Committee to Protect Journalists Capitol Hill Press Conference

Some notable extracts from Joel Simon, CPJ Executive Director, speaking at Capitol Hill at a conference on press security, marking Press Freedom Day. Simon spoke about the number of journalists being killed in conflicts across the world, and why this trend is getting worse:

"In terms of imprisonment, the numbers are also alarming. The number of journalists in prison around the world skyrocketed in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, jumping from 81 to 137, as repressive countries around the world launched opportunistic crackdowns often appropriating the language of the war on terror to justify these repressive measures. While the world's leading jailer of journalists are China, Cuba, and Eritrea, it is important to note the United States has appeared on CPJ's annual lost of imprisoned journalists every year since 2001. At least a dozen journalists were held in U.S. military custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for extended periods of time without due process. One is still being held by the U.S. military in Iraq - a freelance photographer for Reuters named Ibrahim Jassam."

Find details of Ibrahim Jassam's arrest here. An Iraqi court ruled in December that there was no evidence against him.

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Jeff Jarvis' fake speech to the NAA

Jeff Jarvis on the speech he would give to the NAA (Newspaper Association of America), at their conference in San Diego.

Jarvis, on his usual 'changing industry' high (which is brilliant), chastises the old barons of the newspaper industry in the USA for not changing. Some more names than Murdoch would be welcome, and again, there is some vagueness over new web business models - but there always is, that's the point.

An extract:

"Yesterday, you delivered a foot-stomping little hissy fit over Google and aggregators. How dare they link to you and not pay you? Oh, I so want Eric Schmidt to tell you today that you’re getting your wish and that Google will no longer link to you. Beware what you wish for. You’d lose a third of your traffic overnight. If other aggregators (I work with one) and bloggers (I am one) and Facebook all decided to follow suit, you’d lose half your traffic. On most of your sites, only 20 percent of the audience in a day ever sees your homepage and its careful packaging; 4 of 5 readers instead come in through search and links."

As I mentioned in reaction to Henry Porter's article, Google doesn't have to link to news sites - and nor do the rest of us. Jarvis is pretty accurate on user experience of websites too, from my perspective. I have about four news websites I look at everyday (BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, CNN), and most of my other links and news come from Google Reader and it's subsequent links, (or not, seeing as how I often can see the whole post through Reader: there are plenty of the websites themselves I rarely look at).

Another extract:

"You all remember the quote from a college student in The New York Times a year ago, the one that has kept you up at night. Let’s say it together: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” What are you doing to take your news to her? You still expect her to come to you - to your website or to the newsstand - just because of the magnetic pull of your old brand. But she won’t, and you know it. You lost an entire generation. You lost the future of news.

You blew it."

As long as someone is linked up with the tools, perhaps the news will come to them, though they need to allow it to reach them first.

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Andrew Sullivan reflects

This is why he remains my favourite blogger:

"And a democratic country using torture to procure intelligence it can use to justify more torture, and prosecuting a war that never ends against an enemy that can never surrender: this, whatever else it is, is not America as its founders saw it. Again, it is a kind of self-refutation.

Where to go? What to do? You read me flounder every day; and you can find many less conflicted bloggers to read. Maybe I should take a break and live a less examined life for a while. Or maybe I should do what I am still doing: trying to make sense of where I belong, stay praying in a church that has sealed itself off from modernity, cling to a conservatism that begins to feel like a form of solipsism, hang on in the hope that America can reform itself and repair the world a little. I think, in fact, that this is obviously the right and only serious choice. Life is always a temporary and losing battle, an engagement with the deadliness of doing. It just feels deadlier than usual in these past few years of brutally unsentimental education.

Or maybe I should laugh more."

The Final Rocky Mountain News Cover

The Rocky Mountain News, of Colorado, publishes its last edition.

Charles Apple has the final cover the Rocky Mountain News, which has been covering Colorado for nearly 150 years. It finally had to close, with its last issue today. Click here for a larger picture, and here for their website.

(Picture credit to Charles Apple and Kathy Bogan, presentation director of the paper).

There are rumours that the San Francisco Chronicle could close within weeks. Let's hope we don't see another final cover from a classic American newspaper soon - but this seems unlikely.

Hat tip: newspaperescapeplan

The end of the Al Gore Presidency

TA Frank of the New America Foundation has a good assessment of the last eight years on CiF, if only a few hundred Florida voters had stamped a different hole:

'To be sure, Gore did accomplish some good things in foreign policy. The Middle East is definitely better off now that Israel and Palestine are separate states. It was clever to transfer the most diehard West Bank settlers to the Gore Biosphere in North Dakota. But in Iraq, even after the demise of Saddam from virulent salmonella, Qusay has proved to be no more agreeable than his father, and Uday is simply out of control. (Grinding up the players of the national football team and roasting the remains on a stadium-sized spit was the nadir of his coaching.) When a group of foreign-policy luminaries - from Bill Kristol to Paul Wolfowitz and Kenneth Pollack - urged Gore to invade Iraq and remake the entire Middle East, the president didn't even listen. That's rude.'

On Katrina:

'The emergency management agency also took over 24 hours to set up trailers for evacuees along the Gulf Coast, leaving them without government housing assistance for a full day. And Gore's decision to single-handedly venture into a flattened house in Mississippi and free a trapped two-year-old showed him to be an irresponsible showboat. Sure, President Gore knows CPR, hears like a German shepherd, and has the strength of 10 men - but we didn't need to see it.'

Genius. I wonder if similar things will be written in 2017?

US Election Night in Bar One, Sheffield University Union of Students

I've helped to organise a US election party in Bar One, at Sheffield University Union of Students tonight. We've got the bar open until 5am with drinks served until 4, offers on American drinks and American food, a bucking rodeo and BBC and CNN on the big screens, should be a great night!
See how many people might be coming to the event here...

Kudos to the Politics Society, the American Society, the Union Finance Officer and of course Bar One for helping to organise the night.

On a personal note, I'm glad it's going to be over. It's a fantastic distraction. The analysis, from bloggers, news sites, friends and papers is so great one could never get all the perspectives on this election. Watching and reading about it though, as been an absolute fascination. I remember hearing the radio come on in January, in what seems like an age ago telling me Obama had won the Iowa caucas. We've been through the primaries, the controversies, the conventions and it now comes down to the American voters with the eyes of the world watching.

It is the most analysed, most commented on and most anticipated election in history.

Roll on tonight.

Saturday Night Live's VP Debate

Very funny sketch from Saturday Night Live parodying the VP Debate, definitely worth a watch:

McCain, Georgia and a problem like Russia

I've been trying to avoid commenting on US election, despite it being intensely fascinating, as there is so much information, analysis and spin out there already. For me, the most astute commentator on the race is Andrew Sullivan, and I'm certainly not alone there. Despite his economic conservatism on certain issues, I agree with most of what he has to say. But I've been wondering about his comments about Georgia/Russia and the US recently.

Analysing an editorial co-written by Joe Liberman, Sullivan stated:

'What they are laying out in very clear terms is the agenda of a McCain presidency. The agenda is war and the threat of war - including what would be an end to cooperation with Russia on securing loose nuclear materials and sharing terror intelligence, in favor of a new cold war in defense of ... Moldova and Azerbaijan. I'm sure McCain would like to have his Russian cooperation, while demonizing and attacking them on the world stage, but in the actual world, he cannot. Putin and Medvedev are not agreeable figures, and I do not mean in any way to excuse their bullying. But this is global politics, guys, and these are the cold, hard choices facing American policy makers.'

Partly through a process of gentle moderation but also persuaded by Sullivan's own arguments, I have warmed towards Obama on foreign policy considerably. The concept of withdrawal from Iraq has been compromised, proposed and countered by Obama, Bush and Malki to such an extent that it is almost a non-issue now (I say that tentatively). My view that Obama would be good for the US but bad for the world, a view based largely on his willingness to withdraw from Iraq sooner rather than later, is no more. I feel McCain's view of the world differs little from Bush's, and this cannot be healthy when dealing with the Islamist threat in a 'new world order' at the same time as playing good old-fashioned realist diplomacy with Russia and China.

However, I feel a little uncomfortable with Sullivan's points about being 'in favour of a new Cold War in defense of Moldova and Azerbaijan'. The citizens of both these countries deserve not to be bullied by Russia, as do the citizens of Ukraine, Georgia and even Belarus. I think it's a somewhat dismissive comment, and whilst a new Cold War is in no-ones interest, it doesn't mean that the West should not support democracy on Russia's borders. Having a strong and nuclear-powered neighbour who is on the security council doesn't mean you don't have a right to free and fair elections, anymore than having oil-friendly sultans means Middle Eastern states don't have a right to democracy.

Russia needs the West as much as the West needs Russia - be it in the fields of energy or counter-terrorism. But what does Russia have to fear from democratic neighbours? If it's case is strong enough, if it stopped bullying other countries in the form of energy blackmailing, separatist support or bare-knuckled sabre-rattling, than perhaps the citizens of the eastern-bloc and the caucuses would be warmer towards their neighbour rather than engaging in coloured revolutions against leaders who are being poked in the direction constantly by Russia. Than perhaps Russia could know democracy too - for it certainly isn't one now.

Olympics and the US Election Cycle

An occasional mental mussing of mine is tracing back when the previous presidential elections were (easier with a fixed-term system of course). When I tried the same thing with the Olympics, I realised something blatantly obvious - they fall in the same years (with, in the case of the Olympics, some exceptions).

The significance of this, I feel, is twofold. On the one hand for US observers, the Olympics is an opportunity to think about the international stage and the important issues facing US interests across the globe. This year, for example, the strength and growth of China as a campaign issue will only have been heightened by the dazzling opening ceremony and the competition in the medals table. The crisis in Georgia has achieved a greater significance than it otherwise would have, starting as it did at the beginning of the Olympics when Putin and Bush were in the same stadium.

Secondly, for the rest of the world the Olympics is also an excuse to think about the politics of the other nations they are competing against. Although Obama's worldwide appeal, which is as much a reaction against Bush as it is a real enthusiasm for the Illinois Senator, is exceptional, this is likely to be the case every year. No other election garners as much international attention, and taking place at a time when nations are more outward looking than usual anyway due to the Olympics, this can only heighten the attention the US presidential election receives.

Russia and China's Veto of Zimbabwe Sanctions

If there was every a case for Kagan's (and perhaps McCain's) 'League of Democracies', it was Russia and China's disgraceful veto of stronger sanctions against the Zimbabwe regieme.

Both nations fear for their own sovereignty, and knowing that they have no moral authority or proper democratic credentials, decide it prudent to allow the people of Zimbabwe to suffer. The sanctions aren't the only solution. But if Russia and China's repeated opposition to targeting despots or humanitarian intervention continues (see Burma), the long road towards becoming a second League of Nations could well be taken by the U.N.