26 March 2003

UNID Iraqi radio station on 603 kHz From BBC Monitoring's Iraq: Media behaviour note 1800-2000 gmt 26 Mar 03: "Baghdad Radio continues to be unheard on all frequencies. However, a radio station that has yet to identify itself is heard with poor reception as of 1855 gmt on 603 kHz, a frequency used by Baghdad Radio. The radio station has since then been airing only patriotic Iraqi songs." 10:34:12 PM     comment on this entry []

It's over for Radio Austria International I guess we were expecting this, but... "It is all but no pleasure to report what the ORF council decided today: Radio Austria International will be terminated and replaced by Ö1 shortwave relays effective July 1st." (Kai Ludwig). More on this in tomorrow's Media Newsdesk. 10:31:33 PM     comment on this entry []

This media stuff is getting more confusing... In its latest report, BBC Monitoring says "BBC Monitoring was unable to confirm any reception or reports on the status of BBC Republic of Iraq Radio Main Service during the reporting period." And, just to rub it in, they say it twice! Do they know something the rest of us don't? :-) Andy Sennitt 9:40:08 PM     comment on this entry []

Iraqi IP's changed again Lou Josephs says the IP addresses of the Iraqi Web sites have been changed again, presumably in an attempt to circumvent denial of service attacks. The trouble is, it takes 24-48 hours for the new information to reach all the DNS servers around the world. Then when it does, the attacks start again, and it's a vicious circle. I don't understand the mentality of the people who are doing this, or hacking the English Web site of Al Jazeera. This sort of activity is a grim reminder of the sorts of things that happened in the Soviet Union 30 years ago. I remember how people in the West criticised Soviet jamming of shortwave programmes. I see little difference between this and the sorts of Internet capers that are going on at the moment. Except, maybe, that there's no 'collateral damage' like there was if you happened to be broadcasting on an adjacent frequency to a jammer. Andy Sennitt 8:13:51 PM     comment on this entry []

The day so far... Well, it was a good job I didn't stay up last night trying to figure out whether Iraqi TV had really been bombed, because even this morning when I got into the office the various news sources didn't agree on what had happened, when it happened, or even whether various services were on or off the air. In fact, with the help of BBC Monitoring reports, we were able to paint a more accurate picture. The Iraq Satellite Channel has been off and on during the day. I'm not sure which satellite they use for the DSL feed, but the picture I'm seeing now is the same one that was there several hours ago, and you can see it on our Web site at http://www.rnw.nl/realradio/features/html/iraq030319.html We're looking to find a more elegant solution to keep you updated than spreading the information across two Web sites. Our technical Webmaster thinks he has the solution, but I'm not sure how fast we'll be able to implement it. Basically, we share our Web server with our domestic colleagues at NOS, and we have to abide by their security restrictions. At the moment, I have to be behind the firewall at Radio Netherlands in order to update anything on the Media Network site. That means a 6km journey from where I am now, even if it's just to correct a typo! But even if we find a solution to that, I can already see that the concept of a Weblog is a useful addition to the range of activities that Media Network is involved in. So we'll certainly continue with it. I've decided that the weekly Media Network feature, which we publish on Friday, will take a look at the way the electronic media have covered the war so far. You probably wonder why I quote CNN quite a lot. It's because we only have two all-news stations on our cable network here, CNN and BBC World. I watched the last Gulf War on CNN, and I feel comfortable with it. For those of you in the States, CNN is still the channel many of the broadcasters here watch for breaking news, perhaps more out of habit than anything else. The version we get here used to be known as CNN International, and has a presentation team of Americans, Brits, Australians and a few other nationalities. They now refer to their domestic channel as CNN-USA. So if I refer to something on CNN and you haven't seen it, we're probably watching different versions :-) I just checked my E-mail and SpamKiller tells me I have 173 messages, 4 possible spams, and 159 spams! I don't even like Spam! At work we have a server-level filter that seems to do a good job. I've often wondered what sort of a person I would be - both visually and morally - if I took up even a fraction of the offers some of these things contain! Andy Sennitt 7:34:38 PM     comment on this entry []

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