Even as Hungary moved closer to joining the European Union, Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his right-wing Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Party (Fidesz-MPP) continued to bully Hungary’s public service broadcasters and retaliate against unfavorable coverage in the independent media.
Israel’s Hebrew-, Arabic-, and English-language media are extremely lively and, despite some military censorship, mostly free. Yet, journalists covering the second intifada, which began in September 2000 in Gaza and the West Bank, faced a variety of restrictions and hazards from the Israeli army and militant Jewish settlers, including bullets, tear gas, shrapnel, and physical…
Because press freedom is generally respected in Italy, CPJ does not routinely monitor conditions in the country. However, CPJ did protest brutal attacks by police officers and demonstrators on journalists during the July 20-22 Group of Eight (G-8) summit of the world’s industrialized nations in Genoa.
On January 8, President Laurent Gbagbo’s government thwarted an attempted coup by mercenaries whom the ruling Popular Front (FPI) accused of being in the pay of Burkina Faso and other countries bordering Côte d’Ivoire. The rebels occupied the compound of the official RTI broadcasting network and aired communiqués saying that the elected government had been…
On May 3–World Press Freedom Day–President Nursultan Nazarbayev approved restrictive amendments to Kazakhstan’s already burdensome Mass Media Law. Under the law, organizations designated as members of the “mass media” are subject to a host of harsh provisions. But Nazarbayev’s amendment widened the legal net by designating Web sites as “mass media” as well. This change…
Press freedom in Kyrgyzstan suffered major setbacks in 2001 as President Askar Akayev continued his increasingly repressive curtailment of dissent. Politically motivated civil libel suits resulted in exorbitant damage awards, driving some newsapers to the brink of bankruptcy.
Fighting between the Macedonian government and ethnic Albanian rebels seeking increased civil liberties escalated throughout the year, pushing the country to the edge of civil war. Unprofessional reporting and outright hate speech by both ethnic Macedonian and ethnic Albanian journalists played a central role in radicalizing their respective communities and polarizing the political atmosphere.
Government pressure on the Moldovan media increased in 2001 after the Communist Party won a majority in the February parliamentary elections. The Communist candidate, Vladimir Voronin, was elected president in April. Soon after the presidential elections, the Chisinau-based Independent Journalism Center reported that journalists from the opposition publications Flux, Tara, Jurnal de Chisinau, and Trud-Moldova…
Under the totalitarian rule of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, the press is nothing but a government propaganda instrument. One political observer noted that the only variation in the country’s media is the relative degree of vitriol directed against South Korea, Japan, and the United States, calibrated to suit the foreign policy priorities of…
As the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, entered its second year, Palestinian National Authority (PNA) chairman Yasser Arafat appeared to be fighting for his own survival amidst escalating Israeli military attacks and intense diplomatic pressure from the United States. Despite the PNA’s precarious situation and increasing alienation from the population at large, the PNA showed that…