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Committee to Protect Journalists
CPJ Blog
Press Freedom News and Views
2010
Pages: 1 2 or All
Twenty-one years after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, China’s censors are still working to purge public discourse about the tragic events of June 4, 1989. But some Chinese Web users clearly have a healthy appetite for such a debate and are willing to circumvent the government censors.
Firsthand accounts from journalists covering street protests in Bangkok illustrate the severity of the crisis and the danger to the front-line press. At least eight journalists have been shot, two of them fatally, while covering the unrest in the Thai capital, CPJ research shows. On Wednesday, police entered the Buddhist temple Wat Patum, where antigovernment protesters had gathered. The troops opened fire with live ammunition, according to local and foreign media reports. Andrew Buncombe in London-based The Independent picks it up from there:
The Standing Committee of China’s National
People’s Congress adopted a revised
state secrets law on April 29. The changes, which take effect October 1, put
greater onus on media and telecommunications companies to defend state secrets
and cooperate with authorities investigating alleged violations of the legislation.
Chinese commentators point out that while individuals are having to reveal
more and more about themselves online, an official culture of concealment
allows corruption to flourish unreported.
Five years ago today, a gunman strode into the home of muckraking Philippine journalist Marlene Garcia-Esperat, pulled out a .45-caliber pistol, and shot her once in the head. A columnist and radio host on the southern island of Mindanao, Garcia-Esperat had made plenty of enemies while exposing government corruption.
Kensuke Nishioka, 42, looked different from the other Japanese journalists I encountered in
“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.
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 
A polite man in a suit gave investigative reporter Jake Adelstein the message from a leader of one of Japan’s organized crime groups when he was first working on the story back in 2005: “Erase it, or be erased.” Adelstein backed off, but he didn’t stop researching Tadamasa Goto, a thuggish leader of the Japanese mafia, or yakuza. The second time, there was no message. In 2008, it was Adelstein’s sources who informed him his relentless inquiries had crossed a line. Don’t go home, they told him—Adelstein is originally from Missouri—America would not be far enough.
“The e-mail came in at 8.48 p.m.,” Philippine journalist Maria
Ressa told a hushed audience at CPJ’s panel discussion, Press Freedom: On the Frontlines and
Online, this morning at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in
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