MANILA, Philippines: An award-winning journalist critical of the Philippine president was convicted of libel and sentenced to jail Monday in a decision called a major blow to press freedom in an Asian bastion of democracy.
The Manila court found Maria Ressa, her online news site Rappler Inc. and former reporter Reynaldo Santos Jr. guilty of libeling a wealthy businessman. The Rappler’s story on May 29, 2012, cited an unspecified intelligence report linking him to a murder, drug dealing, human trafficking and smuggling. The site’s lawyers disputed any malice and said the time limit for filing the libel complaint had passed.
“The decision for me is devastating because it says that Rappler is wrong,” Ressa said in a news conference after the decision was handed down. Her voice cracking, she appealed to journalists and Filipinos to continue fighting for their rights “and hold power to account.
She was sentenced to up to six years but was not immediately taken into custody. Ressa posted bail for the case last year, and her lawyer said they will appeal the verdict.
Businessman Wilfredo Keng dismissed the allegations as baseless and false and said Rappler refused to take down the story online and publish his side of the story. He provided government certifications in court to show that he has no criminal record and sought 50 million pesos ($1 million) in damages, which he said he would donate if he won the case.
Rappler’s lawyers said the story was based on an intelligence report and that the one-year period under Philippine penal law when a libel complaint can be filed had ended when Keng filed a lawsuit in 2017, five years after the story was published online.
A cybercrime law, which Rappler allegedly violated, was also enacted in September 2012 or four months after the story written by Santos was published. Rappler’s lawyers said Philippine penal laws cannot be retroactively applied.
Rappler, however, acknowledged that it updated the story in February 2014 to correct a misspelled word but said it did not make any other changes. The Department of Justice, which brought the libel charges to court, contended that by updating the story, Rappler effectively republished the story online in 2014, an argument dismissed by the news site’s lawyers.
The Department of Justice cited another law to say that a complaint can be filed under the 2012 cybercrime law for up to 12 years, countering Rappler’s argument that Keng’s complaint was invalid due to being outside a one-year deadline for libel.
If the Manila court upholds the Justice Department’s position, journalists and media agencies can be sued up to 12 years after publishing a report.
As Rappler’s chief executive officer, Ressa faces seven other criminal complaints in relation to legal issues hounding her news agency, including an allegation that it violated a constitutional ban on media agencies receiving foreign investment funds.
The moves against Ressa, who has worked for CNN and was one of Time magazine’s Persons of the Year in 2018, have been denounced by media watchdogs as a threat to press freedom. President Rodrigo Duterte’s government said the complaints were part of normal criminal procedures and were not a press freedom issue.
But Ressa has accused the government of abusing its power and of using the law as a weapon to muzzle dissent. Rappler is one of several local and international news agencies deemed critical of Duterte’s policies.
Duterte has openly lambasted journalists who write unfavorable stories about him, including about his anti-drug campaign that has left thousands of mostly poor suspects dead.
Duterte had already banned a Rappler reporter from his news briefings after a government corporate watchdog ruled that the news site violated a constitutional prohibition on foreign ownership of media when it received money from an international investment firm.
Rappler, founded in 2012, rejected the ruling.
Duterte has openly lashed out against the owner of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, a leading daily.
He has vowed in the past to block the renewal of the congressional franchise of ABS-CBN, which was shut down by the government’s telecommunications regulator last month after its 25-year franchise expired. Congress has been hearing the leading TV network’s request for a renewal of its franchise.
Filipino journalist critical of Duterte convicted of libel
https://arab.news/mvr4r
Filipino journalist critical of Duterte convicted of libel
- The story on May 29, 2012, cited an unspecified intelligence report linking businessman Wilfredo Keng to a murder, drug dealing, human trafficking and smuggling
- Ressa, who Time magazine named as a Person of the Year in 2018, did not write the article and government investigators initially dismissed the businessman's allegation
Getty Images, Shutterstock gear up for AI challenge with $3.7bn merger
- Deal faces potential antitrust scrutiny
- Merger aims to cut costs and unlock new revenue streams as companies grapple with the rise of generative AI tools
LONDON: Getty Images said on Tuesday it would merge with rival Shutterstock to create a $3.7 billion stock-image powerhouse geared for the artificial intelligence era, in a deal likely to draw antitrust scrutiny.
The companies, two of the largest players in the licensed visual content industry, are betting that the combination will help them cut costs and grow their business by unlocking more revenue opportunities at a time when the growing use of generative AI tools such as Midjourney poses a threat to the industry.
Shutterstock shareholders can opt to receive either $28.80 per share in cash, or 13.67 shares of Getty, or a combination of 9.17 shares of Getty and $9.50 in cash for each Shutterstock share they own. The offer represents a deal value of more than $1 billion, according to Reuters calculations.
Shutterstock’s shares jumped 22.7 percent, while Getty was up 39.7 percent. Stocks of both companies have declined for at least the past four years, as the rising use of mobile cameras drives down demand for stock photography.
Getty CEO Craig Peters will lead the combined company, which will have annual revenues of nearly $2 billion and stands to benefit from Getty’s large library of visual content and the strong community on Shutterstock’s platform.
Peters downplayed the impact of AI on Tuesday and said that he was confident the merger would receive antitrust approval both in the United States and Europe.
“We don’t control the timing of (the approval), but we have a high confidence. This has been a situation where customers have not had choice. They’ve always had choice,” he said.
Some experts say US President-elect Donald Trump’s recent appointments to the Department of Justice Antitrust Division signal that there would be little change to the tough scrutiny that has come to define the regulator in recent years.
“With Gail Slater at the helm, the antitrust division is going to be a lot more aggressive under this Trump administration than it was under the first one,” said John Newman, professor of law at the University of Miami.
Regulators will examine how the deal impacts the old-school business model of selling images to legacy media customers, as well as the new business model of offering copyright-compliant generative-AI applications to the public.
The deal is expected to generate up to $200 million in cost savings three years after its close. Getty investors will own about 54.7 percent of the combined company, while Shutterstock stockholders will own the rest.
Getty competes with Reuters and the Associated Press in providing photos and videos for editorial use.
Israel extends closure of Al Jazeera’s West Bank office
- Israel suspended Al Jazeera’s Ramallah office for 45 days in September on charges of “incitement to and support for terrorism”
- Announcement comes days after Palestinian Authority also suspended the network’s broadcasts for four months
RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories: Israeli authorities renewed a closure order for Al Jazeera’s Ramallah office in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, days after the Palestinian Authority suspended the network’s broadcasts for four months.
An AFP journalist reported that Israeli soldiers posted the extension order Tuesday morning on the entrance of the building housing Al Jazeera’s offices in central Ramallah, a city under full Palestinian Authority security control.
The extension applies from December 22 and lasts 45 days.
In September, Israeli forces raided the Ramallah office and issued an initial 45-day closure order.
At the time, staff were instructed to leave the premises and take their personal belongings.
The move came months after Israel’s government approved a decision in May to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from Israel, also closing its offices for an initial 45-day period, which was extended for a fourth time by a Tel Aviv court in September.
Later in September, Israel’s government announced it was revoking the press credentials of Al Jazeera journalists in the country.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has long been at odds with Al Jazeera, a dispute that has escalated since the Gaza war began following Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7.
The Israeli army has repeatedly accused the network’s reporters in Gaza of being “terrorist operatives” affiliated with Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
The Qatari channel denies the accusations, and says Israel systematically targets its staff in Gaza.
Meta replaces fact-checking with X-style community notes
- Meta cited bias and excessive content reviews as key factor in ending fact-checking program
- The social media company also announced plans to allow “more speech” by easing restrictions on discussions of mainstream topics like immigration and gender
LONDON: Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said Tuesday it’s scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with a Community Notes program written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk’s social media platform X.
Starting in the US, Meta will end its fact-checking program with independent third parties. The company said it decided to end the program because expert fact checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact checked.
Instead, it will pivot to a Community Notes model that uses crowdsourced fact-checking contributions from users.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post.
The social media company also said it plans to allow “more speech” by lifting some restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discussion in order to focus on illegal and “high severity violations” like terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.
Meta said that its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms has “gone too far” and has made “too many mistakes” by censoring too much content.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes are in part sparked by political events including Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in an online video.
Meta’s quasi-independent Oversight Board, which was set up to act as a referee on controversial content decisions, said it welcomed the changes and looked forward to working with the company “to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.”
India press watchdog demands journalist murder probe
- Chandrakar’s body was found on January 3 after police tracked his mobile phone records following his family reporting him missing
NEW DELHI: India’s media watchdog has demanded a thorough investigation after a journalist’s battered body was found stuffed in a septic tank covered with concrete.
Freelance journalist Mukesh Chandrakar, 28, had reported widely on corruption and a decades-old Maoist insurgency in India’s central Chhattisgarh state, and ran a popular YouTube channel “Bastar Junction.”
The Press Council of India expressed “concern” over the suspected murder of Chandrakar, calling for a report on the “facts of the case” in a statement late Saturday.
Chandrakar’s body was found on January 3 after police tracked his mobile phone records following his family reporting him missing.
Three people have been arrested.
More than 10,000 people have died in the decades-long insurgency waged by Naxalite rebels, who say they are fighting for the rights of marginalized indigenous people in India’s resource-rich central regions.
Vishnu Deo Sai, chief minister of Chhattisgarh from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), called Chandrakar’s death “heartbreaking” and promised the “harshest punishment” for those found responsible.
India was ranked 159 last year on the World Press Freedom Index, run by Reporters Without Borders.
Washington Post cartoonist quits after paper rejects sketch of Bezos bowing to Trump
- Ann Telnaes said that she’s never before had a cartoon rejected because of its inherent messaging and that such a move is dangerous for a free press
- Wapo exec says the cartoon was rejected only to avoid repetition, because the paper had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon
A cartoonist has decided to quit her job at the Washington Post after an editor rejected her sketch of the newspaper’s owner and other media executives bowing before President-elect Donald Trump.
Ann Telnaes posted a message Friday on the online platform Substack saying that she drew a cartoon showing a group of media executives bowing before Trump while offering him bags of money, including Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Telnaes wrote that the cartoon was intended to criticize “billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.” Several executives, Bezos among them, have been spotted at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago. She accused them of having lucrative government contracts and working to eliminate regulations.
Telnaes said that she’s never before had a cartoon rejected because of its inherent messaging and that such a move is dangerous for a free press.
“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable,” Telnaes wrote. “For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’”
The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists issued a statement Saturday accusing the Post of “political cowardice” and asking other cartoonists to post Telnaes’ sketch with the hashtag #StandWithAnn in a show of solidarity.
“Tyranny ends at pen point,” the association said. “It thrives in the dark, and the Washington Post simply closed its eyes and gave in like a punch-drunk boxer.”
The Post’s communications director, Liza Pluto, provided The Associated Press on Saturday with a statement from David Shipley, the newspaper’s editorial page editor. Shipley said in the statement that he disagrees with Telnaes’ “interpretation of events.”
He said he decided to nix the cartoon because the paper had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and was set to publish another.
“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force. ... The only bias was against repetition,” Shipley said.
