A complicated mix of politics, media and the freedom of both are colliding again in Venezuela after a national court ruled that “for the next four weeks, no newspaper, magazine or weekly of the country can publish images that are violent, bloody, grotesque, whether about crime or not”. This comes as national legislative elections are to be held in the next month and from reaction to the country’s largest newspaper El Nacional publishing an image of an over-filled morgue on its front page last week. After the ruling on Tuesday the paper published blank images with the word “censored” across their front page in protest.

The Guardian reports that “crime regularly tops Venezuelans’ list of concerns. In the absence of complete official figures, which are no longer published, watchdog groups estimate 16,000 people are murdered every year.” Today’s El Nacional led with the question “do you feel that the national feeling of insecurity is to be mostly blamed on the information transmitted by the media?” and they reported that 88% said “no”, their rebuke to the Government’s assertion that “media opponents were using gutter press tactics to sensationalise crime, sell newspapers and damage the country’s socialist revolution”.

I’m sure this all needs to be considered in the complications of local politics, but it is interesting to me that there is a newspaper publishing such shocking images (in whatever context, especially considering the image seems to have been taken last December) and is taking a bold response to censorship. It also amazes me that the censorship could be so ham-fisted, with claims to protect the “psychic and moral integrity of children and adolescents” yet only be in temporary effect until the elections. We’ll see what comes.

Update (8/20): CNN is reporting “Venezuelan judge says newspapers can print violent pictures”: “A judge has lifted an order banning Venezuelan media from printing violent photographs, an official said on state-owned VTV.” Seems like international pressure from press advocates contributed. (via @foodforyoureyes)

This is wonderful. A soccer (football) team in Southampton, Englad, has banned local and national news photographers from covering their games in a bid to force the media to buy photos from the club’s own photographer. The Sun responded with an article that did not once mention the name of the team, “Opposition 0 Plymouth 1.” Better still, the Plymouth Herald decided to draw their coverage of the match. Illustrator (and city historian) Chris Robinson drew images of the goals to accompany the article. Brilliant!

(via the Online Photographer)

Trevor Paglen’s work on the hidden aspects the American military is well worth a look. Peeking into the hidden corners of the American military, his work previously has focused on the patches worn by top secret military units (available as a book, as well), code names used by secret agents, CIA black sites, and signatures found on documents used during “extraordinary rendition”. His new work, Limit-Telephotography, focuses on top secret military facilities that are located in some of the most remote areas of the United States. Using astronomy equipment, Paglen is able to take photographs from miles away, giving the images a hazy quality that speaks volumes about just how little we know about the top secret and confidential American government operations. Be sure not to miss the accounts of Paglen’s trips to photograph these sites, too.

Required supplemental reading: the Washington Post’s two-year long investigation into Top Secret America.

(via The Spinning Head)

 

“There is no right to embed,” Lapan said. “It is a choice made between units and individual reporters, and a key element of an embed is having trust that the individuals are going to abide by the ground rules. So in that instance the command in Afghanistan decided there wasn’t the trust requisite and denied this request.” -DOD spokesman Colonel David Lapan

 

Mother Jones has good coverage of recent developments in Mike Hastings coverage of the war in Afghanistan. The Rolling Stone reporter, previously in the news for his explosive story on General Stanley McChrystal, had been approved for an embed to report from Afghanistan, but as he announced on twitter, it has been unapproved.

I just heard some great news from our friend Ethan Welty who we wrote about in April after he was arrested in Colorado after an environmental protest. As of this week, the charges against him have been dropped. At the time I wrote,

Shortly after the four who had trespassed on the plant’s property were arrested and escorted out police approached Welty, who was on property outside of the power plant, and arrested him. All five were charged with 2nd Degree Criminal trespass, which carries a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $750 fine. Welty is trying to set the record straight, as media is reporting that simply five were arrested at the protest and no one (including the police) is acknowledging that he was there covering the event as a member of the press and that he was obviously not with the four protesters inside the plant.

The arraignments for all five arrested on that day were scheduled for June. To Welty’s knowledge, the four who had been documented trespassing on the coal pile have had their meetings rescheduled to July. Welty had his arraignment rescheduled after a telephone meeting between the District Attorney and his attorney, who is a University of Colorado professor who took the case pro-bono. Following this meeting the DA dismissed the charges. Welty provided this run-down of the reasons:

- the DA, not yet having reviewed the case, was assuming that I had been on the coal pile, so my attorney asks the DA to take a closer look at my case, sending a few of my pictures and mentioning I have several testimonies from witnesses present during the action
- the DA proceeded to contact the police, who informed her that no officers had seen me trespass, and that they had not recorded the name of the Excel Energy security guard who had pointed me out
- with no evidence against me other than the word of an unnamed Excel employee, the DA decided to dismiss my charges rather than to bring my case to trial

This is great news and we are happy for Welty. However he has mentioned that his next step will “be to find a civil (rather than criminal) attorney to scrub official records of my arrest, which to my surprise does not happen automatically when charges are lifted.” There also remains the faulty news accounts of his arrest which we discussed in our original post and were picked up by other websites including re: photo and the always troubling and enlightening Photography is Not a Crime blog.

As well we should mention that Welty has been incredibly busy lately even besides his legal issues. He recently had the cover image of Backpacker Magazine, and was interviewed by the magazine itself to tell you how he did it. He also won an International Conservation Photo Award for an image he made in the North Cascades of our home state of Washington. Oh, and he wrote:

Meanwhile, I’m involved in (too) many projects. In Boulder County, partnering up with photographer Morgan Heim to document local biodiversity for MeetYourNeighbours(.org); in the North Cascades, photographing areas being proposed for national park and wilderness expansion by the conservation community; in Boulder doing my own research on mapping urban agriculture potential which my professors are urging me on to publish. And all that in addition to my classes, glacier research and the more mundane mechanics necessary to maintain momentum as a photographer. I’m excited to be convening (curating) a session on quantitative applications of photography in the Earth Sciences at the huge American Geophysical Union meeting in SF in December.

I’ve already got plans to write about many of those things here on dvafoto when Welty has them finished. Cheers to an energetic and passionate photographer for keeping up the good work and settling up fairly with the law.

A California judge ruled that photographer David Morse’s rights as a journalist were infringed when police seized his camera equipment and photos relating to Morse’s coverage of a December 2009 San Francisco area protest. Police used a court-backed search warrant to take the items. Now, a judge has said that the search of the photographer was improper and violated state laws protecting journalists from having their work seized by authorities. The First Amendment Project assisted Morse in defense for the case. Great news. Photographers: know your rights!

(via lightstalkers)

Newsweek’s hard times continue. While stranded in Beijing, I picked up a copy of the China Daily (the country’s state-run English-language daily newspaper) and saw an interesting item about a Chinese investment group’s recent attempt to purchase Newsweek, the latest step in recent Chinese government- and individual-backed attempts to control China’s image across the globe. The only coverage, unfortunately, is China Daily’s report, but hopefully more deals will be forthcoming over the coming days. There is also a translated interview with the managing editor of Southern Weekly who was involved in the bid, as well as comments from the Chinese internet about the deal.

China’s global media strategy is an important topic. Just as Chinese investors have been taking over worldwide brands and real estate, the country now sees an opportunity to use its strong financial position to influence global opinion about the country and its government by investing in foreign media properties. China Radio International has been running spots on American radio stations, and owns a radio station in Galveston, Texas. There’s a 24-hour news channel aimed to compete against Al Jazeera, CNN, and the BBC. Media executives are being flown to China to for so-called “familiarization” tours. The ironically-named CCTV (China Central Television, the state television news apparatus) now broadcasts around the world in five languages. The goal of these efforts, as senior Fulbright scholar David Shambaugh recently put it in the New York Times, is “to try and raise China’s global profile and improve its image abroad.”

The Newsweek bid is one more such effort. As China Daily reports, it was a coalition of Chinese media professionals and private investors who put forth the money to buy the Washington Post Co. publication. The group, which includes the relatively independent Southern Daily Group, has denied any government involvement in the deal. Nevertheless, the move fits into the China’s general media strategy, a naive attempt to change global opinion about the country. China Daily writes:

Xiang said the move is for the world to have a better understanding of China, and for China to know more of the world.

Importantly, the investors and Chinese media watchers see this bid for Newsweek as only a beginning. Again, in the China Daily report: “The move is an encouraging trend for China’s going-out strategy,” said Yu Guoming, vice-president of the journalism school at the Beijing-based Renmin University of China. “The strategy has, for a long time, focused on overseas expansion of Chinese media.”

More reading: China’s Go-Out Strategy, Can China Successfully Build Soft Power Without A Global Internet Strategy?, Five Have Left Newsweek, Staffers Believe More Are To Follow. But, Lo: Another Potential Bidder! (likely unrelated to the Chinese bid news, but indicative of Newsweek’s current situation)

The Freeman has an interesting look into various states’ efforts to make illegal the recording of police activity. In Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland, wiretapping and eavesdropping laws have been used to prosecute individuals who have recorded police activity in a public location.

“[In three states] it is now illegal to record an on-duty police officer even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.” -Are Cameras the New Guns?

In one example case, motorcyclist Anthony John Graber III was stopped for reckless driving. A plain-clothes police officer stopped him, jumped out of his car waving a gun and screaming, and issued a ticket. Graber had a video camera mounted in his motorcycle helmet; he posted video of the encounter to youtube. Ten days after the police encounter, after police found the video on youtube, Graber was arrested and charged under felony wiretapping laws, which could result in up to 5 years jail time. In December 2009, street artist Christopher Drew found himself in a similar situation in Chicago. Drew was arrested while selling art on the streets of Chicago as a test of the cities anti-peddler law. During the arrest, police officers found a small audio recorder that was recording and charged Drew under felony wiretapping laws; Drew faces 4-15 years in prison. As the Freeman reports, not everyone in the legal realm agrees with these policies: Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice Margaret Marshall dissented to a 2001 ruling upholding charges stemming from recording police activity, “Citizens have a particularly important role to play when the official conduct at issue is that of the police. Their role cannot be performed if citizens must fear criminal reprisals….”

For further reading, keep up with Carlos Miller’s Photography is Not a Crime blog. Since his own arrest in 2007 for photographing Miami police (he was acquitted of all charges), Miller has been chronicling cases of First Amendment violations, many of which involve photographers arrested for taking pictures in public places. And take a look at the excellent Photographer’s Rights pamphlet for US photographers.

(via metafilter)

Watch CBS News Videos Online

I know this a few days old by now, but I didn’t see this get too much traction in the parts of the internet I frequent… In the video above, a Coast Guard patrol boat prevents a CBS news crew from accessing a beach affected by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Most disturbing is the reason cited, “These are BP’s rules, not ours….,” which gives the appearance of US government officials enforcing private company policy as an arrestable offense.

Since the incident, the Coast Guard has officially responded to the allegations: “Neither BP nor the U.S. Coast Guard, who are responding to the spill, have any rules in place that would prohibit media access to impacted areas and we were disappointed to hear of this incident. In fact, media has been actively embedded and allowed to cover response efforts since this response began, with more than 400 embeds aboard boats and aircraft to date. Just today 16 members of the press observed clean-up operations on a vessel out of Venice, La. The only time anyone would be asked to move from an area would be if there were safety concerns, or they were interfering with response operations.” This is not much comfort. Vague appeals to “safety” and the success of the embed program only set off my concerns more. By only allowing journalists to access the spill through official channels, the government and companies control what information is available to the public and other interested parties. Only unrestricted, open access to the affected areas will allow journalists to tell the full story of the environmental tragedy as it unfolds and after. ProPublica sums the problem up well:

“BP hasn’t yet been able to stop the flow of oil, but it’s been more successful at controlling the information coming out about the Gulf disaster.”

The rest of the ProPublica coverage of access to information about the oil spill is well worth a read.

Jonas Lara had been fighting the Los Angeles court system for the better part of this year when he learned that his charges were dropped. PDNPulse reports that Lara was arrested while working on a long-term documentary essay about graffiti writers and charged with trespassing, vandalism, and the destruction of a fence at the location. It’s very similar to Ethan Welty’s case, which we recently wrote about. After appealing to the ACLU, who turned down the case, Lara appealed to friends, family, and colleagues to set up a legal fund so he could fight the bogus charges. Armed with this legal fund, Lara hired a lawyer who hit the ground running with legal challenges to the prosecution’s case. Key evidence had gone missing, and the charges were lessened. Then, after talks with the property owner, Lara agreed to pay a $200 restitution to compensate the property owner for money spent on the cleanup, other charges were dropped, and the judge ordered the Los Angeles Police Department to return Lara’s gear. Crucial to the case, apparently, were letters from Lara’s colleagues affirming his work as a journalist and evidence such as IRS business registration showing that he is a working photojournalist.

I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more cases like this as staff jobs disappear and news organizations shrink. The news will still be gathered, but at much more considerable risk to journalists. Without the institutional and financial support a newspaper, freelancers are stuck out in the cold when legal problems arise. As seen in this case, legal fees can be daunting and criminal charges are frightening; were it not for donations and support from friends, family, and colleagues, the photographer likely would have been unable to fight the bogus charges and escape jail time or get his gear back.