July 2009 Archives

While the general trend in China is toward a more open environment, there is a tendency toward "soft harassment" by police, who threaten retribution to sources and news assistants for helping foreign journalists rather than interfering directly with the journalists themselves. 

On July 22, Gambian President Yahya Jammeh once again went after journalists in an interview on the country's only state-run television station. The president made a thinly veiled threat toward six independent journalists currently facing "seditious publication" and "criminal defamation" charges in the country: "So they think they can hide behind so-called press freedom and violate the law and get away with it. They got it wrong this time. We are going to prosecute them to the letter," Jammeh said. 

The large family of Mexican radio anchorman Juan Martínez Gil gathered around his coffin in the intense tropical heat of Acapulco's main cemetery on Thursday. His brother Javier, who identified his badly beaten body on Tuesday, was the least consolable. He leaned across the coffin, his tears flowing down his face onto the dark metal. "Juanito, you were always with us. Always at my side. Now you are gone. How can I be with you?" he moaned. 

We issued the following statement today in response to the killing of radio reporter Juan Daniel Martínez Gil whose body was found Tuesday near Acapulco...

"Are you sure about coming back here now?" My cousin in Antananarivo was a bit hesitant about the wisdom of my plan to visit the family while the political crisis was still weighing on the daily lives of Malagasy citizens. I had not been back to my home country in nine years until this summer. Prior to that, I went back every year since I left Madagascar after high school. It may have seemed like a peculiar decision to go back when the situation was less than ideal but it was the one time when my work would allow me to stay for almost a full month.

CPJ will be collecting signatures until July 31 on a Facebook petition in support of Maziar Bahari, Newsweek's Tehran correspondent, who is being held without charge in Iran.

Social networking sites are under increasing pressure in China. Someone seems to have realized just how difficult they are to monitor when it comes to breaking news.

With elections due on August 20, pressure is mounting on Afghan journalists, and it's coming from all sides. The International Federation of Journalists helped organize a meeting in Kabul last week to draw the fractious journalists' community together; there are four or five competing organizations, all vying for recognition, dominance, and funding. In March, the donor organizations to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan called on the groups to sort themselves out before they'll start sending money. In a release yesterday, the IFJ addressed both problems: attacks and abuse aimed at journalists as the elections approach and military activity increases; and the inability, so far, of journalists to organize themselves into a cohesive unit. 

Among the dozens of journalists detained in Iran is Majid Saeedi, a freelance photographer working for Getty Images. Jonathan Klein, the photo agency's co-founder and CEO, describes Saeedi as a "dedicated photojournalist" who was simply trying to document events in Iran. Below are examples of Saeedi's work, courtesy of Getty.

In response to a report by The Associated Press saying that the agency's Sri Lanka bureau chief Ravi Nessman left the country on Monday after the government refused to renew his visa, we released this statement...

We were only 30 on Friday: representatives of human rights organizations, a few journalists and academics, a couple of anonymous "concerned citizens." Standing on the Place de la Liberté (Freedom Square) in Brussels two blocks from the Parliament, a few meters away from a police team that had asked us to limit ourselves to a "static demonstration," we held pictures of Natalya Estemirova and roses. A few journalists--the Belgian news agency, Reuters Television, a community TV station--were filming the scene. Scores of people were walking by on their way from lunch back to office work.

I spent Sunday morning in Kabul catching up with Danish Karokhel, at left, director of Pajhwok Afghan News and (along with deputy Farida Nekzad) a 2008 CPJ International Press Freedom Awardee. Pajhwok moved since the last time I was here, and with income from subscribers to its news service and grant money from NGOs, it seems stronger than ever. More than 120 staff members are now spread around the country, with new online efforts and an expanded photo service in the works. With a presidential election scheduled for August, Karokhel is in the middle of planning a training seminar on campaign coverage for his teams in Kabul and the provinces.

In a 2006 interview, Walter Cronkite recalled how the search for missing reporters in Vietnam led him to CPJ and on to Turkey. Interview by Maya Taal

Walter Cronkite had such a profound impact in so many ways that one might overlook an important part of his legacy--his long efforts on behalf of international press freedom and his advocacy on behalf of local journalists around the world. Cronkite was a vital participant in the launch of the Committee to Protect Journalists 28 years ago and, though his title here may have been honorary co-chairman, he was an active force throughout the years.

July marks the start of seal hunting season in Namibia, where hunters will be allowed to kill more than 90,000 seals. British journalist Jim Wickens and South African cameraman Bart Smithers filmed the event near Cape Cross Colony on Thursday morning for a British advocacy organization, Ecostorm. That is, until the journalists became the hunted.

New York, July, 17, 2009-- During a speech and sermon delivered at Tehran University today, former president and cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani called for reconciliation, the release of imprisoned protesters, and an end to restrictions on the press and free speech. The Committee to Protect Journalists had this statement:

My friend and colleague Iason Athanasiadis spent three weeks in an Iranian prison last month. In the ongoing roundups of journalists since the June 12 election, Iason has seen his own friends and colleagues thrown in jail, including Majid Saeedi, a freelance photographer for Getty Images. 

More than 100 prominent journalists from 47 countries sent a petition to the Iranian government today calling for the immediate release of Maziar Bahari, Newsweek's Tehran correspondent, who has been held without charge in an Iranian jail since June 21. Compiled by CPJ, Index on Censorship, and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, the petition was faxed to the Islamic Republic of Iran's justice minister, Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, in Tehran.

As a child, I never thought about becoming a journalist. I never really felt pulled toward any particular field. I just loved to feel free and try new things, especially when it came to hard work.

After hearing news that President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan signed into law a restrictive Internet regulation bill on Saturday, we issued the following statement today...

This week CPJ congratulated the House sponsors of a bill that would expand the breadth and depth of the State Department's annual reporting to Congress on press freedom abuses worldwide. The Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act passed the House last month; now the bill is being redrafted for the Senate by the Committee on Foreign Relations. CPJ, in the July 8 letter to Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Mick Pence (R-IN), who are also co-chairs of the Congressional Caucus for Freedom of the Press, urged the Senate to pass the legislation appropriately named after the late Wall Street Journal reporter.

Five years after the July 9, 2004 murder of journalist Paul Klebnikov, we released the following statement...

Chinese authorities have, unusually, welcomed foreign reporters to Xinjiang since ethnic rioting broke out on Sunday in Urumqi between the Uighur minority and Han Chinese. A Beijing-based agency has even offered to facilitate travel, according to one writer who blogs from Shanghai. (CPJ hasn't confirmed his story. Have any other reporters been approached in this way?) 

The ongoing political crisis following the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya on June 28 has damaged the press freedom climate in Honduras. Complying with orders by caretaker leader Roberto Micheletti, Honduran security forces shut down local broadcasters, blocked transmissions of international news networks, and briefly detained journalists in the aftermath of the coup, CPJ research shows. But part of the damage was self-inflicted: Some media outlets have slanted coverage to favor the coup leaders.

Security forces were protecting, rather than harassing, international journalists covering riots in northwestern Xinjiang this week--a welcome change. A few have reported official interference since Sunday. But during previous outbursts of ethnic unrest in China's Tibetan and Uighur autonomous regions, security forces have repeatedly antagonized and expelled the foreign press corps. Foreign reporters this week have instead been welcomed to the regional capital, Urumqi, allowed a privileged enclave of Internet access, and corralled on an official tour of the city's ravaged center. 

Before he even arrived in Moscow, President Barack Obama gave an exclusive interview to an independent Russian newspaper that has long been on the front lines of press freedom. Novaya Gazeta is known for its ground-breaking investigative reports--and the fact that four of its journalists have been killed in retaliation for their work.

In response to reports that Iason Athanasiadis, a journalist detained in Iran since June 17, was released today we issued the following statement...

We issued the following statement in response to reports that the Gambia's High Court jailed six journalists today who were charged with sedition and criminal defamation. One of the seven journalists, a mother of a young child, was rearrested but then freed on bail...

Iason Athanasiadis is still a young man at 30, but he's an old school, shoe leather journalist. "Journalism's deepest, most honest contributions inevitably spring from on-the-ground reporting, unencumbered by policy agendas in Washington, London, or other foreign capitals," writes Sandy Tolan, author and University of Southern California journalism professor, today in Salon. "That's what epitomizes the work of my friend and colleague Iason Athanasiadis, and it's why his detention by Iranian authorities, on June 17 when trying to board a flight out of Iran, is so troubling."

Articles published in Eritrea's now-banned private newspapers are at the center of a mock political trial being filmed as an educational documentary this week at Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. Inside a courtroom on the sprawling Tempe, Ariz., campus, a judge of the High Court of Eritrea presides dispassionately, international observers lean into translation headphones, and defense lawyers challenge prosecutors to detail the vague antistate charges against 11 political dissidents. It's a trial that the real defendants were never afforded when they were jailed nearly eight years ago.

What is happening in Nicaragua when it comes to press freedom? A CPJ report found that President Daniel Ortega is waging a war against the media. It consists of smear campaigns, legal and economic pressures, verbal and physical attacks, and a rigorous information embargo against the critical and independent media.

Minutes after I woke up to get ready for the presentation of a CPJ report on press freedom conditions in Nicaragua, I turned on the TV. Nicaragua was shaken by the sudden death of Managua's mayor, Alexis Arguello, who was found at home with a gunshot wound to his chest. Arguello, who had won three world boxing titles for Nicaragua and was considered the greatest athlete in the country's history, committed suicide, according to several local press reports. While an autopsy is pending and authorities are investigating his death, on Wednesday the government declared three days of mourning.