Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

I once applied for a job at Borders since talking about books is my favorite topic of conversation. I didn’t drink coffee at the time, so of course when I was hired, the Borders management put me in the café instead of on the book floor.

I’ve stayed away from discussing books on this blog (well except this one earlier time), mainly because I’ve been too busy to read them. But over the holiday weekend, I read two: Boomsday by Christopher Buckley and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

They could not be more wildly different, as Boomsday is a satire along the lines of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” while Persepolis is a graphic memoir about Satrapi’s life in Iran following the 1979 revolution. Guess which one was more fun?

(more…)

Since the NYC marathon is coming up, I was just thinking of the last major sports event (other than the MLB playoffs) – the Olympics. Ready for my train of thought? Because that led to thoughts of media censorship in China, which led to thoughts of media censorship in America and elsewhere.

Regarding the vp debate earlier this month, Sarah Palin said she was thrilled to talk to Americans “without that filter of mainstream media trying to…censor some of my comments as we lay out the contrasts between these two different tickets.”

That’s nothing, compared to other places in the world.

According to Human Rights Watch, many Iranian citizens have officially been denied some freedom of the press rights since early 2000. Iranian courts censored independent print media because they discussed societal issues and promoted change. Over the course of five years, more than 100 newspapers and journals were shut down and many journalists, writers, and intellectuals were incarcerated. As a result, web users started expressing their dissatisfaction with the Iranian government online. In 2004, the courts started imprisoning online journalists, bloggers, and website technicians, blocking websites that were critical of the government or that published stories the government wanted to keep quiet, fining internet service providers that allowed access to sites the government believed should be blocked, and trying to limit or eliminate the creation of blogs.

Following is a humorous anecdote from a BBC article about the situation. In the article there is a segment that deals with the arrest of a journalist and blogger. Here’s what that article says:
Iran’s minister for information technology, Ahmad Motamedi, added that there was “no punishment defined” for people publishing material the government did not agree with, despite the detention of Sina Motallebi, an Iranian blogger and journalist, earlier in 2003.
Dr. Motamedi first insisted he knew nothing of the story, and then said the writer “has been arrested but not in relation to weblogs.”
The minister offered an example, “If somebody is a weblog writer, and kills somebody, should they not be arrested?”

Am I the only one who finds this ridiculous?

What the hell is on this vessel?

For anyone that follows piracy off the coast of Somalia and the Suez Canal, this bit of news reported by the ZA Times is at best surreal and at worst, terrifying.

Somali pirates have struck again – seizing an Iranian cargo freighter, the MV Iran Deyanat, 80 nautical miles off the coast of Yemen. The ship belongs to Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL), a state owned company operated by the Iranian Military.

Routine criminality on the high seas? Guess again. According to the Times, “Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill ‘within days’ of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died.”

The reason? 42500 tons of the ship’s mysterious cargo which is described in the manifest as “minerals” and “industrial products.” Now I’m no medical or seafaring expert but some of these symptoms awfully resemble radiation damage to me.

“Our sources say it contains chemicals, dangerous chemicals,” said Andrew Mwangura, Director of the East African Seafarers Assistance Program.

So let’s go over this one more time. We have a ship owned by the Iranian military, full of radioactive material (or something equally bad) coming from… where? You guessed it. Nanjing, China.

According to the same vague manifest, the ship was actually headed for Rotterdam to make a delivery to a German client. But according to the US Treasury Department, the IRISL has a tendency to falsify their records. Some Somali sources are convinced that the ship was actually headed to Eritrea.

The Deyanat is still at large and the pirates demand ransom. Negotiations are currently under way between the pirates and the governments of Iran and Puntland. Iranian news also reported that the US offered their own ransom, but US officials would not confirm.

Be afraid, Clancy readers. Be very very afraid.