7th May 2014
By Stefanie Chernow

Ethical Journalism Weekly Roundup: May 8th, 2014

Turkey’s UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize laureate Ahmet Sik on #PressFreedom

Turkish journalist Ahmet Sik has been named the laureate of the 2014 UNESCO Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. He was honoured for his commitment to the defense of press freedom. (via WAN-IFRA)

Freedom of the Press 2014

Global press freedom has fallen to its lowest level in over a decade, according to the latest edition of Freedom House’s press freedom survey. The decline was driven in part by major regression in several Middle Eastern states, including Egypt, Libya, and Jordan; marked setbacks in Turkey, Ukraine, and a number of countries in East Africa; and deterioration in the relatively open media environment of the United States. (via Freedom House)

Irish Media Ombudsman: How the Market Acts As A Press Censor

Press freedom is typically understood to mean freedom from state control. So far, so good. But perhaps it is also time to discuss the elephant in the room. This is the inescapable fact that, where the press is concerned, the power – the unacknowledged power – of the market is, if anything, greater than the power of the state, and that it is a power which needs to be seriously considered in any discussion of the freedom and the responsibility of the press. (via The Guardian)

Pro-Russia trolling below the line on Ukraine stories

Guardian moderators, who deal with 40,000 comments a day, believe there is an orchestrated pro-Kremlin campaign. (via The Guardian)

New service will rate the authenticity of digital images

A new image hosting service, Izitru, is launching to give people new ways to certify the authenticity of a digital image. It’s also a tool that journalists can use to help verify images. (via Poynter)

Public editor: It’s not marriage, it’s slavery

The students, aged 12 to 17, were forced onto a convoy of trucks and while some have escaped, others have been either held hostage or sold into slavery. The news out of Nigeria in this story is that a number of the girls were “sold as brides to Islamist fighters for the equivalent of $13 each.” The phrase “sold as brides” in this wire article does not begin to properly describe the horror of this story. In fact, they have been sold as slaves. (via The Globe And Mail)


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Photo credit: Flickr CC Khalid Albaih