Websites
blocked as king "empowers" the people
By Brian Whitaker
"Yesterday marked the official launch in Jordan of Demoqrati – King Abdullah's latest initiative to promote "democratic empowerment and active citizenship". Describing the initiative in one of his periodic discussion papers as an effort to build "political engagement across society", the king said......
How unfortunate, then, that yesterday also marked the start of another initiative – to shackle the social entrepreneurs that King Abdullah appeared to be talking about. Orders went out for internet service providers, as a matter of urgency, to block several hundred Jordanian websites......
Most of the time, Jordan's law-abiding, licensed, print media
does not provide anything like the type of coverage needed to stimulate the sort
of open debate that King Abdullah claims to be advocating.
In a recent survey by the Centre for Defending
Freedom of Journalists (CDFJ), 86% of Jordanian journalists said they
practise self-censorship – which almost all of them blamed on the authorities’
attempts to influence their work.
"It was believed that the so-called Arab Spring might boost
freedom of the media, but despite the minor difference it made, the revolts did
not have the widespread effect we were hoping for," CDFJ president Nidal Mansour
told
the Jordan Times.
He added that the authorities “treated the media as their
opponents and continuously interfered with them, violating the freedom of
journalists and preventing them from reporting freely and independently”."
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