CPJ testifies on challenges to democracy in the Americas
Carlos Lauría’s testimony starts at 1:10 in the video. Carlos Lauría, CPJ’s Americas senior program coordinator, provided testimony before the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of US House of Representatives on Tuesday. Lauría emphasized that violence and government harassment are the main emerging trends that illustrate the major challenges facing the press in the Western…
More hope in Syria as two more journalists freed
Just two weeks ago, I wrote that the recent escapes of American Matthew Schrier and French-American Jonathan Alpeyrie after months of captivity should give hope to all missing journalists in Syria. We now have two more reasons for hope. Sunday, the Italian and Belgian governments announced that missing Italian journalist Domenico Quirico and Belgian academic…
NSA hack compromises Al-Jazeera sources, US credibility
The German magazine Der Spiegel reported this week that the U.S. National Security Agency hacked into the internal communication system of Al-Jazeera. If the report is accurate, the targeted hacking of a news organization represents an assault on press freedom qualitatively different from — and in many ways more disquieting than — the perils posed…
Chishti abducted, beaten: Challenge for Pakistan
Ali Chishti, who writes for The Friday Times, has gone public in Islamabad with details of his abduction and beating last Friday, August 30. Chishti is making the rounds of TV talk shows describing how he was picked up in Karachi by uniformed police driving a police vehicle, blindfolded, switched to another police vehicle, taken…
Egypt needs justice not politics in investigating deaths
Yesterday, the Committee to Protect Journalists launched a campaign calling for serious investigations into the deaths of eight journalists in Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011. CPJ hopes that the current military-led government will lead impartial and serious inquiries into the events surrounding the killings no matter who was in power at…
Death toll mounts for journalists in Philippines
Another Philippine journalist was killed in a drive-by shooting on Wednesday, bringing to at least six the total slain in the country this year. In none of the cases have police determined whether they were killed because of their work as journalists or for other reasons. The investigations into the cases appear to have gone…
Police officer indicted over photojournalist’s false arrest
The flash or, more precisely, the lack of one, gave the policeman away. Over a year ago, on a steamy Saturday night in the Bronx, New York City Police Officer Michael Ackermann claimed that a photojournalist had set off his flash repeatedly in the officer’s face, blinding and distracting him, as he was arresting a…
Journalist Barrett Brown faces prison for posting hyperlink
Tomorrow, a federal judge will weigh a prosecutor’s motion for a gag order in connection with the U.S. government’s prosecution of journalist Barrett Brown. The motion represents a troubling turn in an already-troubling case for press freedom–a case that could criminalize the routine journalistic practice of linking to documents publicly available on the Internet, which…
A fine and shifting line for Pakistan’s media
The government of Balochistan, the troubled southwestern province of Pakistan, registered a case against national television news channel ARY on Monday, August 26, after it aired a video clip of the destruction of the residence of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammed Ali Jinnah. The case was filed under Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorist Act of 1997, claiming that airing the…
Escapees give hope in cases of journalists missing in Syria
It has now been an entire year since Al-Hurra correspondent Bashar Fahmi, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin, and freelancer Austin Tice, of the United States, went missing in Syria. But the recent liberation of two freelance journalists held for months gives us some reason to hope.