Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan would like to take credit for Turkey’s economic growth and increasing regional influence, but when challenged on his country’s abysmal press freedom record he tends to blame others, including the media itself which, he says, exaggerates the problem. But the facts speak for themselves, as I noted in a letter…
There is one simple rule for survival in Tanzania’s media – whether you are an editor, reporter, columnist, printer, or even news vendor: don’t be critical. Thanks to repressive laws on Tanzania’s books, an article considered libelous by the state can get anyone in trouble, even prominent journalists such as Absalom Kibanda — the chairman…
Tuesday’s blog about threats to Hamid Mir generated a lot of discussion on our site. Mir messaged overnight, saying his case was widely reported in newspapers and discussed in Parliament, and there will be a committee of Parliament established to probe the issue. The Associated Press of Pakistan noted that “Minster for Interior Rehman Malik condemned the…
New York, December 22, 2011–Authorities in Tanzania have arrested and charged a columnist and an editor with inciting the police force to subordinate in connection with an editorial critical of the government, according to local journalists and news reports. The printer of the publication has also been summoned to court twice in relation to the…
You don’t notice it at first. Not with the people seemingly moving as normal on the sidewalks and the happy recorded music blaring across the plaza in front of city hall to announce the annual cowboy parade. No, at first Nuevo Laredo looks like a regular border town, until the military armored car goes by…
Prime Minister Erdoğan: The Committee to Protect Journalists is writing to condemn the arrests of as many as 29 journalists in raids on Tuesday as well as the ongoing media repression that has earned Turkey a reputation as one of the world’s worst press freedom violators and done grave damage to the consolidation of Turkish democracy.
Amid a raging debate on Internet freedom and censorship in India, members of the government met last week with a clutch of website operators, including representatives of Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. In a meeting scheduled to address a wider plan to leverage social media to empower the government, it’s unclear whether the touchy subject…