The celebration Tuesday of the 50th anniversary of the Association of European Journalists (AEJ) should have been a joyful and lighthearted affair. Dozens of journalists from all parts of the European Union had traveled to Brussels to share memories, new projects, champagne, and petits fours.
Last week, suspected supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed group listed as a terrorist organization by the European Union and the United States, took their confrontation with the Turkish state to Western Europe, attacking the French and German offices of one of Turkey’s most influential newspapers, Zaman.
The tension between objective news reporting and advocacy was the subject of the final plenary panel that I moderated last week at the Global Media Forum in Bonn. Sponsored by Germany’s multi-language, government broadcast agency, Deutsche Welle, the three-day conference brought together journalists and experts from every continent to address but not necessarily resolve the…
New York, November 17, 2010–Iranian authorities announced on Tuesday that two German reporters for Bild am Sonntag will be charged with espionage, according to international news reports. They were arrested in October while interviewing the son of a woman sentenced to death by stoning on charges of adultery. The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by these developments and…
Journalism conferences discussing global trends often inflate the real but intermittent risks faced by foreign correspondents from wealthier nations who travel to and report from less stable regions of the world. They do so at the expense of downplaying if not plain ignoring the much greater risks faced by local journalists who live in such…
New York, August 7, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned about a criminal investigation the German government has launched against 17 journalists. They are accused of publishing information from classified documents related to CIA rendition flights and suspected misconduct by the German secret services in Baghdad during the 2003 U.S. invasion, according to The…