Trading coverage for access?

This week on The Listening Post: Wikileaks releases shocking military footage from the battlefields of Iraq and in Israel, a new TV drama is attracting both audiences and ethics debates.

On April 5, a grainy black and white video was posted online by the whistleblower’s site Wikileaks. The video immediately began racking up viewing numbers and set off a storm in the blogosphere.

The footage had been filmed on board a US helicopter in 2007 during an encounter outside Baghdad and showed US soldiers firing at and killing 16 Iraqis, two of whom were journalists with Reuters.

It was not just the action on the tape that set the blogosphere alight – the muted response of American TV networks to the footage caused uproar as well.

In our News Divide this week, we examine this explosive piece of footage and analyse why – even in the face of such damning footage – the media still trades coverage for access to war zones.

Rounding up media news in Newsbytes: The protests in Thailand claim their first journalist victim as a Japanese cameraman is killed in the clashes; the al-Shabab in Somalia has banned BBC and VOA radio broadcasts; and in South Africa the media erupts with racial tensions following the death of far-right leader Eugene Terreblanche.

There is a new hit TV series in Israel called Hahatufim or Kidnapped.

The drama deals with one of the most contentious and pervasive of subjects in Israel – the abduction and return of Israeli soldiers. Produced by one of Israel’s biggest broadcasters – Channel 2 – Kidnapped has captured a wide audience not just because of its subject, but also its high-end production values.

The script is written in a way that blends fact and fiction, reality and reconstruction and nowhere is this more evident than in the newsbreaks that happen in the series.

Channel 2’s newsrooms and some of its reporters do a star turn in the drama and it has become a cause for debate amongst media critics in Israel.

The use of a real news studio in an entertainment show is not unknown practice in the television world, but when the show deals with an issue as politicised and current as that of kidnapped soldiers in Israel, it raises serious questions of ethics.

The Listening Post’s Meenakshi Ravi reports on Kidnapped and why its producers are not quite as concerned by the ethical debates that media critics are having about their show.

We end on a musical note this week and it comes courtesy of the Taiwanese talent show Super Star Avenue. A young man named Lin Yu Chun smashed through to the top of viral video charts with his pitch-perfect version of Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You. We think the show has a winner on its hands. Take a listen and see if you agree.

This episode of The Listening Post can be seen from Friday, April 16, at the following times GMT: Friday: 1230; Saturday: 1030, 2230; Sunday: 1930; Tuesday: 0630; Wednesday: 0030, 1430; Thursday: 0530.