Inner City Press -- Investigative Reporting From the United Nations to Wall Street to the Inner City

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, August 22 -- Following the outrageous beheading of journalist James Foley by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the UN Security Council on August 22 issued a press statement, to be on its website here.

  The UNSC statement calls for accountability and states that "journalists, media professionals and associated personnel engaged in dangerous professional missions in areas of armed conflict are generally considered as civilians and shall be respected and protected as such.”

   That journalists should be respected was a position the UN itself took in April 2014 after then Security Council participant Gerard Araud of France told a Lebanese correspondents whose questions he didn't like, "You are not a journalist, you are an agent." Click here for that, including video.

   Inner City Press on behalf of the Free UN Coalition for Access asked UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric about this. Dujarric said that journalists should be treated with respect -- but declined FUNCA's request that he convey this position to Araud (who has since left the UN.)

  Back in April, it was notable but not surprising to Inner City Press, which co-founded FUNCA, that the supposed representative of journalists at UN Headquarters the UN Correspondents Association never admonished Araud.

   UNCA's Executive Committee has functioned as the UN's Censorship Alliance, trying to get the investigative Press thrown out of the UN, and then for example seeking to censor -- by getting Google to ban from its Search -- leaked evidence of its anti-Press complaints to the UN, here.

  Given this record within UNCA, with no reforms since, it was not surprising but all-too-UN for this UNCA Executive Committee to issue its own grandiose statement about James Foley. They didn't do this for journalists killed in Eastern Ukraine... and see above.

 Hypocrisy at the UN is not in limited supply, for example the Secretariat refusing to accept responsibility for bringing to cholera to Haiti - but this is particularly grating.

  In 2012 members of the UNCA Executive Committee tried to get the investigative Press thrown out of the UN following a dispute about reporting on Sri Lanka and conflicts of interest, click here for that.

  Inner City Press quit UNCA after that and co-founded the Free UN Coalition for Access.

  Since then this same UNCA executive committee, without any reforms, has bragged that it is meeting with UN Security Council ambassadors about, what else, journalists' rights and protection. What a travesty.

  Since being exposed, by documents released under the US Freedom of Information Act, for having secretly asked Dujarric to throw out the investigative Press, there have been no reforms at UNCA. One of the "for the record" complaints has been Banned from Google's search under a bogus copyright claim by Reuters bureau chief Lou Charbonneau, here. This is outright censorship.

  Earlier this year the head of the UN Correspondents Association felt comfortable trying to dictate how and who UN Television filmed on World Press Freedom Day. 

  According to multiple sources, Pamela Falk of CBS complained to the top of the Department of Public Information that UNTV dared cut away to a shot of a skeptic during her speech claiming UNCA protects journalists. Video here on Inner City Press' YouTube channel (on full video on UN website, here, from Minute 30).

  After the video and the UNCA attempt to censor that it spawned were known, other critics came forward. This doesn't represent us, said one.  An UNCA member, rather than obediently tweeting the contrived tag, had noted online that when Falk claimed the "GA commends UNCA every year," UNTV camera cuts to @innercitypress shaking head in disbelief, too funny.”

 (The UNTV video, which we went back and found for the reasons below is online here, from Minute 30.)

  As we first diplomatically recorded, the UNTV control room got a complaint about their camera angles. This is called attempted censorship, as is this Digital Millennium Copyright Act filing with Google, here.

  Now we can report based on multiple sources that Falk herself complained to the top of DPI - and that this complaint, rather than being as it should have been laughed at and rejected, was passed on to the control room, trying to dictate even what the camera operators film as cut-aways.

  This is outright censorship: the UN's Censorship Alliance's reverse flow.

  In 2012, some on UNCA's Executive Board tried to pursue the investigative Press for its coverage of UN official Herve Ladsous and also separately of France's ambassador Gerard Araud, then moved for expulsion based on coverage of Sri Lanka. In 2014, UNCA's president has demanded that the UN itself change how it films, to censor opposition.

  Out in the real world, the UN Secretariat had no comment on Ethiopia's jailing of journalists including the Zone 9 Bloggers, when asked about it by the new Free UN Coalition for Access. As we covered on May 8, the UN has yet to speak on Yemen's deportation of one of the few (but more than two) non-Yemeni journalists working in the country.  We'll have more on all this -- watch this site.