On Friday 22 January 2016, a panel joined a packed audience at the Frontline Club for a lively discussion following the London premiere screening of Michelle Shephard‘s Guantanamo’s Child. With unprecedented access to former fellow prisoners, family members and government officials, the documentary explores the political and ethical implications of the harrowing case of Omar Khadr.

Richard Gizbert, presenter of The Listening Post on Al Jazeera English, moderated the discussion. The panel was comprised of investigative reporter and filmmaker, Michelle Shephard; former Guantanamo Bay prisoner and director of outreach at CAGE, Moazzam Begg; and Cori Crider, head of the Abuses in Counter-Terrorism team at Reprieve.

“All the best work that comes out of Guantanamo either has her name or Karen Rosenberg’s on it,” Gizbert began, praising Shephard‘s substantial journalistic achievements in investigating Camp Gitmo over the past decade.

Still buzzing from tonight’s event at @frontlineclub – the film and discussion after were brilliant #mustseefilm pic.twitter.com/lItRso6GXE

— Camilla Pallesen (@CMPallesen) January 22, 2016

Shephard began by elaborating on her experiences and knowledge of Guantanamo Bay, broadly explaining why certain people were imprisoned and others were not. “What decided how you were dealt with and when you were released from Guantanamo was not the merits or demerits of your case, but what passport you held (…) Guantanamo was never created as a place to try for war crimes. It was created as an intelligence gathering unit.”

Gizbert then asked Begg if the film fell short of capturing the difficult times experienced during his imprisonment. He responded: “There is a part of the story you will never get to see. For example, the conversations I had with my lawyer while at Guantanamo were classified. When I left, I asked for the notes of these meetings and they told me I can’t have them because they are classified.”

Referring to the strict rules that journalists experience when covering Guantanamo, Begg continued: “When you can’t film a person’s face, when you can’t show what he looks like, what his expressions are, and how he feels, it takes away from the humanity of the situation.”

Crider picked up on this point and expressed her respect for lawyer Dennis Edney. He features heavily in the documentary as Khadr’s lawyer, and his role in exposing Khadr’s story has been an essential one. “So much of what the Guantanamo lawyer has to do isn’t traditional legal work in any event. They have to get these stories past the censors and into the world to convey these peoples’ humanity. I think for a solo practitioner to do something like this for Omar is absolutely extraordinary.”

Gizbert asked how important it was that a wide range of characters – such as the interrogators and military lawyer – were included in the telling and depiction of the story.

Shephard responded: “It was really essential to get all voices in [the documentary]. Omar Khadr was seen as a murderer and rapist on the extreme right, and Nelson Mandela on the extreme left. He thought he was neither. So we really wanted to break down that character, but not do it in an activist way. We wanted to get the most complete picture possible.”

Indeed, the panellists agreed that the fields of human rights and counter-terrorism are never “black and white.” This ambiguity was highlighted by Begg, who concluded the discussion with a comment on his former interrogators and prison guards at Guantanamo: “I have 15 of them on Facebook, as friends.”

For information on future screenings, please click here.

Richard Gizbert talks to Alex Miller, Milène Larsson and Aris Roussinos of VICE News

The disruptive and unconventional news model of VICE News was a fitting topic for the night that the Frontline Club unveiled their slightly longer, disruptive and exciting ‘Showcase’ evening on Wednesday 30 April.

In a mixture of debate, film and discussion, the audience were treated to two different segments on the ‘changing news landscape’ and the advent of VICE’s new news channel.

Richard Gizbert, presenter of Al Jazeera English’s The Listening Post, chaired the evening that started by sitting down with Alex Miller, Milène Larsson and Aris Roussinos from VICE, to discuss how they are changing the way news is delivered and to show some clips of their online documentaries.

Gizbert asked the team why VICE is different and how is it proving so successful, Miller, VICE’s editor in chief replied:

“When we started people said that online video had to be cats pissing around in baths. We did the exact opposite and made long-form documentaries. The interesting thing is that it was the serious stuff that was getting the most passionate support. We’ve been nudged towards it by watching the things our viewers are interested in.”

https://twitter.com/ClippetNews/status/461797710866051072/photo/1

As a journalist who freelanced for the BBC and Channel 4 before he became a reporter at VICE News, Roussinos commented that “one thing that makes me pretty happy working at VICE is that I’ve got pretty much absolute editorial freedom. Because we can have a longer format on the internet, we are not hemmed in by runtimes. There is a thirst for knowledge – why not feed it?”

“There is a little bit of a myth or a hype going on. [These documentaries] are something Reuters could have done, or Unreported World – I can’t see you’re doing anything different. Is it really the case that people come to your site because they have lost faith in the mainstream media?” filmmaker Sean Langan pointed out from the audience.  There was also concern from the audience that the documentaries lacked context, in particular geo-political context.

After a brief hiatus of drinks in the members’ clubroom courtesy of Chivas Brothers, the second part of the evening got underway.

Richard Sambrook, professor of journalism and director at the Centre for Journalism; Kevin Sutcliffe, VICE head of news production for Europe; Richard James, news editor of BuzzFeed UK; and Tom Giles, editor of the BBC’s Panorama, joined Gizbert to discuss the broader subject of the changing media landscape.

Giles pointed out that the BBC will probably be looking to places like VICE for tips going forward, especially with BBC Three being taken off air: “BBC Three will still go on online, and I’m not an expert, but can’t imagine they won’t turn to people like VICE and want to know how they can inform the whole online younger audience landscape.”

Sambrook raised the concern that VICE and other online outlets have not had any crises yet, and a test will be how they can survive them.

Sutcliffe, who had previously been Channel 4’s Dispatches editor pointed out that:

“It’s all virgin territory to us, we are just finding our way – we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, we’re doing good content we are spending money on that content. We think it’s an opportunity to try and grow a network that works, one that doesn’t have to take its model from legacy media – it doesn’t have to be invested in.”

Gizbert asked James what it is like to come from a print background (as a journalist at Metro and The Daily Mail) to a solely online medium. “It is fantastic. There is so much more freedom and creativity not having to chase the daily news agenda,” he replied.

“In a terrible way, we are prisoners of our form,” said Giles, talking about legacy media. “The reason [online only] is liberating is because you don’t need to worry about how is it going to fit on the channel, or how is it going to get marketed at 8:30pm on BBC One. By the time we’ve got the money and the commission, you’ve already put it out there in a new form in a new landscape”

“But at what moment when other people pop up to do the same thing, and when the competition starts, and it really starts to crunch,” he added.

Watch or listen back here:

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Thank you to Stewart Purvis, Richard Gizbert, Tina Carr, Emma Beals, Allan Little, Mani, Stuart Hughes, Richard Sambrook, Jon Snow, Marina Litvinenko, Martin Bell, Tom Fenton, Anthony Loyd, Lyse Doucet, Bill Neely, Lindsey Hilsum, Charles Glass, John G Morris, Salim Amin, Liz Palmer Gary Knight, Jon Lee Anderson, Jeremy Bowen, Matt Frei and Jean-Jacques Gonfier.

In 2010 U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning committed the largest security breach in US history, handing the classified Afghan War Diary, Iraq War Logs, and 250,000 State Department cables to Wikileaks. Imagery like that of an American helicopter team gunning down citizens and journalists on a Baghdad street in 2007 has been lodged in the global consciousness.

With Manning standing trial before a military court in June, the Frontline Club engaged an expert panel on Monday 15 May to ask what lies ahead for the whistleblower, along with what his experience might mean to governments and the media.

(L-R): Naomi Colvin, Chase Madar, Richard Gizbert and David Leigh. Photo credit: Jim Treadway

Naomi Colvin, a writer, activist and founder of UK Friends of Bradley Manning, declared him a “touchstone for people involved in social justice movements.”

“2011 is one of those years that will go down in history, like 1989, or 1968, or 1848,” she said.  “Political action was on a worldwide scale. . . . That spark of enthusiasm started in the Middle East, and the [documents that Manning released] are at least a contributing factor to that.”

Chase Madar, a New York attorney who has written a book detailing Manning’s experience, agreed:

“The State Department cables [were] just a very brutal and candid assessment of corruption in the Ben Ali government . . . Tunisian intellectuals I’ve spoken with have said you really can’t tell the story of the uprising there without at least mentioning Bradley Manning and his leaks.”

The panel rang of frustration with the American media’s failure to cover the Manning story in fairness or depth. Americans “know very little” about his case, Madar observed.

“The New York Times fails to send a journalist to cover the first public hearing with Manning,” lamented Richard Gizbert, Presenter for al Jazeera’s Listening Post, “which even the Times’ own ombudsman said was ridiculous.”

“I got adopted by the staff of a fish restaurant in Glasgow [recently],” Madar recounted. “The bartender and the waiter knew all about [Manning’s case], and it’s because The Guardian’s coverage [has been] much better than anything in the United States.”

David Leigh, the Guardian‘s investigations editor until 2013 and co-author of a book on Julian Assange and Wikileaks, reduced Manning’s trial to “a piece of theatre by the American military to expose, dramatise, penalise and terrorise whistleblowers.”

Even still, Madar harbored optimism for what Manning will ultimately represent:

“He delivered a 35-page statement of intent in court a couple of months ago…  it was very impressive… poised, very self-possessed, very thoughtful and reflective, as opposed to the way he’d been demonised as some naricissistic little punk… The more people hear from Bradley Manning in his own words and in his own voice – because someone smuggled a recorder into the courtroom, you can hear him with his own voice – the more they’re going to realise that Bradley Manning is the responsible, ethical citizen; that it’s his detractors in government and the media who are the narcissistic, little, punks.”

You can watch a recording of the event or listen to the audio podcast below:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/the-case-of-the-us-vs-bradley

By Charlotte Eyre

Original and innovative content will remain the keystone of the news industry as the media machine progresses, David Carr said in a discussion with Richard Gizbert  on Monday. 

David Carr has been writing about the media and its relationship with business, culture and governments for 25 years and has watched the print landscape change dramatically. Now a media and cultural columnist at the New York Times he writes the Media Equation column for the Monday Business section.

He will be joining us in conversation with Richard Gizbert, presenter of Al Jazeera English’s The Listening Post, a weekly show that looks at news coverage by the world’s media. Gizbert has also spent 25 years working in the media world as a foreign correspondent, covering stories around the world.

Drawing on their experiences working with two very different global media players, Carr and Gizbert will be discussing the future of the news industry.

From the future of newspapers like the New York Times and whether they can adapt quickly enough to survive to the emergence of new business models offering alternative sources of funding. They will be addressing some of the big questions that are exercising many minds within the media.

A remarkable opportunity to debate the future of the news industry with two of its key players.

At our First Wednesday Special, discuss the cultural and political changes set in motion by the events of 9/11 ten years ago and look ahead to the next decade.

We’ll also be discussing extremism, Somalia, photography in transit and the cult of youth in newspapers and there’s also a great opportunity to hear from industry veterans Martin Bell and the New York Times‘ David Carr and Richard Gizbert of Al Jazeera English.

Our screenings include a double bill of films by John D. McHugh, a special preview of The Debt, insight into the world of teenage miners in Bolivia and human trafficking in Nigeria.

Go to our website for further details of all the talks and screenings, PLUS a preview reading of Bang Bang Bang, a multimedia storytelling masterclass with Brian Storm and third party events on remembering 9/11 and on investigative journalism. 
 
Follow us on Twitter and catch up on any events you missed on the Forum blog or download our podcasts on iTunes.

View in iTunes
Watch the event here. 

By Will Spens

The Frontline Club’s first ‘On The Media’ event of 2011 was a fascinating discussion focusing on the changing and sometimes wrought relationship between the worlds media and WikiLeaks. The controversial whistle-blowing website has attracted intense worldwide interest following the massive releases of leaked US military and diplomatic files and the controversy surrounding its enigmatic founder, Julian Assange. In this event, chaired by presenter of The Listening Post on Al Jazeera English, Richard Gizbert, this thoroughly modern relationship was dissected and argued over passionately by an expert panel.

On the nature of the relationship between WikiLeaks and its media partners during publication of the leaked US embassy files around the world, Ian Katz, deputy editor of the Guardian – the only UK paper working with WikiLeaks – was clear in his assessment:

“There was really a rather remarkable collaboration that held for several months and produced some really remarkable journalism. People may not quite understand the sheer scale of the journalistic effort that went into the publication of the cables”

As to the shift in focus by the media from WikiLeaks to Julian Assange, author and columnist David Aaronovitch acknowledged that this was almost inevitable and is more than just media appetite for personality stories:

“Julian Assange is an absolute phenomenon of the modern era. He represents what we think of as the uncertain coming world.”

Mark Stephens, a media lawyer who is Julian Assange’s solicitor, thought that WikiLeaks is itself holding a mirror up to journalism:

“The public see a very crisp image, but what they don’t see is how journalists get that information. They don’t like the way WikiLeaks or journalists get their material and this is an interesting area for concern.”

Gavin MacFayden, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, agreed with this but suggested that some media organisations have acted more reprehensibly than others, adding: ‘a lot of media responded to the worlds greatest power saying to them “you must not publish this”. I think we’ve seen that [in the New York Times] and it’s disgraceful’.

When the question of whether news organisations were equipped to deal with such massive quantities of data to investigate was raised, Ian Katz asserted that “we are nowhere near ready to deal with this kind of data. We need a whole new breed of data journalists’. David Aaronovitch however took a more acerbic view that these releases were “creating a sort of analyst caste of journalists… but the real question is this: do existing media organisations have the economic ability to deal with it?”

One fascinating hypothetical scenario was raised at the end of the extended talk: the question of whether, assuming WikiLeaks had been operational before the war in Iraq, would the US and the UK populations have had access to material which may have prevented the invasion of Iraq from occurring?

Watch the video here:

This event was in association with the BBC College of Journalism.

Throughout 2010 whistleblower website WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange were making headlines with the release of classified documents. Both the leaks and the controversy surrounding Assange have been covered extensively by the media.

For the first On the Media discussion of the year we are going to be putting the spotlight on the media and asking what the WikiLeaks operation and the media coverage of it tells us about the press.

How have journalists responded to this new kid on the block? The future will no doubt see the emergence of similar organisations, but what impact will this have on the culture of journalism? How will the media adapt and how will this currently uncomfortable relationship develop?

Chaired by Richard Gizbert, presenter of The Listening Post on Al Jazeera English.

David Aaronovitch, writer, broadcaster, commentator and regular columnist for The Times;

Mark Stephens, media lawyer with Finers Stephens Innocent and Julian Assange’s solicitor;

Ian Katz, deputy editor of the Guardian;

Gavin MacFayden, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

In association with the BBC College of Journalism.