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Action 258, November 2004
This is the last printed issue of Action. From now on Action will be known as Media Action and distributed only electronically. This issue looks at "Building Slavery in Israel" with refusenik Nir Nader, producer of Video 48's New Film 'A Job to Win'. Stefanie Boyd talks about 'Filming the Price of Gold' in the Peruvian Andes and Munira Sen shows how by changing one word you can change everything with "From Illiteracy to Literacy". Md. Sazzad Hossain reports on "Getting Chittagong into the News" and Pradip Thomas reviews the recent conference "Media, Religion & Culture" held in Louisville, Kentucky. The online course in Communication Rights for Latin America is written up by Roberto H Jordan.
Video 48's New Film 'A Job to Win'
Nir Nader, an Israeli ‘refusenik’ who has been imprisoned for refusing military service, and is an organiser of the Support Forum for Conscientious Objectors, is also a film producer with Video 48 - which WACC is proud to support.
Stefanie Boyd
In the summer of 2000 I visited the small Andean mountain village of Choropampa, planning to write an article about a mercury spill that had poisoned nearly 1,000 people. The culprit was the Yanacocha mine, owned by Newmont Mining of Colorado, the world’s largest gold mining corporation. The initial media frenzy had already cooled and the villagers` plight – their worsening health and the lack of adequate compensation – had been ignored by the company and the Peruvian government. I hoped an article in an influential American newspaper would renew interest in the case.
Munira Sen
- "Statistics they say don’t bleed:” An estimated 350 million Indians cannot read or write.”
- “50 million children across India are out of school, and that is a conservative estimate.”
- Can campaigns make a critical difference and result in social action?
- What is the link between access and participation?
- How can we sustain social change?
Md. Sazzad Hossain
To ensure the right to communicate, to have better access to the media, and to improve representation of the minority and indigenous community, the Bangladesh Centre for Development, Journalism and Communication (BCDJC) has been undertaking a pilot training project with support from WACC since March 2004.
Pradip Thomas
The fourth religion, media and culture conference was held in Louisville, Kentucky, September 1-4. There were about 130 participants mainly from North America and Europe but also from Africa and Latin America. There were a number of WACC friends at this event (Stewart Hoover, Knut Lundby, Peter Horsfield, Bob White, Jolyon Mitchel among many others) and WACC officers and ex-officers, Adan Medrano, Dennis Smith and Rolando Perez. Dennis, Rolando and Renee de la Torre (University of Guadalajara) were on a WACC panel ‘New Scenarios and Subjects in Religion in Latin America’.
Roberto H. Jordan
Close to 80 of us decided to take up the challenge offered by WACC-Latin America for a course on Communication Rights. We do not know each other, we have never met and we come from very different parts of the continent. Our experiences are varied but we come together for this experience because we want to know more about this issue, and we want to be able to “read” the questions from our Latin American perspective. Now that the first stage of the World Summit on the Information Society (December 2003) has concluded we really want to understand the issues before we reach the second stage (Tunisia 2005).