Asia

2016

  
An advertisement for Weibo in Beijing. The Chinese microblogging site uses a large team of censors to monitor users' posts, a former employee says. (Reuters/China Daily)

The business of censorship: Documents show how Weibo filters sensitive news in China

When journalists at the Guangdong-based Southern Weekly found that their 2013 new year editorial had been changed, without their knowledge, to exalt the virtues of the Communist Party, they took their outrage to the Chinese microblogging site Weibo.

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Slideshow: Remembering Avijit Roy, one year after blogger’s murder in Dhaka

On the day Avijit Roy was murdered in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, I had only just left the country. When I arrived in India later that day a Bangladeshi journalist broke the news to me that Roy had been hacked to death and his wife Rafida Ahmed Bonya, also a blogger, had been critically injured.

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Bangladeshis read a newspaper pasted to a wall in Dhaka. The editor of The Daily Star, based in the city, is facing multiple legal cases after saying he published unsubstantiated reports several years ago. (AP/A.M. Ahad)

79 cases and counting: Legal challenges pile up for Daily Star editor who admitted error in judgment

When Mahfuz Anam, editor of one of Bangladesh’s most respected newspapers, admitted recently to a lapse in editorial judgment several years ago, he could not have predicted the legal backlash that would ensue. Anam’s admission that he published unsubstantiated information accusing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of corruption has led to a barrage of defamation and…

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Lawyers scuffle outside a Delhi court on Wednesday. Several journalists say they were beaten by lawyers at the court in the past week. (AP/Tsering Topgyal)

Court reporters beaten by lawyers in latest attack on press freedom in India

Attacks this week against journalists covering a high-profile sedition case have heightened concerns about the state of press freedom in India. CPJ has reported frequently on journalists there coming under attack from police, criminals, politicians, and others. Now lawyers have to be added to the list.

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Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, standing, has been cleared of wrongdoing, but the independendent media are tenaciously challenging the official narrative. (AP/Joshua Paul)

Amid financial scandal, Malaysia increases pressure on media

A financial scandal involving a state investment fund created and overseen by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, exposed in turns by investigative journalists, has put a parallel spotlight on the country’s deteriorating press freedom situation. A suggestion by the government’s top lawyer to strengthen the 1972 Official Secrets Act to penalize journalists who decline to…

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Rahul says he heard police give the order to charge before rushing at students at the Delhi protest. (Rahul M.)

‘I kept telling them I’m a journalist but they kept beating me’: Photographer beaten at Delhi protest

As police cracked down on protesters in Delhi during recent protests over the treatment of Dalits, who occupy the lowest rungs of India’s caste ladder, journalists were caught in the fray. The protests were sparked by the suicide of Rohith Vemula, a student who had been barred from halls of residence and parts of campus,…

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Li Xin talks to the AP over Skype in November. The journalist, who says he worked as an informant for Chinese authorities, went missing on January 10. (AP/Saurabh Das)

As editor-informant Li Xin disappears, journalists share their experiences with China’s security services

The case of Li Xin, a journalist who disappeared in Thailand in January after telling the international press in November he had fled China after being forced to work for years as a government informant, has shed light on the pressures some journalists face to provide information to the authorities.

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Tsai Ing-wen, center, declares victory in the presidential election in Taipei on January 16, 2016. (AP/Wally Santana)

We’re live from Taipei! Please don’t tell China’s censors

Typically, news organizations like to promote original reporting. When an outlet covers a breaking news event at the time and from the place where the event is happening, they want their audience to know. However, for Chinese commercial media that covered this weekend’s presidential election in Taiwan, this was apparently not the case.

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From Charlie Hebdo in Paris to bloggers in Bangladesh, extremists target press

Thursday marks one year since two gunmen burst into the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and opened fire. Over the following year, CPJ documented the deaths of 28 journalists who were killed for their work by Islamic militant groups such as Islamic State and Al-Qaeda. This StoryMap charts the deadly attacks that took…

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2016