Features & Analysis

  

Attacks, arrests, threats, censorship: The high risks of reporting the Israel-Gaza war

Since the Israel-Gaza war began on October 7, 2023, journalists and media across the region have faced a hostile environment that has made reporting on the war exceptionally challenging.   In addition to documenting the growing tally of journalists killed and injured, CPJ’s research has found multiple kinds of incidents of journalists being targeted while carrying…

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Arrests of Palestinian journalists since start of Israel-Gaza war

Since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, an unprecedented number of journalists and media workers have been arrested — often without charge — in what they and their attorneys say is retaliation for their journalism and commentary. As of October 15, 2024, CPJ has documented a total of 69 arrests of journalists in the Palestinian…

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El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele addresses the 79th United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S., September 24, 2024. REUTERS/Mike Segar - RC287AA120O6

A ‘culture of silence’ threatens press freedom under El Salvador President Bukele 

Nearly 80,000 people have been detained, and up to 200 may have died in state custody, since El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s declared a state of emergency in March 2022, temporarily suspending constitutional rights and civil liberties in the country in the name of fighting gang violence. Local journalists and human rights organizations have raised concerns that Bukele, who…

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A journalist and others rush toward the scene of an explosion following an Israeli strike on the outskirts of Gaza City, on September 1, 2024. (Photo: AFP/Omar Al-Qattaa)

One year and climbing: Israel responsible for record journalist death toll

One year in, Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza has exacted an unprecedented and horrific toll on Palestinian journalists and the region’s media landscape. At least 128 journalists and media workers, all but five of them Palestinian, have been killed – more journalists than have died in the course of any year since CPJ…

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In post-election Venezuela, journalist jailings reach record high, media goes underground

Shortly after Venezuela’s disputed presidential election in July, security agents arrested journalist Ana Carolina Guaita and then contacted her family to make a deal. They offered to release Guaita if her mother, Xiomara Barreto, who worked on the opposition campaign to defeat President Nicolás Maduro, turned herself in. Barreto, who is in hiding, rejected the…

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Protesters lift portraits of slain journalists Hero Bahadin (left) and Gulistan Tara in Sulaimaniya, Iraqi Kurdistan, on August 24, 2024.

CPJ submits report on Iraq to UN’s human rights review

The Committee to Protect Journalists has submitted a report on the state of press freedom and journalist safety in Iraq and semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan to the United Nations Human Rights Council ahead of its January to February 2025 Universal Periodic Review (UPR) session. The U.N. mechanism is a peer review of each member state’s human…

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Nigerian security forces lob teargas canisters to disperse an anti-government demonstration to protest against bad governance and economic hardship in Abuja, Nigeria, on August 2, 2024.

In Nigeria, at least 56 journalists attacked and harassed as protests roil region

“He hit me with a gun butt,” Premium Times newspaper reporter Yakubu Mohammed told the Committee to Protect Journalists, recalling how he was struck by a police officer while reporting on cost-of-living protests in Nigeria’s capital of Abuja on August 1. Two other officers beat him, seized his phone, and threw him in a police…

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Russian law enforcement officers walk in the Red Square during stormy weather in Moscow on June 20, 2024. (Photo: Reuters/Maxim Shemetov)

How Russia silences critical coverage of its war in Ukraine

Russia’s months-long jailing of journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva —released on August 1 as part of a prisoner exchange — was one of the most blatant illustrations of Russia’s muzzling of the press in the wake of its February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war has precipitated what a representative of the now-shuttered Russian Journalists’ and Media Workers’…

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Chained and blindfolded: Nigerian journalist Segun Olatunji recounts his detention

The arrest and detention of Segun Olatunji, the then-editor of the privately owned First News site, by Nigeria’s military in March triggered an outcry from local and international civil society, highlighting an uptick in the unlawful detention of journalists in the West African nation.  Olatunji was taken from his Alagbado home in southwestern Lagos state by more than a dozen armed men who…

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Cyberattackers are knocking out media sites around the world with an emerging censorship strategy that uses inexpensive tools, masks attackers' identities, and is very difficult to defend against. (Photo illustration: CPJ; source image: Reuters/Heinz-Peter Bader)

Cyberattackers use easily available tools to target media sites, threaten press freedom

When exiled Russian news website Meduza was hit with a flood of internet traffic in mid-April, it set off alarm bells among the staff as the deluge blocked publishing for more than four hours and briefly rendered the site inaccessible for some readers. It was the largest distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) attack in…

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