Google’s Chinese wake-up call
On Monday, Google made good on its promise to stop censorship of its Chinese search engine, Google.cn, by rerouting viewers to its unfettered Hong Kong site. According to the company’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, the move was “a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced—it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information…
Circumventing India’s radio news ban
Violence against provincial journalists, self-censorship, and the rise of paid news were the leading press freedom concerns cited by editors and journalists that I met with during my recent visit to India. But for Shubhranshu Choudhary, known as Shu, it’s the ban on radio news that most concerns him. He believes the ban is fueling India’s long-simmering Maoist insurgency,…
In India, news for sale
I just returned from India, where I spent a week meeting journalists and discussing press freedom concerns. One issue that emerged during my visit is what is known euphemistically as “paid news.” Many media outlets routinely sell political advertising dressed up as a news article.
Rallying (hesitantly) for reporters abducted in Afghanistan
What can we do to help liberate our colleagues? French journalists have been struggling with this dilemma since December 30, when two reporters of the public service TV channel France 3 and their three Afghan fixers were abducted by a group purportedly linked to the Taliban in the region of Kapisa, in eastern Afghanistan.
Japanese press advocates face 50 lawsuits, broken ribs
Kensuke Nishioka, 42, looked different from the other Japanese journalists I encountered in Tokyo during a February trip. Maybe it was the pink hair. “Don’t believe any journalist who says they’re at risk in Japan,” he declared, shrugging off the time, at age 32, when two members of a nationalist group cornered him in his office, broke his…
Senior Chinese editor forced out for controversial editorial
“Some have commented that this event should go down in media history.” So says Zhang Hong (in English translation on The Wall Street Journal’s China blog today), co-author of an unprecedented joint editorial published last week by 13 Chinese newspapers. The editorials, criticizing the hukou system, which registers individuals in their place of birth and limits their ability to find work and education…
Japanese journalist-turned-lawyer fights media control
Kazuo Hizumi holds his hands up before him, shoulder-width apart. He is demonstrating the size of the blade he kept under his pillow when sleeping at the bureau in his days as a rookie reporter in Osaka in 1987. The journalism community was still reeling from a shooting attack on Asahi Shimbun’s Osaka bureau the month before, which had…
Garcia-Esperat murder suspects back at work in Philippines
On the run for more than a calendar year from court-ordered arrest warrants, Osmeña Montañer and Estrella Sabay, the alleged masterminds in the 2005 murder of Philippine investigative journalist Marlene Garcia-Esperat, at left, are now out of hiding and back at work as senior Department of Agriculture finance officials, according to recent reports in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Burmese censorship at work
At a Tuesday meeting of the International Freedom to Publish Committee (a publishing industry group dedicated to free expression) in New York, Maureen Aung-Thwin handed out pages from Flower News, a Rangoon-based newspaper that had been marked up by Burmese government censors. Burma is the world’s second most censored country, according to a 2006 CPJ…
‘Erase it, or be erased’: Life on a Japanese mafia hit list
A polite man in a suit gave investigative reporter Jake Adelstein the message from a leader of one of Japan’s organized crime groups when he was first working on the story back in 2005: “Erase it, or be erased.” Adelstein backed off, but he didn’t stop researching Tadamasa Goto, a thuggish leader of the…