Watch part two

On the Listening Post this week, increased media coverage of the war in Afghanistan and the injunction banning the UK's Guardian from reporting their own Parliament.
 
It used to be called America's 'forgotten war', but for Barack Obama, the US president, the battle in Afghanistan is the one that really counts.

Ten months into the Obama administration, the strategic focus on Iraq has shifted away from Baghdad and towards Kabul. And the media are moving in the same direction.  

The US review of its military strategy and the drip by drip reporting of the Afghan election results are just two of the angles reporters are chasing.

Our starting point this week is the story of Afghanistan – once again it is topping news agendas around the world, driving media discourse in the US – and it is bound to have an impact on the coverage of other stories – including the war in Iraq.

Guardian gagging order

In part two, Listening Post's Meenakshi Ravi on oil company Trafigura's gagging order against the UK's Guardian newspaper.

Imagine a situation where an oil company, which was so intent on hiding proof of its questionable practises, went to court to get a legal injunction banning publication of that proof, and then got a second injunction banning the media from reporting that they had been banned from reporting what the first ban was actually about.

Sounds absurd? That was the case this month in the UK, where the Guardian newspaper was banned from reporting certain proceedings in Parliament.

Yet word of this legal stifling of free speech soon spread like wildfire around the internet and within hours the injunction was dropped.

The case was called a victory of the blogosphere against the corporate muzzling of the big media, but also served as a chilling indictment of the state of press freedom in Britain.

Same image, different story

In this week's newsbytes: a TV show in Turkey which has been labelled by Israel as 'anti-Semitic'; controversy over two very different versions of the same video released by Israel and Hezballah; Berlusconi's media are rallying round Italy's Prime Minister;

Britain's press watchdog receives a record number of complaints over a 'homophobic' newspaper article; and the possible hoax of 'balloon boy' captures American television news.

Finally, if we really wanted to, we could devote our web video of the week – every week – to the bizarre world of Japanese game shows. Some of them are very strange.

Hidden camera shows got their start in the US in the 1960's with a show called Candid Camera.

Trust the Japanese to take the format to the nth degree. And pity our poor friend in the shirt and tie who thought he was attending a job interview and had no idea that the guns and bullets were fake and that the victims were not dead. Watch closely at the end. He is relieved – but he is not laughing. You can see the video here.


This episode of The Listening Post can be seen from Friday, October 23, at the following times GMT: Friday: 1230; Saturday: 1030, 2230; Sunday: 0300, 1930; Monday: 0030; Tuesday: 0630, 1630; Wednesday: 0130, 1430; Thursday: 0330, 2330.