2020

On March 13, 2020, police in the Venezuelan city of Los Teques arrested Jesús Enrique Torres and Jesús Manuel Castillo, hosts of a news program on local privately owned radio broadcaster La Cima, after they posted a video to Facebook, where they sometimes publish their reporting, about alleged coronavirus cases at a local hospital, according…

Since February 13, 2020, Liberian security forces have harassed, assaulted, or detained at least four journalists during the course of their work, according to the journalists, who spoke with CPJ, and a petition from the Press Union of Liberia, an independent media workers’ advocacy group.

Beginning in 2019, Nicaraguan National Police officers have surveilled and harassed Emiliano Chamorro, director of the digital news outlet El Portavoz Ciudadano and a former reporter at the daily La Prensa, and his family, according to the journalist, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview.

On February 9, 2020, police officers arrested two journalists in Tseung Kwan O New Town, in eastern Hong Kong, while they were covering a vigil for Chow Tsz-lok, a university student who died in November 2019, according to news reports.

More than a dozen journalists were harassed or physically attacked while covering riots that broke out in northeast Delhi in late February 2020, according to news reports and journalists and their colleagues, who spoke to CPJ.

On February 21, 2020, Iraqi riot police in Baghdad’s Al-Kilani Square shot Ahmad al-Rubaye, an Iraqi photographer for the French news agency Agence France-Presse, with rubber pellets that hit his back, legs, and right shoulder, according to news reports, a statement by the local press freedom group Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, and the journalist, who spoke…

On February 18, 2020, the U.S. State Department said in an official press briefing that five Chinese state-funded news agencies–Xinhua News Agency, China Global Television Network, China Radio International, China Daily Distribution Corporation, and Hai Tian Development USA–are controlled by the Chinese government and will be treated as “foreign missions,” a designation typically used for…

On February 22, 2020, intelligence agents of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) arrested and interrogated freelance economic reporter Mohammad Mosaed for several hours over recent social media posts critical of the government and suspended his social media accounts, according to a brief interview he had with the BBC Persian Service a few hours after…

On January 23, 2020, officers of the Liberia National Police assaulted Christopher Walker, the sports editor of the privately owned daily newspaper FrontPage Africa, during the semi-final of a national soccer tournament at the Samuel Kanyon Doe Sport Stadium in Monrovia, the capital, according to Walker, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app, local news…

In the evening of February 12, 2020, three unidentified individuals assaulted Mohammed Zbib, a reporter for the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, in the Beirut neighborhood of Hamra, according to news reports and a report by the journalist’s employer.