Today, I’m going to do a presentation and lead a discussion about a significant recent/ongoing international news story, and for your asynchronous assignment, you will team up into groups and prepare one to present to the class beginning October 15.
LGBT Crackdowns in Indonesia (and East Africa)
Early that year, incendiary statements by high-ranking officials, coupled with a countrywide shift to the religious right, set off a cascade of hate and persecution directed at gay and transgender people. More than 300 people were arrested in 2017 alone, according to Human Rights Watch, many of them during raids on homes, nightclubs and hair salons.
This “moral panic,” as many have taken to calling the current climate, is one manifestation of a rise in Islamic fundamentalism that represents a new chapter for this vast archipelago country which has long touted its pluralism as its greatest strength.
https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/indonesia-publicly-canes-gay-men-as-punishment/
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/25/asia/indonesia-protests-criminal-code-intl-hnk/index.html
How do you approach covering a story like this? Particularly a story that is wide in scope and ongoing, not necessarily a breaking story, but one that may contain many different developments over time?
How do you come up with an angle?
Discuss.
What are some considerations for sensitively and successfully covering a story like this?
Discuss.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-01-13/filmmakers-lgbtq-movies-conservative-indonesia
East Africa:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-11/uganda-anti-gay-law-to-be-reintroduced-to-parliament/11594988
http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/east-africas-queer-community-searches-home-its-own
Presentations
You will break into five different groups and together you will lead a discussion, giving us a rundown of the main developments in the story and relevant background/context, and share at least two pieces of exceptional journalism that have been done on the topic—while deconstructing how these stories approached the topic differently and researching/analyzing how the reporter(s) did it. (Was it a freelancer, as best you can tell, or a staff reporter? Were they already based in the region or did they fly in on assignment?
Ideas for major international news stories that you would be interested in covering?
A few more ideas:
- The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong
- Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war in the Philippines
- The political and economic crisis in Venezuela
- The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan
- The explosion in Beirut amid a larger political/economic crisis
- The situation in Zimbabwe three years after Robert Mugabe was ousted in a coup
- The refugee crisis in Greece
- Land policy and wildfires in the Brazilian Amazon
Or feel free to come up with a different topic that interests you. These presentations don’t have to be related to your beat for the semester, but they certainly can be.
I will send out an email with a sign-up sheet for presentation dates, which will be first come first served, so be on the lookout for that!