Facebook denudes democracy?

(denude = diminish, undermine)

More and more of us are growing used to Facebook as the site where we encounter news media content, ignoring its intrusiveness and focusing on its convenience.

If Facebook decides to censor content that can be as impactive (maybe more in some cases) than formal regulators or government intervention (which often backfires).

This latest example calls to mind the debate over a Scorpions album cover. Both centre on a nude image of a child, making discussing the cases problematic.

The CEO of Aftenposten’s publisher, Schibsted Media Group, said Facebook had tried to stop the newspaper publishing “one of the most important photos of our time”. Rolv Erik Ryssdal added: “It is not acceptable. Facebook’s censorship is an attack on the freedom of expression – and therefore on democracy.”

Facebook deletes Norway PM's post as 'napalm girl' row escalates http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-deletes-norway-pms-post-napalm-girl-post-row?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

See also Nudity and Facebook's censors have a long history

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-history-censoring-nudity-automated-human-means?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

Zuckerberg continues to claim that Facebook is not a media company, just a technology company. But it is one with arguably more power than any other organisation on the planet for influencing the news agenda through promotion or censorship.

FACEBOOK BACKED DOWN AFTER ALL THE TERRIBLE PUBLICITY
Facebook backs down from 'napalm girl' censorship and reinstates photo

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-reinstates-napalm-girl-photo?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

The likes of Mark Zuckerberg already rule the media. Now they want to censor the past

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/09/mark-zuckerberg-censor-facebook-tech-titans?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

ADVERTISER POWER YouTube censors demonetised videos

A notable outcry here, as it reinforces one of the fundamental lessons needed to grasp the complexities of media regulation: advertisers form a de facto, informal regulator. If they won't pay for space in your outlet, in most media industries that will lead to a revenue crisis.

Chomsky has advertiser power as one of the five filters in his propaganda model.

The row and resignation over the Daily Telegraph spiking critical stories about HSBC to protect its advertising account with the bank; the 1960s manoeuvres of The Times to get rid of its new working class readers when advertisers refused to pay any extra for these non-ABC1s; Murdoch closing NoTW only when multiple advertiser boycotts were announced, with more to follow after social media campaigns, which threatened to contaminate other News Corp outlets; the fate of the Daily Herald, a left-wing, union owned paper that was for a time the biggest selling in the world, but would ultimately collapse and reappear as Murdoch's right-wing S*n ...

Some of the trashy YouTube content undermined by YouTube withdrawing ads from 'unsuitable' videos may appear trivial, but the principles of freedom of speech and media diversity are always most easily undermined by picking soft targets to establish censorial practices that can then be arbitrarily widened.

YouTube and Facebook, together with their all-important advertisers, exist as largely unregulated behemoths, gaining an ever expanding role in the media landscape. Censorship, whether it comes down to algorithm 'tweaks' or demonetising videos matters as mainstream media's reliance on digital platforms, not least these two, grows.

With more and more low/micro-budget and back catalogue films going online, not least through YouTube, this can also be viewed as an alternative form of regulation to the formal BBFC system.

YouTube video makers protest as ads are stripped from 'inappropriate' content.

LIBEL Mail faces $150m Trump suit

Read Guardian article here.

Another major example of the difficulty facing any NATIONAL regulator, and the limitations of any media regulator when the rich can always use law courts.

A suit has been filed in Maryland claiming an extraordinary $150m damages after a Mail article is claimed to have defamed Donald Trump's wife Melania.

Unlike the Gawker case this is not enough to bankrupt the Mail - but if they lose it surely will have a huge impact on the press in the UK and beyond.

Trump is using the same lawyer that successfully claimed huge damages in the Hulk Hogan case, seeing Gawker go bust.

This is something of a reverse from recent years when the UK was widely used for libel tourism as accusers were more likely to win than in their home country and also to gain much harsher punishments and publishing restrictions.

Trump has launched 100s of libel suits and legal cases - never forget that the sheer cost of defending these is a serious issue for many media outlets, who will be more reluctant to fulfil their democratic reporting function when it comes to Trump as a result.

IPSO, just like the PCC, has nothing to say on this - shouldn't it (with OfCom?) be a factor here?

See: Melania Trump sues Daily Mail for $150m over 'lies' about her past.

IPSO 2015 Report Sun as worse than Mail!

News UK tops list of complaints upheld in 2015 by Ipso - quite an achievement to beat the Daily Mail

OWNERSHIP CHINA Hong Kong press muzzled

Mysterious confession fuels fears of Beijing's influence on Hong Kong's top newspaper.

HISTORY banned for not being racist in 40s USA

A quote I've picked up on as
(1) it shows you can glean useful material from all sorts of sources, and
(2) its a sharp example of how profoundly censorship has shifted to reflect evolving social values

To be clear, this is about a stage musical - NOT a film (the movie came out shortly after, in 1950).

Peter Guralnick (1994) Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. London: Abacus.

'In the late 1940s [Memphis city censor Lloyd Binford] banned the stage musical Annie Get Your Gun, because it had a Negro railroad conductor and "we don't have any negro conductors in the South. Of course it can't show here. It's social equality in action."' (p.46)

IPSO asserts rule over US website Mail Scientology article

What makes this significant is not so much the appearance of IPSO being tougher than its abysmal predecessor, but its assertion over UK newspaper websites run in another country, an area of much uncertainty.

As ever with press regulation, the principles aren't necessarily so clearcut - this is a good thing, right?
Yes and no...
YES: the press has been using this as a means to get round regulation, and their foreign sites blend unique localised content with material from the main site/paper.
NO: isn't it unfair that rival US papers have no such concerns? Also: This is now a clearly globalised market - does a UK regulator make sense?

Digitisation has severely muddied the waters of regulation.

Mail Online refused to defend its story, saying the events had taken place in the US, and the piece was commissioned, written and edited by journalists working in its American operation. 

As a result it was designed to comply with US law and journalistic conventions, not UK ones as regulated by Ipso.Ipso rejected this and said the Mail Online article had failed to follow UK rules on inaccurate, misleading or distorted information. 

“[Mail Online] had not demonstrated the process by which it had regard for the complainant’s previous denials of the allegations,|” said Ipso.  

“Nor had it explained why it had failed to include his representative’s position, explained prior to publication, that the allegations which had been put to him were untrue. It had also failed to provide a defence of the accuracy of the article, or its decision not to publish a correction.” 

Ipso ordered Mail Online to publish its adjudication on the case in full on its website with a link on its homepage for 24 hours. 

Scientology leader's complaint over Mail Online's Tom Cruise story upheld.

MPAA try to stub out smoking hot topic

The whole basis of the MPAA's voluntary (unlike the BBFC, it doesn't have statutory powers, but its ratings are followed by most major retailers and exhibitors) rating system faces a legal challenge, with the tobacco industry keen to ensure that smoking on screen is ... accessible to children.

Perhaps the classic image of Hollywood glamour, Audrey Hepburn

Telegraph May not criticise Theresa

Guido Fawkes is a noted right-wing website. It flags up here how the Torygraph (nickname for the Daily Telegraph, a right-wing traditionally pro-Tory quality or broadsheet) ripped apart the claims of Theresa May to be a 'safe pair of hands' with an article during the Tory leadership campaign ... then swiftly took it down and removed it from their website. There were rivals seen as even more right-wing than May, but she quickly won without a vote when these figures quit the race, a shift that may have seen the Telegraph move to show support for the new Tory PM, never mind its readers or supposed democratic function.

Read more here.

CHINA Ghostbusters spooks censors

Another example of foreign film censorship.

Ghostbusters in line for China ban due to supernatural theme.

Conjuring 2 disappearing trick from French cinema

Extraordinary case - a horror movie proved too effective, leading to fights over some audience members screaming at scary parts, and so it has been effectively banned from cinemas in France as the main cinema chains have withdrawn it.

A number of cinemas in France are cancelling screenings of The Conjuring 2 following troublesome occurrences of “loud laughter”, “hysterical yelling” and violent altercations. 

The French newspaper Le Parisien has reported that the majority of the 262 French cinemas initially planning to show the Enfield-set chiller have removed it from their programmes following disruptive conduct. Some Paris cinemas axed it on release day, according to 20 Minutes; the reason cited at Cyrano de Versailles cinema was to “ensure the safety of staff and customers”.  

An “altercation” at the MK2 Bastille cinema apparently escalated into a large-scale brawl after one group annoyed other audience members by “screaming at the slightest movement” on screen. 

Le Parisien reports that staff were unwilling to intervene, leading other cinemagoers to take action.One of the country’s major cinema chains, UGC, has opted not to show the film at all as part of an “editorial choice” to cut back on its genre content.The Conjuring 2 has exceeded expectations at the box office, having so far made $276m (£213m) worldwide – on course to beat the £246m of the original. Annabelle, a spin-off based on the unnerving dolly featured in the first film, made £198m. 

That film also provoked disturbances in screenings in France, with multiplex managers removing it from schedules “for security reasons”. Similar scenes of auditorium mayhem were also reported during French screenings of Paranormal Activity and Sinister.

The Conjuring 2 pulled from French cinemas after disorder during screenings.

Canary on BBC anti-left-wing bias

The BBC routinely gets attacked by left and right for bias against them - this lengthy article provides you with a detailed analysis from a left-wing perspective, using a range of very specific examples, not least the rather extraordinary treatment and coverage of Jeremy Corbyn, but also Israel and much more.

There has been considerable research now published into how the wider media have covered Corbyn - finding he is rarely directly quoted in mostly hostile articles and features.

Article.

China - state censorship by the book

More examples of what authoritarian media regulation looks like - useful to bear in mind to balance out any attacks you want to make on Western censorship. Chomsky, of course, argues that ownership, advertiser power etc (the five filters) perform the same job less controversially for the hegemonic forces who shape 'our' supposedly democratic media.

China bans news coverage of Hong Kong bookseller abduction.

Press power in EU referendum, history of Mail might

Great article that provides some historical context for the current, overwhelming right-wing bias of the UK press, which seemingly proved decisive in the 2016 Brexit vote. Here's a short sample - spot the Curran and Seaton book title in there ...:

There’s another consistent and important thread in the Mail’s long political story too. The Mail is a newspaper that wants power. The Mail is a player not an observer, today as in the past. It was the campaign against Stanley Baldwin’s leadership of the Tory party by Lord Rothermere’s Mail and Lord Beaverbrook’s Express in 1931 that triggered Baldwin’s famous onslaught about the proprietors aiming at power – “and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”. These are words that could echo through the Mail’s coverage of the EU debate without a single change, as do Baldwin’s less often quoted comments that the press were “engines of propaganda” whose methods were “falsehood, misrepresentation, half-truths [and] … suppression”. 

I looked up Baldwin’s great speech this week when the Mail, unlike almost every other newspaper, put nothing whatever about the Orlando gay club massacre on its front page on Monday. By any standards this brutal attack was the main story of the day. Every other newspaper led with it. Meanwhile what was the Mail’s front-page headline? It was “Fury over plot to let 1.5m Turks in Britain”. The Orlando story wasn’t on pages two or three either. These were political priorities, not journalistic ones.

Just as with film, we need to be careful in assuming influence from a biased press - media effects is a tricky area! This is, to be fair, less contentious: when the bulk of the UK public have been exposed to decades of hyperbole and frequently made-up anti-EU stories, Euroscepticism is hardly surprising. Its that long-term impact of bias that is crucial, just as its the months and years of anti-Labour/left-wing coverage that makes it hard for the likes of Jeremy Corbyn to prosper - NOT the final editorials.

The EU referendum is a battle of the press versus democracy.

Gawker libel suit Its the end of the word as we know it

American wrestling in the shape of Hulk Hogan may seem an odd topic for an aspiring academic to get into (although hopefully doing a Media course and any half-decent degree will teach you that there is much to learn from the seemingly trivial), but here is what will become a classic example of abuse of libel laws.

The UK was used for libel tourism, the rich and powerful taking advantage of libel laws that were much too easy to use to silence the media (and/or to claim huge damages), with super injunctions (e.g. Guardian and Trafigura, and the Ryan Giggs cases) another much-abused libel tool showing how significant the wider law is.

You can't grasp media regulation by studying the formal regulators alone.

Here we have a case in which a vengeful venture capitalist funded a lawsuit by the wrestler which has caused Gawker (which once upset this VC) to go bust and be sold off. The case was lodged in Florida - where state law means that it doesn't matter if you appeal, you legally must pay up whatever damages the initial judge sets immediately, a variation on the once rampant UK libel tourism.

Read more here.

On a lighter note (though you could decipher the semiotics of the Aryan figure...),

"Whatcha gonna do, brother? Whatcha gonna do when Hulkamania runs wild on you?"