The Listening Post - Venezuela's troubled media - 14 Aug 09 - Pt 2

In part two, The Listening Post's Meenakshi Ravi explores media in exile. It is a common practice for news organisations to parachute correspondents around the world to report from global hotspots. We see them on our screens, we read their by-lines. But what we do not often hear about is the number of local journalists who are forced to escape from those very places.

The media freedom group - Reporters Without Borders - reports that journalists are fleeing countries like Mexico, Sri Lanka and Myanmar at an average rate of six per month. Increasing intolerance of their work either puts these journalists out of work or puts their lives in danger. It is just a handful of these journalists in exile that manage to get back to the profession from outside their home country.

In this week's Newsbytes: an Internet company with ties to Israel is shut down in Lebanon; the hack job that crashed Twitter and Facebook may have been targeted at just one Georgian blogger; the Dutch journalist taking the Kremlin to the European Court of Human Rights; six journalists jailed in the Gambia and the world's first online film festival.

And, finally, China - with its huge reserves of foreign currency - is in a position that few economists would have forecasted just a few years ago. The country has become an important source of money for economies like the US, which have had to bail out banks, insurance companies and car makers with trillions of Chinese owned dollars.

China is not doing this out of the goodness of its heart it needs to keep western economies healthy so that western consumers can continue to buy Chinese exports. It is a serious and complicated business, but the people behind the online American Comedy Network saw the lighter side of the story: you can watch it here.

Category:

News & Politics

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• al jazeera english
• hugo chavez
• south america
• journalist in exile
• venezuela
• china
• meenakshi ravi