Rodney Sieh, editor-in-chief and publisher of Liberian investigative outlet FrontPageAfrica, knows first-hand the harassment and risks critical journalists in his country face. In 2013, CPJ documented how he was sentenced to prison over unpaid fines in a criminal defamation case.
New York, April 18, 2018–Liberian authorities should thoroughly investigate the killing of Tyron Brown, a video editor and camera operator with Super Communications, a privately owned outlet that runs Super FM and Super Television, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
New York, April 11, 2018–The Committee to Protect Journalists today expressed concern over a US$1.8 million civil defamation lawsuit against Front Page Africa, a privately owned Liberian newspaper that has long been the subject of complaints and harassment for its critical reporting on successive governments.
Philipbert Browne, the publisher of Liberia’s Hot Pepper newspaper, was arrested at his office and jailed at the Monrovia Central Prison in the Liberian capital on October 7, 2016, for libel on the orders of a Civil Law Court over a story in his paper titled, “During Ebola Time: ‘I Lost My Virginity'” published the…
Plainclothes police officers on September 15, 2016, detained Festus Poquie, a journalist with Liberia’s New Democrat newspaper, from his office and took him to the Liberia National Police headquarters in the capital Monrovia, where he was detained and interrogated for several hours.
Nairobi, July 7, 2016–The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the decision by Liberian authorities to shut down the privately owned station Voice FM and called on the government today to allow the station to resume broadcasting immediately.
Three men beat Wremongar Joe, a journalist with the radio station Prime FM, in Buchanan, some 60 miles (100 kilometres) southeast of the capital Monrovia, on May 7, 2016, after the journalist refused to delete a video of a brawl between a lawmaker and other spectators during a football match, according to media reports.
On the first Saturday of November 2014, when media owner and broadcaster David Tam Baryoh switched on the mic for his weekly “Monologue” show on independent Citizen FM in Freetown, Sierra Leone, he had no idea that criticizing the government’s handling of Ebola would mean 11 days in jail.
The Ebola crisis in West Africa is unrelenting, and journalists on the frontline of reporting on the virus are caught between authorities wanting to control how the outbreak is reported, and falling victim to the disease themselves.
With the Ebola epidemic predicted to get worse, the Liberian government has taken action to silence news outlets critical of its handling of the health crisis which, according to Liberia’s Information Ministry, has claimed more than 1,000 lives in the country since March. Publishers have been harassed and forced to cease printing, and journalists were…