Criticism of Hungary’s media controls keeps growing

Press freedom demonstration on Kossuth Square near the Parliament in Budapest, 27 January 2012
Photo credit: habeebee via Flickr (some rights reserved)

Sándor Orbán, programme director of the South East European Network for Professionalization of Media (SEENPM), discusses in a recent blog on the Committee to Protect Journalists website the press freedom situation in Hungary, as part of a broader trend of politically-driven clamp downs on journalists and independent media in the region.

“Klubrádió solely wants to provide news and present different opinions and never meant to play any emblematic role. But, because of the decision of the Media Authority, it has became the symbol of free speech in Hungary,” stated the broadcaster’s CEO, András Arató, on Sunday when addressing thousands of demonstrators who gathered in central Budapest to express their support for the station. Once this popular talk radio broadcaster loses its frequency license (which was reallocated to a previously unknown media group that tendered a higher price) in a matter of weeks, pro-government dominance will be nearly complete in terms of broadcast news programs in the country.

Since the conservative Hungarian Civic Union, or Fidesz, came to power with a super-majority in parliament in 2010, media freedom in the country has gradually deteriorated. As a delegation of 12 international free speech and media development NGOs concluded in Budapest in November, the confluence of a restrictive regulatory environment, deteriorating economic conditions, technological change, and a lack of solidarity among professionals created a perfect storm and put independent media in danger. The participants of the mission, which was organized by the South East European Network for Professionalization of Media, also emphasized that the broad, uncertain, and inconsistent provisions of the new Hungarian laws created a chilling effect and strengthened self-censorship among journalists. (The key findings of the mission can be found here, and excerpts from the delegation’s press conference can be watched here.)

Continue reading the article on the CPJ blog

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Sándor Orbán is programme director at the Budapest-based South East European Network for Professionalization of Media, an association of 15 regional media organisations, which promotes excellence in journalism through training, information exchange, media policy research, and advocacy.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organisation founded in 1981. CPJ promotes press freedom worldwide by “defending the rights of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.”

 

 

Posted on February 1, 2012 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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Child trafficking threatens Iraqi society

“I was born free like a bird; I wished to fly in the sky,” says Amal. “I lived in a quiet and simple house in a village in northern Iraq. I had dreams about the future like any other young girl in the world and drew my power from the green mountains around me. Until the day my parents forced me to marry a man who was 50.”

It came as a shock for the 16-year-old Amal to lose her youth for a life with a much older man whom she did not love. “I realised too late that my parents considered me as a good that could be sold. My father asked the man for a lot of money and gold in return for marriage and kept everything for himself. Now I feel that my life is over,” she says.

Anaam Mohammed, a psychiatrist at the University of Arbil, explains the practice: “Some families sell their daughters to wealthy old men on the pretext that they want to save them but in reality they do it for the money they can earn from it.”

“Such a marriage deprives the child of its right to childhood and social welfare. If a married girl returns to her family house, she is scarred for life because she will suffer from lasting physical, but above all, psychological traumas. Terrible, bitter memories cannot easily be forgotten, especially if the girl has been abused sexually,” says Mohammed.

“I’m pregnant with my second illegitimate child because my mother forced me several times to have sexual relations with my uncle. My life was over when I was 13,” says Nubras, now 15.

Nubras has made many attempts to commit suicide. “All I wish today is to die,” she says, “because I want to wash the shame that happened to me. I don’t have any hope left.”

“First my uncle had sexual relations with my mother and I’m his second victim. I feel that my mother sold me to him,” she adds.

Nubras’ mother feels helpless too: “Nubras’ uncle raped her because she doesn’t have anyone to protect and provide for her. Her father died and I don’t have any money. It was not my fault.”

Child in Baghdad

Lost childhoods

According to sources at the Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights, the number of widows in Iraq has reached 108,946 in 2010. The figure for the number orphans is much higher. Altogether there are 1,371,964 orphans in Iraq, of whom 768,556 (56 percent) have lost their father, 396,498 (29 percent) have lost their mother and 206,910 (15 percent) are orphans of both parents.

These are impressive figures considering the fact that young people under the age of 18 in Iraq represent half of the total Iraqi population of around 32 million people. 

The Ministry of Human Rights specified that the figure related to the number orphans does not include the number of children living in orphanages which reaches 238,253.
 
The 8-year-old Mohammed and his 5-year-old brother suffered several sexual assaults from homosexual youths. Their mother had “rented” them in return for USD 9 a day to a “broker” who used children for as beggars.

“When I found out that my sons had been sexually abused by homosexual youths in exchange for USD 20, I wanted to get my sons back, but I was surprised to learn that the conditions of the renting contract did not allow it,” Mohammed’s mother says.

Mohammed and his brother not only lost their childhood, they also lost their mother’s love and her warm lap when she “rented” them to the broker. She also sold two other sons to the same broker who in turn sold one boy to a woman who didn’t have children and the other to a homosexual man.

Human Trafficking in Iraq, a report by War News Radio, August 2011

Severe physical and psychological damages

A psychiatrist who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject gave some insights into the practice of child trafficking in Iraq. “Children are transported in special cages to the provinces where they are exploited as beggars or rented for sex.”

“Some families whose children were kidnapped were able to recover them later. When the children returned home and went through a medical examination, it appeared that they had been sexually assaulted.”

According to the psychiatrist, “children who have been subject to sexual abuse suffer from severe psychological crises in childhood and adolescence and can develop mental disorders. The most important of these disorders is called pressure shock, which mainly affects people who have been exposed to enormous psychological blows, such as rape and the sight of killings of any kind. These symptoms can last more than six months and treatment is very difficult.”

“The effects of pressure shock on a child can also be permanent. The child will keep waking up frequently at night, and suffer from bedwetting, attention deficit disorder and severe emotional crises during adolescence. The child may end up withdrawing from society,” the psychiatrist added.

According to the NGO Children of the World, the number of homeless children in Baghdad has now reached 4,000. These children can be found in 26 areas across the capital where brokers use them as beggars.

Because of the security problems and the poor standard of living still plaguing Iraq, some children and teenagers, especially the ones who are homeless, are also being exploited by armed groups in terrorist operations.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, the number of convicted teenagers in terrorist crimes has gone up rapidly from 239 in 2008 to 324 in 2009 and 383 in 2010.

Children in Baghdad

A personal encounter

In Judria, a city south of Baghdad, many children can be seen begging and selling small items near one of the biggest universities in Iraq. When I tried to talk to them they suddenly disappeared because their “masters” were watching them from behind a wall.

It looked as if their “masters” were afraid that the children would be taken to an orphanage or that the children would reveal where they lived and where they came from. 

When I managed to chat one day with the 5-year-old Sara, she replied: “Ask my brother about where we are living because he is older than me.”

She looked frightened and her behaviour seemed to indicate that she thought someone was watching her.

Sara’s 8-year-old brother Ahmed approached and answered quickly: “We live here in Baghdad. My father died of cancer but I live with my uncle now.”

As he was talking I detected that his accent was from northern Iraq and concluded that he was not originally from Baghdad and that he had moved to the capital recently.

The Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights says that it is very difficult to do research about human trafficking because of the nature of Iraqi society and the islamic tradition which prevents this infamous trade.

The Ministry recommends in its annual report “that the Iraqi police should investigate this criminal activity and not wait until it appears in public under the eyes of all citizens.” 

By Maryam Mohammed Jaafar

Maryam Jaafar writes as a freelance journalist for several newspapers and also does volunteer work for Iraqi human rights organisations. She graduated in Political Science at Baghdad University in July 2011 and is the winner of the 2011 Kamel Shiaa Prize for Iraqi press freedom. Her interests lie in media, story writing, poetry, communicating with people and working with NGOs.

 

 

 

 

Posted on December 21, 2011 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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State of play of the Tunisian press after the Revolution

In cooperation with the Luxembourg Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the EJC on 1-4 December organised a two-day meeting in Tunis and Hammamet on the state of play of the Tunisian press after the Revolution.

The event offered a group of 15 journalists - five European journalists from France and Luxembourg and 10 Tunisian journalists - the opportunity to exchange views on topics such as press freedom in Tunisia, journalistic sources and journalism ethics. 

Posted on December 6, 2011 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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EJC launches Press Freedom 2.0 programme in Bolivia

EJC’s five-year Press Freedom 2.0 programme in Bolivia was launched the last week of November with simultaneous journalism training and press freedom events taking place in the capital La Paz.

EJC Programme Manager Josh Laporte (left)

A training of trainers workshop was held in cooperation with the Fundación para el Periodismo and led by the director of the Clarin journalism school of Buenos Aires, Miguel Winazki. The programme targeted future media trainers for the Fundación as well as Bolivian university faculties of communication.

 

The official project launch event featured a roundtable led by Pedro Glasinovic, President of the Asociación de Periodistas de La Paz where the latest press freedom violations in Bolivia were presented to an audience of local journalists, donors and media NGOs in great detail.

Read more: (in Spanish)
Periodistas lanzan el proyecto “Press Freedom 2.0”, Asociación de Periodistas de La Paz

 

Posted on December 6, 2011 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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Sticky bombs make many Iraqi children orphans

The thirty-year old Ali was fighting for his life on November 3, 2011, after being seriously injured by a sticky bomb.

As he lay in his hospital bed, he thought of his children whom he might never see again if he died.

He wanted to see his wife and children, but he passed away before they arrived.

On the same day, another sticky bomb placed under a train exploded in the west of Baghdad between the areas of al-mashahda and Tagi, causing the death of the three train drivers.

One of the drivers, Ahmed, did not die right away. For the next two days, his family was full of hope that he would survive and spend the Eid al-Adha festival with them. Eid is a time for people to visit each other and celebrate together. His children prayed for his recovery.

But in the end he died.

While other children would happily play and celebrate the festival, the families and the orphans of the three drivers would be crying for them.

Iraqi people today are wondering how long this situation which is affecting the whole society will last.

A child in Iraq, photo credit: lachicaphoto via Flickr (some rights reserved)

From a peak in 2006 and 2007, violence has fallen sharply in Iraq, but killings and attacks still occur almost daily as U.S. forces are preparing to withdraw after more than eight years since their invasion that helped topple the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

According to statistics from the Iraqi Health Ministry, 161 civilians were killed in October in Iraq as a result of bomb attacks and other forms of violence, up from 110 in September.

On the first day of the Eid al-Adha festival, three bomb explosions hit the food and clothes market Al-shorja in the centre of Baghdad, the most popular and crowded market in the city, killing at least 10 people and injuring 20.

With the increase of violence in Iraq and the impending withdrawal of the U.S army at the end of the year, Iraqi people are wondering whether the Iraqi army has the ability to manage the security in the country and have control on the situation.

By Maryam Mohammed Jaafar

The Iraqi journalist Maryam Mohammed Jaafar earlier this year won the Kamel Shiaa Prize for Iraqi press freedom for her article “Violence is spreading among the Iraqi children”. Maryam is currently spending three months in Brussels under the auspices of the EJC.

Maryam Mohammed Jaafar meets EJC editors Sueli Brodin and Hanna McClean at the EJC office in Maastricht, the Netherlands

Posted on November 18, 2011 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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Financial Corruption Investigative Journalism Courses in Georgia

Together with local partner the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA), EJC implemented two back-to-back five day Financial Corruption Investigative Journalism Courses in November with trainers from the Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF).

The intensive, practical workshops targeted both Georgian tv and print/online journalists, regional journalists and featured local co-trainers from EJC’s Training the Trainers course earlier in the year.

A total of 26 journalists received the joint EJC—GIPA—TRF course completion certificate.

Complete photo albums:

- first week training
- second week training

Photo credits: Natia Metreveli, Programme Coordinator, Georgian Institute Of Public Affairs

Related article:  EJC launches five-year NL Foreign Ministry funded programme in Georgia

 

Posted on November 16, 2011 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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Hacks and hackers gather to write the first Data Journalism Handbook

This article is cross posted on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog and on the Data Journalism Blog.

 

Ravensbourne college is an ultramodern cubist design school which abuts the O2 arena on the Greenwich peninsula. It is perhaps an unusual and yet apt setting for journalists to meet. 

Members of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the European Journalism Centre saw this as a perfect opportunity to herd a number of prominent journalists and developers who, fuelled by an unlimited supply of mocacchinos, started work on the first Data Journalism Handbook.

 

Data Journalism Handbook

 

The occasion was the yearly Mozilla Festival, which acts as an incubator to many such gatherings. This year the focus was on media, freedom and the web.

 

 

The manual aims to address one crucial problem: "There are a lot of useful resources on the web," Liliana Bounegru of the EJC said, "but they are all scattered in different places. So what we're trying to do is put everything together and have a comprehensive step-by-step guide."

In data journalism, most people are self-taught, and many find it hard to keep up-to-date with every tool produced by the industry. “It could be vital having a handbook that really explains to journalists how you can approach data journalism from scratch with no prior knowledge, ” says Caelainn Barr of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Friedrich Lindenberg of the OKF believes there is a real urgency in making newsrooms data-literate: “If journalists want to keep up with the information they need to learn coding, and some bits of data analysis and data-slicing techniques. That will make much better journalism and increase accountability.”

And who better than the New York Times’ Interactive Editor Aron Pilhofer, The Guardian Data Blog’s Simon Rogers and others to lead the ambitious efforts?

In charge of sorting the wheat from the chaff, around 40 people joined them in the sixth floor of the college, for a 48 hour session.

 

 

The first draft of the handbook should be ready in the coming months, as other contributions from every corner of the web are still working on making an input.

Of course the first data journalism handbook had to be open source. How else would it be able to age gracefully and be relevant in years to come?

Workshops of this sort represent a decisively different break from the past. Aspiring data journalists will know that hands-on sessions are a cut above the usual lectures featuring knowledgeable speakers and PowerPoint presentations. Discussing the topic and citing examples is not enough. After all, if you give a man a fish you have fed him for a day. But if you teach a man ho w to fish, you have him fed for a lifetime.

Jonathan Gray concurs: “Rather than just provide examples of things that have been done with data, we want to make it easier for journalists to understand what data is available, what tools they can use to work with data, how they can visualise data sets and how they can integrate that with the existing workflows of their news organisations.”

At the event itself, after a brief introduction, the crowd split into five groups and began collaborating on each chapter of the handbook. Some were there to instill knowledge, others were there to absorb and ask questions.

 

 

“I like the fact that everyone is bringing a different skillset to the table, and we’re all challenging each other”, one participant said.

Francis Irving, CEO of ScraperWiki, led the session on new methods of data acquisitions. He believes the collaboration between journalists, programmers, developers and designers, though crucial, can generate a culture clash: “When working with data, there’s a communication question, how do you convey what you need to someone more technical and how do they then use that to find it in a way that’s useful.”

“A project like this is quite necessary,” noted Pilhofer, “It’s kind of surprising someone hasn’t tried to do this until now.”

 

Video report from the Data Journalism Handbook session at the Mozilla Festival

Report by Federica Cocco, freelance journalist

Federica Cocco is a freelance journalist and the former editor of Owni.eu, a data-driven investigative journalism site based in Paris. She has also worked with Wired, Channel 4 and the Guardian.

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The organisers would like to thank everyone who is contributing to the handbook for their input and to Kate Hudson for the beautiful graphics.

The free e-book will be available at the European Journalism Centre’s DataDrivenJournalism.net website in the coming months. If you want to follow our progress or contribute to the handbook you can get in touch via the data journalism mailing list, the Twitter hashtags #ddj and #ddjbook, or email bounegru@ejc.net.

Posted on November 16, 2011 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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Press Freedom 2.0 in action: Bolivia

As part of the Press Freedom 2.0 project in Bolivia, a series of town hall meetings were organised with local partner Asociación de Periodistas de La Paz in various regional cities with citizens and journalists to discuss the importance of journalism ethics and to describe the journalists association’s ethics tribunal.

These photographs were taken during the first of these meetings, held in Cobija, Bolivia - one of the largest cities in the Amazon region of the country bordering Brazil.

Posted on November 14, 2011 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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Media training in Kenya

The EJC media skills training in partnership with the Kenya Peace Network took place on 17-18 October, 2011 at the Pastoral Center of Marsabit, Kenya. Communication and media officers of 23 Kenyan NGOs participated in the practical workshop led by EJC trainer Hamadou Tidiane SY. 

The training was part of EJC’s global Press Freedom 2.0 programme, funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and was organised in cooperation with programme partner Mensen met een Missie.

Posted on November 3, 2011 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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Data journalism: a new level of playing field

A review by Dimitri Tokmetzis of EJC’s session at PICNIC 2011: From Database Cities to Urban Stories

Data traces and city life

The simple act of living generates more data than one might expect. In fact, many data traces are created just through working, travelling, buying, communicating, and surfing the web.

When data becomes a ubiquitous resource however, power relations between governments, companies and citizens are going to change and not necessarily for the better.

Data journalism is one of the tools used in finding, establishing and maintaining a new level of playing field; but a lot of work still needs to be done. According to MIT associate professor Beth Coleman, ‘What we need is an API for cities.’

EJC @PICNIC: From Database Cities to Urban Stories

The European Journalism Centre on Thursday 15 September organised a session entitled ‘From Database Cities to Urban Stories’, at the Amsterdam PICNIC festival. The panellists, among whom Beth Coleman (MIT), Saskia Sassen (Columbia University), Mark Shepard (State University of New York), and Mirko Lorenz (Deutsche Welle), agreed that the information revolution has profoundly changed the way we use our urban spaces. Cities are equipped with more sensors that continuously feed data into increasingly intertwined systems, making cities not only modern, but also smart. Database technology holds the promise of efficient and effective public services.

How do we use data to make city life better?

Wouldn’t it be great if the traffic flows to, from and within a city could be optimised? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if public utility organisations could find waste and inefficiencies in their systems, so that our energy bills could go down and cities could become cleaner and greener? And what about commercial opportunities? With so much data flowing around, shops and companies are already tailoring products and messages to every consumer who walks into their store or business.

But the data deluge must have more meaning for our urban environments, warned Beth Coleman. An urban space must also make room for public interests, civic virtue and poetic expression. Urban data is currently overwhelmingly used to answer the question ‘what can we buy’? The question should be: ‘How do we make use of all the data to make (city) life better?’

Beth Coleman: ‘How do we make use of all the data to make (city) life better?’

Access to data shifts power relations
Commercial enterprises are heavy users of data and have become increasingly educated in constructing automated decision support systems that use algorithms in defining and deciding what is profitable and what is not, who gets access to services and spaces and who doesn’t. Governments are catching on fast. The New York City Police Department has a state of the art information control centre where data streams from traffic management, police records, city records and CCTV-images are continuously processed. The Baltimore police department uses algorithmic decision support systems to calculate who is likely to get involved in a murder – either as a victim or a perpetrator.

As a result, power relations are shifting fast. Companies and governments have access to increasingly better data, better networks and better. They now know much more about you. Most citizens, on the other hand, have the media at their disposal. And although most media have made the leap to social networking and internet reporting, the tools they use for finding stories are still largely stuck in the twentieth century: phoning, talking to key players, analysing records (if the journalist is really persistent), etc.

How to rebalance the power relations?
The picture would be even bleaker if it were not for data journalism. In the second part of the EJC’s session at PICNIC, a couple of inspiring examples of civic activism were presented. Eymund Diegel, a Brooklyn native, talked about the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. He and a couple of neighbours were disturbed by the deteriorating quality of the Gowanus canal in Brooklyn, which displayed a large amount of filthy backwater. They used modern data technology to prod the city’s administration into action. They made aerial photographs using cheap cameras and balloons. They used mapping and infrared technology to show the existence of pockets of pollution. They also found out that there was still a fresh water spring that could be used to clean up parts of the canal. The project was not only helpful for the city’s administration, but also for the community, as it found a common cause for people to come together and work towards a solution.

German journalist Mirko Lorenz sees data journalism as a way to end ‘modern cheating’, a situation where one party can fool another because the first party has better access to data and better understanding due to the correct handling of the data. Data journalism gives journalists and citizens alike a new process to use the same set of data in order to tell their own story. In the right hands, data can be used to expose weaknesses in governance, waste and abuse. What is more, gaining access to data is becoming easier with cheap hardware and (almost) free software.

But it is not yet entirely fool proof, Lorenz warned. Data in and of itself is not enough. The data has to be filtered; noise has to be separated from meaning. The data has to be visualised in order to find a problem or a solution, and there is a great need for stories to be told with datasets. One can present one’s findings, but in order for people to listen, one has to construct a narrative, which often defies the mono-cultural story that is being told – which is exactly what good journalism does.

Mirko Lorenz: ‘From attention to trust: How data driven journalism can help us in the urban future’

A lot of work still needs to be done. Big questions on ownership, openness and usability of data, transparency and trust need to be answered. Also media have to overcome their technological limitations and start looking outside the boundaries of the old way of doing things. This implies the need for a cultural change, something which is always difficult to achieve. But if done well, data journalism holds the potential to give data back to the audience, back to the citizens, and therefore to give back some of the power that was lost during the information revolution.

By Dimitri Tokmetzis
Dimitri Tokmetzis (36) is a freelance journalist in the Netherlands and editor of the Dutch weblog Sargasso.

A photo-impression of EJC’s session at PICNIC 2011

Resources:
Video: Beth Coleman: ‘Using technology to run our cities: promises and perils’
Video: Mirko Lorenz: ‘From attention to trust: How data driven journalism can help us in the urban future’
Video: Saskia Sassen: ‘I Bring open source urbanism and urbanising technology’
Video: Marc Tuters: ‘A pointless vision for Amsterdam’s future’
Video: Martijn de Waal: ‘Urban media and the public sphere’
Slides: Mirko Lorenz: ‘From attention to trust:
 How data driven journalism can help us in the urban future’
Slides: Martijn de Waal: ‘Urban media and the public sphere’

Source: Data Driven Journalism website

Posted on September 26, 2011 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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