COMMENT BLOG
A remark, a critique, an opinion…
Privacy on the frontier of lawlessness
Privacy was something that used to be taken for granted. Ordinarily, the private life of an individual was not open to scrutiny, while public life was the concern of law and order and decency. In communication terms, privacy meant that only the addressee could open...
Ban books, ban people
“For the past twenty years, the main issue restricting ublic debate in terms of Turkish laws has been the prosecution and imprisonment of journalists, writers and intellectuals on the grounds that they contribute to violence and terrorism.” This quote comes from a...
From manufacturing consent to manufacturing consensus
An influential book on communications in the 1980s was Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Communication, by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. It proposed a “propaganda model” as a way of understanding how the mass media system intersected with the U.S....
It’s vital to be able to “read” social media
In an era when misinformation and “fake news” abound on social media, it is important to understand where people get their news. Democratic participation and accountable government rest on informed and balanced opinion that is transparent about its motivations and...
Big data’s big brother: Real-time data processing
Walk around any city and your face will be caught on camera and might even be added to a facial-recognition database. That data can now be processed in real-time. Regulations about how it can be used are minimal and generally weak. The military, law-enforcement...
“Democracy, as we know it, is about to die…”
There was a mantra among communities and businesses when foreign goods and huge chain stores started crowding out small, local operations. “Buy local” was the cry. With climate change sensitising people to the carbon footprint of food and flowers flown in from around...
Civil rights and the climate crisis
Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, writes that the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of people, but also democracy and the rule of...
Short-sighted policies for short-term gain
Accessibility and affordability are watchwords of the communication rights movement. Yet when it comes to digital access, governments have still not got their act together. The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) says that Africans face the highest cost to connect...
A voluntary way of holding social media to account
Article 19 – the international freedom of expression organization – has proposed creating Social Media Councils (SMCs) as a way of moderating content on social media based on a “multi-stakeholder accountability mechanism”. Article 19 argues: “In today’s world,...
Unfriendly-fire: Media freedom under threat
“Elected leaders in many democracies, who should be press freedom’s staunchest defenders, have made explicit attempts to silence critical media voices and strengthen outlets that serve up favorable coverage. The trend is linked to a global decline in democracy itself: The erosion of press freedom is both a symptom of and a contributor to the breakdown of other democratic institutions and principles, a fact that makes it especially alarming.”
Internet governance should work towards mechanisms to reinvigorate independent journalism
A free and independent media sector is one of the cornerstones of what it means for a country to be a liberal democracy. The emergence of the Internet was initially received with much optimism as there was an expectation that it would help democratize media systems, allowing “citizens to report news, expose wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest, monitor elections, scrutinize government, deepen participation, and expand the horizons of freedom.”[i].
True public service media to the rescue
Every ten years or so the BBC comes in for criticism for being too partial or too impartial.
PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Jeffrey/ACT Alliance