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New York, May 9, 2008: As some pundits already send “A Farewell to Hillary” – as Charles Krauthammer put it in the Washington Post - current media analysis does not yet fully support the conclusion that Senator Clinton’s candidacy is a hopeless bid now – at least when comparing media coverage of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. “The media present a split image of the Democratic race to the American public,” reports Markus Rettich, Head of Political Analysis at Media Tenor International, “Clinton has lost last week’s TV momentum, but Obama has not completely won it.”

Media Tenor’s analysis includes Thursday’s evening news. The question is if media pressure on Clinton will get intense enough to force her to concede. “And the answer is: not yet,” says Rettich. Obama’s victory in North Carolina was presented as an important step towards nomination, but it has not pushed away last week’s concerns about his political agenda. Obama was said to be the party’s favorite, but when other Democrats are quoted he only has a narrow lead.

“It’s only a horse race push,” says Rettich, “this might help Obama in opinion polls, but it might only be a bandwagon effect. Obama still has a way to go to convince more voters.”

Whereas the discussion of the Democratic race has increased the coverage of both candidates, media interest in the Republican nominee has decreased this week: McCain’s “Vision For Defending the World’s Vulnerable” did not draw broad attention. If media awareness is low, a candidate might suffer if negative aspects dominate coverage. “This happened to John McCain last week,” Rettich says. But this week the tone of coverage was balanced.

Clinton has lost media momentum

This North Carolina primary has changed the trend: After last week’s push, Clinton has lost momentum this week. The share of positive statements sharply decreased. Obama was rated better.

ABC, NBC, CBS candidate coverage, 2/11 - 5/8/2008: tone of coverage by weeks

Basis: all statements by or on Clinton and Obama on ABC, CBS, NBC evening news programs 2/11 – 5/8/2008

Concerns remain for Obama

Barack Obama’s strong performance in North Carolina has been presented as a big step towards the nomination. Nevertheless, concerns about his view of society and his general political goals remain.

Newsweek, Time, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox News coverage, 5/5 - 5/8/2008: Obama’s top 5 topics

Basis: a total of 1,145 statements by or on Obama in Newsweek, Time, ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX evening news programs 5/5– 5/8/2008

Split image of the Democratic race

Detailed analysis reveals that the analyzed six media published a split image during the last two weeks. The tone of Obama’s coverage was better on ABC news; Clinton was rated more positively on CBS and on the Brit Hume show.

Candidate coverage, 4/28 – 5/8/2008: tone of Obama and Clinton coverage by media outlets

Basis: all statements by or on Obama and Clinton in Newsweek, Time, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox evening news programs 4/28 – 5/8/2008

Balanced coverage of McCain this week

Candidate coverage, 2/11 – 5/8/2008: tone of McCain coverage by weeks

If media awareness is low, a candidate might suffer if negative aspects dominate coverage. This happened to John McCain last week. But this week, the tone of coverage was almost balanced on TV and very positive in Time Magazine.

Basis: all statements by or on McCain in Newsweek, Time, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox evening news programs 2/11 – 5/8/2008

To read the full Media Tenor election report in PDF format click here.

For the third time, International Media analysis company Media Tenor is offering a detailed analysis of the U.S. presidential campaign. TV news coverage of the leading Presidential contenders is scrutinized at a detailed level. “The methodology was developed 15 years ago and has been successfully used not only to analyze the 2000 and 2004 U.S. Presidential campaigns, but also for International politics as well,” Schatz explains. Media Tenor’s Presidential Campaign Watch focuses not only on Candidate standings, but also on topics and sources, while adding on an international perspective. Results of Media Tenor studies will be regularly published on MediaChannel.org.

For further information visit: MediaTenor.com

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European media and their audiences catch the U.S.’s Election Fever

On a Wednesday a couple of weeks ago, French, Dutch and Polish camera crews gathered in a small studio on Park Avenue. All were correspondents for TV news networks in their respective home countries, and all had come to interview Amber “Obama Girl” Lee, who was in New York shooting a video for her latest song. (Her  debut, “I Have a Crush…on Obama,” launched on YouTube in June, has been viewed, in a conservative count, 8 million times.) The Dutch correspondent did his item on “Elections 2.0,” on the role of YouTube in the race for the White House; the Polish team, meanwhile, interviewed the Dutch reporter as part of a story about how a young girl with a crush on a potential presidential candidate was now conquering the world with her videos.

European media are covering the run-up to the November ’08 presidential elections with an unprecedented intensity and frequency. In the Netherlands, for example, the primaries have been covered extensively on public television, radio, and the front pages of national dailies since they began; and whether Obama or Clinton will stand a better chance against McCain is a hot topic of debate among students, politicians, media pundits, and housewives alike.

Dutch politicians ‘endorse’ candidates; newspaper editorials assess the campaign; translated (auto)biographies of McCain, Clinton and Obama are all over the place; and Dutch journalists, former correspondents, and “America-watchers” have published books with such inspiring titles as The Best One Never Wins, Hurray! A New President, and The Fight for the White House. The news and opinion weekly, Elsevier, is translating and publishing Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can’t Win (although both the author and the publisher are still debating the appropriateness of the title), and has featured Obama, Clinton and McCain on its cover; Nieuwe Revu, another weekly, ran a feature about Giuliani when he was still in the race.

Technical advances are at least part of the reason the coverage is more extensive this time around. Major newspapers have all devoted special sections of their Web sites to the elections, with wire news, blogs, and original reporting.

“This just wasn’t possible four years ago,” says Pieter Broertjes, editor in chief of the Volkskrant, a leading national daily, which is running an election special on its Web site. (The Volkskrant site even features a “Voting Compas,” a questionnaire through which Dutch readers can find out which candidate they should support - even if the majority of the country’s 16-odd million citizens won’t be able to cast a vote.)

NOS, the national news network, has dispatched three correspondents to Washington to cover the elections, and according to Hans Laroes, NOS’s editor in chief, “their output is much bigger” than it was four years ago. In April alone, Nova, the premier current affairs program on Dutch public television, aired twenty-eight items related to Clinton, Obama, or McCain; by comparison, the total number of items devoted to Kerry and/or Bush during the 2004 general election was thirty-one.

The Dutch, it seems, can’t get enough of American election news - and they’re not alone. US elections have always been important media events in Europe, if only because U.S. foreign policy simply affects Europe - especially “Atlantically Oriented” nations like the Netherlands, Germany and the UK. But across the board, this year’s coverage already outsizes that of 2000 and 2004 by far. And the general election hasn’t even started yet.

According to Salvatore Scrimenti, Program Officer for the Netherlands, Germany and France at the Foreign Press Center in New York, an agency of the U.S. State Department, there is “a lot more interest on behalf of the foreign press. In addition, the foreign press centers, unlike 2004, are conducting press tours to many of the battleground primary states, which we did not do during 2004.” These tours, he added, are always filled to capacity.

“It’s because it’s so exciting,” says Pieter Broertjes of the Volkskrant. The elections are much more interesting for Dutch audiences, Laroes notes, because no incumbent president is participating in them. Or, as one TV correspondent, Willem Lust, puts it: “It’s an open-ended race, and the candidates are historically unique” - a reference, of course, to Hillary Clinton’s gender, and Barack Obama’s race.

Indeed, fascination with the Democratic candidates seems to be part of it, too. “Obama Mania” has hit even European politicians: the leader of the Italian Democratic Party, Walter Veltroni, campaigned (in vain) with the slogan  “Si, Puo Fare” (“Yes, We Can”), and Dutch Labor Party MP Diederik Samsom has been reported as obsessively forwarding Internet videos of Obama’s speeches to his colleagues, adding, “We should do the same!”

But at the heart of the European media’s election craze lies more than just the thrill of an open- ended race or the exoticness of the candidates. Attention is unlikely to drop once the battle between Clinton and Obama is over. To the contrary: the European campaign coverage will likely go “full speed on to the White House.” For the first time, the Foreign Press Center will be present at both party conventions; and Hans Laroes has said that his team in Washington will be expanded in the six or eight weeks preceding the actual elections, so that “even more reports” can be filed. And Election Day (which, in GMT+2 is Election Night, really) will be broadcast live for the first time.

As Laroes puts it, mildly: “Bush’s policy has been rather polarizing, so there’s a lot of interest in a ‘different politics.’” Europeans desire change, and their media deliver the stories of the run-up to that change. “It’s much more than just Clinton-Obama,” Laroes says. “It’s about the country itself, profoundly so.”

–by Lynn Berger

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PALO ALTO, Calif. — A Danish newspaper editor who received death threats and is facing criminal charges for commissioning cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad is accusing his American counterparts of undermining free speech by failing to republish the cartoons when the issue prompted riots in Muslim countries two years ago.

“It reads on the top of the New York Times, ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print,’ but it’s very hard to argue that this was not news on February 1, 2006,” the culture editor of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten, Flemming Rose, said Wednesday night during a speech at Stanford University. Most American newspapers did not publish the cartoons, which include images of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban and of suicide bombers being greeted by the Muslim prophet in heaven.

“Europe has usually been criticized for being politically correct and on the defense when it comes to Islam, but more European newspapers published the cartoons,” he said. “We might not have had the kind of ongoing crisis if more newspapers around the world would have published the cartoons at the same time because by doing so you would have drawn a clear line. … Instead, it was pretty unclear what people in liberal democracies thought of this issue.”

Mr. Rose scoffed at a Washington Post editor’s claim that the cartoons were not needed to illustrate the story. The Danish editor said the Times later indicated that its reporters abroad might have been endangered by publishing the cartoons, an explanation Mr. Rose said was “fair” but should have been made clear to readers more promptly.

Asked by The New York Sun whether he was let down by the American press, Mr. Rose said, “Absolutely. I felt it was really very disappointing. … If you look at the cartoons that have been published in the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times and the New Yorker, I mean a lot of them are very offensive.”

Before he spoke, a handful of Muslim students protested silently. One carried a sign saying, “Hate Speech Cannot Be Free Speech.”

By Josh Gerstein

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The Goldsmith Awards Program, launched in 1991, has as its goal the encouragement of a more insightful, spirited public debate about government, politics and the press. The program includes the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, two book prizes, Fellowships and the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism. The $25,000 Prize for Investigative Reporting has honored pioneering work by teams of journalists from across the country. The Book Prize has recognized distinguished scholarship by writers examining free speech, public television, race, journalism ethics, and campaign advertising.

Financial support for the Goldsmith Awards Program is provided by an annual grant from the Goldsmith Fund of the Greenfield Foundation.

Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting

The Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting honors the journalist or journalists whose investigative reporting in a story or series of related stories best promotes more effective and ethical conduct of government, the making of public policy, or the practice of politics.

Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism

The Goldsmith Career Award is given annually for outstanding contributions to the field of journalism, and for work that has enriched our political discourse and our society.

2008 Winner: Paul E. Steiger: Watch Video of the ceremony.

Goldsmith Book Prize

The Goldsmith Book Prize is awarded to the trade and academic book published in the last year that best fulfills the objective of improving government through an examination of the intersection between press, politics, and public policy.

2008 Winners

Academic:
John G. Geer
In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns

Trade:
Ted Gup
Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life

For more information visit: The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy

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Remember the “Brady Bunch” episode in which Marcia broke her date with Charley so she could go out with Big Man on Campus Doug Simpson?

Tribune Co., with its dueling suitors for Newsday, looks to be in a similar situation, except that in the case of the TV show, Doug canceled after Marcia took a football in the face and there just might be a way for Tribune to make everybody happy without anyone’s nose getting out of joint.

The Chicago Tribune’s parent would very much like the $650 million that Cablevision Systems Corp. is dangling for control of Tribune’s Newsday.

Yet Tribune Co., already the beneficiary of a deal with Rupert Murdoch to switch the affiliation of its San Diego station this summer from The CW to Fox, almost certainly doesn’t want to tick off Murdoch, who thought his News Corp. had an agreement in principle earlier for Newsday at $580 million.
To hear Murdoch on News Corp.’s quarterly conference call, he can’t wait to realize what he expects will be a $100 million improvement in annual cash flow from the efficiencies of running the Long Island tabloid in tandem with his New York Post. He doesn’t want to up his bid and, as if to apply pressure, he noted that Tribune Co. boss Sam Zell is “famous for being a man of his word.”

Well, this is a dilemma. Fortunately, this column is the “Ask Amy” of the media business.

So try this compromise: a three-way deal.

Let Cablevision, the sprawling communications, sports and entertainment empire run by firmly rooted Long Island royalty, the Dolan family, have control of the hometown paper.

Let heavily leveraged Tribune get its cash, keeping just enough of a stake in the operation to structure the transaction in a way that reduces taxable capital gains.

Let News Corp. get some or most of the Newsday synergies it seeks so it can reverse losses at the Post without raising hackles of those who are sure Murdoch has too much control of New York-area media, what with already owning the Post, The Wall Street Journal and two TV stations, to say nothing of the rest of his global holdings.

Voila.

And there’s reason to think it’s at least under consideration.

“Hell, anything can be negotiated,” John Morton, an independent newspaper industry analyst in Silver Spring, Md., said somewhat warily Thursday. “It would require the Dolans to somehow accede to letting Murdoch in the door … [and] I always hesitate to speculate what’s in anybody’s mind, but I suspect Murdoch would not be favorably disposed toward this unless it appeared otherwise he was going to lose out completely.”

Murdoch indicated in the mid-week conference call that he didn’t think there was going to be any problem, predicting things would be wrapped up next week.

But what if he’s just posturing? What if Zell and company are willing to tell him he lost his shot at Newsday? Would it be better to save some of the efficiencies to be shared by jointly printing and distributing the two papers than walk away completely?

“Anything could happen,” Morton said. “It is possible for two newspaper companies that are not commonly owned to strike collaborative arrangements so long as they don’t run afoul of antitrust laws, and I doubt they would in this case because Newsday and the Post operate in separate markets for the most part.”

On the other hand, Morton believes Tribune Co. shouldn’t be dating at all with “one of its most reliable and prosperous” papers.

“I can think of a lot of television stations they would be better off without than Newsday,” he said.

Long as we’re solving problems: If there isn’t the money to finish the new Museum of Broadcast Communications at State and Kinzie, wouldn’t that make a swell location for the Children’s Museum?

Maybe: This week marks the 40th anniversary of CBS-owned WBBM-AM 780’s all-news format.

“Seems to be more small talk and casual quips between the anchormen than news,” Herb Lyons, the Chicago Tribune’s Tower Ticker columnist, wrote after the first two weeks. “Also, lots of offbeat, dull interviews and features. But maybe they got something.”

– by Phil Rosenthal

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Even with countless media outlets available these days, a Sunday New York Times cover story could always be counted on to send a jolt through the television news cycle.

But apparently that’s no longer the case. Indeed, reporter David Barstow’s 7,600-word investigation of the Pentagon’s military analyst program — whereby ex-military talking heads, often with direct ties to contractors, parroted Defense Department talking points on the air — has been noticeably absent from television airwaves since the story broke on April 20.

While bloggers have kept the story simmering, Democratic congressional leaders also are speaking out, calling for investigations that could provoke the networks to finally cover the Times story — and, in effect, themselves.

On Tuesday, Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and John Dingell (D-Mich.) sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin “urging an investigation of the Pentagon’s propaganda program” to determine if the networks or analysts violated federal law.

FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps, a Democrat, applauded their efforts. “President Eisenhower warned against the excesses of a military-industrial complex,” Copps said in a statement. “I’d like to think that hasn’t morphed into a military-industrial-media complex, but reports of spinning the news through a program of favored insiders don’t inspire a lot of confidence.”

DeLauro said by phone that the Pentagon’s program was “created in order to give military analysts access in exchange for positive coverage of the Iraq war.”

The FCC request follows DeLauro’s April 24 letters to five of the most powerful network executives: NBC News President Steve Capus, ABC News President David Westin, CBS News President Sean McManus, FOX News chief executive Roger Ailes and CNN News Group President Jim Walton.

Only ABC and CNN have responded so far, according to DeLauro, who is not the only member of Congress calling attention to the Times story.

Both Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) have written to the Government Accountability Office, seeking an investigation into whether the Pentagon aided in connecting military analysts with contractors.

“I decided to push this issue hard because ever since The New York Times exposé appeared, the silence has been deafening,” Kerry said in statement to Politico.

Kerry said there needs to be a “thorough investigation” into government contracts and “whether Americans’ tax dollars were being used to cultivate talking heads to sell the administration’s Iraq policy.”

Others involved include Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, who wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), who told Think Progress he’s begun to “distrust the military,” and Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), who said on the House floor that the Times story reflects poorly on the Pentagon, analysts and media organizations.

Congressional outcries alone might not be enough, but if investigations yield any new discoveries or lead to high-profile hearings, the networks would be hard-pressed to continue their de facto blackout.

“We are in a time when stories can have a second life,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. A few years ago, if a story did not generate attention after a week, it could be considered dead, said Rosenstiel, who cited the instance of how bloggers revived the U.S. attorney firings story.

Rosenstiel’s organization tracked the mainstream media for a week after the Times story and found that out of approximately 1,300 news stories, only two touched on the Pentagon analysts scoop — both airing on PBS’s “NewsHour.”

Besides being “an important story,” “NewsHour” executive producer Linda Winslow said that following up was necessary because of remaining concerns about information the public was given during the run-up to the Iraq war.

None of the analysts in the Times story appeared on “NewsHour,” according to Winslow, but as Barstow reported, they did appear on NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX and CNN.

Andrew Tyndall, an independent television analyst who monitors the nightly newscasts, said the broadcast networks rarely do “self-criticism stories.” However, he added, “this is really the sort of thing that all of the networks should have addressed online.”

Brian Williams, anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” finally responded on his blog, “The Daily Nightly,” 10 days after the Times article ran. Williams wrote that he “read the article with great interest,” and mentioned working alongside two four-star generals included in the Times piece — Barry McCaffrey and the late Wayne Downing.

“All I can say is this: These two guys never gave what I considered to be the party line,” Williams wrote. “They were tough, honest critics of the U.S. military effort in Iraq.”

While Williams defended the ex-generals and his network, the anchor did not reveal details about NBC’s vetting process. (Nor, as Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald pointed out, did he mention Downing and McCaffrey’s support of the war in 2002 and 2003.) And while Barstow had been told by NBC that there were “clear policies in place,” the network declined to get into specifics.

In Barstow’s original account — which is based largely on more than 8,000 pages of Pentagon documents the Times successfully sued to gain access to — the networks either declined to comment or simply provided terse statements to the reporter.

(Barstow declined a request for comment and told readers on NYTimes.com that he may follow up on the story. Five days after the original story ran, he wrote a short piece about the Pentagon’s suspension of the program.)

Unlike many newspapers, the networks do not have ombudsmen or public editors, leaving little room for transparency if they refuse to comment or commit to a follow-up story.

CBS’s “Public Eye” blog, created in the wake of the Dan Rather “Memogate” debacle, was the sole medium for responding to viewer concerns with original reporting and analysis. But it was shuttered in December, following cutbacks.

“This controversy about military analysts would have been right in our ballpark,” said Dick Meyer, former editorial director of CBS News who spearheaded the “Public Eye” project in September 2005.

Meyer, who became NPR’s editorial director of digital media last month, said, “It’s irresponsible for a modern news organization to not have some kind of readers’ advocate, some kind of public editor function.”

By Michael Calderone and Avi Zenilman

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Sami al-Haj is a free man today, after having been imprisoned by the U.S. military for more than six years. His crime: journalism.

Targeting journalists, the Bush administration has engaged in direct assault, intimidation, imprisonment and information blackouts to limit the ability of journalists to do their jobs. The principal target these past seven years has been Al-Jazeera, the Arabic television network based in Doha, Qatar.

In November 2001, despite the fact that Al-Jazeera had given the U.S. military the coordinates of its office in Kabul, U.S. warplanes bombed Al-Jazeera’s bureau there, destroying it. An Al-Jazeera reporter covering the George Bush-Vladimir Putin summit in Crawford, Texas, in the same month was detained by the FBI because his credit card was “linked to Afghanistan.” In spring 2003, the U.S. dropped four bombs on the Sheraton hotel in Basra, Iraq, where Al-Jazeera correspondents—the only journalists reporting from that city—were the lone guests. Another Al-Jazeera staffer showed his ID to a U.S. Marine at a Baghdad checkpoint, only to have his car fired upon by the Marines. He was unhurt. That can’t be said for Tareq Ayyoub, an Al-Jazeera correspondent who was on the roof of the network’s bureau in Baghdad on April 8, 2003, when a U.S. warplane strafed it. He was killed. His widow, Dima Tahboub, told me: “Hate breeds hate. The United States said they were doing this to rout out terrorism. Who is engaged in terrorism now?”

Then there is the story of Sami al-Haj. A cameraman for Al-Jazeera, he was reporting on the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. On Dec. 15, 2001, while in a Pakistani town near the Afghanistan border, Haj was arrested, then imprisoned in Afghanistan. Six months later, shackled and gagged, he was flown to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. Haj was held there for close to six years, repeatedly interrogated and never charged with any crime, never tried in a court. He engaged in a hunger strike for more than a year, but was force-fed by his jailers with a feeding tube sent into his stomach through his nose. Haj was abruptly released this week. The U.S. government announced that he was being transferred to the custody of Sudan, his home nation, but the government of Sudan took no action against him. He was rushed to an emergency room, and soon was seen on his old network, Al-Jazeera:

“I’m very happy to be in Sudan, but I’m very sad because of the situation of our brothers who remain in Guantanamo. Conditions in Guantanamo are very, very bad, and they get worse by the day. Our human condition, our human dignity was violated, and the American administration went beyond all human values, all moral values, all religious values. In Guantanamo, you have animals that are called iguanas, rats that are treated with more humanity. But we have people from more than 50 countries that are completely deprived of all rights and privileges, and they will not give them the rights that they give to animals.” He described the desecration of the Quran as part of the effort to break him: “They hold the Quran in contempt, destroyed it several times and put their dirty feet on it. They also sat on the Quran while trying to get us angry. They repeatedly committed violations against our dignity and our sexual organs.” At least one official in the Defense Department has denied the charges.

Asim al-Haj, Sami’s brother, told me in an interview last January about the 130 interrogations: “During these times, the interrogations were all about Al-Jazeera and alleged relations between Al-Jazeera and al-Qaida. They tried to induce him to spy on his colleagues at Al-Jazeera.”

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 10 journalists have been held for extended periods by the U.S. military and then released without charge. Just weeks ago in Iraq, the U.S. military released Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein after holding him without charge for two years. The military had once accused Hussein of being a “terrorist media operative who infiltrated the AP.”

The committee reports that 127 journalists and an additional 50 media workers have been killed in Iraq since 2003, well more than twice the number killed in World War II. We need to remind the Bush administration: Don’t shoot the messenger.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America. Her third book, “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times,” was published in April.

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The editor of a Zimbabwean independent weekly newspaper has been arrested for publishing an opinion piece written by an opposition leader.

Davison Maruziva, editor of the Sunday paper The Standard, is being held over an article written by Arthur Mutambara, the leader of a splinter faction of the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

In the article, which was published on 20 April, Mr Mutambara delivered a withering critique of Robert Mugabe’s rule of Zimbabwe, accusing the veteran president of running down the economy and his security forces of abuses.

A Reuters photographer has also been detained in Zimbabwe for allegedly using a satellite phone to file pictures while covering the aftermath of recent elections, Reuters said today.

Howard Burditt, a Zimbabwean national, has been in police custody since Monday.

Mr Burditt has not been charged.

A number of local and foreign journalists have been detained in Zimbabwe since the country held elections on 29 March, including a New York Times correspondent who was later released.

Meanwhile, pressure is mounting on Zimbabwe to admit foreign observers to oversee a presidential election run-off amid fresh claims that pro-government militias are instilling terror in the countryside.

As the opposition alleged 30 supporters had now been killed and a union chief said 40,000 farmworkers and their dependents made homeless, authorities played down the levels of violence.

Six days since results from an inconclusive 29 March presidential poll were announced, there was still no word on when a second round would take place nor whether the opposition Movement for Democratic Change will participate.

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Unlearning Intolerance Seminar
“Art Changing Attitudes toward the Environment”

Remarks by Mr. Kiyo Akasaka, UN Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information

Opening Session

Conference Room 1
8 May 2008
10:00 a.m.

Excellencies,
Distinguished Panelists,
Special Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

On behalf of the United Nations Department of Public Information, it is a pleasure to welcome you to the sixth “Unlearning Intolerance” seminar: “Art Changing Attitudes toward the Environment”. Welcome also to all of you joining us via the live webcast of today’s seminar.

I would like, at the outset, to thank our distinguished panelists and partners who will share their expertise on climate change, the environment, and the impact that art can have on shaping attitudes toward the environment. I have no doubt we will have a lively discussion during the course of the day. I would like to encourage all of you to take part in a dialogue with our experts and special guests.

I am happy to welcome Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Mr. Djoghlaf plays a key role in the field of sustainable development and the protection of our global biodiversity. He is also a champion of the development of national strategies for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity.

I am also happy to welcome Elisabeth Guilbaud-Cox of the United Nations Environment Programme. UNEP is in the forefront of the United Nations’ efforts to conserve and protect the environment, and to raise awareness about the impact of climate change.

I would like to thank and welcome Mia Hanak, Executive Director of the Natural World Museum, and her team, for the excellent collaboration with the Department of Public Information in organizing this seminar and the exhibit “Art, Attitudes and Environment”, which we will open this evening, and to which you are all invited.

UNEP and the Natural World Museum are partners in the Art for the Environment initiative. The initiative uses art and creative programmes to inspire and engage the public in environmental awareness and action. It also seeks to empower individuals, communities, and leaders to incorporate environmental values into social, economic, and political realms.

It is a special pleasure to welcome the distinguished artists who are present here today, and who come from six countries from different regions of the world. I believe that their artwork will demonstrate to us how art can create a greater appreciation of the environment, as well as transform our attitudes toward our natural world. I am delighted to be in the company of such a unique group, and thank them all for raising awareness of one of the greatest challenge of our times: climate change.

The “Unlearning Intolerance” seminar series was initiated by the Department of Public Information in 2004. The objective of the series is to examine manifestations of intolerance as well as explore means to promote respect and understanding among peoples. As its name suggests, the “Unlearning Intolerance” series offers opportunities to discuss how intolerance, wherever it exists and for whatever reason, can be “unlearned” through education, inclusion and example.

In previous years, the seminar series featured issues of global importance on themes such as Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, combating genocide, cartooning for peace, and the role of the media in promoting tolerance. This year we look at the intersection between intolerance and the environment, through the medium of art. In the two sessions today we will discuss how “environmental intolerance” can be confronted, and how art can serve as a vehicle for environmental action.

Climate change is a top priority for the United Nations and for Secretary-General Ban, who has stressed repeatedly that climate change is “the defining challenge of our age”. Secretary-General Ban has also emphasized that the impact of climate change is real and that we need to act now. The scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have shown that unless we act there will be serious consequences worldwide, threatening humankind, and plant and animal species. They emphasize that the cost of inaction far exceeds the costs of action. The UN as a whole — every agency, fund and programme — is committed to being part of the answer to climate change. And as the Secretary-General told Member States in Bali, the UN will continue to expand support for global, regional and national action on climate change and to lead by example.

Today, we look at climate change through the eyes and work of artists. We will see and discuss examples of art that depict the threat of climate change, and that emphasize that intolerance towards the environment can be addressed through artistic communication.

Art, and artists, both modern and ancient, have always had an intimate relationship with nature, and have been in the vanguard on issues involving the environment. Through their work, they have explored the fragility of the natural world, as well as the beauty and power of natural phenomenon.

Architects and designers today have been among the first to highlight the reality of climate change, and the need to act and adapt to its effects by creating environmentally sustainable structures and objects.

The fine arts — photography, painting, sculpture – can also profoundly connect us to the environment, and can provoke or shape our views on the relationship between the environment and politics, history, and science for example.

Indeed, it is both the implicit and explicit ideas in such artwork that make environmental messages come alive. You will see this in Mr. Banerjee’s photographs of the Arctic, which visually explore the region’s connection to larger global issues such as resource wars, global warming, and the human rights struggles of the northern indigenous communities. Ms. Paredes’ artwork blends the human body into the natural world to show that we are all part of the same environment.

Ms. Chalmers explores intolerance towards the environment from a different perspective, by questioning if the hierarchical relationship which humankind has towards all other species is indeed justifiable.

The artwork by Mr. Pastor and Mr. Ikeda puts the spotlight on two essential components of our earth: water and trees. Both are basic resources that ensure not only our present existence on earth but also ensure future generations’ safe environment. Mr. Ikeda has dedicated the majority of his prolific career to raising awareness of global warming around water issues. Mr. Pastor’s art illustrates how essential trees and plants are to a stable climate.

It is a pleasure to see that Noor Al-Bastaki’s photographs focus on tomorrow’s generation. Ms. Al-Bastaki, the youngest participant in today’s discussions, captures youth facing their future with determination and, most importantly, armed with knowledge.

I would also like to acknowledge to Mr. Anatsui who was unable to participate in the seminar owing to his ill health. We are honoured to have his work featured in the “Art, Attitudes and the Environment” exhibit alongside the work of our participating artists. We wish Mr. Anatsui a speedy recovery.

For additional information, please visit http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/tolerance/seminar.html

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Press freedom declined on a global scale in 2007, with particularly worrisome trends evident in the former Soviet Union, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. This marked the sixth straight year of overall deterioration. Improvements in a small number of countries were overshadowed by a continued, relentless assault on independent news media by a wide range of actors, in both authoritarian states and countries with relatively open media environments…

Sub-Saharan Africa: Overall, 7 countries
(15 percent) were rated Free, 18 (37 percent) were rated Partly Free, and 23 (48 percent) remained Not Free in sub-Saharan Africa. The average regionwide level of press freedom declined during the year, as did the average score in the legal and political categories.

Trends in individual countries presented a mixed picture, with some improvements but a greater number of declines, including three negative status changes. Press freedom conditions continue to be dire in Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, and Zimbabwe, where authoritarian governments use legal pressure, imprisonment, and other forms of harassment to sharply curtail the ability of independent media outlets to report freely. All three countries continue to rank among the bottom 10 performers worldwide.

Reasons for the negative movement during 2007 varied from country to country, but it appeared to be driven by either legal or political factors, and in many cases a combination of the two. Benin’s score worsened from 30 to 31, which tipped it over the cusp from Free to Partly Free status, owing to the continuation of criminal libel cases and polarization in a growing number of politically funded media outlets. An increase in legal ha