ATR

At the Lideta courthouse in Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Ababa, stands a statue of a blindfolded woman holding a set of scales in her outstretched hand–a universal symbol of justice, here cast in metal of pinkish gold and wearing thick braids in her hair.

If there were any doubt about who the presidential frontrunner would be in Egypt’s May 2014 elections, the Egyptian media made sure to strongly suggest that then-Defense Minister Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi was the only choice.

Nelson Mandela regularly harangued the media once he’d been freed after 27 years of imprisonment by South Africa’s apartheid government. He would call individual journalists when he liked or disliked something they had written or when he wanted to advance a political lobby.

Athens, May 6, 2012. Journalists attending Golden Dawn’s triumphal election night news conference are ordered to stand up when the group’s leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, enters the room. “Rise up! Rise up! Show your respect!” barks the master of ceremonies, an agitated black-clad, bald-headed toughie. The journalists who refuse the injunction are asked to leave the…

Before Maidan, before Tahrir Square, before the “color revolutions” that overthrew entrenched autocrats, there was the Soviet revolution of the late 1980s.

More than a year after the December 2013 mass attack against journalists at Kiev’s Maidan Square, which coincided with the Ukrainian police’s violent dispersal of protesters rallying against the policies of then-President Viktor Yanukovych, the press in the beleaguered nation continue the battle for survival. The biggest problem remains impunity in attacks against journalists.

During South Africa’s Boer War, at the turn of the 20th century, a determined news organization relocated reporters, copy editors, and printing presses to the front line to ensure accurate reporting. In the Warsaw Ghetto, during World War II, a literal underground press, established to counter Nazi propaganda, required the nightly movement of cumbersome printing…