Skip to main content

A report says, the media are not united against organized crime

A report says, the media are not united against organized crime
Reporters Without Borders is today releasing a thematic report on what is now the single biggest threat to media freedom – organized crime.
A total of 141 journalists were killed during the decade of the 2000s for daring to denounce the influence of criminal gangs and their parallel economy. Since the end of the Cold War, the media’s leading predators have been mafias, drug cartels and paramilitary groups that have turned to large-scale smuggling.
Mafias of the traditional Costa Nostra kind are no longer the only form that this transnational phenomenon takes, one that is deadlier for journalists than the world’s remaining oppressive regimes and dictatorships. No continent is spared.
There is more to organized crime than the toll of dead and injured from its operations. It is a complex geopolitical and economic reality that the media have the utmost difficulty in portraying. Financial networks, money-laundering, legal fronts and tax paradises constitute an invisible but ubiquitous parallel world that will not be brought down by the arrest of any godfather or drug lord.
Organized crime not only poses a physical danger to journalists, it also defies the media’s investigative ability. At the same time, the media and public relations constitute a strategic objective for criminal groups. Far from wanting to overthrow the social order, they want to infiltrate it and use it.
With the help of its local correspondents and by interviewing journalists and media observers in every continent, Reporters Without Borders has tried to describe the obstacles and challenges that organized crime poses to the media, which are often reduced to covering this complex issue in terms of shootouts and bloodshed, or to just counting the dead in their own ranks.
It is clear from this report that the media are not united against organized crime, their correspondents are isolated and lack resources, and their capacity for investigative reporting is eclipsed by the race for breaking news.
Without claiming to offer definitive solutions to this enormous problem, Reporters Without Borders recommends pooling information and sources, and calls for the creation of journalists’ associations that can help to guarantee the independence of their media and prevent murky financial interests from influencing editorial choices.
Journalists are beginning to wake up to the issue. This could be seen at the forum that the Knight Centre for Journalism in the Americas organized last September in Austin, Texas. Some of the interventions at the forum provided material for this report.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Modern Day Child Prostitution in Kabul, Afghanistan: Children are used as Sex Workers in Afghanistan to Serve Foreigners

An eyewitness piece: Modern Day Child Prostitution in Kabul, Afghanistan: Children are used as Sex Workers in Afghanistan to Serve Foreigners. “The police told my mother that she will not receive my father’s retirement check for working at the Ministry of Agriculture unless I work as a prostitute serving foreigners. My mother at first refused but she relented once the police told her that I would be able to keep 60% of the pay and be able to keep supporting my mom and 6 brothers and sisters and the other 40% would go to the police,” says Ara. By James Van Thach  Salem-News.com 12-year-old girl named Ara Atta says, “My father was killed by the Americans because he did not stop his car at a checkpoint.  (KABUL) - When we hear about the news in Afghanistan, the mainstream media tells us stories of explosions and deaths of military personnel and civilians. A story that is not being told is of child prostitution slavery in Afghanistan. “There is a police ope
Post a Comment
Read more

Afghanistan: “It’s Just Damage Limitation Now”

By Mark Thompson Source:  time.com   Briton Ben Anderson is a documentary filmmaker (the BBC, HBO, the Discovery Channel), but he turns to the written word in No Worse Enemy : The Inside Story of the Chaotic Struggle for Afghanistan . The book offers a gritty – and grim — assessment of the war. Anderson embedded with U.S. and British troops for months in the southern part of the country from 2007 to 2011. He details corruption, incompetence, fear — by both allied troops and Afghan civilians — and a Groundhog Day kind of existence., where a battle fought for days has to be fought again, later. Most distressingly, he argues that the American and British publics are getting a misleading picture of progress on the ground. Battleland conducted this email chat with Anderson last weekend. Why did you write No Worse Enemy: The Inside Story of the Chaotic Struggle for Afghanistan? I’d been travelling to Helmand for five years, first in 2007 with the Brits, then later
2 comments
Read more

There are non-Taliban poets in the 'Poetry of the Taliban’

By Hanan Habibzai It is truly a matter of controversy as it appears that non-Taliban Afghan poets are presented as Taliban. It is a matter of shock to read in the Independent that Ezatullah Zawab, a permanent journalist and poet, is Taliban poet. It is still unclear how many more (non-Taliban names) are there in the ‘ Poetry of the Taliban ’. Zawab is not a Taliban but a critic of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and the continuous political and social corruption within Karzai’s government. He studied at the Nangrahar University, working as a freelance journalist since 2001 in eastern Afghanistan. His reports mainly published by IWPR and the Pajhwok Afghan News . He was among the first journalists who covered the killing of tens of civilians in June 2008 where American-led air-strike bombed a wedding convoy in Shinwari district in eastern Nangrahar province killing more than 55 civilians including the bride. Most of the victims were children and women. In the aftermat
Post a Comment
Read more