'journalism' - tagged features

The French media watchdog, Reporters Without Borders, sent three people to Olympia, in Greece, to disrupt the torch lighting ceremony. Vincent Brossel was one of the Reporters Without Borders activists who disrupted the ceremony and was later arrested. He was released on parole, and returned to France where he spoke with Jan van der Made. 

Photo-journalists have just had their big night in front of the camera. The World Press Photo Awards are seen as the photography world’s equivalent of the Oscars. The winners were announced in a ceremony in Amsterdam last friday. The top prize was taken by British photographer Tim Hetherington for his shot of an American soldier in Afghanistan. The subject is clearly exhausted and is resting inside a bunker with one hand held up to his forehead. Also exhausted were the awards judges. They had to look at over 80,000 entries in just a few days. Panel judge MaryAnne Golon, Head of photography at Time Magazine and chairman of the judging panel, Gary Knight, both spoke to Network Europe about their impressions of this year’s entries. 

On the face of it, French journalists should be delighted. With only five weeks to go before the first round, the French presidential campaign is still wide open, the main candidates have a lot of personality, and one of them is even photogenic. But actually journalists in France are a bit depressed. Almost sixty per cent of French people say they're not satisfied with the media's coverage of the campaign. And to make things worse, there are now TV shows with no journalists at all, where citizens question the candidates directly. Radio France International's Nick Champeaux is still happy, but thought he should find out more about why some of his fellow professionals aren't. 

he was a Russian investigative journalist but Anna Politkovskaja, was mourned internationally. Her colleagues say her murder was retaliation for her reports on Chechnya and indeed her legacy will forever be linked to the fight for press freedom. Radio Netherlands opened their vault to take us back to an interview they recorded in 1995 after the journalist fell seriously ill with symptoms of food poisoning after covering the Beslan hostage tragedy. She alleged that the Russian government poisoned her in an attempt to silence her reports on the war in Chechnya 

Anna Politkovskaja was mourned internationally, and indeed her funeral was attended by the head of the European Commission's delegation to Moscow along with representatives from the EU's current Finnish presidency and ensuing German presidency. And on Tuesday outside the Russian embassy in Stockholm, Swedish journalists demonstrated and lit candles in Politkovskaja's memory. The 48-year-old was one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's most vocal critics. But in his first public comments on the shooting, Putin vowed to hunt down the perpetrators and said he believed the killers wanted to stir up anti-Russian feeling. And without a doubt, the murder cast a shadow over Putin's two-day visit to Dresden, Germany. The annual bilateral deliberations are aimed at fostering Russian-German ties. Talks between German chancellor Angela Merkel and Putin were, this time, also dominated by energy security and of course North Korea's nuclear crisis. 

There are significantly less Muslims in Sweden than in France but that doesn't mean the 300,000 strong community isn't facing its own issues of integration. Sweden's official policy is multiculturalism. But just what that means is a source of constant debate. One product of Sweden's search for its own brand of multiculturalism is Gringo magazine, which turns prejudice on its head by using the language of the suburbs where most of Sweden's immigrant population lives. Meryam Can, managing editor of the magazine, draws on her own Turkish-Swedish backgound to discuss integration and discrimination in Swedish society. 

Europe's Roma community suffer arguably even worse discrimination than immigrants do. Journalism is frequently responsible for blackening the name of this minority, who often live on the fringes of mainstream society. But it can equally be used to inform, as prejudice is often born simply out of ignorance. Radio Sweden reports on a meeting of Romani journalists from accross Europe that took place in Stockhom recently, and found out about the special difficulties faced by reporters from this community.