Pakistan renews effort to restrict coverage of extremists
It’s not the first time the Pakistani government has tried to restrict broadcast coverage of extremist activities—and it probably won’t be the last. On Monday, a legislative committee forwarded a bill to the National Assembly that would restrict coverage “of suicide bombers, terrorists, bodies of victims of terrorism, statements and pronouncements of militants and extremist…
Global Media Forum cites risks of environmental reporting
He’s young, unemployed and carries himself with the innocence of a man who hasn’t spent much time outside his own village. But Egyptian blogger Tamer Mabrouk is the real deal. Appearing at an international media conference in Bonn, Mabrouk’s description of chemical dumping into a brackish lagoon on the northern Nile Delta near the Mediterranean Sea…
CJR: Singapore not so modern on press freedom
Singapore is a rich country with a surprisingly poor press freedom record—so says a story out this week in the Columbia Journalism Review. CPJ’s own findings point to a series of court fines and damages awarded over slights to the country’s government by major international papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street…
Burma campaign hits Grand Central
New York’s Grand Central Station is a gathering point today for people who are coming into town from a little farther away than usual: Burmese dissidents, writers, monks, and musicians are convening to protest the military junta of Senior General Than Shwe. Human Rights Watch has organized a petition and an art and photo installation in Vanderbilt…
Finding success in exile from Sierra Leone
It was just days ago that my daughter had her 11th birthday. She was excited about this birthday as never before, but I understood why. A couple of days prior, she was accepted to the Frederick Douglass Academy in Manhattan for middle school starting next fall. The school is regarded as one of the best…
In Pakistan, a censor’s hand in Facebook, Twitter woes?
Last week, users of Facebook and Twitter in Pakistan began reporting a strange security problem. When they visited those sites, they found they were logged in–but with the accounts and privileges of complete strangers. Private Facebook information and Twitter direct messages belonging to other users were viewable, and the surprised Pakistani users had complete control…
Denied access, CPJ manages to interview Kazakh prisoner
On June 3, I took a six-hour-long drive from Almaty to Taraz with local press freedom advocate Rozlana Taukina and two family members of imprisoned editor Ramazan Yesergepov to visit him. Yesergepov has been a long-term case for CPJ. In November 2008, he published two internal Kazakh security service (KNB) memos in his now-defunct newspaper, Alma-Ata Info, which…
French journalist indicted for ‘stealing’ Sarkozy video
French journalists are flabbergasted. One of their colleagues, Augustin Scalbert, a journalist with Rue89, a leading news Web site, has just been indicted by a Paris prosecutor under the charges of “stealing and keeping” a video belonging to the public television channel France 3. If the journalist is found guilty, this indictment can land him in…
As dissidents move online, governments fight back
Social media and cyber dissidents have exerted a increasing influence on global politics over the last few years—Twitter, for instance, was widely utilized by protesters and journalists during Iran’s 2009 post-election Green Movement, and China has been locked in conflict with Google over allegations of censorship and hacking. “Ideas in Action” with Jim Glassman, a half-hour weekly show on…
For Eritrean expatriate press, intimidation in exile
For the better part of the last 20 years, Tedros Menghistu has been a refugee, forced to flee his Red Sea homeland of Eritrea not once, but twice—first as a young man displaced by war in the early 1990s, and then as a professional journalist escaping political censorship and military conscription a decade later. Menghistu is also…