Last night I appeared on ABCTV News24’s The Drum (video here) talking about the current media feeding frenzy over broadcaster Alan Jones and his offensive remarks towards Prime Minister Julia Gillard. The amount of time and energy spent on this issue, I argued, was utterly disproportionate to the comment itself. It was crude and wrong…
Showing all posts tagged censorship
Protecting an Australian journalist, such as Julian Assange, from the clutches of US empire
Michael Moore and Oliver Stone on a key point in the Wikileaks saga that must be remembered. Their New York Times op-ed: If Mr. Assange is extradited to the United States, the consequences will reverberate for years around the world. Mr. Assange is not an American citizen, and none of his actions have taken place…
What freedom of speech really means in today’s US
A fine program,… Alyona Minkovski on RT, has now finished and this is from her last episode:
News flash; Victorian government, police and Zionist lobby upset that public have right to oppose Israel
Following this week’s decision in a Victorian magistrate’s court that found protestors had the right to oppose Israeli chocolate shop Max Brenner in public, now comes the inevitable whinging from the political elites. It’s not fair, they say, that citizens can speak out against wonderful democratic Israel. It’s unfair that people say nasty things about…
Footage of my 2012 PEN Free Voices lecture
I was invited this year to give the 2012 Sydney PEN “Free Voices” lecture on free speech, censorship and war. It was delivered at the Sydney Writer’s Festival in May and in Melbourne in June. ABC published an extract recently. Film footage of the Sydney event is now available. May you be provoked:
Private eyes are watching all of us
The idea that repression only happens “over there” is a myth that needs to be constantly challenged (my recent PEN lecture tackled this). Take this (via Pro Publica): Cellphone companies hold onto your location information for years and routinely provide it to police and, in anonymized form, to outside companies. As they note in their…
My 2012 PEN Free Voices lecture on free speech and why it matters
The following is published today as the lead piece by ABC’s The Drum: The two-hour drive from Islamabad to Peshawar is along a surprisingly smooth road. Mud-brick homes sit amongst lush, green fields. Police checkpoints are set up routinely to stop unwanted visitors. I am asked why I want to see the troubled Pakistani town…
Melbourne Triple R radio on PEN lecture and freedom of speech
This week I gave the 2012 Free Voices PEN lecture in Melbourne. I was interviewed about the issues on Melbourne’s … Triple RRR Spoke program:
Our web future is censored unless we fight our own government’s secret demands
The sooner we adjust our thinking to understand that growing number of so-called democracies rather like the idea of censoring the internet, the better (via the Guardian): There has been an alarming rise in the number of times governments attempted to censor the… internet… in last six months, according to a report from Google. Since the search…
ABC Triple J Hack on Syria, social media and not trusting what we see
The conflict in Syria continues to worsen. I was interviewed on Wednesday’s ABC Triple J Hack program about the role of social media, especially related to the war zone: Children being placed on tanks and used as human shields, that’s happening in Syria according to the United Nations. With the viral nature of social media…