Mission Journal: Why Turkey matters
Turkey is hardly a press freedom paradise, but what makes the country so exciting for journalists is the amount of news it generates on any given day. The domestic story is huge, with near-daily street protests, the booming economy beginning to sag, and the prospect of regional conflict looming with Syria. And Istanbul is a…
Journalists and imperfect justice in Bangladesh
Bangladesh’s Supreme Court has hardened the sentence against Abdul Quader Molla, a top Islamist of a key opposition party, from a life term to death for his role in mass killings committed during the country’s war of independence from Pakistan in 1971. But what caught my eye in particular was that Molla was also convicted…
Endless surprises for Al-Jazeera
Mhamed Krichen/CPJ Board memberThere seems to be no end to American surprises when it comes to Al-Jazeera. The latest was revealed by Der Spiegel, the German weekly news magazine, which reported the U.S. National Security Agency hacked into our internal communications system, according to documents provided by Edward Snowden, the former NSA security analyst.
Is China silencing rumors, or the public?
China’s Internet has changed fundamentally since Shi Tao was given a 10-year prison sentence in 2005. Shi’s case was a marker of sorts— the first high profile sentencing in China for online activity. The government says 40 percent of the population is online as of December 2012. That’s 564 million people. In 2005, penetration was…
Bolivian government gangs up on Página Siete
Bolivia’s loss of territory along the Pacific coast during a 19th-century war with Chile remains an extremely sensitive issue in the landlocked nation. Every March 23, patriotic “Day of the Sea” ceremonies mark the calamity, which Bolivia hopes to reverse through a lawsuit filed this year against Chile at the International Court of Justice.
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…