Online Reporters Now the Journalists Most Often Jailed

bckspc writes "The Committee to Protect Journalists today released the results of its annual survey of journalists in prison. For the first time, they found more Internet journalists jailed worldwide than journalists working in any other medium. CPJ found that 45 percent of all media workers jailed worldwide are bloggers, Web-based reporters, or online editors. Their chart of journalists jailed by year is also interesting."

Comments

Lack of an editorial board.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Stuff on mainstream media has to pass through an editorial board. So potentially "criminal" reports get stopped there.

The board will know to not report something like, "the Grand Hoo-haw of our country is a stupid jerk."

Because the Grand Hoo-haw will take offense, and toss the whole staff in jail.

Bloggers, well, they just blog whatever they want. That's why they are sometimes much more interesting and insightful than mainstream stuff.

Re:Lack of an editorial board.

[HungryHobo]

News stations/traditional media: give you one angle, theirs, decided by what's going to get them sued and what's going to sell most copies. What's "true" is a minor concern if it could get them sued.

Bloggers: Give you every angle, largely ignoring what could get them sued, getting most hits could be considered to be like selling most copies but since there's rarely significant money involved this has a very small effect. "true" amounts to whatever the blogger opinion is.

Are we lumping board in with bloggers?
I have gotten sick of reading my national newspapers because I got sick of seeing so many stories (a week after I'd seen them online) where half the important facts of the situation were left out entirely and you could see the reporter had decided that X was guilty or that Y had happened and only presented that half of it in the story.

Example:
A story a few years ago about a woman who's twins had died because she refused to have a Csection. The (respectable) national newspaper presented the story as a "look how selfish this woman was, she killed her children becuase she was afraid of blemishing her body with a scar, she should have been forced to have a Csection!(for the children)" I should mention that this newspaper tends to push the view of women as incubators whenever abortion issues pop up.

Of course I'd read the story online before that and had run into the little fact that this woman already had kids, at least one of whom had been born by Csection and so she already had csection scars. The newspapers didn't feel that this fact was important yet it completely tore apart their whole story.

But sure those evil bloggers with their lies! they just want to put "real jornalists" out of a job!

With message boards when someone does that another person will jump in with the second half and call bullshit(normally). When newspapers present exactly half the story people treat it as gospel. "I read it in the newspaper!"

Blogs and message boards are a hundred times better to get your information from than all but the very very best traditional news media.

If you only ever read one blog your going to get worse information than from reading one newspaper, on the other hand if you read a few message boards you're likely to get much much much better info than you'll get from the same stories presented in a few normal newspapers.

Lies by omission are still lies and I'd prefer to be told the whole truth along with a pile of falsities than be told only the half of the truth which supports some hacks beliefs or agenda.