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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'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?
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.
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."
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.
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.