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The Largely Unknown Success Story of Afghanistan's Television Network
Daniel_Stuckey writes in with an Afghanistan media success story. "I met Orner at South by Southwest, where she was hustling her latest film, The Network. The Network features a brighter side of Afghanistan's brighter side: the story of its television revolution. In Orner's opinion, it's a narrative that runs contrary to our common conceptions of a country that has spent decades in a state of war and instability. She followed Saad Mohseni, a media guru and founder of Afghan media firm Moby Group, who is credited for jump starting the nation's media transformation. Sometimes referred to as the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan, Mohseni, an Afghan expat and entrepreneur, explains how he and his siblings returned to Kabul from Australia in 2001, amidst the war shifting into gear. First, they launched a radio station, and by 2004 they'd shifted to television with Tolo TV, quickly turning Moby Group into the largest media conglomerate in the nation."
Can we get a new mod category? For hipsterish memes?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I met Orner at South by Southwest, where she was hustling her latest film
Be seeing you...
We are at war with the Muslim world.
They win by out-breeding us.
We win by infecting them with MTV middle east and feminism, then outlasting them.
Their grandchildren will act and speak in ways that would make the gayest emo kid blush and stutter.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'll just leave this right here.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Granted it's got a lot of problems. But Afghanistan is probably the best country to live in it's neighborhood. The leadership is a bit erratic, and the Taliban is a problem; but neighboring Pakistan has both problems worse. Neighboring Iran is Iran. Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan are dominated by the same ruling class that ran them when they were Soviet states, the elections are little better then jokes.
Technically China is also Afghanistan's neighbor, which means that Afghanistan may only be the second-most fucked up country in it's region. It's first if you don't think China's recent economic success is a) going to continue or b) worth all the prices the Chinese pay for it.
its little known, i guess.. and i dont know if its been a great success either but the united states govt has its own arab language network..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhurra
a United States-based Arabic-language satellite TV channel funded by the U.S. Congress that broadcasts news and current affairs programming to audiences in the Middle East and North Africa.
Its stated mission is to provide "objective, accurate and relevant news and information" to its audience while seeking to "support democratic values" and "expand the spectrum of ideas, opinions, and perspectives" available in the region's media
it says its available in nearly 2 dozen countries.. i dont see afghanistan on the list.. it looks like the US wont have to worry about competition in that country?
James bond is British, and Seth's only goal in life is to piss every possible demographic off to the point of no return
you terrorist moron
Funny, I was just watching that episode of Family guy.
Mr Mohseni and his employees will be out of business or dead as soon as the western forces leave and the Taliban take over again. Or they may just be put out of business by the corrupt present government who don't want the distraction of an independent media.
I recall how the Taliban kept sabotaging Cell Towers in the interest of enforcing some "islamic" ban on cell phone usage. It seemed like this was a pretty fragile system since it was hard to protect the towers. Did this ever resolve itself? I would guess that broadcast towers for TV and Radio have longer ranges and thus might have fewer locations to protect. But ultimately I wonder if those can be protected against a determined foe.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Is Junis involved with it at all? Whatever happened to that guy?
quickly turning Moby Group into the largest media conglomerate in the nation.
Having different media all under the same commercial interest is considered a "success"? Only from the view of the US, I suppose.
The rest of the world would probably consider the flourish of different medium under different interests more desirable.
I need/want more information. Sure, this is great from a tech viewpoint but from a humanitarian view... Well, I want to know if they have free press AND if that press is what it needs to be in order to do its job. We have that right here in America and we tend to use it fairly well, more so when we get away from mainstream media but pretty well regardless. What free press demands, to be effective, is an inquisitive and persevering group of people to perform that task. Without that you have nominal free press that doesn't do any good. The article touches on this and hopefully the movie covers it more. I'll watch it when it is available to me. Also, the lady has a big nose. (I'm a little high and couldn't help but notice and comment on it.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
why we ever spent a dime to 'save' them i'll never know.
oh wait. oil.
and to piss the russians off.
but still. fuck those guys.
For instance, men having multiple wives in different places and being at liberty to divorce them at will and take more - there is something in Islam that the hippie and punk movements would envy, and only resent that women don't have the same leeway. Free sex already exists in the Muslim world - for men. Muslim societies are already dysfunctional - introducing MTV values there isn't going to do more damage.
So how do poor men get free sex when the available women have all been sold into harems of rich men?
Learn to love Alaska
Sometimes referred to as the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan
Oh, so he's an asshole then?
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
So how do poor men get free sex when the available women have all been sold into harems of rich men?
This question gives an explanation to the ages old tradition of waging wars on neighbors, specially the infidels, for the purpose of capturing women (and men of course, to be used as slaves).
Murdoch is probably the worst comparison anyone cold ever have made while staying in the media business. It's like comparing a head of state to Adolf Yong Cheney-Mobutu.
Then again, with the name of the station being English, it's very likely that that's exactly what it is: A US propaganda station.
Wouldn't be the first time.
They switch to young boys usually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect
There will never be a shortage. Islamic law allows men to seek out girls as young as 9 for marriage - following the example of Mohammed himself. So it's not like there will ever be a shortage of women - and also, not all women of age would get sold into the harems of rich sheikhs. The ones that don't, and also the divorced ones would always be available to the poor Muslims. And heavens forbid, if there are non-Muslim women in the neighborhood, don't be surprised if they disappear, as they regularly do in Pakistan, even when they are underaged: there have been hundreds of instances of Christian or Hindu girls being kidnapped and 'married' to Muslim kidnappers, and that has also caused a quiet exodus of a good portion of the remaining Hindus to India.
In a typical normal country of 10 million there are about 5 million women and 5 million men.
If you change this to exclude women under 9 and men under 25, you get about 4 million women and 3 million men.
This means 1.3 wives per man. In a middle-age country, where the men are dying by their millions in war, the numbers come out to be about 4 million women and 1 million men, 4 wives per man.
Islam's view that men should take wives made sense in the dark ages when women couldn't look after themselves, and men were usually dead.
Most Islamic countries are stuck in those dark ages.
They switch to young boys usually.
Wrong religion, that's the Catholics.
Can I download their output on my Commodore 64?
fugly
Islam encourages deceiving and/or killing anyone who doesn't think like you. Saddam Hussein was right: running a country full of Muslims is REALLY difficult.
And if the United States finds itself unable to export democracy, at least the World's appetite for it's entertainment industry is insatiable.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Death toll of catholic religious wars over 2000 years : estimated at 10,000 to 300,000 people (including things like the inquisition, the crusades and incidents between gnostics and others).
Death toll of islamic religious wars over 1200 years : estimated between 300,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 people. (Mostly Indians and black Africans, and since muslims destroyed most of their own history, it is pretty hard to get reliable numbers)
Frankly, why anyone is suprised is beyond me : "Thou shalt not kill" versus "and when the holy month is past, kill the infidels. Any method, ambushes, tricks, lies is acceptable. Kill them all" ...
There is just no comparison. Yes, Christian on Christian violence is much better documented, because Christians (mostly monks) keep historical books. Muslims have a habit of, first, not writing nearly as many books in the first place*, and, worse, burning books (not just historical ones, the vast majority of ancient arab literature comes from Christian libraries, including, ironically, the currently used version of the quran)
* I read just last week that the entire literary output of the entire "muslim world" (~ 1 billion people) is slightly less than the literary output of Luxembourg (a little over half a million people and 200,000 expats).
Nice copy and paste, but no mention of wars here.
Shocked to see that luxembourg has so many ex pats though.
When Muslims rape kids, it's usually girls. When Catholics rape kids, it tends to be boys.
So how do poor men get free sex when the available women have all been sold into harems of rich men?
This question gives an explanation to the ages old tradition of waging wars on neighbors, specially the infidels, for the purpose of killing off your spare poor men
.
FTFY.
your post is full of shit. please take your fox news fear mongering elsewhere.
To note, Islam has historically been the most peaceful of the big 3. Read this for some education - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_the_Book
AC is right
In short, there are aspects of Islam very much compatible with the degenerate aspects of the secular-progressive culture
I'd love to see you turn that microscope on Catholicism.
Baywatch? Dallas?
The troll that was true!
I'd be happy to, once we have countries like Italy, Spain, France, Austria becoming hotbeds of Catholic terror plots (like Afghanistan was in this story), or those countries adapting policies that they had during the 16th century, like the Spanish Inquisition or the persecution of Hugenots in France, or Catholics in non-Catholic countries spending all their time trying to destabilize their host countries and its laws with the ultimate goal of making them states answerable to Pope Francis. Only problem with your analogy - today, the countries I mentioned above are very Liberal-Progressive socially. Neither France nor Spain remotely resemble what they were in the 17th century, but all Muslim countries, except (for now) the ex Soviet 'stans' are pretty much what they were in the Middle Ages, or in some cases, such as Malaysia or Indonesia, even worse.