Skip to main content

The latest threat to journalists..... and, yes, their partners

Two "stories" which highlight how journalists, and even their quite unconnected partners, can be caught up in the "new" approach to what constitutes terrorism, etc.

Exhibit #1:

"In an act of blatant escalation against press freedom, UK officials held David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, at Heathrow Airport under a controversial Terrorism Act for 9 hours, the maximum allowed under law before police must release or formally arrest a "suspect." Miranda was finally released after police confiscated all his electronics, including cell phone and laptop - a move prompting Greenwald to compare them,  unfavorably, with the Mafia.

"If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further...Every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world ...all they do is helpfully underscore why it's so dangerous to allow them to exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark."


Exhibit #2:

"You can delete the tweet, just not always the message.

Michael Grunwald, Time magazine's senior national correspondent, has come under enormous fire this weekend for declaring his support for the extrajudicial murder of Wikileaks' publisher and embattled journalist Julian Assange.

In what is perhaps the most singular and noxious example yet of how establishment media figures express their contempt for those journalists who have chosen to challenge government and corporate power as oppose to coddling that authority, Grunwald tweeted:"



Read on here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

Isn't there something radically wrong here?    Israel, a non-signatory to the NPT has, evidently, been the cause for those countries that are Treaty members, notably Canada, the US and the UK, after 4 weeks of negotiation, effectively blocking off any meaningful progress in ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.    IPS reports ..... "After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies. “The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS. “This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-dependent allies for l

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?