New York City must navigate the pandemic, and recovery efforts, while battling compound pre-existing conditions: racial injustice, inequality, and climate vulnerability. Local accountability journalism will make all the difference in the world to the shape we emerge in.
The team at @THECITYNY has an incredible record of impactful reporting, and I can't wait to join them in January. Some examples:
Like everything else about this pandemic, obituaries are unequal, whiter and more male than those we have lost. A project to memorialize every New Yorker who has died from COVID-19. thecity.nyc/2020/6/10/2128…
Stories like this bring crucial focus to the ways in which racial and economic inequity are at play in the city's transit arrangments. @thecitynyc produces a steady drumbeat of them thecity.nyc/2020/12/14/221…
Deep coverage of New York's spatial development battles through the eyes of people who live in the affected neighborhoods thecity.nyc/brooklyn/2020/…
I could go on with these, and in the coming weeks I will, but you can see pretty clearly why I am so thrilled to work with this team.
Of course if you like what you see, and you believe that New York City, and the world, need robust local accountability infrastructure, and a rich civic information sphere, you can donate now, or better still, join us: thecity.nyc/pages/membersh…
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Facebook's internal human rights team has designated India a "tier 1" risk for harm to vulnerable populations. But the company is not prepared to protect its staff against the consequences of deplatforming the Bajrang Dal, or take the business hit. wsj.com/articles/in-in…
The Bajrang Dal make the Proud Boys look like a knitting circle
When people die thanks to hate preached on open platforms, and violence co-ordinated via messaging apps, no-one will be able to say they didn't know. Only that they didn't care.
The Press Trust of India, @PTI_News, roughly India’s AP, may not be a bastion of accountability journalism, but it is a crucial institution providing news from across the country. Now it faces a campaign of intimidation from the Modi government. (Short thread)
On June 25, with tensions running high over clashes at the Sino-Indian border, PTI published this typically anodyne interview with the Chinese ambassador: ptinews.com/news/11592287_…
The first response came from one of the wire service’s most important subscribers, the state broadcaster, which described the coverage as “anti-national” - a catchall slur for government critics: thewire.in/media/governme…
“Even before COVID-19, we squandered a decade in the fight against poverty, with misplaced triumphalism blocking the very reforms that could have prevented the worst impacts of the pandemic” a stinging final report from @PhilipGAlston chrgj.org/2020/07/05/phi…
From the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, at the end of his 6-year term, this is both a critique and manifesto for very specific change in the way the global poverty reduction agenda is framed, measured, and pursued
“Over the past decade, the UN, world leaders and pundits have promoted a self-congratulatory message of impending victory over poverty, but almost all of these accounts rely on the World Bank’s international poverty line, which is utterly unfit for the purpose"
We are going to see a lot of “worst decade ever” takes over the next 3 weeks. And to be fair, taking the tally on #HumanRightsDay is pretty bleak. But there is another story.
At the beginning of the decade, protests swept across Iran and much of the Arab world, Russia too. Today, repression has escalated where resistance flourished, and devastating wars grind on.
Smartphones, and social platforms were seen, then, as vectors of freedom and of connection. Now they are too often tools of division and disinformation
One day, perhaps, people will pause in their celebration of Koos Bekker’s genius, to ask whether the Tencent investment liberated Naspers from its apartheid legacy, or built on a culture of media collaboration with repression, taking it digital and global
Did decades as a pillar of the apartheid propaganda machine represent a weight the new Naspers had to overcome, or a set of competences in collaboration that served it well as the Chinese state built the machinery of algorithmic authoritarianism, helped by companies like Tencent?
South Africans, anxious about the ANC’s fascination the with Chinese model, should look to the vastly deeper relationship between the country’s most important media company a sector of the Chinese system enmeshed in wholesale censorship and surveillance.
Julius Malema has pinned this tweet calling on his supporters to attack @PaulivW and @dailymaverick. It may be couched to skirt Twitter's ToS, but make no mistake: delegitimization, harassment, physical threats, these are old tools of intimidation algorithmically supercharged.
Women, particularly journalists and politicians, face disproportionate levels of online harassment and abuse. wired.com/story/amnesty-…
Political leaders like @Julius_S_Malema have a special responsibility to stand for rights, including press freedom, and not to indulge in speech designed to undermine them. Far from pinning that tweet, he ought to delete it and apologize.