90% of journalists' murderers across the world get away with it - report

http://www.theguardian.com/
Governments failing to break cycle of impunity as 370 journalists murdered in past 10 years
Governments are falling short in their efforts to combat impunity in the killing of journalists, with 90% of murderers walking free, according to a report issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

It says the lack of justice in the hundreds of murders of journalists around the world continues to bedevil press freedom.

American journalist James Foley was murdered by Islamic State militants in August 2014. Photograph: Nicole Tung/AP

The report, The road to justice: breaking the cycle of impunity in the killing of journalists, argues that governments have failed to take meaningful action to reduce the high rates of targeted violence and impunity against journalists.

In the past 10 years, 370 journalists have been murdered in direct retaliation for their work. The vast majority were local journalists reporting on corruption, crime, human rights, politics or war. But there are very, very few arrests or convictions of perpetrators.

Elisabeth Witchel, the report's lead author and CPJ's consultant on its global campaign against impunity, says: "The unchecked, unsolved murders of journalists who seek to inform their societies and the world is one of the greatest threats to press freedom today.

"It is crucial that national governments and the United Nations system provide the resources and political support to break the cycle of impunity in the killing of journalists."

A graphic illustration of the terrifying problems faced by journalists

The report's release comes ahead of the first UN-recognised "International day to end impunity for crimes against journalists" on 2 November.

Internal threats: ‘Journalists have to fight through job insecurity’

Pakistan is termed to be one of the most dangerous countries for journalist. However, the lesser-known fact is that journalists in Pakistan not only face external threats to life and personal security, but are also subjected to internal threats including job security.
In order to discuss the issues faced by journalists in Pakistan, Individualland Pakistan in collaboration with Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) and Friedrich Naumann Foundation organised an engagement session with journalists in Islamabad.

Individualland Pakistan is a research based advocacy firm that is working on themes like responsible reporting, good governance, conflict sensitive journalism, gender equity.
In her opening remarks, Executive Director, Individualland Pakistan Gulmina Bilal Ahmad stated that it’s a dilemma that journalists raise their voices to solve the problems of the society, but they face a series of different problems themselves, ranging from lack of job security to their personal and family’s security.
President National Press Club Islamabad Sheharyar Khan was of the view that standards of journalism cannot be raised until or unless journalists are given job security and a proper salary structure.
President Rawalpindi Union of Journalists Ali Raza Alvi was also present at the occasion. Senior journalists from Khyber Union of Journalists and Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists also attended the session.

Asma Shirazi cites ‘unsung heroes’ in Pakistan press

By AFP
WASHINGTON: Asma Shirazi, the Pakistani journalist honoured for courageous reporting on Thursday spoke out against “brutality” against reporters in her country as she expressed hope for greater freedom for the news media.

Shirazi, Pakistan's first female war correspondent and host of popular TV talk show “Faisla Awam Ka” on DawnNews, made the comments as she accepted the 2014 Peter Mackler Award for Courageous and Ethical Journalism.

Shirazi said she was encouraged by the recognition but noted that the country remains one of the most dangerous in the world for news reporters, with 99 journalists killed in the line of duty since 2000.

Journalists in Pakistan “are working in an environment where they could be killed anytime,” she told the award ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington.

“I dedicate this award to the unsung heroes of journalism in Pakistan who sacrificed their lives for the cause of their profession.”

She said this includes many working in remote areas who “are endangering their lives on every spur of the moment.” The situation is one of “extreme gravity,” she said, noting that reporters have been beheaded, tortured, and killed in suicide bombings.

“Despite these dangers and difficulties, Pakistani journalists continue unabated with the task at hand, to give voice to the voiceless, to speak truth to power and to tell everybody the everyday story of our life,” she said.

She added that the prize offers “an opportunity to raise my voice against the brutality that journalists in Pakistan are subjected to.” “I expect this award to promote the true meaning of courage and ethical journalism in Pakistan.”

UK triples Chevening scholarships for Pakistan

70 Chevening scholarships on offer
LAHORE: The Chevening Scholarship programme has nearly tripled the number of scholarship places for Pakistan by offering around 70 such opportunities for the academic year 2015-2016.
This was stated by Chevening Scholarship Pakistan programme head Jonathan Williams during a presentation held at the Pearl Continental Hotel on Monday.
The British High Commission held the presentation session in collaboration with the Lahore Press Club.

Williams said that the scholarship offered post graduate academic qualification to students. “So far, the scholarship has produced more than 43,000 scholars globally. This includes around 1,300 Pakistanis. The purpose of the session is to raise awareness regarding the scholarship, especially among journalists,” he said.

Can journalists be opinionated on Twitter?

By Usman Shahid
The events taking place around us affect our feelings, which as a result, affect our conversations throughout our normal lives. Since August, the prolonged Azadi march has been affecting the feelings of average Pakistanis on the road.

Being associated to the data-mining and text-mining field, I carried out a little experiment to explore the sentiments of Pakistani journalists who are reporting current events in Pakistan. I took journalists as my test subjects as ordinary people generally take their (journalists’) opinions seriously and even adopt them as their own. But according to the journalism objectivity principle, these journalists should remain impartial and convey only facts without including their feelings, emotions, opinions and political views along with the news. The result was rather interesting.

In academic literature, extracting the writer’s opinion or feeling from the text using the machine learning computational technique is termed as sentiment analysis or opinion-mining. Generally speaking, by using sentiment analysis, researchers try to extract the opinion or feeling of a writer, leaving behind only factual text. The attitude of the writer normally involves his or her judgment, emotional state and emotional effects that writers normally intend to convey to their readers. The results of this analysis appear as positive, negative, or neutral for every piece of “news” conveyed by writers or journalists.

Positive results indicate the writer’s happy mood and excitement while writing the text. Negative refers to the presence of sad emotions or negative opinion. When equal polarity of positive and negative sentiments exists in the text, it becomes difficult for the computational techniques to pass their judgment, and therefore refer to them as neutral. For example, if the writer is talking about somebody’s death, but doing so without expressing or including his opinion or emotions on the demise.

Twitter has become a famous tool to extract people’s personal and political views. Researchers in the US used Twitter data to understand people’s emotions during the presidential elections. It is due to the same reason that John Morton, who was a former newspaper reporter and is now the president of a consulting firm that analyses newspapers and other media properties, wrote an article on how social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have changed the way journalists interact with the public. He says,

“Journalists should not reveal their political views, Twitter or no Twitter”

For a good journalist, journalism objectivity must be ensured. Journalism objectivity is the basic principle of journalistic professionalism and refers to the neutrality of the journalist. It ensures that he/she remains neutral without choosing to be on either side of the argument. That is when only the facts are reported for what they are.

In Pakistan, almost every journalist claims to be neutral. In this experiment, I put this claim to test via sentiment analysis using tweets of famous journalists in Pakistan so as to show how neutral their reporting is under the context of political activity regarding Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)’s Azadi march.

I used R Software’s Twitter library (Twitter) for mining or extracting tweets from August and Datumbox API, a text analysis service, to rate the sentiment of each tweet as positive, negative or neutral. I took into account tweets of various journalists such as Cyril Almeida, Fahd Husain, Fereeha Idrees, Hamid Mir, Iftikhar Ahmad, Jasmeen Manzoor, Javed Chaudhry, Kashif Abbasi, Moeed Pirzada, Mushtaq Minhas, Rauf Klasra, Raza Rumi, Shahzeb Khanzada, and Talat Hussain. Due to limitation of time, I wasn’t able to conduct the experiment on other renowned journalists.

Initially, I obtained the sentiments from some of the tweets individually.

Moeed Prizada tweets:


Pirzada’s mood and feelings were detected as positive.


The disappointment in Hussain’s tweet was concluded as negative. The sentiment analyser considered Hussain to be feeling rather sad whilst tweeting this text.

However, the sentiment analyser was unable to extract a positive or negative analysis from Mir’s tweets.


Clearly, it was difficult to conclude whether he was excited or sad. He conveyed the message but did not include any emotions or opinions.

Every tweet was carrying different sentiments, and so for the next stage, I collected tweets of journalists, who tweeted in August, and calculated the twitter profile of each journalist to understand what type of aggregate sentiment they are spreading amongst their followers. And the results of the experiment turned out to be quite interesting. The results of the sentiment analysis are shown in Table 1 and Figure 1 below.

Pirzada and Husain’s sentiments are obtained as most positive amongst all of their peers. Minhas appeared as the one who mostly displays negative sentiments in his tweets. For neutral sentiments, Mir tops the list. Not only did he top the list, but there were barely any positive or negative sentiments portrayed in any of his tweets, which proved that he is better at hiding his emotions and opinions as compared to his peers. Ahmad, Klasra, and Khanzada had similar results to Mir.

Positive sentiments remain higher than negative for Husain, Mir, Chaudhry, Pirzada and Rumi. Whereas Almeida, Idrees, Manzoor and Abbasi try to balance their sentiments in their tweets, thus, their neutral sentiments remain lower than their positive and negative sentiments.

As per the results, it is obvious that most of the Pakistani journalists are tweeting with emotions and not taking into consideration the existence of journalism objectivity. And this is surely affecting their followers.

A journalist’s job is to be impartial and let the people decide for themselves which politician is correct or not. Our journalists should only convey the facts without their own judgments about the political events, parties or people.

If I manage to get time in the future, I will conduct an experiment to analyse the sentiments of the people responding to these journalists to understand how much their tweets affect the people reading them. Till then, I leave you with the results of my current experiment to ponder upon journalism objectivity.
Usman Shahid
A PhD candidate at North Dakota State University (USA) and a lecturer at COMSATS, Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Practical journalism institute to be set up in Peshawar

PESHAWAR: The Journalists Welfare, Safety and Development Foundation will establish a practical journalism institute in the provincial capital to build capacity of mediapersons by imparting them professional and safety trainings on regular basis.

Similarly, various kinds of events like workshops, seminars, dialogues would be arranged under different themes to enhance knowledge of journalists so they could face challenges of the new era. The decision was taken at a meeting of the foundation’s cabinet chaired by its patron Syed Bukhar Shah Bacha at Peshawar Press Club on Monday.

It decided that practical journalism activities would be extended gradually to other parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The meeting decided to work for welfare of orphans and widows of the deceased mediapersons after collecting data about them.

One Pakistani journalist’s quiet media revolution

By Merium Kazmi,
As the first woman at the Dawn newspaper, Zubeida Mustafa led the way for other female journalists with her coverage of hard-hitting political issues. She spoke to Merium Kazmi.
In 1975, when Zubeida Mustafa joined Pakistan’s top liberal daily Dawn, she was the only woman. During her approximately 33 years as an assistant editor at the English language newspaper, she was credited with not only integrating women’s issues across diverse topics, but also promoting equal opportunities for women at the newspaper.

Zubeida Mustafa speaks during the 2012 Courage in Journalism Awards held by the International Women’s Media Foundation at the Beverly Hills Hotel on October 29, 2012 in Beverly Hills, California. Frederick M Brown/Getty 

Earlier on, as an up-and-coming female journalist, not only did she find it challenging being taken seriously by her male colleagues in terms of the stories she wanted to cover, but it was also a struggle to navigate the oft-segregated and conservative societal structure of her native Pakistan.

Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi win Nobel peace prize 2014

Paul Owen, Matthew Weaver and agencies ,The Guardian, Friday 10 October 2014
Pakistani teenager and Indian children’s rights activist beat Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, the Pope and Vladimir Putin to the prestigious prize

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenage education campaigner shot on school bus in 2012 by a Taliban gunman, has won the 2014 Nobel peace prize.

Malala won along with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian children’s rights activist.

The two were named winner of the £690,000 (8m kronor or $1.11m) prize by the chairman of the Nobel committee - Norway’s former prime minister Thorbjoern Jagland - on Friday morning.