Media and Issues

On the occasion of World Water Day, ARTICLE 19 has reminded the international community that freedom of expression, the free flow of information and transparency are central to the full realisation of the right to water. The watershed developments in the right to water campaign over the past year particularly, demonstrate that the realisation of the right to water necessitates transparency and...

A journalist of newswire Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) has won the prestigious United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity for reportage on women's issues. Azera Parveen Rahman, principal correspondent with IANS, got the Most Promising Young Woman Journalist award for the year 2007. She was among 31 other awardees in the northern region. Rahman was given the...

The unparalleled recent events in the Middle East have offered newspapers a chance to make use of their youth pages and supplements to explain a complex situation. The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) have gathered some examples from around the world. "Newspapers – yes newspapers – are playing a leading role in providing explanatory journalism for children, who are...

NPR, PBS and local public broadcast stations in the United States are hiring more journalists and pumping millions of dollars into investigative news to make up for what they see as a lack of deep-digging coverage by their for-profit counterparts, the Associated Press (AP) has reported. Public radio and TV stations have seen the need for reporting that holds government and business accountable...

The International Press Institute (IPI) has been awarded $2.7 million by Google Inc, to sponsor the ‘IPI News Innovation Contest’, a project aimed at advancing the future of digital news by funding new ways to inform communities in Europe, Middle East and Africa. The IPI News Innovation Contest aims to encourage breakthrough ideas with the potential to create lasting impact. Grants will be awarded...

The protests throughout the Middle East, and most notably Egypt, have registered as the No. 1 news story over the past two weeks, according to the Project for Journalism's News Coverage Index. They accounted for 20 per cent of the newshole from January 24-30 and then a whopping 56 per cent from January 31-February 6, making it the biggest international story in a single week since PEJ began...

The protests rocking the Arab world this week have one thread uniting them: Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite channel whose aggressive coverage has helped propel insurgent emotions from one capital to the next, says a New York Times report. Al-Jazeera has been widely hailed for helping enable the revolt in Tunisia with its galvanizing early reports, even as Western-aligned political factions...

Viewing TV coverage of terrorist events causes deterioration of psychological resources, such as commitment and a sense of success, and to feeling threatened, which in turn can also lead to loss of resources and other negative affects. This has been found in a new study at the University of Haifa. “Mass media plays a central role in reporting on terrorism and political violence. The present study...

For the most part, women in Indonesia only ever seem to make the headlines for their role as a famous person’s relative, a victim or a criminal, a reporters’ guild says. In a study carried out between July and September last year, the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) looked for mention of female news sources in seven Indonesian-language dailies. “These are the three types of women who...

There were marked differences between countries in the coverage given to the UN’s Copenhagen summit on climate change in 2009. A new study has found that of the 12 countries studied, Brazil and India provided the most coverage, followed by Australia and the UK. Nigeria, Russia and Egypt gave the summit the least space in its newspapers. In Summoned by Science: Reporting Climate Change at