Professor Jackie Harrison, CFOM Chair, writes about the long history of media manipulation and fake news, and the staying power of quality journalism. This piece for The Conversation, published on the World Press Freedom Day 2018, marks also the UNESCO announcement for Jackie Harrison, who has been awarded a prestigious new UNESCO Chair in Media Freedom, Journalism Safety and the Issue of Impunity.
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CFOM members, Jackie Harrison, Sara Torsner and William Horsley will be attending and participating in World Press Freedom Day (WPFD) 2018 in Accra, Ghana. CFOM hosts the Journalism Safety Research Network of around 170 members and is an official partner with UNESCO and the University of Ghana in the academic conference which is being held for the third year in a row as part of the WPFD celebrations.
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Proposals which were described as ‘important and timely’ were submitted for the attention of Commonwealth leaders by an expert Working Group for a new ‘code’ on media-government relations, but they were ignored in the final Communique. Even so, foreign ministers from the organisation’s 53 member states meeting in London heard powerful appeals for the Commonwealth to do more to protect media independence and the lives of journalists who face threats and acts of violence for their work.
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In 2017 the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation handed down an exceptionally important decision. It struck down a series of previous convictions handed down against Elena Nadtoka, the editor of a local newspaper in the Rostov Region, and instructed the local courts concerned to reverse their verdicts. The move followed a final ruling from the European Court of Human Rights on what was seen as a crucial test case in the struggle for survival of free media in Russia.
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Emma Heywood, a Lecturer and Researcher at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Journalism Studies, wrote this article which has been published on The Conversation based on her first-hand experience of life in the West Bank, where her research is focused on the role of local radio in NGO activities in war-affected zones.
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