For immediate release

WAN-IFRA Appoints Representative in Bangladesh

To take WAN-IFRA services closer to publishers in the country

The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) has appointed Drik Picture Library Ltd., the leading picture and news agency of Bangladesh, as its representative in the country, in a move to bring WAN-IFRA’s services closer to local publishers.

As each country in the Indian sub-continent displays unique characteristics and challenges, the representation will help to address the specific needs of Bangladesh’s publishers and will include local media events and training.

“‘We are very happy to appoint Drik Picture Library as our representative in Bangladesh,” said Magdoom Mohamed, Managing Director of WAN-IFRA South Asia. “Our relations with Dr. Shahidul Alam, Managing Director of Drik Picture Library, goes back to more than 8 years and we share some common ideas of what needs to be done to help improve the media industry in Bangladesh. We are confident that this relation will go a long way, and, with Drik’s respected position in the country, it will enable seamless rendering of all WAN-IFRA services to the publishers in the country.”

Dr. Shahidul Alam said: “Drik has found a natural partner in WAN-IFRA, as both are trade organizations with a human right’s mandate. The Newspapers in Education programme is also an area where the mutual interest in media and education of both organisations provide synergy. Drik’s pioneering role in new media and ICT creates a clear path for the partnership to utilise the dynamism in Asian media and propel it to new heights.”

WAN-IFRA already has a publisher member in Bangladesh, The Independent daily newspaper.

This year, WAN-IFRA will organise its twentieth annual South Asian Conference, WAN-IFRA India 2012, on September 26 and 27 at Pune, India. The conference will address the challenges and opportunities for news publishers in the region and provide a direction into the future of the news publishing industry in the region.

WAN-IFRA South Asia, based in Chennai, India, manages services offered to the members and publishers in the South Asian region. 

About WAN-IFRA

WAN-IFRA, based in Paris, France, and Darmstadt, Germany, with subsidiaries in Singapore, India, Spain, France and Sweden, is the global organisation of the world’s newspapers and news publishers. It represents more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries. Its core mission is to defend and promote press freedom, quality journalism and editorial integrity and the development of prosperous businesses.

For more information, please contact: Magdoom Mohamed, Managing Director, WAN-IFRA South Asia Pvt. Ltd., 54 K B Dasan Rd, SIET Administrative Building, 3^rd Floor, Chennai 600 018, India (T:+91.44.4211 2893 F:+91.44.2435 9744). Email:infoindia@wan-ifra.org (or) Dr.Shahidul Alam, Managing Director, Drik Picture Library Ltd., House No.58, Road 15A, Dhanmondi Residential Area, Dhaka 1209, Bangladesh (T:+880.2.9120 125). Email: office@drik.net

Weegee’s photographs are as much about Weegee as they are about crime.
By James Polchin

Media Lens, London, 18 January 2012

News that a fourth scientist in two years, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, had been assassinated in Iran by an unknown agency generated minimal outrage in the press.

Patrick Cockburn notedin the Independent:
‘While the identity of those carrying out the assassinations remains a mystery, it is most likely to be Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad…’

The Sunday Times published a meticulous account of the planning and execution of the attack provided by ‘a source who released details’ on the actions of ‘small groups of Israeli agents’ operating inside Iran. (Marie Colvin and Uzi Mahnaimi, ‘Israel’s secret war,’ Sunday Times, January 15, 2012)

Julian Borger’s article in the Guardian warnedagainst ‘Goading a regime on the brink.’

We wonder if the Guardian would have described the Iranian assassination of scientists on US or Israeli streets as ‘goading’. We also wonder if Borger would have described these as terrorist attacks.

Using the media database Lexis-Nexis we have been able to find just one example of a UK journalist describing Roshan’s assassination as an act of terror – New Statesman’s senior political editor Mehdi Hasan writingin the Guardian. Otherwise, almost all references have been limited to the use of the word by Iranian officials behind scare quotes. (After challenges from Media Lens and other activists, Borger did publisha rare example of non-Iranian use of the term.)

By contrast, in October, the US accused Iran of recruiting a used car salesman, Manssor Arbabsiar, as part of a terrorist plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in a restaurant in Washington, DC. In that case, journalists had no qualms about using the word terror without inverted commas. Karen McVeigh reported in the Guardian:
‘Manssor Arbabsiar, a naturalised US citizen, was arrested last month, and stands accused of running a global terror plot that stretched from Mexico to Tehran.’

The Daily Mail:
‘An extraordinary terrorist plot has been foiled – which would have seen the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. murdered on American soil.’

The Telegraph:
‘Iranian government officials were accused by the Obama administration of plotting a string of deadly terrorist attacks on American soil.’

On Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald postednumerous similar examples from the US media. The alleged Arbabsiar plot was subsequently debunkedby analyst Gareth Porter.

As Greenwald observed, ‘accusing Israel and/or the U.S. of Terrorism remains one of the greatest political taboos’. Responding to a Media Lens reader who had suggested, not unreasonably, that ‘a terrorist is one who brings terror to another person’, Channel 4′s Alex Thomson wrote:
‘Your definition of a terrorist as one bringing terror is nonsensical as it would encompass all military outfits’ including ‘the Royal Fusilliers [sic]’. (Forwarded to Media Lens, February 25, 2005)

Is that really so absurd? After all, following the murderous firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, prime minister Winston Churchill wrote to Bomber Command:
‘It seems to me that the moment has come that the bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.’ (Blitz, Bombing and Total War, Channel 4, January 15, 2005)

Presumably, then, one can argue that the RAF is a terrorist organisation.

Returning to last week’s assassination, while no-one has yet suggested that Iran is now obliged to bomb Washington, Borger argued:
‘If Americans had been killed in the Georgetown restaurant that was supposedly the target [of the debunked Arbabsiar ‘plot’], the Obama administration would have been obliged to respond militarily.’

In similar vein, the aptly-named James Blitz asked in the Financial Times:
‘But even if an immediate military conflict… is averted, this still leaves a wider question: how much longer can Israel and the US wait before they bomb Iran’s nuclear sites?’

The day after Roshan’s killing, Andrew Cummings, formerly an adviser on the Middle East and US affairs in the UK cabinet office national security staff, commented in the Guardian on ‘the risks’ of ‘this audacious approach’ – he meant the murdering of scientists. The sub-heading explained:
‘The death of another Iranian scientist has led to criticism of such actions, but Tehran’s refusal to co-operate leaves little alternative.’

Cummings clarified:
‘What many people fail to recognise, though, is that a covert campaign, while rife with physical, diplomatic and legal risks, is the lesser of many evils.’

And yet, as Patrick Cockburn noted, ‘the US has found no evidence Tehran is trying to make a nuclear bomb, though US politicians [and US-UK journalists] often speak as if this was an established fact…
‘The US National Intelligence Estimates on Iranian nuclear progress, the collective judgement of all the US intelligence organisations, said there was no evidence Iran had been trying to build a bomb since 2003. The Defence Intelligence Agency concluded that Iran’s nuclear weapons programme at that time was directed against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and when he was overthrown by the US, it was ended.’

Compare this with Blitz’s version:
‘Some western intelligence agencies believe Iran will bide its time a little longer and enrich more uranium – but will not take the big strategic decision to race for the bomb in 2012. Still, in every other respect, the auguries are not good.’

Again by contrast, Greg Thielmann, a former US State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst, toldveteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh last year: ‘there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb’.

Readers might respond that Cummings and Blitz are entitled to their baseless views, and the Guardian and FT are perfectly entitled to publish them – that’s what free speech is all about. We agree.

But a problem arises when we try to imagine the Guardian publishing a piece justifying the Iranian killing of a US scientist on a US street one day after he had been murdered. And try imagining the FT hosting an opinion piece that asked: ‘How much longer can Iran wait before launching its bombers against the US and Israel?’

One might think that a corporate media system would act independently of the state – there is no formal mechanism of control. But as the ingrained bias sampled above indicates, this often turns out not to be the case. With regard to human rights, for example, corporate media typically do not simply pick a subject and lavish it with attention. Rather, political power selects an issue, frames the coverage, and media corporations jump on the bandwagon.

Type a household name like ‘Halabja’ into the UK media database search engine Lexis-Nexis, for example, and it produces more than 1,800 references to Saddam Hussein’s 1988 gassing of Kurds. Similarly, the words ‘Srebrenica’ and ‘massacre’ generate nearly 3,000 hits. Both issues have been afforded vast, impassioned coverage.

In truth, for Western commentators, the importance of these horrors is most often rooted, not in the scale of suffering inflicted, but in their utility for justifying the West’s military interventions. Thus an editorial in the Independent observed of Libya:
‘Concern was real enough that a Srebrenica-style massacre could unfold in Benghazi, and the UK Government was right to insist that we would not allow this.’ (Leading article, ‘The mission that crept,’ Independent, July 29, 2011)

A Times editorial commented:
‘Without this early, though sensibly limited, intervention, there would have been a massacre in Benghazi on the scale of Srebrenica.’ (Leading article, ‘Death of a dictator,’ The Times, October 21, 2011)

Of course media concern for human rights could be sincere – journalists are human beings, after all, and human beings often do care about the killing of civilians. But then the record requires some explanation.

Consider the massacre of 53 Libyans at the hands of ‘rebel’ fighters in Sirte last October. The Daily Telegraph reported:
‘Human Rights Watch said 53 people appeared to have been shot dead in a hotel in the centre of the city when it was under the control of fighters from Misurata. The badly decomposed bodies, some with their hands bound behind their backs, were found in a garden of Hotel Mahari.’ (Ben Farmer, ‘Libya will be a “moderate” Muslim nation, country’s interim leader insists,’ Telegraph, October 25, 2011)

According to Lexis-Nexis, the word ‘Mahari’ generates a total of eight articles mentioning the massacre across the entire UK press, with one mention since October. Widening the search to ‘Sirte’ and ‘killing’ produces a few additional mentions.

Or consider the fate of the dark-skinned Tawergha people, former slaves brought to Libya in the 18th and 19th centuries. Until recently, some 31,000 of them lived in a coastal town, also named Tawergha, 250 km east of the capital Tripoli. The UN news agency IRIN reported the ethnic cleansing of the town by Nato-backed forces:
‘Their town sits empty – doors hanging open and homes burned; the sign leading to the city has been changed to New Misrata and its population told not to return.’

As for the people:
‘In an abandoned Turkish company compound on Airport Road in Tripoli, more than 1,500 displaced Tawergha spend their days brushing away flies and watching their children play with toy guns amid piles of rubbish.

‘Here, women and children have huddled around on the uncovered mattresses they sleep on, weeping. They arrived in early November after a physically and emotionally draining journey from Tawergha, having been displaced by armed men every time they settled somewhere new.

‘Every one told of a father, son or brother who is either dead or in jail…

‘[One] young woman told stories of Tawergha detainees receiving electric shocks, having cold water poured on them and being burned with cigarettes by the revolutionaries from Misrata who were holding them. “This is Abu Ghraib, not Libya!… We have done nothing wrong. If they continue to beat us and attack us for no reason, it will become a cycle,” she said.’

A rare, excellent mainstream article by Åsne Seierstad in The Times supplied additional details:
‘”Slaves,” says graffiti on a wall. On a road sign, the town’s name has been scribbled over. “Misrata,” it says now. The commander of the local victors, Ibrahim al-Halbous, had already said it: “Tawergha no longer exists, only Misrata.”’

The article continued:
‘”Brigade for cleansing of black slaves,” proclaims one scribbled message on a wall along the road to Misrata. “Hairdresser. Free haircut,” says another. Large sections of the town are in ruins after the battles.’

Seierstad found that Tawerghans were still not safe even in Tripoli:
‘Seven or eight people live in each room, in corridor after corridor, barrack after barrack.

‘But the construction site has no guards, and the avengers from Misrata can enter even here. They arrive at night. The men sleep fully clothed, ready to flee. Some nights earlier, an armed gang arrived at 2am. “You are all going to die,” they shouted. “Get out, black animals.”’ (Åsne Seierstad, ‘Four months ago, 30,000 people lived in this town. So where did they go?,’ The Times, December 3, 2011)

Last summer, the then Prime Minister of Libya’s National Transitional Council, Mahmoud Jibril, said:
‘When it comes to Tawergha, in my view, this is nobody’s business but the people of Misrata’s. This cannot be dealt with according to theories and textbooks about national reconciliation in South Africa, Ireland or Eastern Europe.’ (Seierstad, ibid.)

Using a different spelling, the Telegraph has so far supplied one sentence: ‘Tawarga has been forcibly emptied of residents by rebels and looted.’ (Richard Spencer; Ruth Sherlock; Rob Crilly, ‘Gaddafi’s son flees to Niger as rebels make more gains,’ Telegraph, September 12, 2011). The sentence doesn’t appear in the online version.

A Guardian article barely hinted at the ethnic cleansing, reporting merely that Tawarga’s ‘mostly black population fled in August when rebel forces captured it’. Chris Stephen described the ethnic cleansers’ attitude towards Tawargans as a ‘gripe’. Seumas Milne mentioned Tawerga in a single sentence.

According to Lexis-Nexis, the Independent has published two articles focusing on the atrocity – a substantial piece in September and a further 102 words in November, totalling 867 words.

Curiously, The Times has published the most significant mentions. In addition to Seierstad’s piece, Andrew Gilligan published a substantial report: ‘The ghost town where rebels took their revenge’ in September. (The Times, September 11, 2011)

A later article reported ‘The expulsion of the entire 30,000 population of Tawarga, a satellite town of Misrata…’ (Libya Tom, ‘Murder and rape campaign brings revenge to ghost town,’ The Times, September 29, 2011)

James Hider also commented briefly in October:
‘The town of Tawarga was accused by neighbouring Misrata of siding with Gaddafi’s forces, and is now all but deserted and largely ruined.’ (James Hider, ‘Where there was unifying hatred, now there is a vacuum,’ The Times, October 22, 2011)

Since Seierstad’s article on December 3, there have been no mentions in any UK newspaper of this clear case of ethnic cleansing by Western-backed forces. As ever, media outrage splutters and falls away when the West is implicated in a crime against humanity. And as ever, this could hardly contrast more starkly with the incandescent ‘Something must be done!’ outrage in response to the crimes of official enemies. Lexis-Nexis finds no mention of any British or American politician commenting on Tawergha’s fate, and finds no mentions in any editorials. Now imagine the coverage if Iran, or Syria, or North Korea had been responsible.

Commentators sometimes lament the fact that the ‘mainstream’ media system is ‘controlled’ by profit-seeking corporations. It is not; it is made up of corporations. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Media companies are key elements of a corporate system that utterly dominates politics. In reality, US-UK military interventions are state-corporate military interventions. It ought to come as no surprise that the corporate media propagandises on behalf of its own interventions and works hard to hide the ugly consequences from a public with the power to resist.

In the digital age, people document and share everything – even insults to the fallen

Jonathan Jones

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 January 2012 18.17 GMT

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Forty years ago this month, the country of Bangladesh declared its independence from Pakistan. Then-President Richard Nixon supported Pakistan during the war because he wanted to prove the US would stand by an ally.

Many Americans disagreed with that stance. And when a ship headed for Pakistan with military equipment and ammunition was set to stop at a US port, one group of Americans felt it was necessary to get involved.

“I was ready to risk my life there,” says 78-year-old Richard Taylor. “I just wanted to get in front of that ship.”

In July 1971, Taylor and a group of protesters used canoes and kayaks to try and block the Pakistani freighter Padma from reaching the Port of Baltimore.

The ship was coming from Canada, bound for Pakistan. It was said to be carrying military equipment and ammunition, presumably to aid the government in its war with what was then called East Pakistan.

The US had ordered an arms embargo on new shipments to Pakistan. But newspapers reported that Pakistani freighters like The Padma were still visiting US ports to load military equipment that had been purchased before the embargo.

Taylor’s flotilla of two canoes, three kayaks and a rubber raft left from Baltimore’s Broening Park. The police and Coast Guard tried to stop it. But Taylor says the group was undaunted.

“One of key parts of this was that the US government was sending military aid to the West Pakistani government that was doing the invasion,” says Taylor. “So that made it poignant. People were suffering thousands of miles away, but our government was helping that suffering to happen.”

Timmy Aziz knew that suffering first hand. He grew up in East Pakistan. He was 10 when war broke out. He now teaches environmental design here in Baltimore.

“It’s really impressive how far they would have had to have gone,” says Aziz. “They would have been way in the middle of the water and completely in harm’s way. This massive freighter and these tiny little canoes, which would easily get washed away in the wake of the ship that size.”

Forty years on, Bengalis are expressing a renewed interest in their country’s independence movement. One of them is New Yorker Aris Yousuf. He finds the canoe blockade story so fascinating that he’s making a documentary on it.

“I wanted to see if I could make a film about the history of 1971, Bangladesh’s independence war and what happened in the US and be able to put it together from the people who participated at that time,” says Yousuf.

What happened that time in July 1971 was that the US Coast Guard foiled Richard Taylor and his friends. The Padma made it into the harbor; it was eventually loaded and left. The following month, protesters expanded their actions to include any Pakistani ship trying to dock in the US, regardless of its cargo. And they enticed longshoremen at the Port of Philadelphia to join the boycott.

“The cause had a heart, had a deep heart,” says 64-year-old Elliot Gevis. “And there were tremendous atrocities that were going on.”

Today, Gevis is a pediatrician. But back in 1971, he worked the docks in Philadelphia. He learned about the war in East Pakistan and the canoe protest from flyers, and helped convince other longshoremen not to load ships. The first freighter affected was The Al-Ahmadi. Richard Taylor and other protesters again used canoes and kayaks to try and block the ship. When it ran the blockade, Gevis and other dockworkers refused to unload it.

“Not everybody was supportive of that,” Gevis recalls. “But then again, they did respect unions. And they did respect not crossing picket lines, things of that sort. But at the same time, they had to pay bills and feed families. That was a big consideration.”

When the ship pushed off, no cargo had been loaded or unloaded.

After four more months of intense protests–and picketing in front of the White House– the US government finally ended all arms exports to Pakistan. It marked the end of one of the more unusual protest movements in America’s history.

“We’ve been just humbled by people who are Bengalis saying we couldn’t have done it without this movement here,” says Phyllis Taylor, Richard’s wife.

She, too, was involved in the protests.

“Not us necessarily, but a small group of committed people giving us hope, as Dick said, in the jungles that you could make a change.”

After nine months of fighting, East Pakistanis won the war. Their prize: a country now known as Bangladesh.

Shahidul Alam’s ‘My Journey as a Witness’: book excerpt and giveaway

Drik calendar 2012 now available:

A moment of crisis, a celebration, the unexpected, a dream realized, hidden truths, a reaffirmation of what we knew. Through TV screens, newspaper pages, giant electronic screens and tiny handsets, we gather, sift, scroll and parse news unfolding. Through twitter feeds, facebook and blogs, we circulate the news that we are fed, to inform, alert and mobilise those around us. Occasionally we question. The news photograph brings down powerful autocrats, highlights the plight of a single child, shines a spotlight on communities in strife, ignites the passion of victory, shares the tragedy of loss.

But the manufacture of consent has rarely been more engineered. With everything from wars to presidential campaigns being stage-managed and with mainstream news increasingly fed by official sources, reliance on usual sources of news images has become increasingly dangerous.

Majority world countries suffer particularly from stereotypical representations, and with media-mergers creating ever more powerful organisations, with tentacles that touch every aspect of our lives, our ‘knowledge’ of the world becomes increasingly more dominated by a few players. The need for news sources to be diverse and varied was never more urgent. With Getty and Corbis controlling the stock photo market, and Reuters, AP, AFP and EPA dominating the wires, massaging the truth is a norm that infiltrates our consciousness. The barriers between news and entertainment becomes increasingly blurred. Advertorials, product placements, well planted press releases package marketing hype through the Trojan horse of sponsored sound-bites and gritty footage masquerading as news.

Popular uprisings orchestrated through selected and sometimes fictional ‘news feeds’ are used to justify invasions, occupation and the murder and demonization of leaders who have outlived their usefulness. Propaganda in the guise of news, calls for selective applications of the Geneva Convention and international laws. Murder is justified, genocide glossed over. News channels hailed as the champions of the underdogs, know when to change their tune , towing the party line.

The majority world has traditionally been represented by white, middle class, western photographers. But having local photographers is not sufficient in itself. As long as editorial control remains in the North, stories will continue to have a northern slant. As long as major corporations own the media, reporting will always serve the interests of the wealthy. The only way this can be challenged is through alternative sources being formed that are independent of western and corporate media. Lean, efficient, fluid media entities that can outmaneuver the media giants, creating fissures in smooth storytelling of the mega media machinery, allowing a different truth to emerge through the cracks.

DrikNEWS is such a guerilla resistance against media occupation. The agency, an independent body of Drik Picture Library uses the powerful mix of new technology and grassroots reporting, to challenge established media, especially through citizen journalism and rural reporting. Through professionals immersed in their communities, and unhindered by the strings of corporate control, it tells stories that go against the grain. Combining powerful tools available through new technologies, linked with an extensive network of passionate reporters, the pioneers of digital technology in Bangladesh have combined the global reach of new media, with the local sensitivity of rural journalists nurtured by their communities. This is news for the people told the way only the people can tell.