In the News

2011

  

The Agenda: Global press freedom

CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon was on Canadian TVO’s show The Agenda talking about CPJ’s newly published 2011 prisoned census and press freedom around the world.

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“At heart he is still a journalist. But it was his journalism that endangered his life.”

In 2008 Namal Perera was dragged from a car and savagely beaten with metal rods by paramilitary forces in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The attack was so severe that he was forced to flee the country for fear of his life. With few options available to him, he CPJ helped to secure a special rescue fellowship to…

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From safety of New York, reporting on distant home

Nigerian journalist and ex-pat Omoyele Sowore is the focus of this New York Times Piece on exiled journalists in New York City.  Since 2001 CPJ cites 649 journalists who have been driven into exile, 592 or which still have not returned to their home country. Despite some being thousands of miles from home, the rapid…

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Egypt’s Jon Stewart sees few laughs in military clampdown

Following the collapse of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, Bassem Youssef rose to stardom with a satirical television show similar to Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. Now as the new government is beginning to look more like the old, he expresses his frustration over the ruling military council’s actions to restrict the press in what…

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Why can’t Russian embassy officials behave themselves?

The Iron Curtain may have fallen, but the state of press freedom in Russia remains bleak.  In what is a post-Cold War first, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent Luke Harding was expelled from Russia earlier this year.  The Telegraph describes what happened to him, and why deportation might have saved him from a worse fate. Click…

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Brazilian cameraman killed in drug raid gun battle

Brand TV, a CNN affiliate, cameraman Gelson Domingos da Silva, succumbed to gunshot wounds sustained while covering an anti-drug militia police raid in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday.  Da Silva is the fourth journalist to be killed this year in Brazil, a nation that has seen a rise in violence against the media and currently…

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Journalist Group fears for Syrian media writers

Ongoing strife in Syria continues to take a toll on journalists as more reporters and bloggers have gone missing in recent days.  CPJ reports that 3 individuals have vanished in the past week, adding to the growing list of disappeared media workers this year.  Democracy Now! as well as the Beirut based NowLebanon.com covered the…

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RFE/RL Turkmen correspondent freed from jail

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) correspondent Dovletmurad Yazguliyev has been released from prison in Turkmenistan after being sentenced to 5 years in jail earlier this month.  RFE/RL reports that Yazguliyev was freed by presidential amnesty after his case drew worldwide condemnation lead by the CPJ and other rights groups.  Click here for the full story. 

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UN report: Mexico 5th most dangerous place in the world for journalists

On Monday the UN and Organization of American States released a joint report naming Mexico as the 5th most dangerous place in the world for journalists with over 70 deaths since 2000.  CPJ ranks Mexico 8th in the Impunity Index and 9th in total journalist deaths.  So far in 2011 there have been 8 journalists murdered in the…

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Laura Pollán Toledo, who rallied the wives of jailed Cuban dissidents, dies at 63

The CPJ remembers Cuban human rights advocate Laura Pollán Toledo who died in Havana on Friday.  Founding the Ladies in White after the arrest of her husband, journalist Hector Maseda Gutiérrez during the Cuban government’s 2003 Black Spring crackdown on the press and dissent, Pollán worked endlessly for justice.  Earlier this year she was rewarded…

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2011