Category Archives: france

#jesuisjimmy

 

AFP/Martin Bureau

AFP/Martin Bureau

The new Charlie Hebdo has been printed with the Prophet Mohammed on the cover.  The cartoonist who drew the picture, Renald Luzier, explained it at a press conference where he repeatedly broke down.  “It was not the front page the world wanted us to make, but it was the one that we wanted to make,” he said. “It was not the front page the terrorists wanted us to make, because there are no terrorists in it, there is just a man crying, a guy crying – it’s Mohammad.”

In the US, the Washington Post printed the picture, so for the first time depicted the Prophet Mohammed, while for its part the New York Times did not take this step, but instead warned about the possibility of reprisals.

In Hong Kong, a pro-democracy tycoon who runs the Apple Daily newspaper, Jimmy Lai, had a petrol bomb thrown at his house, sparking a #jesuisjimmy hashtag, while a German correspondent in China wrote this sobering account of the arrest of her Chinese assistant.   Before Thursday’s class, please read the first 82 pages of the People’s Republic of Amnesia, and make sure that you have filed your first blogpost by 8am.

 

 

#jesuischarlie

After a weekend of extraordinary rallies attended by 3.7m people in France, here’s the cover of the new Charlie Hebdo magazine.  The latest reports say that three million copies will be printed.

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Charlie Hebdo’s lawyer, Richard Malka, said it will carry cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, “We will not give in otherwise all this won’t have meant anything,” he told France Info radio on Monday, which broadcast from the magazine’s heavily guarded temporary offices at Libération newspaper.

“Humour without self-deprecation isn’t humour. We mock ourselves, politicians, religions, it’s a state of mind you need to have…..The Charlie state of mind is the right to blaspheme.”   Meanwhile, as the Obama administration regrets not showing up at the march, questions are being asked about exactly who was ‘supporting’ press freedom.  Question is: was it really a solidarity march for them or a photo-op?

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And to finish, a quick reminder that tomorrow’s class will be a WordPress session in the Mac lab on the 2f of the Modern Languages Building.   Come armed with your own wordpress site.

 

Welcome to Comm 439!

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Welcome to Comm studies 439!   This is a class website, and I’ll be posting assignments, reading lists, random thoughts and other general info here.

On a day we should all be thinking about media freedom, here are some cartoon tributes to the murdered Charlie Hebdo journalists in France.   Interesting to see which news outlets refused to publish the cartoons – AP, CNN, The Daily Telegraph, New York Daily News and many others, while the Washington Post, Buzzfeed and Huffpost were among those that did.  As for the New York Times, there was a lot of back-and-forth, as described by Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, who explained the thinking of Editor Dean Baquet, “I sought out a lot of views, and I changed my mind twice,” he told her, “It had to be my decision alone.” He decided against, citing the sensibilities of Muslim readers, “We have a standard that is long held and that serves us well: that there is a line between gratuitous insult and satire. Most of these are gratuitous insult.”

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On another topic, there are some great opportunities for student journalists on the horizon – there’s a position at Michigan radio for students with work/study funding which would allow for some writing and reporting experience.    Also the deadline is approaching for the Pulitzer Center’s student fellowship.  Email me for more details, or I’ll post shortly.  And finally, the deadline is fast approaching for the AP paid internship over the summer, which offers posts all over the US as well as Bangkok; Berlin; Johannesburg; London; Mexico City; New Delhi; Paris; Rio de Janeiro; Seoul and Tokyo.   Start filing your applications now!