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(Thumbnail photo credit: The Philippine Daily Inquirer)

National Artist Francisco Sionil Jose disses Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa and says there is no censorship in the time of Duterte. Jose has been making loquacious claims lately without basis (like when he said no media station was closed by Duterte). But I have a story to tell from the first-person perspective. The Philippine Daily Inquirer had censored me.

Ten opinion columns of mine never saw print in the Inquirer online edition, even though they were published in the broadsheet edition. When one is published in print but not online, it means the article cannot be shared digitally in social media, which had become the most common way of ensuring the widest-possible readership.

One can only understand the reason behind the censorship: political umbrage. It was used as a tool to prevent criticism against influential political figures.

For sure, there were alternative platforms to share the censored article online. To the consternation perhaps of Inquirer.net, friends and colleagues in the Inquirer Opinion page made sure I had the printed article shared in social media.

Even as the censorship was effectively challenged by the articles posting in in social media, Inquirer.net never cared. Two weeks later, another article was censored, and so forth and so on. The pattern was predictable. It was designed for one to break down and stop writing.

In the beginning, one would think it was simply clerical error. One, of course, seeks recourse from the opinion editor. The opinion editor was new and had accepted that position despite not having a personality of approachability (Dont ask me because that's beyond my pay grade).

Before the chairman of the board could compose a coherent answer for the opinion editor to relay to me, the papers insiders had already given me, albeit secretly, the reason: Inquirer.net had a standing editorial policy not to publish anything unfavorable to Bongbong Marcos and Bong Go. The policy apparently affected even news stories which had to show a favorable slant. In fact, demoralization was brewing among the online news staff. The Inquirer has more than a dozen opinion writers. Of all writers, why was I singled out? You do not censor big-time names; otherwise, hell will be raised. How do you serially censor Ambeth Ocampo or former Supreme Court justice Antonio Carpio or former cabinet secretary Winnie Monsod?

Recall that Duterte was angry at the Prietos of the Inquirer. This was his way of threatening the Inquirer that, under its revered slogan of balanced news, fearless views, was a known administration critic. Many in the paper had rude awakenings.

So what was the official line of the Inquirer management about the censorship? It was fake news at its worst. It said Inquirer.net was a separate company (yet was using the same brand and the same livery) that had its own set of editorial policies. Prior to Duterte, there were no such things as separate companies (Inquirer the paper, Inquirer.net, Radyo Inquirer, etc.).

The Inquirer had joined the era of fake news by making a convenient lie about why it was censoring opinion articles. If the paper and the online edition were two separate companies, then that means one can criticize the other. And that is exactly the experiment I chose to do: say outright that the Inquirer had censored my articles. The next day, the opinion editor who once said his pay grade was low gave me my ouster notice. I had expected it. I can answer for myself. But Inquirer, until today, cannot answer for itself.

For many of us who lived through the Marcos regime, the Inquirer was a gilded pillar of strength. We have lost touch with reality when we continue to think of it in the same way.

It was only important for it to survive the business onslaught of Duterte. As to press freedom, the Inquirer is no longer the vanguard it used to be.

The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.

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Censorship in the time of Duterte - Vera Files - Vera Files

Alisa Cromer | for Editor & Publisher

Ask any journalist what makes their blood pressure go up on deadline. It is being routed to a public affairs office without getting the interview, missing a deadline, or just getting a pre-screened department-organized message. Theres no opportunity for follow-up questions or even an off-the-record conversation.

Lately, the public and even local reporters who have not covered a Washington, D.C. beat are unaware of how restricted access has become at the federal level.

District journalists are no longer allowed into federal buildings without an escort and appointment. It is assumed that every interview will be coordinated through public affairs representatives, who are political appointees. If the public information officer (PIO) is not interested in a story or the reporter, they ignore their inquiries or slow-roll it so that the reporter misses the deadline. Its now common practice for PIOs to join calls and monitor live interviews.

And then there are the gag orders, implied or by memo, so federal government employees cannot talk directly to the press without imperiling their career.

These practices are now deeply embedded into government culture and getting worse every year, leaders of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) told E&P during a recent vodcast on the topic. SPJ, a group with 6,000 members, calls it censorship by PIO. Its such a bane that the association created an entire web page dedicated to the issue.

In July 2021, SPJ and 24 more journalists' associations wrote a letter to the White House with specific demands: To be allowed direct contact with sources, access to federal buildings, and that requests for interviews be granted.

At the local level, access to officials and information is less controlled; however, dozens of police departments and state agencies have explicit and implicit gag orders preventing employees from talking to the press, according to new research by the Brechner Center.

Science reporting has also been at the heart of the national controversy, Matthew T. Hall, opinion editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune., told E&P. This was especially true during the Trump administration, when the pandemic surged and the CDC was late with information. Last year, The Washington Post decried its gag order to prevent employees from talking, surfaced by a Freedom of Information Act request after a lawsuit.

The Biden administration promised openness, but by July 2021, after just six months in office, the EPA faced its first stress test and folded. When whistleblowers reported a rubber-stamping of toxic chemicals, the chief of staff in the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, Allison Pierce, sent a memo reminding employees not to talk to the media without going through public affairs.

Tim Wheeler, chair of the Society of Environmental Journalists Freedom of Information Task Forcechair of the and an editor at the Chesapeake Bay Journal, says none of this is shocking nor new.

An army of PIOs is managing the information, he said. You are getting your information filtered as often as not, or they dont get back to you at all.

March 2021 Let the Sunshine In webinar

Just after the Biden administration settled in, Wheeler hosted a webinar with the pithy title, Let the Sunshine In. Will EPA reopen its doors to the press? for SEJ members to meet the new office of public affairs at the Environmental Protection Agency.

He started by talking about Bidens promised openness and the executive order to restore scientific transparency. How do you intend to restore transparency? Does that include the ability for reporters to interview staff and get a timely start on answers to questions?

Lyndsay Hamilton, enthusiastic, whip-smart and just two months on the job as associate administrator for the office, took the lead. Nick Conger, the EPAs press secretary, was playing back-up.

Hamilton said her goal is a positive, transparent relationship. She views media relations as a service we provide ... We are committed to sharing timely, accurate information to the best of our ability ... it is your job to always ask for more. If we cant (get you what you need), dont be afraid to ask about the why.

Conger started with, Can we just say happy Sunshine Week? He talked about empowering regional executives to answer media questions but still coordinated with public affairs.

Next question.

Wheeler asked, There was a time when reporters did not have to go through a PIO for permission or have minders present at the interview. Can we go back to that, and if not, why not?

Hamilton responded, Im not going to debate the word minders with you, and explained that staffers sit in on interviews to be helpful. She said the role of media relations is to make sure journalists are connected to the right source, that sources are comfortable talking to media, to let conversations play out, and to follow up on items we need to do. Accuracy is another issue.

Besides, she has allowed interviews without a staffer listening in. They are not on every call.

Wheeler had brought some messages from environmental journalists who could not attend. One wrote that she was so excited about getting a thorough response by email from a scientist that she was giddy. Three more said that they never got their requested interview. Two were regional reporters, but a district reporter said he had not had an on-the-record interview with someone at the EPA since the Obama administration.

Hamilton responded that the new EPA would strive to do better. She gave out her and Congors emails as go-tos in case of a problem, noting that theirs is still a small team of political appointees.

There may be other reasons for no response. For example, scientists may not want to talk, and We dont require them to. We are certainly straining to do our best We might miss an email here and there.

Wheeler had another question, The two scientists recently talked to me on the record without coordinating (with your office). Did they violate EPA policy?

Well, Im not going to track them down unless you want me to, Hamilton answered. We do ask (them) to coordinate with public affairs, but Im glad you got the information.

What if a scientist is speaking at a scientific conference, and I approach them afterward, during a break. Are they allowed to talk to me? he asked.

Hamilton stuttered a bit. Sure, I mean. Absolutely. Sure. I mean, they are in a public forum already. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, Wheeler noted, Ive seen a PR official swoop into the conversation in some instances ... Just so you know.

Hamilton added that she does this, too. As the PR person on site, I do sometimes join a conversation to know who the reporter is, where they are from We do like to know what people are saying about the agency.

What about the Executive Order that Biden signed 24 hours into his presidency, directing agencies to review scientific integrity practices and identify more effective ways of interacting with the media.

Did he mean going through a spokesperson? asked Wheeler.

Not sure we have a full answer, Hamilton said. We will soon.

Todays censorship

Censorship by PIO is so insidious in part because the media have quietly gone along. No reporters have faced arrest for pushing back. Stories get published. Even if the information is managed, the job gets done.

We are not printing blank pages, but part of the story is missing, explains Kathryn Foxhall, who covered the medical and science beat, including the CDC, for decades.

It will be correct; probably it will be interesting. It will suffice, but there will be all kinds of things that are not mentioned, like budget, political pressures, differences of opinion within the agency, she said.

Foxhall, who has referred to PIOs as censors, minders, controllers and spies in articles and speaking engagements, was one of the earliest and still one of the fiercest proponents for press access. In September, she was awarded SPJs Wells Memorial Key award for her efforts.

To give an example of how covering Washington changed during her career, she likes to tell a story from the Reagan era, when she could talk to a source unsupervised. She was interviewing a high-level source at the CDC about recent budget cuts just as the AIDS epidemic unfolded.

He was saying, Well make do and blah blah blah, Foxhall recalled. I was trying to get off the phone, when I asked what he would say if he were off the record. He reversed course and absolutely exploded. The story I wrote massively changed, and those changes could have saved lives.

Today, these confidential conversations have been largely eliminated. We now have over 4 million pandemic dead, she said.

For over two decades, public health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, have controlled public scrutiny of themselves.

So how did this happen?

Foxhall says she first noticed sources redirecting her to official channels in the early 1990s. The newsroom talked about these blocks and what to do about it. There was some eyeball rolling. but you could still get around it with some people skills, she said. Over the years, it got tighter and tighter.

Another reason is the way governments are organized. Department heads are political appointees, while the staff, scientists and lower-level public affairs officers are career employees and subject matter experts.

Over time, each presidential administration inserted a growing layer of political appointees of PIOs on top of the careerist departments and started pulling strings, steering coordinating all speech to reporters.

Ironically, Obama was more of a micromanager of information released by lower-profile federal agencies than Trump. Despite his rhetoric, Trump was primarily interested in controlling departments involved in high-profile news stories and essentially left the lower-profile departments alone, sources say.

With Biden, micro-management has returned. PIOs, who are political appointees, have started to weigh in on every piece of information and interview that goes out, including which reporters and news outlets get access, and rewriting press releases with political messages in mind.

It hasnt helped that the news media shed thousands of journalists who migrated over to these expanded public affairs offices.

Wheeler does not blame these former journalists. It is not always the PIO, but the president and governors and people they appoint who control dissent and contraindications, Wheeler said, adding, Some of my best friends are PIOs.

And there are other factors. After 9/11, access to federal buildings was restricted, so credentialed reporters could no longer enter without an appointment and escort. COVID-19 shut down most public meetings and other events that provided face-to-face opportunities for journalists to meet public officials without a chaperone.

To report this story, we contacted eight government PIOs by email. One went off the record, on deep background. One was afraid to talk because she was new. Finally, one said she would get back to me with a time but missed the deadline.

The other PIOs at the CDC, EPA, the Department of Interior, the National Association of Government Communicators, and Health and Human Services had not responded by deadline.

A case to battle restricted access

If the media is going to challenge the culture of restricted access, the battle will probably be fought in the courts.

Frank LoMonte, the First Amendment attorney at the Brechner Center, who has written a white paper on case law as a roadmap for news media to use in the future, feels the courts have favored employees talking about their jobs despite blanket gag orders.

The reality is that the employee always wins. We have dug back as far as we can, and the judges say the gag orders are too broad every time. These are 24 cases and all kinds of judges, he said. The bottom line is that (legally) you cannot enforce a gag order preventing an employee from discussing their work with the news media, he said.

The most important Supreme Court case, United States v. National Treasury Employees Union, circa 1995, only confirmed the legal status on which the lower courts have always agreed.

We know (blanket gag orders) exist. We know they are pervasive across all levels of government. But Im here to tell you its a dead man walking. They are all illegal; they are just waiting for someone to sue, LoMonte said.

Whats missing is the perfect case.

Most plaintiffs in existing case law have been government employees, such as schoolteachers and police officers. However, with the decline of labor unions who supplied the money and the lawyers, these cases dried up.

So today, LoMonte is setting the stage for a media organization to file suit eventually. It just must be the right case to avoid creating a legal precedent that could worsen things.

So what would the perfect case look like?

According to LoMonte, the media should look for a government agency with a blanket gag order policy that is clear and in writing. An employee handbook is better than a mass email. A mass email is better than a series of single ones, and any email is better than a verbal rebuke. The CDC emails, though explosive at the time, he said, did not make the cut.

Asked if hes worried that governments wont just vague up their cultural policies after reading this article thinking here of the EPAs broad guidelines to please coordinate he said not to worry. Plenty of government agencies at the state and local level outline exactly what employees cant say.

His new research has already turned up a couple of dozen illegal policies at police departments, including the NYPD, despite the fact it has already been sued once on the issue and lost. Sixteen state agencies in Georgia also have explicit gag order policies.

His advice to journalists is to start documenting.

Ask the (sources) who were gagged, Did you see a memo? Run it to the ground and document it, he told SPJ attendees on the stage with Foxhall. Get the agency on the record. Where did it come from, who made it?

Another culprit in Censorship by PIO is the media itself.

The press acquiesced, Foxhall contended. Why isnt the news industry fighting the controls? One of the top reasons, in my opinion, is that we need their stuff. Its easier and inexpensive to quote an official source. If the press parrots (an official source), it takes about an hour to write it up. (But) we dont want to discredit our own story by saying how little we know.

She suggested that journalists need to start consistently writing about their access and make it part of the story. Lose the embarrassment that journalists are supposed to know everything, and therefore we cant admit that these people are successfully blocking our newsgathering.

The San Diego chapter of SPJ gives Brick and Window awards once a year to highlight the access issue.

We need to call attention, Matthew T. Hall said. Im hoping someone at the Biden administration watches when this is published and picks up the phone.

Alisa Cromer is the editor of LocalMediaInsider, an online trade journal covering the media industry. She grew up in Washington, D.C.

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Censorship by PIO - Editor And Publisher Magazine

Viennas museums are putting their works on view in a place where few world-class institutions have ever shown their art: OnlyFans. On that site, visitors can now see an account set up by the citys tourism board where suggestive works from Viennese institutions like the Albertina and the Leopold Museum are being posted.

The Viennese are very open-minded, Helena Hartlauer, head of media relations at the Vienna Tourist Board, said of the unusual move.

OnlyFans is an app where viewers can pay a subscription fee to access exclusiveand often eroticcontent from a creator. Now, for $4.99 a month, people can view painted nudes and risqu statues culled from the collections of Viennas finest museums, which maintain that these artworks are not necessarily sexual in nature. The citys tourism board said the move to post artworks on the platform came after repeated censorship on other social media platforms.

In July, the Albertinas TikTok account was suspended and then blocked for displaying the art of Nobuyoshi Araki, whose photographs often feature sexually explicit images of nude women. Then in September, when the Leopold Museum promoted its 20th anniversary by posting a work by Art Nouveau illustrator Koloman Moser, the campaign was flagged as potentially pornographic by Facebooks algorithms. To avoid any repercussions, the museum switched out that image for a less objectionable work. That warning recalled Faceboooks deletionof a post by the Natural History Museum of Vienna showing the Venus of Willendorf, an ancient fertility talisman depicting a naked woman with enlarged breasts.

In migrating these offerings to OnlyFans, Hartlauer claimed that Viennas museums were enacting more than just a publicity stuntthey were also aiming to start a conversation about the necessity of social media and the problems associated with it. According to Hartlauer, while some might argue that these museums could use other pieces to promote themselves, the matter is not quite so simple, given that it is growing harder and harder to tell what will be labeled explicit. These platforms arent transparent at all, Hartlauer said.

Museums, of course, arent alone in this frustrating struggle with social media platformsartists have also voiced concerns about the guidelines for social media like Instagram. In a recent op-ed for ARTnews, artist Clarity Haynes described repeatedly trying to post nude self-portraits by photographer Laura Aguilar, only to have them deleted each time. This kind of censorship does not exist in a digital vacuum, Haynes wrote, describing the deletions as homophobic, racist, fatphobic, and misogynistic.

The Viennese museums new OnlyFans recalls another attempt at launching a platform for sexually suggestive art. This past summer, Pornhub started the Classic Nudes guide, an app that allowed users to find images of nudes in the worlds most renowned art institutions. Museums didnt respond well to that initiative. The Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid all threatened to suePornhub for its recreations of famous paintings in their holdings, among them Titians Venus of Urbino (1538), which is held by the Uffizi.

By contrast, Viennas tourism board said it was making no pretensions about the sexuality and nudity of artworks in its collection. We also wanted to do this to show solidarity with artists who are censored, Hartlauer said. If you cant show your artwork on social media this can really be an obstacle to your communications efforts, and even to your career.

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Following Social Media Censorship, Viennese Museums Take Their Art to OnlyFans - ARTnews

The autumn edition of the Index on Censorship will be published in Great Britain today, Tuesday. Before the 26th UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow she is dealing with a very special climate, the climate of fear, which is spread wherever climate and environmental activists oppose overexploitation. For the time of this issue, lawyer Steven Donziger, known for his fight against chevron activities in Ecuador, will participate virtually. He appears virtually because he has been under strict house arrest in the United States for 800 days.

Ignored by the US press, Steven Donziger is an example of the people his first namesake Stephen Spender wanted to give a voice to: on October 15, 1971, his appeal With Concern For Those Not Free appeared in the Times. It led to the establishment of the Index on Censorship.

In this section we always present astonishing, impressive, informative and funny figures from the fields of IT, science, art, economics, politics and of course mathematics on Tuesdays.

All articles on Pay, please!

Anyone who thinks of an index in the context of occidental history and not in the sense of database IT thinks of the first List of Prohibited Books, with which the Catholic Church banned numerous thinkers and their books. Writings by Galileo Galilei or by Johannes Kepler landed on this index. In modern times Immanuel Kant caught the Critique of Pure Reason, in very recent times it was the writings of the author couple Jean-Paul-Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In 1968 it was a letter from the young Soviet Russian Alexander Daniel to the British writer Graham Greene, referring to the situation of his father July Daniel drew attention. Along with Andrei Sinjawski he was sentenced to hard camp work in a show trial. The trial showed that the Soviet leadership, after the thaw, took a tougher pace again because everything was fermenting in their entire sphere of influence.

In Great Britain a group of supporters was formed which, after Amnesty International, called itself Writers and Scholars International (WSI). On October 15, 1971, the Times published its founding manifesto With Concern For Those Not Free, written by the poet Stephen Spender. Spender announced the publication of a magazine called Index, which should make all persecuted writers, poets and artists in East and West heard. Critical voices were not only suppressed in the Soviet Union, dictators were also in power in Greece, Spain and Portugal, not to mention Latin America.

Fifteen British and American artists joined the call, including the poet WH Auden, the musician Yehudi Menuhin, the composer Igor Stravinsky and the sculptor Henry Moore. When the magazine first appeared in 1972 under the slightly crooked title Index on Censorship. A Voice for the Persecuted, it contained pieces by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an account of the crackdown on student protests in Prague, and a text by Giorgios Mangakis on the Torture in Greek prisons.

In the 50 years of its existence the quarterly index published numerous important documents such as the translation of Charter 77, the Solzhenitsyn Nobel Prize speech, the story of the disappeared in Argentina, the declaration of hunger strike by the students from Tianmen Square, the declaration of supporters of Salman Rushdie and the reports by Anna Politkovskaya about the wars in Chechnya. The summer edition of 2021 was the Whistleblowern Dedicated to this world, with a focus on the case of Reality Winner, who is not allowed to speak publicly after serving her prison sentence.

Now appears under the sign of Glasgow Climate Change Conference the autumn edition Climate of Fear. The silencing of the planets indigenous peoples, which deals with the protest of indigenous peoples that is being stifled by governments and corporations around the world.

There is a small one to appear Online celebrationwho the lawyer Steven Donziger is switched on. He has been under house arrest in New York for 800 days and is being prosecuted by US judges for his lawsuits against the Chevron oil company. For example, they demand the surrender of all electronic devices belonging to the lawyer. Similar to the case of Julian Assange, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has found that the proceedings against Donziger violate current US law.

(mho)

Disclaimer: This article is generated from the feed and not edited by our team.

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Pay please! No end to speaking bans - 50 years of the censorship index - Market Research Telecast

The Bates Student would like to address the petition released on Oct. 15 (and subsequent articles by News Center Maine and The Intercept) regarding censorship of The Bates Student by the Bates College administration.

The Bates Student was not coerced or censored by any member of the Bates administration, the Bates Communication Office, or any other member of the Bates community in the writing or republishing of Elizabeth LaCroixs article from Oct. 13.

Mary Pols, Bates media relation specialist, asked The Student to temporarily take down the original article, pointing to several misleading statements and reporting inaccuracies. The Student made the decision on its own accord to honor this query. Mary Pols handles all media relations for the college; therefore, The Bates Student, like all other media outlets, is unable to access school administrators in all departments without first communicating with Pols. However, Pols has no authority to require changes or read articles before publishing and did not attempt to exercise such authority.

Nearly all edits made to the originally published article were additions. Information regarding neutrality statements was reworded for clarity. Additionally, a quote provided by Francis Eanes was paraphrased, as it relayed second-hand information that could not be verified. Commentary provided by employees with first-hand experience was unaltered, or in Jon Michael Foleys case, expanded.

Every edit or change in the article was discussed between Elizabeth and myself and approved by me as editor-in-chief of The Bates Student. We corrected inaccuracies that were misleading or confusing, and we allowed additions to both the union and administration side of the story, as shown in the document outlining edits made to the original article linked in the petition.

The staff of The Bates Student takes immense pride in our editorial independence. We are given full autonomy on what is and is not published. In the interests of informing the Bates community, we stand by the edits we made.

If you have any questions regarding the events of the past week, please send us an email ([emailprotected]).

Jackson Elkins 22 and Elizabeth LaCroix 23

Editor-in-Chief and Managing News Editor at The Bates Student

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A Statement Regarding the Petition Against Censorship at Bates - The Bates Student