"We have asked the Australian embassy in Washington, DC to investigate this incident," Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said on Tuesday, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison demanded an investigation into the alleged assault. "I want to get further advice on how we would go about registering Australia’s strong concerns with the responsible local authorities in Washington," she added.

Craig McPherson, Seven Network’s Director of News and Public Affairs, in turn, said, it was "nothing short of wanton thuggery."

"They weren’t in anyone’s way – just doing their job," McPherson said, adding that the company will file its own complaints against the police’s behavior, calling the incident "abhorrent."

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/490497-australian-journalists-assaulted-washington/

See also:

Female journalists say they feel “violated” by a sexist forum that has been posting personal images and lewd comments about women in the Australian media industry for more than a decade.

Hundreds of high-profile journalists and emerging reporters have had their images uploaded onto the forum, which also posts suggestive images of Australian actresses, female sports stars and models.

Photos lifted from female journalists’ social media accounts show them exercising and socialising with friends, alongside objectifying comments such as “[it’s] about time they changed the camera angle to show some leg” and “superb tits”.

While most images show women fully clothed, several topless images of one reporter, taken six years ago when she worked as a model, have also been posted on the site.

ABC reporter Lily Mayers said she discovered photos of herself in a bikini on the forum that she’d posted on her private Instagram account while holidaying in Hawaii eight years ago. 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/07/sexist-forum-posts-hundred...

Read from top.

By Eric ZUESSE 

A friend happens to run a web-archiving service and has been coming under intense pressure to remove allegedly “false” Web-pages from his archive’s records. This would be censorship by that Web-archive. I sent him this note arguing that he should not:

Once you get into doing that, you will lose all credibility yourself.

Right now, your credibility is that you censor nothing. Censoring is not your function. If you start to censor, then you will be taking sides in partisan conflicts. That’s for others to do — NEVER a Web-archive, because then it’s a selective Web-archive, and that means untrustworthy AS a “Web archive.” The beauty of being a Web-archive is that it makes no content-judgments. (Its users do, whenever they select a Web-page as being something that’s important enough to be archived; but that is their decision, to copy that page, not your decision.) Because if it does — if a Web-archive makes any content-judgments — then it is doing what it should NEVER do. It’s not equipped to make such judgments, of what is worth copying and preserving and what is not. Making such judgments is only for CONTENT-PROVIDERS, and their audiences, to do. If you do it, then your credibility will be shot. (Users will come to know that what they archive there might subsequently become removed. If pages become removed by you, you won’t be reliable to them as an archive.)

But I go even further; I have argued against ANY censorship, at all, ever, even by a content-provider.

The ultimate arbiter regarding what is true and what is false is inevitably going to be the recipient of the given statement, and not the people who produce or ‘authenticate’ it. If that recipient simply has faith in other persons as ‘authorities’ or ‘honest’, then that recipient becomes the mental slave of those particular producers of ‘truth’. Because of such ‘authority’, that individual’s judgment is then being controlled by others. It’s a 1984-type mentality, ideal for any dictatorship to survive; it is deadly to any democracy — it is the mentality that kills democracy. The only individual who has the actual right to censor what one receives is oneself.

However, I failed there to note something that is important regarding how censorship is, in fact, practiced in the United States and other multi-party dictatorships; and this highlights why you especially ought to avoid all content-judgments:

As you know, Democrats expose themselves to Democratic Party (generally called “liberal”) ‘news’-media, and Republicans expose themselves to Republican Party (generally called “conservative”) ‘news’-media; so, the two groups often disagree, but both Parties are controlled by billionaires (just different factions of billionaires); and, therefore, the supreme filter (which excludes the most-essential facts — the facts that all of them want to be secret) is the billionaire-class itself, which controls both Parties and clearly does not represent the public, even though it controls the U.S. Government. Consequently, for example, essential truths (such as these) get excluded by all of the mainstream U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media (which are owned and controlled by U.S.-and-allied billionaires). The multi-partisan consensus, or mainstream, in a multi-party dictatorship will therefore exclude the truths that are the most essential ones in order for the public to be able to understand the socio-political reality. And that’s what a dictatorship does (it filters out the most-essential truths) — regardless of whether it is a one-party dictatorship or a multi-party dictatorship. Such truths, as these, can be found only outside the Establishment’s ‘news’-media.

A common way that billionaires deceive the public to think that their multi-party country is a democracy is to propagandize, via media they own or scholars whom they fund, against the Government’s, or against “publicly funded,” media, as if all censorship comes only from governmental officials, and to ignore that the billionaires control not only for-profit and non-profit media, and endowed university chairs, but also the Government itself, which is being run by officials whom billionaires have themselves helped to place into power; so, attacking only the Government’s media is a fake way of attacking the entire system of mass-deception that the billionaires control. The form by which billionaires control the media — by a corporation, or by a non-profit, or by the government — is actually almost irrelevant.

If the most-essential truths in order to understand the socio-political reality are being filtered-out, then the voters are effectively being controlled; then they are not free agents, democracy then can’t possibly exist there; they are effectively being controlled. The most-essential truths are the ones that both liberal and conservative ‘news’-media hide. You can’t do anything about this, but the worst thing to do would be to add to their censorship.

Your service is for historians. We rely heavily upon the records that you store. We do not expect any filtering, at all, in what you do, because we expect your service to be entirely impartial. Do you not agree that far too much partiality already exists in the Web-content itself, and that anything which you might do, to add yet another layer to such partiality, will be a disservice to the historical profession?

A common phrase is “History is written by the victors,” but if you will be umpiring the Web, then you will be participating in the determination of whom the “winner” will end up being. Would that be rigging the game — even if doing so ‘after-the-fact’? Should you be an umpire? Should your judgments be in the picture, at all? If they are, then why shouldn’t your users distrust your judgments, and distrust you as an archive?

I hold that there is no alternative: If you add to the judgments, then not only do you become part of the problem, but you can’t reasonably be excused for your being part of the problem (of rigging ‘democracy’). You simply don’t belong in the picture, at all. The participants in the game do, but you certainly DO NOT. The participants can be excused for judging, because that’s an essential thing for them to do in order for anyone to participate in any game. But if you judge, then you can’t be excused, because judging isn’t part of your function. It would not only be unprofessional; it would be unethical; it would be prejudicial, even though your exercise of judgment is coming after the game was played. It would be yet more of “History is written by the victors.” It wouldn’t be merely retrospective. You don’t belong in the game, at any time. You are not an umpire. You are not a judge. Only the participants in the game have a right to do that. You don’t.

Unfortunately, there are content-editors and producers, whom the billionaires’ organizations hire in order to filter out the essential truths. I hope that you will not affirm what they do, but will, instead, just passively let and allow and store, at your archive, whatever contents that they publish and which their readers copy into your archive, so as to allow that to constitute 100% of the content-judgment, the entirety of the game, that ends up being stored in your archive.

Read more:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/06/07/censorship-central-rol...

Read from top.

See also:

freedom of the media in the wrong place at the wrong time... in of civilisation and CHAOS...

Two Russian journalists were hurt while reporting from the scene of an intense confrontation in front of the federal court in Portland, according to a Sputnik correspondent covering the same events. Vyacheslav Arkhipov, a cameraman with a Russian Channel One, was hit with a baton and thrown to the ground. His camera was smashed by an officer.

His colleague, Yulia Olkhovskaya, was targeted while filming the protest with her phone. An officer took the device and the helmet she was wearing and pushed her to the ground, the reporter said.

A senior official from Channel One said the two were not seriously hurt in the incident, but the damage to their equipment appeared significant.

Speaking after the incident, Olkhovskaya said her cameraman fared worse than she did. “One [officer] hit him in the right arm with a baton with all [their] strength while another one grabbed his camera and smashed it on the ground,”she said in an interview. According to her account, the officers emerged from the courthouse and were wearing khaki gear, indicating that they were federal rather than Portland police. 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/495488-russian-journalists-hurt-portland/

See toon at top.

More than 70 journalists and staff at Hungary's top news site Index have resigned, accusing the government of launching a bid to destroy or tame their website.

Index is the last of Hungary's key independent media and editor in chief Szabolcs Dull was fired on Tuesday.

Its journalists said the sacking was "clear interference" and an attempt to apply pressure on the site.

Hours later protesters gathered in Budapest to rally for media freedom.

Over the past decade, supporters of nationalist and conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban have gradually taken control of Hungary's independent media. Hungary is ranked 89th out of 180 countries on the Reporters without Borders World Press Freedom Index.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53531948

Read from top.