Hong Kong, May 8, 2014–A Chinese journalist missing since April 24 was detained by authorities and has been accused of leaking a confidential Communist Party document, according to news reports. Gao Yu’s arrest comes amid the detention of several government critics as the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown approaches, according to news reports.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Hamid Mir, the executive editor of Pakistan’s Geo Television, survived an April 19 assassination attempt, but was badly injured. The shooting came a few weeks after the Pakistani government pledged in a meeting with CPJ to address the insecurity plaguing the country’s journalists. Shortly after the attack, some Pakistani media stated that CPJ…
“The federal government is fully committed to continue fighting against impunity in cases of killed journalists,” Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff told a CPJ delegation during a meeting on Tuesday in Brasilia, the country’s political capital. Accepting that deadly violence against the media is a detriment to freedom of the press, Rousseff said her administration will…
Bangkok, May 7, 2014–Vietnamese police in Hanoi arrested the founder of a popular blog and his assistant on Monday on accusations of disseminating anti-state articles, according to news reports. In 2007, blogger Nguyen Huu Vinh started the Ba Sam news website and aggregator, which often posted materials critical of the government and its policies, reports…
Journalism is increasingly mediated by the same digital tools to which we entrust the rest of our lives. In keeping with CPJ’s mission to enable and protect journalists wherever they find themselves under threat, we are pleased to announce the hire of Tom Lowenthal, our first staff technologist.
This week, South Africans go to the polls for their fifth democratic elections since 1994, but despite constitutional guarantees of media freedom, the vast majority of South Africans who vote will do so informed only by the positive news and information carried by a public broadcaster widely criticized for its partiality to the ruling party.