{"id":629,"date":"2010-01-19T11:07:18","date_gmt":"2010-01-19T16:07:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/delicious.com\/url\/0f015b6a240a652385ff75f2f7b8e0af#tomathon"},"modified":"2010-01-27T14:07:44","modified_gmt":"2010-01-27T19:07:44","slug":"niger-welcome-to-the-para-government-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.tomathon.com\/mphp\/2010\/01\/niger-welcome-to-the-para-government-press\/","title":{"rendered":"Niger: Welcome to the para government press"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&quot;L\u2019Afrique peut-elle se d\u00e9velopper? TANDJA a os\u00e9 !&quot; shouts the headline.  A suck-up piece about how President Tandja dares to reject colonial notions of &quot;democracy&quot; in favor of real &quot;African&quot; traditions.  This is the same crap we&#039;ve been fed for decades: cult of personality dressed up as liberation.  What&#039;s interesting is that the byline is Ousseini Lawali in &quot;La nation&quot; N\u00b000 of 13 January 2010.  Yes, Number Zero of a brand new paper in Niamey, bravely printing the stories other refuse to tell of how great the President is.    And so last week&#039;s meetings of the government press authority (CSC) come into focus.  While the CSC was founded in 1993 to protect journalism, it is now a government controlled censorship agency.  Last week it announced a vague &quot;refoundation&quot; of press laws and journalistic standards in Niger.  So we we likely see the vibrant, if little distributed, independent newspapers gagged in coming months, to be replaced by &quot;independent&quot; papers like &quot;la Nation&quot;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&quot;L\u2019Afrique peut-elle se d\u00e9velopper? TANDJA a os\u00e9 !&quot; shouts the headline.  A suck-up piece about how President Tandja dares to reject colonial notions of &quot;democracy&quot; in favor of real &quot;African&quot; traditions.  This is the same crap we&#039;ve been fed for decades: cult of personality dressed up as liberation.  What&#039;s interesting is that the byline is Ousseini Lawali in &quot;La nation&quot; N\u00b000 of 13 January 2010.  Yes, Number Zero of a brand new paper in Niamey, bravely printing the stories other refuse to tell of how great the President is.    And so last week&#039;s meetings of the government press authority (CSC) come into focus.  While the CSC was founded in 1993 to protect journalism, it is now a government controlled censorship agency.  Last week it announced a vague &quot;refoundation&quot; of press laws and journalistic standards in Niger.  So we we likely see the vibrant, if little distributed, independent newspapers gagged in coming months, to be replaced by &quot;independent&quot; papers like &quot;la Nation&quot;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-p\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.tomathon.com\/mphp\/2010\/01\/niger-welcome-to-the-para-government-press\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[107],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1mYFK-a9","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tomathon.com\/mphp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tomathon.com\/mphp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tomathon.com\/mphp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tomathon.com\/mphp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tomathon.com\/mphp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tomathon.com\/mphp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":639,"href":"http:\/\/www.tomathon.com\/mphp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions\/639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tomathon.com\/mphp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tomathon.com\/mphp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tomathon.com\/mphp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}