France Bans Citizen Journalists from Reporting Violence
Infowold: France bans citizen journalists from reporting violence
The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.
I fail to see how this is anything but an attack on freedom and a means to attempt censorship of damaging information (which, of course, will never work: ‘you can’t stop the signal‘ on the internet).
Citizen journalism has been increasing in importance lately, in fact, I would argue that its rise has been one of the few sources of positive for Democracy (which is otherwise beleaguered by low voter turnout, complacent media hegemonies, and rising corruption from powerful lobbies) in the past decade. Yet, as far as I can tell from a few Google News and BBC searches, this story is only being covered internationally in tech related news venues (which is how I heard about it).
Why is France embracing such anti-democratic laws? What possible benifit will they have? I’m not French so maybe that’s part of the problem, but just don’t understand…
March 13th, 2007 at 11:21 pm
After reading this article, I wondered “what is France trying to hide?”
How do they expect to have any form of evidence for an act of violence. Video and Photography are great sources of evidence. Why rule it out???
And if it’s an official committing the act, even better. Let that fucker go to jail for taking advantage of his authority. So France, who are you trying to protect? Obviously not the victim.
March 24th, 2007 at 3:44 am
[...] Regarding the French ban on citizen journalism filming violence that I wrote about earlier: [...]