2016

Attacks on the Press 2016 Edition | Gender and Media Freedom Worldwide Introduction: Breaking the Silence by Joel Simon Some of the information we need to make sense of a complex world is missing. Read More › The Sadness of May the 25th by Jineth Bedoya Lima A Colombian journalist recounts the rape that led…

I am a hugger. Maybe it’s my Texas heritage, but the value of wrapping people in a warm embrace at the right time has stayed with me, like a hint of twang, in the 40 years since I left the state. And hugs have been just the right thing many times during the decades that…

In October 2015, when I solicited Chinese readers’ views on gender issues in journalism, one comment spoke volumes about the state of the debate in China: “Women can take advantage of their looks and feminine traits to attract well-known and powerful men to accept their interviews.”

Heba Alshibani did not set out to become a journalist. She had expected to become an academic, as many members of her Libyan family had before the February 2011 uprising that led to the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi. But when the violence did not abate after Qaddafi’s overthrow, Alshibani witnessed events that she felt compelled…

It feels strange to be writing about friends in jail. You wonder what kind of a friend you are–free to breathe the air, to walk the streets, to continue to work, while your friends cannot. Why do you deserve this privilege?

“When I cried, he slapped me hard and put his hand over my mouth.” That is how a 12-year-old girl in the Central African Republic described an episode in which a man found her hiding in the bathroom of her home in the wee hours of August 2, 2015, dragged her outside, and raped her,…

Late on the evening of September 16, 2000, 31-year-old Ukrainian investigative journalist Georgy Gongadze left a colleague’s house in Kiev and headed home to where his wife and young daughters awaited him. He never made it.

Inside a four-room apartment in Antakya, Turkey, a town on the border with Syria, more than a dozen men sat on mattresses on the floor. It was just past 10 p.m. and the soldiers, all men in the Free Syrian Army, the rebel opposition group in Syria, were busy coordinating their next trip into the…

New York, April 26, 2016 — The Committee to Protect Journalists strongly condemns an Iranian court’s sentencing of three reformist journalists. Tehran’s Revolutionary Court sentenced the three to between five and 10 years in prison on charges of “acting against national security,” according to press reports.

CPJ releases annual assessment of press freedom worldwide