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News - National | 2017-04-21

Press Freedom

NATIONAL governments remain the single largest source of revenue for news organisations in Africa. In Rwanda, for example, a staggering 85-90% of advertising revenue comes from the public sector.

In Kenya, it's estimated that 30% of newspaper revenue comes from government advertising. In 2013, the government spent Ksh40 million in two weeks just to publish congratulatory messages for the new president, Uhuru Kenyatta.

But with a general election coming up this year in August, the Kenyan government has decided to stop advertising in local commercial media.

In a memo, reportedly sent to all government accounting officers, the directive was given that state departments and agencies would only advertise in My.Gov a government newspaper and online portal.

Electronic advertising would only be aired on the state broadcaster the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.

It's difficult not to characterise the withdrawal of state advertising from commercial media as punitive. Without this revenue stream newspapers are likely to fold.

Worse still, efforts to withdraw government advertising from commercial media can be interpreted as a worrying way to undermine the freedom of expression.

Starving news media of revenue is a means of indirect state control. This has been the case in countries such as Serbia, Hungary, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland.

But to fully understand the link between government spend on advertising and media freedom it's important to take a historical perspective.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

The 1990s saw the adoption of multiparty politics in many African countries. This led to relatively liberal constitutions in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana, among others.

Since then, most African governments have grown anxious about their inability to control the local news agenda, much less articulate government policy.

For governments in countries such as Ethiopia, Uganda, Zimbabwe and more recently, Tanzania, controlling the news agenda is seen as a means to stay in power. Views that compete with the state position are often cast as legitimising the opposition agenda.

This is part of a much broader strategy for political control which Africanist historians and political scientists have called the ideology of order. This is based on the premise that dissent is a threat to nation-building and must therefore be diminished.

The narrative was popularised by most post- independence African governments and empha- sised through incessant calls for what they liked to call unity.

In Kenya, former president Daniel arap Moi even coined his own political philosophy of peace, love and unity. Citizens were expected to accept this narrative unequivocally. Dissenting views were undermined through state-controlled media such as the Kenya Broadcasting Corpora- tion and newspapers such as the Kenya Times.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, African govern- ments conveniently used the nation-building argument to suppress legitimate dissent. Op- position was punished by imprisonment, forced exile and even death. This was common practice in Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and in West Africa more generally.

The current political climate on the continent is premised on constitutional safeguards including the protection of free speech which make these kinds of punishments unlikely in the present day.

Many countries now have institutional safe- guards including fairly robust judicial systems capable of withstanding the tyranny of naked state repression.

As a result, the media is controlled in subtler ways and its violence is softer. It's against this background that I interpret the withdrawal of government adverts from the commercial media in Kenya.

CONTROLLING MEDIA BUDGETS

In Kenya, the decision followed a special cabi- net meeting which agreed that a new newspaper would be launched to articulate the government agenda more accurately.

The government also argued that the move was part of an initiative to curb runaway spending by lowering advert spend in Kenya's mainstream media and directing all the money to the new title.

A similar move was made in South Africa last year when the government's communications arm announced that it would scale down gov- ernment advertising in local commercial media.

Instead, advertisements would be carried in the government newspaper Vuk'uzenzele. The deci- sion withdrew an estimated US$30 million from the country's commercial newspaper industry.

The South African government also claimed that the move was made to reduce government spending. But critics have argued that the deci- sion was made to punish a media outlet that's been particularly critical of President Jacob Zuma's presidency.

In both countries the decisions have hit at a particularly hard time for the media industry, providing governments with the perfect tool with which to control the press.

WILL A FREE PRESS SURVIVE?

Commercial news media is going through a period of unprecedented crisis. The old business models are unable to sustain media operations as audiences adopt new ways of consuming news.

More than that, mass audiences are growing ever smaller. Newspapers particularly haven't been able to adapt to the changing pro le of the old versus the new newspaper reader.

The effect has been that newspapers are no longer as attractive to advertisers. As such, they have to rely a lot more on state money and patronage for survival.

To sidestep state control commercial media in Africa must rethink their business models and diversify their revenue streams.

It won't be an easy road but non-state media must also work hard to disrupt this re-emerging narrative of order. Nation states cannot revert to the dark days when government policy was singular and alternative viewpoints were silenced or delegitimised.

* George Ogola, senior lecturer in journalism, University of Central Lancashire.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

View post:
Government adspend a weapon against media freedom in Africa? - Namibian

BEIRUT The last rebel fighters have left the Syrian town of Zabadani near Damascus as part of a reciprocal evacuation deal for four besieged towns that had been interrupted after a bomb attack hit one convoy, state media and a war monitor said on Wednesday.

Thousands of people also left the rebel-besieged Shi'ite towns of al-Foua and Kefraya in Idlib province under the deal.

"Al-Zabadani has become completely empty of militants" who either evacuated or accepted government rule, state television said, broadcasting from the town which had long been under siege by pro-government forces.

State media said around 500 rebels and their families departed al-Zabadani and nearby areas for rebel-held territory in northwest Syria.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 3,000 people left al-Foua and Kefraya heading toward Aleppo city, which the government controls. They included nearly 700 pro-government forces, the Britain-based war monitoring group added.

Under the agreement between the warring sides, civilians and pro-government fighters were being moved out of the two Shi'ite towns, in exchange for Sunni rebels and civilians getting bussed out of the towns of Zabadani and Madaya.

The evacuations had been stopped after a bomb attack on a convoy of evacuees from al-Foua and Kefraya on Saturday reportedly killed 126 people, including more than 60 children.

Alaa Ibrahim, governor of the Damascus suburbs, told state television in Madaya that the government would "gradually restore all its services" now that rebels had left the town. The same would soon happen in Zabadani, he said.

Thousands of Syrians have evacuated mostly besieged rebel areas in recent months under deals between President Bashar al-Assad's government and insurgents fighting for six years to unseat him.

Ambulances brought wounded people from the convoy attack into government-held Aleppo and took them to hospital on Wednesday, state media said.

Several people from al-Foua and Kefraya who were injured in the blast told Reuters they had spent three days in rebel territory, where they received first aid and food, before arriving in Aleppo.

"My face was dripping with blood," said Fatmeh Yassin, 18, who suffered eye injuries from the blast. "Later, they took us to a hospital around Bab al-Hawa" near the Syrian-Turkish border.

Yassin lost her brother who had been in the convoy with her and "hadn't heard anything about him in days," she said at a hospital in Aleppo.

Sharif al-Hussein from Kefraya waited at the same hospital for doctors to check his 6-year-old son.

"There is shrapnel in his eyes because he was sitting at the window of the bus when the explosion happened," said al-Hussein, who had also received emergency aid in the opposition area near the Turkish border.

"They told us this morning to get ready for the (Syrian Arab) Red Crescent to come get us," he said. "We couldn't believe it."

(Reporting by Ellen Francis and Angus McDowall in Beirut, Kinda Makieh in Damascus; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Hugh Lawson)

WASHINGTON A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.

JERUSALEM Israel's military said on Wednesday it believes Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces still possess several tonnes of chemical weapons, issuing the assessment two weeks after a chemical attack that killed nearly 90 people in Syria.

Read the original:
Syria evacuations resume, bringing Damascus-area town under state control - Reuters

National governments remain the single largest source of revenue for news organisations in Africa. In Rwanda, for example, a staggering 85-90% of advertising revenue comes from the public sector.

In Kenya, its estimated that 30% of newspaper revenue comes from government advertising. In 2013, the government spent Ksh40-million in two weeks just to publish congratulatory messages for the new President Uhuru Kenyatta.

But with a general election coming up this year in August, the Kenyan government has decided to stop advertising in local commercial media.

In a memo, reportedly sent to all government accounting officers, the directive was given that state departments and agencies would only advertise in My.Gov a government newspaper and online portal.

Electronic advertising would only be aired on the state broadcaster the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.

Its difficult not to characterise the withdrawal of state advertising from commercial media as punitive. Without this revenue stream newspapers are likely to fold.

Worse still, efforts to withdraw government advertising from commercial media can be interpreted as a worrying way to undermine the freedom of expression.

Starving news media of revenue is a means of indirect state control. This has been the case in countries such as Serbia, Hungary, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland.

But to fully understand the link between government spend on advertising and media freedom its important to take a historical perspective.

How did we get here?

The 1990s saw the adoption of multi-party politics in many African countries. This led to relatively liberal constitutions in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana among others.

Since then, most African governments have grown anxious about their inability to control the local news agenda, much less articulate government policy.

For governments in countries such as Ethiopia, Uganda, Zimbabwe and more recently Tanzania, controlling the news agenda is seen as a means to stay in power. Views that compete with the state position are often cast as legitimising the opposition agenda.

This is part of a much broader strategy for political control which Africanist historians and political scientists have called the ideology of order. This is based on the premise that dissent is a threat to nationbuilding and must therefore be diminished.

The narrative was popularised by most post-independence African governments and emphasized through incessant calls for what they liked to call unity.

In Kenya, former president Daniel Moi even coined his own political philosophy of peace, love and unity. Citizens were expected to accept this narrative unequivocally. Dissenting views were undermined through state-controlled media such as Kenya Broadcasting Corporation and newspapers such as the Kenya Times.

From the 1960s 1980s, African governments conveniently used the nation-building argument to suppress legitimate dissent. Opposition was punished by imprisonment, forced exile and even death. This was common practice in Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and in West Africa more generally.

The current political climate on the continent is premised on constitutional safeguards including the protection of free speech which make these kinds of punishments unlikely in the present day.

Many countries now have institutional safeguards including fairly robust judicial systems capable of withstanding the tyranny of naked state repression.

As a result, the media is controlled in subtler ways and its violence is softer. Its against this background that I interpret the withdrawal of government adverts from the commercial media in Kenya.

Controlling media budgets

In Kenya, the decision followed a special cabinet meeting which agreed that a new newspaper would be launched to articulate the government agenda more accurately.

The government also argued that the move was part of an initiative to curb runaway spending by lowering advert spend in Kenyas mainstream media and directing all the money to the new title.

A similar move was made in South Africa last year when the governments communications arm announced that it would scale down government advertising in local commercial media.

Instead, advertisements would be carried in the government newspaper Vukuzenzele. The decision withdrew an estimated $30-million from the countrys commercial newspaper industry.

The South African government also claimed that the move was made to reduce government spending. But critics have argued that the decision was made to punish a media outlet thats been particularly critical of President Jacob Zumas presidency.

In both countries the decisions have hit at a particularly hard time for the media industry, providing governments with the perfect tool with which to control the press.

Will a free press survive

Commercial news media is going through a period of unprecedented crisis. The old business models are unable to sustain media operations as audiences adopt new ways of consuming news.

More than that, mass audiences are growing ever smaller. Newspapers particularly havent been able to adapt to the changing profile of the old versus the new newspaper reader.

The effect has been that newspapers are no longer as attractive to advertisers. As such, they have to rely a lot more on state money and patronage for survival.

To sidestep state control commercial media in Africa must rethink their business models and diversify their revenue streams.

It wont be an easy road but non-state media must also work hard to disrupt this re-emerging narrative of order. Nation states cannot revert to the dark days when government policy was singular and alternative viewpoints were silenced or delegitimised.

The Conversation

See original here:
How African governments use advertising as a weapon against ... - Rand Daily Mail (registration)

Russia's media regulator says Twitter has agreed to store some of its users' data inside Russia, a move that would comply with domestic law but stoke further fears about user privacy and surveillance.

The agency, known as Roskomnadzor, said on April 19 that Twitter is in the process of determining "what information about Russian citizens and organizations in commercial relations with Twitter in Russia can be stored in the Russian Federation."

"We expect we will be able to send this commercial data to Russia by the middle of 2018 and notify you of this at that time," the agency quoted a Twitter public policy and communications official, Sinead McSweeney, as saying.

The California-based company refused to comment.

The reported decision by Twitter comes two years after a law took effect requiring Russian and foreign companies to store data for customers who are Russian citizens on servers housed on Russian territory.

The law has sparked wide concerns among privacy advocates who feared it would further restrict speech in Russia, where the Internet has served as a freewheeling and largely unhindered forum for public debate, particularly compared with traditional media outlets that are state controlled.

The measure reflected a marked tightening of control over media and the Internet by the Kremlin. President Vladimir Putin has publicly called the Internet a "CIA project."

Regulators have also adopted increasingly strict regulations on bloggers, requiring them to register if they reach a certain threshold of readerships or followers.

Companies that don't comply with the new Russian law are to be included in a blacklist, under court order by Roskomnadzor, and subject to a fine of up to 300,000 rubles, or about $5,000.

Blocking Violators

Roskomnadzor can also order Internet providers to block access to violators.

Many of the world's biggest and best known Internet companies have taken a quiet approach in determining whether to comply with the law.

But Roskomnadzor in November ordered the professional social networking site, LinkedIn, to be blocked from Russian Internet service providers for not complying with the new regulations.

In Russia, authorities have also moved to outright censor some material deemed politically sensitive.

Late in March, the Russian Prosecutor-General's Office asked Roskomnadzor to block access to webpages and videos posted on YouTube, the popular blogging site Live Journal, and the social networking site VKontakte, that were promoting unauthorized political demonstrations tied to anticorruption crusader Aleksei Navalny.

Continued here:
Media Regulator Says Twitter Will Comply With Law, Locate User Data In Russia - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty

Rex Tillerson has made it clear that he likes the media about as much or even less than President Donald Trump. While Trump has relied on the press to make him the center of attention, Tillerson relies less on it and as the head of the State Department, which is supposed to provide policy for the U.S, he has been very determined to keep his distance. As Blasting News has reported, Tillerson has gone out of his way to not engage with anyone at the Department and on a flight to Beijing over the last few months, he took with him just one reporter to be interviewed where he revealed just how little he tries to rely on the press. Blasting News even reported on mass firings of officials left over from the previous administration, weakening the opposition, and the Department's function.

During his trip last week to Russia, it was reported that Russian president Vladimir Putin was upset enough about the United States' attack against the Assad regime that he initially refused to meet with Trump's Secretary of State. What was scheduled and reported on was his meeting with his counterpart Sergei Lavrov. But the Washington Post reported that after his meeting with Lavrov, the Secretary ditched reporters before he met with Putin at the Kremlin. Originally, it was the Associated Press (AP) which first tweeted that a Kremlin spokesman was the original source, that they were the ones who said Tillerson was meeting with Putin. The Post's article is titled: "We are relying on China and Russia to tell us what Trump and Tillerson discussed with their leaders."

The Washington Post said that it was surprising that Putin's team and not Tillerson's was the source. The contrast here is with the fact that according to the Post he, allowed U.S. journalists to accompany him to the Osobnyak Guest House in Moscow for the meeting with Lavrov. What's more, their article said that Russian #State Media pushed out a steady stream of information and that the State Department couldn't match it, and that they too had to rely on that information. Prior to the Donald Trump's presidency, the U.S. has largely believed and even now accuse the Russian government of disinformation from its media channels.

The Post refers to the differences in the perception of reporting by Russian state media and the Associated Press via Twitter where the AP said at 1:45 pm Eastern that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Moscow and Washington have agreed on the need for the United Nations to investigate the use of chemical weapons in Syria. This was clearly during the meeting that was on Tillerson's itinerary. But then at 3:28, the AP reports differently on not only the topic of agreement, but from the view of who is disputing the agreement: The United States is disputing that it has agreed with Russia on the need for a United Nations investigation into a chemical weapons attack in Syria.

The article says that the stream of disinformation was allowed to go unchecked by the State Department for an hour and 45 minutes. Prior to becoming Secretary, Tillerson was the CEO of Exxon Mobile who considered his relationship with Putin to be good enough to award Rex Tillerson with a Friendship Award which is considered Russia's highest honor bestowed to foreign citizens. During his confirmation hearing, it was suspected that he would try to help lift sanctions on Russia since he was against them as Exxon CEO because it hurt their bottom line.

During his hearing, Tillerson was also cornered for not saying whether he believed that Putin had assassinated people who opposed him. In an exchange between he and Sen. Marco Rubio during his hearing, he refused to conclude that Putin was a war criminal and that under his review, he would only side with what was already in the public record after looking at it more thoroughly, which would indicate that negative coverage on the Russian president or the West's decades old conclusion that Putin was a war criminal was simply not enough to go by.

It's assumed that Tillerson might also be taking his cues from the #White House. In the mentioned Blasting News article (at the beginning of this one) it referred to the fact that Trump has aides monitoring members of his cabinet throughout the government to keep them in line. In a similar way of controlling the message, the Post also makes the comparison with Chinese state media where the White House had little to nothing to say about the discussion between Trump and Xi other than that it was good. The Chinese government provided a far more descriptive and detailed account and what America has to rely on for transparency. #propaganda

More:
Trump government allows foreign state media to control narrative - Blasting News