Ten years ago I joined the staff of the Committee to Protect Journalists to launch the Journalist Assistance program, an initiative, as CPJ board member Gene Roberts describes, developed to establish a standing direct response mechanism for journalists facing threats and attacks. When I left the position in 2009, many people asked me what case stood out the most.
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In 2007, my colleague Karen Phillips suggested we do something to mark World Refugee Day. Initially planning to publish a brief statement, I set about reviewing our data for background, checking in with older journalist cases about their current situation and looking broadly for trends to highlight. As the number of cases began counting into the hundreds, it became clear that what we had was a new indicator of press freedom conditions. Today, we're marking our fifth year of publishing the CPJ survey of journalists in exile, which is based on 10 years of data on 649 cases.
Former dictator Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier is facing some blowback after breezing into Haiti last Sunday following a 25-year absence. On Wednesday, prominent Haitian journalist and former UN spokesperson Michele Montas joined three others in filing criminal complaints against the former dictator who returned to the country Sunday, just days after the anniversary of last year's devastating earthquake.
One year after the devastating January 12, 2010, earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and crippled Haiti's media infrastructure, the country's media have made significant strides toward recovery even as they face enormous ongoing challenges.
He's young,
unemployed and carries himself with the innocence of a man who hasn't spent
much time outside his own village. But Egyptian blogger Tamer
Mabrouk is the real deal. Appearing at an international media conference in Bonn, Mabrouk's description of chemical dumping into a
brackish lagoon on the northern Nile Delta near the Mediterranean Sea was
punctuated by photos of unmistakable filth. He won over the audience when, in
response to a question on how one travels with sensitive material, Tamer deftly
removed a memory card secreted in an electronic device and held it in the air.
That, he said, is where he had carried documents for this trip.
I arrived in New York in April 2003. It was cold.The streets of Brooklyn seemed too wide to me and the buildings huge. The number 3 train would pass over and over again like a luminous monster. From the window of my apartment, I would watch this train go by. I would also watch people walk without speaking to one another. My days were monotonous and nightmares invaded my nights. I recalled vividly how in Haiti my family and I were threatened with death several times, culminating in an evening when unidentified gunmen targeted my house. In the days after that, they assaulted and attacked other journalists working for the same media outlet as me. Such heinous acts haunted my dreams.
I went into exile.
Three months after the January 12 earthquake, Haiti’s oldest newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, has resumed daily publication. The April 6 issue not only signaled the resumption of daily publication, it marked a return to some normality, said Frantz Duval, the daily’s new editor-in-chief.
Of the 12 radio stations in the city Leogane, south of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, only five are back on the air more than two months after the earthquake. Most stations were seriously damaged and several broadcasters are struggling to restore transmission, the head of the Leogane Press Association (APL), Julmane Saint Fort, told CPJ. Saint Fort said that six radio stations were completely destroyed and five severely damaged while the rest suffered some minor material harm.
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