Posted by
Colin Crummy
on 24 February 2006 at 18:03
Tags: Issues, Magazines, Muhammad cartoons
New Delhi police have detained Senior India editor, Alok Tomar, after he republished the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, according to Voice of America, contrary to a government warning against publication.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 20 February 2006 at 15:18
Tags: International, Muhammad cartoons, Newspapers
Writing in yesterday’s Washington Post, the Danish editor who commissioned those cartoons explains why he did it.
Jyllands-Posten culture editor Flemming Rose writes:
… I commissioned the cartoons in response to several incidents of self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam. And I still believe that this is a topic that we Europeans must confront, challenging moderate Muslims to speak out. The idea wasn’t to provoke gratuitously — and we certainly didn’t intend to trigger violent demonstrations throughout the Muslim world. Our goal was simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing in tighter.
It’s certainly worth a read.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 16 February 2006 at 14:40
Tags: International, Muhammad cartoons, Student Media
Two more student newspaper editor — this time in the United States — have been suspended after printing the controvertial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Editor-in-chief Acton Gorton and opinion editor Chuck Prochaska of the Daily Illini, an indendent student newspaper at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, were suspended by the paper’s editoral board after claims they had not properly consulted other editors before deciding to run the cartoons.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 13 February 2006 at 10:01
Tags: Muhammad cartoons, Newspapers, Student Media
The student newspaper editor who was suspended with two other journalists after they became the first and only newspaper in Britain to print the controvertial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad has broken his silence.
Speaking to the Western Mail, Tom Wellingham, the editor of Cardiff University’s student rag, Gair Rhydd, apologised for running the cartoons:
“The reproduction of one of the controversial cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in our most recent edition was a na ve and ill-considered course of action which caused needless offence to Muslim students and members of the community alike.
“The cartoon was not reproduced as part of some frivolous defence of freedom of speech, but was a genuine mistake on our part which arose from a desire to give context to a small and balanced world news piece reporting the developing international situation surrounding the cartoons.
“We apologise for the harm we recognise we have caused.”
Yesterday’s editon of the Gair Rhydd — the first published since the last week’s edition containing the cartoons was recalled and pulped — also contained a full-page statement from the university’s Islamic Society calling for peaceful protest. The statement described the article as “not only unthoughtful and irresponsible but a cruel and heartless act by the newspaper involved” which “only serves to intensify and stir frustration evident amongst Muslims at the present time.”
Posted by
Caitlin Pike
on 10 February 2006 at 16:44
Tags: BBC, Muhammad cartoons, Online
The BBC’s Newsnight programme has enjoyed record traffic to its web site as a result of the cartoon controversy.
In the latest edition of his weekly column for fans of the programme, Newsnight editor Peter Barron also heralded the growth in the number of people watching the programme via broadband, providing further evidence that convergence is well and truely underway:
While the numbers on old-fashioned TV were up, so were those of people watching Newsnight via broadband.
We’ve only been doing this for a few months, but already thousands are choosing to watch the programme on demand, and this week the figures shot up.
More than 20,000 people downloaded the video of Monday night’s debate and a further 20,000 watched Fergal Keane’s film about corruption within the Kenyan government.
Still small numbers compared with TV proper, but it’s growing at an amazing rate, and new developments are happening almost daily.
Barron plugged a new broadband “web space” launched by BBC TWO which his programme will be involved in.
A “refresh” the Newsnight site will also be launched in the next couple of weeks. Barron said it will have “less clutter and easier navigation” and that shortly the best bits of Newsnight will be available in a podcast each week.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 10 February 2006 at 16:03
Tags: BBC, Blogs, Muhammad cartoons
BBC News Online world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds says bloggers have become a valuable source of information for him.
For example, Reynolds writes in a column posted today, a blog called Neandernews tracked down the origin of a fake cartoon that helped fuel the Muhammad cartoon conflagration. It turns out the image was a photocopy of an Associated Press photograph taken at a French pig squealing competition (sic). The AP is now protesting this illegitimate use of its material.
Reynolds also credits the conservative American web site WorldNetDaily with discovering that the Danish cartoons were published in an Egyptian newspaper last October, without raising the sort of storm we have seeen over the past fortnight.
What is really important in Reynolds’ column is his advice for journalists about how to deal with the barrage of criticism that emanates from some blogs.
Reynolds writes: “I have taken to intervening in some of these sites if and when I am personally criticised and sometimes to defend the BBC in a general way. Otherwise the comments go unanswered. I found that one rapidly develops a very thick skin and I can now understand how politicians can cope with criticism.”
Using the bloggers’ derisory abbreviation for the Mainstream Media, Reynolds says:
If the MSM does not respond, it will suffer. The same is even truer of businesses, whose products can be disastrously damaged by web-based attacks.
If the criticism is fair it must be answered, directly to those making it. Remote, computer-generated responses are counter-productive.
And mistakes must be quickly corrected. If the criticism is unfair, then the MSM has to know about it early on and develop defensive tactics.
Richard Sambrook, head of the BBC World Service and Global News Division (who runs a blog himself) accepts that the BBC needs to do more.
“The BBC should proactively engage with bloggers. This is a new issue for us. Some departments look at blogs, though haphazardly. But it pays dividends. The BBC is a huge impersonal organisation. It needs to come out from under its rock,” he says.
As for using blogs as a source he says: “The key is careful attribution. It would be a big mistake for the MSM to try to match the blogs, but they can teach us lessons about openness and honesty. The MSM should concentrate on what it can do - explain, analyse and verify.”
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 10 February 2006 at 14:38
Tags: International, Muhammad cartoons, Newspapers
The Danish editor who commissioned the non-infamous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad has been sent on ‘indefinate leave’.
Flemming Rose, culture editor of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, had said that he might print planned Iranian cartoons about the Holocaust.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 10 February 2006 at 14:17
Tags: Muhammad cartoons, Student Media
In a leader published today, the Oxford Student newspaper has rounded on its counterpart at Cardiff University, Gair Rhydd, for publishing the cartoon
showing the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban.
“The Cardiff University student newspaper Gair Rhydd’s decision to be the first and only newspaper in Britain to print the cartoons is nothing short of infantile attention-seeking,” the Student thundered in an attack on its rival for annual student journalism prizes.
Thousands of copies of the Cardiff student newspaper were recalled and pulped this week after it ran the cartoon. The editor, Tom Wellingham, and two other student journalists were suspended by their students’ union. Wellingham is reported to be ‘devastated’ by his suspension.
Meanwhile, back amidst the dreaming spires, four editors of the Hertford college magazine Simpkins “faced university action” after an issue of the rag had to be removed from circulation “for publishing potentially offensive material”.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 9 February 2006 at 12:42
Tags: Muhammad cartoons, Newspapers, Student Media
The student editor who was suspended from his students union for allowing the publication of the cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad is ‘devastated’, the South Wales Echo reports.
The editor of Cardiff University’s student newspaper, Gair Rhydd, Tom Wellingham, was suspended along the paper’s news editor and correspondent. Journalists at the student rag say he has returned to his parents’ home in England.
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 9 February 2006 at 11:17
Tags: BBC, Blogs, Mobile Phones, Muhammad cartoons
The Washington Post’s Kevin Sullivan has a story about the role of new media technologies in fuelling the row surrounding the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Text messages, blogs, helped spread rumour, gossip - and in some cases, misinformation - and help organise the various responses by Muslim groups.
One use the story documents is to manipulate online polls run by news organisations:
In London, Azzam Tamimi, a member of the Muslim Association of Britain, said text messages were being used to bring out the vote in opinion polls on the Internet. On Tuesday, he received a group message asking him to respond to a poll that a German newspaper was conducting about whether it should publish the cartoons. Even though the poll was aimed at readers in Germany, Tamimi said, instant global communication means “there are no barriers anymore.”
His group is helping to stage a rally Saturday in London’s Trafalgar Square. Organizers hope to attract thousands of moderate Muslims through mass e-mails and text messaging.
Abdul-Rehman Malik, a contributing editor of Q-News, a popular Muslim magazine in Britain, said he had received hundreds of e-mails and dozens of text messages about the cartoons. He said some messages were computer-generated so that thousands of phones could be reached nearly instantly, such as one telling him to reply “no” to a British TV survey about whether to broadcast the cartoons. “It’s efficient and immediate — the ultimate activists’ dream,” Malik said.
The UK Independence Party recently used similar tactics to manipulate a BBC poll into who was the most powerful person in Britain. The anti-EU party mobilised its supporters to vote for EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso in order to highlight the influence of the EU on British politics.
But even without this sort of manipulation, online polls of the sort run by many news organisations on their web sites have never had any scientific validity whatsoever. The information they generate is meaningless because the sample is self-selecting. Rather than condemning political groups for attempting to manipulate such polls, we should be asking why news organsiations, which should be in the business of reporting truth, conduct and report on such pseudo-polls at all.
For commerical web sites, the answer is simple: polls — especially ones that are highlighted and rigged by activists — drive traffic to a new site. And that’s good for advertising sales. Telephone polls used by some TV broadcasters raise even more money with per-call charges. It’s a money spinner, but the outcome is inevitably also more spin than fact.
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