A total of 36 journalists were killed for their work in 2003, a sharp rise from 2002, when the number stood at 19. Thirteen journalists were killed covering the war in Iraq, by far the most dangerous beat of the year.

Of the journalists who died in Iraq, at least four were killed by U.S. fire, most notably in the April 8 shelling of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel and the air strike that hit the Baghdad bureau of the Qatar-based channel Al-Jazeera that same day.

In a massive crackdown on the independent media in March and April 2003, Cuban officials jailed 29 journalists—about one-third of the island’s independent press corps—and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from 14 to 27 years.

In Togo, authorities accused three independent journalists of trying to send photographs of alleged election disturbances to Web sites abroad. In mid-June, the trio was arrested and eventually charged with "attempting to publish false information." All three were held for more than a month, and two were tortured while in custody.

In October, the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea released an extensive report, based primarily on testimony from defectors, claiming that up to 200,000 political prisoners are currently detained in North Korea’s extensive gulag system. Offenses include reading a foreign newspaper and "not taking proper care of" a newspaper containing a photo of Kim Jong Il.

On October 9, 2003, two unidentified assailants stabbed to death Tolyatinskoye Obozreniye Editor-in-Chief Aleksei Sidorov in the Russian city of Togliatti. He was the second editor-in-chief of the independent daily to be murdered in 18 months.

In Chile, the Sixth Chamber of the Santiago Appeals Court overturned in early 2003 the conviction of TV commentator Eduardo Yáñez on charges of "disrespect." Yáñez faced up to five years in jail when he was prosecuted for calling the country’s judiciary "immoral, cowardly, and corrupt" for not compensating a woman who had been wrongly imprisoned. The appeals court ruled that "even though the expressions voiced by Yáñez can be qualified as excessive, vulgar, or ignorant, they do not constitute the crime of disrespect."

Internet service providers and cybercafé owners are held legally responsible in Vietnam if their customers access banned information online. A Culture and Information Ministry official explained, "Restaurant owners must guarantee the food is free from harmful substances. Therefore it’s the same with Internet cafe owners. They are not allowed to provide young people with poisonous substances."

With 39 journalists in prison in 2003, China was the leading jailer of journalists for the fifth year in a row. As of midnight on December 31, 2003, there were 136 imprisoned journalists worldwide.

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in the United States revoked the credentials of two reporters from the Qatar-based news channel Al-Jazeera, purportedly to reduce the number of journalists on the stock exchange floor for security reasons and to give priority to reporters from financial networks. While one NYSE spokesman denied that the move was related to Al-Jazeera’s coverage in Iraq, another spokesman said the station was not a "responsible" news outlet, hinting that its war coverage may have factored into the decision to revoke the journalists’ accreditation. Their credentials were restored on April 29.

The government of Sudan suspended Al-Sahafa, one of the country’s most popular dailies, for three days because it ran an advertisement for Ethiopian Airlines that mentioned the wine served on its flights. The government took issue with the newspaper for advertising alcohol, which is banned in Sudan.

Tajikistan’s press is notoriously nervous about reporting on anything that could anger the government. As a result, the media allowed President Imomali Rakhmonov to bask in two days of constant television coverage of his participation in a conference on potato farming, while a typhoid outbreak in the capital went unreported for several weeks.

In Morocco, a group of unidentified men physically assaulted a reporter after he wrote an article alleging that a provincial governor had granted a concession for the sale of alcohol to Morocco’s royal financial and economics adviser. The assailants beat the reporter and stripped him of his pants, telling him never to write about the governor again.

On October 20, 2003, police in Somalia detained an editor for nine hours and accused him of publishing information that was "not good for the government."

In Iran, Canadian-Iranian journalist Zahra Kazemi died in a hospital after being held in government custody for nearly two weeks. The official Iranian news agency, IRNA, reported that court officials called Kazemi’s death a "quasi-intentional murder" and ordered her two interrogators, who were not identified, detained.

In announcing the repressive new Mass Media Law as part of his continuing crackdown on independent journalists, President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus noted that he was "deeply convinced" that all journalism should be state-run.