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Watch part two
This week on The Listening Post, we analyse the media's fixation with the Somali piracy story. We also take a look at what goes into making an award-winning news photograph.
Our lead story this week puts the spotlight on a global media that has suddenly turned its focus on Somalia following the high-drama piracy story that broke there.
As the media zeroed in on the Horn of Africa, the story that emerged was a dramatic tale fuelled by modern-day images of lawless swashbucklers holding the powerful craft that entered their waters to ransom.
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| Pirates generate more media attention than the causes of the country's lawlessness [EPA] |
What was missing was the back story – the troubling circumstances in Somalia that have created an environment in which illegal trades, including piracy, thrive.
Somalia has been labelled Africa's 'deadliest country' by Reporters Without Borders and getting a story out of there is a challenge for the global media.
But the Somali pirates were media savvy enough to make themselves accessible to international media; so accessible that they hogged the airtime and the real story about the plight of Somalia went largely unreported.
Spinning through other news from the world of media in our Newsbytes section, we start with a follow up from last week's lead story: the Mumbai attacks. The wall-to-wall coverage by Indian television news channels reaped huge benefits for them with ratings tripling over the 60 hours of non-stop reportage.
Also in this section we show you snippets of the latest video released by Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem. Shot by Palestinians living in the West Bank, the footage forms part of B'Tselem's growing cache of video evidence on human rights abuses in the area.
On a lighter note, we take a look at Chinese television's preparations for coverage of Chinese New Year celebrations. Following the Olympics lip-syncing gaffe in which the authorities had a cuter looking little girl lip sync Ode to the Motherland during the opening ceremony, the television authorities have made clear that lip syncing at the Chinese New Year celebrations will be considered out of sync with official rules.
In part two, The Listening Post's Meenakshi Ravi uncovers the stories behind the prize-winning news photographs selected by World Press Photo Awards 08.
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| 'American Soldier' by Tim Hetherington was shot in Afghanistan [EPA] |
How did photographer John Moore capture his pictures of Benazir Bhutto just moments before her assassination?
What had taken place in the seconds before photographer Tim Hetherington took his World Press award-winning photo of an American soldier fighting in Afghanistan's Korengal region?
And why is Time magazine photographer Platon's portrait of Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, so powerful?
Meenakshi catches up with the World Press travelling exhibition in London and discusses the photographs and the state of news photography with winner Tim Hetherington, Associated Press photographer Lefteris Pitarakis and the Guardian newspaper's head of photography, Roger Tooth.
We close our show with our weekly video viral. This week we present a slick animation about Iran's bloggers put together by the Vancouver Film School. The clip presents some little known facts about the nation's bloggers.
This episode of The Listening Post airs from Friday, December 12, 2008 at the following times GMT:
Friday: 1230, 2030; Saturday: 0430; Sunday: 0600; Monday: 0530; Tuesday: 0730, 2330; Wednesday: 0300, 1000; Thursday: 0630, 1430; Friday: 0130.
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