At the end of last year, South Africa’s National Assembly, the lower house of the parliament, passed the highly contentious Protection of State Information Bill. Better known as the ‘Secrecy Bill’, the proposed legislation relates to the “protection and preservation of all things owned or maintained for the public by the state” against foreign spies, but would in effect deny the country’s own citizens, particularly the poor, an accountable and transparent state.

As the Western media continues to maintain its simplifying and homogenising rhetoric around ‘arab revolution’ since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarek in Egypt last week, news is coming out of collective and economic resistance in Iraq.

A few months ago this blog highlighted a piece in MediaHacker satirising clichéd foreign reporting from Haiti. Of course, it's not only the Haitian people whose lives are examined through the one-dimensional lens of the Western press. Following up on Binyavanga Wainaina's satirical article on writing about Africa (e.g., liberal use of the word 'darkness' in the title), the literary magazine Granta recently published a guide to reporting on Pakistan.

Raul Zibechi does us all a service by outlining the festering discontent among Latin American social movements towards the continent's left-wing governments. Occassioned by the end of the Americas Social Forum, his article makes the case that despite the emerging fault lines over a number of issues, including indigenous rights and resource extraction, these governments are still popular among the poor. A popular revolt is not in the making, according to Zibechi.

Some of the observations are not terribly new -- many in the left in Brazil have long been dismayed by Lula's turn to the centre -- but it's still rare to find this kind of nuance on Latin America from the mainstream media.

Sick and tired of the clichéd – and often condescending – press treatment of the developing world? The Haiti blog Mediahacker offers up a tonic for those of us demoralised by the mainstream media's trite, paint-by-numbers coverage of that country.

Billed as a guide to help prepare journos for next January’s one-year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, Ansel Hertz satirises the regurgitated phrases and artificial narratives that have come to define reporting in that country.

The pieces opens with two favourite nuggets that will be familiar to anyone following the issue: 

“For starters, always use the phrase ‘the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.’ Your audience must be reminded again of Haiti’s exceptional poverty. It’s doubtful that other articles have mentioned this fact. You are struck by the ‘resilience’ of the Haitian people. They will survive no matter how poor they are. They are stoic, they rarely complain, and so they are admirable. The best poor person is one who suffers quietly. A two-sentence quote about their misery fitting neatly into your story is all that’s needed.”

Hertz’s piece goes beyond clever parody. In the same ironic tone he laments the failure of the press to dig deeper for the causes of poverty in Haiti, warning reporters to "not try to get to the bottom of the issue" and “avoid any reporting that could change the system.”