Posts tagged press freedom
Now Showing: Reportero
Last summer we interviewed Bernardo Ruiz, the director of Reportero, a documentary that follows the crime and drug war reporting of a Tijuana-based newsweekly called Zeta.
The hour-long film gets its PBS premiere on POV this Monday January 7.
Via POV:
In Mexico, more than 50 journalists have been slain or have vanished since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderón came to power and launched a government offensive against the country’s powerful drug cartels and organized crime. As the drug war intensifies and the risks to journalists become greater, will the free press be silenced?
For our interviews with Bernardo, see here.
More important, tune in to POV Monday. A full description of the film is here and includes a background on Mexican press freedom over the last 25 years.
Twelve Egyptian newspapers Tuesday refused to publish and five TV stations have suspended their broadcasts in protest of the new Islamist-drawn constitution, as tens of thousands prepare for an anti-Mursi rally outside the presidential palace. The self-imposed media blackout comes one day after several Egyptian newspapers, including Al Watan and Al-Masry Al-Youm, carried a front page image showing the silhouette of a reporter in shackles behind bars under the headline: ‘A constitution that cancels rights and shackles freedoms. No to dictatorship.’
Egypt’s media on strike ahead of anti-Mursi rally | Al Akhbar English (via theamericanbear)
Background (via CNN):
Newspapers and television stations known for criticizing President Mohamed Morsy are falling silent Tuesday and Wednesday to protest the country’s new draft constitution and an edict the head of state issued nearly two weeks ago to expand his powers.
As Egyptians count down to a public referendum on the draft constitution to be held in less than two weeks, some newspapers disappeared from news stands Tuesday. Others printed the same protest picture of the press symbolically behind bars with the headline, “No to Dictatorship.”
Article 48 of the draft constitution ties media freedom to the framework of society and national security, which many Egyptian journalists see as vague terminology.
More: See here for a Q&A on what’s driving Egypt’s unrest.
Timeline: One Year in the Debate Over Press Freedom
One year ago today I published a blog post entitled “Why I’m Tracking Journalist Arrests at Occupy Protests.” The next day, police raided New York City’s Zuccotti Park, where they arrested 12 journalists and blocked many others from documenting the raid. Here is a look back at the year in journalist arrests and debates over press freedom in the digital age.
Today, on behalf of El Faro, I receive the Anna Politkovskaya award with great pride. However, I think that such recognition should also be given to other journalists in the Central American region who are going through really alarming situations.
Nowadays, 75% of murdered journalists do not die in war zones. Instead, they are being killed deliberately only to be silenced. In fact, Mexico and Honduras are the most dangerous countries in the world to practice journalism.
Recently, an NGO passed along a questionnaire to several local journalists in Mexico and asked what could international organizations do to support their work. Several responded that they wanted a firearm, and one of them explained: “I want a gun so they cannot catch me alive.”
Carlos Dada, the news director of Central American publication El Faro, in his acceptance speech (in Spanish) of the 2012 Anna Politkovskaya Award honoring courageous investigative reporting.
Background: Dada and his colleagues operate under constant and very real threats in one of the most hazardous regions of the world for independent journalists. El Faro was also awarded the 2012 WOLA Human Rights Award last month, and the Columbia School of Journalism’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize back in 2011.
(via fjp-latinamerica)
Philippines Suspends Internet Law
The Philippine Supreme Court suspended a far reaching Internet law that went into effect October 3. The law passed new restrictions on online behavior and speech in an attempt to address child pornography, identity theft and other computer related crime.
However, journalists and free speech activists protested that the libel provisions bundled into the law would curtail free speech.
Via ABC Radio Australia:
However one provision that metes out heavy jail terms for online libel, tougher than for defamation in the traditional media, has caused an uproar.
Equally controversial is a provision that allows the government to shut down websites and monitor online activities, such as video conversations and instant messaging, without a court order.
Human rights groups, media organisations and netizens have voiced their outrage at the law, with some saying it echoes the curbs on freedoms imposed by dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s.
Philippine social media has been alight with protests, while hackers have attacked government websites and petitions have been filed with the Supreme Court calling for it to overturn the law.
Note that the law has been suspended, not struck down. This gives the government time to amend it.
Image: A protester in Manila rallies against a cyber-crime law in front of the Supreme Court building. By Noel Celis, AFP/Getty Images via the Los Angeles Times.
I want to expose the crimes that the regime is carrying out… I will film until my last breath.
Meanwhile, In Iran
Two journalists begin their prison sentences.
Via the Committee to Protect Journalists:
Authorities summoned Shiva Nazar Ahari, a blogger and founding member of the Committee of Human Rights Reporters (CHRR), on Saturday to begin serving her prison sentence in the women’s ward of Tehran’s Evin Prison, according to CHRR. In 2010, Nazar Ahari was sentenced to six years in prison on charges of moharebeh, or “waging war against God,” “propagating against the regime,” and “acting against national security” for reporting on political gatherings, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. In January 2011, an appeals court reduced her sentence to four years in prison and 74 lashes, news reports said…
…In the other case, Zhila Bani Yaghoub, a former editor of the banned reformist daily Sarmayeh, began serving a one-year prison term on September 2 in Evin Prison’s women’s ward, according to news reports. She was sentenced in 2010 to a year in prison on anti-state charges and banned from practicing journalism for 30 years, news reports said.
Bani Yaghoub was arrested in June 2009 with her husband, Bahman Ahmadi Amouee, who is also a journalist, news reports said. Amouee, who is serving a five-year sentence, was transferred out of Evin Prison and sent to Rajaee Shahr Prison earlier this year, according to news reports.
Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders reports that the country is disrupting Internet access in major cities in the lead up to the Islamic Revolution’s 31st anniversary, and Google Mail, specifically, has been blocked.
Also, Gizmodo reports that with the Iranian currency tanking, SMS messages that use words like “dollar” are being blocked.
Indian Cartoonist Arrested on Sedition Charges
Via the Wall Street Journal:
Cartoonist and free speech activist Aseem Trivedi was set to pick up an award for his hard-hitting cartoons in Washington D.C. this week. But his trip was abruptly canceled after a Mumbai court found the same cartoons “offensive” and issued a warrant for his detention.
“My cartoons did nothing but tell the truth,” Mr. Trivedi told India Real Time on Friday after he heard of the court order. He voluntarily surrendered to police on Saturday and has been unreachable since.A local court accused Mr. Trivedi of sedition over cartoons that appear to mock the Indian state. The cartoons were on display at an anti-corruption rally last December in Mumbai.
I think we have to make clear to him and to the American people that we’re not going to accept this kind of behavior.
Leon Panetta, US Defense Secretary, on the publishing of No Easy Day, an account by a retired Navy Sea involved in the mission that killed Osama Bin Laden.
Written under the pseudonym Mark Owen, it’s been reported that the author is Matt Bissonnette. ABC News, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on SEAL book: “We’re not going to accept this kind of behavior”
Map: Abducted journalists in Mexico since 2003
Artículo 19 has just released its latest data on the state of the protection of journalists in Mexico with regard to abductions (a total of 13 since 2003).
This time, a visual representation of the country shows the specific regions where the journalists vanished. The state of Michoacán, for instance, leads with 4 abductions. Rings a bell?
Bonus: Artículo 19’s previous release on attacks to Mexican media.
Image: 13 Disappeared journalists in Mexico since 2003, via Artículo 19. Select to embiggen.
CPJ: Venezuela’s private media wither under Chávez assault
The CPJ just released a special report on how Venezuela has used a combination of legal and illegal maneuvers to break down the country’s independent, private media, including non traditional outlets, such as websites.
According to the New York based NGO, Hugo Chavez desire to control what is published in the country has extended to the Internet. Under current legislation, for example, government officials can order Internet Service Providers to restrict websites that violate controls.
From CPJ’s report:… It curbs electronic media content according to the time of the day, with adult content reserved for shows after midnight, including violent or sexual content and soap operas—and news images of violence.
Chavez efforts to put more controls on what news outlets can publish is more a result of the President desire to curb freedom of expression and threat critics of the regime, than a candid concern about the quality of the content audiences in Venezuela are being exposed to.
FJP: El Universal and El Nacional newspapers have lost all government advertsising, another measure to put pressure on independent news outlets.
Reuters: Navy SEAL in “material breach” of non-disclosure agreements with Osama bin Laden book
Exclusive: Former Navy SEAL in “material breach” of non-disclousre agreements with Osama bin Laden book, according to the Pentagon’s top attorney in a letter obtained by Reuters.
The Pentagon says it is considering “all remedies legally available” against the former Navy SEAL and all those acting in concert with him. The Pentagon says further public dissemination of the book “will aggravate your breach and violation of your agreements.”
Syrian Documentarian Missing
Via Screen Daily:
Syrian film producer and founder of the pan-Arab DOX BOX Film Festival Orwa Nyrabia is believed to have been arrested by Syrian authorities.
Nyrabia, 34, disappeared on Thursday evening (Aug 23) at Damascus airport where he was due to have boarded a flight for Cairo.
“According to Egyptian Airlines, he did not board the plane, which indicates that he was arrested by the Syrian authorities at the airport,” his family said in a statement.
Nyrabia, who studied film production in France, is the co-founder of Damascus-based production company Proaction Film and the documentary-focused DOX BOX Film Festival alongside Diana El-Jeiroudi.
Here are some of Lawrence Wright’s comments on the disappearance, via the New Yorker:
I had the good fortune at the time to meet Orwa Nyrabia (also transcribed Nairabiya). He is a big, ironic, bold spirit, whose jolly nature seemed perversely at odds with the grimly repressive atmosphere inside that country…
…Orwa was one man who quietly stood against the Syrian police state. He was not a revolutionary but he was an independent filmmaker, which inevitably placed him in jeopardy. In this brutalized society, he was also a person who still held onto joy and hope, qualities that are hunted down in Syria by forces dedicated to suffocating the best in human nature…
…So many have died in Syria already—more than thirty thousand, according to U.N. figures. More than two hundred thousand refugees have fled into neighboring countries. I wish that Orwa were among them. Instead, he is likely one of the tens of thousands who have been detained by the regime—including four hundred children who were tortured, according to UNICEF.
In the video above, Lebanese filmmaker Mahmoud Kaabour calls out the Syrian government, saying, “We will not sit down for the loss of a person like Orwa.”
“She is not a war journalist, but rather a human journalist.” — Hiroshi Yamamoto on his daughter Mika who was shot and killed earlier this week while covering the Syrian war in Aleppo.
Via Reporters Without Borders:
Yamamoto was the fifth foreign journalist to be killed since the start of the war in Syria, following Gilles Jacquier, a French reporter for France 2, on 11 January 2012 in Homs; French photographer Rémy Ochlik and Marie Colvin, a US reporter for the Sunday Times, on 22 February 2012 in Bab Amru, and Ali Chaabane, a Lebanese journalist working for Lebanon’s Al-Jadeed TV, on 9 April 2012…
…Around 30 Syrian journalists and citizen-journalists have also been killed since the start of the war.
The New York Times is carrying the last footage filmed by Yamamoto, as well as a video from her husband about her death.
Image: A video still of Mika Yamamoto who died of wounds sustained in Aleppo on Tuesday. Via ABC News.
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