IN OCTOBER 1995, TESFAYE TEGEN, the editor of a weekly newspaper in Addis Ababa, made a very costly editorial decision. U.S.-backed insurgents who had toppled Soviet-backed dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam four years before had just held elections to legitimize their rule. Tesfaye’s* paper, Beza, ran cartoons lampooning members of the new government as a submissive…
Ethiopia’s independent journalists currently work under threat of prosecution from three separate areas of government: a poorly trained police force that sometimes operates independently of the public prosecutor’s office; an inexperienced, partisan judiciary operating in a severely backlogged court system; and overly sensitive government officials who are offended by public criticism of their actions. Journalists…
The Ethiopian government currently publishes four major newspapers and owns and controls all broadcast media. The primary challenge facing the state-run news outlets is a public perception of irrelevance and lack of objectivity. As one journalist who has worked for both the private press and the state media told CPJ, “The government press is not…
Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Jan. 13–When this country opened the way for an independent press at the turn of the decade, the blossoming of newspapers of nearly every political persuasion was widely hailed as a critical stepping stone toward true multiparty democracy. But here, as elsewhere in Africa, rather than marking a clean break with an…
CPJ’s 1995 report surveys 101 countries The bullet-ridden wall pictured on the cover is a detail from a photograph taken in Somalia by American photojournalist Dan Eldon of Reuters. Eldon, Associated Press photojournalist Hansi Krauss, and Reuter colleagues Hosea Maina and Anthony Macharia were murdered in July 1993 by a Somali crowd angered by the…