Is sport above human rights?

Issue: Sport on trial

From Index on Censorship

Should Syrian delegates be allowed to attend the London Olympics? Should high-profile sporting events take place in countries where free expression is repeatedly crushed? As sport and politics collide, this issue of Index on Censorship, Sport on Trial, asks: is sport above human rights?

Award-winning journalist and author Mihir Bose asks whether sporting events should be held in countries with repressive regimes. Stephen Escritt and Martin Polley investigate London 2012’s attempt to privatise the Games with threats of legal action against small businesses that use the word Olympics. Corinna Ferguson examines new threats to the right to protest and asks whether the Games are being used to roll out intrusive powers.

Also in this issue, Malu Halasa interviews Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat, who was awarded an Index Freedom of Expression Award earlier this year. Plus Salil Tripathi on censorship at literary festivals and reports on press freedom from Hungary, Dagestan and Mexico.

Political blogging on the right and the left

A tale of two blogospheres: Discursive practices on the left and right

From American Behavioral Scientist

As presidential candidates from both parties gear up for the big day in November, more and more people are turning to political blogs to provide them with the latest news on the election-front. This study examined the differences among top political blogs from the right and the left and found that left-wing blogs encourage more user participation, present more opinion-related content, and were more likely to rally their readers to action. Researchers analyzed 155 top political blogs from a 2-week period in early August 2008. They first determined which blogs represented ideologies from the left and which represented ideologies of the right. They then applied a coding scheme to analyze blog structure, the incorporation of user activity, authorship, calls to action, and overall content from both types of blogs. The authors wrote, “The left is more egalitarian in opportunities for speech, more discursive, and more collaborative in managing the sites. The right is more individualistic and hierarchical, with its practice consisting more of pointing to external stories than of engaging in discussion or commentary.” They conclude “In effect, readers on the right are treated more as traditional media consumers: They play a relatively passive and marginal role in producing the primary content,” wrote the authors. “Users on the left have a more active, productive role, blurring the production-consumption distinction and, through this, increasing the probability that the left wing of the blogosphere incorporates a wider range of views than a more centralized model.”

Are coalitions the inevitable future for UK governments?

From Political Science

Two heads are better than one? Assessing the implications of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition for UK politics

The UK’s political system has been recognized as a model delivering a stable one party government, but 2010 has proved the exception rather than the rule with the result of a hung parliament and the formation of the first peacetime coalition for more than 70 years. This coalition has been agreed between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, two parties with seemingly little in common. This paper recognizes how the UK’s shifting political landscape and changes in personnel at the top of both parties has facilitated the coalition. It considers and assesses the impact of the coalition on the political parties involved and asks whether coalitions might become a more regular feature of Westminster government.

 

MRSA in the United Kingdom where science meets politics, and a sensationalist media produces a misinformed public

From British Journal of Infection Control

‘Hospital superbug claiming lives’, ‘Dirty NHS hospitals to blame for MRSA’, ‘Unclean wards killing patients’. These familiar UK newspaper headlines have terrified the public over recent years. However the author of this letter explains how their move from working on UK NHS wards to American hospitals revealed the superbug is not a problem left behind on British soil. In their experience the bug is just as prevalent in the cleanest US hospitals.  The author believes the great British public need to be made aware that MRSA is a truly global phenomenon plaguing large numbers of countries. The differences observed are less about the spread of the infection and more about the political handling and levels of media propaganda.