When Hate Goes Viral: The Danger of Social Media...
By Ashif Rabi Last November, a group of Bangladeshi Muslims attacked a Hindu neighborhood in the Eastern part of Bangladesh. Thousands of people ransacked the temples and homes of Hindu families. Attacks such as these on minorities are not a new thing in Bangladesh, but this particular incident ha... |
Lugar, Schiff remember Mark Helmke as CIMA annou...
On Thursday, December 1, Indiana University’s School of Global and International Studies (SGIS) joined CIMA and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in announcing a new partnership, the Mark Helmke Postdoctoral Scholarship on Global Media, Development, and Democracy. The announcement coincid... |
3 Reasons Why Messaging Apps are Key to Media Fr...
Governments around the world are targeting encrypted messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Telegram, which can be used to spread news and information quickly and securely. This is one of the key findings from Freedom House’s 2016 Freedom on the Net report, which was released earlier this week. In fact... |
Media Freedom in the New Burma: Defamation, Self...
By David Angeles With last November’s landslide election victory of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, the outlook for a successful democratic transition in Burma, also known as Myanmar, seems more positive than ever. Arguably, it was the initial opening of the medi... |
State of Emergency in Ethiopia curtails Media Fr...
By Simegnish Yekoye A year after the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), together with its allies, claimed a 100 percent of the seats in the May 2015 parliamentary elections, the country declared a state of emergency for the first time in 25 years. The government that Presid... |
The International Community in Ethiopia is Wrong...
There is a common perception in the international diplomatic community in Addis Ababa that putting public pressure on the Ethiopian government to improve human rights and other basic democratic freedoms is likely to backfire. Ethiopia’s current government—which has been strongly influenced by Et... |
Distorting the News in Africa: How Dictators Hav...
By Elie Smith In response to the influence of Western media in their countries, African dictators have ramped up nationalistic and pan-African propaganda through government-sponsored media. These media outlets spend their time either painting an overly rosy picture of the situation in Africa, or att... |
Highlights from the Global Media Policy Forum: T...
By Teemu Henriksson Editor’s Note: This post was first published on WAN-IFRA’s website and is republished here with permission. WAN-IFRA’s Public Affairs and Media Policy department held its annual Global Media Policy Forum held at the World News Media Congress on Monday 13 Ju... |
Year in Review: Top 5 CIMA Blog Posts of 2015
As 2015 comes to an end, it’s a good time to take stock of which topics attracted the most interest on CIMA’s blog over the past year. To do this, I performed a quick analysis of the number of blog post visitors in order to compile a list of the five most-read blog posts of […] |
In Bangladesh “the term ‘blogger’ has beco...
Around the world online freedoms are being threatened both by states and violent criminal organizations that are seeking to repress free speech. One glaring example is that of the endangered bloggers in Bangladesh who have been threatened, harassed, and killed. In 2015 alone, Islamic extremists have... |