Talk-ins 10 Informed


DM Week debates


Journalism under atack It was a truly chilling moment when Nasser Abu Bakr faced his Zoom audience and described how he was inhaling gas fired by the Israeli army. Te president of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate was in Gaza, where bombs were raining down on the strip of land between Israel and the Mediterranean Sea. Tat morning, one of his colleagues, radio journalist Yousef Abu Hussein, was killed when his house was hit by a missile. Nasser was speaking at the 5PM Talk- in, with journalists and union leaders from around the globe, chaired by


organisations are deliberately targeted by those who want to hide the truth.” Among the panel members was Ayşe


Düzkan, “adopted” by the NUJ aſter being sentenced to 18 months in jail by the Turkish authorities for writing for the pro-Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündem. She described new laws which banned people recording violence by the police and soldiers against demonstrators. Journalists were also being intimidated and arrested under the increasingly authoritarian regime of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party said panel member, Sabina Inderjit, general secretary of the Indian Journalists Union: “In Kashmir there has been a complete communication clampdown, with the internet blocked for over a year. Tat was the darkest time I have ever gone through.” Te IFJ uses its annual end-of-year


Killing List to highlight every media worker’s death. On Wednesday 19 May, the 2021 tally was 14 – to be updated. Te panel’s Jim Boumelha, IFJ treasurer, said: “About two journalists are killed every week. Tey are mostly local, beat reporters, not the more glamorous war correspondents. In nearly nine in 10 cases, no prosecutions will follow.”


Jeremy Dear, deputy general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) who said: “Te killings of journalists happen not just in war- torn countries but are delivered and systematically designed to silence independent voices and investigative journalism all around the world. “With more than 230 journalists in jail, laws on sedition and criminal defamation are used to silence media, and unlawful surveillance and online harassment target journalists. As we see today in Gaza, journalists and media


Defending public service broadcasting While the public service broadcasters came into their own during the pandemic, competition for eyeballs from the likes of Netflix and Disney+, under-funding and hostile political forces all remained threats, a panel chaired by Radio 4’s Rebecca Keating heard. However, the DM Week 5PM panellists


were easily able to be upbeat about the worth of public service broadcasting (PSB) channels and why they were so important, so trusted and so full of talent. Cearbhall Ó Síocháin, an RTÉ


Irish language broadcaster, said: “At the outset of the pandemic audiences came back to RTÉ in search of reliable news and current affairs. And then we saw spikes of people returning to us for comfort and succour; to escape the horror in the arts, music, drama and entertainment. Te real test is that we


can convince them that the reasons they came during Covid-19 are the reasons they should stay.” Patrick Barwise, co-author of Te War


Against the BBC, believes the former chancellor, George Osborne, who persuaded the BBC to take on the costs of the welfare benefit of the over-75s’ TV licence, is the main villain. “If the BBC’s public funding had simply kept pace with general inflation, then today it would be annually almost £1.4billion beter off,” he said. Jo Stevens, Labour’s media and digital shadow secretary, was more concerned by the government’s shadowy PSB advisory panel which does not publish its agenda, or discussions. She also believes it could be only pure ideology driving any privatisation of Channel 4: “What is the problem the government is trying to solve by doing this?” Sir Peter Bazalgete, chair of ITV,


is worried by the tech giants: “If in 10 years’ time all TV signals are distributed by the internet, that means the gatekeepers will be the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons.” Tat’s why new laws to grant prominence to PSBs


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