Duterte-critic journalist convicted in Philippine libel case

Philippine journalist Maria Ressa was convicted Monday of cyber libel and faces up to six years behind bars in a case that watchdogs say marks a dangerous erosion of press freedom under President Rodrigo Duterte.

Ressa, 56, and her news site Rappler have been the target of a series of criminal charges and probes after publishing stories critical of Duterte's policies, including his drug war that has killed thousands.

The award-winning former CNN journalist was sentenced to up to six years' jail in the culmination of a case that has drawn international concern.

It was not immediately clear how long she would actually have to serve if the conviction becomes final, and Judge Rainelda Estacio-Montesa allowed Ressa to remain free on bail pending an appeal.

"We are going to stand up against any kind of attacks against press freedom," a defiant Ressa told journalists after the conviction in Manila.

"I began as a reporter in 1986 and I have worked in so many countries around the world, I have been shot at and threatened but never this kind of death by a thousand cuts," she said.

Monday's verdict decided a trial that stemmed from a businessman's 2017 complaint over a Rappler story five years earlier about his alleged ties to a then-judge on the nation's top court.

Ressa, who Time magazine named as a Person of the Year in 2018, did not write the article and government investigators initially dismissed the businessman's allegation.

But state prosecutors later filed charges against her and Reynaldo Santos, the former Rappler journalist who wrote it, under a controversial cyber crime statute aimed at online offences such as stalking and child pornography.

Santos was also found guilty on Monday and allowed to remain free on bail.

The law they are accused of violating took effect in September 2012, months after the article was published.

But prosecutors say Rappler's typographical correction to the story in 2014 to change "evation" to "evasion" was a substantial modification and the article was thus covered by the law.

- 'Assault on independent media' -

Duterte's spokesman Harry Roque said the president backs free speech and has never filed a libel case against a journalist while in government.

"The president supports freedom of expression and freedom of the press. I hope that's clear," Roque said.

But rights groups and press advocates say the libel charge along with a series of tax cases against Rappler, and a government move to strip the news site of its licence, amount to state harassment.

"Ressa... and the Rappler team are being singled out for their critical reporting of the Duterte administration," Amnesty International said.

"With this latest assault on independent media, the human rights record of the Philippines continues its free fall."

Human Rights Watch said the case "will reverberate not just in the Philippines, but in many countries that long considered the country a robust environment for media freedom".

The Philippines has fallen in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index to 136 out of 180 nations and territories.

Ressa's verdict comes just over a month after government regulators forced off the air the nation's top broadcaster ABS-CBN, following years of threats by Duterte to shut down the network.

Both Rappler and ABS-CBN have reported extensively on Duterte's anti-drugs campaign in which police have gunned down alleged dealers and users in operations condemned by rights groups.

Some of the crackdown's highest-profile critics have wound up behind bars, including Senator Leila de Lima, who is serving three years in jail on drug charges she insists were fabricated to silence her.

In 2018, Duterte denounced Rappler as a "fake news outlet" and subsequently banned Ressa and her colleagues from his public engagements.

Agence France-Presse

Online Video Content Doubled in 4 Years

The number of young Americans watching online videos every day has more than doubled, according to survey findings released Tuesday. They’re glued to them for nearly an hour a day, twice as long as they were four years ago.

And often, the survey found, they’re seeing the videos on services such as YouTube that are supposedly off-limits to children younger than age 13.

“It is the air they breathe,” said Michael Robb, senior director of research for Common Sense Media, the nonprofit organization that issued the report.


The group tracks young people’s tech habits and offers guidance for parents.



The survey of American youth included the responses of 1,677 young people, ages 8 to 18.

Among other things, it found that 56% of 8- to 12-year-olds and 69% of 13- to 18-year-olds watch online videos every day.

In 2015, the last time the survey was conducted, those figures were 24% and 34%, respectively.
The margin of error was plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

Overall screen time hasn’t changed much in those four years, the survey found.
The average tween, ages 8 to 12 for the purposes of this survey, spent four hours and 44 minutes with entertainment media on digital devices each day.

For teens, it was seven hours and 22 minutes.

That did not include the time using devices for homework, reading books or listening to music.

But the findings on video-watching indicate just how quickly this generation is shifting from traditional television to streaming services, often viewed on smartphones, tablets, and laptops.
Among the teens surveyed, only a third said they enjoyed watching traditional television programming “a lot,” compared with 45% four years ago.

Half of the tweens said the same, compared with 61% in the last survey.


YouTube was their overwhelming first choice for online videos, even among the tweens who were surveyed — three-quarters of whom say they use the site despite age restrictions.

Only 23% in that age group said they watch YouTube Kids, a separate service aimed at them and even younger children.

And of those, most still said they preferred regular YouTube.

“It puts a lot of pressure on a parent to figure out what they can reasonably filter,” Robb said.

When presented with the findings, YouTube said that, in the coming months, it will share details on ways the company is rethinking its approach to kids and families.

For now, Farshad Shadloo, a spokesperson for YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, reiterated the company’s terms of use on age: “YouTube is not a site for people under 13.”

Among other things, the company also cited its restriction filters and YouTube Kids.

Even so, many children with online access are adept at getting access to regular YouTube or other streaming content — partly because their parents are overwhelmed, said Sarah Domoff, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Central Michigan University who studies tech’s impact on youth and families.

Those parents could certainly be doing more to track screen time, she said.
But, as she sees it, filters on services such as YouTube also aren’t adequate.

“It’s really hard to block out certain things unless you’re standing over your child,” Domoff said.
That’s especially hard to do when devices are portable.

Some are skeptical about how much YouTube will change a service that easily leads its users, young and old alike, down a “rabbit hole” of video content, much of it created by everyday people.

“If your model is built on maintaining attention, it’s really hard to do something,” said Robb, of Common Sense Media.

His advice to families: “Protect homework time, family time, dinner time and bedtime.
Have device-free times or zones.”

Domoff added, “There needs to be a game plan.”

Associated Press

Billionaire buys Los Angeles Times for $500M

LOS ANGELES, United States — Billionaire physician and investor Patrick Soon-Shiong agreed Wednesday to buy the Los Angeles Times, in a move aimed at reviving the fortunes of the newspaper amid recent turmoil.

Publishing group Tronc Inc. said it reached a deal to sell the LA Times and San Diego Union-Tribune to Soon-Shiong’s Nant Capital for $500 million plus the assumption of $90 million in pension liabilities.

The move comes after months of newsroom unrest at the storied Los Angeles daily that has seen three editors in the past six months, and a vote to unionize the journalists.

“We are pleased to transition leadership of the Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune to local ownership, and we are certain that the journalistic excellence in Southern California will continue long into the future,” said Justin Dearborn, chief executive of Tronc, the name adopted for the group previously known as Tribune Publishing.

Soon-Shiong, a surgeon whose biotech investments have boosted his net worth to some $7.8 billion, said in a statement: “We look forward to continuing the great tradition of award-winning journalism carried out by the reporters and editors of the Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune and the other California News Group titles.”

The LA Times, like many newspapers, has been downsizing its staff as readers turn away from print to online news platforms.

The Los Angeles daily was family-owned for more than a century before being sold to the Chicago-based Tribune Co. in 2000.

Tribune Co., which split off its broadcast division and renamed its publishing arm Tronc (for Tribune Online Content), will continue to own the Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Baltimore Sun and the New York Daily News.

The LA Times Guild, which recently won the right to represent employees, welcomed the news, saying it “looks forward to working with a local owner who can help us preserve The Times as a guardian of our community and as the voice of the American West.”

Billionaire newspaper owners

Soon-Shiong, born in South Africa to Chinese parents, has been an investor in Tronc and also owns a stake in the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team. He has been a faculty member at the UCLA medical school and has invested in and donated to medical research.

He was a founder of the Cancer MoonShot 2020 program, renamed Cancer Breakthroughs, aimed at developing immunotherapies to cure cancer.

Soon-Shiong is the latest billionaire to seek to turn around struggling newspapers, following on the heels of Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post and Boston Red Sox owner John Henry’s deal for the Boston Globe.

“I’d say this is good news, but with a caveat,” said Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University journalism professor and author of a forthcoming book on the efforts of Bezos and Henry to remake American newspapers.

“Wealthy local ownership is exactly what the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune need, assuming that Dr. Soon-Shiong is willing to be patient and to respect the independence of the newsroom.”

Kennedy noted that the businessman has in the past criticized “false reporting” about his own research efforts.

“Given that, we’ll have to see which Dr. Soon-Shiong shows up in the owner’s suite,” Kennedy said.

Separately, Tronc announced a new digital strategy, and appointed recently reinstated executive Ross Levinsohn to head a new Tribune Interactive division.

Levinsohn, a former interim CEO at Yahoo who has worked in other online services, returns from leave after an independent probe into allegations of sexual harassment which found no wrongdoing, according to Tronc.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen said the new digital strategy appears at odds with the plan to shed the Los Angeles Times.

“If there was any discernible plan at @tronc it depended on the idea of scale,” Rosen tweeted. “Selling @latimes means that idea has gone bust.” /cbb

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Rolling Stone, iconic music magazine, looks for buyer

Rolling Stone, the iconic 50-year-old magazine of music and counterculture, is putting itself up for sale amid an increasingly uncertain outlook, its founder said.


Jann Wenner — who started Rolling Stone in 1967 as a hippie student in Berkeley, California and now runs it with his son Gus — told The New York Times that the future looked tough for a family-run publisher.

“There’s a level of ambition that we can’t achieve alone,” Gus Wenner told the newspaper in an interview published late Sunday.

“So we are being proactive and want to get ahead of the curve,” he said.

One of the most influential magazines covering rock music, Rolling Stone has also been a home for experimental writers such as the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson.

But the magazine’s reputation — and finances — were badly damaged when it retracted a 2014 story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia, with a review finding that Rolling Stone did not undertake basic journalistic procedures to verify the facts.

Rolling Stone last year sold a 49 percent stake to a Singaporean music and technology start-up, BandLab Technologies, which is headed by Kuok Meng Ru, the scion of one of Asia’s richest families.

It was not immediately known if Kuok would want to take a controling stake in Rolling Stone.

The Wenner family earlier this year sold its other two titles — celebrity magazine US Weekly and lifestyle monthly Men’s Journal — to American Media, Inc., a publisher of supermarket tabloids including The National Enquirer.

If American Media, Inc., were interested in Rolling Stone, it would mark a sharp change in owners’ ideologies.

The tabloid empire is led by David Pecker, an ardent ally of President Donald Trump, while Rolling Stone tilts strongly to the left and has featured lengthy interviews with Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

Jann Wenner, 71, who is also a key force behind the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, said that he hoped to keep an editorial role at Rolling Stone but that the decision would be up to its new owner.

source: entertainment.inquirer.net