Tony Blair: Sultan of spin
What have the global media made of the British prime minister’s resignation?
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| Tony Blair: Britain’s sultan of spin |
In our Newsdivide this week we look at Britain’s sultan of spin – Tony Blair and what the global media made of his departure.
Having spent ten years in office the British prime minister has honed his skills at dealing with the media.
However, now that he has resigned Mr Blair’s political obituaries are not reading the way he would have liked.
In our Newsbytes this week: a Mickey Mouse lookalike is at the heart of a conflict between the two main Palestinian political factions and Israel.
The character called Farfur is on a programme shown on a TV station controlled by Hamas. An Israeli media watchdog group spotted Farfur urging young Palestinians to support armed resistance against Israel – the video was posted on the net and the complaints poured in.
The BBC has also found itself at the heart of a dispute with the US-based Church of Scientology and the result was a made for TV meltdown moment for the BBC reporter.
And reporting restrictions in Iraq as the government there says it intends to ban journalists from the sites of bombings and other acts of violence.
In our feature the online revolt of the Digg nation is explained by our reporter Meenakshi Ravi. Digg.com is part of the new generation of news sites: users submit stories that they like and then it is the users who vote on which stories make it to the front page. It is community driven.
However, at the beginning of this month it was news of dig.com itself that was swamping the site’s front page when someone posted a news story containing a copyrighted hack code into high definition DVDs.
When they were threatened with legal action Digg’s moderators decided to delete the code.
The deletion of the code was seen as tantamount to censorship and so the rebellion started and Digg back-tracked on their decision.
It is a story about the growing power of new online communities and the collision course that they are on with the lawyers who are paid big money to protect corporate copyrights. www.flickr.com
And finally in the internet video of the week we see the Clash of cultures – Blair goes punk and asks “should I stay or should I go?”
Watch this episode of The Listening Post here:
Part 1:
Part 2:
This episode of The Listening Post aired from 18 May 2007
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