Posts under ‘Issues’

BBC: Afghan senate backs death penalty. Afghanistan’s upper house of parliament has issued a statement backing a death sentence for a journalist for blasphemy in northern Afghanistan. Pervez Kambakhsh, 23, was convicted last week of downloading and distributing an article insulting Islam. He has denied the charge. The UN has criticised the sentence and said […]

Nice. Consumer Reports and the Center for Media and Democracy have created Full Frontal Scrutiny to focus public attention on the people and organizations who function in our society as hidden persuaders. You’ll find them at work posting to blogs, speaking before city councils, quoted in newspapers and published on the editorial page, even sponsoring […]

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall reports that he’s been “Banned at The DoJ” — taken off the email distribution list for press releases and the like. This has to be one of the more lame governmental PR decisions of the recent past. TPM and its sister websites did spectacular work last year in uncovering and […]

Glenn Greenwald accurately explains the grotesque result of laws that seek to curb that amorphous problem of “hate speech” — a concept that turns free speech on its head. And unlike many of his colleagues on the political left, Greenwald explains why he’s defending people whose speech frequently deserves contempt: People like Mark Steyn and […]

Jeff Jarvis ably deconstructs a NYT op-ed in which: A herd of journalism-school deans wrote a predictable but also naive and possibly dangerous — and certainly not strategically forward-thinking — attack on media cross-ownership and the FCC’s loosening of its rules in today’s Times op-ed page. They do mean well, and they are not off […]

It’s hard to know where to begin in responding to David Hazinski’s “Unfettered ‘citizen journalism’ too risky,” an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he calls for regulation of citizen journalism: Supporters of “citizen journalism” argue it provides independent, accurate, reliable information that the traditional media don’t provide. While it has its place, the reality […]

I want to come full circle on a posting last July, when a London newspaper, commenting on the likely move of a senior News Corp. editor to the Wall Street Journal should — as has happened — Rupert Murdoch’s company buy Dow Jones. The paper wrote: Robert Thomson, the present editor of The (London) Times, […]

Techdirt: AT&T Does Nothing, Convinces Reporter It Has Now ‘Opened’ Its Network. Basically, absolutely nothing happened here except that AT&T’s marketing crew declared that AT&T’s network is now open, and convinced USA Today to report it as if it were a big deal. If there was any change at all within AT&T, it’s that retail […]

Follow the links from Electronic Frontier Foundation page on the bizarre Manalapan v. Moskovitz lawsuit to see a local government running wild against free speech. The town is suing to get the identity of — and all kinds of other information about — a critical anonymous blogger. Anonymous speech should generally be taken less seriously […]

Rebecca MacKinnon: Is Web2.0 a wash for free speech in China? Lately I’ve given a few talks around town titled “Will the Chinese Communist Party Survive the Internet?” My answer – for the short and medium term at least – is “yes.” Western media pundits and many policymakers have a tendency to assume that the […]