Features & Analysis

  
CPJ
Two major security efforts coincide with World Press Freedom Day.

In 2 major efforts, journalist security tailored to fit

In the past, donors and groups providing security to journalists in less-developed nations tended to export a Western, military-style of training designed for a war-time environment. But the danger of covering combat is one thing. Being fired upon by a motorcycle-riding assassin is another–as is being sexually molested in a crowd, discovering a video camera…

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Two men, one wearing a mask depicting President Enrique Peña Nieto, protest to demand justice in the Regina Martínez case a year after her murder on April 28. (AP/Felix Marquez)

Mexican press fails to question Martínez murder case

He certainly looked guilty of something, and as if he’d finally been caught. With either his head down or with a kind of scared, dead-eyed stare, in a white jumpsuit, in front of the four Veracruz state police officers crowded behind him. They were all in black uniforms, with a strip of face and eyes…

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Protesters seek justice in journalist murders in Veracruz, one of the nation's deadliest places for the press. (Reuters/Edgard Garrido)

In Mexico, a movement and a bill against impunity

Who can say exactly when the work of press freedom groups, human rights defenders, and budding networks of Mexican journalists became a movement? It would have been many murders, many funerals, many orphans ago. It would have been countless news events–about crime, corruption, violence–that went uncovered because reporters and news organizations concluded that the only…

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Vladimir Putin speaks to the media following a live nationwide broadcast phone-in, in Moscow Thursday. (Reuters/Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA Novosti)

Vladimir Putin denies repressing media, critics

In the year since Vladimir Putin returned to the Russian presidency, independent media, civil society groups, and opposition activists have been under attack. But as he has done in the past, Putin recently asserted that his government is not engaged in political repression.

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Hamid Karzai goes conservative on media

As if a faltering media industry and rising risks to endangered journalists as NATO reduces its forces in 2014 aren’t bad enough, add in a president pandering to religious conservatives in a pre-presidential election run-up. Reporting from Kabul, Reuters said Wednesday:  

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A police van takes defendants in the rape trial to court. (Reuters/Adnan Abidi)

Objection to international press at Indian rape trial

A British journalist trying to cover the Delhi gang rape trial was asked to leave the courtroom on Tuesday after the prosecution objected to the presence of the international press. Andrew Buncombe, a correspondent for The Independent of London, was ejected from a court in the Indian capital even though a wide-ranging order restricting press…

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Kuwaiti prime minister delays draft media law

In a welcome move Wednesday, Prime Minister Sheikh Jaber al-Mubarak al-Sabah offered to shelve Kuwait’s controversial draft media law, according to news reports. The announcement came in what the official Kuwait News Agency (KUNA) called a “candid, frank, and expanded meeting with chief editors of Kuwaiti press.” 

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So your Twitter account is hacked? Reset, tweet, pray.

That is a bogus @ap tweet.– AP CorpComm (@AP_CorpComm) April 23, 2013 More than a quarter million Twitter accounts have been hacked worldwide, the social media company disclosed in February, but Tuesday’s attack on The Associated Press’s verified account, @AP, had unusual effect. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 143 points after someone hijacked the…

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Kyrgyz official urged to address Askarov case

Kyrgyzstan has endured a turbulent past and continues to face significant challenges, but its leaders are committed to a democratic future, Djoomart Otorbayev, the nation’s deputy prime minister, told human rights and press freedom advocates in New York this week. The country still grapples with the repercussions of the brutal June 2010 ethnic conflict that…

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Supporters of Kuwaiti opposition politician Musallam al-Barrak pray in the yard of his house in Andulos, after he was sentenced to jail for insulting the emir, April 15. (Reuters/Stephanie McGehee)

Kuwait should abandon repressive draft media law

On April 8, the Kuwaiti cabinet approved a draft media law that would severely undermine press freedom in the country. But it is not too late to prevent a bad bill from becoming a bad law.

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