The following week we will be launching a series of discussions, screenings and workshops examining the risks faced by journalists around the world. 

The award-winning, genre-bending documentary filmmaker Mads Brügger launches our new masterclass series, and Tweets from Tahrir is the first of our Screenings from the Frontline with Al Jazeera.

February’s #FCBBCA will bring together a distinguished panel to discuss Iran’s internal power struggle and its turbulent relationship with the West. 

We will also be examining the rebuilding of Libya and Fawzia Koofi will be discussing why she wants to become President of Afghanistan, while Matt Frei will be joining us to look back on his career.

Follow us on Twitter and catch up on any events you missed on the Forum blog or download our podcasts on iTunes.

ALL EVENTS ARE OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

By Nicole Hunt

The UN Human Rights Committee session opens on Monday in Geneva, with the situation in Iran on the agenda for the first two days.

Meanwhile, Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos begins a five day visit to North Korea, which is currently suffering through a major food crisis.

A judge in Courbevoie, France is due to rule on whether L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt should be made a ward of the state following accusations by her daughter Françoise that she is mentally unfit to manage her €17bn fortune.

South African President Jacob Zuma hosts Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Pretoria on Tuesday for a trilateral summit, expected to focus mostly on trade.

The meeting comes on the same day that fellow BRICS country China releases its third quarter GDP figures. 

In London, judges reveal the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction; nominees include Julian Barnes, Carol Birch, Patrick deWitt, Esi Edugyan and Stephen Kelman.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh begin a 10-day trip to Australia on Wednesday, heading first to Canberra. During their visit, the royal couple will also take in Brisbane and Melbourne before heading to Perth for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting on 28 October.

Greek public and private sector unions hold a 24-hour strike to protest what they say are ‘barbaric’ austerity measures being introduced as part of the Government’s efforts to meet the conditions of its €110bn bailout from the IMF, the EU and the European Central Bank.

EU Commissioner for Internal Markets Michel Bernier holds a press conference in Brussels on Thursday to present the Commission’s proposals for reforms to the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive and the Market Abuse Directive. The reforms are aimed at strengthening the EU regulatory system and increasing oversight in the wake of the financial crisis.

The European Space Agency is having a more exciting day in Kourou, French Guiana, where the first two Galileo satellites are being test-launched at 12:34pm. The full satellite project is expected to be operational by 2014.

News Corporation holds its annual general meeting in Los Angeles on Friday, amid calls from some shareholder groups to vote against the re-election of CEO Rupert Murdoch’s sons James and Lachlan to the company’s board in the wake of the UK phone hacking scandal.

In Abu Dhabi, Finance Ministers from the Gulf Cooperation Council begin a two-day meeting where they discuss proposals for a single Gulf currency. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde attends on the second day.

Remember the apocalypse hysteria back in May? When the world failed to end, preacher Harold Camping revised his prediction, and is now confident that the world will in fact end on 21 October.

Assuming we’re still here, attention turns to Cairo on Saturday where the court hearing resumes for two police officers charged over the death of Khaled Said. The verdict in the case, which prompted widespread protests against police impunity last year, has been delayed twice, most recently from 24 September after new evidence emerged.

Unusually, there’s quite a lot going on on Sunday, beginning with the delayed European Council and Eurogroup meetings in Brussels. Predictably, Greece and the euro debt crisis are at the top of the agenda, with leaders focusing on economic governance and financial regulation.

Following an international uproar over five to 15 year sentences for Bahraini medical staff convicted of inciting hatred against the regime and attempting to topple the monarchy during anti-government protests earlier this year, a civil re-trial ordered by the country’s Attorney General begins in Manama.

There are also four elections taking place across the world: parliamentary polls in Tunisia, which were scheduled in the wake of President Zine al Abidine Ben Ali’s resignation back in January; a general election in Argentina, where incumbent Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is expected to win a second term; a presidential election in Bulgaria, where current President Georgi Parvanov is not eligible for a third term; and federal elections in Switzerland, where 13 parties are currently represented in parliament.

To top it off, the Rugby World Cup final takes place in Auckland.

A panel of experts and a packed audience discussed this at last night’s event, which was chaired by author and broadcaster Tom Fenton and in association with the BBC College of Journalism. You can listen to the podcast here or download from itunes.

Video streaming by Ustream

Dina Matar, senior lecturer in Arab media and political communication at SOAS, said it would be difficult for state media to gain trust and credibility, particularly if they are associated with the old guard. It will take time before these questions can be answered and they will have to take place as part of wider institutional change, Matar said, adding that in countries like Tunisia and Egypt there have already been changes that were "sincere and quite deep":

In Egypt we have seen a change in the editors at some. of the state media, including Al-Ahram and we have seen a change in the language that is used by the old state media, which is now still under the same name but perhaps under a new editorship.

Other key problems that face the state media, and actually media in general in the Arab world, is the question of ethics, social responsibility, the question of what to write about, how to say things and I think there is a need for some form of regulation.

Faisal J. Abbas, who is a blogger for the Huffington Post, said "the simple answer is that there’s not going to be a future for Arab state-owned media":

I’m not with the notion that this is what many people are calling the social media revolution or a Facebook revolution, I don’t think it is. If you compare internet usage in the Arab world you find that 40 million Arabs used the internet last year, which is the equivalent of what Al Jazeera Arabic gets in one day. I think it’s a mixture of both.

 

But if competition doesn’t take out the state-owned media the dictators which use them will soon dismantle them because they’ve proven useless.

Hugh Miles, award-winning investigative journalist specialising in the Middle East and North Africa, said the media in the Arab world was struggling with the same "technical" problems as the media in the West, including the rapid advances in the internet, changes in the way media is consumed which mean the old news model no longer works:

They also have another problem, which is a crisis of credibility, they are completely discredited. For years they’ve been trailing in popularity stakes behind Al Jazeera and also other private commercial channels.

State media in Tunisia and Egypt needs a large overhaul, it needs to reinvent itself and has a very large hill to climb in order to become competitive again [in the satellite market]. To be competitive they need to have the same ingredients as Al Jazeera has, which is a backer with bottomless pockets, a political environment which will tolerate freedom of speech and they need to be able to compete to attract the best staff.

Ayman Mohyeldin, Middle East-based correspondent for Al Jazeera English, said he was not a fan of the "marketing gimmick" of calling it the "Facebook" or "Twitter revolution but subscribed to the notion that the revolutions were "fuelled by information" which allowed Arab citizens to overcome fear:

If it weren’t for the family of Mohammed Bouazizi, the fruit and vegetable seller who set himself on fire, if it weren’t for his family and friends who went  to the streetsand protested  that night and uploaded the video on the internet for other people in nearby villages to see, and if it weren’t for Al Jazeera thousands of miles away in their studios noticing and putting that image on and broadcasting it to the 40 million or 50 million people watching, other people in Tunisia would not have known that this happened. 

The reason why is because they would have been watching state media and we all know that state media would have painted rather a different picture of Tunisia.