ATR

ON SEPTEMBER 27, GHANA’S VIBRANT INDEPENDENT MEDIA hosted Africa’s first-ever live presidential debate in advance of the December 7 national elections. The debates included six out of seven candidates for the presidency, reached an audience of several million Ghanaian voters, and helped boost the international popularity of outgoing president Jerry Rawlings, who stepped aside peacefully…

DESPITE THREATS AND INTIMIDATION, Guatemalan journalists continued to pursue dangerous stories, including investigations into military activities and a government intelligence agency. Perhaps the biggest story of the year was the August revelation that Guatemalan legislators had secretly conspired to reduce a new tax on alcoholic beverages. Among those implicated in the scandal was the president…

AS GUINEA’S INTERNAL POLITICS HEATED UP AND RELATIONS WORSENED with neighboring Liberia and war-torn Sierra Leone, the government grew even more hostile toward the independent media. Nevertheless, Guinea boasts a lively private press that emerged, along with multiparty democracy, in the early 1990s. Guinean journalists faced harassment, abusive detention, and even exile in reprisal for…

A YEAR AND A HALF AFTER THE END OF PRESIDENT SUHARTO’S authoritarian rule, the most significant reform in Indonesia remains the emergence of a largely unshackled press. With hundreds of islands and a large, fragmented population, the press plays a crucial role in allowing Indonesians to debate their future and in calming tensions that arise…

THE EXPLOSION OF VIOLENCE THAT BEGAN IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES on September 29 has been unsparing of journalists, reinforcing the West Bank and Gaza Strip’s reputation as among the world’s most hazardous beats. Reasons why included the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Israeli security forces, and militant Jewish settlers. While no conclusive evidence exists that the…

SOLDIERS UNDER THE COMMAND OF ROBERT GUEI, the retired general who seized power from an elected government on Christmas Eve, 1999, terrorized Côte d’Ivoire during their 10 months in power. As part of a general pattern of human rights abuses, they raided newsrooms at will, seized reporters’ equipment, banned news organizations, and forced journalists to…

LEBANESE JOURNALISTS HAVE BEEN NOTED FOR THEIR FREEWHEELING STYLE, but the freedom and independence that characterized Lebanon’s media before the 15-year civil war have yet to return, for reasons that include censorship, self-censorship, archaic media laws, and occasional state intimidation. Nevertheless, an important taboo was breached in March, before Israel’s anticipated withdrawal from south Lebanon,…

THREE YEARS SINCE HIS NATIONAL PATRIOTIC PARTY (NPP) came to power after multiparty elections ended a brutal, eight-year civil war, Liberian president Charles Taylor has become one of Africa’s fiercest enemies of the press. On March 15, for example, Taylor’s government shut down the independent station Star Radio and suspended the Catholic Church-owned Radio Veritas.…

IN A WATERSHED YEAR FOR MEXICAN DEMOCRACY, the dissolution of ties between much of the media and the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) helped foster a more professional and competitive press in 2000. The election of National Action Party (PAN) candidate Vicente Fox to the presidency on July 2 ended the PRI’s 71-year hold on…

CENSORSHIP, PROFESSIONAL BANNINGS, AND CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS were among the official acts that eroded press freedom in Morocco in 2000, reversing gains seen in the final two years of the late King Hassan II’s reign, and following the 1999 coronation of his son, the liberal-minded King Muhammed VI. In December, the government permanently banned the weekly…