The appointment of a high government official in the body that governs Estonia’s public broadcaster is opening a can of worms. He promises to keep his two hats apart – but some people don’t trust him. On 3 May 2017, Riigikogu, Estonia’s parliament, appointed Paavo Nogene to the post of Chancellor of the Ministry of…
Italian lawmakers have reacted to the spread of fake news and misinformation with an authoritarian law. Far from solving the problem, though, it in fact creates even more. A new strain of meningitis brought in by African immigrants ravages the country. Members of parliament pass a law setting up a “crisis fund” for their survival…
Media and journalism are changing fast and so should the media research agenda. Analyzing the role of social media in the recent elections in America, Farhad Manjoo wrote in the New York Times on 16 November 2016 that widespread misinformation online was a “primary factor in the race’s outcome.” I would add that some mainstream media have…
Local journalists are investing much hope in the newly installed power in Myanmar to reform the country’s media system. But that will be a gargantuan task. Manny Maung argues that it will happen, but slowly. Myanmar has for the first time in five decades sworn in an elected president without military ties. The road towards democracy…
Shortly after grabbing the country’s political helm, Croatia’s government has begun brashly purging institutions of whomever is not their friend. The public broadcaster HRT is one of their more prominent victims. Croatia’s public service broadcaster, Croatian Radiotelevision (Hrvatska Radiotelevizija, HRT), has undergone many crises in the past two and a half decades, like many of…
The Romanian public service broadcaster has undergone scores of crises in the past two and a half decades. But now, talk about its insolvency is starting to get serious. The decision-makers’ obsession with the politics involved rather than the reality is likely to provide the last nail in Romanian public media’s coffin. Managed by an interim board…
Chinese authorities have never liked dissenting voices. Now, they want to solve that problem by removing foreign players from their internet. This would be a major blow for international news producers. The Chinese government traditionally doesn’t cope well with critical voices and has done all they can to fence opinionated people off of its internet….
Is it right for Apple to refuse a government’s request to create software to snoop into a terrorist’s phone? Three legal experts say it was the right call. Doing otherwise would have set a dangerous precedent. A lot of noise has been made about the open letter Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO sent after the US…
In summer 2015, a much-criticized decision by Europe’s human rights court left online portals anxious about what comments they allowed on their sites. Now, the same court has reversed that decision in a lawsuit lodged by two Hungarian websites. That means less stress for online media. The legal implications of online comments had been somewhat…
We have more media, but only a few very powerful companies controlling them. Can anything be done against this hegemony? Professor Des Freedman offers a recipe: “Be the media, know the media, change the media.” He also calls on academics to come out of their ivory towers and join in the policy battles. “We’re facing…