Ann Cooper

Ann Cooper is Professor Emerita, Columbia Journalism School and a former executive director of CPJ. Before joining CPJ she was a foreign correspondent for NPR, including serving as Moscow bureau chief from 1987 to 1991.

Some Ukrainian journalists are leaving the media for the military in the name of patriotism 

Russia’s war in Ukraine, now in its third month, has already claimed an alarming number of journalists’ lives: at least seven killed in crossfire while reporting and at least six more who died in circumstances that CPJ continues to investigate.  There are at least 10 more names that do not appear on CPJ’s list of journalists killed…

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Opinion: Putin tolerated some critical voices in his 22-year assault on Russian media. His war in Ukraine ends even that.

On the morning after Boris Yeltsin stunned the world by resigning and turning over the Russian presidency to Vladimir Putin, The New York Times published a “man in the news” column that struggled to define the new leader. Putin was a man who “would never deceive you,” promised his political mentor and former St. Petersburg…

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Calling the war ‘war’: Meduza’s Galina Timchenko bucks Russia’s censorship on Ukraine

The Kremlin was infuriated by editor Galina Timchenko’s coverage of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine. So it pressured her boss to fire her. Timchenko left Moscow with much of the staff from her popular website, moving to Riga, Latvia, where they could work free of Kremlin censorship. That may sound like today’s news, but it actually…

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Russia’s silencing of Ekho Moskvy forces a sad end on a brave broadcaster

Russia’s silencing of Ekho Moskvy over its Ukraine war coverage marks an end to an iconic radio station with a brave history dating back to the late Soviet era. Even in the heady final years of glasnost (“openness”), hiding truth from the Soviet public was pretty easy for the country’s Communist leaders. When hardline Communists…

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Remembering Pavel Sheremet, IPFA honoree, friend to CPJ, and hard-nosed journalist

Pavel Sheremet, who died yesterday when a bomb blew up the car he was driving in Kiev, was a CPJ International Press Freedom awardee in 1998. At the awards ceremony in the glittery Waldorf-Astoria Hotel that November, Sheremet was a no show.

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