Mediaboss Marketing

The coronavirus pandemic may threaten press freedom and worsen the crises that reporters around the world are facing, according to this years World Press Freedom Index, which evaluates the landscape for journalists in 180 countries and territories.

The report, published on Tuesday by the media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders, said the United States and Brazil were becoming models of hostility toward the news media. It also singled out China, Iran and Iraq for censoring coverage of the coronavirus outbreak.

The pandemic has already redefined norms. New laws that some governments have passed with the ostensible goal of slowing the spread of the virus ones that broaden state surveillance, for instance have raised concerns about long-term negative effects on the news media and freedom of expression.

The pandemic has allowed governments to take advantage of the fact that politics are on hold, the public is stunned and protests are out of the question, in order to impose measures that would be impossible in normal times, Christophe Deloire, the secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, said in a statement.

Press freedom in the United States continued to suffer under President Trumps administration, according to the report, which ranked the country 45th out of 180, up three spots from last year. A dangerous anti-press sentiment as well as the arrest, physical assault, public denigration and harassment of journalists had trickled down to the local level, the report said.

China ranked 177th, the same as last year. Last month, China said it was expelling American journalists working for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, weeks after the Trump administration limited to 100 the number of Chinese citizens who could work in the United States for five state-run Chinese news organizations that are widely considered propaganda outlets.

Reporters at foreign news outlets in China were among those who aggressively reported on the coronavirus outbreak, including in the early days when the Chinese government sought to play down its severity.

In Iraq, officials this month fined Reuters and temporarily suspended the news agencys license after it published a story that said the government was underreporting coronavirus cases.

The report also referenced oppressive policies in some countries in the Balkans and the European Union. In Hungary last month, lawmakers gave Prime Minister Viktor Orban the power to sidestep Parliament and suspend existing laws. The new legislation, which will further limit freedom of expression, may give Mr. Orbans government more leeway to persecute journalists, critics say.

Still, Europe continued to be the continent where the news media had the most freedom, with Norway ranking first for the fourth consecutive year and Finland and Denmark in second and third place. Sweden fell to fourth place because of an increase in the online harassment of reporters.

At the bottom of the index, there was little change. North Korea fell one spot, taking over last place from Turkmenistan. Eritrea, which ranked third to last, was the lowest-ranked country in Africa. Haiti fell 21 spots to 83rd, the steepest drop of any nation. Journalists there lack financial resources and institutional support, and have been victims of intimidation and physical violence, particularly while covering protests, the report said.

Go here to see the original:
Coronavirus Threatens Press Freedom Around the World, Report Says - The New York Times

All winged swarming things that walk on fours shall be an abomination for you. Leviticus 11:20 (The Israel Bible)

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. (Frederic Legrand COMEO / Shutterstock.com)

One theory about the origins of the coronavirus is that a naturally occurring virus being studied in a microbiology lab in Wuhan, China escaped. The virus escaped from a laboratory researching dangerous pathogens. Once labeled a conspiracy theory, evidence to indicate this may have been the case is piling up and the U.S. State Department recenty announced they were actively investigating this possibility.

WUHAN LAB

An article by Steven Mosher, an internationally recognized authority on China and population issues, published on February 22 in the New York Post suggested that this was indeed the case. The article noted that Chinese leader Xi Jinping held an emergency meeting on February 14 to discuss the need to contain the coronavirus and set up a system to prevent similar epidemics in the future. At the meeting, Xi described lab safety as a national security issue. The next day, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive titled: Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.

The article by Mosher noted that the only BSL-4 microbiology laboratory in China that fits the Ministrys description of being able to handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus is located in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak: BSL-4 labs have to be equipped with airtight hazmat suits or special cabinet workspaces that confine viruses and bacteria that can be transmitted through the air to sealed boxes that scientists reach into using attached high-grade gloves. There are about 54 BSL-4 labs worldwide and the National Biosafety Laboratory, part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is one of only two bioweapons research labs in all of China. The Wuhan lab is also equipped for animal research.

The Wuhan laboratory was constructed in 2015 and opened in 2017 while still undergoing testing. It was the first of a planned five to seven Biolabs designed for the purpose of studying high-risk pathogens, including Ebola and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) viruses.

ITS ALL ABOUT THE BATS

In a subsequent article, Mosher noted that the outbreak was attributed to bats sold for human consumption at a wet market in Wuhan. Mosher noted that the market was, in fact, a seafood market and did not sell bats. He also claimed that none of the first people infected had visited the seafood market. Mosher cited a report by two scientists who work for the state-run South China University of Technology that claimed that the COVID-19 virus is from the same family of coronaviruses carried by the Horseshoe Bat. The report claimed that there are no known colonies of this species of that bat within 560 miles of Wuhan. That report, originally published on Research Gate, is no longer available on that site. Acording to the report, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC), located 280 meters from the wet market, had imported several hundred bats for the study of the coronavirus. About 7 miles away was the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was also conducting research on the same bats.

In 2015, the WIV published an article in the journal Nature Medicine noting that the coronavirus found in the Chinese Horseshoe Bat thrived in human cells and, based on research on mice, could infect and replicate in primary human airway cells. A letter in the same journal responded to the article, expressing concern that the risk of such research was outweighed by the risks.

DENIAL

The head of the labs bat-coronavirus research, Shi Zhengli, was alerted about the epidemic in Wuhan at the end of December and arrived on scene to determine whether the outbreak could be traced back to her lab. In an article in the South China Morning Post reported Feb. 6, she concluded that there was no connection between her experiments and the outbreak.

It should be noted that anyone who attempts to share Moshers articles about COVID-19 on Facebook is issued an automatic warning telling them the article contains false information and the preview is obscured.

An article in the New York Post contesting this labeling noted that one of the independent researchers who determined that the reasoned arguments in Moshers opinion article constituted false information was Danielle E. Anderson, assistant professor, Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. The Post noted that Anderson regularly works with the researchers from the Wuhan lab.

One response to this tweet posted by the highly-respected journalist Sharyl Atkisson noted that due to their governments campaign of misinformation, most Chinese people are convinced the coronavirus has its origins in the U.S.

The other Facebook fact-checker labeled Moshers claims as false information because any responsible government would strengthen safety and security procedures in high-containment labs even while admitting that the SARS virus had escaped Chinese labs in the past.

It could be argued that Facebook has a vested interest in diverting blame from China. Despite being banned from China in 2009, China remains Facebooks second-largest market, generating $5-7 billion, or teen percent of its ad revenue, annually. Facebook is opening a new engineering team in Singapore in the hopes of expanding their Chinese operations.

CHINAS UGLY HISTORY OF VIRUSES ESCAPING FROM LABS

This is not to say that COVID-19 was manufactured in a laboratory. A U.S. study of the coronavirus genome published in March found no signs it had been engineered. By comparing the available genome sequence data for known coronavirus strains, we can firmly determine that SARS-CoV-2 originated through natural processes, co-author Kristian Andersen, from Scripps Research in California, said at the time.

Shockingly, the Washinton Post reported last week that U.S. Embassy officials warned in January 2018 about inadequate safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab and passed on information about scientists conducting risky research on coronavirus from bats.

Pandemics have begun as a result of naturally occurring viruses escaping from a Chinese laboratory. In 2010, it was revealed that Human H1N1 virus that struck China and then the Soviet Union before spreading to the entire world in 1977 was due to a laboratory escape of a 1949-50 virus.

In 2004, four cases of an escape of the SARS virus from the same laboratory at the Chinese National Institute of Virology were discovered. The outbreak spread to 29 countries, causing more than 8,000 infections and at least 774 deaths.

In March, the Chinese government responded to accusations by diverting blame to the U.S. Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry wrote that It could have been the US army that brought the epidemic to Wuhan America owes us an explanation!. The accusation was based on the flimsy premise that members of the U.S. military participated in in the World Military Games held in Wuhan last October, which brought together representatives from over 100 nations.

CHINA BLOWING SMOKE WHILE THE U.S. WANTS ANSWERS

Last week, China foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian addressed the matter at a news conference, telling journalists the World Health Organizations officials have said multiple times there is no evidence the new coronavirus was created in a laboratory.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday that Chinese authorities themselves, when they started investigating the virus, considered whether the WIV was, in fact, the place where this came from.

We know theyve not permitted the worlds scientists to go into that laboratory to evaluate what took place there, whats happening there, whats happening there even as we speak, he said in a radio interview.

In an interview on Saturday with Michael Knowles, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TEX) noted that speculation that the COVID-19 virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory was tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory nutjobbery.

Senator Cruz referred to the two labs in Wuhan conducting studies on viruses in bats and the State Department concerns that safety standards in those labs could lead to an escape and pandemic.

But the real bombshell revelation was his next statement.

The U.S. government was funding the Chinese research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Cruz cited a just-released report of the National Institutes of Health which stated that in fiscal year 2019, the funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology $76,301 as part of an overall $3.7 million funding program that went to six years in sites in China, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Myanmar. The project included studying viral diversity in animal (bats) reservoirs, surveying people that live in high-risk communities for evidence of bat coronavirus infection, and conducting laboratory experiments to analye and predict which newly discovered viruses pose the greatest threats to human health.

Cruz added that the NIH report specified that the funding at the Wuhan lab went to study the coronavirus.

We dont have confirmed evidence that [the epidemic] did come from the lab, Cruz added.What we know is that U.S. taxpayer dollars were going to the Chinese government to fund this research on bat coronaviruses, on how they could be infectious to humans, how they could be transmitted to humans, how they could be dangerous to humans, at the same time the State Department was raising real concerns about the safety and security protocols at the lab that were partially funding.

Cruz concluded with a powerful demand.

The Chinese government needs to answer the question right now; were they studying the novel coronavirus, this virus, the virus that has killed over 140,000 people worldwide. Was that the virus studied at one or both of the labs in Wuhan?

Read more here:
Facebook is Censoring News Sites Criticizing China's Management of Covid-19. Here's the Real Reason Why - Breaking Israel News

Daryl Hannahs bare behind in Splash isnt the only thing being censored by Disney Plus and its family-friendly streaming service, as a few other shows and films have received subtle edits.

Although Splash had been streaming since February, sharp-eyed viewers noticed Hannahs hair had been CGId to cover her bare butt as her character goes running off into the ocean. A Disney spokesperson did confirm that a few scenes in the film have been slightly edited to remove nudity.

1999s Toy Story 2 had its post-credits sequence edited for an inappropriate scene when the film was re-released on DVD to tie in with Toy Story 4.

The censors removed a casting couch joke where Stinky Pete (Kelsey Grammer) flirts with two Barbie dolls hinting that he can get them into movies. You know, Im sure I could get you a part in Toy Story 3, Stinky Pete says.

The scene was deleted in light of the #MeToo movement. The original scene is below and does not appear in the streaming service version.

But Disney Plus did have a change of heart, it seems, over animated series Gravity Falls. Creator Alex Hirsch tweeted back in November 2019 about its decision to remove a symbol from Stanley Pines initial fez. Hirsh said, Lol apparently the geniuses over at Disney+ decided to remove Grunkle Stans fez symbol for no reason, but then accidentally left it in the thumbnails.

The symbol appears to be back on Stanleys fez, at least for American audiences.

Screencap Courtesy of Disney Plus

Lilo and Stitch audiences have noticed a subtle change to one of its scenes. After fighting with her sister, Lilo runs into the laundry room and climbs into a clothes dryer. In the edited version, Lilo climbs into something that looks like a pizza box.

The rest is here:
Disney Plus Censors Casting Couch Joke in Toy Story 2 and Other Subtle Edits - Variety

Over the course of the semester, the Lanthorn will be conducting an editorial series titled News on News revolving around how news is consumed today, the concept of fake news and the fight journalists continue to fight to have their voices be heard.

Over doing this editorial series, I learned a lot about how journalists think and learned some helpful lessons as to how to react to institutional pressures.

I highlighted the importance of the #FreeIgnace movement, the beninese journalist who is sadly still incarcerated for simply doing his job. I talked to students who have experienced censorship, both in their time at GVSUand in the Ukraine.

I learned some important lessons from journalists who continue to fight the good fight, whether it be Matthew Kauffman leading the charge to free Ignace Sossou or Raymond Joseph continuing to investigate a corrupt South African lottery system.

These journalists and students speaking out against the powers that be has always been important, but is crucial now more than ever, as Americans everywhere are staying in their homes trying to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

While journalists are not doing the work of essential workers and nurses and doctors working the front lines to fight the virus, those spreading news to the public are in the next tier below. Now more than ever, citizens around the world are looking towards local and national news.

As journalists, we have a responsibility to give the public accurate news, especially in this time of crisis. One of my roles as a part-time assignment editor at Fox 17 is to answer the phone of nervous viewers. Here are what the majority of those calls have consisted of the past few weeks:

Hey, my boss is making us go in to work, but my wife and I are nervous about me getting infected. What do I do to report them?

How do I file for unemployment?

Im about to run out of rent money ever since I lost my job, where can I turn to if I end being homeless in the next few weeks?

My daughter needs her heart medicine to survive. Is it even safe to go into pharmacies right now?

The Walmart by me is not practicing social distancing. Is there anything you guys can do about that?

While it can be nice to provide people with certain resources to help them get what they need in this worldwide pandemic, its a lot of pressure to try to help these people, who appear to have nowhere else to go.

I am nowhere near a guidance counselor or a life coach or a motivational speaker, but I have had to play all of those roles in these phone calls. While I struggle to sleep at night thinking of the thousands of people struggling just in West Michigan alone, its through these phone calls that I have realized that journalists are more than writers, editors, reporters, broadcaster and anchors: we have a job to help people in this time of crisis.

Phone calls such as the ones above are the reason why I am confident I will stay in journalism. As Kauffman and Gamble and Joseph advised in our interviews, journalists need to have thick skin; not just in dealing with criticism and institutional censorship and threats, but also helping those in need, whether that be in providing accurate information, conducting an investigation, or simply giving news consumers a guiding light and someone to talk to.

Through this editorial series, it has been reiterated to me that thick skin and a refusal to back down is a crucial skill that every young journalist needs to develop.

We will face criticism. We will face threats. We will be called pigs and biased, and our writing will be deemed as fake news and thats on the tame end of the criticism. But for every negative message towards us, the positive support comes through tenfold, and knowing that we have a truly important role informing and helping people makes this job more worth it than I ever could have imagined.

Read the original post:
News on News: Reflecting on institutional censorship and the conversations with the experts - Grand Valley Lanthorn

If there is one positive thing that can be said about this terrible plague were enduring, it is that now and then, it gives the Trudeau government some really, really great ideas.

Sure it was only a couple of weeks ago that the Liberals came up with the idea that they a minority in Parliament, remember should give themselves the power to tax and spend for the next two years, without having to get parliamentary approval. It was a truly brilliant idea, except that it ignored the fact that approving government spending is one of the most important functions of Parliament. Take away its authority over spending and the House of Commons might just as well be any old bingo hall, or with a little imaginative renovation, a one-of-a-kind Costco store.

Now, compliments of Privy Council President Dominic LeBlanc, we learned that the Liberal government is contemplating legislation to make it an offence to, as a CBC report put it, knowingly spread misinformation that could harm people. In plain language, this government is openly thinking of making itself the official censor of what can and cannot be said about COVID-19. Pure brilliance again, dont you agree?

Well, actually, no. Dont even think of it. Better still, to borrow a phrase from Greta Thunberg: how dare you? There is already a government that has that power, and in some cases brutally exercises it. That is the government of the Communist Party of China.

And what has it done with that power? It barred telling the truth about COVID-19, and instead told lies about it. On the where it happened, when it happened, how it happened and how it spread, the Chinese government confounded, confused and lied about a plague that has now hobbled the whole planet. And China officially reprimanded the doctor who initially tried to warn people about the coronavirus, and who, with dread irony, actually died from it. (A postmortem apology followed from the government. That surely helped.) Admire the Chinese government if thats your thing, but on this subject, it is not an example to be followed.

So, lets tap this serpent of an idea on its little head before its fangs emerge and it develops a real appetite. The problem with government having control over what is said and written, completely aside from it being the utter contradiction of a liberal democracy, is that governments especially on a matter such as this pandemic are simply not competent enough to know what is right and what is wrong.

What is required for a government to pass a law against misinformation? To begin with, it presumes an infallible authority thats able to make judgments on what is, or is not, correct information. Even worse, it presumes the government has the ability to make judgments on a matter that, incontestably, is not yet fully understood by anybody.

This virus is new. The investigation of its nature, transmission, the best policies to confront it, the extent of the response to it, even the nature of the response all of these elements are, at best, in an incomplete and early stage of understanding.

Experts have varying degrees of skill and knowledge. If experts disagree, which happens often, will some of them be silenced? In actuality, a divergence of opinions can be seen as a path to the full truth emerging. But this cannot happen if the government gags those who may seem to be wrong at the present moment.

On the purely political front, there are equal objections to giving government censorship powers. Governments take to extensions of their power like bears to honey. The more power they get, the more they believe they alone should exercise it. Power swells the ego. Add more power, and if you follow the analogy, a little balloon soon thinks its the Hindenburg. And a government swollen with power does not like other voices.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau barred the leader of the Opposition from joining talks with other opposition leaders because, in Trudeaus own memorable words, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer disqualified himself from constructive discussions with his unacceptable speech earlier today.

Yet it is not for Trudeau, or any other prime minister, to determine what is acceptable speech from his constitutionally positioned critic, the leader of the Opposition. Nor is it proper for this minority government, which has had enough struggles of its own over misinformation on masks, on screening at airports, on our relative security from the pandemic to decide what the rest of us can, and cannot, say or write about this unique crisis.

National Post

Read the original post:
Rex Murphy on COVID-19: The power to censor speech and other great ideas from our Liberal overlords - National Post