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Top prosecutor Alison Saunders' call for a public debate about the myths and stereotypes surrounding rape (Call to end the demonisation of rape victims, 30 January) must be heeded. Her concern that the demonisation of women in the media has a detrimental effect on British justice reflects our evidence to the Leveson inquiry last week. Persistent negative portrayal of victims and inaccurate reporting of the realities of rape send a strong message: to jurors that women routinely "cry rape"; to rape survivors that they will not be believed; and to potential perpetrators that they will get away with it.

We have asked Lord Justice Leveson to make concrete recommendations to ensure accurate and non-prejudicial coverage of rape, including the fact that most victims do not report it, and a consistent approach to regulation of sexually objectifying images in the print media. We also want to see government and public bodies invest in long-term work, including in schools, to change public attitudes and to raise awareness of hidden issues such as sexual exploitation and childhood sexual abuse. We will be failing women if we don't grasp this opportunity to create long-term change.
Anna Van Heeswijk
Object
Heather Harvey
Eaves
Holly Dustin
End Violence Against Women Coalition
Jacqui Hunt
Equality Now
Lee Eggleston
Rape Crisis England and Wales
Dr Maddy Coy
Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit
Marai Larasi
Imkaan

Cable companies often run a mix of ads, some promoting their own features and deals, and others seeking to improve the brand images. Time Warner Cable's new $80 million campaign leans toward brand burnishing.

Frying Pan News: Two former LA Times employees committed suicide after losing jobs

Memphis police delete images from TV photojournalist’s cell phone

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Nova Scotia erects new barriers as Ontario, B.C. promise better access

Commentary by Dean Jobb

“The administration of justice,” Justice Morris Fish wrote in the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling in Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. v. Ontario(2005 SCC 41), “thrives on exposure to light – and withers under a cloud of secrecy.”

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The network signed on for a second season of the racetrack-based drama, which stars Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte. On Sunday night, Showtime was quick to point out, its drama "Shameless" beat out "Luck."

Who says your first-person essays have to be limited to print?

We’re ending our four-part series on personal essays with a nod to the growing digital outlet, with 15 sites all eager to publish your piece.

Salon.com is hungry for unique stories only you can tell, while three parenting pubs want to read “click-y content” that’ll bring the laughs. You can even tweet “tiny truths” to CreativeNonfiction.org in 130 characters or less.

Find out more on word count and submission etiquette at Personal Essay Markets, Part IV [sub req'd]. And don’t forget to revisit our Parts I, II and III for advice on tackling the oldie-but-goodie print pubs.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Washington state lawmakers are hearing requests to clamp down on classified-advertising companies that don't require ID, before allowing sex-related ads to be posted online.

Some journalists say their high subscriber counts through the Facebook Subscribe feature are effectively useless, since the majority seem to be users who are not interested in the content they're providing and simply post gibberish or sexual harassment.

Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman said the “mob mentality” and “unfortunate rhetoric” around the protest of SOPA and PIPA earlier this month unnecessarily polarized the copyright debate between the technology and entertainment industries.

Mathew Ingram on Twitter CEO Dick Costolo's claim the company is not a media entity: "In most of the ways that matter, Twitter definitely qualifies as a media entity, which is why its decision to selectively censor the user-generated content that flows through its network is so important."

Outgoing Associated Press CEO Tom Curley: "The challenge is the revenue side and how to raise revenue. There’s obviously a shifting taking place. Some of that shift has involved sending money from traditional media to Web players so we all have to figure out what relevance means for the news world."

The Super Bowl is set for Indianapolis this weekend and the hometown newspaper, The Indianapolis Star is planning on using visuals, Web galleries and multimedia to enhance its coverage.

Story of winter Olympics hopeful who bore same name as German underwear firm too good to be true

They say if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. So when news surfaced in Germany of a promising young luger from the tropical islands of Tonga who bore the same name as a racy German underwear firm with a dream of sledding to victory at the Olympics, scepticism might well have been warranted.

But the story was too delicious. Bruno Banani, 24, ostensibly the son of a coconut farmer from the South Pacific nation, was aiming to be Tonga's first ever competitor at a winter Olympic games. In doing so, went the story, he was fulfilling the wish of the Tongan Princess Royal, Salote Mafile'o Pilolevu Tuita, whose life's ambition was to see a citizen from her sun-drenched isles triumph among the ice and snow of the world's premier cold weather sporting contest.

When Banani, whose catchphrase was "coconut powered", was unveiled to the German media, he was naturally sponsored by Bruno Banani, a purveyor of knickers and bras from the east German city of Chemnitz.

But he seemed legit. After all, he had been invited to train with the world-beating German luge team. They had apparently taken pity on the Tongan, whose upbringing on the resolutely snowless islands had not best prepared him for a lifetime of hurtling feet-first down a treacherously slippery track at 80mph. It was like the film Cool Runnings which was about Jamaica's first bobsled team trying to make it to the Olympics. But now an investigation by Der Spiegel magazine has revealed that the plucky luger really was too good to be true – not in fact christened Bruno Banani by his mother, but by some mischief-making opportunists at a marketing company in Leipzig.

According to Spiegel, certain elements of the Banani story are true. He is indeed 24 and until his move to Germany was one of the 106,000 inhabitants of Tonga. He did attend a "casting" session on the islands in 2008, hosted by the German luge champion Isabel Barschinski. And yes, the Princess Royal did actually dream of getting a Tongan to the Winter Olympics.

But it's here that the Banani myth starts to become detached from reality. It seems that the young IT student who was picked for luge success was actually called Fuahea Semi and was not the son of a man who farmed coconuts, but cassava. At this point a marketing firm called Makai came into play, according to Der Spiegel. At the final selection round in Tonga, it intervened and somehow arranged for a passport to be issued for Semi in the name of Bruno Banani.

And, presumably reasoning that most people hadn't heard of cassava, it rewrote his father's history so that he farmed coconuts instead.

The Guardian contacted Mathias Ihle, the boss of Makai Europe, to see if everything Spiegel reported was true, and ask for an interview with Banani/Semi. In an emailed response, Ihle thanked us for our interest and said that with regret, his client would not be available for an interview.

"Bruno is about to compete at the luge world championships [held in Altenberg, east Germany, from 6 February] and we are trying to make things as calm as possible around him, especially after the [Spiegel] article. Unfortunately I cannot help you further," wrote Ihle. Norbert Loch, the trainer of the German national luge squad, did not respond to inquiries.Whether the International Olympic Committee, which has very strict rules about sponsorship, allows Banani to compete at the 2014 olympics in the Russian city of Sochi remains to be seen. Although it may not come to that: when Banani tried to qualify for the 2010 Vancouver games, he crashed out and ended up in hospital with concussion.

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News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch frequently tweets about how web pirates are destroying the entertainment business by stealing its content and preventing studios from making a profit.

But a report by Floor64's Michael Masnick, released by the Computer and Communications Industry Association, shows the opposite is true: The entertainment industry is not being killed by the world wide web.

In fact, it's exploding: "Through a decade of economic and technological upheaval, the entertainment industry grew 50 percent while consumers increased spending on entertainment," claims the report.

Since 2000, the portion of household spending that went to entertainment increased from 4.9 to 5.62 percent by 2008. Put another way, that's a 15 percent increase in consumer spending on publishing, movies and music, the report states.

The worldwide number of people playing video games has grown from 250 million in 2008 to 1.5 billion in 2011.

Source: Floor64

Consumer spending on video games in North America has more than doubled from $10 billion in 2005 to over $25 billion in 2011.

60 percent of all Americans over six years old play some kind of video game.

Please follow The Wire on Twitter and Facebook.

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All of the recent anti-piracy legislation's seem to have put the tech community at odds with the content community. 

Major entertainment industries like Hollywood and the music industry have a right to protect their content and profit off of it.

However suing your customer is not a winning business strategy and suing the sites that provide the unauthorized distribution of content is proving to be difficult. 

If Hollywood and other related industries really want to reduce internet piracy, then they need to innovate.

There are ways to compete with free if you give your customers what they want in a convenient, affordable, and timely manner.

Here are just a few ideas about what the video game industry, software industry, music industry, Hollywood and more could do to solve their piracy problems.

The video game industry needs to embrace digital subscription services.

The Good: The video game industry has done a good job of finding new customers in nearly all demographic categories. A record number of people are playing video games on a variety of different platforms and some games are doing really well. For example, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 broke the same record it set the previous year and produced $1 billion dollars of sales 16 days after the game was released. 

The Problem: However that didn't aid video game sales as game sales were down 21 percent in December. This could be because major gaming consoles are near the end of their life cycle but either way the video game industry was surprised at the drop in sales and at least a little bit worried. 

The Solution: 

• Continue to deliver more and more games through digital subscription services like GameFly. However, reduce the wait on new titles and have them arrive in my mailbox faster.
• $60 dollars for a video game that can be beaten in a week or less is expensive. Find a way to lower the production costs in your value chain so that you can lower the costs of video games without sacrificing value. I know this seems like a tall order but consider this: the most pirated video games of 2011 were also highly anticipated titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3. The fact that people are buying the pirated version may signal that the cost is out of reach for what you get.
• Or let users buy different versions of the game. Some versions of games can come with a bare version and other's, the one's that cost $60.00 should come with enhanced features. Follow the Sims model of buying the base package and then having the option to add extra  expansion packs to the game that open up new gameplay options.

Hollywood should take a cue from Hulu and start streaming movies for free.

The Good: Whether a movie is considered good or not is subjective, but we think it's safe to say that people will always love to watch movies.

The Problem: Honestly, where do we start? First, Roger Ebert was right to criticize the movie going experience. It has been awful for as long as we can remember. The rising ticket costs, over priced concessions, annoying teens, and people on their phones are all reasons to avoid the movie theaters at any costs. Add to that the fact that you don't even know if a movie will be any good and you may have suffered at the theater for no good reason.

That may explain why more and more people are waiting for the DVD release of films to see them but that doesn't explain the pirated distribution of movies. A lot of movie content is pirated because there are no other convenient or affordable options for users.

A Solution:

• We like GIGAOM writer Ryan Lawler's idea to create a Hulu like service that streams movies over an internet connection. The service could be free with ads or users could sign up for monthly subscriptions that allow them to access either a set or unlimited number of movies a month. 
• Another of Lawler's ideas: Since indie films are hard to find in the theaters, consider streaming more of indie (and other new release movie titles) on demand for half the price of a movie ticket. 

Comic book publishers need to publish more of their content digitally, and they need to do it faster.

The Good: If we can take a record turnout at this years New York Comic Con as a sign, comic books still are, and perhaps forever will be popular. Furthermore, comic book publishers are finally starting to understand the needs and desires of their customers by allowing their content to be published digitally thanks to the likes of apps like comiXology.

The Problem: It is essential that comic books find a way to go digital. Brick and Mortar comic book stores are closing their doors left and right and major comic book publishers have been slow to make the full transition. A lot of readers don't feel like they have any choice but to go the pirated route.

The Solution:

• Upload more content from more publishers digitally to apps like comiXology and do it faster. If the comic book industry wants to compete with free websites they need to compete with them by striking at their weaknesses. Sites that offer pirated comic book content are ideal because they let readers find out what happens next much faster than waiting for the paper form (especially in the case of international comic books like mangas). However, they often have inaccurate subtitles or blurry images from bad scan jobs. 
• Allow users to access an unlimited amount of content for a monthly price. No one wants to pay $15.00 for a 60 page (or less) picture book. Even 4.99 for 17 pages seems excessive. A low monthly fee automatically deducted from an account saves hassle and helps you gain readership.
• Make the first comic book in a series free. A lot of publishers like VIZ Media, who has released some of their content on their app, already do this. Others should follow suit. 

Please follow SAI: Media on Twitter and Facebook.

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• Megaupload May Have To Delete All Your Files On Thursday
• The Feds Mysteriously Acquired Five Years Of Kim Dotcom And Megaupload's Chat Transcripts
• P&G To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It's Free To Advertise On Facebook