should unconditionally release Belay Manaye and stop arbitrarily detaining members of the press.”

Belaynesh, who visited her husband in jail, told CPJ that the journalist feared he was being held under legal provisions introduced when a state of emergency was declared on August 4 in response to conflict in the northern Amhara state.

The emergency declaration gives the government additional powers to ban public meetings, declare a curfew, shut down mass media, and detain people suspected of crimes against the state in order to “maintain public peace and order” in response to “the armed illegal activities of the Amhara National Regional Government.”

The Fano militia in Amhara have been fighting federal forces since April, after the federal government announced a controversial decision to integrate regional militia into the federal army. The Fano were previously allied with the federal government in a civil war in northern Ethiopia that ended with a peace deal in November 2022. 

The state of emergency law, reviewed by CPJ, gives security personnel wide powers of arrest and suspends the due process of law, including the right to appear before a court and receive legal counsel. Ordinarily, Article 19 of Ethiopia’s constitution requires police to produce detained persons in court within 48 hours.

Belay and Ethio News co-founder Belete co-host two daily news programs on the channel and had extensively covered the conflict in the Amhara state.

In the weeks following the declaration of the state of emergency, CPJ documented the arrest of at least seven other journalists who had covered the Amhara conflict.

This is not Belay’s first detention. In July 2020, authorities arrested Belay, two of his colleagues, and one ex-colleague from the Amhara Satellite Radio And Television (ASRAT) on allegations of inciting violence. After 46 days, Belay was released on bail without charge, according to his post on X, formerly Twitter, and the Addis Standard.

In an emailed statement, federal police spokesperson Jeylan Abdi said he could not comment on the detention of Belay and other journalists under the state of emergency and referred CPJ to the command post, which was established to oversee the state of emergency.

CPJ’s queries via email and messaging app to the federal ministry of justice, and government spokesperson Legesse Tulu, who is a member of the state of emergency command post and has issued statements on behalf of the body, did not receive any responses.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The changes were aimed at speeding up the game and boosting attendance, and they were a smashing success on both counts: the average game time for the 2023 season was the shortest in 38 years, and attendance rose by the highest percentage in 30 years.

Now let’s turn to a change that’s been introduced gradually, almost sneakily, a change that should itself be smashed. Jimmy Traina writes a column for Sports Illustrated, cleverly titled “Traina Thoughts.” This one is easy to follow:

Major League owners are selfishly committing an egregious error. Throughout the regular season and even into the playoffs, they’re putting dollars ahead of fans by selling exclusive television rights to streaming services. Early in the 2022 season, a Traina Thought called the error “The Terrible Marriage Between Baseball and Streaming.”

It was terrible because pitching great Max Scherzer was set to make his first start for the New York Mets—but the game wouldn’t air in New York, and it wouldn’t be called by the regular Mets’ announcers Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling. Scherzer’s debut with the Mets had been picked as the Friday Night Baseball game, and it was showing only on Apple TV+.

Traina spoke up for the masses: “Baseball fans already pay around $100 for a local cable or satellite package. Some baseball fans pay extra for the MLB TV package….When is enough enough?”

For Mets’ Hall of Famer-turned-announcer Darling, his personal had-enough moment came this August. The Mets were playing on the road against the Los Angeles Angels. Darling planned to watch the telecast but found himself with a problem: the TV rights had been sold to the streaming channel Peacock, and Darling wasn’t a subscriber.

He wasn’t about to become one, either: “It was a protest. I said I’m not getting another one. I’m not spending another $5.”  (Darling, in fact, has free access to Peacock, but he didn’t know it at the time.)

New York has two major league baseball teams, and the Mets aren’t alone in trivializing the fans who don’t have streaming services, or haven’t mastered the challenges of using them (or, saddest of all, can’t afford them in the first place). The New York Yankees televise most of their games on their own widely-available cable channel, but they too have taken to selling exclusive rights to streaming services. Friday night Yankee games have been appearing only on Amazon Prime, and designated games only on Apple TV+.

There’s a dissing here that deserves more mention and attention.

Today’s major league baseball fans are paying extra-major league prices for their fandom. It’s really Yankee fans, not the owners, who’ll be paying Aaron Judge $40 million in 2024 and $360 million over nine years. It’s Yankee fans who’ll be paying an average ticket price of $188 in 2024, approaching $800 for a family of four. It’s Yankee fans who’ll be paying up to 10 percent more in 2024, despite the Yanks having just racked up their first losing season in 30 years. (To be fair, not all Yankee prices are in the stratosphere: beers and hot dogs went for $6 and $3 this past season, far below the major league-leading $10.50 and $6.25 charged in Fenway Park by the Boston Red Sox.)

These days there’s a new and hidden price that fans have to pay, and it discriminates hugely. Streaming channels get exclusive TV rights for select days and times, shutting out everybody who doesn’t have access to those outlets.  Nobody seems to care about the fans who won’t get to see the games; they’re an afterthought (if they’re thought about at all).

What Thomas Paine said long ago has come around again:  We’re living in times that try men’s souls. For millions of baseball fans, particularly tech-challenged, older and poorer fans, showing games only on streaming services is something they do not need—anytime, especially at playoff time, and extra-especially in times like these.

Baseball moguls should be focusing on doing everything they can to attract new fans. What they’re doing instead is anti-fan, and dumb besides. Traina has a thought: “[P]ut games on channels where more people can see them,” not on streaming services.

What a refreshing, right-side-up idea: counting fans instead of counting streaming dollars.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gerald E. Scorse.

Since February, CPJ has documented two journalists’ deaths, several reporters fleeing their homes, and numerous other threats and attacks on the press as gangs have taken over much of Port-au-Prince, killing, raping, burning homes, and terrorizing communities.

The journalists’ work appeared to be a clear motive for the abduction in some cases, though money and visibility were also likely factors. In every case, a ransom was paid to secure the release of the victim, although no one was willing to disclose the amount paid.

• On February 3, suspected gang members kidnapped Haitian journalist Jean Thony Lorthé, host of the show, “Memory Refresh,” on privately owned radio and television outlet Radio Vision 2000.

Lorthé told CPJ that he was headed to a funeral in Port-au-Prince’s Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood with his wife and brother at around 7 p.m. when they were ambushed at a crossroads by a dozen heavily armed men in the Laboule 12 neighborhood, which is controlled by the Tik Makak gang.

“They took us hostage and confiscated our two vehicles, stripping us of jewelry, cell phones, and cash,” Lorthé told CPJ.

Lorthé said he believed his journalism was a motive in the kidnapping. “I was asked a lot of questions about Radio Vision 2000, about some of my reports, and they questioned me about the government,” he said. The gang leader was present at the kidnapping, he said, taking that as a sign that the abduction was planned.

The three captives were freed after 15 days following the payment of a ransom. Lorthé, who has since left the country, said he went to the Central Directorate of the Judicial Police, responsible for investigating serious crimes in Haiti, to make a statement but he had not heard anything since and did not know if the police were investigating the case.

“Generally speaking, the police don’t react. Especially since the police don’t have the means or the strategy to confront the gangs,” he said. “I was given a certificate of my statement. I’m not aware of anything else.”

A spokesperson for the Haitian police did not respond to a request for comment on Lorthé‘s case.

• On March 17, Lebrun Saint-Hubert, owner of the community radio station RCH 2000 and host of a current affairs show “Konfizyon” (Confusion), was kidnapped and held captive for eight days. 

Saint-Hubert told CPJ that eight armed men dressed in black took him hostage around 7 p.m. in the Delmas 39 area of Port-au-Prince while he was drivingto a restaurant he owns, Kora Bar & Grill. The kidnappers demanded $1.5 million in ransom, said Saint-Hubert, who declined to tell CPJ how much he paid.

Upon his release, Saint-Hubert, who also filed a complaint with the police and briefly left the country. He has since returned to Haiti and resumed hosting his show.Saint-Hubert, who also works as a police officer, said he had requested to be transferred to a safer neighborhood. “No one can move in Haiti. It’s like a prison,” he said, in reference to the volatile situation on the ground.

Saint-Hubert confirmed that a dispute with a local politician over ownership of the radio station may have been the motive for the kidnapping, as reported by local media, but said he could not be certain who was responsible.

• From April 10 to 21, Robert Denis, the 75-year-old owner of the TV station Canal Bleu, was held captive until he paid an undisclosed ransom, he told CPJ.

Denis, who is also president of the National Association of Haitian Media,said hewas stopped by armed men while driving his car at 10 a.m. on the Route de Frères, east of the capital. Denis said that he was held in an empty room, where he slept on the floor, and was subjected to death threats.

“They only had one objective: money,” said Denis, adding that his car, laptop, passport, and other documents were stolen.

Denis said he filed a complaint with the police but had little hope of the case being resolved. “They said they would investigate, but it’s like we are at war. The police don’t have the resources to protect everyone. The gangs can kill and kidnap, and they know nothing will happen to them,” he said.

CPJ has previously documented the kidnappings of three other journalists in the country:

• On June 20, Pierre-Louis Opont, president of Haiti’s independent Télé Pluriel channel 44, was kidnapped a week after the brief abduction of his wife, Marie Lucie Bonhomme, a veteran journalist for  Radio Vision 2000, in Port-au-Prince’s Tabarre neighborhood. Bonhomme told CPJ that she was freed after several hours while her husband was held for over two months before his release.
• On July 21, Blondine Tanis, a host on the local broadcaster Radio Renovation FM, was kidnapped by unidentified people at her home in the Delmas neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. She was released on July 30 after a ransom was paid. In each case, victims told CPJ that they were unaware of any effort by the police or judicial authorities to investigate the incidents.

Haiti is one of the world’s most dangerous places for journalists. CPJ has documented the killings of nine journalists since 2021, with six confirmed to have been killed in connection with their work.

“Journalists must strike a balance between their duty to inform and their obligation to stay alive,” Lorthé said. “To protect themselves, they must analyze situations carefully before approaching gangs,” adding that journalists do not have the training or the equipment to protect themselves when covering gangs. 

On October 2, the United Nations Security Council approved sending an international security mission to Haiti to support the police in regaining territory from the gangs.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On August 26, 2023, police arrested Tewodros Zerfu, a presenter and program host with the online media outlets Yegna TV and Menelik Television, while he was chatting with a friend at a cafe in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, according to reports from the outlets and accounts from his sister Seblework Zerfu and Yegna TV founder Engidawork Gebeyehu, who spoke to CPJ by messaging app.

 Four days later, on August 30, two security officers in civilian clothing arrested Nigussie Berhanu, a political analyst and co-host of, “Yegna Forum,” a biweekly political show on Yegna TV, according to Yegna TV reports, Engidawork, and a family member who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns.

On September 11, seven federal police officers arrested Yehualashet Zerihun, the program director of the privately owned station Tirita 97.6 FM, his residence in Addis Ababa, according to a report by Tirita and Yehualashet‘s wife Meron Jembere, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app. Meron said she had not been given any specific reason for his arrest to date.

The three journalists were initially detained at the Federal Police Crime Investigation Center in the capital city of Addis Ababa, but have since been transferred to a temporary detention center at a military in Awash Arba, a town in Afar State that is about 240 miles (145 kilometers) east of Addis Ababa, according to the people who spoke to CPJ. Those sources said they were not aware of the journalists being presented in court or formally charged with a crime.

“The detention of journalists at a military camp, under unclear judicial oversight, is a deeply worrying sign of the depths to which Ethiopia’s regard for the media has sunk,” said CPJ sub-Saharan Africa representative, Muthoki Mumo. “Authorities should release journalists Tewodros Zerfu, Yehualashet Zerihun, and Nigussie Berhanu, as well as other members of the press detained for their work.”

Ethiopia declared a six-month state of emergency on August 4, 2023, in response to the conflict in northern Amhara state involving federal government forces and the Fano, an armed militia, according to media reports. Since then, CPJ has documented the detention of at least four  other journalists in Addis Ababa, two of whom remain detained, also in Awash Arba.

The state of emergency legislation gives security personnel sweeping powers of arrest and permits the suspension of due process of law, including the right to appear before a court and receive legal counsel.

In addition to his role as a program director, Yehualashet was a host and co-host of three weekly radio shows, “Negere Kin,” “Semonegna,” and “Feta Bekidame,” focusing on art and social issues.

According to CPJ’s review of their work, Tewodros and Nigussie usually appeared together on Yegna TV’s regular program, “Yegna’s Forum,” and their commentary and reporting is published on Yegna TV’s YouTube channel, which has over 600,000 subscribers. Yegna Forum is a mostly political program, which has been critical of the Ethiopian government. Prior to their detention, they had discussed the ongoing Amhara conflict, criticizing the passing of the state of emergency decree, and questioning the neutrality of the Ethiopian National Defense Force.

A few days before his detention, Nigussie made a Facebook post in which he alleged that he was “perceived as a threat” to the government, and had been “identified as a target.”

CPJ’s queries sent via email to federal police spokesperson Jeylan Abdi and the office of the federal minister of justice were unanswered. Government spokesperson Legesse Tulu did not respond to queries sent via messaging app and text message.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On August 31, four Comorian journalists appealed their August 24 convictions for defamation and insult related to the publicizing of sexual misconduct allegations against unnamed leadership of the state-owned ORTC, according to the journalists, who spoke to CPJ over the phone, and a statement in support of the appeal by the National Union of Journalists in the Comoros, a local trade organization.

The charges and convictions by the criminal court in the capital, Moroni, followed a complaint by Hablani Assoumani, operational director of the ORTC, over “defamatory allegations of sexual touching” made during a January 17 meeting between Comoros President Azali Assoumani and journalists, as well as in subsequent media coverage of the allegations, according to those sources and a copy of the summons for one of the journalists to appear in court, which CPJ reviewed.

The journalists convicted include Andjouza Abouheir, vice president of the journalists’ union, and Toufé Maecha, former director of ORTC, who both made comments related to the allegations during the January 17 meeting; as well as Abdallah Mzembaba, a correspondent for Radio France Internationale, and Oubeidillah Mchangama, a reporter with the privately owned FCBK FM broadcaster, both of whom published reporting about these allegations, the four journalists told CPJ.

A court date for the journalists’ appeal has not been set, according to Saïd Mohamed Saïd Hassane, Mzembaba’s lawyer, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

“Convicting journalists for asking questions and reporting on sexual assault allegations sends a chilling message that promotes impunity for such abusive behavior. Authorities should not oppose the journalists’ appeal,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in Durban, South Africa. “Journalists have been crucial to exposing sexual misconduct in workplaces around the world. Comoros authorities should focus on investigating such allegations, not seek to deter reporters from holding those in power to account.”

During the January 17 meeting, Abouheir questioned the country’s president about allegations of sexual touching “by at least one man, a superior, on young women,” in return for promises of “promotions,” according to media reports.

Mzembaba told CPJ that after the meeting he reported for RFI on the allegations and the president’s response. That reporting suggested that the person accused is “a director of one of the national television departments.” On June 15, the Moroni court summoned Mzembaba to appear over that coverage, according to the summons that CPJ reviewed.

Mchangamasimilarly told CPJ he was being prosecuted for reporting the details of the meeting in a January 19 Facebook Live broadcast.

On June 22, the public prosecutor called for one year’s sentence, with a minimum of three months to be served in prison, and a one-year ban on the suspects from exercising their profession, claiming in the indictment that the speech and media coverage of these allegations had “tarnished” the country’s image, according to several reports.

On August 24, the Moroni court sentenced the four journalists to a nine-month suspended sentenceand a fine of 150,000 Comorian francs ($US325) each for defamation and insult, according to news reports.

CPJ reached the secretary for ORTC’s general manager Mohamed Abdou Mhadji via messaging app, but he declined to comment. CPJ’s calls to the Comoros Ministry of Justice via the number listed on their Facebook page went unanswered.

[Editors’ Note: The first paragraph of this report was updated to correct a typo.]

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s public television broadcaster TVNZ is planning significant cuts to content production, programmes and operational spending in response to commercial clients’ reduced spending on advertising.

Future projects are under review and pay rises for executives and top-earning staff have also been scrapped at the state-owned broadcaster.

Staff were informed of the changes in a memo and video address today from acting chief executive Brent McAnulty.

• READ MORE: Other TVNZ reports
• Other Mediawatch reports

The memo says senior executives have identified “all the possible cost savings opportunities we have” in recent weeks.

“Content budgets have been reduced, both for local production and international content. Remuneration reviews have been cancelled for our exec team and our other highest-earning employees,” it said.

“There have been some really tough calls to make here, but we need to live within our means,” McAnulty told staff.

“All projects are being reviewed to decide whether they should continue, be paused, or be cancelled for this financial year,” the memo said.

Digital technology overhaul
TVNZ currently has a tender out for a major overhaul of its digital technology and internet infrastructure.

“We’re also putting tighter controls on capital expenditure and we’re looking at how we can reduce casual and contractor labour costs,” the memo said.

“The TV advertising market is tough right now, and as the biggest player we are being impacted,” McAnulty told staff in today’s memo.

“Local businesses have been reducing their advertising spend because of the economic conditions, and uncertainty in the lead up to the election,” it said.

The memo urges staff to use up their leave this year.

Recruitment for vacant roles is “paused until 2024” and TVNZ is “choosing not to fill some other vacant roles” and will defer the starting dates for some roles.

TVNZ has more than 750 staff. More than 300 of them earn more than $100,000 a year.

Annual allowance dropped
An annual allowance of $350 paid to all staff — which was effectively a covid-19 relief initiative — will not be paid this year.

TVNZ has “paused” all travel for 2024 except “business-critical travel related to newsgathering, commercial clients and content negotiations”.

TVNZ will also spend less on social media and online marketing and promotion and market research, according to the memo.

“We’re pausing all internal events — though we’re still hopeful that we’ll have Christmas celebrations in our three main offices,” the memo said.

TVNZ reported revenue of $180.3 million in the six months to December 2022, but forecast a loss of $15.6m in the 2023/24 financial year.

The broadcaster has previously signalled that it may need to respond to financial difficulties in the near future.

TVNZ’s most recent Statement of Intent (pdf) says alignment of revenues and costs was under “increasing pressure”.

A ‘dynamic approach’
“We’ll adopt a dynamic approach to the allocation of business resources between investing to sustain our core TV business and accelerating the growth of our future online business. The stronger the commercial performance of our core business, the more actively we’ll be able to invest in shaping our future,” the document says.

Brent McAnulty assured TVNZ staff in today’s memo that TVNZ still had a strong share of television audience and revenue and its online platform TVNZ+ had an “impressive growth trajectory.”

Previous CEO Kevin Kenrick persuaded the government in 2019 to allow TVNZ to effectively forgo dividends to the Crown to allow it to invest in programmes and digital services.

This angered rival commercial media rivals who could expect no such backstop, while also competing with offshore-owned streaming services as well other broadcasters for audience and revenue.

TVNZ has invested heavily in TVNZ+ and recently launched live sport on the platform after securing rights held by Spark Sport until it ceased in July.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

I’ve had to learn to be very good about structure. Historically, my schedule has been either super rigid or extremely free, depending on my circumstances. I think both have been detrimental to my mental health and creative output, so I’ve had to find a balance. Sometimes I’d realize it was four o’clock and I hadn’t brushed my teeth yet. Other times I had my day planned out so thoroughly I didn’t give myself time to eat or go outside at all. I’ve learned that structuring my day in a way that feels productive but also nourishing makes me feel better not just in the work, but in my body and my life.

My strike schedule looks something like this: I’ll wake up, make coffee, check emails. I try to go to a morning yoga class a few times a week. I’m going to try not to lie to you and say, “I wake up every single day and I take a class.” But right now I’m probably doing it two, three times a week. I do think it’s also important to try to rest your body and rest your brain.

Right now, I’m really focused on rest because when I am in a writer’s room, it’s pretty draining. If you’re writing every day, you just get so tapped out. Last year was a very, very busy year for me. Up until April of this year, I was pretty much working nonstop. Then, after we went on strike, I began regularly contributing to The LA Times’ ‘De Los’ section. So I’ve honestly been trying to take advantage of this time to rest and sleep and care for my body, in between picketing and writing for The Times. And only just recently, I’ve started letting some TV writing ideas become bigger than just ideas, like outlining an idea for a series. I’ve been trying to carve out some time in the day just for outlining or writing or brainstorming whatever ideas come up. Jotting stuff down, seeing where it goes, tapping into my experiences for fodder, all that good shit. Then I eat a beautiful dinner made by my partner and I watch Love Island. That’s literally my life and then I go to fucking bed.

I would love to hear what the strike has illuminated for you, particularly as someone pretty new to the industry.

I came from 20 years as a journalist. I started at an alt weekly in San Diego, which no longer exists. Then I freelanced while working a ton of random jobs to get by, and eventually landed at Vice for a few years. I think coming from that career path, [journalists] see TV as like, Oh, that’s it. You’re fucking set. Because [in journalism] you just get so used to being beaten down and driven out and laid off. It’s such a hard pursuit, especially like in my case, if you’re one of the very few Latinx people — or have any kind of underrepresented background — within those spaces. You end up doing so much double duty explaining identity and experience.

When I hit the wall at Vice, I’d realized that no one was really investing in me. I constantly felt like I was having to prove myself. A lot of my career felt like people were underestimating me and me being like, Fuck you, I’m going to do this anyway. So I only really had myself in some ways, and then eventually the community I built that was supportive and mutually supportive.

But when I started working in TV, I had the realization that it has its own problems just like any other industry. And I know it’s kind of bleak, but there is no Promised Land. We’re always going to be fighting, especially as creative people because our creativity and our work is going to be constantly devalued. But you have to know your own value. You have to know what you’re worth and what you can do, and that you have to be willing to invest in yourself at all costs because they’re not going to. We’re dealing with it now with the AMPTP.

What has been really heartening is that, just like when I was a union rep at Vice, picketing with the Writer’s Guild has offered me a really strong group of people who all support each other and are willing to fight with you so you’re not alone in your fight.

Can you walk me through that journey, from journalism to TV?

I was in a group chat with a bunch of other Latinx writers started by Shea Serrano, as a space for us to support each other, talk shit, and just joke around. Everyone was in journalism, digital or print media, TV or film. One day the conversation of money came up and the TV writers shared their rates and I was like…Whoa. You make how much? I have to work the whole year and still don’t make as much as you do in like a month or two.</i>

I think we start making concessions in our lives at a pretty young age sometimes. Writing for TV or film, that was always something I dreamt of when I was younger. But I was like, well, maybe one day,/i>. But journalism was considered a more practical writing career. Then when things just became so untenable working in digital media for me, I knew I had to get out. It just wasn’t sustainable.

So, I decided to just write a pilot. I needed something to prove that I could actually do this. Because I could say, I’m really interested in writing for TV and I’d be really great at it, but you have to prove how serious you are. It’s important to be willing to do the work, not just say you want to do it and then wait for someone to let you do it. You need to be able to prove that you have a voice and a vision—that you know what kind of show you want to make and what kind of jokes you want to tell. I wrote on very late nights—until 2 or 3 A.M.—whenever I still had the energy to be creative after work. Sometimes, I slacked off enough at my day job so I’d still have some juice. And then I just started reaching out to my community and being like, “Hey guys, I wrote a pilot. Is anybody willing to read it and give me feedback?”

Then one day, I got a DM from Shea. He and I had been Twitter friends and I was in that group chat, so we’ve known each other and supported each other’s work from afar for years. He really was one of my favorite writers, and from what I understand, he liked my work, too. He hit me up and was like, “Hey, can we talk on the phone?” I was a little confused because anyone wanting to talk on the phone that isn’t your mom can feel very serious. Like your doctor doesn’t even talk to you on the phone. So, I sat down and I got a beer at the Trader Joe’s in Downtown Brooklyn and we got on the phone.

He was like, “So, I sold a TV show. It’s with this guy named Michael Schur. I don’t know if you know him, but he’s done some pretty cool stuff. Anyway, I think it would be really cool if you wrote on the show.” First of all, yes I fucking know who Michael Schur is because I am obsessed with him. He’s like my comedy hero, he’s so cool. And I was like, “Absolutely. But I’ve never written for TV before.” He was just like, “Me neither. I think you’re really funny and smart. And with the work you do, I think you would be a cool fit.” I was so stoked that he saw the potential that I knew I had.

From there, I had to do an interview and send in a package. I included my spec script, but also clips of articles that I’ve written. But I didn’t immediately quit my job or anything. I had to cash out all my vacation time and then take a leave of absence. I did the first writer’s room and then eventually came back, and by that time I had left Vice and gone to Netflix. And so it was possible for me to do both. Shout out to Evette Dionne, who was my boss at [Netflix’s] Tudum. She really supported me by just giving me the space to do this thing. Evette was like, This work can be done at any time, come back after your writer’s room.

You spend a lot of your career just hoping somebody sees you and recognizes something in you that’s worth investing in. When somebody does see it, and nurtures it, it’s so exciting—and often a result of the investments you made in yourself all along.

That’s really special, to have experienced that kind of acknowledgement and investment from writers you respect. From Tudum, you jumped fully into TV?

Yeah, it really is. After I later got laid off from Tudum—we all got laid off—then I had no choice but to be a full-time TV writer. This was all I had now. Thankfully Debbie Wolf and I became friends — she was one of our writers in the first half of season one of Primo,/i>, and she sold her show Lopez v. Lopez to NBC, and she chose to bring me on. And again, she was just like, I see you and I want you on my show. That felt like such validation that I was on the right path.

I always had my eye on what the larger vision was, but sometimes it was pure chaos. I see now I was just planting seeds the whole time. Now, in the last couple of years, I’ve really been watching them grow and bear fruit and blossom. It has been really incredible. But there were years that were extremely brutal, especially when other life stuff got in the way. When my dad got sick and then died. Or when I went through a divorce when I was really young. You wonder, I have to get through all of this and make my dreams come true? Bro, I’m tired.

Creative pursuits under capitalism can require so much patience and resilience!

They really do. For me, it took 39 years. But we’re here. I’m honestly glad it took the time it did, because at 25, I don’t think I would’ve been able to handle it as well. I’ve always felt it’s important to trust the universe, and I think in my gut I knew it was always going to work out. I didn’t know how or when, but I really trusted that the universe was looking out for me. Where that trust came from, why I decided to bet on it, I don’t know. But I always felt like my purpose was there and I just had to move in a way that I felt good about and things would work out. The ancestors would look out. Whoever it is, whatever it is, would look out for me.

Kind of a pivot, but what are your ideal working conditions?

Two hours a day max. And five hours of Love Island…

Honestly, I do not love working long hours, but you do it sometimes because you have to and that’s fine. My ideal working conditions involve a very open collaborative environment with people that are supportive and where everyone wants the best for each other and wants to get the best out of each other in a really kind and generous way. A leader that is there to instill their trust in you, and also help you become a better writer. Mike Schur is that person, and so is Shea, and the people they hired for Primo are those people too, including Lisa Muse Bryant and Peter Murrieta. And even others like my friend Sylvia Batey Alcalá. Same went for many of the folks at Lopez vs. Lopez, like Keith Heisler, Erica Harrell, Desiree Proctor, Lesley Wake Webster, and Marcos Luevanos. It’s so important to work in an environment where everyone’s really looking out for each other and it’s based in care and growth and everyone wanting to make the best possible, funniest, coolest, raddest show.

Also, free food. A lot of options for beverages. Those are the main things I require: A beautiful collaboration where we care for each other. And also there must be snacks.

What about your ideal work-life balance?

At the end of the day, work is work. Making TV is great and as cool as it is, it’s not your whole life. Your life is your family, your friends. That’s your life. This is your work. And I think when you work with people who understand that—especially those people in leadership positions—it makes such a huge difference.

I remember working at Vice, where they acted like if this fucking blog post doesn’t get out by 1:35 P.M. on the dot, it was the end of the world. In reality, this is a blog about Love Island. I’m stoked to write it, but I just don’t want to live like that. And I just can’t produce good work if I’m under stress. As a leader, if you aren’t understanding that people have lives and other responsibilities and need rest, then you just aren’t a good leader.

I’m curious how you determine whether a project deserves your attention and your time to pursue it and see it through, as opposed to projects that you feel good abandoning?

Sometimes I don’t really have that luxury, to be honest. Sometimes I have to see a project through because it’s a check. That’s the reality of it. And sometimes I get to do a project and I invest in it. I now have a development deal for a TV show based on my upbringing in Tijuana and San Diego. And a lot of the work I’ve had to do with that is not paid. Even with a deal, you don’t get paid until you sell—and you might not sell. So that’s like two years worth of work and I’m doing it because that’s my story and I’m willing to do whatever it takes. I should be paid for it, but at the moment, that’s not the case.

A lot of projects that I take on, I try to make sure they matter to me in some way or that I’m excited by some element of it. But sometimes I’m just like, this one is going to pay for my AT&T bill and a few other things and that’s fine too. There’s room for all of it. I’m at the point where I could be more selective, but not all the way selective. I’m not balling that hard yet, but hopefully one day.

When I do have the choice, I try to think about the people I’ll be working with and the ways I could grow from it. I just try to approach everything as though there’s a reason for it coming into my life, and inevitably I’m going to get something out of it. Sometimes the shitty thing leads to an amazing thing. It all eventually leads to something better. You’re always taking a big gamble on yourself. But I’m willing to roll the dice on that one.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sara Tardiff.

On August 14, a group of unidentified men carrying guns, knives, and sticks attacked journalists who were reporting on the aftermath of clashes between younger members of the Opu Nembe community and their leaders, according to the journalists, who spoke with CPJ, and news reports.

The men assaulted and robbed one journalist and stole equipment from two others. Two of the journalists were injured while fleeing the scene, they told CPJ.

“Authorities in Nigeria must identify all members of the group who recently attacked journalists working in Bayelsa state and hold them to account,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator in Durban, South Africa. “Police should conduct a swift and transparent investigation to send a clear message to all Nigerians that protecting the press is a priority.”

The journalists at the scene included reporter Joseph Kunde and camera operator Miebi Binafiai with the privately owned Television Continental news broadcaster; reporter Awe Baratuapere and camera operator Ayebakuro Rhodes Egein with the government-owned Nigerian Television Authority; reporter Iniyekenime Doctor Bruce, with the privately owned Africa Independent Television broadcaster; and Folaranmi Femi, a correspondent for The Sun newspaper.

Those journalists told CPJ that the police provided them with a security escort to the area, but then left because of another assignment. The journalists had nearly finished their work when dozens of young men appeared, fired guns into the air, and attacked them.

Femi and Kunde said they ran back to the police base to alert the officers. Police returned to the village about 20 minutes later and used tear gas and shot in the air to disperse the crowd.

Before police arrived, Binafiai told CPJ, attackers pointed an AK-47 rifle at him and stripped him of his shirt and pants, which they used to tie his hands and legs. The men then kicked and punched him until the officers arrived and chased them away. Binafiai said he lost a tooth in the attack, for which he received medical treatment, and the attackers also stole his camera, a mobile phone worth 170,000 naira ($220), two microphones, and 7,000 naira (US$9) in cash.

Bruce told CPJ that she fell down while running away and pretended to be unconscious, but the attackers stole her mobile phone and camera as she lay on the ground. She said that the Nigeria Union of Journalists later recovered her camera, but it was broken.

Baratuapere said he lost his tripod while running from the attackers and sustained a small cut near his right knee.

Egein told CPJ that he fell over as he was running to seek sanctuary in a nearby house, and broke his ankle and hurt his knee. A woman followed him inside the house and threatened to hand him over to the attackers unless he gave her all his money and belongings. Egein said he gave her his mobile phone, iPad, earbuds, 5,000 naira (US$6) in cash, and his ATM card, which she later used to withdraw 77,000 naira (US$100).

Egein said the woman hid him for a while and then introduced him to two men who escorted him to the next village, where he stayed until the following morning.

The other five journalists said police took them to the station, where they filed a complaint and waited until about midnight for officers to safely escort them out of the area.

Bayelsa state police spokesperson Butswat Asinim told CPJ on August 28 that investigations were ongoing to recover the stolen items and identify the perpetrators.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

The reason: His decade reporting on the environmental havoc caused by the illegal extraction of gold from his childhood home in the Amazon rainforest in eastern Peru.

Despite the danger, Calloquispe, a freelancer for El Comercio, Latina Televisión, and environmental news site Inforegión, presses ahead with his investigations and scoops.

Unlike Lima reporters who sometimes cover these issues by spending a few days in the area before returning to the safety of the capital, Calloquispe lives in the jungle and must deal with the fallout of his reporting. “The pressure against me is very strong,” Calloquispe, 57, said in an interview with CPJ in the Amazon town of Puerto Maldonado where he is based. “But this is where I want to be.”

Journalists in Peru face a variety of threats, ranging from a rising number of criminal defamation lawsuits to attacks by police during anti-government protests. Reporting on environmental issues from the Amazon, which encompasses parts of Peru and several other South American countries, can be especially dangerous due to its remote location, the lack of law enforcement that allows criminal groups to thrive, and poor communications infrastructure. Last year, British freelance journalist Dom Phillips was shot by suspected illegal fishermen while researching a book on how to protect the Amazon with Indigenous issues expert Bruno Pereira. Their bodies were found dismembered and buried in the Brazilian rainforest.

Illegal gold mining, Calloquispe’s beat, is often carried out by criminal networks which extract the precious metal without permits or authorized machinery. This underground industry is estimated to account for more than one-quarter of Peru’s total gold production, according to think tank InsightCrime. Environmental groups blame the industry for the contaminating rivers with mercury, destroying riverbeds with dredges, and for deforestation. It’s also a source of political corruption and human trafficking as girls and young women are brought into mining areas for sex work, according to the U.N.

In the Peruvian capital of Lima, Calloquispe’s editors describe him as an extremely well-sourced journalist willing to venture into dangerous areas to report on one of the biggest threats to the Amazon rainforest.

“You need courage and willpower to cover this beat,” said Ricardo León, the weekend editor at El Comercio who works closely with Calloquispe. “What struck me about Manuel is that he is one of the few journalists in the region strongly opposed to the industry.”

Aside from documenting the environmental havoc, Calloquispe’s reporting helps explain why the industry is so entrenched, León said. For example, ahead of local elections in 2014 and 2018, he found that numerous candidates in Madre de Dios province, the mining epicenter in the Peruvian Amazon, were connected to the industry.

Calloquispe often goes along on police raids against illegal miners. But Rodolfo Mancilla, a public prosecutor in Puerto Maldonado, told CPJ that political support for the industry is so strong that local mayors and legislators often try to stymie these law enforcement operations. Calloquispe has also reported on a jump in homicides in the mining zone, on the industry’s impact on Indigenous communities, and on human trafficking.  

“Manuel is very committed to his work,” Pamela Bressia, his editor at Latina Television, told CPJ. “He is always trying to investigate and uncover wrongdoing.”

That commitment comes, in part, from Calloquispe’s upbringing. When he was 5, his father moved his family from the mountains of central Peru to a plot of land in the Amazon rainforest about 25 miles from Puerto Maldonado. Calloquispe fished, hunted wild boar with a shotgun, and soaked in his jungle surroundings. His father tried panning for gold but soon switched to farming.

“He found a few nuggets but came to believe that the forest did not want to give up its gold,” Calloquispe said. “He felt a bad vibe, like he was doing something wrong. He told me: ‘This is not for us.’”

His father had been illiterate but eventually learned to read and furnished their home with three books: a Bible, a classic Peruvian novel called “La Serpiente del Oro” (“The Gold Snake”), and a volume of geography. The books sparked Calloquispe’s own interest in reading and writing.

“I figured if my father was illiterate and learned how to read, why can’t I?” he said. 

Calloquispe attended an elementary school in the jungle where there was one teacher for all six grades. He then graduated from high school in Puerto Maldonado and moved to Lima to become the first member of his family to see the Pacific Ocean and to enroll in a university. He didn’t know what a journalist was but liked telling stories and contributed to the school’s so-called “newspaper wall” where students printed out articles they had written and posted them on a bulletin board.

Upon returning to Puerto Maldonado in the late 1990s, he jumped into journalism.

At first, Calloquispe reported for a local newspaper and a TV station where he hosted a news and interview program. He started focusing on illegal mining following the construction of a highway connecting Peru’s interior to the Amazon jungle that opened up the region to a wave of fortune-seekers and made it easier to bring in dredges and other heavy machinery. Calloquispe’s coverage attracted the attention of media outlets in Lima and he began reporting for Inforegión in 2011 and for El Comercio and Latina Televisión in 2013.

León, the El Comercio weekend editor, said that reliable regional correspondents like Calloquispe are difficult to find. He said many reporters in remote areas are poorly paid and as a result often tempted to accept bribes from politicians and business owners in exchange for ignoring scandals and producing puff pieces.

“It’s very difficult to find good reporters because there is so much corruption,” León said. Before hiring Calloquispe “we never had a regular contributor” in Puerto Maldonado.

For his part, Calloquispe says he became committed to exposing environmental crimes because he was raised in the rainforest and remembers what it was like before loggers and gold miners invaded the area.

“It used to be a virgin forest and now it’s deforested,” he says. “You used to be able to swim in the rivers which were pristine. Now, they are just muddy water and lots of sediment and no fish or wildlife. It gets worse every day.”

Meanwhile, Calloquispe faces ongoing harassment and danger. In January, when a horde of miners who had discussed killing the journalist on chat groups surrounded his home and shouted threats in response to his article about an illegal mining boss allegedly funding anti-government protests. Calloquispe’s editors at Latina Television contacted the police, who escorted the journalist to the airport so he could board a flight to Lima. He stayed there for two weeks until he could safely return to Puerto Maldonado.

“We were very worried,” Bressia said. “If he would have stayed put, they would have killed him.”

Although Calloquispe has filed complaints with the police and Attorney General’s office, he says there have been no arrests stemming from the attacks and threats against him. A police official in Puerto Maldonado told CPJ he was not authorized to comment on the attacks on the journalist. CPJ emailed the press department of the Attorney General’s office but received no response.

Bressia noted that station managers have talked with Calloquispe about switching to another beat or reporting from Lima but that he’s adamant about staying put, in part, because he wants to write a book about illegal mining.

Calloquispe says that after publishing controversial stories he will go into hiding for a few weeks then return to Puerto Maldonado. He is also trying to get hold of a protective vest and to save up the USD$2,500 he needs to buy a pistol. Some of his friends in the police department have promised to teach him how to shoot.

“There will come a moment when I will have to defend myself,” he said.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by John Otis.

The reason: His decade reporting on the environmental havoc caused by the illegal extraction of gold from his childhood home in the Amazon rainforest in eastern Peru.

Despite the danger, Calloquispe, a freelancer for El Comercio, Latina Televisión, and environmental news site Inforegión, presses ahead with his investigations and scoops.

Unlike Lima reporters who sometimes cover these issues by spending a few days in the area before returning to the safety of the capital, Calloquispe lives in the jungle and must deal with the fallout of his reporting. “The pressure against me is very strong,” Calloquispe, 57, said in an interview with CPJ in the Amazon town of Puerto Maldonado where he is based. “But this is where I want to be.”

Journalists in Peru face a variety of threats, ranging from a rising number of criminal defamation lawsuits to attacks by police during anti-government protests. Reporting on environmental issues from the Amazon, which encompasses parts of Peru and several other South American countries, can be especially dangerous due to its remote location, the lack of law enforcement that allows criminal groups to thrive, and poor communications infrastructure. Last year, British freelance journalist Dom Phillips was shot by suspected illegal fishermen while researching a book on how to protect the Amazon with Indigenous issues expert Bruno Pereira. Their bodies were found dismembered and buried in the Brazilian rainforest.

Illegal gold mining, Calloquispe’s beat, is often carried out by criminal networks which extract the precious metal without permits or authorized machinery. This underground industry is estimated to account for more than one-quarter of Peru’s total gold production, according to think tank InsightCrime. Environmental groups blame the industry for the contaminating rivers with mercury, destroying riverbeds with dredges, and for deforestation. It’s also a source of political corruption and human trafficking as girls and young women are brought into mining areas for sex work, according to the U.N.

In the Peruvian capital of Lima, Calloquispe’s editors describe him as an extremely well-sourced journalist willing to venture into dangerous areas to report on one of the biggest threats to the Amazon rainforest.

“You need courage and willpower to cover this beat,” said Ricardo León, the weekend editor at El Comercio who works closely with Calloquispe. “What struck me about Manuel is that he is one of the few journalists in the region strongly opposed to the industry.”

Aside from documenting the environmental havoc, Calloquispe’s reporting helps explain why the industry is so entrenched, León said. For example, ahead of local elections in 2014 and 2018, he found that numerous candidates in Madre de Dios province, the mining epicenter in the Peruvian Amazon, were connected to the industry.

Calloquispe often goes along on police raids against illegal miners. But Rodolfo Mancilla, a public prosecutor in Puerto Maldonado, told CPJ that political support for the industry is so strong that local mayors and legislators often try to stymie these law enforcement operations. Calloquispe has also reported on a jump in homicides in the mining zone, on the industry’s impact on Indigenous communities, and on human trafficking.  

“Manuel is very committed to his work,” Pamela Bressia, his editor at Latina Television, told CPJ. “He is always trying to investigate and uncover wrongdoing.”

That commitment comes, in part, from Calloquispe’s upbringing. When he was 5, his father moved his family from the mountains of central Peru to a plot of land in the Amazon rainforest about 25 miles from Puerto Maldonado. Calloquispe fished, hunted wild boar with a shotgun, and soaked in his jungle surroundings. His father tried panning for gold but soon switched to farming.

“He found a few nuggets but came to believe that the forest did not want to give up its gold,” Calloquispe said. “He felt a bad vibe, like he was doing something wrong. He told me: ‘This is not for us.’”

His father had been illiterate but eventually learned to read and furnished their home with three books: a Bible, a classic Peruvian novel called “La Serpiente del Oro” (“The Gold Snake”), and a volume of geography. The books sparked Calloquispe’s own interest in reading and writing.

“I figured if my father was illiterate and learned how to read, why can’t I?” he said. 

Calloquispe attended an elementary school in the jungle where there was one teacher for all six grades. He then graduated from high school in Puerto Maldonado and moved to Lima to become the first member of his family to see the Pacific Ocean and to enroll in a university. He didn’t know what a journalist was but liked telling stories and contributed to the school’s so-called “newspaper wall” where students printed out articles they had written and posted them on a bulletin board.

Upon returning to Puerto Maldonado in the late 1990s, he jumped into journalism.

At first, Calloquispe reported for a local newspaper and a TV station where he hosted a news and interview program. He started focusing on illegal mining following the construction of a highway connecting Peru’s interior to the Amazon jungle that opened up the region to a wave of fortune-seekers and made it easier to bring in dredges and other heavy machinery. Calloquispe’s coverage attracted the attention of media outlets in Lima and he began reporting for Inforegión in 2011 and for El Comercio and Latina Televisión in 2013.

León, the El Comercio weekend editor, said that reliable regional correspondents like Calloquispe are difficult to find. He said many reporters in remote areas are poorly paid and as a result often tempted to accept bribes from politicians and business owners in exchange for ignoring scandals and producing puff pieces.

“It’s very difficult to find good reporters because there is so much corruption,” León said. Before hiring Calloquispe “we never had a regular contributor” in Puerto Maldonado.

For his part, Calloquispe says he became committed to exposing environmental crimes because he was raised in the rainforest and remembers what it was like before loggers and gold miners invaded the area.

“It used to be a virgin forest and now it’s deforested,” he says. “You used to be able to swim in the rivers which were pristine. Now, they are just muddy water and lots of sediment and no fish or wildlife. It gets worse every day.”

Meanwhile, Calloquispe faces ongoing harassment and danger. In January, when a horde of miners who had discussed killing the journalist on chat groups surrounded his home and shouted threats in response to his article about an illegal mining boss allegedly funding anti-government protests. Calloquispe’s editors at Latina Television contacted the police, who escorted the journalist to the airport so he could board a flight to Lima. He stayed there for two weeks until he could safely return to Puerto Maldonado.

“We were very worried,” Bressia said. “If he would have stayed put, they would have killed him.”

Although Calloquispe has filed complaints with the police and Attorney General’s office, he says there have been no arrests stemming from the attacks and threats against him. A police official in Puerto Maldonado told CPJ he was not authorized to comment on the attacks on the journalist. CPJ emailed the press department of the Attorney General’s office but received no response.

Bressia noted that station managers have talked with Calloquispe about switching to another beat or reporting from Lima but that he’s adamant about staying put, in part, because he wants to write a book about illegal mining.

Calloquispe says that after publishing controversial stories he will go into hiding for a few weeks then return to Puerto Maldonado. He is also trying to get hold of a protective vest and to save up the USD$2,500 he needs to buy a pistol. Some of his friends in the police department have promised to teach him how to shoot.

“There will come a moment when I will have to defend myself,” he said.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by John Otis.

“The court-imposed suspension of TELE1 due to an RTÜK order, along with the imprisonment of the outlet’s chief editor Merdan Yanardağ in June, are unlawful and shameful acts aimed at intimidating the opposition media in Turkey into silence,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative, on Tuesday. “TELE1 should immediately be allowed to continue broadcasting, and Turkish authorities should make peace with the fact that a free and critical news media is essential for democracy.”

The blackout started on Sunday, August 6, and will last until Saturday, August 12, according to reports by TELE1 and other outlets.

Yanardağ was arrested, pending trial, in June due to his criticism of authorities over the prison conditions of Abdullah Öcalan, the convicted leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey considers a terrorist organization.

At that time, RTÜK also ordered a seven-day suspension of TELE1, which was delayed pending a lawsuit filed by the media organization. The RTÜK decisions can be appealed in court, according to the related Turkish laws. However, TELE1 reported on August 1 that it had been informed that an Ankara court had lifted the stay of execution and allowed the suspension to go into effect.

RTÜK’s board is based on political party seats in parliament, which is currently controlled by the ruling Justice and Development Party and its allies. In the past, RTÜK has favored pro-government outlets and has focused penalties on critical outlets. In April, CPJ joined other press freedom, freedom of expression, and human rights organizations in calling for the regulator to stop punishing broadcasters for critical reporting.

TELE1 published a press statement on Saturday assuring its audience that the outlet will live on and “continue on its path as a distinguished example of honorable journalism in the history of the press.” The outlet also published an online video that day in which the TELE1 staff vowed to continue doing their jobs after the suspension ends despite the pressure they face.

CPJ emailed RTÜK but did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

On Wednesday, June 28, at least 12 soldiers from the Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC) arrested, punched, and used belts to hit Ngoyi, a reporter with the U.N.-backed Radio Okapi; Malou, a reporter with state owned Radio Télévision Nationale Congolaise (RTNC); and Nkelani, a camera operator in training with the state owned broadcaster RTNC2.

The three journalists had been covering a land dispute in Kinshasa, the capital, according to a report as well as Malou and Fiston Wavingana, an RTNC camera operator who witnessed the incident, both of whom spoke to CPJ.

Authorities released Malou later that day, and released Ngoyi and Nkelani on Thursday after interventions by the U.N. mission to the DRC, according to a tweet by a local journalist and a Radio Okapi staffer who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns. None of the journalists were charged with a crime.

“DRC authorities should hold accountable those responsible for arresting and violently abusing journalists Jeef Ngoyi, Marie-Louise Malou Mbela, and Jiresse Nkelani,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “The repeated arrests and attacks on Congolese journalists by security forces that are supposed to be protecting the public make for an alarming pattern that must be reversed.”

Before they were attacked, the journalists had interviewed a man who alleged that soldiers evicted him from his home on the orders of the DRC Minister of Urban Planning and Habitat.

A video posted on Twitter by a local journalist appears to show Ngoyi, Malou, and Nkelani after their arrest, sitting in the back of a truck with at least two other men, who CPJ was unable to identify. Two soldiers armed with rifles stand over them, and one of the soldiers can be seen beating them with a coiled rope. 

During their detention, soldiers held the journalists at the local office of the Military Detection of Anti-Patriotic Activities, an intelligence unit known by its French acronym DEMIAP.

Ngoyi told CPJ that they were not seriously injured by the beatings.

Sylvain Ekenge, a spokesperson for FARDC, claimed the journalist had attacked the soldiers, resulting in their arrest.

A local DEMIAP official who was reached by phone declined to give their name or comment. CPJ’s call to the urban planning minister went unanswered.

In November 2022, FARDC soldiers similarly assaulted David Ramazani, director of Buniaactualité TV and the Buniaactualité.cd news website.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The guards also grabbed, slapped, and pushed Pa Ousman Joof, founder and global coordinator of Gambia Talents Television, when he attempted to film the men attacking Cham, according to a report by the privately owned The Standard news site, as well as Cham and Joof, who also spoke with CPJ. The guards also hit Cham’s camera operator, Sanneh Samba, on the waist with an electric shock baton, Cham and Joof said.

Cham told CPJ he was making his way out of the Banjul City Council building after covering the ceremony when he and Samba spotted an NPP politician arguing with a man. Shortly after Sambabegan filming the argument, one of the politician’s security guards knocked the camera out of his hand, causing the lens to hit the ground and crack, according to Cham and the chief executive officer of Jamano Media, Alhagie Mamat Janha, who spoke by phone with CPJ.

Cham and Samba tried to explain to the security guards that they were doing their job and should be allowed to freely cover what was happening. Another guard then grabbed Cham by the neck and punched his mouth, drawing blood, while a third guard splashed a bottle of water across the journalist’s body, Cham told CPJ, adding that he told the guards he would defend himself with his tripod if they continued to attack.

A fourth guard then joined the attack, hitting Cham on the nose with an electric shock baton, which also drew blood. Cham ran from the guards, according to the journalist and footage of the incident recorded by Joof, which CPJ reviewed. The guards chased him down, grabbed him, and tried to drag him, but bystanders intervened and allowed him to escape, Cham said.

The guards also briefly slapped and grabbed Joof until police intervened and allowed him to leave, Joof told CPJ.

Cham said he described the incident to other journalists at the scene and reported it to the local police station with Janha. He also went to a local hospital and received treatment to stop the bleeding and heal the wounds to his mouth and nose.

Cham also said that neither he nor his employer had heard from police as of June 26.

CPJ’s calls and text messages to Banjul police spokesperson Binta Njie went unanswered as of June 26.

NPP spokesperson Seedy Njie issued a public apology for the incident, but the journalists rejected the apology since it did not reference their names, according to a June 6 report in The Standard. CPJ’s messages to the NPP spokesperson went unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On June 20, Ormaza, a reporter and newscaster for the privately owned broadcaster Majestad Televisión, was driving from her home in La Concordia to her outlet’s headquarters in the nearby northwestern city of Santo Domingo when a black SUV with no license plates swerved in front of her and forced her off the highway, according to news reports and the journalist, who communicated with CPJ by messaging app.

Ormaza lost control of her car, which went into a ditch and rolled on its side. She sustained minor injuries to her neck, chest, and legs in the accident.

On June 22, Ormaza received a message from a Facebook account she could not identify, saying: “Now you know what we are capable of. Your journalism does not scare us and the next time it won’t be an accident. It will be a bullet to the middle of your forehead.” 

Ormaza said these incidents followed her TV report—which has since been removed from the station’s website due to safety concerns—about brakes failing on an overloaded bus causing a May 28 accident that killed two passengers and injured dozens. Ormaza resigned from the TV station on Monday, June 26, and said she and her family want to flee Ecuador amid the threats.

“Ecuadorian authorities must thoroughly investigate the recent harassment of journalist Lissette Ormaza and ensure that those who threatened her life are held to account,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in Quito. “At least two journalists have already fled Ecuador this year due to safety concerns. Authorities must use all resources at their disposal, including the country’s journalist protection mechanism, to ensure the safety of Ormaza and her family.”

When Ormaza sought comment from the bus company mentioned in her story, a manager ordered the journalist and her camera operator to leave. “He was very angry and tried to hit the camera,” Ormaza told CPJ. 

In early and mid-June, she received four death threats from Facebook accounts she could not identify, according to Ormaza and screenshots reviewed by CPJ. One said: “I hope I don’t have to use the bullet that has your name on it. I hope you understand, snitch.” 

After the car accident, Ormaza’s brother, who is a doctor, prescribed her pain medication and recommended she use an orthopedic brace on her neck. She did not report the highway incident or death threats to the police or attorney general’s office for fear of reprisal, she said.

CPJ called the bus company mentioned in Ormaza’s report and the police in Santo Domingo and emailed the attorney general’s office in Quito for comment, but did not receive any replies.

Crime and homicides, often carried out by drug-trafficking gangs, are rising in Ecuador, leading to a surge in threats and violence against the country’s journalists.

At a press conference in Quito on Wednesday, June 28, a CPJ delegation will release “Ecuador on edge,” a report documenting the impact of political paralysis and spiking crime on press freedom in Ecuador.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

So I hear your plan is working and you can get up and do whatever you want.

It’s a transformational period. I wanted to figure out how I can be an irresponsible, ridiculous artist and just do things that are nonsense and still make very good money. Every day I get to wake up and do something stupid.

That does sound ideal.

Six years ago I formed a plan and I had bumps along the way, but now it’s becoming a real thing and I feel good. I’m pretty happy. But because it’s becoming a real thing, I’m just like, “What am I going to do now that I can pick projects? What do I want to do more than anything else?” That leads me to a lot of thought about, “Who am I? What am I doing?”

Sometimes I’m like, “How can I make sure I’m creative today, given all my other responsibilities?” But if I was like, “Oh my God, I can be creative all the time,” it’s a similar approach to time, but I guess it’s a little bit more sublime.

What I expect to happen is that when I have more time to focus, the quality of my work is going to increase dramatically. That’s what I think is going to happen. Every time that I’ve had an idea and not had enough time to really make it perfect and exactly what I want, that’s going to go away. Instead, I’m going to have the ability to execute as I envision things because now I have resources, now I have connections, now I have time.

I think everybody who’s reading this will want to know how you got to that point.

Here’s my complete plan. It’s actually really simple. Looking back, I can explain it simply, but in the process, it was pretty crazy. What I did was I created a company and I signed myself as an artist exclusively to that company. I found people who are great at all the things that I hate to do and I’m terrible at, like a finance person or a manager agent with a bunch of connections or a person who’s good at finding money. I found those people and those people have a small share in my company. So if they do those things for me, my success means their success.

This is Supreme Robot Pictures. That’s basically what the structure of the company is. I’m exclusively signed to Supreme Robot Pictures and I create projects and I do the creative part.

Every day it’s going to be up to me to just figure out what I want to do. I have projects that are testament to that already, projects that are already making money, that are testament to this whole setup. I’m creating projects that have recurring income and those projects themselves are art projects and that recurring income pays for my team’s base salary so I don’t have to seek outside work once the recurring income is set up. I could spend the entire year working on one thing if I felt like it, as long as the recurring income covers whatever salary that I’ve said that I want. The very basics of it are I made myself as an artist into a company and then I profit share with people who do all the things that I hate.

You said you’re going to be able to do things just how you want them, and that implies that up till now, you haven’t.

Well, I am a perfectionist about one thing and that one thing can be done whether or not something is high production value or low production value. I’m a perfectionist about communicating because that’s the thing that’s most important to me. I want to communicate with people, but I can communicate with people on a budget of $50 and I can communicate with people on a budget of a million dollars. I mean, I know that other people, they have different tastes.

For instance, I’m a cartoonist and a lot of my friends that are cartoonists render way, way better than I do. But also my cartoons—what I really am trying to do is get a specific message across. If I can get that message across, that makes me happy. And at any level of production, the message is the same and that’s what is the most important part to me.

How do you have no hang-ups about money?

I used to have more hang-ups about money. I did. But have you ever heard that phrase? I think it’s Confucius, that a man has two lives. The second one begins when he realizes he has just one life to live.

I can relate.

For real. That happened to me six years ago. I was like, “What am I doing?” I was a producer on the Love and Hip Hop franchise and we were making just crap television and I was just like, “Why am I here? Is this how I’m going to waste the rest of my life?” And then, no offense to Love and Hip Hop, but I just don’t want to make Love and Hip Hop stuff anymore, which is obviously some sort of offense to Love and Hip Hop.

But then I was like, “If I’m not going to do that, what am I really going to do with my life?” Part of that was really focusing on what I want, what I really, really want. And what I really want actually has nothing to do with money. What I really want is I want freedom. I just want freedom. I want to be a frolicking elf in the woods. I have no cares. I have no responsibilities.

If I had kids during these past six years, I probably wouldn’t have been able to take the same risks. I probably wouldn’t have. However, now that I’ve done it, I can actually easily look back and say, “Hey, if you want to do it with low risk, these are ways you can do it with very low risk.”

You’re definitely going to have a consulting arm of this company.

I have a podcast where I just give away this information for free. I stopped for a while because I was too swamped. But now we’re starting it up again. It’s called the Arts Academy podcast. And so this information is all free because who cares? I mean, I know that I’m already doing stuff that’s going to make me money. And I know giving away information for free is going to help me make money anyway, so why not?

What are some intermediate steps that you haven’t articulated yet?

Well, one thing I had to deal with was crippling social anxiety. So what I did was I made a deal with myself, which is I’m just going to push through and do it and my heart will be pounding, but I’m just going to do it. I started doing that and experimenting with things.

I reasoned to myself to make myself move forward and do all the things I thought I needed to do to be successful. For instance, I asked myself a question, “Can I be successful?” And my anxiety was like, “No, idiot.” And then I was like, “Oh, but let’s reason that through.” I reasoned it down to this sentence, which I always think of, which reminds me I can be successful: There’s already somebody out there doing it worse and they’re a millionaire.

Oh, that’s so good.

So that’s it. That is what I think about all the time. Whenever I’m like, “I don’t want to go forward,” I’m just like, “Some idiot is just laughing in a bowl of money right now.”

Bowie did it. He didn’t lose an ounce of respect. Actually, he was seen as a genius forward thinker as a result.

I didn’t know Bowie made himself into a business.

If I’m getting the story right, it was like selling shares of himself in some kind of way.

Yeah. That’s exactly basically what I’m doing. That’s it. I’m going to read about that because I was looking for other people who did something like that. Although I made a company and the company signed me exclusively, it’s not actually me, but I’m basically selling shares in all of my works.

I can break it down for you. I’ll talk about gross margins, then I’ll talk about my business model. So gross margins are basically a measure of how profitable a business is. If you have a store and the store brings in $10,000 in a month and then it costs $7,000 in equipment and stock and whatever, and then you make $3,000, that’s your profit. You take that $3,000 and you divide it by the $10,000 and you get 30%, that percentage is your gross margin. So basically for every $7 you spend, $it brings in $10. So your profit is 30%. The gross margins of a company, McDonald’s, which is a super successful company, is about 80%.

So basically for every $2 they bring in about $10. When you think about art as a gross margin, it can be something that is a gross margin and the higher your gross margin is, the more valuable you are to people. But your gross margin as an artist can be very large. For instance, think about this one. For me, with me and my team, let’s say it takes us $5,000 a week to run. So to pay myself a salary to pay the people that are helping me, a salary they pick, takes $5,000 a week. What I want to do is I want to create a project and I want someone to invest in that project because it’s a business.

And once someone invests in that project, then that project is not an expense of development anymore. Now that project has other people’s money, so it grows with other people’s money. So for me, for something like the podcast Wiki Listen, , it took me about five weeks to develop, which is about $25,000 of development time. But over the next four years it is projected to make about $2 million. So if you take that number, $2 million, and you subtract $25,000 from it, you get a gross margin of almost a hundred percent. I’m not saying that it should drive people, but if you want to express what you’re doing as an artist to a person with a checkbook who will give you money to do it, and you can show that your gross margins are good, then you’ve got a chance.

So there’s Victor, the hard boiled finance guru. And there’s Victor, the uninhibited standup on stage. And I just wonder if you make mental transitions as you perform different roles.

Oh my gosh, I do. I think of myself as the business person and the artist. And the business person has one job. Keep the artist happy. That’s the business person’s job. If the artist needs money to make their projects, the artist needs money to make their projects so they don’t have to think about money. The artist needs time. And if you keep the artist happy, the business is going to keep making money because the business has all the connections that it needs. I’m also looking for somebody to take over the business side because all I really want to do is be the artist. But I have to do business now to get to the point where I can actually hire somebody to do that and I can just be the artist.

Meanwhile, all of that acumen will keep that person from stealing from you or whatever problems could happen after they’re hired.

The people who I work with are my very dear friends and they understand specifically what my goals are. And they also understand that my goals are something that can work. If anybody has a question, I answer it as completely and honestly as I can. I don’t keep things from my crew and we function as friends. So we all know that we are creating a party. We’re going to party forever.

Can you tell me about Lunch Club?

Lunch Club is a website that puts professionals, in whatever field or whatever curiosity you have, in touch with other people, and on lunch dates. It used to be a thing in person, but then in the pandemic it switched to online and it really blew up. You can go to Lunch Club and you’ll meet people and after you meet and talk to them, they’ll rate you. If your rating remains good, you meet more people. If your rating is bad, you get kicked out. I’m sure it’s not like that bad. I haven’t met anybody where they said their rating was terrible or anything like that.

Do you find out your rating?

I think it does have a rating. I should look at it and see what my rating currently is.

Is there a part of your story we haven’t covered that you think is important?

Here’s what I think is important. At the core of what I’m doing is I’m trying to create a life where I can just get up and play all day. Because that’s what I used to do as a kid. It is strange to find the tools to do that where I had to find them. When I say that I studied people who were entrepreneurial gurus, I really did. But I was only focusing on those things which I could take from them. I was only focusing on those things that I could take from them, that were in line with my ultimate goal.

I also only focus on things I could deal with. Because when I started really studying entrepreneurship, it became very clear that if somebody wanted to be a millionaire, you could be a millionaire doing the shittiest drop-shipping job. You can become a millionaire if you really want to do just the crappiest of crap. But some of the techniques that they use for the crappiest of crap things also work if you just change the product into something that’s actually good, like art. That’s it.

What’s the process by which you get to the next thing?

I have an idea and I take it to trusted friends or people or artists, just smart people that I know that I like, and I just pitch it to them and then I let them poke holes in it. Then if they poke sufficient enough holes in it, then maybe I’ll set it aside. But if they don’t, then I will shore it up and fix it and keep developing it until I get it to the point where I can write it all down and explain it to a layman.

Then once I can write it down and explain it to a layman, I use that to start pitching it to outside funding. So the company has its own salaries, but the projects that I make, my company doesn’t put its own money into those projects. We develop those projects with outside people. So I have an idea and I find third party funding, whether it’s an actual investor for that or it’s a distribution company or it’s a publisher or whatever, wherever the money comes from, just not from my company. That does three things.

One, it protects my company so that I don’t waste my money on projects. But then two, it validates the idea because if someone else is willing to put money into it, then I’m like, “Okay, this actually is a good idea.” Then three, it puts other people on the team of that project whose best interest is for that project to succeed. So those projects then become LLCs. Subsidiary companies of my company. And those LLCs, the investor has equity in it. Then maybe I work with a PR company and I give them a vested interest in the company as well, so that they do PR for the project for free, and get paid on the other side. If the project is already funded, then it’s valuable to them to do PR for free because they’re like, “Okay, it has a marketing budget so my effort isn’t wasted.”

That’s how something goes from zero to being a project. There are projects also which don’t cost money, which are just like they only cost my time and those personal projects that I just do in the background and then when they’re done, they’re done. For instance, The Anti-Racism Activity Book is an example of that, where it didn’t really cost any money for my company. It only cost my time and attention. Then it became its own Kickstarter, and the Kickstarter was successful, and then now the book is out.

So that’s an example of just a side project that I would do as well. So those are the type of things that my company does. Either I grow a project and it becomes a co-production with someone else, or I do things that cost no money to develop on my own time.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Paul Barman.

The disappearance of Opont on Tuesday, June 20, came days after Bonhomme, a veteran reporter for Haiti’s radio station Vision 2000, was abducted from her home for several hours, according to news reports and Bonhomme.

“Haitian authorities must immediately investigate the whereabouts of Pierre-Louis Opont and the abduction of Marie Lucie Bonhomme,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna. “At the same time, Haiti’s criminal groups must stop using journalists and their relatives as pawns in their power struggle with local authorities.”

Bonhomme told CPJ that Opont called her about 7:10 p.m. on Tuesday as he was driving to their home in the Tabarre district of Port-au-Prince to say that he would be home in five minutes. He never arrived. A local news report noted that the area is controlled by the Kraze Baryè gang, led by Vitel’Homme Innocent.  

Bonhomme told CPJ that a week earlier, on June 13, she was taken from their home at 3a.m. by a group of approximately 30 armed men in a case that was widely covered by the Haitian media. “I believe I was deliberately targeted. It was clear that Vitel’homme knew who I was. Sadly, I don’t know why he chose to abduct me; just to send a message perhaps,” she said.

Bonhomme said that the men entered her home carrying rifles and handguns, threatening to kill her if she didn’t open the metal gate giving access to her room and another unoccupied room. She opened the gate after they began throwing bottles into the space.

The men ransacked her house, taking two laptops, Bonhomme’s cellphone, iPad, and internet router. The men also took the cellphones of three other people in the house at the time and who are not being named for safety reasons.

Several of the men then drove Bonhomme away in her Toyota 4Runner, transferring her to a pick-up truck about 10 minutes later. After another drive lasting about 90 minutes, they entered the gated courtyard of a house. The gunmen got out, with one instructing her to stay in the car.

Several minutes later, the front car door opened, and a man called her by her first name, asked her in Creole if she was all right and whether she recognized his voice. She told him that she recognized his voice as that of Vitel’homme.

Bonhomme told CPJ that she and the man she believed to be Vitel’homme had a five-minute conversation while she was in the car. She could not see his face because it was dark outside, but said his voice was familiar from his numerous broadcasts. She said he did not express anger toward her, but complained about “the people he collaborated with and who today want to destroy him.”

Bonhomme said she told him that the country could not continue to function in its current state of stability and asked if he had considered “being part of the solution.” Vitel’homme said that he believes in dialogue but that officials do not, and then told Bonhomme that he was going to set her free.

The abductors drove Bonhomme back home around 8a.m. and returned some of the devices belonging to her and the others staying in her home. She subsequently retrieved her cell phone, car, and work computer between June 14 and 16 by calling two numbers given to her by Vitel’homme.

“[T]he police don’t have the means today to deal with the atrocities committed by the bandits, and that’s why our position on this is to see to what extent the international community could come to the aid of the police,” said Renan Hedouville from Haiti’s Office of the Protector of Citizens, an independent state entity. “The armed bandits in Haiti today control everything, they impose their laws, they kill, they pillage, they kidnap in full view of everyone, including journalists, who carry out their difficult job, and of course are often the victims.”

Bonhomme has worked for Vision 2000 since 2000, where she hosts a morning current affairs show from 6:30- 9:30 a.m. 

Opont worked as a journalist in the 1980s with the state-run TNH (Télévision Nationale d’Haiti), and previously served as president of Haiti’s electoral commission from 2015- 2016. In 2016, Télé Pluriel channel 44 was attacked by armed gunmen.

Bonhomme told CPJ that she believed that her husband’s disappearance is related to her work and that kidnapping journalists appears to be seen by gang members as a quick show of authority, rather than a direct retribution for the journalist’s reporting.

“I’ve been a journalist for over 35 years, and the situation in Haiti has never been so dangerous,” she told CPJ. Bonhomme said she has previously faced threats from gangs and local officials; this is the first time she has been abducted.

“I have to keep working, but I can’t do it now,” she told CPJ. “I’m very worried, especially as the Vitel’homme gang is continuing its attacks in the commune of Tabarre, particularly in my neighborhood.”

Bonhomme reported her abduction to authorities, and an investigating magistrate visited several days later along, accompanied by members of a police anti-kidnapping unit, but she is not aware of any further action taken by authorities.  

CPJ contacted the Anti-Kidnap Unit about Bonhomme and Opont via messaging app but did not immediately receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

On June 6, a local court of appeal in Mbandaka, the capital of the northwestern Equateur province, declared the closure of privately owned Radio Télévision Sarah illegal and ordered the outlet be permitted to reopen, according to a copy of the court order reviewed by CPJ and the outlet’s lawyer, Pontife Ikolombe, and its managing director, Steve Mwanyo, who both spoke to CPJ by phone. 

The outlet has been closed since November 15, 2021. The court order followed a May 30, 2023, lawsuit filed by the broadcaster against the Equateur government, Ikolombe said. 

On June 7, Equateur Governor Bobo Boloko Bolumbu sent the provincial Minister of Justice Imbambo Nzobali and armed police officers to block access to the broadcaster’s office, Ikolombe and Mwanyo said. As of Tuesday, June 13, the officers remained outside the office and denied the journalists entry. 

“Congolese authorities must ensure that the court ruling permitting Radio Télévision Sarah to reopen is respected,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “The nearly two years that Radio Télévision Sarah was kept off the air is an injustice and must not be prolonged.”

A few hours before police arrived at the outlet’s office on June 7, the outlets’ journalists accessed the office and found that broadcasting equipment, including a transmitter, microphones, and cameras, were missing, Mwanyo told CPJ. He said he believed provincial government authorities had taken the equipment as they were the only ones with access to the office since the closure.

In November 2021, Papy Ekate, the Equateur province minister of communication and media, accused the outlet of airing inflammatory programs and criticism of Bobo, and ordered the outlet closed for 60 days, according to Mwanyo and a report by local press freedom organization Journaliste en Danger. On January 15, 2022, the Equateur government extended the suspension indefinitely, Mwanyo said.

During a rally held in Mbandaka on December 21, 2022, President Felix Tshisekedi publicly asked Bobo to accept criticism, according to a report by privately owned website yabisonews.cd.

CPJ’s calls and requests for comment sent via messaging app to Nzobali, Bobo, and Rossy Bolekwa, the governor’s deputy chief of staff, did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Twenty five broadcasters from 13 Pacific countries touched down in Auckland recently for the Pacific Broadcasters conference.

A meet and greet filled with lots of talanoa, networking and healthy debate, the conference was a welcome change from a typical Zoom meeting.

Natasha Meleisea, chief executive of Pacific Cooperation Broadcasting Ltd (PCBL), which operates Pasifika TV, says the conference was about uniting Pacific broadcasters.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific broadcasting reports

“I’ve kind of shared messages today around, it’s never a solo journey. There is strength in the collective and partnerships is really important,” Meleisea says.

“For a very long time we’ve had Pacific voices or Pacific stories being told by non-Pacific. There’s nothing wrong with that.

“However, it’s good to provide a platform where our own Pacific people can share those stories themselves and PCBL, Pasifika TV enables that.”

Vanuatu Broadcasting and Television Cooperation (VBTC) chief executive Francis Herman says that after seeing Vanuatu stories in the hands of overseas productions, story sovereignty is an important point of discussion.

‘Misconstrued a lot of things’
“We’ve noticed that in previous years, people have just flown in, told our stories, misconstrued a lot of things,” says Herman.

“[They’ve] gone for the ratings, gone for the dollars and left us high and dry, and they really haven’t told the real stories. We are the experts in our own culture, our own island, or about our people.”

But Herman says the PCBL partnership has been a “faithful . . . and equal partnership.”

“We haven’t been seen as a very small island developing state or a very small broadcaster. They’ve treated us as equals.

“We tell our own stories. We know our audience better, we know our country better than they do.

“Let’s tell our stories. And I think Pasifika TV has given us that opportunity and that’s why we’ve continued that partnership.”

Story sovereignty major factor for Pacific broadcasters. Video: Tagata Pasifika

Part of that partnership includes training in camera production, operation of Live U units and journalism training, something which Kiri One TV chief executive Tiarite George Kwong deeply values.

“Kiri One just started five years ago . . . and so we are very new in this kind of industry,” Kwong says.

‘Upgrading our skills’
“The idea for the partnership with PCBL is to upgrade our skills so that the news that we produce is up to the standard that people want to listen and watch every day.

“Compared from day one that we started, we have seen the improvement.”

Broadcasters like Mai TV in Fiji have taken the PCBL training one step further, when they acquired the netball rights for the Oceania Netball Series in 2022, their first time to do so.

“We were thinking we cannot do this because you need all the different equipment and costs and things,” says director of Mai TV Stanley Simpson.

“But we spoke with PCBL and they found solutions for us. And through that we were able to take the Oceania Netball series to Tonga, to Samoa and the Cook Islands, which is the first time that we were able to distribute rights from Fiji.

“That empowerment has been really strong. And from the discussions and the inspiring conversations we’ve had with the team at PCBL, it made us look around and realise that we have the best stories in the world in the Pacific.”

Now that their Pacific counterparts are receiving the necessary training and equipment, Meleisea says there is an abundance of Pacific content being produced from their regional partners.

‘A phenomenal feat’
“We went to air in 2016, at that point in time we weren’t getting any content from the Pacific. Fast forward eight years down the track, we’re now getting eight to 10 hours a day from the Pacific, which is a phenomenal feat.

“In order to achieve that, it’s been a slow build. It’s been about providing equipment, providing training, and then providing the infrastructure and the connectivity to enable it.

“So without all of those three things, we wouldn’t have been able to get the content from the region.”

Funded as part of NZ’s Public Interest Journalism project. Republished from Tagata Pasifika with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

“We welcome the Hong Kong court decision to quash the conviction of journalist Choy Yuk-ling. It’s high time for the Hong Kong government to stop persecuting the media and drop all criminal cases against journalists for their work,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Press freedom is constitutionally guaranteed in Hong Kong. No journalists should be criminally charged, let alone convicted, for their reporting.”

Choy was convicted in April 2021 on two counts of giving false statements to obtain car ownership records on a public registry while researching a documentary for Hong Kong’s public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong about a mob attack on a group of protesters. The court fined her 6,000 Hong Kong dollars (US$765).

In unanimously overturning her conviction on Monday, June 5, a panel of five judges at the Court of Final Appeal ruled that when Choy chose “other traffic and transport related matters” to search the public registry, that category should not exclude “bona fide journalism.”

Separately, on Sunday evening police detained Mak Yin-ting, a correspondent with French broadcaster Radio France Internationale and former chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, while she reported on public attempts to commemorate the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, according to the HKJA, a report by the journalist in RFI, and news reports. She was released after a few hours without charge.

CPJ has documented the dramatic decline of press freedom in Hong Kong, once a beacon of free press in the region, since Beijing introduced a national security law on June 30, 2020, with journalists being arrested, jailed, and threatened.

Among them include Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, editors of the now-shuttered news website Stand News, who are on trial for conspiracy to publish seditious publications.

Jimmy Lai, founder of the shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily and CPJ’s 2021 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Awardee, is facing life imprisonment on national security charges in a trial that is due to start in September. Lai, a British citizen, is serving a sentence of five years and nine months on fraud charges. He has been behind bars since December 2020.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Janine Jackson interviewed the National Writers Union’s Eric Thurm about the Hollywood writers’ strike for the May 26, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

More Perfect Union (5/22/23)

Janine Jackson: Whenever workers find their employment conditions, or those of their coworkers, so difficult or dangerous, so precarious, or simply so unfair that they make the decision to withhold their labor in order to effect change, it’s a big deal, sometimes a life-altering one for individuals, and sometimes a sea change for an industry. But folks who have never been in that situation don’t always understand it, and some don’t try.

What looks like public support for the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America may stem from the fact that it centers on the people who write the TV shows and movies that help many of us get through this thing called life.

But does that mean it includes an understanding of the role that power, and the balance of power, plays in all labor actions? That could definitely be an added benefit, no matter the particular outcomes here.

Eric Thurm is the campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project. His explainer on the writer’s strike appeared recently in GQ, and he joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Eric Thurm.

Eric Thurm: Thank you. Happy to be here.

GQ (5/5/23)

JJ: Labor actions in various industries are definitely perceived differently, by the broader public and by the news media that report on them. I think that difference stems, in part, from just a lack of consistent worker-centered journalism generally, but also from this idea of just, well, if you make more money than I do, I can’t see your beef.

In the case of writers, it goes up a notch; as with athletes, “You make money doing something fun.” It becomes almost, “How dare you?”

And there’s a lot wrong with that, but part of it is this laser focus on money. Pay is central, often, and why wouldn’t it be? That’s the literal currency of valuing work. But labor actions are virtually always about something more than that.

So take your time, if you would, and break down, particularly, those behind-the-scenes industry specifics that we as outsiders might not see, but should see, as the central issues in what looks like an important strike.

ET: Yeah, absolutely. So I think that there are a couple of things that are driving the strike. One of them is that, for all that there is a popular perception that writers get paid extremely well, that increasingly is not the case.

And in the same way that it is, like you mentioned, for athletes or for actors or for a lot of other highly visible professions, there is a very small number of people at the top who basically have a winning lottery ticket, and just get paid extremely well.

But in order to even have a chance at winning that, you have to spend a lot of time in the trenches, with much worse working conditions, often even less pay, with a lot less stability, and in particular, an original source of stability, and the reason that a lot of people have been able to make a career as writers is because of something called residuals, which basically is an amount of money that you get paid when something that you worked on and are credited on gets used in another context.

Slate (5/4/23)

So that’s why, if you ever have heard people talk about syndication, or getting to a hundred episodes: If you wrote, let’s say, one episode of Friends, and when that gets to the point where it just is on TBS all the time, you get a check every time it airs.

And that functions as an additional bit of stability, particularly because even people that have been successful often have very long periods without working, just because of the nature of the industry.

And that safety net, I think as safety nets for people in all industries are being slowly dismantled, or as bosses are trying to dismantle them, that is a safety net that a lot of writers don’t have anymore, especially because the residual payments for streaming are basically nothing.

So in theory, you could write something that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are watching on Netflix or Hulu or something, and you will see no additional money from that.

JJ: I think viewers understand that we’re watching media differently today. I can watch a whole series that took months or years to create in a weekend. And I’m like, well, that’s that.

As media critics, we don’t blame the people, but there are things that we don’t see that could be useful for us to understand. And I think residuals is definitely one of those.

And then, also, you write about something called a mini-room, like it has to do with the pipeline of how you grow and get work as a writer, that I don’t see, just watching TV, but is very meaningful for the quality of what I see.

Los Angeles (5/5/23)

ET: Totally. And that’s something that if you, like me, are a big nerd about this sort of thing, you start to notice people’s names popping up in different contexts and credits of things. And if you pay a lot of attention, you start to see that pipeline. But for a lot of people, it definitely isn’t visible.

So basically a mini-room essentially means a writer’s room that has fewer writers in it, and is convened for less time. There are supposed to be basic minimums in the WGA contract, and there are the minimum basic agreements that stipulate if you are making this type of TV show, you have to have this number of writers, and they have to be employed for X amount of time.

And that is also an additional source of stability, but it also is how people learn the business, and how people learn how to produce, or how to eventually make their own shows.

So if you are the new writer, which in a lot of respects is still kind of a misnomer, because by the time somebody gets staffed on their first room, if they’re working in TV, it’s very possible, if not likely, that they have been grinding away at a lot of other things for a long time.

But once you get that credit, you spend time around the showrunners and the people that are more senior to you, who know a little bit more about the industry, and you observe them.

A lot of the time writers will go to set to supervise on episodes that they wrote, which can be really important for a lot of reasons, both because it is useful training for the writer, but also because a lot of decisions get made on a snap basis on set, and the writer is the person who knows where the show is going, where the show has been.

Vince Gilligan (CC photo: Gage Skidmore)

I think people have this assumption that everybody knows everything about the overall plan of the show at any given moment, but if you’re the director or the cinematographer or even some of the actors, you don’t know that. And so things that might feel disjointed to people, if you’re watching something that, for example, has a mini-room, would probably actually be much better and make more sense if there had been a writer on set to be like, “Actually, this is where we’re taking it. Let’s make a decision that’s more in line with the overall creative direction.”

And that also is how people learn all the ins and outs of this stuff. And without having that, there just is no way for people to get better at their craft, or to develop any of the skills that people need to have in order to make any of the stuff that we like.

Just to give one example: Vince Gilligan, who created Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, and this stuff that people really like, worked for quite a while on The X-Files, and wrote a bunch of episodes, and produced some of the episodes, and then eventually ran this very brief spinoff.

And you can really see how those careers develop. People don’t emerge out of nowhere knowing how to run the small army that is a TV production.

JJ: It also sounds just a little bit like a lot of other workplaces, where management says, “Ooh, if you work 40 hours, you get benefits….so we’re just going to book two people for 20 hours.” It sounds like evading valuing people.

And one of the things that you wrote in the GQ piece was, “Emerging technologies will continue to be a tool for companies seeking to reduce the amount they pay workers (or to get rid of them entirely).”

And I just think that’s another issue where people are kind of shadow-informed, halfway informed. It’s not that writers hate technology, obviously, or hate AI, or don’t understand it, but it’s another part of the power relationship here.

Eric Thurm: “Essentially, every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out.”

ET: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I talked about a little bit in the piece is that technology has been a source of struggle for decades, in particularly the Writers Guild contracts, because, essentially, every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out, which I suspect a lot of people will be intimately familiar with. This is the business model of some of the biggest companies and most worker-hostile companies in the world.

And that dates back to when home video emerged, or when DVD box sets emerged. And part of the reason that streaming pays so little is that it was new the last time that the writers went on strike in 2007, and they agreed to have it be covered by the minimum basic agreement, but not as fully as, like, a TV network.

And so of course the companies exploited that as much as possible. And on some level, it’s hard to blame them, at least in the sense that the purpose of the company is to take as much value out of the workers as it can.

And this is what people are referring to when they say that the studios are really trying as much as possible to turn writing, but also acting, and all of the other myriad jobs that go into making entertainment that people watch, into gig work, into stuff where you just have no say in your work, and are told by this unfeeling algorithm, or app or whatever it is, what you are and are not supposed to do.

Washington Post (5/30/23)

And in the context of what people like to call AI, beyond the fact that the issue with a lot of these programs is that they are trained on a lot of other people’s work—I saw someone recently describe it as, “This is just a plagiarism machine,” which I think is a very accurate description. Even in cases where it does something interesting, you can use it as a smoke screen to avoid having to credit the people that created something.

I think that’s something that we are going to see the studios try more and more, even without necessarily having AI be involved.

Literally, just the day before we’re having this conversation, HBO Max rebranded as just Max, and apparently they have changed the way that movies and TV and everything show up on their site, so that it just says “creators,” and that will include producers and directors and some other people, and you don’t really know who did what, rather than saying, this was directed by this person, and this was written by this person.

And I think that that attempt to obfuscate things, and make it harder to understand the people who are actually creating something, is the entire point of how the studios are trying to handle this, and part of why they’re so interested in AI.

CounterSpin (4/7/23)

JJ: I think a lot of folks would actually be maybe a little surprised, and certainly disheartened, to know that bosses in creative industries act a lot like bosses in every other industry. The response has been, essentially, you’re lucky to have a job, you ungrateful whelp. There’s a line of people just like you I could hire tomorrow. And then, also, I thought we were all friends!

This is the line that Starbucks gives baristas who go on strike. There’s a lot of similarities across industry that might be more important than the differences. And yet nobody asks the CEOs, “Aren’t you a creative? Isn’t this a labor of love for you?”

This sort of general societal understanding, which I blame news media a lot for, is that a strike is an interruption in a natural order of things, and the workers who go on strike are to blame for any disruptions or harms that come from it.

ET: Yeah, I think that that’s definitely true. And you could have long conversations, or write whole books, about the attempt of capital and bosses and corporations to make their profit-extracting mechanisms look like these very cuddly or friendly things.

I think there’s, like you’re saying, a real direct line to bosses saying, “Oh, we’re all a family here, and we don’t want a union”—that’s somehow a third party, even though it’s just the workers—”coming between us and our little family.”

Deadline (5/8/23)

And even in the context of these negotiations, one of the things that the writers are asking for is these more concrete minimums for staffing, in terms of numbers of writers and the amount of time that people are in rooms. And the studio response was to say, this is an unfair or arbitrary quota that is, and I think this is the direct quote, “counter to the creative nature of our industry.”

And it’s like, OK, you’re not the people making the creative decisions. And if you were, right, I would love to see what these people came up with, if they had to try to write a whole season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or something.

And it’s funny, I think that that actually is something that comes out of, or is impressed into a lot of, not just news media, but entertainment media. I don’t really know exactly how to fully extricate these things, but I do think that it’s quite telling that one of the dominant forms of media, that makes the most money and gets the most push behind it, is the workplace sitcom, the central thesis of which is that your coworkers are supposed to be your family.

And it’s extremely rare to see anything like that, where anybody really talks about the material conditions of people in the workplace.

Jacobin (3/11/22)

JJ: That’s a great point.

ET: That’s a kind of bugbear of mine. And I am cautiously optimistic about what will come out of the strike, and what will come out of what I think is a much more increased labor consciousness among people, both in these creative industries, but also more broadly.

When I was growing up, and I think that for quite a long time, the dominant Hollywood depiction of labor is, oh, union bosses, corruption, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the things that we’ve heard a million times.

And I think that in a lot of respects, that really is a lingering effect of the Red Scare, and a lot of purges of people in creative fields. And it does feel like there’s been at least some recovery, or attempts to change that.

Even something like Riverdale, this adaptation of a previously existing IP that’s a kind of silly CW teen soap, had a really fantastic subplot in one of the most recent seasons, where Archie from Archie Comics forms a union, and they have all these conversations about solidarity, and about the importance of music and labor formation, and this stuff that I would never have expected to see even two or three years ago.

Washington Post (5/16/23)

JJ: I’m going to ask you one final and also hopeful question on that. I did want to just kind of cram in this Washington Post piece that fits this template that we’re talking about, that was talking about the last Hollywood writers’ strike, which you referenced, in 2007–08.

And the Post piece said that that strike

cost writers and other workers an estimated $772 million, while knock-on effects did more than $2 billion in damage to the broader California economy. Promising shows were hamstrung, promising movies were shot with half-finished scripts, promising careers were cut short.

And if that wasn’t enough, the piece went on to say that because of those darn strikers, TV was forced to go to reality shows and, yep, Donald Trump. So I guess the idea was, maybe think about that when you’re supporting striking workers?

I don’t even think this piece was meant to be mean, but it was such the template of “the labor action causes damage, the labor action causes hurt, and what went before it was somehow not causing damage, and not causing hurt.” And so you’re supposed to be mad at the interrupters.

And I just want to attach that, though, to the idea that we know that many journalists have internalized the idea that they aren’t workers, they’re independent contractors. They’re just individuals doing a job, and unions are kind of icky, and who needs solidarity until it happens to you. All of which is just to say that you see change there, besides the landscape, you see change in that mindset among writers, among journalists, a change in the idea that, no, we’re not workers, no, we don’t need to band together. You see something different happening there.

New York Times (6/4/15)

ET: Yeah, definitely. That’s something that has been really heartening for me. I’ve been in and around digital media for a little over a decade now, which feels really wild to say, but the beginning of that period, I was in college, and I had no real understanding of a lot of these issues. And I definitely, I think if you had asked me, I really did feel, oh, I’m lucky to be here.

In the intervening years, and especially since Gawker unionized in, I think, 2015, the rush of solidarity, and the proliferation of unions across digital media, has been really powerful.

And I think that that has been both enormously meaningful for the people that are doing the work, and then getting a lot of people who, like I think you said, would not have ordinarily thought of themselves as workers to see themselves as such.

It also has created this broader awareness that I think has led to much better journalism in the last few years, even places like Vice or the Washington Post or Business Insider, and these people who were able to get jobs where they can cover this stuff.

And I think that there are a lot of reasons why, a lot of lines you can draw between the strength of these unions and the ability to produce this kind of coverage. But that also has led, I think, to a much stronger sense of worker solidarity across the industry.

Freelance Solidarity Project

So I am really involved in the Freelance Solidarity Project, which organizes freelancers across digital media as a division of the National Writers Union. We have done a lot to organize in parallel with, and supporting, people who are facing similarly precarious conditions.

And I think that a lot of people, who before would have been like, “I exist above things, and I would never think of myself as being in the same position as someone who has a gig-based job,” I think now people are a lot more aware of the similarity of those positions, and a lot more thoughtful about what’s driving that precarity, and what we can do to stop it, which also is something I think that you see as the WGA strike plays out right now.

A lot of people who are unionized with IATSE, which is the union that represents most below-the-line crew and production staff, a lot of IATSE workers have refused to cross picket lines. And all of these things are part of what makes production possible, and it’s part of why so many shows have had to shut down.

The economic damage that you reference, that this Washington Post article is talking about, not only is it caused by the bosses, but it also is the direct result of people being able to stand in solidarity and say, we are not going to allow this thing to continue to happen.

And it’s been really heartening to me to see so many people say, “I am so amazed by the Teamsters standing with us. If they have to go out this summer, we’re going to be right there.” I think that’s so great.

JJ: It sounds like you’re saying, better solidarity among workers leads also to better creations and better work.

ET: I sure hope so.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Eric Thurm. He’s campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union; they’re online at NWU.org. He’s a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project, FreelanceSolidarity.org, and you can still find his explainer on the ongoing writer strike at GQ.com. Eric Thurm, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ET: Thank you.

The post ‘Studios Are Really Trying to Turn Writing Into Gig Work’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

GQ (5/5/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Going on strike is something that people with no personal experience are comfortable depicting as frivolous and selfish. That extends to many corporate news reporters, who appear unable to present a labor action as other than, first and foremost, an unwonted interruption of a natural order. However else they explain the issues at stake, or humanistically portray individual strikers, the overarching narrative is that workers are pressing their luck, and that owners who make their money off the efforts of those workers are not to be questioned.

It’s a weird presentation, whether it’s baristas or dockworkers or TV and movie writers. As we record on May 25, the Writers Guild strike is on its 23rd day, and having the intended effect of shutting down production on sets around the country.

Eric Thurm wrote a useful explainer on the WGA strike for GQ. Thurm is campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project. We hear from him about some behind-the-scenes aspects of the strike affecting what you may see on screen.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of San Francisco.

The post Eric Thurm on the Hollywood Writers’ Strike appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

On Saturday, May 20, a group of protesters at a rally organized by opposition presidential candidates in Kinshasa, the capital, attacked Djokwa while she covered demonstrators clashing with police, according to media reports and local journalists Prisca Yasetonga and Gloria Tshiatumba, who were at the scene.

One protester swung a machete at Djokwa, a reporter with the privately owned broadcaster Congo Lisanga Télévision, cutting the right side of her head. Demonstrators also seized her phone and camera.

Protesters also used a machete to threaten Yasetonga, who told CPJ they prevented her from covering the demonstration for the privately owned YouTube channel Mbonka nde Congo Television, but she managed to escape without injury.

“DRC authorities should thoroughly investigate the recent attack on journalist Geonne Djokwa and ensure that anyone who slashes a journalist’s head with a machete is made to face the consequences of their actions,” said Muthoki Mumo, CPJ’s sub-Saharan Africa representative, in Nairobi. “As the DRC approaches its next elections, journalists must be free to report on political activities without obstruction or fear that they will be attacked.”

Tshiatumba told CPJ that Djoka was taken to a hospital for treatment, where President Felix Tshisekedi visited her, and her condition was improving. Her phone and camera had not been returned as of May 25.

The demonstration over rising living expenses, which was organized by four opposition candidates in the DRC’s presidential election scheduled for December 2023, turned violent when police sought to disperse the crowd, according to media reports. When the police attacked, protesters fought back and sought to prevent journalists from documenting the scene, Tshiatumba told CPJ.

CPJ called the four opposition candidates who organized the rally, Martin Fayulu, Moïse Katumbi, Delly Sesanga, and Matata Ponyo. None replied, and a representative who answered Fayulu’s phone disconnected shortly afterward.

CPJ called Kinshasa City Police Chief Sylvano Kasongo Kitenge but no one answered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

When I was growing up in Kiribati, then known as the Gilbert Islands, New Zealand divers came to safely detonate unexploded munitions from World War II.

Decades on from when US Marines fought and won the Battle of Tarawa against Japan, war was still very much a part of everyday life.

Our school bell was a bombshell. We’d find bullet casings.

• READ MORE:  UPNG student protesters call for ‘transparency’ over US defence pact
• There must be clarity’ – PNG students protest over US defence deal
• Security pact: PNG expects more US military boots on ground
• Pacific leaders arrive in Port Moresby ahead of Modi and Blinken PNG visit
• OPM calls on global trade unions to blacklist Indonesian goods, services
• Other US defence pact reports

In fact, my grandmother’s leg was badly injured when she lit a fire on the beach, and an unexploded ordnance went off. There are Japanese bunkers and US machine gun mounts along the Betio shoreline, and bones are still being found — even today.

Stories are told . . . so many people died . . . these things are not forgotten.

That’s why the security and defence pacts being drawn up around the Pacific are worrying much of the region, as the US and Australia partner up to counter China’s growing influence.

You only have to read Australia’s Defence Strategic Review 2023 to see they are preparing for conflict.

The battle is climate change which is impacting their everyday life. The bigger powers will most certainly go through the motions of at least hearing their voices.

— Barbara Dreaver

Secret pact changed landscape
While in the last few years we have seen China put big money into the Pacific, it was primarily about diplomatic weight and ensuring Taiwan wasn’t recognised. But the secret security pact with the Solomon Islands changed the landscape dramatically.

There was a point where it stopped being about just aid and influence — and openly started to become much more serious.

Since then, the escalation has been rapid as the US and Australia have amped up their activities — and other state actors have as well.

In some cases, lobbying and negotiating have been covertly aggressive. Many Pacific countries are concerned about the militarisation of the region — and whether we like it or not, that’s where it’s headed.

Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister Simon Kofe said he understands why his country, which sits between Hawai’i and Australia, is of strategic interest to the superpowers.

Worried about militarisation, he admits they are coming under pressure from all sides — not just China but the West as well.

“In World War II, the war came to the Pacific even though we played no part at all in the conflict, and we became victims of a war that was not of our making,” he said.

Important Pacific doesn’t forget
“So it’s important for the Pacific not to forget that experience now we are seeing things that are happening in this part of the world, and it’s best we are prepared for that situation.”

Academic Dr Anna Powles, a long-time Pacific specialist, said she was very concerned at the situation, which was a “slippery slope” to militarisation.

She said Pacific capitals were being flooded with officials from around the region and from further afield who want to engage.

Pacific priorities are being undermined, and there is a growing disconnect in the region between national interest and the interest of the political elites.

Today in Papua New Guinea, we see first-hand how we are on the cusp of change.

They include big meetings spearheaded by the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, another one by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a defence deal that will allow US military access through ports and airports. In exchange, the US is providing an extra US$45 million (NZ$72 million) in funding a raft of initiatives, some of which include battling the effects of climate change.

Equipment boost
The PNG Defence Force is also getting an equipment boost, and there’s a focus on combatting law and order issues — which domestically is a big challenge — and protecting communities, particularly women, from violence.

There is much in these initiatives that the PNG government and the people here will find attractive. It may well be the balance between PNG’s national interest and US ambitions is met — it will be interesting to see if other Pacific leaders agree.

Because some Pacific leaders are happy to be courted and enjoy being at the centre of global attention (and we know who you are), others are determined to do the best for their people. The fight for them is not geopolitical, and it’s on the land they live on.

The battle is climate change which is impacting their everyday life. The bigger powers will most certainly go through the motions of at least hearing their voices.

What that will translate to remains to be seen.

Barbara Dreaver is TV1’s Pacific correspondent and is in Papua New Guinea with the New Zealand delegation. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“We are gravely concerned by a shooting at FOX13 in Memphis, Tennessee, earlier today,” said Katherine Jacobsen, CPJ’s U.S. and Canada program coordinator. “We urge local law enforcement to conduct a swift and thorough investigation into the shooter’s motives and ensure that the press can work freely without fear of intimidation.”

A report from the outlet said there were no injuries, and that the station’s employees were evacuated for about 30 minutes before returning to work. The man was armed with an AR-style weapon, and law enforcement took the shooter into custody around two hours after the shot was fired, according to those sources.

Sgt. Louis Brownlee, the public information officer and legal liaison of the Memphis Police Department, told CPJ by email that no charges have been filed and the investigation is ongoing. 

CPJ’s call and email to FOX13 were not immediately answered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On April 24, Mnangagwa’s security aides barred five journalists from covering her visit to the Museum of African Liberation in Harare, according to media reports, a statement by the Zimbabwean chapter of the regional press freedom group Media Institute of Southern Africa, and two of those journalists.

The following day, members of her security staff and Mnangagwa’s spokesperson blocked another journalist from photographing a separate event, according to media reports and that journalist.

Mnangagwa’s has previously barred journalists from covering her public events, as CPJ has documented. General elections are expected to be held in Zimbabwe in July or August.

“Zimbabwe’s presidency should ensure that all media can freely cover First Lady Auxilia Mnangagwa’s public events and avoid situations where only her official photographer will have access,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “Zimbabweans have a right to access news and information about the president and his spouse, who are public figures.”

At the April 24 event, Mnangagwa’s staff denied access to reporter Problem Masau and photographer Shepherd Tozvireva, both with the privately owned newspaper NewsDay, as well as three unidentified journalists with the army-controlled broadcaster Nkululeko Rusununguko Television, according to those reports and Masau and Tozvireva, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

Masau told CPJ that the Institute of African Knowledge had invited Mnangagwa for a tour of the museum on April 24 and requested journalists from all the media houses to cover it, but then Mnangagwa’s staff asked the NewsDay and Nkululeko Rusununguko Television journalists to leave the scene.

At the event on April 25, held in the town of Beitbridge, south of Harare, a security officer told Newsday correspondent Rex Mpisa that the first lady’s official photographer and spokesperson John Manzongo requested that Mpisa not take photographs, Mpisa told CPJ via messaging app.

“I obliged. They said she has her own media team to cover her,” the journalist told CPJ.

CPJ repeatedly called Manzongo and sent questions via email and messaging app to Mnangagwa’s office for comment, but did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

In March, state security officers in Shanghai detained Li, a book publisher and radio host for Taiwanese public broadcaster Radio Taiwan International, who goes by the name Fucha, while he was visiting relatives in the city, according to news reports and a Wednesday, April 26, press conference by Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office, reviewed by CPJ.

Zhu Fenglian, a spokesperson for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said during the press conference that Li is under investigation for “conducting activities endangering national security.”

“The detention of publisher and radio host Li Yanhe is yet another example of China’s suffocating intolerance of a free press,” said Iris Hsu, CPJ’s China representative. “Chinese authorities must stop pinning national security charges on both foreign and local journalists.” 

Li, who was born in China, immigrated to Taiwan in 2009 and founded Gusa Press, which has published books that are critical of Chinese authorities. Li also hosts the show “Seeing China This Way – Time with Fucha” on Radio Taiwan International, where he discusses Chinese politics and current affairs.

CPJ’s calls to China’s Taiwan Affairs Office were not answered.

At least 43 journalists were imprisoned in China for their work as of December 1, 2022, according to CPJ’s annual prison census, making it the second largest jailer of journalists worldwide after Iran.  

In 2019, China arrested Australian blogger Yang Hengjun on espionage charges. He is still detained and alleged during a May 2022 court trial that he was subjected to severe physical abuse while being questioned. 

In 2020, authorities arrested Australian anchor Cheng Lei, who worked for Chinese state broadcaster China Global Television Network, for allegedly conducting “criminal activity endangering China’s national security.” Cheng is still in detention and was put on a secret trial in March 2022.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The statement said RTÜK recently fined broadcasters FOX TV Turkey, Halk TV, and TELE1 for recent critical coverage and commentary, following penalties already imposed on the broadcasters and others. The statement also noted that RTÜK’s pro-government approach to monitoring the media has been an ongoing problem.

In addition, the statement condemned the recent decision of Turkey’s Industry and Technology Ministry for not renewing the operating license of Deutsche Welle, depriving the German public broadcaster’s Turkish staff of contracts and benefits.

The full statement can be read here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

SPECIAL REPORT: By ABC Backstory editor Natasha Johnson

When Tahlea Aualiitia talks about hosting the ABC’s new Pacific-focused news and current affairs TV programme, The Pacific, her voice breaks and she becomes emotional.

Personally, it’s a career milestone, anchoring her first TV show after a decade working mostly in radio, producing ABC local radio programmes and presenting Pacific Mornings on ABC Radio Australia. But it’s also much more than that.

Aualiitia grew up in Tasmania and is of Samoan (and Italian) heritage. She has strong connections to the country and the Pacific Islander community in Australia.

• SEE MORE: Follow The Pacific

What moves her so profoundly about The Pacific is that the 30-minute, weekly programme is being broadcast across the Pacific on ABC Australia, the ABC’s international TV channel, as well as in Australia (on the ABC News Channel and iview), and is produced by a team with a deep understanding of the region and features stories filed by local journalists based in Pacific nations.

“For me, it’s representation and I think that is really important,” she says.

“I’m probably going to cry because for so long I feel that in Australia and on mainstream TV, Pacific Islanders have been, at best, under-represented and, at worst, misrepresented.

“Given the geopolitical interest, there is more focus on the Pacific but my hope for this show is that it will highlight Pacific voices, really centre those voices as the people telling their stories and change the narrative.

‘The ABC cares’
“It shows the ABC cares, we are not just saying we decide what you watch, we’re involving you in what we’re doing, and I think that that makes a difference.”

Aualiitia’s father was born in Samoa and moved to New Zealand at the age of 12, then later to Australia. Her mother’s brother married a Samoan woman, so Samoan culture was celebrated in her immediate and extended family.

She recalls a childhood shaped by Samoan food, dance and song, and the importance of family, faith and rugby. But from her experience, “the narrative” about the Pacific in Australia has tended towards being negative or patronising.

“I think people tend to see the Pacific as a monolith and there are a lot of stereotypes about what a Pacific Islander is, especially in view of the climate change crisis — there’s this idea everyone’s a victim and they should all just move to Australia,” she says.

“There’s a lot of stuff you carry as a brown journalist. When I hear a story on the news about a Pacific Islander and a crime, I brace myself and think about what that might mean for my day, is it going to make my day at harder when I walk out onto the street, will it make my day at work harder?

“I’ve had people say to me when they learn I have an arts degree, ‘oh, your parents must be so proud of you because you’re the first person in your family who has gone to uni’. And that’s not true, my dad has a PhD in chemistry.

“It’s indicative of ideas that people have of what you’re capable of, what you can do, and that’s the power of the media to shape those narratives and change those narratives.

Facebook ‘reality’ check
“When I started presenting Pacific Mornings, I would interview people from across the Pacific and people would find me on Facebook, message me, saying, ‘I didn’t know any Pacific Islanders were working at the ABC’.

“I was just doing my job, but they said they were proud of me, of the visibility and that it was a good thing that it was happening. So, I hope this programme re-frames things a little bit by showing the rich diversity of the Pacific, its different cultures, resilience, and the joy of being Pacific.”

The Pacific is being produced by the ABC’s Asia Pacific Newsroom (APN), based in Melbourne, with funding from ABC International Broadcast and Digital Services.

While the scope of the ABC’s international services has fluctuated over the years, depending on federal government funding levels, an injection of $32 million over four years to ABC International Services allocated in the 2022 budget has enabled this first-of-its-kind programme to be made, among a suite of other initiatives under the Indo-Pacific Broadcast strategy.

“The APN has been a trusted content partner for the ABC’s International Services team for many years and already has deep Pacific expertise,” says Claire Gorman, head of international services.

“We have been working with the APN to produce our flagship programmes Pacific Beat and Wantok for ABC Radio Australia and have been wanting to produce a TV news programme for Pacific audiences for some time, but until now have not have the funding for it.

“The Pacific is the first of many exciting developments in the pipeline. We believe it is more important than ever before for Australians and Pacific audiences to have access to independent, trusted information about our region.”

Pacific-wide team
Joining Aualiitia on air is long-serving Pacific Beat reporter and executive producer Evan Wasuka and journalist Johnson Raela, who previously worked in New Zealand and the Cook Islands.

Correspondent Lice Movono, based in Suva, Fiji, and Chrisnrita Aumanu-Leong in Honiara, Solomon Islands, are contributing to the programme as part of a developing “Local Journalism Network”, also funded under the Indo-Pacific Broadcast strategy, to use the expertise of independent journalists located in the region.

Behind the scenes are APN supervising producer Sean Mantesso, producers Gabriella Marchant, Dinah Lewis Boucher, Nick Sas and APN managing editor Matt O’Sullivan.

“The ABC has covered the Pacific for decades but largely for the Pacific audience,” says O’Sullivan.

“In recent years, that’s mostly been via Pacific Beat and increasingly through digital and video storytelling. We’ve felt for some time that there’s growing interest in the Pacific within Australia and there’s also a massive Pacific diaspora in Australia with strong links to the region.

“So, we’ve felt a need to share our content more broadly. The Pacific programme will cover the breadth of Pacific life beyond palm trees and tourism, from politics to jobs and the economy, climate change, culture and sport.”

Lice Movono has been working as a journalist in Fiji for 16 years and has previously filed for the ABC. She believes elevating the work of regional journalists across the ABC programs and platforms, through the Local Journalism initiative, will help provide more informed coverage of Pacific affairs.

“I believe it’s critical for journalists from within the Pacific to be at the centre of storytelling about the Pacific,” she says.

“A few years ago, while working in a local media organisation, I had the opportunity to attend a conference in Europe and it shocked and saddened me to find that there are people on the other side of the world who have little or no understanding of what it means to live with the reality of climate change here in the region.

“So, it means everything for me to work with the ABC, which has one of the widest, if not the widest reach in the Pacific region and to have access to a platform that tells stories about the Pacific and Fiji, in particular, to the rest of the world, to tell authentic stories through the lens of a Pacific Islander, and an Indigenous one at that, about the realities of what Pacific people face.”

While the covid pandemic and various lockdowns curbed a lot of international news gathering, it provided an opportunity to showcase the work of locally based reporters on ABC domestic channels.

“We’ve often used stringers in the region, but covid showed us the value journalists in country can offer,” says O’Sullivan.

“Because we couldn’t fly Australian-based crews into the region during the pandemic, we relied more on journalists in the Pacific telling their stories, for example during the 2021 riots in Solomon Islands.

“We are now building on that foundation of local expertise and knowledge by establishing the Local Journalism Network of independent journalists to report for the ABC.

“We’ve had producers doing training with them, teaching them how to shoot good TV pictures and we’ve provided mobile journalism kits that enable them to quickly do a TV cross.

“In filing for the ABC, they can tell stories local media often can’t but the challenge for us is protecting them.”

Support and protection from the ABC has been welcomed by Movono. Renowned for her tough questioning, she has endured personal threats and harassment over the course of her career, but the country is now moving into a new era of openness with the newly-elected Rabuka government repealing the controversial Media Industry Development Act that was introduced under military law in 2010 and has been regarded as a restraint on media freedom.

In an international scoop, Movono landed an interview with the new Prime Minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, for the first episode of The Pacific.

“When I knew that there was going to be a segment of The Pacific where we could Talanoa with leaders of the Pacific, it was important for me to position the ABC as the one international organisation that Rabuka would do an interview with,” she says.

“I knew, with the new government only weeks into power, it was going to be a challenge. The government is dealing with a failing economy, a divided country, high inflation, high levels of poverty, the ongoing recovery from covid and trying to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

“But he has made progress as a Pacific leader, as the leader of a country just coming out of a military dictatorship, and he’s done some significant work in the region. So, it was a very significant interview, probably one of the most important assignments of my career.”

In addition to new content and engagement of local journalists, ABC International Services is also expanding the FM footprint for ABC Radio Australia and enhancing media training across the region.

As she prepared for the first episode of The Pacific to go to air, Tahlea Aualiitia was keen to hear the feedback from the audience and — with some trepidation– from family and friends in Samoa.

“I think that’s the part that I’m most nervous about,” she says.

“I know that they will lovingly make fun of my struggling to pronounce Samoan words properly, given I grew up in Australia, but I know they’re already proud of me because of the work I’m doing here.

“Having said that, my brother is a doctor, so I don’t think I’ll ever reach that level of family pride but I’m getting closer!”

The Pacific premiered on ABC Australia last Thursday. This article is republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

On March 15, police assaulted at least nine journalists on the court’s premises in the capital city of Dhaka after clashes broke out between lawyers supporting the ruling Awami League party and the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, and police charged into the crowd swinging their batons, according to multiple news reports and five of those journalists, who spoke with CPJ.

The deputy commissioner of the Dhaka police’s Ramna division told news website Bdnews24.com later on March 15 that “journalists got caught up in the turmoil” when officers attempted to break up the unrest, and police were investigating the attacks.

On March 16, Dhaka police officials expressed regret over the incident in a meeting with local journalists but, as of March 29, have not held any of the officers involved in the attacks to account, the journalists told CPJ. 

“The recent apology by the Dhaka police over officers’ attacks on at least nine Bangladeshi journalists is a welcome but insufficient response,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director. “Bangladeshi authorities must hold the officers who attacked journalists to account, return any equipment confiscated from reporters, and ensure that police are thoroughly trained so they can help, rather than imperil, members of the press covering newsworthy events.”

Two officers with the police Public Order Management Division slapped Zabed Akhter, a senior reporter for the privately owned broadcaster ATN News, shoved him to the ground, and kicked him as he repeatedly identified himself as a journalist and told them he suffered from a nerve condition, Akhter told CPJ by phone.

Police also pushed Jannatul Ferdous Tanvi, a senior reporter for the privately owned broadcaster Independent Television, as she tried to help him, Akhter said.

Later that day, Akhter received medical treatment for internal injuries to his waist and back at a hospital, where the two officers apologized to the journalist, Akhter said, adding that those officers had not been held to account for the incident as of March 29.

A group of 10 to 15 officers kicked and used a bamboo stick to beat Md. Humaun Kabir, a senior camera operator for the privately owned broadcaster ATN Bangla who was filming the unrest, knocking him to the ground, Kabir told CPJ by phone. Officers continued to slap him as he ran away, according to a video of the incident reviewed by CPJ. Kabir sustained a head injury for which he took painkillers. 

Five or six officers beat Maruf Hasan, a reporter for the privately owned newspaper Manab Zamin, in the head and back while he identified himself as a journalist, he told CPJ via messaging app.  Officers also insulted him with vulgar language and confiscated his microphone, which they had not returned as of March 29, Hasan said.

He told CPJ that he sustained painful injuries to the areas that were beaten.

About five police officers also beat Mohammad Fazlul Haque, a senior reporter for the privately owned news website Jago News, according to Haque, who told CPJ via messaging app that he had been beaten but then did not respond to additional questions seeking details.  

According to those news reports and the journalists who spoke with CPJ, police also attacked Nur Mohammad, a reporter for the privately owned newspaper Ajker Patrika; Ibrahim Hossain, a camera operator for the privately owned broadcaster Boishakhi Television; Kabir Hossain, a reporter for the privately owned newspaper Kalbela; and Mehedi Hassan Dalim, a reporter for the privately owned news website The Dhaka Post.

CPJ contacted those journalists via messaging app seeking additional details but did not receive any replies.

Suvra Kanti Das, a senior photojournalist for the privately owned newspaper Prothom Alo, told CPJ by phone that he was also covering the elections when an officer grabbed him by the shirt, demanded to see his media identification card, insulted him with vulgar language, and ordered him to leave the premises, which he did.

CPJ’s calls and messages to Roy Niyati, a spokesperson for the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Since March 16, letter bombs have been sent to the TV stations Ecuavisa, Teleamazonas, and TC Television; the radio station EXA FM; and to one independent news commentator, according to multiple news reports and journalists who spoke with CPJ. One journalist sustained slight injuries after one of the devices exploded.

In each case, journalists received couriered manila envelopes containing USB drives and threatening messages sent from the central town of Quinsaloma, Interior Minister Juan Zapata told reporters on Monday.

“Ecuadorian authorities must thoroughly investigate letter bombs recently sent to journalists throughout the country and bring those responsible to justice,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ´s program director, in New York. “It is crucial that these threats are taken seriously and authorities make reporters’ safety a priority.”

On March 16, in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuavisa journalist Lenin Artieda received a package containing a USB stick. When he inserted the drive into his computer, it exploded and slightly injured his face and one of his hands, according to those news reports and Fundamedios, a press freedom group based in Quito, the capital.

The following day, TC Television news host Mauricio Ayora, also in Guayaquil, received a similar package, station manager Rafael Cuesta told CPJ via messaging app.

Following anti-virus protocols, Ayora did not try to access the information on the USB drive and, after learning about the attack on Artieda, the station turned the device over to the police, who confirmed it contained an explosive.

Identical packages were also sent to Teleamazonas journalist Milton Pérez and EXA FM journalist Miguel Rivadeneira, both in Quito, who handed them over to police, according to those news reports.

A fifth package, addressed to independent news commentator Carlos Vera, was intercepted by authorities before it reached him, those reports said.

Cuesta told CPJ that Ayora had received threats over his reporting on drug trafficking groups and prison riots in 2021, but doubted the bombs were related to that work. He said the packages contained messages that were confusing and did not have a clear specific motive.

“This is an absolutely clear effort to muzzle journalists who have been aggressive in their coverage or to muzzle the media,” said Zapata, adding that police were investigating the bombs. The attorney general’s office said in a statement Monday that it had also opened an investigation.

In a statement Monday, Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso said that his government “categorically rejects any kind of violent acts against journalists.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

At least 28 members of the press were obstructed, harassed, or attacked while covering gubernatorial and state assembly elections across Nigeria on March 18 and 19, according to news reports and journalists who spoke with CPJ.

“Nigerian authorities should swiftly identify and hold accountable those responsible for the recent attacks, harassment, and intimidation of journalists covering state elections and ensure that members of the press feel safe to report on political issues,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “Freedom of the press during elections, which of course includes journalists’ safety to do their work, is fundamental to the democratic process.”

On March 18, at least 10 unidentified men punched and used sticks to hit a TV crew with the privately owned broadcaster Arise TV after they used a drone to film voting stations in southwestern Lagos state, according to a report by their outlet, a statement by the International Press Centre, a local media group, and one of the crew members, correspondent Oba Adeoye, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

Nearby security officers did not intervene while the men attacked Adeoye, camera operator Opeyemi Adenihun, and driver Yusuf Hassan, but seized the drone following the incident. Adenihun said he received medical treatment the next day for a cut to his face.

Lagos police spokesperson Benjamin Hundeyin told CPJ by phone that police were investigating and that Adenihun was invited for questioning on March 20 but said he did not appear. Adenihun told CPJ by phone that he had not heard from police since he reported the incident on March 18.

In Ikeja, the capital of Lagos state, Ima Elijah, a reporter with the privately owned news website Pulse.ng and her camera operator were harassed and forced out of a polling unit by unidentified individuals who insisted that the elections at that polling unit should not be reported by the media, according to a report and Instagram video by the outlet.

Also in Lagos state, two officials from Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission prevented Chibuike Chukwu, a reporter with the privately owned news website Independent, from taking pictures or videos at a polling place, according to a report by the outlet and a person familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

In the northern city of Lafia, the Nasarawa State capital, three state security officers slapped, punched, and used sticks to hit Edwin Philip, a reporter with private broadcaster Breeze 99.9 FM, on orders from a palace official at a polling unit, according to news reports and Philip, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

Philip had been inquiring about reports that the palace official had instructed some men to beat up a voter when the officers briefly seized his phone and began beating him. Philip received stitches at a hospital for a deep cut to his head and reported the incident to the police the same day. Nigeria’s Security and Civil Defence Corps condemned the attack and apologized on March 20. Rahman Namsel, a spokesperson of the Nasarawa State Police, told CPJ by phone that he was unaware that the case was reported to the police and said he would investigate the matter.

In the city of Lagos, at least 10 unidentified individuals punched Amarachi Amushie, a reporter with the privately-owned broadcaster Africa Independent Television, on the back, punched AIT camera operator Aliu Adeshina all over his body, and chased them out of a polling place, according to the IPC statement as well as Adeshina and Amushie, who spoke to CPJ by phone. Neither journalist sustained a significant injury. 

Also in Lagos, unidentified people chased AIT correspondent Henrietta Oke out of a polling place, and others confiscated AIT correspondent Nkiru Nwokedi’s phone at another polling place, returning it 20 minutes later following intervention from community leaders, according to that IPC statement and Nwokedi, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

In northern Kano state, dozens of unidentified men accused Ashiru Umar, editor and senior correspondent with the privately owned broadcaster Premier Radio, of filming them, grabbed his phone, and stomped on it at a polling place in Daladanchi, a town in northern Kano state, according to a report by the privately owned website Premium Times and Umar, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

The men beat Umar with their hands, sticks, and stones and attempted to stab him in the back with a knife. Umar was treated at a hospital for a swollen jaw, bruises, and minor cuts to his knee and hands and filed a report with the police, he told CPJ. CPJ’s calls and text messages to Kano police spokesperson Haruna Abdullahi did not receive any response.

In the city of Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, at least five unidentified individuals, including a masked man with an axe, chased at least 10 journalists after noticing them filming a voting station, according to the IPC statement, a report, and two of those reporters, Adejoke Adeleye, a reporter with the privately owned outlet PM News, and Yusuf Adeleke, a reporter and editor with the privately owned news website Newsflagship, who spoke to CPJ by phone. CPJ’s calls and text messages to Abimbola Oyeyemi, the state’s police spokesperson, did not receive a reply.

On March 19, an official from the Independent National Electoral Commission ordered four security officers to prevent Ayo Adenaiye, an Arise TV news correspondent, James Akpa Oche, a campus reporter at Bayero University Kano, Stephen Enoch, a reporter with Plus TV Africa, and at least three other journalists from various outlets from accessing a vote collation center in the city of Kano, according to a report by Premium Times, Adenaiye, Oche, Enoch, and another reporter who was there and spoke to CPJ by phone, requesting anonymity citing fear of reprisal. The officials had a list that excluded many journalists from entering the collation center, Adenaiye said. 

CPJ called INEC national spokesperson Festus Okoye for comment but did not receive any response.

Hundeyin, the Lagos police spokesperson, responded to CPJ’s request for comment sent by messaging app requesting evidence that the attacks in Lagos state were reported to his office.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

New Zealand pay-TV company Sky TV plans to cut some jobs in the country as it outsources roles to India and the Philippines, reports the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union.

Sky chief executive Sophie Moloney said the proposal would result in some of Sky’s work in technology and content operations being outsourced to experienced international provider Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), according to TVNZ’s 1News.

TCS is an India-based information technology services and consulting company.

In customer care, Sky TV said it would adopt a hybrid model, with one third of its team based in New Zealand and two-thirds in the Philippines (through Sky’s existing partner Probe CX Group).

It said the proposal would see “over 100 roles” retained in its New Zealand call centre, while “around 200” roles would be created in the Philippines to deal with “more straightforward” inquiries.

“Overall, the proposed changes would boost Sky’s customer service capacity by 40 percent across the two teams, driving better customer experiences and the ability to meet customer demand as it flexes,” said Sky in an announcement to New Zealand’s stock exchange last month.

Sky said the changes would result in “multi-million dollar permanent savings within two years”.

Sky TV provides pay television services via satellite, media streaming services and broadband internet services.

It has no connection with the UK’s Sky Group or Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

On Tuesday, February 21, Taliban officials, in a meeting with journalists in the southern province of Helmand, announced a ban on all media outlets—including Taliban-run Radio Television of Helmand and Bakhtar News Agency —preparing and distributing photos and videos, according to the media watchdog Nai and a journalist inside Afghanistan, who spoke to CPJ by messaging app on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal. Taliban authorities have not clarified whether text-based media activities are still allowed; however, Bakhtar News Agency has stopped operations in Helmand, because the ban on recording video and taking pictures has prevented them from producing any content.

Separately, on Monday, February 20, Taliban officials in northern Parwan province ordered the media to change their coverage to fall in line with what is reported by the Taliban-run Bakhtar News Agency, stifling all independent reporting, according to a local news report and another journalist inside Afghanistan, who spoke to CPJ by messaging app on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

“The Taliban’s severe restrictions imposed on the media in Helmand and Parwan provinces reflect an alarming escalation of local information control,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “The Taliban must immediately reverse these devastating orders and allow journalists to report without fear of retaliation. Access to information inside Afghanistan depends on it.”

Abdul Ahad Talib, the Taliban governor of Helmand, said during the February 21 meeting that recording videos and taking photos are forbidden in Islam, which is why the ban includes Taliban-run outlets, the journalist told CPJ. Taliban officials also warned the journalists attending the meeting not to discuss the order publicly.

CPJ contacted Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid for comment via messaging app but received no response. CPJ was unable to locate contact information for the Taliban governor of Helmand.

In August 2022, CPJ published a special report about the media crisis in Afghanistan, showing a rapid deterioration in press freedom since the Taliban retook control of the country one year earlier, marked by censorship, arrests, assaults, and restrictions on women journalists.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Critical journalism during a time of mourning for the tens of thousands of lives lost to the earthquakes may appear harsh, but it can also pave the way to justice for the victims and better regulations to save lives in the future,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna, in New York. “Turkish authorities should revoke the penalties leveled against broadcasters FOX TV Turkey, Halk TV, and TELE1, and refrain from silencing media criticism of the government and its institutions.”

On Tuesday, February 22, the Radio and Television Supreme Council, the government telecommunications regulator known as RTÜK fined Halk TV and TELE1 5% of their annual revenue and fined FOX TV Turkey 3%, the reports said. The RTÜK also suspended the next five episodes of the Halk TV and TELE1 shows that aired criticism of the government’s earthquake preparation and rescue efforts.

The outlets have the right to appeal to RTÜK decisions under Turkey’s telecommunications law.

Separately, the RTÜK on October 19, 2022, had imposed a three-day broadcast ban on TELE1 that will begin Wednesday, February 23, in response to a parliamentary deputy’s comments on a political debate show in September 2022. Socialist politician Sera Kadıgil described the Presidency of Religious Affairs, Turkey’s official religious authority, as “a tool for political Islam” while she was a guest on the show. TELE1 will comply with the court order for an immediate ban while its appeal is pending. 

CPJ emailed RTÜK for comment but did not receive any response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Jennifer Dunham.

RNZ Mediawatch

New Zealand’s media were in emergency mode yet again this week, offering hours of extra coverage on air, online and in print.

Outlets in the hardest-hit places reported the basics — even without access to basics like power, communications and even premises.

What will Gabrielle’s legacy be for media’s role in reporting disasters and national resilience?

• LISTEN TO RNZ MEDIAWATCH: Before and after Gabrielle
• Cyclone Gabrielle: Death toll rises to 11, Civil Defence targets isolated communities
• Cyclone Gabrielle: Pasifika songs of gratitude ring out across Hawke’s Bay
• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Susana Suisuiki reports
  
• Cyclone Gabrielle death toll rises to 9, thousands uncontactable and landslide risk in Auckland
• Cyclone Gabrielle: Where to donate
• Follow RNZ live updates

“Keep listening to the radio. You guys have done a great job updating people and it’s very much appreciated,” the Civil Defence Minister Keiran McAnulty told Newstalk ZB’s last Sunday afternoon as Gabrielle was just beginning to wreak havoc.

Barely two weeks earlier, sudden and catastrophic flooding in and near Auckland caught the media off-guard, but some commentators claimed the heavy warnings about Gabrielle were oppressively ominous — and risked “crying wolf”.

Gabrielle ended up as a national emergency and sparked non-stop rolling news coverage. There were few flat spots on TV and radio, and live online reporting around the clock also give a comprehensive picture — and pictures — of what was going on.

It stretched newsrooms to their limits, but news reporters’ work was skillfully and selectively supplemented with a steady stream of vivid eyewitness accounts.

Forestry slash flood
Tolaga Bay farmer Bridget Parker’s description on RNZ Nine to Noon of yet another inundation at her place with added forestry slash was among the most confronting (and sweary).

Checkpoint’s emotional interview on Wednesday with a couple that owned a house in which a friend “disappeared under water” was compelling — but also chilling.

RNZ’s Kate Green arrived in Gisborne on Monday with the only means of communicating that worked — a satellite phone.

“You can’t even dial 111. Everything that can break is broken,” she told RNZ Morning Report listeners, quoting the local mayor.

RNZ’s Māni Dunlop, who managed to fly in on Tuesday, told listeners that from the air the East Coast looked “buggered”.

Gisborne is a city and Tairawhiti a region not well covered at the best of times by New Zealand’s national media, which have no bureaux there. It is a bit of an irony that in the worst of times, it was so hard to get the word out.

But the locally-owned Gisborne Herald stepped up, somehow printing editions every day distributed free to 22,000 homes — with the help of NZDF boots n the ground on some days.

Proud news day
“I’m proud to be working on this paper today,” reported Murray Robertson said, signing off an eye-opening video of scenes of the stricken city posted online once power came back and a fresh Starlink unit kicked in.

On Wednesday, ZB’s Mike Hosking pleaded on air for diesel to keep their signal up in Hawke’s Bay, while the editor of Hawke’s Bay Today Chris Hyde — only months into his job — found himself literally powerless to publish when the rivers rose, cutting the electricity and cutting him off from many of his staff.

“The first day I was in a black hole. In a big news event, the phones ring hot. This was the biggest news event in Hawke’s Bay since the Napier earthquake  . . . and my phone wasn’t ringing at all,” he told Mediawatch.

Hyde, just 32 years old, was a student in Christchurch when The Press stunned citizens by publishing a paper the morning after the deadly 2011 quake.

Hyde said NZME chief editor Shayne Currie and The New Zealand Herald’s Murray Kirkness were instrumental in putting the Auckland HQs resources into getting NZME’s upper North Island dailies promptly back in print and available for free.

“Just keep supporting local news, because in moments like this, it really does matter,” Chris Hyde told Mediawatch.

On Wednesday, Hyde had the odd experience of seeing Tuesday’s edition of the paper on the AM show on TV before he had even seen it himself.

Cut-off news focus
On Wednesday, RNZ switched to focus on news for areas cut off or without power — or both — where people were depending on the radio. RNZ’s live online updates went “text-only” because those who could get online might only have the bandwidth for the basics.

Day of ‘danger’

This is the first copy of Tuesday’s @hawkesbaytoday that I’ve seen. It never made it to my home, to our offices, to our subscribers. When I wrote that headline had some idea of what was coming, and yet we had no idea. pic.twitter.com/57PmhoeyYr

— Chris Hyde (@chrishydejourno) February 16, 2023

“Thank God for news media in a storm,” was former Herald editor Gavin Ellis in his column The Knightly Views.

He was among the critics of media coverage of Auckland’s floods a fortnight earlier.

Back then he said social media and online outlets had trumped traditional news media in quickly conveying the scale and the scope of the flooding.

This time social media also hosted startling scenes and sounds reporters couldn’t capture — like rural road bridges bending then buckling.

But Gavin Ellis said earlier this week he couldn’t get a clearer picture of Gabrielle’s impact without mainstream media.

“Those two episodes where chalk and cheese. Coverage of Cyclone Gabrielle by all media was excellent, both in warning people about what was to come – although that wasn’t universal – and then talking people through it and into the aftermath, And what an aftermath it’s been,” he told Mediawatch.

“This is precisely why we need news media. They draw together an overwhelming range of sources and condense information into a readily absorbed format. Then they keep updating and adding to the picture.” he wrote.

Retro but robust radio

“It’s even more pressing if you haven’t got electricity, and you haven’t got those online links. That was when radio really came into its own,” said Ellis.

“Organisations like the BBC,and the ABC (Australia) are talking about a fully-digital future and moving away from linear broadcasting. What happens to radio in those circumstances if you haven’t got power? If you’re sitting on your rooftop surrounded by water, you can still have a radio on, he said.

“We need to have a conversation about the future of media in this country and the requirements in times of urgency need to be looked at,” Ellis told Mediawatch.

RNZ’s head of news Richard Sutherland’s had the same thoughts.

“It has certainly been a reminder to generations who have not been brought up with transistor radios they are important to have in a disaster. This will also sharpen the minds of people on just how important ‘legacy’ platforms like AM transmission are in civil defence emergencies like the one we’ve had,” he said.

“With the Tonga volcano, Tonga was cut off from the internet. and the only thing getting through was shortwave radio. In the 2020s, we are talking about something that’s been around since the early 1900s still doing the mahi. In this country, we are going to need to think very carefully about how we provide the belt and braces of broadcasting infrastructure,” he told Mediawatch.

“Everyone was super-aware of the way that the Auckland flooding late last month played out — and no one wanted to repeat that,” said Sutherland, formerly a TV news executive at Newshub, TV3, TVNZ and Sky News.

“Initially the view was this is going to be bad news for Auckland because Auckland, already very badly damaged and waterlogged. But as it turned out, of course, it ended up being Northland, Coromandel, Hawke’s Bay have been those areas that caught the worst of it,” Sutherland told Mediawatch.

News contraction
“Over the years, and for a number of reasons, a lot of them financial, all news organisations have contracted. And you contract to your home city or a big metropolitan area, because that’s where the population is, and that’s where the bulk of your audience is,” he said.

“But this cyclone has reminded us all as a nation, that it’s really important to have reporters in the regions, to have strong infrastructure in the regions. I would argue that RNZ is a key piece of infrastructure,” he said.

“This incident has shown us that with the increasing impact of climate change, news organisations, particularly public service lifeline utility organisations like RNZ, are going to have to have a look at our geographic coverage, as well as our general coverage based on population,” he said

“We are already drawing up plans for have extra boots on the ground permanently  . . but also we need to think where are the regions that we need to have more people in so that we can respond faster to these sorts of things,” he said.

“We are at a moment where we could do something a bit more formal around building a more robust media infrastructure . . . for the whole country. I would be very, very keen for the industry to get together to make sure that the whole country can benefit from the combined resources that we have.

“Again, everything comes down to money. But if the need is there, the money will be found,” he said.

Now that the government’s planned new public media entity is off the table, it will be interesting to see if those holding the public purse strings see the need for news in the same way.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.