SINCE ITS FOUNDING IN 1981, CPJ HAS, AS A MATTER OF STRATEGY and policy, concentrated on press freedom violations and attacks on journalists outside the United States. CPJ aims to concentrate its efforts on those countries where journalists are most in need of international support and protection. As a result, we do not systematically monitor…
URUGUAY IS HOME TO ONE OF THE MOST VIBRANT MEDIA SCENES in the Americas, but public officials frequently pursue criminal defamation cases against journalists, while state advertising is distributed to reward media that provide favorable coverage of the government. Uruguayan journalists say that criminal defamation cases have become commonplace in the last decade. Under Article…
THE ANTAGONISTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE MEDIA and President Hugo Chávez Frías, coupled with some alarming legal developments, prompted CPJ Americas program coordinator Marylene Smeets to visit Venezuela in October to investigate the situation. Read her special report on Venezuela. The report concludes that the president’s verbal fusillades seem to have given the population and authorities…
ALTHOUGH PRESIDENT CLINTON RECEIVED STAR TREATMENT during his historic visit to Vietnam in November, little news of the trip was allowed into the country’s state-owned press. Huge crowds greeted the first U.S. president to tour the country since the Vietnam War. Speaking in Ho Chi Minh City, Clinton urged the Vietnamese government to allow more…
AS TENSIONS WITH NEIGHBORING ANGOLA MOUNTED and politicians maneuvered to prepare for elections in 2001, Zambian journalists faced censorship, physical assault by police, and a host of repressive media laws. The most egregious attack on the independent press during the year was the trial of eleven journalists from the Lusaka daily The Post on charges…
JOURNALISTS IN ZIMBABWE FACED INCREASING DIFFICULTIES IN 2000, as President Robert Mugabe’s government tried to extend its control over the news in the face of serial political crises. Mugabe’s problems included a faltering economy, an unpopular military intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a contentious election, and a controversial move to seize white-owned land.…
EIGHTY-ONE JOURNALISTS WERE IN PRISON AROUND THE WORLD at the end of 2000, jailed for practicing their profession. The number is down slightly from the previous year, when 87 were in jail, and represents a significant decline from 1998, when 118 journalists were imprisoned. While jailing journalists can be an effective means of stifling bad…
PREFACE by Philip Gourevitch INTRODUCTION by Ann Cooper REGIONAL ANALYSES: Africa | Americas | Asia | Europe and Central Asia | Middle East and North Africa AFRICA: Country summaries Angola | Benin | Botswana | |Burkina Faso | Burundi | Cameroon | Chad | Comoros | Republic of Congo | Democratic Republic of Congo |…
By Philip GourevitchNearly a hundred years ago, in Boston, the Congo Reform Association published a pamphlet by Mark Twain, titled King Leopold’s Soliloquy, A Defense of His Congo Rule (1905). The text is an imagined monologue by the Belgian monarch, delivered as he reads through stacks of literature protesting the systematic murder and mutilation of…
By Ann CooperAs a foreign correspondent covering the Soviet Union a decade ago, I was an eyewitness to a dramatic example of the press’ critical role in building democracy. Granted a bit of freedom by Mikhail Gorbachev’s mid-1980s glasnost policy, long-suppressed Soviet journalists set their own daring agenda: they probed forbidden history, investigated contemporary corruption,…