COMMENT BLOG
A remark, a critique, an opinion…
VAW: A plague within the pandemic but not headline news
Last year the South African president elevated the epidemic of violence against women to national crisis level following pressure from activists, promising to put in place a public national register of offenders, a review of cold cases and harsher penalties for...
News media, discrimination, and bias
No apologies for quoting at length from “The Media Isn’t Ready to Cover Climate Apartheid” by Michelle García (The Nation, 17 June 2020). While praising the public service ethic of many media outlets, whose coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic has been exemplary, she...
Enabling community engagement in humanitarian responses
In times of disaster, the need to engage with affected communities to ensure useful, timely and accurate information is mutually shared is increasingly recognised as essential. As the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA)...
Speaking up for free speech
A group of 153 academics, writers, and social activists published a letter in Harper’s Magazine (7 July 2020) expressing concern that “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments” are tending “to weaken norms of open debate and toleration of differences in...
The enemy on your wrist
Electronic tagging has always been controversial. Today it is being touted in the name of health security. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, intrusive monitoring tools adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic may further normalize the surveillance...
Toppling statues are opportunities for collective reflection
Protests against racism unleashed by the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of police in Minneapolis spread all over the United States, Canada, and parts of Europe in May and June of this year. As the protests spread, so did the practice of...
Protecting journalists is a balancing act between dictums and dictators
The Philippines is facing another crackdown on media freedoms. On June 15, 2020, a court in the capital Manila, convicted former CNN journalist Maria Ressa and former Rappler writer Reynaldo Santos Jr. of cyber libel for publishing an article that implicated a...
Time to stand up for journalism and journalists – again!
Democracy stands or falls by its guarantee of freedom of expression and opinion and an independent press. Two tragic events have thrown that statement into sharp relief: the global coronavirus pandemic and the murder of George Floyd in the USA. Index on Censorship has...
Upgrading digital infrastructure to serve all people everywhere
Ownership of mobile phones, especially smartphones, is spreading rapidly across the globe. Yet, there are still many people in emerging economies who do not own a mobile phone, or who share one with others. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2019 mobile divides...
Advocating freedom from fear
At a time when the world is rightly focused on the coronavirus pandemic and its long-term consequences, under-reported news includes how far down the road we are (or not) toward the abolition of nuclear weapons. The report “Enough is Enough: Global Nuclear Weapons...
Journalists are key workers in a chaotic world
It’s a familiar story. Toe the government line – any government – and survive. Criticize the government, or its cronies, or policies that benefit the few rather than the majority, and risk censure or worse. Investigative journalism examines questions of public...
Migrant voices in the time of Covid-19
With the onset of the current pandemic, things are bound to get a lot more challenging for many migrants and refugees, as well as for the societies that host them. The number of forcibly displaced people worldwide was already the highest it had been in decades even...
PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Jeffrey/ACT Alliance