Ariel Dougherty will be receiving one of the 2022 Women and Media Awards from WIFP at our 50th Anniversary celebration October 23rd, coming to Washington, DC, from New Mexico. As a filmmaker, for almost five decades, Ariel Dougherty has been a leader in the independent and feminist film & cultural communities. 

Teacher, producer, and mentor, she has encouraged hundreds of women directed films to completion and to reach a wide and varied audience. Among these works are FEAR, a short by Jean Shaw produced in a community workshop setting to Lynn Hershman’s WOMEN, ART, REVOLUTION!, for which Ariel raised a single $100,000 contribution. She has written scores of articles about the intersection of women’s rights, funding, and media & cultural policy. She co-lead creation of a Women’s Media Policy in November 2011 at National Council on Women’s Organizations. 

As National Director of Media Equity Collaborative, 2007-2013, she surveyed the field of women centered media to enlarge their support before the donor community. An administrator at the East Hampton, NY public access facility Ariel created the Producer’s group, and she also anchored her own show, CUTURAL DEMOCRACY/ECOLOGY. Always an innovator and visionary, she initiated, TARTS/Teaching Artists to Reach Technological Savvy, a 1984 Apple funded network of four women’s arts organizations. Development director of Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY, she curated the series, “Women’s Work in film & Video”. She was integral to the revolutionary project, International VIDEOLETTERS, a monthly video exchange among 26 women’s media groups from fourteen feminist communities across the US. 

In 1969 Ariel co-initiated Women Make Movies, first as a production arm of the Women’s Liberation Movement and was incorporated in 1972. A community based media teaching workshop was the heart of its original program with distribution as a critical earned income program. Today the organization is the globe’s largest distributor of women’s films and one of the most self-sustaining organizations to emerge from the women’s liberation movement. 

Currently Ariel is completing a book about 26 contemporary girl/women/lesbian community based film teaching programs, with a look back to the parallel projects from the 1970s. With Sheila Paige, her WMM co-founder, she is working to bring their early films like SWEET BANANAS, WOMEN’S HAPPY TIME COMMUNE and SURVIVA and the workshop films before new audiences today. @MediaEquity

The Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press is honoring Birgitte Jallov with one of the 2022 Women and Media Awards. She will be present at WIFP’s 50th Anniversary celebration, October 23rd, where all the winners of the 2022 Women and Media Awards will be announced. If you are not familiar with the outstanding work of Birgitte Jallov, please read about her media contributions.

Birgitte Jallov is the founding Director of EMPOWERHOUSE, an initiative to advance communities’ access to strong, sustainable community media, which Birgitte has worked to advance since the early 80s where she was a part of the budding community radio movement in her home country of Denmark. Since them Birgitte has worked systematically with documenting how community media can advance women’s voices, rights and empowered lives in more than 70 countries worldwide, based on which she is presently preparing a podcast series about ‘Women on the Global Community Airwaves’. This series will dig into what it is that distinguishes a community radio/media environment with significant women’s engagement and one without; and it will contribute to Birgitte’s ongoing work to identify strategies of empowerment to transform communication.

Having just stepped down as the chairwoman of ‘Community media forum Europe’ where Birgitte as the editor of the CMFE newsletter still pursues the Forum’s objectives of strengthening community media in Europe, Birgitte is a significant voice, securing space for and engagement of women in the sector. A former member of the international board of the International Association of Women in Radio and TV (IAWRT) and now lead member of several of the organization’s management committees, she has facilitated the development of the organization’s first strategic plan in recent times and heads the ‘Rural Women and the Media’ and the ‘Moldova Digital Safe House Committee’ – a one-stop-shop for women in the media, targeted by online – and off-line – harassment. 

Birgitte is the author of ‘EMPOWERMENT RADIO – voices building the community’ on how to build sustainable community radio, where the successor is on its way, focusing on community media’s role in advancing the many important aspects of human rights. An author of numerous policy publications, community media manuals, and articles on how to ensure community ownership of the media, Birgitte lectures in universities and trains community-based organizations. In her quest to ensure women’s space in the media – not least community media, she has initiated and designed impact assessment methodologies, in order to extract ways to secure empowered lives of women in and around the (community) media.

WIFP supports the Nuclear Ban Treaty.

Nuclear weapons are an existential threat to sentient life on our planet. Urge President Biden to sign the U.S. onto the treaty. We call on all world leaders to eliminate nuclear weapons. Do not modernize, eliminate!

Press Conference, June 22. The event was livestreamed and broadcast to Vienna, where the State Parties to the Treaty are meeting for the first time.

Promote the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in the U.S.

Support the Norton Bill H.R.2850.

Already signed the ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) Pledge AND co-sponsored the Norton Bill:

Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC)
Jim McGovern (MA-2)
Barbara Lee (CA-13)
Carolyn Maloney (NY-12)
Pramila Jayapal (WA-7)
Mark Pocan (WI-2)
Rashida Tlaib (MI-13)
Ilhan Omar (MN-5)

Signed the ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) Pledge but still needs to co-sponsor the Norton bill:

Earl Blumenauer (OR-3)
Ro Khanna (CA-17)
Betty McCollum (MN-4)

Co-sponsored the Norton bill but still needs to sign the ICAN Pledge:

Ayanna Pressley (MA-7)
Peter Welch (VT)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14)
Andy Levin (MI-9)
Mondaire Jones (NY-17)
Raúl Grijalva (AZ-3, Tucson)

NUCLEARBAN.US

WIFP and DC Action For Assange reject today’s announced decision of the UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, to extradite Mr. Julian Assange to the United States, the country that plotted to assassinate him.  Mr. Assange is a journalist and publisher, who told the truth about US crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.  The US Government now seeks to extradite Assange to the US, with a range of charges that could bring up to 175 years in prison.  Assange’s extradition was initially blocked by UK courts, on the grounds that a US prison sentence would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment”; however, subsequent appeals have cleared the way for extradition.  (More details at www.assangedefense.org)  

Tens of thousands of people signed petitions, and dozens of journalism and civil liberties organizations wrote to Patel, asking her to stop this extradition of an innocent journalist. They expressed concern for his human rights and the worldwide chilling effect on media freedom caused by this indictment.

On May 10, 2022, Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Dunja Mijatovic called on Priti Patel not to extradite Julian Assange:

He wrote: […] it is my view that the indictment by the United States against Mr Assange raises important questions about the protection of those that publish classified information in the public interest, including information that exposes human rights violations. The broad and vague nature of the allegations against Mr Assange, and of the offenses listed in the indictment, are troubling as many of them concern activities at the core of investigative journalism in Europe and beyond.Consequently, allowing Mr Assange’s extradition on this basis would have a chilling effect on media freedom, and could ultimately hamper the press in performing its task as purveyor of information and public watchdog in democratic societies.

Among other statements of support, a group of more than 300 doctors from around the world, known as Doctors for Assange, called on the UK to block extradition. In a letter to Patel, the group says the WikiLeaks founder suffered a mini stroke last October and that his overall health is continuing to deteriorate in prison. The doctors write, “The extradition of a person with such compromised health … is medically and ethically unacceptable.”  

Other statements supporting Assange have come from Nobel Peace Prize winners, celebrities such as musician Roger Waters and actress Susan Sarandon, and many others.

Priti Patel’s decision to extradite Mr. Assange has shown a total disregard of the human rights watch groups and experts who warned her that his extradition to the USA would be illegal under international human rights law and create a severe threat to media freedom. 

What does it tell us when the United Nations, press freedom, and civil liberties organizations are ignored by powerful governments? It shows us that these supposedly democratic governments have much to hide, that investigative journalism is vitally needed more than ever, and that the gathering of “buried” truth is the only tool we have to defend against corruption and totalitarian rule.

We, along with hundreds of thousands of people around the world, will continue to protest and demand justice and freedom for Julian Assange.  Members of DC Action for Assange will continue to rally at the US Department of Justice and in bi-weekly vigils calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to drop the charges (the next vigil will be Sunday, June 19, 2022 from 5-7 pm, near the Bethesda, MD home of AG Garland).

DC Action for Assange 

Call on the U.S. and U.K. to say NO to Extradition

WIFP and other supporters of Julian Assange will gather at U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday, May 17, 2022, 1 pm – 3 pm. Please join us.

Supporters of the First Amendment will gather to protest the continued persecution of Julian Assange, a publisher who exposed war crimes, and calling on the U.S. to drop attempts to extradite Assange to the U.S.   We will gather at the corner of 10^th Street and Pennsylvania Ave, NW, for a program of speakers & music. 

Speakers at the rally will include:  journalists Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil of The Grayzone; Leonardo Flores of CodePink; Louis Wolf of Covert Action Quarterly; Esther Iverem of WPFW and Marsha Coleman-Abedayo of the No Fear Coalition.  Music and cultural performances will be presented by Luci Murphy of the Black Workers’ Center chorus.

We protest the Biden administration’s continued efforts to prosecute a publisher and criminalize journalism. It is the first case of a publisher being tried under the Espionage Act. Trump’s prosecution has become President Biden’s and AG Merrick Garland’s legacy.

On May 17, at the same time as our rally at the DOJ, supporters of Assange will be gathering in London (6 PM)  – calling on U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel to refuse to “rubber-stamp” the High Court’s approval of the extradition of Assange (announced on Dec 10, 2021).  The High Court overruled an earlier court decision blocking the extradition, largely on humanitarian grounds.  (Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser had ruled that Julian Assange would be subjected to cruel and extreme conditions if extradited to the US for further proceedings).

Julian Assange has been jailed for over 3 years in the U.K. Belmarsh prison despite not being convicted of a crime. Assange may be the one indicted, but it is anti-war journalism that is on trial in the U.K. In this case of extra-territorial over-reach, the US wants to extradite Assange – a non-U.S. national for journalism outside the U.S. For revealing accurate information about serious war crimes, Assange faces a sentence of 175 years in a U.S. supermax prison under conditions of extreme isolation.

We protest the punishment by process and torture of Assange by not granting him bail during this drawn out appeal process, and depriving him of much needed medical attention during the past 3 years of his incarceration at Belmarsh. He is being treated so harshly for one reason only: to freeze disclosure and to freeze dissent. Injustice to Assange is an injustice to us all.

Our loyalty as citizens should not be to government, but rather to the principles of democracy and freedom. Assange publishing classified information reinforced our right to know what the government was doing in our name. The WikiLeaks publications were never a threat to our freedom but revealed a systemic coverup of military secrets.

We call on the Biden administration to immediately drop all charges against Julian Assange and end efforts to seek his extradition to the U.S., for further trial proceedings.

DC Action For Assange

Update: Some of us during the protest at the Department of Justice 5/17/22.