Distribution of Print Media INDEPENDENT PUBLICATIONS Sales of private publications are concentrated in the capital, Addis Ababa. There is no organized distribution system in place. Newspapers and magazines are primarily sold on the streets by children who earn a subsistence living for their work, and, to a lesser extent, by independent contractors and newsstands. The…
Art. 8, Sec. 1 of the Press Proclamation grants the press “the right to seek, obtain and report news and information from any government source of news and information,” yet the private press continues to be denied access to government officials and their agencies. Moreover, independent journalists have been refused confirmation of information, or answers…
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…
NEW YORK –The leaders of China, Nigeria, and Turkey are among 10 world figures identified by the U.S. based Committee to Protect Journalists as “Enemies of the Press.” All are responsible for brutal campaigns against journalists and press freedom, as documented by CPJ in its ongoing monitoring of press freedom violations worldwide. The Enemies of…
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…
Independent Nigerian journalist Nosa Igiebor has been languishing in prison since his arrest in December 1995. He was jailed for his critical coverage of the country’s military dictator, Gen. Sani Abacha. Though he was placed in solitary confinement, Igiebor was hardly alone. In fact, a record 182 journalists around the world were in jail at…
On Dec. 23, 1995, six agents of Nigeria’s State Security Service (SSS) arrested Nosa Igiebor, the editor in chief of the best-selling weekly magazine Tell, as he prepared to leave his Lagos home for work. Igiebor, a 1993 recipient of CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award, had just resurfaced after months in hiding. While he was…