Reporters without Borders on Press Freedom in Morocco

Stamp Commemorates Moroccan American Treaty of Friendship

Stamp Commemorates Moroccan American Treaty of Friendship


A few days ago I posted an entry about recent setbacks in freedom of the press in Morocco.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be visiting Morocco November 2-3.  In advance of that visit Reporters Without Borders, an organization that fights for freedom of the press has sent an open letter to the Secretary of State  outlining violations of press freedom since July 2009 and concluding:

Reporters Without Borders urges you to use the opportunity offered by your visit to Morocco to talk about the difficulties that the independent media are facing and to raise this crucial issue with the Moroccan authorities. The aim of the Forum of the Future which the US government set up in 2004 is to promote democratisation in the Broader Middle East and North Africa region. Press freedom is an essential component of this democratisation.

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Coverage of War in Afghanistan

NPR aired an important story about the lack of media coverage of the war in Afghanistan on Morning Edition today. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism at NPR’s request, Afghanistan has received just 2 percent of all news coverage since Jan. 1.

Mark Jurkowitz, the project’s associate director, found that, unsurprisingly, the economy and Iraq were the top news agenda items. The historic elevation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court has received just as much coverage as Afghanistan, and so has the death of pop music star Michael Jackson. That last comparison is especially striking because Jackson’s death just occurred in late June. There are now 62,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and more may well be on the way.

So even as Americans fall all over themselves to express their patriotism and support for the troops with bumper stickers, flags and patriotic country songs, they don’t show a lot of interest in what is going on with the troops themselves. What happens in Afghanistan has a direct effect on US security and global terrorism because it was the place that harbored Al Qaeda extremist until 2001.
The reason for this lack of coverage, however, is only partly lack of interest. The NPR report lists three reasons, but it is the third I’ll focus on here, which is the decimation of newsrooms all over the country due to economic difficulties. Here we have a conundrum. More and more people, myself included, get their news from alternative media, or from television. The internet is the leading source of new for many people.
But very few internet sources of news are actually sources of news. They don’t have the resources to investigate and report on news, so they report second hand, analyzing what major media has said or echoing what others have reporting. Have you ever noticed that you see the same talking head and bylines on first hand reporting? This is why. Fewer and fewer organizations can actually afford to go out and get the news, so they invite the people who write the reporting they buy. So why is there so little coverage of Afghanistan?

It’s expensive.
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“In that kind of environment, the idea of being able to spend money to send journalists — in a smaller newsroom — overseas becomes not just a luxury, but almost an impossibility,” Jurkowitz says.
The Los Angeles Times (on behalf of Tribune Co. newspapers), CNN and Fox News also maintain bureaus there. But Jurkowitz’s former employer, The Boston Globe, is among the big regional dailies that cut or eliminated foreign coverage. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t have a permanent Afghanistan bureau. Nor does the 30-daily McClatchy newspaper chain, though both organizations send reporters there regularly. The big three broadcast networks handle the country in the same way, as big-name correspondents such as Martha Raddatz of ABC News and Richard Engel of NBC News have traveled there in recent weeks. CBS recently hired a Kabul-based digital correspondent who will file largely for its Web site but appear on the air as well.
A look at TyndallReport.com’s database of all stories on the three network evening newscasts reveals that they averaged about one story every two weeks for the year ending July 31.
Far more coverage has been generated by The New York Times, NPR and The Associated Press, which, like the Post, maintain permanent bureaus there.

U.S. court reverses ruling barring Muslim scholar

This happened while I was overseas, so I didn’t get a change to post it here, but it is progress and I wish to acknowledge it.  Ramadan in an eminent, astute and highly respected scholar.  In fact he has been recently appointed a new Islamic Studies Chair at the University of Oxford.  He has done a great deal of meritorious scholarly work on Islam and the West and I was shocked that my country would deny him a visa.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. federal appeals court on Friday reversed a lower court ruling that had upheld the U.S. government’s right to bar Swiss Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan from entering the United States.
The ruling boosts the hopes of Ramadan and U.S. civil rights groups who argue that the U.S. government had unlawfully revoked Ramadan’s visa several times in 2004. The case was sent back to a lower court for further consideration.
Civil rights groups had appealed a federal judge’s ruling in 2007 that upheld the government’s right to ban Ramadan.
The U.S. government initially gave no reason for the ban but government lawyers later said he was barred because he gave 1,670 Swiss francs, then worth $1,336, to a Swiss-based charity, the Association de Secours Palestinien, or ASP, from 1998 to 2002.
Washington listed ASP as a banned group in 2003, saying it supported terrorism and had contributed funds to the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
On Friday, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals said it was unclear whether the consulate officer who considered Ramadan’s case had given the professor the opportunity to answer whether he knew he had contributed funds to an organization designated a terrorist organization.
The consulate officer “was required to confront Ramadan with the allegation against him” and let him explain whether he knew “the recipient of his contributions was a terrorist organization,” the ruling said, adding that “the record was unclear whether the consular officer had done so.”
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via U.S. court reverses ruling barring Muslim scholar | U.S. | Reuters.
The fact that I had not responded to this ruling came to mind today because I read a thought provoking piece that Ramadan wrote in response to Obama’s speech in Cairo early this summer.  It is worth reading and begins

We are used to nice words and many, in the Muslim majority countries as well as Western Muslims, have ended up not trusting the United States when it comes to political discourse. They want actions and they are right. This is indeed what our world needs. Yet, President Obama, who is very eloquent and good at using symbols, has provided us with his speech in Cairo with something that is more than simple words. It has presented an attitude, a mindset, a vision.
In order to avoid shaping a binary vision of the world, Barack Obama referred to “America”, “Islam”, “the Muslims” and “the Muslim majority countries”: he never fell into the trap of speaking about “us” as different or opposed to “them” and he was quick to refer Islam as being an American reality, and to American Muslims as being an asset to his own society. Talking about his own life, he went from the personal to the universal stating that he knows by experience that Islam is a religion whose message is one of openness and tolerance. Both the wording and the substance of his speech were important and new: he managed to be humble, self-critical, open and demanding at the same time in a message targeting all of “us”, understood as “partners”.
The seven areas he highlighted are critical…

via Tariq RAMADAN.