Timothy Garton Ash* – The Guardian A planned ‘coronavirus tax’ on revenues and attacks on foreign-owned media threaten to cut away democracy piece by piece Democracy dies in darkness. One of the European Union’s most fragile democracies, Poland, now faces… Continue Reading
By Fábián Tamás – Telex.hu (*) Over the past few weeks, the state of Hungary’s media has become the focus of intense public debate both domestically and across Europe. After the exclusively Fidesz-chaired Media Council revoked the oppositional Klubrádió’s frequency… Continue Reading
By !!444 InsightHungary!!! (*) Hungary and Poland on Thursday launched a challenge with the European Court of Justice over a so-called rule of law mechanism in the European Union’s budget that would link payment of EU funds to upholding of democratic standards.… Continue Reading
By Robert Lipsyte* – TomDispatch As Do Pestilence, Famine, War, and Death The Four Horsemen of our media apocalypse — Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump — have ridden roughshod over us this past half-century leaving their… Continue Reading
By Ishaan Tharoor* – The Washington Post Three-quarters of the people on earth live in countries where freedom is declining. That’s one of the grim takeaways in an annual report produced by Freedom House, the Washington-based pro-democracy think tank and… Continue Reading
By Peter Molnar* – The Nation The government shut down a station that connected many listeners—particularly the elderly—to their country and the world When the faithful listeners to Klubrádió, a talk radio station that has been a beacon of free speech… Continue Reading
Marina Hyde* – The Guardian This is about more than Facebook and news – it’s about the pursuit of power in a world where companies are stronger than countries You can say Mark Zuckerberg puts you in mind of a… Continue Reading
By Roberto Savio* In a robustly entertaining – and thoroughly informative – book on the lighter side of the United Nations, Thalif Deen, a former UN Bureau Chief and Regional Director for Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency, has just… Continue Reading
Organizations for the defense of freedom of expression, human rights institutions, journalists’ unions and reference media all over the world have shown growing concern about the autocratic decisions of the supposedly democratic governments of Hungary and Poland due to the… Continue Reading
By Jeet Heer* -The Nation Trump’s two impeachments are just the start of a long struggle to turn the former president into a pariah. The second impeachment of Donald Trump was an improvement, but only a partial and halting one,… Continue Reading
By Jillian C. York* – The Guardian Twitter and Facebook need to be more transparent about how they choose who gets censored The enforcement of policies on content moderation by popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, is… Continue Reading
By Michael M. Grynbaum – The New York Times Defamation cases have made waves across an uneasy right-wing media landscape, from Fox to Newsmax. In just a few weeks, lawsuits and legal threats from a pair of obscure election technology… Continue Reading
By Kari Paul* – The Guardian Facebook has said it will no longer algorithmically recommend political groups to users, but experts warn that isn’t enough Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, announced last week the platform will no longer algorithmically recommend… Continue Reading
By Sue Stephenson * – Wall Street International Magazine The entire process of how books are chosen is too secretive considering its societal impact The books we read influence our thinking and our opinions—sometimes for generations. Yet as readers and… Continue Reading
By Glauco Benigni* “Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial marketeers, the non-literate with the semiliterate and the post literate. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with… Continue Reading
Opinion, by Robert Reich* – Newsweek Most of the 74,222,957 Americans who voted to reelect Donald Trump—46.8 percent of the votes cast in the 2020 presidential election—don’t hold Trump accountable for what he’s done to America. Their acceptance of Trump’s… Continue Reading
By Jessica Corbett – Common Dreams (*) Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to tie the repeal to proposed $2,000 coronavirus relief checks. Digital rights advocates and sex workers are among those speaking out against GOP Senate Majority… Continue Reading
By Farhana Haque Rahman* ROME, Dec 23 2020 (IPS) – Despite its grim record of multiple natural disasters and a deepening climate crisis, one could be forgiven for looking back on 2019 with a degree of nostalgia. There is no… Continue Reading
By Maria Ressa* (Brief intervention at the webinar “From Repression to Resistance: Combatting the Lawfare against Press Freedom,” Manila, Nov 21, 2020) On June 15, 2020, I sat in a decrepit, windowless courtroom and listened to Judge Rainelda Estacio-Montesa deliver… Continue Reading
By Nadia Batok* – Wall Street International AI has gone from a science-fiction dream to a critical part of our everyday lives Artificial Intelligence has changed our world Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the… Continue Reading
