Mission & Justice

Stephanie March; 31/7/08

East Timor’s inaugural Journalist of the Year awards last week provided much-needed encouragement for professionals facing an uncertain future, as authorities draft a press law that could make defamation a criminal offence. At a ceremony in Dili on Saturday, Nelson Filomeno De Jesus from Radio Timor-Leste took the top award, named after five international journalists killed by Indonesian troops in Balibo, East Timor, in 1975. His story about a failure of the justice system to deal with child sexual abuse won both the top prize and the Roger East award for Best Electronic Journalism, presented by Hollywood actor Anthony LaPaglia.

(more…)

Sanna Trad; 17/5/08

“Go home, Osama,” was not a particularly clever insult. “Go to hell, you educated pigs,” was much better, although a little unexpected. Waleed Aly, a counter-terrorism expert and founding member of the new SBS comedy Salam Cafe, reckons there came a point where the racist insults he received in the street stopped offending him and started making him laugh. “The funniest thing is the one-liners you get,” he said. “How can you compete with comedy like that? After a while it stops being offensive and just starts being funny.” Salam Cafe, the brainchild of the show’s regular panel members Mr Aly, Ahmed Imam and Susan Carland, takes a rare look at the funnier side of the issues that affect Muslims.

(more…)

Tom Keneally; 7/2/08

Recently SBS screened a documentary that analysed Turkish television as a reflection of the concerns of the Turkish people, caught as they are between the blandishments of the US and the European Union, and less secular Muslim regimes to the east. Turks like to be seen as living in an advanced state, despite, for example, their Government’s persecution of novelist Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year. In any case, the program revealed that the most controversial show on Turkish TV was a contemporary drama about a Greek boy who falls in love with a Turkish girl. Their respective families treat their intention to marry as a calamity perhaps worse than death.

(more…)