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Tue 25 Mar, 2003 04:29 am
Quote:(AP) -- The Arab television network al Jazeera said Monday two of its reporters covering the New York Stock Exchange have had their credentials revoked because of the station's coverage of the war in Iraq.
But NYSE spokesman Ray Pellechia denied the station's war coverage was the cause.
Citing "security reasons," he said the exchange had chosen to limit the number of broadcasters working at the lower Manhattan exchange since the war began, giving access only to networks that focus "on responsible business coverage."
Al Jazeera said it got a letter from the exchange saying the number of accredited TV stations needed to be reduced. It said its reporters Ammar al-Sankari and Ramzi Shiber had had their credentials withdrawn.
The network said the reason was "al Jazeera's coverage of the war on Iraq."
It said it has covered the New York Stock Exchange for years and believes it is the only channel affected by the new curbs.
Pellechia said other broadcasters had been refused accreditation or permission to increase their staff, but he declined to give examples.
U.S. military officials on Sunday criticized al Jazeera for carrying Iraqi TV footage of U.S. prisoners of war.
Al Jazeera is based in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, which also hosts the U.S. military's Central Command for the region. The station has gained a reputation as an unusually independent voice in a region where many news media are government-controlled.
Ghazi Khankan of the Council on American-Islamic Relations decried the move, saying al Jazeera "is really one of the very few independent Arab media, and to cut them off is a loss to the stock exchange."
He said he understood the sensitivity of the footage of U.S. captives, "but I don't think this is the right thing to do in spite of the sad pictures."
Another story
Quote:The Defense statement asked for the assistance of media organizations in ensuring that Australia "meets its obligations under the (Geneva) conventions."
For now the Australian media ignored the request.
How long will it take before press freedom gets the fatal shot?
We all know Rumsfeld is no fan of press freedom and we all know embed-journalism is no journalism at all but Cinema and infotainment.
This is the editorial of an African newspaper. I think its a bull's eye!
Quote:Disgusting media lies on the war
So much for all the heady fiction about painless, surgical, video-game war. And so much for truth. I felt like throwing up as I watched US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld complain about how Iraq was treating captured American invaders.
The US, as everybody knows, is the one state that has refused to ratify a treaty establishing an international justice system for war crimes.
The US also captured thousands of enemy combatants during its invasion of Afghanistan and has resolutely refused to recognise them as prisoners-of-war.
Only when its own soldiers are captured that the mightiest state on earth starts waxing indignant about "humane" treatment of POWs.
The truth, as they say, is the first casualty in war. This has never been brought home more clearly than in the present war. All the major Western news organisations, the ones that hector us relentlessly about the divine mission of journalism, have thrown all principle out of the window by allowing their coverage to be "embedded" with the US and British mission to overthrow President Saddam Hussein by force of arms.
The net result is that all the images we are allowed to see of the war are only what the US military allows us to see. When the Western press is not busy feeding us with lies about progress in the war, it is routinely denying that the invading forces are meeting resistance, they are busy also censoring news from independent sources.
First there was the denial, for instance, that US soldiers had been captured. When incontrovertible proof was aired by Al-Jeezira TV, Western broadcasters, complying with demands from the Pentagon, conspired to bar the footage from reaching their own citizens.
Call it censorship or propaganda, but we do have uncontested proof that the Western media have willingly allowed themselves to become part of the war effort.
Why? For the simple fact that Washington is desperate to hide the truth from its own citizens. The US lost the Vietnam War largely because the American people went aghast at the harrowing news reports brought to their living rooms.
More recently, in Somalia, it was media coverage of captured and killed US soldiers being subjected to brutal treatment that forced American forces to declare "victory" and scamper for safety.
As long as US citizens are shielded from the brutal reality of war, goes the logic, they will not apply so much pressure to have their boys brought back home.
The US media, at the end of the day, are owned by the same corporate family which includes arms manufacturers and big oil firms that have a direct financial stake in fuelling the war.
So they are quite happy to lie to the world and to themselves. We will not be shown harrowing images of innocent Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by indiscriminate bombing. We will not see young American soldiers waging a war they do not understand facing up to the real horrors of armed conflict.
We will be allowed to see only the sanitised version of war as a painless video-game. We will see all the lies about surgical, high-precision bombing strikes that magically take out Iraqi military targets while sparing innocent civilians.
Ha! How then does one explain the fact that "friendly fire" is taking such a toll on allied forces? If US missile batteries will hit allied aircraft and tanks, then it follows that bombers and cruise missiles will hit hospitals, schools and homes. That, we must not see.
And, of course, we captured, injured Americans soldiers or bodies of their dead. Remember, this is supposed to be a bloodless war and American lives, in particular, are supposed to be sacred.
Reminds one of media coverage of September 11. No American blood was to be seen. And the media went to absurd lengths in their acquiescence, so much so that Newsweek, Time and other US publications, and even the TV stations, could only illustrate the horror of the terror attack by flashing back to the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi.
Bodies of dead and maimed Kenyans could safely be shown to American audiences, who would otherwise recoil in horror if it was their
own countrymen and women being shown in such dire circumstances
Australian journalists make a stand on censorship - source: Australian Broadcasting Commission:
Journalists' union condemns ADF censorship request
The union representing journalists has condemned the Defence Department's attempt to censor the Australian media over images from the war in Iraq.
The Defence Force has asked Australian media organisations to obscure the faces of allied and Iraqi prisoners of war (POWs).
The move follows US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asking US media organisations not to broadcast the pictures American POWs in a request most US media appeared to comply with.
Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance federal secretary Christopher Warren says media organisations are not respondents to the Geneva Convention and requests to censor material is a denial of press freedom.
"There's no doubt it's curtailing the story in war," Mr Warren said.
"Awful things happen, awful things happen to individual men and women, but you don't prevent that awfulness by preventing it being reported and preventing those countries participating in that war from finding out what's going on."
~~
Also interesting that this horror was only evinced re shots of USA prisoners, after the spoon-fed by the military western media had been showing close-up shots of Iraqi prisoners for a couple of days.
Mind you, I do think the covered faces thing is a good idea generally - parading and photographing prisoners for media consumption is against the Geneva convention. It is just that it ought to be fair.
I've heard today that the servers of Al-Jazeera were constantly under DoS attack. The severs of the English site were most of the time down because some hackers(believed to be Americans because only the American servers were hit) have no idea of what freedom of speech means.
Amnesty International has warned that the bombing of Iraqi state television station in Baghdad by US allied forces could be a breach of the Geneva Conventions.
"The bombing of a television station, simply because it is being used for the purposes of propaganda, cannot be condoned. It is a civilian object, and thus protected under international humanitarian law," the organisation said in a statement.
Seems like Rummy has a rather limited view on press freedom. "Only our press is free to write about our victories"
Can you confirm the casualties at the state television station, or was it mainly paralyzed electronically?
I think "killed in action" is not a precise term.
"Kindly, but firmly, led to self-censorship" would be more precise.
A government can suggest, but it's up to the media to follow suggestions.
I live in a country that practiced such kind of self-censorship for a couple of decades. It was a "closely watched" democracy. And before that, it was downright censorship. It was a veiled authoritarian regime.
As a fighter for democracy and a journalist, I know quite well how such machinery works.
War is an extraordinary event, and journalists are expected to behave accordingly. It's in their our set of values where they must define where the line of self-censorship must be set.
My impression is that the US leadership is setting the line to ressemble a noose, and that the majority of the media has been only too willing to accomodate.
What worries me most is that the process of "suggestions" goes far beyond the war. The shutting up of the Hollywood community at the Oscars, the "happy" music that prevails in radio and MTV, the painlessness that is trying to be injected in the American public.
The Bush administration knows that the internal front was key to the outcome of the Vietnam War. But the promotion of self-censorship is way beyond that.
The websites of the Arabic television news channel Al Jazeera have come under electronic attack from hackers.
Some visitors to the site were diverted to a pornography site, while others found a page with an American flag and the message "Let Freedom Ring".
The Arabic and English-language sites of al-Jazeera have suffered internet disruptions since the television station showed pictures of dead and captive American soldiers in Iraq.
The TV channel has described the electronic onslaught as a vicious attack on the freedom of the press.
The al-Jazeera sites are slowly recovering from the hack attacks, but experts say it could take at least until Saturday before service returns to normal.
The TV channel's websites have suffered a string of assaults which have effectively crippled its internet presence.
It has been subject to a technique known as a denial of service attack, with hackers flooding the site with meaningless data in an effort to squeeze out legitimate traffic.
At one point a group calling itself the "Freedom Cyber Force Militia" hijacked visitors to al-Jazeera's English website and sent them to a different webpage with the message "God bless our troops".
Its sister website in Arabic was sending surfers to a porn site.
"It has been hacked," said Jihad Ali Ballout, a spokesman for al-Jazeera.
He described the attack as "a frontal, vicious attack on freedom of the press" and urged anyone with information about the hackers to contact authorities.
The channel said it hoped to have the Arabic site back up soon, but admitted that its English-language service might now be delayed for several weeks.
Al-Jazeera, a Qatar-based network, is widely considered as the Arab world's most influential news organisation.
The TV channel has angered US and British officials for broadcasting videotape of dead and captured US troops in Iraq
US Secretary of State Colin Powell has gone as far as accusing it of portraying the invasion of Iraq in a negative light and exaggerating Baghdad's military achievements.
Story from BBC NEWS
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