By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, India, Aug 31 (Asia Media Forum) – Rasik Rasheed’s (not his real name) hefty Internet bills hardly bother his family. Cooped up at home due to curfews and strikes here for nearly three months now, youngsters like him have been busy not just with their studies but with waging what they call the Kashmir struggle on the Internet.
By Rodney Diola*
HONG KONG Aug 20 (Asia Media Forum) – The hostage mayhem in the Philippines assumed such a nightmarish quality it might as well have been President Aquino’s bitterest political enemy, his scandal-plagued predecessor Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who had stage-managed the whole fiasco.
By Kara Santos
MANILA, Aug 28 (Asia Media Forum) – In the wake of the bungled hostage-rescue operation that left eight Hong Kong tourists and the gunman dead, the Philippine media are finding themselves a target of anger by many who say that sensationalism and no-holds-barred coverage added to the bloody end to a crisis they call an international embarrassment.
By Ashfaq Yusufzai
ISLAMABAD, Jul 27 (Asia Media Forum) – Tired of fear-based propaganda coming over the airwaves used by extremist militants in Pakistan’s volatile regions near Afghanistan, radio producers are working on ways to reclaim this medium and relearn the skills to make it relevant to residents’ daily lives.
By Li Tao
China’s media landscape has changed drastically in recent years in which the country’s rapid economic growth has had a major role to play. The reform and opening up and the subsequent relaxation of government regulations saw the birth of market-oriented media in China, after which even flagship Party newspapers began publishing profitable weeklies and dailies.
By Lynette Lee Corporal
PATHUM THANI, Thailand, Jul 8 (IPS) — Teenage boys gape at a coloured photograph of a vagina, while girls give embarrassed smiles as they watch a cartoon that showed penises ‘talking’ about masturbation. Young girls crowd around a display panel on love and relationships, as a boy embraces a female mannequin with all his might in order to measure the strength of his hug.
By Nurul Kabir (Published in New Age, October 3, 2010)
NO DOUBT the odds are against dissenters in any nation’s judicial system. But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence.
Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A personal history of our times, p 162
We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to……
By Marites Danguilan Vitug
When I started out in journalism 30 years ago as a reporter for ‘Business Day’, my publisher, Raul Locsin, embedded in our young reporters’ minds one important value: independence. We were not beholden to anyone. We were neither establishment nor opposition. We were not with the so-called “alternative press” during the benighted years under Ferdinand Marcos.
By Stanislaus Jude Chan
SINGAPORE, Jul 30 (Asia Media Forum) – “Chewing gum is banned in Singapore?” a curious friend in Bangkok asks. Encouraged by my nod, she cautiously probes: “What happens when you get caught, death sentence?”
You laugh. Perhaps the question was almost child-like in its naivety. But it highlights the far-reaching reputation of a government that freely dishes out harsh penalties on every imaginable “crime”. The result is no laughing matter: a climate of fear that looms over citizens – and foreigners – like a hangman’s noose.
Aung Htun (not his real name) is one of the young video journalists featured in the award-winning feature documentary ‘Burma VJ (Reporting from a Closed Country)’.
The Anders Østergaard-helmed film, which has won 40 awards in the international film circuit including the Berlin Film Festival 2009 and the Sundance Film Festival 2009, revolves around the video journalists’ cat-and-mouse game with the Burmese junta while covering the monk-led mass protests in September 2007.
Since coming off the press in March 2010, ‘Shadow of Doubt: Probing the Supreme Court’ has had many readers prowling about the dignified shadows that are the domain of the Philippines’Supreme Court, which sits at the apex of a judiciary system meant to be a keeper of democracy. The book continues to make waves at a time when issues of governance and democracy are at the fore, as a new President takes on the reins of this South-east Asian country.
Young Indian women are taking to journalism in droves, but Ammu Joseph, author of several authoritative books on women in media, believes that these numbers do not necessarily translate into gender awareness. IPS Asia-Pacific’s Ranjit Devraj interviews Ammu Joseph, Indian journalist, author and media watcher.
New!
TheAsiaMediaForum.org is a space for journalists to share insights on issues related to the media and their profession, as well as stories, information and opinions on democracy, development and human rights in Asia.
