New media and the G20

Watch part two

On The Listening Post this week, new media coming into its own at the G20 summit, and the proliferation of web censorship in totalitarian regimes.

This week in the News Divide: Twenty political leaders, four hours to discuss the state of the world, and the biggest protests in the Western hemisphere since the world economic meltdown. We are talking about the G20 meeting in London.

How well did the mainstream media cover the story and was there a better, alternative way of getting the real news?

The meeting and the protests pitted the political establishment against many voices of global discontent – and the news media were also divided – mainstream versus underground. The result was two quite different narratives being told in parallel.

In part two, The Listening Post’s Simon Ostrovsky takes a look at Internet censorship. There are many countries around the world that routinely censor their Internet for material, often of a political, religious or ‘alternative’ cultural nature, which is deemed to encourage dissidence against a regime.

We will be focusing on the role and responsibility of the Western companies who provide the technology to police the Internet, as well as how to get around the controls to access material that many governments do not want their citizens to see.

In this week’s Newsbytes: hard-line clerics in Saudi Arabia have called for a ban on pictures of women in the media, as well as a ban on music on television; an update on two American journalists who will now be prosecuted in North Korea for allegedly illegally entering the country; a Sudanese blogger has released a chilling account of his ordeal at the hands of the Sudanese police, after showing his support online for the International Criminal Court’s decision to indict Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president; and a Finnish computer programmer has replaced his missing finger with a prosthetic one containing a 2Gb memory stick.

Finally for our Internet video of the week: Twitter is one of the latest social networking tools and it is clear to us at The Listening Post that as a news delivery system, providing instant, on the ground updates via SMS texting, Twitter represents a breakthrough. But what about all the other people who tweet all the time on mundane topics? The people at current.tv threw together a little animation on Twitter that asks the same question. We have made this look into the twittersphere our internet video of the week.

This episode of The Listening Post aired from Friday, April 3, 2009.