News that a judge in France
froze the private bank accounts of Gabon's President Omar Bongo was all over the international media but barely a word appeared in the national press.
Committee to Protect Journalists
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February 2009 Archives
Yesterday's arrest of Nadesapillai
Vithyatharan in a suburb of Colombo was a continuation of the killing, jailing,
harassing, and intimidating of Sri Lankan journalists--and the feeling is that it if it
hadn't been for the quick response of the international community, Vithyatharan's
situation could have gotten a lot uglier.
"If nobody goes, then somebody
has to go." That, according to his editors at APF News, was the
personal motto of fallen Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai, who
until his tragic death had reported from conflict zones around the
world. That journalistic drive put Nagai in the line of fire during Burma 's
2007 Saffron Revolution, when he was shot and killed by a soldier while
filming a government crackdown on street demonstrations in the old
capital of Rangoon
A week ago today, CPJ sent a letter
of concern to President Blaise
Compaoré of Burkina Faso urging his government to investigate a series
of death threats sent in the past year or so via e-mail to independent
journalists there. Using Yahoo
"The government has barred independent
journalists from travelling to the war zone"--the description of the Sri Lankan
conflict has been among the most often-repeated for almost two years. News outlets
want the latest pictures of the war in
This week in the
We received good news this morning from
Filmmaker Robyn Kriel, 25, from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, spoke to PBS' Wide Angle last week about the risks she took reporting from Zimbabwe in the lead-up to the country's 2008 presidential election. Last April, CPJ closely followed the case of Kriel's mother, Margaret Kriel, who was imprisoned for four days on accusations of "practicing journalism without accreditation." You can listen to the interview here.
Exiled Cuban journalist Alejandro Gonzalez Raga spoke to reporters in Madrid on Monday as part of CPJ's launch of our book, Attacks on the Press. He talked about the brutality of life in a Cuban prison, the torture he and other journalists who were jailed for their writing endured. Here are his remarks, in Spanish:
Ever since Radio Kalima staffers launched their new station
on January 26
There is an often-repeated phrase among journalists: No
story is worth dying for, we say. But journalists are dying in every region of
the world. In
The border city of Tijuana, where drug-related violence left almost a thousand people dead in 2008, has had a
strong military presence since the government of President Felipe Calderón
deployed the Mexican army to fight powerful drug cartels. It can be
felt in the streets. While we were driving to the Zeta offices, where we would
launch our book yesterday, two Humvees packed with heavily armed military personnel
passed us on
The utility company had just cut off the electricity supply to
his house. Darkness and shadows were back in Alejandro Gonzalez Raga's life.
His rented apartment in Madrid--shared with his wife, siblings, and in-laws--was as
devoid of light as the Cuban cells in which he was jailed for five years after
Castro´s "Ofensiva 2" operation in March 2003, also known as the "Black Spring."
Even so, Gonzalez Raga came to the presentation of Attacks on the Press 2008 at the Madrid Press Association.
The utility company had just cut off the electricity supply to his house. Darkness and shadows were back in Alejandro Gonzalez Raga's life. His rented apartment in Madrid--shared with his wife, siblings, and in-laws--was as devoid of light as the Cuban cells in which he was jailed for five years after Castro´s "Ofensiva 2" operation in March 2003, also known as the "Black Spring." Even so, Gonzalez Raga came to the presentation of Attacks on the Press 2008 at the Madrid Press Association.
CPJ's launch yesterday in
On Saturday night, the Writers
Guild of America honored CPJ with the Evelyn F. Burkey award, which recognizes
contributions that have "brought honor and dignity to writers everywhere." CPJ
Chairman Paul Steiger and I accepted the award. As Paul noted in his remarks,
CPJ couldn't do its work without "the encouragement of writers and journalists
around the world." The New York
Times had a nice
blog entry on the event.
There are 125 journalists in jail around the world,
according to the latest CPJ census carried out December 1. That's a slight
decline from the previous year, when we counted 127 journalists in jail. Those
findings are included in Attacks on the
Press, our annual survey, which we released
today.
When Iraqi cameraman Jehad
Ali came to the United States last September to have corrective surgery
for severe injuries he sustained in a December 2005 attack by
gunmen in Baghdad, the plan was to spend two months in Valencia,
California. Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Donald Wiss had offered to waive his fee and
the
From his prison
cell, veteran Chinese journalist Jiang Weiping wrote a poem to his daughter,
Jennifer, which included the lines: "Though the road home has many twists and
turns / Your daddy believes that we will be reunited soon." She was little more
than 10 years old when he was imprisoned in 2000 for reporting on a
high-profile corruption case that rocked northern
Falastiin Iman, a former producer for the independent Somali
broadcaster HornAfrik, was talking by phone on Sunday with the station's
director, Said Tahlil, left. He was upbeat, she said, a mood that is not easy to come
by in Four hostages released this weekend by Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) said at a press conference on Monday that the leftist guerrilla group had declared the Colombian media a "military target," according to Colombian and international news reports. The statement stirred a heated debate among Colombian journalists over coverage of guerrilla groups.
Being a foreign correspondent means living between two worlds. You are an
outsider, a foreigner. But you are also insider, with unprecedented access to
those in power. You become part of the country in which you live, participating
in the culture and developing lasting friendships. And yet you are always apart,
observing, commenting, translating, and explaining.
The recent cancellation of a radio show hosted by prominent Argentine broadcast journalist Nelson Castro, a harsh critic of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's administration, sparked immediate controversy. Electroingeniería, the company that owns the Buenos Aires-based Radio Del Plata, announced on Friday that the news show "Puntos de Vista" (Points of View), which has been on the air for 16 years, will come to an end today, the local press reported.
Fabio Prieto Llorente, one of 21 independent journalists
jailed in Cuba
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