At UN Amid Syria, Gulf & Western Media UNCA Starts Counterfeit of ICP, and Ban Ki-moon's UN Cheers Them On, Joins In

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, September 6 -- The same group of insider wire services and Gulf media which tried to get Inner City Press thrown out of the UN, unsuccessfully so far, have this week set up counterfeit Inner City Press social media accounts and troll-followed UN Missions, agencies and people who follow the Free UN Coalition for Access,@FUNCA_info.

  This comes less than a month after @InnerCityPress was named one of two "Twitterati" for UN coverage by Foreign Policy magazine (the only one based at the UN), and after InnerCityPress.com reported on the propagandistic distribution of questions at the missile-justifying stakeout by US Ambassador Samantha Power on September 5, here.

The goal seems to be to now create confusion about which is the real @InnerCityPress account. It is not hard:@InnerCityPress has 6,725 followers and UNCA-linked counterfeit for now less than 25, while mass-following over 800. It's a nasty piece of business. 

  Still, a communications chief of an NGO targeted by the UNCA trolls was fooled, and snarked about the account. Other FUNCA followers, when targeted, automatically followed back the counterfeit account.

It's a new low for this gang of scribes, who hide behind anonymous accounts since they work for big media companies like Reuters and Agence France Presse.

The UN bureau chiefs of these two companies, Louis Charbonneau and Tim Witcher respectively, both tried to get Inner City Press thrown out of the UN, as documented by e-mails obtained from US government agency Voice of America under the Freedom of Information Act.

    (VOA's Broadcast Board of Governors, on which Secretary of State John Kerry serves, has started stonewalling on the follow-up request, so an appeal is being filed this week.)

   Click here for VOA's request that Inner City Press' UN accreditation be "reviewed," saying it had the support of Reuters, AFP and Bloomberg (which after a letter to Matthew Winkler purported to drop out of the campaign.)

Reuters' Charbonneau as first vice president of the UN Correspondents Association, it is documented, passed an internal anti-Press UNCA document to UN accreditation official Stephane Dujarric three minutes after promising not to do so. Story here, audio here, document here.

  Once the Voice of America led push was exposed, Dujarric begrudgingly extended Inner City Press' accreditation, while providing pointers on how to cover Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and his head of peacekeeping Herve Ladsous. 

  Inner City Press quit the UNCA Executive Committee, to which it had been elected, and co-founded the Free UN Coalition for Access to actually protect journalists. (Here is a sample project by a FUNCA member in Somaliland, here.)

  Only this week, at a UN noon briefing, an UNCA insider tried to cut off the question of a FUNCA member reporting for Pacifica Radio's WBAI who asked about chemical weapons use by rebels in Syria. Click here for that.

In setting up the counterfeit social media account, the UNCA insiders stole the work of FUNCA's co-founder. UNCA long ago stopped defending journalists - it tries to get some thrown out of the UN, or to steal or destroy the work of others. 

  And the UN, informed of UNCA's trolling back in February -- here is on the record audio of UNCA's 2013 president Pamela Falk, ultimately responsible for all this -- has done nothing. 

  In fact, the UN's Department of Public Information has threatened to suspend or withdraw Inner City Press' UN accreditation for hanging a sign of the Free UN Coalition for Access on the door of its shared office, while UNCA has five signs.

  It's like being in a game in which the referee not only permits one side to sleazily (anonymously) attack the other, but even joins in gleefully in the attack. Apparently it's the law of the jungle.

  The UNCA Executive Committee members who have at a minimum done nothing to stop this are, as pictured lunching with Ban Ki-moon, Denis Fitzgerald of Saudi Press Agency; Melissa Kent of CBC; Sylviane Zehil of L'Orient le Jour; Tim Witcher of AFP; Ali Barada of An-Nahar; Kahraman Halicelik of Turkish Radio & TV; Pamela S. Falk of CBS; Lou Charbonneau of Reuters; Bouchra Benyoussef of Maghreb Arab Press; Yasuomi Sawa of Kyodo News; Masood Haider of Dawn; Unknown; Zhenqiu Gu of Xinhua; Stephane Dujarric of UN DPI

  This counterfeit trolling, this stealing or attempted destruction of journalists' work and attempts to block questions or censor is exactly was the Free UN Coalition for Access was formed and will continue. Watch this site.

    

As Arms Trade Treaty Failed, New Low by UN Cowardice Association UNCA

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, March 29 -- While diplomats milled around UN Conference Room 1 waiting to learn how theirlack of consensus on the Arms Trade Treaty would be phrased, what were the leaders of the UN Cowardice Association up to?

  Using their anonymous social media accounts to try to claim a victory for their role in the UN's raid of Inner City Press' office on March 18, at which UNCA president Pamela Falk of CBS took photographs. 

  Then anonymous UNCA leader “Concerned UN Reporter” passed photographs including of Inner City Press' bookshelf to BuzzFeed. This is UNCA: the UN's Censorship Alliance.

  Their new anonymous social media accounts are associated with most members of the UNCA Executive Committee: Louis Charbonneau of Reuters, Tim Witcher of Agence France Press, Melissa Kent of CBC, Syliane Zehil of L'Oriente Le Jour, even Barbara Plett of the BBC and others pictured below.

  There's also former Executive Committee member Margaret Besheer of Voice of America, and former former Evelyn Leopold. But absentee president Falk, after screaming on February 22 that she didn't know which of her board members were behind the accounts, has done nothing to find out. Is she resigning?

Ban's UNCA Lunch of the Lost, Feb 7, 2013, credit Evan Schneider, UNPhoto. From left: OSSG's Del Buey; Denis Fitzgerald of Saudi Press Agency; OSSG's Nesirky; Melissa Kent of CBC; Sylviane Zehil of L'Orient le Jour; Tim Witcher of AFP; Ali Barada of An-Nahar; Ban Ki-moon, Kahraman Halicelik of Turkish Radio & TV; Pamela S. Falk of CBS; Lou Charbonneau of Reuters; Bouchra Benyoussef of Maghreb Arab Press; Yasuomi Sawa of Kyodo News; Masood Haider of Dawn; Unknown; Zhenqiu Gu of Xinhua; Stephane Dujarric of UN DPI

  Falk has only issued a legal threat to Inner City Press, from her CBSNews.com e-mail account, not to question why she took photos of the March 18 raid by the UN Department of Public Information.

  DPI is aware of the fake social media accounts and claimed to take them seriously. DPI's Stephane Dujarric is followed by a recently created one. But so what? Watch this site.

Behind UN Raid on Press Office Are UN Censorship Alliance Leaders, Named Here

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, March 18 -- Behind the UN raid on Inner City Press' office on Monday (photo, video), beyond the UN officials who entered, search and photographed the Press office without any notice or consent are those who created the atmosphere: the UN's Censorship Alliance, which continues to call itself the UN Correspondents Association.

  Freedom of Information Act documents obtained from Voice of America show that it was UNCA that “met with UN officials (very quietly)” in 2012 to try to get Inner City Press thrown out of the UN. Louis Charbonneau of Reuters, then and now UNCA's First Vice President, has refused to state his role in this meetings (audio here), as has UN official Stephane Dujarric.

Dujarric, two days before the raid by his Media Accreditation unit, dismissed Inner City Press' renewed request for due process rules and protections.

But who leads this UN Censorship Alliance, whose president Pamela Falk of CBS took photographs of the raid on Inner City Press' office?

On the Executive Committee of the UN's Censorship Alliance are:

Masood Haider of Pakistan's Daily Dawn, who voted repeatedly in 2012 to get Inner City Press thrown out;

Tim Witcher of Agence France Presse, who asked UNCA to act against Inner City Press about an article it publishedabout Herve Ladsous, the fourth Frenchman in a row to head UN Peacekeeping, then supported Voice of America's exposed request to get Inner City Press thrown out of the UN, then filed his own false complaint about a March 8 verbal encounter which he initiated by cutting into a conversation to hiss about “lies and distortions;”

Denis Fitzgerald of Saudi Press Agency, who in connection with false allegations that Inner City Press must be funded by the terrorist Tamil Tigers because it asked questions about Sri Lanka, browbeat Inner City Press and offered to serve on a panel to judge it;

Barbara Plett of BBC, who voted to expel the press, asking Inner City Press why it had published a photograph of the French Ambassador, and why it reported that UNCA's president had rented one of his apartment to Sri Lanka's ambassador, when he was a UN official, before UNCA without asking the opinion of the whole board screened Sri Lanka's war crimes denial film in the UN;

Sylviane Zehil of L'Orient le Jour, who went shown news articles from government press in Sri Lanka saying Inner City Press should be jailed for what it had written, and related anonymous death threats triggered by the UNCA proceeding, said “that is not my problem;”

Ban Ki-moon's UNCA Lunch of the Lost, Feb 7, 2013, credit Evan Schneider, UNPhoto. From left: OSSG's Del Buey; Denis Fitzgerald of Saudi Press Agency; OSSG's Nesirky; Melissa Kent of CBC; Sylviane Zehil of L'Orient le Jour; Tim Witcher of AFP; Ali Barada of An-Nahar; Ban Ki-moon, Kahraman Halicelik of Turkish Radio & TV; Pamela S. Falk of CBS; Lou Charbonneau of Reuters; Bouchra Benyoussef of Maghreb Arab Press; Yasuomi Sawa of Kyodo News; Masood Haider of Dawn; Unknown; Zhenqiu Gu of Xinhua; Stephane Dujarric of UN DPI

Bouchra Benyoussef of Maghreb Arab Press, who voted against Inner City Press every time and, once seeing Inner City Press rushing to try to ask a question of a Moroccan official at a UN stakeout, gestured that the microphone should be turned off, the stakeout ended;

Zhenqiu Gu of Xinhua, who voted every time against Inner City Press, told Inner City Press that it did not respect authority enough and placed his Xinhua underling Bill Reilly as the chair of the panel to judge Inner City Press, despite conflict of interest;

Ali Barada of An-Nahar, who filed his own false complaint against Inner City Press (deemed even by UN authorities to be “bogus”) and served on panel to judge Inner City Press but refused to respond to legal requests to see “evidence” alluded to;

Kahraman Halicelik of Turkish Radio & TV who claimed he would drop off the board if UNCA tried to get Inner City Press thrown out of the UN-- then when that was proved, under FOIA, didn't leave, and remains on the board;

Louis Charbonneau of Reuters, who filed a stealth complaint in 2012, had Reuters support Voice of America's move to thrown Inner City Press out of the UN (according to VOA documents), and on February 22 told Inner City Press, “the fundamental problem is your website” (his colleague Michelle Nichols joined in Witcher of AFP's false February 22 complaint); and

Pamela Falk of CBS, who screamed at Inner City Press on February 22 “mugger” and “you call yourself a journalist” and “just don't write about me,” before taking pictures of the raid on Inner City Press' office on March 19. UN Censorship Alliance indeed. Watch this site.