Islamophobia and the press, Trump’s cracking down on leakers, and the Facebook fake news ‘war room’
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Published in
4 min readOct 19, 2018
edited by Marco Nurra
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- One man’s (very polite) fight against media Islamophobia. For three years, Miqdaad Versi has waged a quixotic — and always scrupulously courteous — campaign against the endless errors and distortions in news about British Muslims.
- The Trump administration has now indicted at least five journalists’ sources in less than two years’ time — a pace that, if maintained through the end of Trump’s term, would obliterate the already-record number of leakers and whistleblowers prosecuted under eight years of the Obama administration.
- A crackdown on fake news in Egypt is getting women and dissenters thrown in jail. Social media accelerated Egypt’s revolution. Now those same services have become a tool of control for a repressive regime.
- A year after her murder, where is the justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia? The Maltese journalist reported on government corruption, but no politician has been questioned about her murder, says novelist Margaret Atwood, writing on behalf of PEN International. “When a journalist is murdered, all of society suffers. We lose our right to know, to speak, to learn.”
- “We need to know the whole truth about my mother’s assassination,” said Andrew Caruana Galizia. On the anniversary of her death in a car bomb outside her home, her son said the vilification that his mother had faced was “a contributing factor to her murder”. Anyone fighting for justice now puts them “in the same dangerous space she occupied”.
- Jamal Khashoggi: What the Arab world needs most is free expression. The Washington Post just published journalist’s final column, written just before his disappearance.
- The challenge of reporting the Khashoggi story. “The struggle to double check evidence when the only sources of information — the Turkish government and closely intertwined Turkish media — are politically biased has been a challenge for journalists reporting the Khashoggi case.”
- Russia’s Novaya Gazeta is sent funeral wreath and goat’s head in latest threats. A funeral wreath, a severed goat’s head, and threatening notes were sent to the newspaper’s Moscow office this week in what the paper said in an editorial statement were the latest threats against its journalists.
- Facebook cracks down on ‘dark ads’ by British political groups. “All paid-for political content will be automatically published in a public advertising library for up to seven years, ending the practice where adverts are visible only to those who are targeted by them.”
- Facebook has a fake news ‘war room’ — but is it really working? The new political ad moderation system has also had major hiccups. Hours after the briefing, USA Today published a report showing that Facebook had removed ads after incorrectly labeling them “political”, simply because they used descriptions like “African-American” and “Mexican” or were written in Spanish.
- Shooting made me rethink decades of photojournalism. “We often use our journalistic dogma for good — to argue a First Amendment right, to limit undue influence from the outside, to lend voice to the voiceless. But like all dogma, ours is also used as a lazy excuse for not thinking hard enough about what we do. We work too often on autopilot, arriving at the events, collecting facts, quotes and images, and publishing them simply because that’s what we’ve always done. The profession of journalism is far too important to not have constant reevaluation of practice, motive and ethics.”
- Spain’s Público rolls out open source tool in bid to boost transparency. “What we hope is that other media want to implement this tool in their organisation and that they assume transparency as a value to restore citizens’ trust in journalism.” said Público’s deputy editor-in-chief Virginia Pérez Alonso.
- Civil’s token sale has failed. Now what? Refunds, for one thing — and then another sale.
- Reader payments now make up 12 percent of The Guardian’s revenue. They now gets more revenue from consumers than from advertising. More than 900,000 people pay it through a combination of membership, recurring contributions, print and digital subscriptions and one-off contributions. Here is the Guardian Media Group annual financial report.
- Vox.com founder Ezra Klein and NYU professor Jay Rosen talked about the problems in political journalism on this Vox podcast: “Jay Rosen is pessimistic about the media. So am I.”
- Best books, articles, blogs about journalism, for journalists. Reading recommendations crowdsourced by the Reuters Institute.
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