Barack Obama and the media

Watch part two

We begin the show this week with Barack Obama’s first 100 days on the global media stage.

When he was sworn in as US president on January 20, that story and those images, made every front page and every news broadcast around the world.

In the 100 days since, Obama has remained in the headlines. For Obama, working the media is a crucial part of influencing public opinion, both at home and overseas.

His first 100 days have had him at heart of big news stories – the collapsing US and global financial markets, his reaching out to the Islamic world, and the debate over the Bush administration’s use of torture, to name just a few.

In part two The Listening Post’s Simon Ostrovsky travels to Russia.

According to the International Federation of Journalists, more than 150 reporters – roughly ten a year – have been murdered in Russia since 1993.

Many of those murders have occurred in Moscow, yet there have been few trials and the conviction rate is barely 50 per cent.

Scores of other journalists say they have been threatened, intimidated and assaulted.

One of the most recent murders – of Anastasia Barburova who was freelancing for the outspoken newspaper Novaya Gazeta – resulted in a meeting at the Kremlin involving Dimitri Medvedev, the Russian president, and the paper’s editor-in-chief.

Barburova was the fourth Novaya Gazeta reporter killed in the past 8 years – including Anna Politkovskaya – a longtime critic of the Kremlin whose voice was silenced by a gun.

Our report looks at these cases and the other media workers whose cases remain unsolved.

In this week’s Newsbytes: A torture video from the UAE; a video of the execution of a couple in Pakistan’s Hangu district; swine flu and the twitter eruption that followed; and the media war in Thailand.

Finally, music is one of the many things that internet users go to YouTube for. There is all kinds of it on the file-sharing site – from classic music videos – to amateurs auditioning online.

Here is the result of a special YouTube project. The people behind the site sent out music written by Tan Dun, the Chinese composer, and invited musicians to audition by uploading their part of the piece for a collaborative video. The result – with well over a million hits so far – is our internet video of the week.

This episode of The Listening Post aired from Friday, May 1, 2009.