China workers' news: At least 119 workers confirmed dead in Jilin factory fire

3 June, 2013
http://www.clb.org.hk/en/content/least-119-workers-confirmed-dead-jilin-factory-fire

At least 119 people have been killed in a fire that swept through a poultry processing plant in the north-eastern province of Jilin on Monday morning, 3 June, the local authorities have confirmed. The official media reported the fire had been ignited by series of explosions at Baoyuanfeng Poultry at around 6.am when around 300 to 350 workers were on the site. Many workers were trapped inside the plant’s narrow network of passageways as the fire spread rapidly.

The Global Times reported that almost all the doors of the workshops were locked on the outside, and only a narrow side exit had been left open, which made escaping difficult. Relatives of the victims told the Global Times that most of the doors were shut during working hours to prevent workers from slacking off while on duty. One survivor told the official Xinhua news agency that there was a stampede when workers fled the workshop and only around 100 employees managed to escape the fire. At least 54 workers were sent to local hospitals around the city of Dehui for treatment. Photographs posted on social media sites in China such as Weibo (see above) showed thick black smoke billowing out from the factory, as well as some of the horribly burnt victims. This is one of worst, if not the worst, factory fires in China in living memory and the death toll has already exceeded that of the infamous Zhili Toy Factory fire in Shenzhen in 1993, which killed 87 young migrant women workers and injured 47 others. However, the lack of proper fire safety equipment, exits and training for workers are all too commonplace in China’s factories.

The worst industrial accidents in China have been in the coal mining industry, with several disasters in the mid-2000s, which claimed the lives of more than one hundred miners. See CLB’s research report Bone and Blood: The Price of Coal in China for more details.

China’s workers demand a better trade union : China’s workers have demonstrated remarkable solidarity and organizational ability for several years now in strikes and protests across the country. They have demanded and in many cases obtained higher wages and better working conditions from their employer. Moreover, they have done this on their own and without the help of the trade union, which is usually seen as ineffectual or merely a tool of management.

China’s public institutions a “discrimination disaster zone”: The vast majority of China’s public institutions (事业单位) blatantly discriminate against job applicants from outside their local area, the Legal Daily reported today. The newspaper cited a survey of job advertisements at nearly 100 public institutions in cities across China during the first five months of this year which showed that a staggering 99 percent of the institutions stipulated that candidates should have a local household registration (户籍) – in other words, no one from outside the locality could apply.

The survey, conducted by China’s foremost anti-discrimination organization Yirenping, indicated that the longstanding and institutionalized problem of household registration discrimination was actually getting worse and that the worst offenders were the civil service and educational, scientific and public health institutions etc. The Legal Daily said the country’s public institutions had now become a “discrimination disaster zone.”

New report shows little improvement in the lives of migrant workers’ children in China: The Chinese government has implemented a whole raft of policies over the last decade to improve the lives of migrant workers’ children. However, a new survey published by the All-China Women’s Federation shows that between 2005 and 2010, the numbers of left-behind children and migrant children in the cities both increased, while the long-standing issues of separation, loneliness and vulnerability, as well as the lack of access to decent education, healthcare and social services remained largely unresolved.

The survey, based on data from the 2010 census, shows that the number of left-behind children increased by 2.42 million to reach 61 million, or about 38 percent of the total rural population under the age of 18. There was a much greater increase in the number of migrant children living in China’s cities. In 2010, there were 35.8 million migrant children in the cities, an increase of 41.4 percent over five years. Children from rural families accounted for about 80 percent of that total, about 28.8 million in all.

Read More

JAMES PARKER - Books reviewed: Why Sylvia Plath Still Haunts Us

The best books about Sylvia Plath (no shock here) are by women: Janet Malcolm’s probing, feline The Silent Woman and Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband. But her best critic, strange to say, was Ted Hughes. Hughes on Plath is irresistible, not merely because he was a genius writing about a genius, but because the force propelling his prose is love. In the letters and essays that he wrote about his dead wife, Hughes responded to her work with a binocular combination of spousal sympathy and undomesticated awe.

Her name, at this point, is almost onomatopoeic: the elegantly coiled, haute-American Sylvia, poised and serpentine, and then the Germanic exhalation ofPlath, its fatal flatness like some ruptured surface resealing itself. Her whole history is in there somehow: the shining prizewinner with a death obsession, the supercharged, comical/terrible talent whose memory is the lid of a sarcophagus.

“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary / The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.” That’s the Plath-world, freakishly bleak, exerting its tractor-beam fascination on American culture. Fifty years after she killed herself, we find her vital, nasty, invincible, red-and-white poetry sitting in a region of cultural near-­exhaustion. Her short life has been trampled and retrampled under the biographer’s hoof, her opus viewed and skewed through every conceivable lens of interpretation. A Massachusetts girlhood; a precocious literary ascent interrupted by an early nervous breakdown; a decampment to England; marriage to—and separation from—the poet Ted Hughes; suicide. In her lifetime, she published just one book of poetry (The Colossus and Other Poems), one novel (The Bell Jar), and a few stories in magazines. Upon her death, the bulk of her work—including the completed manuscript of Ariel—was still unknown to readers.

Out of these elements, endless constructions and conjurations. The ’70s enthroned her as a feminist martyr. She has been posthumously psychoanalyzed, politicized, astrologized. She did, it’s true, pack into her three decades a remarkable number of reboots and re-selvings—transformation, and its lethal opposite, was her theme—but even so … Can’t we leave her alone?

Not just yet, we can’t. This year has already brought us two new biographies, two more runs at the imago. Carl Rollyson’s American Isis declares her “the Marilyn Monroe of modern literature.” This is not as daft as it sounds: When Plath arrived in England in 1955, on a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University, she was, at least to English eyes, ablaze with American glamour. She had fashionable hair, man-eater lipstick, and a wobbly sense of momentum about her. She posed in a swimsuit for the university newspaper. She wore red shoes, as in a fairy tale. She wanted, she needed, to be famous. Rolly­son makes much—too much, perhaps—­of a dream Plath had three years later, in which Marilyn appeared to her “as a kind of fairy godmother,” giving her a manicure and promising her “a new, flower­ing life.”

Mad Girl’s Love Song, by Andrew Wilson, cuts a little deeper, because it comes in at a sharper angle. Querying the notion that Plath’s career was essentially a countdown to the artistic blastoff ofAriel—­the poems she wrote in the months preceding her death—Wilson zooms in on her pre-Ted life: the bold college girl, adventuress in the virginal ’50s, who finally rebelled into madness. In Wilson’s book, we get to know in depth her extraordinary, leather-jacketed pen pal Eddie Cohen, who wrote to Plath after reading a short story she had published in Seventeen magazine and then—though only a couple years her senior—took it upon himself to be her epistolary instructor in art, sex, and the life authentically lived: “Petting, if it does not culminate in orgasm for both parties, will increase rather than alleviate frustrations.” Cohen was of the “Howl” generation (“I have seen many of my friends,” he wrote in one letter, “all of whom are hard-headed, clear-thinking people, driven to sanatoriums and asylums”), and he had intuited that Plath was a high risk for cracking up. Plath, on the other hand, in literary-hustler mode, would later propose that their correspondence be published as a book called Dialogue of the Damned.

Wilson also gives us one priceless image: that of Plath, her hair bound up, retiring each night in a viscid mask of Noxzema, its odor so strong that her roommate considered finding alternative accommodations. This is about as Sylvia Plath as it gets: the bedtime beauty routine turned ceremonial horror, the lady cream with its repellent smell—ecce mulier, at the brink of the underworld, passing semi-­monstrously through the rituals of American womanhood on the way to some deeper, darker initiation.

Wilson and Rollyson both make heavy use of Plath’s archived letters and journals, committing themselves thereby to chunks of laborious paraphrase: “In an unpublished letter,” Wilson tells us at one point, “she outlined her belief that, at the moment, her store of suppressed sexual energy was being sub­limated, channelled into her creativity.” Zzzz. This sort of thing, as it accumulates, produces a muffling, third-hand effect. Another breath from the Plath-world, maybe: mummification.

The best books about Sylvia Plath (no shock here) are by women: Janet Malcolm’s probing, feline The Silent Woman and Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband. But her best critic, strange to say, was Ted Hughes. Hughes on Plath is irresistible, not merely because he was a genius writing about a genius, but because the force propelling his prose is love... read more:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/why-sylvia-plath-haunts-us/309310/

Read More

Mukul Mangalik - A STRATEGY TO CRIPPLE A SEAT OF LEARNING

The Telegrqph, 4 June 2013

A STRATEGY TO CRIPPLE A SEAT OF LEARNING

The four-year undergraduate programme, meant to be in place from July, is being thrust upon Delhi University in an undemocratic manner, writes Mukul Mangalik

“A University stands for humanism, for tolerance, for reason, for the adventure of ideas and for the search of truth. It stands for the onward march of the human race towards ever-higher objectives.” — Jawaharlal Nehru.

Work in colleges and universities is meant to be about reading, writing, discussions, arguments and processes of learning how to think and how to choose patiently and without fear. It is meant to bring the universe to young minds, provoking them to ‘get out of bed, out of deep habitual sleep’, take stock of their talents and passions, pursue the disciplines of their choice with depth and ‘work to grow’ in ways that are true to their evolving selves. It is meant to give students and teachers the opportunity to “lean and loaf at ease observing a spear of summer grass” (loafing being the colloquial equivalent of contemplation), making the ‘insides of their heads interesting places for themselves for the rest of their lives’.

This is why perhaps processes of reform in higher education — dealing as these must with journeys of the mind and imagination, with the university as a site of knowledge creation and justice — have to proceed with patience, thoughtfulness and a deep regard for debate and substantive democracy.

This being true, all that has been happening in Delhi University in the name of ‘academic interest’ over the last two years has been anti-academic and inimical to a public university, which, in spite of all its flaws, has remained a site of hope and promise.

No university administration that takes academic pursuits and its public character seriously would ever push through the kind of massive changes that have been thrust upon DU by its administration in less than two years. It is unthinkable that this should happen without either a critique of the existing system or an open-minded and thorough discussion in well-established deliberative bodies on concrete proposals mapping out desired changes. At DU, with its half a million students, nine thousand teachers and close to 80 colleges, the time available ruled this out, and yet the unthinkable continues to happen.

The record speaks for itself. In July 2011, barely a year after everyday academic pursuits and college and university sports grounds had been sacrificed to the money-making machine of the Commonwealth Games, semesters replaced the annual mode of teaching and evaluation. This huge change was imposed on the university without debate or preparation. The seismic academic, social and administrative fallout of this decision continues to bedevil DU, and we are expected to believe that this is academic reform.

In 2011, one of the finest pieces of academic writing, A.K. Ramanujan’s “Three Hundred Ramayanas…” was excised from DU’s undergraduate syllabus by the Academic Council on extra- academic grounds. More recently, an exceptional bookshop, the U-Special, has been axed and the North Campus intellectual hub, the Students’ Activity Centre, of which it was a part, rendered dysfunctional, and we are expected to believe that the administration is concerned about the quality of academic life in DU.

The biggest structural change in the history of DU, the four-year undergraduate programme, meant to kick in from July 2013, will have implications ranging from the financial to the infrastructural, as well as grave consequences for employment conditions, academic quality, the public character of the university and the National Policy on Higher Education. It is being thrust upon DU more thoughtlessly, recklessly and undemocratically than ever, within a matter of weeks literally, and we are expected to believe that this represents academic reform.

The first time ever that a raw document doubling up as a proposal for the FYUP was presented to any statutory body of DU was as recently as December 24, 2012, when it was placed before a ‘special’ meeting of the AC. The AC, in a single sitting, accepted the hurriedly cobbled FYUP document, thereby abdicating its responsibility to substantive debate, democracy and higher education. The first official communication to department heads regarding the FYUP came in a letter from the Dean of Colleges dated March 5, 2013, asking them to get syllabi ready for all new courses on the basis of a skeletal structure provided to them within a fortnight. Harassment, intimidation, coercion, secrecy and the flouting of statutes and norms have haunted ‘dynamic’ syllabus making thereafter.

Compare this with the years of informed debate, discussions and painstaking effort that went into the transition from the two-year to the three-year structure of study earlier in DU’s history. Committees were set up, comparative studies and research undertaken, the results put up for deliberation and meticulous preparations made to ensure that the transition would be smooth and the results enriching for students and teachers alike. Much of this happened barely a few decades ago, during the vice-chancellorship of the legendary Maurice Gwyer. The contrast with the recent happenings in DU could not have been starker.

Clearly, the fact that nothing remains static does not mean that all change is by definition progressive. Sometimes processes tell us everything. The nature of results cannot be divorced from the means adopted to reach promised lands. The FYUP and all that has preceded it since 2010-2011 have been coercion and impatience-driven processes, exclusionary, uncivil and anti-intellectual to the core, systematically undermining democratic practices and procedures.

Such reform processes cannot be expected to concern themselves with the terrible consequences of thoughtless, arbitrary and hurried decisions on minds and imagination, on the possibility of learning to think independently and co-operating as equals in workplace reform. They cannot be expected to uphold Nehru’s vision. They can only be expected to set terrible precedents, deform and impoverish DU academically, diminish the value of its degree and destroy meaningful public higher education in India.

This is largely the reason for, and the meaning of, the deformed structure of the FYUP and the intellectual deficiency of many of the 50 courses that will have to be taught under conditions of inexcusable ad-hocism. Quantity, packaged in weighty or mystical course names — Foundation, Discipline, Mind-Body and Heart — is replacing quality while the multiple exit points will ensure that even this greatly diminished quality is unequally shared among students. Teachers, and especially the new student entrants to DU, are being flung into the fire with no fire fighters anywhere in sight.

No matter what the alibis, the most recent being employability and progress, the current processes of change in DU have nothing to do with academic reform. Together with the marginalization of teachers from decision-making, the usurpation of all powers by the vice-chancellor, the rule of fear over the university and the assault on freedoms and rights, everything is adding up to transform the university into a machine and students and employees into courtiers.

Capital alone, including the mushrooming higher education enterprises, driven by animosity towards public control and compelled by an insatiable appetite to commodify, appears poised to win. It seems that the development of the under-development of DU has become a necessary condition for Capital’s own unfettered bid to yoke Indian higher education to a profit-making logic.

The shocker is that this injustice against worthwhile public higher education is being enacted at public expense, the executors being the custodians of public good. Had an FYUP lookalike been caught snooping around publicly controlled natural resources, it would have been criticized for what it was — rendering wealth, held in the general interest, for private gain.

The citizens of this country need to wake up to the incalculable consequences of an offensive that is pushing DU away from the many for the benefit of a few.

The author is Associate Professor of History, Ramjas College, Delhi University

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1130604/jsp/opinion/story_16966082.jsp

Read More

Taymiya R. Zaman - Not Talking About Pakistan

NB - this article appeared earlier in the Critical Muslim and then in Tanqeed.
http://www.tanqeed.org/2013/02/02/not-talking-about-pakistan-taymiya-zaman/
Thanks to the author for permission to post..

Questions about Pakistan are now a fact of living here, no different from damp weather or calls from salespeople. Some I deflect, and others I frame around my own terms.

I drew a secret line around the borders of Pakistan and rarely stepped over it. In the fall of 2007, I began teaching Islamic history at a small liberal arts college in San Francisco; even though my classes on South Asia and the Middle East could easily have included Pakistan, I made sure to exclude Pakistan from all my syllabi. To avoid ever having to talk about Pakistan, I changed the name of a course a predecessor had titled “History of South and Southeast Asia,” to “Indian Civilizations.” This now meant that the course took a leisurely route through the Indus Valley Civilization, the coming of the Aryans, the spread of Jainism and Buddhism in North India, the rise of the Mughal Empire and concluded with British colonial rule and the formation of India and Pakistan in 1947. But, after an emotionally charged lecture on Partition, I would begin a section on modern India and say nothing of Pakistan after the moment of its creation. My class, “The Modern Middle East,” covered American wars in Afghanistan but my syllabus screeched to a halt at the Pakistan border.  Although the country inevitably featured in class discussions about U.S. foreign policy, I assigned no readings on Pakistan. In my other classes, I stayed away from the twentieth century, which meant that the question of Pakistan never arose.

Outside the classroom too, I was something of an expert at not talking about Pakistan. This was a feat, given the interest that Pakistan generated. Being Pakistani meant that well-meaning students would frequently tackle me in corridors and ask me what I thought about “the current situation” in Pakistan. Most of the time, this was an excuse to tell me what they thought, namely that America needed to bomb the hell out of Pakistan because the country was a den for terrorists. In some instances, the student would add, as a considerate afterthought, that he hoped my family was safe. I would respond to student comments such as these with non-committal statements about the banality of the nation-state. My retreat into vagueness would diffuse the conversation, and I would hurry away. This constant bombardment and the defensive maneuvers it called for left me with little energy for words, and no space at all to know what I thought about the Pakistan in which people around me were interested. What I did know was that there was a Pakistan somewhere that belonged to me and it was under attack; this meant that I needed to protect it because doing so was the same as protecting myself.

When asked to give guest lectures on Pakistan, I would analyze the politics of talking about Pakistan instead, and refuse to discuss the place directly. Once, I was asked to make a presentation on the Pakistan Earthquake of 2005, and I agreed only because I trusted the professor who had invited me to speak to her class. I was tired of images of suffering, helpless brown people waiting for Angelina Jolie’s benevolence, and I wanted the class to know about the heroic efforts on the part of Pakistanis for their own people. I saw my talk as an offensive on behalf of Pakistan rather than the solitary, defensive war I was fighting. In another instance, at a student event focused on injustices around the world (which included the usual images of the suffering and the brown and the female and the poor), I spoke about the injustice of intervening in other countries in the name of justice, a point I would make in my own classes without directly referencing Pakistan. Both talks were well-received, and I appreciated the sensitivity and intelligence of the students with whom I spoke afterwards. Students such as these helped me remember that there were possibilities that lay outside the daily blur of pain through which I experienced my surroundings..

read more: http://www.tanqeed.org/2013/02/02/not-talking-about-pakistan-taymiya-zaman/2/

Also see: Bina Shah- On "Not Talking About Pakistan"

Read More

Chinese media and the politics of forgetting: Tiananmen anniversary - June 4, 1989

A debate over national identity and patriotism linked to the annual 4 June vigil dominates Hong Kong's media, while a deadly factory fire and social media curbs are key topics in mainland press.

The Hong Kong press are trying to calm down an ongoing row over patriotism and growing tensions between Hong Kong residents and mainlanders as the city holds its 24th vigil to seek redress for the victims of a military crackdown near the Tiananmen Square in Beijing on 4 and 5 June 1989. Apple Daily says the situation is more complicated this year because the Beijing authorities and local pro-establishment factions are exploiting the patriotism debate to divide pro-democracy activists. The organisers of the 4 June candlelight vigil in Victoria Park - Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China - came under fire for choosing "loving the country and loving the people is the Hong Kong spirit" as a patriotic slogan for this year's event.

Ta Kung Pao, a Beijing-backed Hong Kong newspaper that usually ignores the Tiananmen vigil, has spoken out against "nativists" or localists who are boycotting the vigil and holding an alternative event outside the Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui. The newspaper says the avoidance of patriotism at the Victoria Park vigil is tantamount to an "act of national betrayal". Hong Kong Economic Times and South China Morning Post also urge the public to set the patriotism debate aside and use the vigil to press for an official vindication of the Tiananmen movement. Ming Pao calls on a new generation of leaders to show the political wisdom and courage to start a process of reassessing 4 June that ultimately leads to a full rehabilitation for the victims. 

In Taiwan, the Taipei edition of Apple Daily says 4 June is more significant than usual this year because many people want Communist Party leader Xi Jinping to give an official apology for the crackdown. "From 1949 to 1989, the Chinese Communist regime killed tens of thousands of people directly or indirectly. This had nothing to do with Xi Jinping. If he takes the lead in apologising, it will have highly positive symbolism, and it will also strengthen the legitimacy of Communist rule," the editorial says.

Over in the mainland, Ming Pao notes that internet users have kept censors busy by commemorating 4 June with online puns using the numbers 89 and 64. There are also online calls for users to post photos of themselves wearing black mourning clothes. Candle icons posted by thousands of people on Sina Weibo, a mainland microblog platform, have also been censored along with dozens of search terms related to 4 June, South China Morning Post reports. Hong Kong Cable TV says police intercepted Hong Kong reporters heading for the national flag-raising ceremony in Beijing's Tiananmen Square this morning and detained them for over an hour.

Internet freedom

In other political news, a commentary by Beijing state newspaper Global Times warns that free speech advocates are gaining the support of "Western public opinion" in opposing state controls over the internet. "Political and moral traps that deceive netizens should be prevented from arising on the internet. Management to reduce online rumours and curb clamour that deceives people and harms the country should be carried out resolutely according to the law," it stresses.

Another Global Times commentary calls on Chinese journalists to "reflect rationally" on recent social media guidelines for staff at the Associated Press and to refrain from posting "unconstrained" views that are at odds with their publications. "A process is needed for eliminating the 'politicization' of social networks, in which media professionals should make efforts instead of exacerbating problems. Professional media outlets in China should maintain their influence and judgment, and avoid acting as a loud-hailer for social networks," the commentary stresses.

However, commentator Hu Yong in China Youth Daily says it is unrealistic for journalists to remain totally objective in a social media age. "If social media policies prevent dialogue among journalists, journalists will have also lost an opportunity for reflection," Hu Yong concludes. Finally, Beijing Times, Global Times and other mainland newspapers are outraged at the deaths of at least 120 people who were trapped inside a poultry slaughterhouse that caught fire yesterday in Changchun, Jilin province. A Global Times reporter at the scene says that almost all the doors of the workshops were locked on the outside, and only a narrow side exit had been left open, which made escaping difficult.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22763370

See also
Chinese Journalists resist censorship: Timothy Garton Ash on The Southern Weekly affair

Looking Back at the June 4 Massacre, Twenty-Four Years on

The Crises of Party Culture: by Yang Guang
The crises of Party culture become clear with a single glance. The CPC is called the ruling party, yet it operates according to secret party rules: this is an identity crisis. Its formal ceremonies and slogans are like those of an extremist church, and it has long lost its utopian doctrine that stirred the passion of the people: this is an ideological crisis. It tells beautiful lies while accepting bribes and keeping mistresses: this is a moral crisis. The totalitarian system is in the process of collapsing, yet political reform is not in the foreseeable future: this is a political crisis. It has corrupted traditional values and also rejected universal values, rendering Party members and government officials at a spiritual loss: this is a crisis of values.

June 4, 1989 - the Chinese people struggle for democracy

Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang

ALL REFERENCES TO TIANANMEN SQUARE MASSACRE CLOSELY CENSORED FOR 20 YEARS

Beijing: The cutting edge of capitalist nihilism

China: witnessing the birth of a superpower

Caging a Monster: In My Country (Today's China) by Murong Xuecun

Learning How to Argue: Interview with Chinese intellectual Ran Yunfei

Liu Xiaobo’s Plea for the Human Spirit

Glory Days, or remembering how Indians love(d) China

Blind Activist Calls For End To 'Lawlessness' In China

China: Writing out the non-Han

China - The old regime and the revolution

My first visit to Gandhiji: Tan Yun-Shan (including Gandhi's first letter to China)

Closing the Circle: Article on Revolution

Book on Mahatma Gandhi released in China

Read More

Turkey protests: Trade union to start two-day strike

One of Turkey's big trade union groups is staging a two-day strike to support continuing anti-government protests in a number of cities.

The left-wing Kesk trade union confederation, representing some 240,000 workers, accused the government of committing "state terror". Protests and clashes with police continued into the night on Monday. A second death in the protests has been confirmed by the governor's office in the southern city of Antakya. Abdullah Comert, 22, a member of the youth wing of the opposition Republican People's Party, was "seriously wounded... after gunfire from an unidentified person," the governor's office said, adding that he died later in hospital.

Earlier, the Turkish Doctors' Union said 20-year-old Mehmet Ayvalitas was hit by a car on Sunday which ignored warnings to stop and ploughed into a crowd of protesters in the Mayis district of Istanbul. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan went ahead with a trip to Morocco and insisted the situation was improving. The strike on Tuesday and Wednesday is expected to affect schools and universities along with government offices. In a statement, Kesk said: "The state terror implemented against entirely peaceful protests is continuing in a way that threatens civilians' life safety." The confederation, representing 11 unions, accused the government of undermining democracy.

Mr Erdogan remained defiant on Monday in the face of continuing violence, dismissing any suggestion of a "Turkish Spring". In a televised news conference he said: "The main opposition party CHP has provoked my innocent citizens. Those who make news [and] call these events the Turkish Spring do not know Turkey."

After arriving in Morocco, he insisted the situation was "calming down". "On my return from this visit, the problems will be solved," he told reporters. In contrast, President Abdullah Gul, adopted a more conciliatory tone, defending the right to protest while urging calm. "If there are different opinions, different situations, different points of view and dissent, there is nothing more natural that being able to voice those differences," he was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency.

More clashes

There were further clashes on Monday between police and protesters which continued into a fourth night in Istanbul and the capital, Ankara. Thousands of demonstrators again gathered in Istanbul's Taksim Square, the focus of the protests. Many protesters shouted "Tayyip, resign!" while waving red flags and banners and blowing whistles, and tear gas could be seen wafting over the square. Police also used tear gas again to disperse protesters near Mr Erdogan's office in the Besiktas district of the city. Hundreds of protesters were reported to have gathered in the early hours of Tuesday in Ankara where they were met by more tear gas and water cannon.

Share values in Turkey were hit badly by the unrest, with the main share index falling by 10.47%... read more:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22762391

Read More

Sandeep Bhushan - Manufacturing News

News studios have gradually become the site where news is "manufactured". Indeed, the very definition of "news" has changed as Indian television networks become increasingly promoter-driven. There are severe cutbacks in news gathering, reporters have been marginalised and the focus has shifted to studio-driven news presentations with outside "experts". From his perspective as a former television reporter, the writer analyses the current state of broadcast media.

As a journalist associated with television broadcast news for the last two decades, how and where does one begin talking about television broadcast journalism? As both a participant and an avid consumer of news, lines blur easily, making it extremely difficult to find any sense of objectivity. But having “hung up my mike” in a manner of speaking, I believe the ringside view afforded to me both as a reporter and a desk hand privileges me with insights not easily available to the growing mass of critics and media sociologists struggling to make sense of prime time television – opinionated, loud, rude anchors, endless talking heads, studio-hopping experts, flashing graphics and even absurd soaked-in-theatre “live” visuals. All this is consumed by viewership, day after day, given the omnipresence of television in the intimacy of our living rooms.

A good starting point would be an observation made by the US regulatory authority, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which in a recent report said:

The Walter Cronkites and John Chancellors (both deceased, but widely accepted as America’s most credible TV journalists) are a dying breed. In many cases you don’t have journalists. You have performers.¹

This observation, made in the backdrop of the financial meltdown in the US, accurately sums up the television scenario in India. Post-2008, there has been a profusion of studio-based “performers” rather than news professionals across India’s broadcast landscape, transforming the manner in which news content is packaged, delivered and consumed by the viewing audience.

The news studio has become the site for “manufacturing” news and consent on behalf of the beleaguered state. This is largely the product of an unprecedented financial crisis which has threatened media’s advertisement-based revenue model,² forcing it to cut costs and increase dependence on the state, the financial market, and other cash-rich promoters who are jostling to move into, arguably, India’s most powerful medium. Taken together, these have ended up making the owners/promoters, rather than editors, the prime drivers of television news content – a point eloquently made by the latest Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) report.³

Owners in the Studio

The Zee “extortion” case is perhaps the best illustration of the role of owners in the studio. The Hindi news network launched a shrill “probity” campaign against Congress Member of Parliament and steel tycoon Navin Jindal for allegedly using his clout to swing favourable deals in coal block allocations. Later, as it turned out, the campaign was eyeing Jindal’s riches, Rs 100 crore to be exact, as a price for rolling back the campaign. Ironically, the matter hit the headlines after two of the network’s editors were caught on hidden camera allegedly “extorting” money from Jindal officials. Later, both the editors, Sudhir Choudhary⁴ and Samir Ahluwalia spent nearly 20 days in Delhi’s Tihar jail. The Delhi police are now investigating the complicity of both the owners and the editors in the alleged extortion incident.⁵

In its brief history spanning not more than 20 years, the Indian television broadcast industry has been largely perceived as a handmaiden of the state owing to its emergence within the womb of Doordarshan (DD) – a legacy it still finds tough to live down. In the recent past, however, major private players especially from the non-media sector have also moved in on account of its growing commercial and political clout.

As one of the “midwives” who ushered in this change, former DD boss and secretary Information and Broadcasting (I and B), Bhaskar Ghose discusses pointedly in his book⁶ how the government sold airtime to private producers for an “irrationally modest” amount. The producers in turn not only charged the sponsors the sky but also sold approximately three to four minutes of free commercial time (FCT) to advertisers. Secondly, “the producer or the sponsor kept the copyright...repeats of popular serials meant paying a fortune (by DD) to the copyright holder.” Ghose mentions the “Ramayana” example where the producer retained all the video rights.⁷

Finally, as the Central Bureau of Investigation case relating to India’s premier news network New Delhi Television (NDTV) shows, there was extensive patronage and quid pro quo at play.⁸ The then director general DD, Rathikant Basu is alleged to have “manipulated” the placement of NDTV promoter Prannoy Roy’s pioneering programme, “The World This Week” (TWTW) in a “superior” category which, according to a report of Parliament’s Public Account Committee (PAC), caused the government a loss of Rs 3.52 crore. NDTV is also alleged to have wrangled more than $20 lakh in foreign exchange for the production of TWTW from the Ministry of Economic Affairs on Basu’s recommendation. Crucially, there was no attempt to figure out how the money was used. In its letter to the PAC, NDTV denied these charges,⁹ alleging that the I&B ministry had provided erroneous data.

But it is not just NDTV. Aaj Tak, India TV, News 24 are some of the other channels that have apparently drawn heavily upon DD’s fabled generosity. Of course, their rise and consolidation was a product of a number of other factors, chief among them being conditions of economic boom and early bird advantage.

In the post-2008 phase, the state-media nexus thrives. But a little differently. The state appears to be actively playing stranger to the growing consolidation underway in the media space on the back of a general slowdown and steadily deteriorating fortunes of media networks.¹⁰

Newsroom Meltdown

Post the economic meltdown, the most grievous blow has been suffered by two key institutions that are lynchpins of news systems anywhere in the world, the editor and the reporter. Increasingly, the locus of power in news operations has shifted to the studios – the promoters and their hand-picked editors. This has resulted in a near complete centralisation of news-gathering operations. The shift in power equations chiefly reflects the political sensitivities of the emerging news ecosystem which calls for the involvement of the promoters in cost-cutting operations at various levels on a day-to-day basis (from transportation, outstation shoot, type of hotel accommodation, buying footage, retrenchment, etc).

Cost-cutting apart, every day the promoter walks the thin line balancing several conflicting interests such as businessmen and politicians of all hues in an era of coalition, by no means an easy task in the relentless 24×7 news cycle. A pliable editor provides a way out by not merely filling in but also ensuring that a chain of command is created whose primary mandate is to protect the promoter’s interests. In virtually every newsroom (both in Hindi and English news networks), there is a long unwritten list with regard to covering politicians – depending on their proximity to the promoter (the Ambanis and the Gandhi family, for example, are a complete no-no in most newsrooms).^11.. 

^{read more:} http://www.epw.in/commentary/manufacturing-news.html-0

Also see: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Industrialization of the Mind

The rise of the tycoons Economic crisis and changing media ownership in central Europe

Read More