Oh how outraged everyone is getting over the bean spilling going on at the Leveson Enquiry.
Yet looking at phone hacking as a morality tale masks the real background story. As the enquiry is revealing, phone …

Al-Jazeera has recently passed two milestones. The first, on 11 November was the launch of its new Balkans channel. The second, four days later, was the fifth anniversary of Al-Jazeera English. As Al-Jazeera extends its …

This review originally appeared in Literary Review, April 2011
This book essentially a warning to the West – a term that is never defined but refers more or less to US policymakers – about its blinkered cyber-utopianism. Evgeny Morozov …

On March 30th, the frontline club and in association with BBC Arabic hosted a special panel titled: Protest, Technology and the End of Fear. The event hosted Alaa Abdul Fattah, famous Egyptian blogger and political …

What has happened during only a span of four weeks in Tunisia is mind-boggling and unprecedented in the modern day history of the Middle East; that a dictator who has had a stronghold in Tunisia …

Lucky enough to attend the Dubai International Film Festival for the second time, my interest was, once again, in the Arab films. I saw mostly shorts, and most of them were great: creative writing, intense acting, …

One problem with trading principle for power is that you then have to be a better Machiavelli than everyone else. It seems clear, Mr. Clegg, that you are not.
The last election saw the continued rise …

Trucking the dream.
Hello all, i thought I’d bore you with some tails of the road and why trucks are cool.
The theoretical blurb, come waffle;
Recently I’ve been doing some work in Ghana, a tricky situation after …

I’m gutted that Sweden hasn’t qualified for this year’s World Cup. Last time it happened – the only time in the last 20 years – I was just 17 years old. So who should I …

A mental note to myself – go see Avatar! Meanwhile, however, please find below a great compilation / analysis of Chinese viewpoints to the film from our fellow MA from SOAS, Andy Yee. Andy is is currently graduate student in Pacific Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and I am trying to get him to contribute more to Carousel! in the upcoming months. Looking forward to another post-essay-coitum term of interesting writings / projects on the site. Crossposted from Global Voices Online.

Following our reports about the plight of SOAS (ex-)student Hossein Derakshan HERE, the plot around his imprisonment now thickens even more. Now Newsweek is accusing him being a spy behind the current Iran trials aimed at arresting many of the opposition figures.

Somewhere deep in the northern savannah there is an ideological clash that will affect the lives of the 5,000 inhabitants of Binaba for decades to come. Leninist collectivization meets autocracy in a system perhaps harking …

The idea of flat earth news owes a lot to Herman and Chomsky’s ‘propaganda model’. The basic premise is that due to increased corporate ownership and focus on profits (with associated redundancies, cost-cutting and targets) journalists are no longer able to check stories like they used to. Here are its 10 rules.

We have now finally gotten peer-review comments back from a book that I have been co-editing the past year. The book “Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change” will now be published sometime 2010 after a few relatively standard changes / edits / modifications. My chapter passed without any edits required so quite happy to avoid the extra work.

Men go down in history, and in the way that they do, not only because of their notable achievements, but also because it is men who write history to begin with. How would things be different if history were written by women?
Similarly, would news — news today, history tomorrow — be different if it were written more by women than men and not within a male-dominated social structure as it is now? Apparently.

The article below originally appeared on Chowraha – Crossroads
A piece on today’s Metro, a newspaper read by at least 2 million people in the UK everyday, caught my instant attention. At first I found it …

(UPDATE!  The continuing discussion in NYT has made me edit my post a bit.  Please note that I have specially erased references to the comment that I referred to as I know now a bit …

As a target of commodification, panda is used not only by native Chinese artist but also professional cultural business capitalists.Just look around of yourself, it seems there is nothing can not be commodified. Even god itself can’t escape from this!

I came across this interesting production on YouTube, and it reminded me about our many discussions on the portrayal of the “Other” and Orientalism.
For extensive readings of Hollywood’s institutionalized stereotyping, please click on the following …

The world’s coolest statistician, Hans Roesling, speak out again: “beware the media hype!’” A rather eye-opening statistical analysis of our just passed swine flu panic. Do check out the YouTube video.