released after paying settlements which run into hundreds of millions of dollars as the headlines the news continues here to the listening post next and monday put it well on. u.s. and british companies have announced the biggest discovery of natural gas in west africa but what to do with these untapped natural resources is already a source of heated debate nothing much has changed they still spend most of their days looking forward to for dr events like this one five years on the syrians still feel battered or even those who managed to escape their country have been truly unable to escape the war. the popular filipino news website is facing the mounting pressure the securities and exchange commission people. have received the following enough money to buy for like a few. rough spots as a war of attrition is on the way for colleagues determined to wait.

long richard gives birth in europe the listening post here are some of the stories we're tracking this week does the case against one news website amount to the new terror to government issuing a formal declaration of war against the filipino media climate skepticism is friendship and unscientific so why is it that skeptics still manage in certain countries to get so much airtime because it's a fallacy by stuff pretty much. the italian government has a formula for taking on the fake news problem and breaking down the happy talk. and more in the interactive getting to the core of the facebook story through pure satire. we begin in the philippines at a popular online news site rapper that's long been a thorn in the side of president rodriguez to tear take rappers criticism of detail to a signature policy is war on drugs and its investigations into his personal wealth have not gone down well with the president has long accused rapper of being run by

americans which would be illegal under filipino law the site now faces a possible shutdown over that allegation rapper a says this is pure politicize ation of the press that the president now calls the shots when it comes to media regulation since coming to power in two thousand and sixteen roderigo detective has made finley veiled threats against journalists and hit them with accusations of fake news but this official move against rappler takes the conflict to another level rappler vows to take the case to the supreme court if it has to and should that happen we're sure to learn a lot about the media politics and power in the age of. our starting point this week is monella. why are we targeted because we're journalists who ask tough questions. investigative reports on key facets of this administration starting with the drug

war president. and the online social. mission and how that forms the bedrock of this information in this country that really is crippling the miners but we're going to do is to challenge it and we will challenge take every legal remedy that is possible take it all the way up to the supreme court and we're also taking it to the people. by fighting the case in the court of public opinion believe that that. rapper has posted videos on its own site explaining its side of the legal story rappers one percent but. there's also an f.a.q. section the. dedicated to the case it's editors have used news conferences and this is a harassment case and freedom of the press demonstrations began to get the word out . and they have turned to their colleagues in mainstream news outlets channels like a.b.s. c.b.s. and g.m.a.

to report on the story as well those outlets might given the kind of precedent this case could set in the philippines they're trying to test the waters if nobody will complain or protest about what they're doing or they will go ahead with the other news organizations and in fact the president has come out with speeches against the largest they news abroad wire. and he has also lashed out against the two biggest news organizations on the end to and jamie seven u.s. . president that has continued to lash out against any kind of use organization that exposes us any kind of a wrongdoing in his government. if we allow ruppert to go down sooner or later everyone's going down we cannot afford to be real not alone. we've been through.

the marcos dictatorship and. his shop. had only a small things as propaganda mouthpieces and we do that because press freedom is not even ours it belongs to the people and you take only press freedom to take away people's right to information that's very basic so you loose democracy that. the government's case against rappler is a financial one like many companies in the philippines rapper uses p.d. r.'s philippine depository receipts as a vehicle to secure foreign funding p.d.i. hours give investors a slice of the profits if the company makes money but unlike shares no control of that company with the philippines financial regulator the securities and exchange commission or f.c.c. is asserting is that one of rappers p.b.r. investors the group run by founder pierre omidyar does have

a measure of control over things like the company's makeup or by laws thereby breaching filipino law which for bids for in control of media companies carry roquet is a spokesperson for president. is about. it is not about freedom of press what property it was an ingenious fundraising that result that in control of by a foreign entity a media creation because the business of spreading information on its visit with national interests should only be owned by the beatles but the thing is. even there . not as ownership but as investments and it's not only. the other networks and very telling thing too is the fact that the solution their gender. who is basically the government's lawyer. so it's basically the government telling the securities and exchange commission to

do something about them so that alone is a very big government intervention you have to look at the f.c.c. decision in context philippine media has been under attack on line for more than a year and a half and just last july targeted rappler and then a few days after the f.c.c. decision i received a cyber libel case for a twenty twelve article that was published before the cyber libel law was actually passed the government says this is pure coincidence but when coincidences happen too frequently they form patterns and the patterns very clear. that rappler and not a more conventional news outlet has provoked this kind of response from the authorities is a measure of just how far the site has come in the six years since its launch and the importance now would taxed to alternative news sources in the philippines it's fairly in the us this is the first time we have

a purely online use are going to. have a print version it doesn't have a broadcast satellite facility so this is the first time that we have a purely news online site and a big portion of the shares are owned by journalists and so as an in the what they project you would like to have more rappler. take came to power in mid two thousand and sixteen launching his war on drugs and drug users the government puts the number of extra judicial killings at four thousand human rights groups say it's more like twelve rapper was among the news outlets critical of the carnage and the absence of due process that displeased the president who does not take kindly to second guessing and who used last year's state of the union address to take issue with rappler and its ownership still be one hundred percent really you know.

the. rapper has also made enemies in the filipino blogosphere president to territory has legions of online backers the self described d.d.'s die hard to tear taste supporters some of whom can be quite vicious posting the home addresses of journalists they disapprove of threatening them and trying to undermine the work of sites like rappler the criticized or his policy we did a whole series of this in october twenty sixth game that was what made us a target of the propaganda machine as soon as we published that story we came under attack i was getting hate messages messages death threats an average of ninety eight messages per hour our best defense was to understand it so we collected the data and we processed it we showed that twenty six fake accounts can actually ripple and influence up to three million other accounts by april twenty seventh

seen the key content creators in the propaganda machine or a point that the government it's on line state sponsored. and it is meant to silence dissent it is meant to silence criticism as poisonous as the rhetoric in the blogosphere can be the government's case against rappler based on those seems downright pedantic it's worth reiterating rappler is not the only news outlet in the philippines that uses p.d. r.'s as a source of financing the country's two biggest television networks abs and g.m.a. used them as well no prizes for guessing where this story's going president that they while he says that he's not sending i'm a nice applause that the news organizations he's trying to kill them slowly constricting their economic funding their sources of funding so this is that the worse the worse this.

we're discussing other media stories that are on our radar today with one of our producers tara enough target the italian government says it wants to take on fake news it's created a new online tool with which to do that what are the details and why now yes there's been a bit of a frenzy about fake news and it's a day in the run up to an election and march and this all goes back to two thousand and sixteen when a network of fake news sites was blamed for influencing the outcome of a referendum on constitutional reform this time around the government has enlisted the help of its city's postal police which is the unit to investigate cyber crime and they've created this online portal which ask you the submit a link to the news item in question and then missed any facial networks they've seen on it seemed the postal police will then examine each case and take action if laws were broken and if not they'll try to issue official statements to dispel the

false information but it's not like everyone in italy sees this as a good idea no they don't because it's a fine line isn't that so people are worried about online censorship and they're also worried about giving the police too much power to decide what is true and what is not the government of the platform is a transparent and legitimate will end up protecting citizens from unfounded news but some argue the ruling party has politicized this issue the director of political front checking site politico has warned of the dangers of turning policeman into fact checkers since people could actually face up to three months in jail for distributing false information you've also been looking into yemen where a journalist has been killed apparently caught in the crossfire earlier this week a photojournalist called mohammed could see was killed in the province of tiles and one of the alleged to have been rocket fired by the rebels he worked for the private channel buckley's t.v. and was on his way to investigate the aftermath of a missile strike when he was killed a local journalist working for russian broadcaster r.t.

r. it was also wounded in the same attack and look at the death is being blamed on the this was mentioning a number of journalists and also being killed and found the lead missile strikes also worth mentioning i suppose the crossfire is hardly the only danger that journalists in yemen are currently facing no it's not journalists in yemen are routinely targeted for doing that work last week the national organization of yemeni media nine is released a report that detail to two thousand two hundred fifteen violations against media workers and journalists since the who these took over the country in two thousand and fourteen that includes abductions and torture but one legal case against a journalist has just come to an end with the release of her show in our make he's been a critic of all the parties involved in this war he's been held by the who these with no access to a lawyer or his family for five months ok thanks to our. among the world's climate scientists the number of those who doubt that global warming is caused by human

activity is extraordinarily low fewer than three in one hundred however that's not the impression you might get from the news media in certain countries climate change skeptics enjoy plenty of exposure through which to propagate their theories such as carbon dioxide doesn't cause a greenhouse effect the planet's actually cooling or the climate has always changed you'll hear those arguments more in some parts of the world than others and much more because climate skepticism in the news media is largely confined to what is known as the anglosphere the u.s. the u.k. australia and to a lesser extent canada and new zealand elsewhere including the most populous polluting countries china and india such skepticism is hard to find the listening post will yong now on the curious existence and persis tense of climate skepticism in the news media. there are many questions but in the air like like what causes global warming is it

real profound is it can you reverse it the evidence for a catastrophe is not there we're at the lowest historical lows for extreme weather it's all based on a filed fundamental the fundamental ease that it is the human emissions of carbon to draw global warming that has never been shown across the united states australia the u.k. fringe opinions like these make their way into mainstream discussions about climate change with striking frequency so what we've got is a fallacy based on fertile promoted but what's surprising isn't just that climate skeptics still exist in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence it's that they get so much exposure largely in the so-called anglosphere. we look to very large number of articles with and. three thousand more than eighty percent of the articles that had climate skepticism in them were found in the u.s. and the u.k.

compared to the newspapers in brazil china india and france this is quite clear that there is a strong presence of skeptics in the australian and canadian press as well india third largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions there was very very little climate skepticism that. the president of skepticism is actually right now for about seven hundred articles that i have managed to code so far but point four percent of the. climate skepticism what. i've been a journalist in china for more than ten years of climate change is my area of expertise and i found barely a trace of climate skepticism in the chinese media. and there is a funny contradiction is particularly acute here in the united states where we here are home to some of the most influential scientific organizations and here is well

some of the contrary unism is most evident and most acute so what's behind the persistence of climate contrary an ism in the anglosphere countries right wing media moguls came to business to remain as usual have certainly played their part the anglosphere forms the core of rupert murdoch's media empire and outlets like fox news the wall street journal the london times the australian and sky news australia have long provided platforms for climate skepticism. of these. facts but right wing media are only part of the story news outlets with a reputation for impartiality like the b.b.c. have also come under fire for how often they present fringe views on climate change alongside those of climate scientists otherwise known. that's full span and even if there is one thing and there's been no recording moving for the past fifteen

sixteen seventeen years well then you say oh yeah that's there is a lot of controversy about that no not that's a fact that the b.b.c. has had a particular problem with for a number of years and particular the today programme on radio four was kind of the main flagship current affairs program which is almost feels like groundhog day of probably every year or two they'll have another car crash moment where they can buy a climate skeptic on the predictions made at the beginning of the year of global warming alarm have so far proven to be wildly inaccurate and posted on the exact same till i joined this past yes it's. temperature as well temperature as well which is it which means it will be a big round of completely the complaints about harold exaggerated. and the b.b.c. is now even in the position of having an off color investigation into the way that

reports climate change due to this being such a huge problem. the notion that there is balance in the climate change story that climate science holds the same weight and significance this climate skepticism has been manipulated to great effect particularly in the united states the fossil fuel industry there has set out to so doubt about the science of global warming by funding like minded think tanks who make spokespersons available at the media's request to get it it's simply should be now recognised that has no bearing on the temperature of the earth there are some members of think tank we simply say they say they are paid to spend in one case forty percent of their their work day reaching out to the media one such think tank is the heartland institute which has received funding from exxon mobil koch industries and the american petroleum institute heartlands. people are fixtures in the u.s. and other anglosphere media outlets we always have. the same is true for the

competitive enterprise institute which has also been funded by oil and coal companies aren't the director of the center for energy and fireman with the competitive enterprise institute one place he won't find climate skeptic lobby groups is china chinese industry just like the media tends to move in step with communist party policy as far as the party is concerned the debate around the cause of global warming has long been settled for almost a decade now china has been the world's leading investor in clean energy. and in his speech at the c.c.p. nineteenth congress late last year president xi jinping himself warned of the homes humanity had inflicted on nature. in china on climate change is it's very important it's happening and we have to do something about it and it's very difficult for journalists to deviate from the official line on anything so be very unlikely that the chinese journalist the editor would stick their neck out and say actually it's

not happening or we don't need to do anything about it. over the past decade or so chinese media have developed closer relationships with our climate scientists as a result the quality of the reporting has improved considerably. for example now you often see journalists making the connection between climate change and local environmental disaster. it was in that leaky. india too is home to a sizable fossil fuel sector and like china it has no industry funded lobby disputing climate science however the reasons for that are quite different india's extractive. generally get what they want from government whoever's in power pushing back against concerns about climate change simply hasn't been necessary climate

skepticism. in that they're not very large. business groups political party. this is what you were a very very vocal and you vocal think tanks that have actually been at the forefront of a lot of. the frequency of cyclonic storms in coastal areas increasing experts believe this is a clear indication of the effects of climate. it's difficult to be blind to the effects of climate change and although climate skepticism has been a remarkably resilient industry within so-called legacy media in online media the picture looks markedly different one of the things we looked at was whether digital . space and voice and time to climate skeptics and express is simply the answer was they didn't and i think that's to do with their audience which is very young and we

know from personal attitudes surveys in many countries that young people don't tend to be very skeptical about climate change. the influence of online media is growing but mass media remains the primary source of information for most news consumers and in that realm skepticism still has a place however as the consequences of climate change increasingly i think the anglosphere the pushback against skeptics is growing louder. and although the carbon industry continues to pump money into not being and media messaging they haven't heard passion on their point of skepticism is running on borrowed time. finally sometimes political cartoonists can do just as good a job explaining a news story as conventional journalists can even when those stories are complicated such as facebook's recent announcement that it's revamping its news

feed by feeding you less news the american cartoonist mark fiore dissects facebook's explanation for the changes which does not even mention the site's issues with fake news and hate speech but suggests that by deemphasizing posts from news outlets facebook will be bringing people together because who needs news when you can have chipper social interactions instead we'll see you next time you're at the listening post. to the better. if you were getting an. algorithm it's ninety. like super duper hard to get rid of. get rid of other.

able to get real like journalists. by someone in your warm friendly bubble of comfort you can also go to settings click. info type menus backslash first amendment and message telling you how to sign up for. nine out of ten research team members agree that news. media outlets. rewinds returns with new updates on the best of documentaries. and the moving story of two young turkmen girls in afghanistan. at last able to get an education after years of repressive taliban occupation. five years on what has become of their dreams. rewind pencils and bullets at this time.

until now the coverage of latin america most of the world was about covering khuda taz tragedies. and that was it but not how people feel how they look how they think and that's what we do we go anyway five and a half months are demanding it when it's occasional system that was introduced to. latin america as europe has have to fill a void that needed to be filled. facing the realities of growing up when did you realize that you were living in a special place a so-called secret city getting to the heart of the matter the man maher government calls you a gringo lead terrorist hear their story on the talk to al-jazeera at this time. from satellite technology to three d. printing and recycled waste to solar powered classrooms africa is transforming

young innovators are propelling change building communities creating employment and solving problems they're challenging systems and shaping you what it's about creative thinkers shaping the continent's future innovate africa at this time on. a ceasefire goes into effect in the last remaining syrian rebel stronghold near damascus waiting for.