Piers Morgan accused of knowing about illegal phone hacking when he was editor of Daily Mirror on day one of trial
Lawyers are going through documents they say will give background on evidence the court is due to hear later. We’ll bring you details of that evidence as the court hears it.
Good morning, welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of phone hacking claims against Mirror Group Newspapers at the high court in London.
Continue reading...Newspaper uses secret room in first-person shooter game Counter-Strike to bypass Russian censorship
A Finnish newspaper is circumventing Russian media restrictions by hiding news reports about the war in Ukraine in an online game popular among Russian gamers.
“While Helsingin Sanomat and other foreign independent media are blocked in Russia, online games have not been banned so far,” said Antero Mukka, the editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomat.
Continue reading...Even stories on cost of living leave journalists facing assault, threats and arrest under Digital Security Act
Four weeks ago, a reporter in Bangladesh was hauled from his office, badly beaten – and then thrown from the roof of his building, leaving him with fractures in his back, three broken ribs and a machete wound on his head.
The journalist, Ayub Meahzi, believes he was targeted for reporting on alleged local government ties to a criminal group.
Continue reading...German magazine accused of putting down India with caricature depicting population overtaking China
A cartoon in the German magazine Der Spiegel poking fun at India as it becomes more populous than China has been castigated as “racist” by Indian ministers.
The cartoon shows a rickety old Indian train packed with people and swarms of passengers atop it. On a parallel track, a sleek Chinese bullet train is seen with just two drivers, looking surprised at the sight of the Indian train.
Continue reading...More than 300 journalists write to Russia that arrest sends ‘dangerous signal’ about attitude to journalism
More than 300 foreign correspondents who have worked in Moscow have written to the Russian government to call for the immediate release of Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter being held on espionage charges, saying his arrest sends a “disturbing and dangerous signal” about the country’s attitude to independent media.
Gershkovich, who was detained in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg last month on spying charges that carry a possible 20-year prison sentence, is the first US journalist detained on such charges since the end of the cold war. Both the Wall Street Journal and the US government has denied that he was involved in espionage.
Continue reading...Mathias Döpfner’s reported comments on climate, Muslims and east Germany – and his apparent political manoeuvring – create shock waves
The German CEO of Europe’s largest media publisher tried to use his flagship tabloid, Bild, to influence the outcome of Germany’s last election and fed the newspaper his personal views attacking climate change activism, Covid measures and the former chancellor Angela Merkel, leaked messages suggest.
The internal chats, emails and text messages published by the German weekly Die Zeit on Wednesday clash with the public presentation of Axel Springer SE’s chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, who recently said he wanted to bring “non-partisan” journalism to a too-polarised US media landscape through his acquisition of the English-language title Politico.
Continue reading...Russian foreign minister rejects request and says US must not ‘make a fuss’ over arrest of Evan Gershkovich
Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, called for Russia to free the detained American journalist Evan Gershkovich in a rare phone call with his Moscow counterpart since the start of the war in Ukraine.
The American’s plea was rejected by Sergei Lavrov, who responded by saying that US officials and media outlets must “not make a fuss” or try to politicise the plight of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter.
Continue reading...Le Monde and Libération correspondents sent home in junta’s latest move against media from former colonial power
Burkina Faso has expelled correspondents from Le Monde and Libération, the newspapers said on Sunday, the latest move the junta running the west African country has taken against French media.
Burkina Faso, where two coups took place last year, is battling a jihadist insurgency that spilled over from neighbouring Mali in 2015.
Continue reading...Government to roll back section 40 legislation, recommended by Leveson, as part of media bill
Ministers will push ahead with plans to abolish a key piece of press regulation law, unpicking one of the main recommendations of the Leveson inquiry into the culture of the British newspaper industry.
The government said they would roll back a rule that could require news outlets to pay the costs of the people who sue them unless the news outlet is signed up to a state-backed press regulator. Labour indicated that opposition MPs will not object to the plan, meaning it is likely to sail through the House of Commons.
Continue reading...Calculation based on leaked offer to staff that implies firm valued at $20bn compared with $44bn he bought it for
Twitter is worth less than half of what Elon Musk paid for it six months ago having lost more than $20bn (£16.4bn) in value, according to calculations based on a leaked memo from the billionaire.
Musk suggested in memo to the social media company’s staff that it is now valued at less than $20bn. This compares with the $44bn he paid for it in October 2022.
Continue reading...Press members living under the Taliban, and living uncertain lives in Pakistan, must be given clarity say campaign groups
Hundreds of Afghan journalists remain stranded in increasingly “dire” circumstances as frustration mounts over the UK government’s refusal to share the latest entry criteria for its flagship resettlement programme.
This weekend, a coalition of press freedom and free expression organisations, including Index on Censorship, the National Union of Journalists, PEN International and English PEN, have written to home secretary Suella Braverman asking why details of the next phase of the Afghan citizens’ resettlement scheme (ACRS) have yet to be revealed.
Continue reading...Family pay tribute to man they described as ‘a journalist to his bones’
Margaret Thatcher’s former press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham has died at the age of 90 after a short illness, his family has said.
Ingham was a journalist with the Guardian in the 1970s before going into communications for the government. He served as press secretary for Thatcher for almost her entire time as prime minister.
Continue reading...High-profile reporters say in letter ‘We are journalists, not activists’ after contributors protest coverage of trans issues
A dispute at the New York Times over its coverage of transgender issues deepened with news of a letter signed by high-profile reporters, criticising the Times’ union president for her own letter on the issue, in which she said staff who protested the paper’s trans coverage were concerned about “a hostile working environment”.
“Factual, accurate journalism that is written, edited and published in accordance with Times standards does not create a hostile workplace,” read the new letter, signed by the chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, political correspondent Lisa Lerer and other senior figures and reported by Vanity Fair.
Continue reading...Steven Waldman says a new initiative, Rebuild Local News, wants to revitalize hundreds of outlets decimated by the industry
Local news organizations across the United States need to be given serious government financial help, especially in the form of tax breaks, in order to stave off a crisis in the media sector and help save US democracy, a leading advocate for non-profit journalism has said.
Steven Waldman, co-founder of Report for America, said a new initiative, called Rebuild Local News, wanted to revitalize hundreds of local news outlets across America decimated by changes in the industry, shifts in the sector’s advertising revenue structure and more recently, the pandemic.
Continue reading...Country’s finance ministry claims broadcaster has not fully declared its income and profits
India’s finance ministry has accused the BBC of tax evasion, saying that it had not fully declared its income and profits from its operations in the country.
Indian tax authorities ended three days of searches of the British broadcaster’s Delhi and Mumbai offices on Thursday night. Opposition political parties and other media organisations have criticised the searches as an attempt to intimidate the media.
Continue reading...Two weeks on from the death of government critic John Williams Ntwali, police have failed to answer questions over the alleged road accident in which they say he was killed
Calls are growing for an investigation into the apparent accidental death two weeks ago of a prominent Rwandan journalist and government critic.
John Williams Ntwali, a regular critic of the authorities, was found dead on 18 January. According to reported police accounts, he was killed when a speeding vehicle rammed a motorcycle on which he was riding pillion in the capital, Kigali. A US senate committee said he had been “silenced”. Human rights organisations have joined other activists in raising doubts about the cause of the death of the 44 year-old editor of The Chronicles newspaper.
Continue reading...Outlet declared ‘undesirable’, with journalists, sources and donors facing threat of prosecution
Russia has declared the news outlet Meduza an “undesirable organisation”, in effect outlawing one of the country’s best-known sources of independent reporting on the Kremlin and war in Ukraine.
Meduza, founded by Russian journalists in Riga, Latvia, in 2014, was declared an undesirable organisation by the general prosecutor’s office on Thursday for “posing a threat to the foundations of the Russian Federation’s constitutional order and national security”.
Continue reading...Key Putin ally, who founded Wagner mercenaries, attempted to ‘subvert sanctions and silence journalist’
The Treasury must explain how the Russian founder of a mercenary army was given permission to circumvent sanctions, to attempt to silence a British journalist, Labour has said.
In a letter to Jeremy Hunt, seen by the Guardian, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Pat McFadden, said that No 11 had to say why it had granted the permission and whether similar allowances had been made for other sanctioned oligarchs to use libel lawsuits.
Continue reading...Media council reports progress under progressive stance of President Suluhu following years of repression by former regime
The number of journalists being censured for their work in Tanzania has fallen slightly, raising hopes that press freedom is improving in the country.
Last year, 17 “press violations”, which include threats, arrests, denial of access to information and equipment seizures, were reported in the east African nation, the Media Council of Tanzania told the Guardian. This compares with 25 in 2021 and 41 in 2020.
Continue reading...Paper’s apology followed piece in which columnist said he ‘hated’ Meghan
A spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex has said an apology by the Sun over a column in which Jeremy Clarkson said he “hated” Meghan is “nothing more than a PR stunt”.
The column has become the Independent Press Standards Organisation’s (Ipso) most complained about article, with more than 20,000 people contacting it over the piece, according to Ipso.
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