Posts tagged press freedom
It’s a fairly basic constitutional issue for the press, whether or not there is a reporter’s privilege. It’s something a lot of people outside the press don’t really understand, don’t really care about. I think the basic issue is whether you can have a democracy without aggressive investigative reporting and I don’t believe you can. So that’s why I’m fighting it.
James Risen, reporter, New York Times, in a talk at the National Press Club. ‘Reporter’s Privilege’ Under Fire From Obama Administration Amid Broader War On Leaks.
Background: The Obama Justice Department continues its attempts to force Risen to testify against CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling by arguing that Reporters’ Privilege does not exist when the information revealed is considered illegal.
In this case, the CIA’s Sterling is charged with leaking classified information about a plot against the Iranian government that Risen then used in his book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.
Via the Huffington Post:
While the Obama administration hasn’t prosecuted those responsible for torture during the Bush years, it is taking a strong stand against a former official believed to have supplied information to the media about use of torture and other controversial tactics during the previous administration.
In January, the Justice Department charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou with disclosing classified information to the media; The FBI claims to have evidence linking him to a 2008 New York Times story detailing the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.
In another notable case, the DOJ charged Thomas Drake under the Espionage Act, claiming the former National Security Agency official provided classified information of gross NSA mismanagement to a Baltimore Sun reporter. The government’s case collapsed in 2011 and Drake pleaded guilty only to a misdemeanor.
The crackdown hasn’t gone unnoticed among reporters, with tension recently spilling out into the White House briefing room after the administration praised Anthony Shadid and Marie Colvin, journalists who died while covering the bloody conflict in Syria.
Jake Tapper, the senior White House correspondent for ABC News, asked White House Press Secretary Jay Carney how public support of those journalists’ work “square[s] with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistleblowers to court.”
“There just seems to be a disconnect here,” Tapper added. “You want aggressive journalism abroad; you just don’t want it in the United States.”
Iranian Cartoonist Draws Politician, Sentenced to 25 Lashes
Via the Guardian:
An Iranian cartoonist has been sentenced to 25 lashes for a caricature of a local MP, the semi-official Ilna news agency has reported.
Ahmad Lotfi Ashtiani, MP for Arak, took offence to a cartoon published in Nameye Amir, a city newspaper in Arak.
The cartoonist, Mahmoud Shokraye, depicted Ashtiani in a football stadium, dressed as a footballer, with a congratulatory letter in one hand and his foot resting on the ball.
Iranian politicians, including Ashtiani, have been recently criticised for interferring in the country’s sports…
…Shokraye was subsequently sued by the MP for having insulted him. A court in Markazi province, of which Arak is the capital, sentenced the cartoonist to 25 lashes – an unprecedented punishment for an Iranian cartoonist.
More Journalists Murdered In Mexico
Via the Los Angeles Times:
MEXICO CITY — Two missing news photographers were found dead Thursday in southeastern Mexico, officials said, marking a grim week for journalists in the violence-plagued state of Veracruz after the weekend killing of a Mexican magazine correspondent.
The photographers, identified as Gabriel Huge and Guillermo Luna, were found dismembered and bearing signs of torture in a housing complex in Boca del Rio, a suburb of the port city of Veracruz.
Two other bodies found in the same place have not been identified, state spokeswoman Sandra Garcia said. But some Mexican news reports said one of the other victims was a journalist who worked for a newspaper called Diario AZ…
…The deaths come less than a week after correspondent Regina Martinez was found strangled and beaten to death in Xalapa, the state capital, where she lived and covered organized crime and corruption for the Proceso newsweekly magazine.
Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of access to information are vital whether you’re a credentialed journalist, a protester or a bystander with a camera. The First Amendment’s protections must extend to everyone.
Police have arrested dozens of journalists and activists simply for attempting to document political protests in public spaces. We are calling on the Justice Department to address this widespread abuse and protect everyone’s right to record.
Open letter in petition form via the Free Press to US Attorney General Eric Holder.
If interested, the petition can be signed here.
What are the top ten most censored countries? According to new analysis by the Committe to Protect Journalists, they are:
- Eritrea
- North Korea
- Syria
- Iran
- Equatorial Guinea
- Uzbekistan
- Burma
- Saudi Arabia
- Cuba
- Belarus
Happy World Press Freedom Day….
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 19, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The FJP wishes all a happy and safe World Press Freedom Day.
Press Freedom: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Via the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas:
Less than 15 percent of the world’s population lives in a country with a full free press — the lowest level in more than a decade, according to Freedom House’s new report, Freedom of the Press 2012, released Tuesday, May 1. The global press freedom rankings were released to coincide with the May 3 celebration of World Press Freedom Day.
In general, the report found that, for the first time in eight years, worldwide media freedom did not decline overall. Still, of the 197 countries and territories examined, only 33.5 percent (66) were rated as “free.” The number of “partly free” countries increased to 72 (36.5 percent), and 59 (30 percent) were rated “not free.” Most of the world’s population (45 percent) lives in a country with a “partly free” press, the report showed. The rankings are based on the level of freedom in three categories: legal, political, and economic.
While the rest of the world saw no real decline in press freedom — and even improved in the Arab world — in the Americas, press freedom deteriorated in 2011, the report said. Both Chile and Guyana moved from “free” to “partly free,” and Ecuador’s overall numeric score declined significantly. Press freedom remained restricted in Venezuela and Cuba, and extreme danger for journalists in Mexico also hurt that country’s press freedom scores — both Mexico and Honduras remained listed as “not free” (see these Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas maps on press attacks in Mexico and Central America) While the United States continues to have one of the freer presses in the region, it, too, saw a slight decline because of arrests and harassment of journalists covering the Occupy movement.
As members of the nonfiction filmmaking community, we want to express our outrage over the ongoing harassment of our colleague Laura Poitras by the US government and the Department of Homeland Security. We call on the Obama administration to investigate this abuse of power and to bring an end to this persistent violation of America’s bedrock principle of a free press.
Laura Poitras is one of America’s most important nonfiction filmmakers, the recipient of the 2011 Cinema Eye Honor for Outstanding Achievement in Direction for her landmark film, The Oath, and the chair of our Filmmaker Advisory Board. She was nominated for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar and twice has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for her work. Her long list of credits, awards and impeccable credentials would be easy for anyone to verify.
Over the course of the last several years, as Laura has been working to chronicle the post-9/11 world and the effect of American policies here and abroad, she has been repeatedly harassed, detained, interrogated and has had her cameras and computers seized by Homeland Security officials as she attempts to re-enter her home country.
Not once in more than three dozen detentions and interrogations has Homeland Security found anything to justify this chronic abuse of power.
Within the last week, as Laura was returning from a recent trip abroad, she was once again detained. This time, however, she was also threatened with being handcuffed for attempting to take notes during her interrogation.
Nonfiction filmmakers perform a vital role in a democratic society, serving as observers and investigators of the world around us. It is unacceptable for any American nonfiction filmmaker or journalist to be treated in this manner. They must be able to return to their own country without fear of arrest or fear that their work product will be seized, solely because they are investigating or chronicling subject matter that may be sensitive or controversial.
We ask other members of the nonfiction film and journalism communities to protest this affront to a free press and we reiterate our call on the Obama administration to end these draconian and un-American policies once and for all.
An open letter to the Obama administration from Cinema Eye, an organization that holds the annual Cinema Eye Honors documentary awards. To date, over 60 filmmakers have signed the letter including 10 Academy Award winners.
For background on what’s been happening to Poitras, see Glenn Greenwald’s article in Salon.
While the Bush administration treated whistleblowers unmercifully, the Obama administration has been far worse. It is actually prosecuting them, and doing so under the Espionage Act — one of the most serious charges that can be leveled against an American. The Espionage Act is an archaic World War I-era law meant to go after spies, not whistleblowers. Strangely, using it to target the media and sources is the brainchild of neo-conservative Gabriel Schoenfeld, who would have sources who disclose information to reporters, journalists who then write about it for newspapers, the newspapers that publish the information and the publisher itself all be held criminally liable.
Everyone wants to know why Obama, with his pledge to “protect whistleblowers,” would do this. After all, Obama’s transition agenda recognized that “[o]ften the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled.” That’s not just a broken promise, it’s a complete reversal.
Jesselyn Raddack, Salon. Obama Targets Journalists.
Related: See Glenn Greenwald — also from Salon — from this past weekend.
In an article about Laura Poitras, an Oscar-and Emmy-nominated documentarian, he writes that she is detained for questioning — and has her analog and digital belongings (think footage, notes, etc) investigated — “virtually every time” she enters the United States.
Via Greenwald:
[Poitras] has had her laptop, camera and cellphone seized, and not returned for weeks, with the contents presumably copied. On several occasions, her reporter’s notebooks were seized and their contents copied, even as she objected that doing so would invade her journalist-source relationship. Her credit cards and receipts have been copied on numerous occasions. In many instances, DHS agents also detain and interrogate her in the foreign airport before her return, on one trip telling her that she would be barred from boarding her flight back home, only to let her board at the last minute. When she arrived at JFK Airport on Thanksgiving weekend of 2010, she was told by one DHS agent — after she asserted her privileges as a journalist to refuse to answer questions about the individuals with whom she met on her trip — that he “finds it very suspicious that you’re not willing to help your country by answering our questions.” They sometimes keep her detained for three to four hours (all while telling her that she will be released more quickly if she answers all their questions and consents to full searches).
Index on Censorship Opens Archives
For forty years England’s Index on Censorship has published journalists, authors, artists and activists from around the world about threats to freedom of expression.
To celebrate its 40th anniversary, Index is opening up its archives to provide free access to articles and essays written over the years by the likes of Aung San Suu Kyi , Nadine Gordimer, Kurt Vonnegut, Ai Weiwei, Salman Rushdie, Vaclav Havel and a host of eminent others.
Editors’ picks and access to the complete archive is here.
Free access to the Index archive is available for the next 40 days.
A policeman strikes AFP photojournalist Patricia Melo during the Portuguese general strike in Lisbon March 22, 2012. Portugal faces a general strike by workers angered by austerity measures imposed as a condition of a 78-billion euro bailout last year but doubts remain as to whether Thursday’s stoppage will receive widespread support. REUTERS/Hugo Correia.
“Your First Amendment rights can be terminated.” Chicago police officers arrest members of the local media outside a hospital Sunday evening. [WMAQ-TV]
FJP: Chicago. Where arresting journalists happens.
Killing Reporters Now a Federal Offense in Mexico
The Mexican senate passed a bill yesterday that makes killing reporters — and any infringement on freedom of information — a federal offense. As we noted earlier, 40 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2006 with very little follow through in police investigations.
The hope is that elevating such crimes to the federal level will lead to better investigations and prosecutions. The belief being that there’s less corruption at that level.
Via Reporters Without Borders:
The federal senate’s 95 members yesterday unanimously passed an amendment to article 73 of the constitution allowing the federal courts and investigators to deal with crimes that threaten the work of journalists and freedom of information. The amendment was already approved by the lower house last November.
The amendment says: “The federal authorities will also be able to try crimes under state jurisdiction when they are linked to federal crimes or when they are crimes against journalists, persons or installations that affect, limit or impinge on the right to information or the freedoms of expression and publication.”
Mexico is ranked 149 out of 179 countries on Reporters Without Borders annual press freedom index.
The Battle Over Online Freedom Continues
The clash between citizens and governments over online freedom of expression is growing, according to a new report by Reporters Without Borders.
Called Beset by Online Surveillance and Content Filtering, Netizens Fight On, the study explores how both authoritarian and democratic governments attempt to control online activity. To do so, the authors label a number of countries such as Syria, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Bahrain, Iran and Turkmenistan among others as “Enemies of the Internet”; and say countries such as Australia, France, Egypt, Eritrea and India among others are “Countries Under Surveillance.”
Through this lens, the report’s authors declare, “More than ever before, online freedom of expression is now a major foreign and domestic policy issue,” and outline how:
- Internet and mobile phone shutdowns are occurring more frequently
- Content filtering is increasing
- Content removal is increasing
- Pressure on Internet Service Providers and Web site owners to police content is increasing
- Surveillance is more effective and more intrusive
- Government propaganda is increasing
- Cyber attacks are increasing
- Arrests, raids and roundups are increasing
While not a pretty picture for online freedoms the report does include examples of how citizens are fighting back. For example:
In order to combat increasingly competent censors, self-styled “hacktivists” have been giving technical assistance to vulnerable netizens to help them share information in the face of pervasive censorship. The campaigns on behalf of the Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad and Syria’s Razan Ghazzawi have transcended international borders. The hashtag #OpSyria, started by Telecomix – a decentralised network of net activists committed to freedom of expression – has allowed Syrians to broadcast videos of the crackdown.
An overview of the report can be found here. The full report is available here (PDF).
Image: Wordcloud of Beset by Online Surveillance and Content Filtering, Netizens Fight On. Created with Wordle.
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