Wednesday - May 03, 2006

Censor This!

Imagine if you will, a United States where bad news is never reported, every TV show has George Bush’s picture locked in one corner of the screen, newscasters referred to Dubya as a “god”, no criticism of Bush is allowed and Bush remained in power forever.

I apologize to any Liberal or Leftist readers out there who just went into shock at that picture. Don’t worry my little pinheaded friends. It won’t happen here in the USA, thanks to all of us “gun nuts” that you seem to hate so much. A well armed populace keeps government honest. Remember that.

The really painful part of this story below is that several of these countries serve in the UN on committees for Human Rights and other “watchdog” groups whose mission is to stop their kind of behavior. Yep, that would be the very same UN that your tax dollars help to support. Feel better now ... ?

North Korea Tops Most Censored Countries List
_{May 3, 2006, 4:37 AM EDT}

UNITED NATIONS (AP)—North Korea’s media praises “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il every day but never reported the country’s famine in the 1990s. Myanmar bans anti-government sentiment in the media. Turkmenistan’s dictator approves the front pages of major newspapers—and they always include a photo of him.

The three nations topped the list of “10 Most Censored Countries” issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists on the eve of World Press Freedom Day. The other countries were Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Eritrea, Cuba, Uzbekistan, Syria and Belarus.

“People in these countries are virtually isolated from the rest of the world,” CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said Tuesday. “They’re kept uninformed by authoritarian rulers who muzzle the media and keep a chokehold on information through restrictive laws, fear and intimidation.”

“We call on the leaders of these most censored countries to join the free world by abandoning their restrictive actions and allowing journalists to independently report the news and inform their citizens,” she said.

The list is the first on censorship issued by the committee. Its regional staff, which researches press freedom abuses around the world, rated the degree of censorship according to 17 different benchmarks, including censorship regulations, jamming of foreign news broadcasts, imprisonment and harassment of journalists and the degree of state control of media.

The report noted that Equatorial Guinea’s state-run radio has described the president as “the country’s God,” and its only private broadcaster is owned by his son.

In Libya, which has the most tightly controlled media in the Arab world, no news or views critical of Moammar Gadhafi are allowed, and one critic who wrote for a London-based opposition Web site was killed last year, it said.

Most countries on the list are ruled by one man who has remained in power by manipulating the media and rigging elections, the report said. Cooper said the media fosters personality cults in Equatorial Guinea, North Korea and Turkmenistan, where President Saparmurat Niyazov’s image is constantly displayed in profile at the bottom of television screens.

- More censorship news here ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/03/2006 at 07:19 AM   
Filed Under: • International • Oppression •  
• Comments (9) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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