This UN-Sponsored report has some limitations, but also some useful statistics about gender and global media in several parts of the world.
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Media in Action
A report by Global Action Research, with support from the Data Center and Research Action Design on media and youth organizing in the United States.
CURB Decarceration Report
Communities United For a Responsible Budget (CURB) puts out an annual report on how California counties are doing in making strides towards lower rates of imprisonment. This year, every single one got a failing grade, the competition being between a fail, a double fail and a triple fail.
Digital Culture Shift Report
As activism for police accountability, fair wages, just immigration, and more takes center stage — social justice movements of the 21st century are using technology to achieve greater scale and reach wider audiences. But are these digital strategies building power for long-term social change, or helping maintain the status quo?
A report from the Center for Media Justice says the answer depends on the strategy — and offers new approaches and recommendations, from a diverse cross-section of leaders, for building effective social movements in an age of big data and digital technology.
Artificial Scarcity: How Data Caps Harm Consumers and Innovation
New America’s Open Technology Institute released this report examining the use of data caps on wired and mobile broadband service in the United States. The report analyzes the financial incentives that major Internet service providers have to implement these usage limits and research that demonstrates the behavioral effect of these policies on consumers.
Not To Be Trusted
ColorOfChange partnered with Media Matters for America to study how accurately local news stations are covering the role of Black people in crime. The result is an outrageous level of distortion: news stations report that Black people are involved in murder, assault and theft an average of 75% of the time in New York City, which exceeds the actual NYPD arrest rates for those crimes by 24 percentage points.
World Press Freedom Index 2015
The Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index ranks the performance of 180 countries according to a range of criteria that include media pluralism and independence, respect for the safety and freedom of journalists and the legislative, institutional and infrastructural environment in which the media operate.
Quick Summary: Top of the list are three Scandinavian countries, Finland which has been in first place for five years in succession, followed by Norway and Denmark. At the other end of the scale, Turkmenistan, North Korea and Eritrea were the worst performers.
The United States ranked 49th, down three places from 2014.
Video Visitation
Update: Wisconsin senator Tammy Duckworth is trying to get a bill going to regulate video visitation and preserve in-person visitation rights.
Sign the petition to show support for her efforts.
A case study by the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition and Grassroots Leadership.
In September 2014, a group of Dallas-area advocates led a fight against an initiative that would have introduced video visitation capability to the Dallas County jail. The company proposing to provide services to Dallas had buried in its contract a requirement that the jail eliminate in-person visitation, thus leaving those who wished to visit prisoners only one option – visit by video. Or, don’t visit at all.