As Internet penetration deepens, largely religiously and socially conservative India is struggling to cope with concerns about controversial web content and its easy accessibility to a vast population, all with little oversight. Local courts have become the launching point for some of the anti-Web offensives.
Amid a raging debate on Internet freedom and censorship in India, members of the government met last week with a clutch of website operators, including representatives of Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. In a meeting scheduled to address a wider plan to leverage social media to empower the government, it’s unclear whether the touchy subject…
Retired Supreme Court Justice Markandey Katju is shaking things up at the Press Council of India, where he was appointed chairman in October. The statutory body, mandated to look at media freedom and address complaints against the print media since 1966, has often been criticized for ineffectiveness, its role limited to admonishing news outlets.
Two photojournalists said they were beaten by police and detained for several hours while they were covering a protest that escalated into a violent clash between youth and government forces in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, on August 19, 2011, international news reports said.
New York, June 27, 2011–The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes news today that police in Mumbai have arrested seven suspects in the June 11 slaying of veteran crime reporter Jyotirmoy Dey. But CPJ is concerned that the alleged mastermind remains at large and that police have not identified a motive in the killing.
In the comfort of my London home, far from the dangers of crime reporting in Mumbai, the news flash on television seemed unreal. Senior journalist Jyotirmoy Dey had been killed, pumped full of five bullets in broad daylight. I thought things like this only happened in Bollywood flicks, and that crime reporters in Mumbai never…