Blogger Mickey Kaus has found something sketchy happening on The Twitter: insulting tweets about celebrity twitterers are disappearing from search results. Grassy knoll territory? Or is the company protecting one of its most valuable asset, the Twitterati?
Censorship
Australia Post stamps out raunchy Penguins
The retail arm of Australia Post has banned the sale of three literature classics amid concern over racy passages and graphic sex scenes.
Guardian: We’ve been gagged from reporting Parliament
The UK’s Guardian newspaper says it has been censored from reporting on Parliamentary proceedings, after a gag order was placed on the details of a question to be asked later this week in Parliament.
Wankley Awards: China bullies its way to a perfect national day
Event planners and government spinners take note: here’s the Chinese government’s top 10 tips on how to pull together a major media event free of any negative coverage, writes Crikey intern Melanie Mahony.
ACMA iTunes and the failure of net filtering
The underlying Australian internet censorship process is unworkable, and always will be. Opponents of the filter are busy proving it, with complaints about iTunes selling MA15+ films without requiring age verification.
No sunshine for Fijian journalists
Fijian authorities are censoring and intimidating the media with ‘Gestapo-like’ tactics, including arrests and interrogations, finds a damning new report on Fiji released by Amnesty International, titled Fiji: Paradise Lost.
Censorship and cowardice at Conde Nast
Publisher Conde Nast has buried a story from GQ on possible connections between Vladimir Putin, the KGB and a series of 1999 bombings officially blamed on Chechen terrorists, keeping the piece off the web and out of Russia, for fear of reprisals.
Gawker translate censored story into Russian
Outraged at revelations that GQ buried a story linking Vladimir Putin to a series of 1999 bombings to keep it out of Russia, Gawker has rallied its readership to translate the article into Russian and spread it online.
East Timor’s media ‘blackout’ or just a lack of research?
There isn’t a ‘media blackout’ occurring in East Timor, rather lots of factually incorrect stories that ignore the East Timorese government’s focus on anti-corruption campaigns.
Shafer: Grow a spine, Washington Post
The Washington Post recently canceled its web video feature “Mouthpiece Theater” after public outrage over a tasteless sleight about Hillary Clinton. But that’s what newspapers — especially the Post — do, says Jack Shafer, and the paper’s backpeddling is a huge cop-out.
The University of Melbourne gags VCA staff
The University of Melbourne has placed an unprecedented gag on Victorian College of the Arts staff members talking to the media, with Senior staff members currently locked in a battle with the University over reforms stemming from the introduction of the controversial Melbourne Model.
News outlets censor killer’s racist rant
The AP and other news outlets have omitted racist comments and references to US President Barack Obama when publishing excerpts from the diary of gunman George Sodini, who opened fire on a Pittsburgh fitness center yesterday, killing four women.
Iran protestor deaths covered up
A doctor working in Tehran writes in the Guardian that the death toll from the post-election protests is far higher than the official figure of 20, and that medical staff are being pressured to cover up the real figures.
Al Jazeera pulls West Papua doco
Al Jazeera’s English channel has decided not to air an Australian documentary on human rights abuses in the Indonesian province of West Papua. Did they cave in to pressure from the Indonesian government?
Honduran media whitewash
Al Giordano plays spot-the-difference with a real picture of a gunned-down teenager at a rally in Honduras, and that published by pro-coup newspaper, La Prensa. Hint: he looks suspiciously less dead.
Criminalising the imagination
ast month, Christopher Handley, a collector of comic books, pled guilty to federal charges of importing and possessing obscene cartoon drawings of children; he faces a maximum prison sentence of 15 years.
Chipping away at the Great Firewall of China
The Chinese government has decided not to go ahead with plans to put internet censoring software on every new computer, following widespread criticism from the international community.
ABC forced out of Iran
The ABC’s Middle East correspondent Ben Knight reports on the censorship facing journalists in Iran, with the government revoking all press cards and refusing to let the press onto the streets.
Breaking the Tiananmen taboo
An official Beijing newspaper made a quiet but unprecented mention of the Tiananmen Square Massacre yesterday. Why did they do it and — more importantly — why were they allowed to?
Wikipedia clams up Scientologists
Wikipedia has banned the Church of Scientology from editing of Scientology-related articles after a four-year “editing war” between Scientologists and critics.
Britain’s war on football indecency
Duleep Allirajah defends his Democratic right to sing really offensive songs at the footy.
Media banned from Aung San Suu Kyi trial again
Burma’s military junta has again barred the media from the trial of the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Protesting media censorship with Lego men
Flickr user Legofesto has created a pretty amazing gallery of Lego men being tortured to make a political point about how the media censor torture images.
Meet Facebook’s porn cops
To keep Facebook clean and friendly for advertisers, the site employs a team of “porn cops” who spend their days monitoring and censoring users’ content.
LA Times / Wednesday, 6 May 2009
Controvertial right-wing US radio host Michael Savage has been banned from entering Britain on the grounds that he is a “hate promoter”.