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On The Listening Post this week, the coverage of the Copenhagen climate change summit and the blogosphere - still the place to go for news out of Iran.
We start this week's show in Copenhagen. News stories do not get much more complex than the issue of climate change.
That made the coverage of the Climate Change conference this past week highly problematic. If the national leaders in Copenhagen can not agree on how to deal with the issue or even if the problem is man made, how could they possibly agree on a solution?
What made matters worse was the email scandal - which became known as Climategate - that threatened to debunk climate science and undermine the conference before it even began.
So the news media in Copenhagen were left to sift through the sound bites and separate scientific fact from ideological fiction.
Our starting point this week is the Planet Earth: the conference in Denmark, the emails from Britain, and the newspapers from around the world that came together on an issue that divides politicians.
The Iranian blogosphere
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| The Iranian government is trying to prevent images like these from coming out [AFP] |
In part two, The Listening Post reports on the state of the Iranian blogosphere.
Six months after the disputed presidential elections, the authorities are desperately trying - and often succeeding - to contain the online phenomenon that has the potential to be revolutionary.
There was a political protest in Tehran this past week that much of the foreign media were prevented from covering - which underlined, once again, the growing importance the Iranian blogosphere has in telling the world about its story.
Following the elections in June, the international media's appetite for pictures and information out of Iran has been insatiable. From coverage of the mass protests to the iconic image of Neda, the story has topped the media agenda.
The amount of coverage has fallen off since then, but bloggers and citizen journalists remain at centre stage, providing information to the outside world, at great risk to their own safety.
In this week's Newsbytes: One of Sri Lanka's top journalists reveals to RSF that she has been getting death threats, three journalists are killed in a suicide bombing in Somalia, Rupert Murdoch expands his media empire in the Middle East, women are banned from wearing make-up on TV in Iran and Google has a new policy when it comes to surfing the net.
Saving the environment
Finally, for our Internet video of the week, we go back to where we started: Climate change and what to do about it. There are some powerful interests at play in this story. On one side, there is the fossil fuel industry, among other industries.
On the other, there is what has come to be known as the net roots: musicians, filmmakers and online activists who come together on the world wide web in efforts like the this one.
Australia's Midnight Oil were always a political band with an environmental bent. They have lent out one of their best known tracks, Beds are Burning.
They handed it over to a new generation of musicians, in the hope that it would become the anthem for a movement. Judging from the number of hits the video is attracting, it is working. Watch it here.
This episode of The Listening Post can be seen from Friday, December 11, at the following times GMT: Friday: 1230; Saturday: 1030, 2230; Sunday: 0300, 1930; Monday: 0030; Tuesday: 0630, 1630; Wednesday: 0130, 1430; Thursday: 0330, 2330.
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