Asia

New York, March 11, 2010—A state official responsible for media regulation said Wednesday the government should require Chinese journalists to obtain official training to report the news, according to local and international news reports. Domestic journalists already need government-issued identity cards to work in China.  

What can we do to help liberate our colleagues? French journalists have been struggling with this dilemma since December 30, when two reporters of the public service TV channel France 3 and their three Afghan fixers were abducted by a group purportedly linked to the Taliban in the region of Kapisa, in eastern Afghanistan.

Colombo, March 10, 2010—In a meeting with a CPJ delegation today, Sri Lankan Attorney General Mohan Peiris said he was prepared to offer protection to any of the nation’s journalists who return to the country from exile.

Kensuke Nishioka, 42, looked different from the other Japanese journalists I encountered in Tokyo during a February trip. Maybe it was the pink hair. “Don’t believe any journalist who says they’re at risk in Japan,” he declared, shrugging off the time, at age 32, when two members of a nationalist group cornered him in his office, broke his ribs, and injured three others in protest against an article he wrote. (Police arrested and charged the attackers.) Or the following year when the Japanese mafia, the yakuza, kidnapped him for a day and threatened him to stop reporting.

“Some have commented that this event should go down in media history.” So says Zhang Hong (in English translation on The Wall Street Journal’s China blog today), co-author of an unprecedented joint editorial published last week by 13 Chinese newspapers. The editorials, criticizing the hukou system, which registers individuals in their place of birth and limits their ability to find work and education elsewhere, quickly disappeared online.

New York, March 3, 2010—Police in Nepal must immediately investigate Monday’s fatal shooting of publisher and business owner Arun Singhaniya, the second murder of a media executive in the country in a month, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

New York, March 2, 2010—The Afghan government should allow full coverage of terrorist attacks, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today, following reports that intelligence officials had privately issued a ban on live coverage to news outlets on Monday.

Kazuo Hizumi holds his hands up before him, shoulder-width apart. He is demonstrating the size of the blade he kept under his pillow when sleeping at the bureau in his days as a rookie reporter in Osaka in 1987. The journalism community was still reeling from a shooting attack on Asahi Shimbun’s Osaka bureau the month before, which had left one writer injured and another, Tomohiro Kojiri, killed. No one was prosecuted for that murder and the statute of limitations for initiating legal proceedings has passed. 

On the run for more than a calendar year from court-ordered arrest warrants, Osmeña Montañer and Estrella Sabay, the alleged masterminds in the 2005 murder of Philippine investigative journalist Marlene Garcia-Esperat, at left, are now out of hiding and back at work as senior Department of Agriculture finance officials, according to recent reports in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.