2020

In early March, Jon Gerberg was in Detroit, Michigan, covering the Democratic primaries as a video journalist with The Washington Post. But as the COVID-19 virus has spread in the United States and around the world, Gerberg’s coverage has changed to focus on the pandemic.

Journalist Evrim Kepenek works in Istanbul as the women and LGBTI+ news editor for the independent news website Bianet. Like most people, she works from home these days, but she is also a street reporter who recently observed twin fears among the Turkish public: getting infected with COVID-19 and getting arrested for talking about it.

At a public hearing on Nigeria’s social media bill held in Abuja last month, the voice of Chris Isiguzo, president of the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ), rang clearly across the room: “This bill…seeks to pigeonhole Nigerians from freely expressing themselves.” The NUJ is “totally opposed” to it, he said.

On March 31, CPJ and nine partner organizations wrote to the Secretary General and the Committee of Ministers at the Council of Europe to express concern about government restrictions on the media during the COVID-19 pandemic.

CPJ today joined eight other human rights and press freedom organizations to call for the immediate release of journalist and human rights defender Azimjon Askarov, who has been serving a life sentence in retaliation for his reporting since June 2010.

In the three years since Hurricane Maria hit the island, Puerto Rico has experienced a financial, political, and public health crisis, but reporter Bárbara Figueroa Rosa told CPJ that these events “have no comparison” to the impact the coronavirus pandemic could have on the U.S. territory.

Igor Rudnikov is the editor-in-chief of the independent Novye Kolyosa newspaper, based in the western Russian city of Kaliningrad. In 2017, agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested Rudnikov over his paper’s reporting, as CPJ documented at the time.

The Committee to Protect Journalists and Internet Society today released a joint fact sheet that explains the importance of encryption to press freedom and the free flow of information.

Stefania Battistini, an experienced reporter for Italian public broadcaster RAI, has covered terrorist attacks, earthquakes, and Syria’s civil war for the channel’s news program. Now, she is confronting the biggest challenge of her career: the coronavirus pandemic that is ravaging Lombardy, northern Italy, one of the hardest-hit regions in the world. Battistini, who is based…

Governments all over the world have been considering cellphone surveillance to help track and contain the spread of the coronavirus.