How the media should report more fairly on Palestine/Israel

In the last weeks since the publication of a petition that I helped write, Do Better on Palestine, there’s been a lot of media backlash and public support. It’s a call for the media to more fairly and accurately report on Israel/Palestine. US-based outlet The Intercept has just covered the whole saga and helpfully places…

Sky News TV interview on Israel, Palestine and Gaza

My TV interview with Sky News on the weekend talking Palestine, Israel, occupation, Jewish dissent, Israeli extremism and media bias. We covered quite a lot considering it’s a normally pro-Israel, Murdoch-owned network. The 100s and 100s of comments below the video oscillate between support and calls for violence against Palestinians.

Please don’t complicate matters

The coming war with Iran is discussed by mainstream commentators with little grasp of the issues and an infantile “he said/she said” mentality. The war would be a disaster, and anybody who says otherwise is simply pimping for one side of politics or relishing the charming idea of bombing the Iranians to smithereens. A diversity…

Protect us

Decent bloggers are finding it increasingly difficult to do their job, namely challenge the powerful in society: When a billionaire born in Uzbekistan and an outspoken former British ambassador clashed over a scorching blog, the first outcome was the Internet equivalent of a smackdown. The daily Web log, or blog, of the former U.K. ambassador…

We’re all journalists

The US House of Representatives recently passed a federal shield law for journalists who receive “substantial financial gain.” This is encouraging, but as the Citizen Media Law Project explains, there are some fundamental problems: This change significantly narrows the bill’s coverage and is plainly aimed to exclude non-traditional journalists. But it doesn’t just exclude those…

Killing other voices

Democracy in the media? Hardly, let the moguls reign: The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city. Kevin J. Martin, chairman…

Repression inc.

Global advocacy group Reporters Without Borders is regularly criticised for its alleged bias against countries not friendly to the US. It’s often a fair call, but nonetheless, the group still produces, in my opinion, important studies about repression of journalists in non-democratic countries. Its 2007 Worldwide Press Freedom Index has just been released. Australia is…

Something new, please

With the constant failure of the mainstream to hold governments to account for a litany of misdeeds, this project sounds intriguing: As struggling newspapers across the country cut back on investigative reporting, a new kind of journalism venture is hoping to fill the gap. Paul E. Steiger, who was the top editor of The Wall…

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