With sierra Leoneans struggling to safeguard a fragile peace after 10 years of civil war, the Independent Media Commission (IMC) moved to fulfill its mandate. The IMC, which the government established in 2001 and is staffed by mostly government appointees and a few media personalities, grants publication and broadcast licenses, monitors government-media relations, enforces a…
In April, for the first time in 10 years, Singapore’s government acknowledged the need to relax controls over media. In an effort to promote the country as an international arts and culture hub, officials also launched a review of the country’s stringent censorship policies, which regulate licensing and all media content, including on Singapore-based Web…
Despite a hostile political and economic atmosphere, the Solomon Islands’ small but tenacious media have managed to pursue controversial stories, including exposés of official misconduct and links between the government and ethnic militias. In 1998, a violent conflict erupted after indigenous residents of Guadalcanal, the archipelago’s largest island, formed the Isatabu Freedom Movement (IFM) to…
Since the 1991 overthrow of Maj. Gen. Mohammed Siad Barre by forces loyal to warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed, historic clan rivals have threatened the unity of this country, once known for practicing multiparty democracy while military juntas and civilian despots controlled most other African countries. In the face of such chaos, the media, which had…
On September 27, in a landmark decision for press freedom in South Africa, a Johannesburg court dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by Minister of Housing Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele against the independent daily Mail & Guardian and its former editor Phillip van Niekerk. Van Niekerk and the Mail & Guardian had been sued over the paper’s December…
President Kim Dae Jung, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his efforts to reconcile with North Korea, spent his final year in office politically isolated and unloved. His unpopularity came partly from the constant hammering he took from the country’s major media outlets, which oppose his “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with the…
A cease-fire agreement signed in February by the government and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ushered in a period of relative calm in Sri Lanka after 19 years of war. The LTTE has been fighting for an independent homeland for the country’s ethnic Tamil community, which has suffered discrimination from the Sinhalese…
The Sudanese public has access to several high-profile independent newspapers that criticize government authorities and policies. But that criticism comes at a price, especially when it relates to the Muslim government’s nearly 20-year-old civil war with Christian and animist rebels in the south of the country.
Like many of its East African neighbors,Tanzania has been overwhelmed by the proliferation of pornographic tabloids. Since 1992, when the advent of multiparty politics fostered media liberalization, the number of privately owned newspapers has steadily increased to about 400.