Where a story can cost you your life
The recent murder of a journalist in Pakistan has sent chills through journalistic circles.
On Listening Post this week: Another journalist is murdered in Pakistan and the primary suspect is not an extremist group – it is the security forces. And sexism on Italian TV.
Pakistan is currently considered the most dangerous place on earth to report from. In just over a year, 16 journalists have been murdered. But the most recent case has sent a chill through journalistic circles there.
Syed Saleem Shahzad was an investigative journalist and the Pakistan bureau chief of Asia Times Online. When his body was discovered – bearing signs of torture – the chief suspect was not an extremist group but, according to other reporters, Pakistan’s intelligence agency.
The media landscape in Pakistan is a pretty noisy, opinionated place but it often draws the line at the military and intelligence agencies – a line that Shahzad crossed. Our News Divide this week looks at the case of Syed Saleem Shahzad and the story that could have cost him his life.
In News Bytes this week: The curious case of an outspoken Syrian blogger who may, or may not have been arrested by the country’s security forces; media freedom in Mexico continues to deteriorate as a newspaper’s building is attacked and a missing journalist’s body is discovered; Wikileaks frontman, Julian Assange receives the prestigious Martha Gelhorn prize for journalism; and the New York Times has a new executive editor, the first female in the paper’s 160-year history to be given the role.
Media mogul and Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi is about to go on trial for allegedly paying for sex with an under age prostitute. While this may be considered a sex scandal in Italy, what many Italians tend to overlook is just how sexually charged their television has become. Switch on the TV there today and you will be bombarded with images of women – whether they are dancing, reporting the weather or talking on chat shows – who are predominantly young, good-looking and scantily clad. Having attractive people on television is not a new phenomenon, but is it being taken too far in Italy? Listening Post’s Meenakshi Ravi looks at the sexist representation of women in the Italian media, why that is and what is being done to change it.
Our Internet Video of the Week takes an addictive mobile phone video game and fuses it with a popular nursery rhyme, to make a rather insightful animation about the Arab uprisings. A lot of you will be familiar with the tale of the three little pigs, but for those of you who are not acquainted with the video game, it is called Angry Birds and the point is to demolish buildings (in this case regimes) by catapulting the birds into them. And if you look at the colour of these birds in particular, you will see the deliberate homage to another popular, addictive social media phenomenon – one that was instrumental in the uprisings. We hope you enjoy the show.
Listening Post can be seen each week at the following times GMT: Saturday: 0830, 1930; Sunday: 1430; Monday: 0430.