Director Ken Loach has taken aim at the BBC, describing its news coverage as “manipulative and deeply political” and saying it is a “rotten place for a director”.
Tag Archives: control over media
| Ken Loach: BBC news manipulative and deeply political
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| The war against journalists in Ukraine is getting bloody
On the morning of July 20, the idyllic calm of Kiev’s leafy center was shattered. A bomb planted beneath award-winning journalist Pavel Sheremet’s red Subaru exploded, killing him instantly and raining down fiery debris on the quiet boulevard. Triggered by remote control, the assassination was intentionally visible, loud, and meant to send a message. What made the loss so hard for Kiev’s journalist community was that the 44-year-old Sheremet had survived the intimidation and censorship that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, moving from his native Belarus to Russia and finally to Ukraine, fleeing authoritarian presidents who aimed to control the press to secure their own political stability. Sheremet’s death has made many in the media fear that Ukraine has returned to its darker days of journalism.
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| The attack on freedom of speech in Ukraine
One of the main Ukrainian TV channels was attacked by fascists. On September 4 group of right-wing radicals attacked the building of the TV channel “Inter” in Kiev. In their opinion the channel carries wrong information policy. While “Inter” supports the official mythology of the Kiev regime and is considering a civil war as the Russian intervention, the fascists believ that the channel is too soft on the opposite side of the conflict. This they call the “anti-Ukrainian position”.
The fascists staged a picket near the building of the channel, and then somehow got inside the office and threw firebombs. An employee of the channel describes the pogrom: “They broke, started beating people, break and destroy things. They baited us with gas, and poured gasoline everything. Bastards.” The fire damaged equipment of the channel, some employees suffered burns. Fortunately, no one died.
After the fire, channel employees moved to reserve buildings, but effort to continue normal operation failed. September 5 fascists staged a blockade of channel’s buildings. The evening of September 6, they lifted the blockade but put an ultimatum to the directors of the channel: to change the information policy for five days.
The same day, the press service of “Inter” reported that the television channel administration has submitted 10 allegations of crimes against the channel to the Prosecutor General, Ministry of Interior, Security Service and the National Police, but “there is no reaction of law enforcement officers in the allegations.” During the siege of channel’s building the police watched action on the part of the fascists and did not intervene.
Apparently, there would be no reaction on the part of Kiev regime. There is reason to believe that it stays behind the atrocities the fascists. Shortly before the raid Interior Minister publicly accused the channel in the “anti-state position” and urged the Security Service of Ukraine to “deal” with the TV channel. SSU responded with a polite refusal. It seems like the minister decided to act through the fascist gangs controlled from his side.
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Turkey Crackdown Chronicle: Week of August 7, 2016
Police detain two journalists from state broadcaster
Police detained two correspondents for Turkey’s state-owned broadcaster TRT last night and this morning, the news website Bianet reported today. Police detained Bertan Golal from his home in Istanbul. Police attempted to detain Özcan Keser from his home in Istanbul, but the journalist was not at home when they arrived, so they phoned him and asked him to turn himself in. Keser did so, arriving at Istanbul’s Vatan Street Police Station this morning. Both journalists had previously worked for the pro-Hizmet movement Cihan News Agency, according to Bianet. The government accuses the Hizmet movement of planning a July 15 failed military coup.
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| Russian news may be biased – but so is much western media
by Piers Robinson
As tensions continue to escalate with Russia, increasing attention is being paid in western media to what are frequently described as the “propaganda” activities of Vladimir Putin’s regime. The Sun headlines “Putin’s glamorous propaganda girls who front a new UK-based news agency ‘that aims to destabilise Britain’” in reference to the recent establishment of Sputnik News in Edinburgh, while the Mail describes how “Vladimir Putin is waging a propaganda war on the UK”.
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