Attacks on the Press: Journalism on the World's Front Lines 9781119088424, 9781119107125, 9781119107132, 111910713X

Table of contents :
Attacks on the Press
Contents
Foreword
1. Going It Alone: More Freelancers Means Less Support, Greater Danger
2. Covering War for the First Time-in Syria
3. The Rules of Conflict Reporting Are Changing
4. Broadcasting Murder: Militants Use Media for Deadly Purpose
5. Lack of Media Coverage Compounds Violence in Libya
6. Reporting with Bodyguards on the Paraguayan Border
7. Between Conflict and Stability: Journalists in Pakistan and Mexico Cope with Everyday Threats
8. Conflating Terrorism and Journalism in Ethiopia. 9. We Completely Agree: Egyptian Media in the Era of President El Sisi10. Finding New Ways to Censor Journalists in Turkey
11. Treating the Internet as the Enemy in the Middle East
12. Overzealous British Media Prompt Overzealous Backlash
13. Outdated Secrecy Laws Stifle the Press in South Africa
14. Amid Ebola Outbreak, West African Governments Try to Isolate Media
15. For Cluesto Censorship in Hong Kong, Look to Singapore, Not Beijing
16. Surveillance Forces Journalists to Think and Act Like Spies
17. Two Continents, Two Courts, Two Approaches to Privacy. 18. Journalists Grapple with Increasing Power of European Extremists19. Indian Businesses Exert Financial Muscle to Control Press
20. The Death of Glasnost: How Russia's Attempt at Openness Failed
21. Media Wars Create Information Vacuum in Ukraine
22. Journalists Overcome Obstacles through Crowdfunding and Determination
23. Trends in Press Freedom: 10 Most Censored Countries Threaten Jail Terms, Restrict Internet to Silence Press
10 Most Censored Countries
1. Eritrea
2. North Korea
3. Saudi Arabia
4. Ethiopia
5. Azerbaijan
6. Vietnam
7. Iran
8. China
9. Burma
10. Cuba
Index.

Citation preview

Attacks on the Press 2015 Edition

The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide, defending the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal. CPJ ensures the free flow of news and commentary by taking action wherever journalists are attacked, imprisoned, killed, kidnapped, threatened, censored, or harassed.

Attacks on the Press 2015

Edition

Journalism on the World’s Front Lines

Committee to Protect Journalists

Cover photo: An armed pro-Russian separatist orders a journalist to leave near the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in the region of Donetsk on July 20, 2014. (Bulent Kilic/AFP/ Courtesy of Getty Images) Cover design: © Committee to Protect Journalists Editor: Alan Huffman Editorial Director: Elana Beiser Copy Editor: Kerry Bailey Copyright © 2015 by Committee to Protect Journalists, New York. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. The first edition of Attacks on the Press was published by Bloomberg Press in 2013. Published simultaneously in Canada. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate percopy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/ permissions. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation.You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002. Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-ondemand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: ISBN 9781119088424 (paper) ISBN 9781119107125 (ebk) ISBN 9781119107132 (ebk) Printed in the United States of America 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Contents

Foreword By Christiane Amanpour

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1. Going It Alone: More Freelancers Means Less Support, Greater Danger The lack of adequate preparation might make safety experts shudder, but faced with low pay and high risk, the only option for many conflict journalists is to learn on the fly. By Robert Mahoney

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2. Covering War for the First Time—in Syria Lacking the support of an editor or established news organization, a young freelancer turned to a community of independent journalists who helped her find her way in a conflict zone. By Erin Banco

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3. The Rules of Conflict Reporting Are Changing Syria has reshaped the way war is covered. Faced with continuing journalist kidnappings and murders, one veteran reporter proposes a new approach. By Janine di Giovanni

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4. Broadcasting Murder: Militants Use Media for Deadly Purpose Islamic State, Boko Haram, and Mexican drug cartels videotape their own violence, presenting a conundrum for the press. By Joel Simon and Samantha Libby 5. Lack of Media Coverage Compounds Violence in Libya The world hardly knows what’s happening in Libya. The information vacuum allows various groups to distort the truth and even to cause greater bloodshed. By Fadil Aliriza 6. Reporting with Bodyguards on the Paraguayan Border Amid lawlessness in Paraguay, one journalist has his own security detail to fend off attacks by smugglers and the henchmen of corrupt politicians. By John Otis 7. Between Conflict and Stability: Journalists in Pakistan and Mexico Cope with Everyday Threats Working where violence is endemic takes a psychological toll on journalists and their families and hampers the ability to report. By Daniel DeFraia 8. Conflating Terrorism and Journalism in Ethiopia Addis Ababa is using defense against terrorism to justify stifling the press and putting reporters in jail. By Jacey Fortin 9. We Completely Agree: Egyptian Media in the Era of President El‐Sisi Self-censorship, firings, and official harassment are transforming many Egyptian journalists into mouthpieces for the government. By Mohamed Elmeshad

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10. Finding New Ways to Censor Journalists in Turkey The declining number of imprisoned journalists is a welcome change, but it does not indicate a more open approach toward the media in Turkey. By Yavuz Baydar 11. Treating the Internet as the Enemy in the Middle East When it comes to popular movements, no one knows better than Middle East leaders how powerful the Internet can be—and no one is doing more to undermine it. By Courtney C. Radsch 12. Overzealous British Media Prompt Overzealous Backlash Journalists in the United Kingdom are besieged by police, Parliament, pressure groups, public relations agents, and even publishers. By Liz Gerard 13. Outdated Secrecy Laws Stifle the Press in South Africa The invocation of antiquated laws and the introduction of restrictive new ones set a dangerous precedent for censorship in a country still finding its way as a democracy. By Ferial Haffajee 14. Amid Ebola Outbreak, West African Governments Try to Isolate Media In an environment where access to facts can be lifesaving, some West African governments appear as interested in arresting reporters as arresting a deadly disease. By Sue Valentine

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15. For Clues to Censorship in Hong Kong, Look to Singapore, Not Beijing Many in Hong Kong fear China’s blunt media restrictions, but the territory’s journalists are more likely to encounter the more subtle weapons of Singapore. By Madeline Earp 16. Surveillance Forces Journalists to Think and Act Like Spies Only with expertise, practice, and expensive tools can the media protect sources in the digital age. Journalists now compete with spooks, and the spooks have the home-field advantage. By Tom Lowenthal 17. Two Continents, Two Courts, Two Approaches to Privacy As the United States confirms its value of free speech over privacy, Europe tilts in the opposite direction. By Geoffrey King 18. Journalists Grapple with Increasing Power of European Extremists The rise of right-wing groups across the continent leads to attacks on journalists—and a fierce debate in the profession over how to report on nationalist political parties. By Jean-Paul Marthoz 19. Indian Businesses Exert Financial Muscle to Control Press Corporate interests try to suppress unfavorable coverage through expensive lawsuits, the withholding of advertising, and the outright purchase of news outlets. By Sumit Galhotra

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20. The Death of Glasnost: How Russia’s Attempt at Openness Failed There was a moment when the Russian media was poised to join the West’s in open and objective news coverage. That moment has passed. By Ann Cooper 21. Media Wars Create Information Vacuum in Ukraine The shutdown of broadcasters, restrictions on reporting, blatant propaganda, and beatings, abductions, and killings of journalists leave people in eastern Ukraine and Crimea in the dark. By Muzaffar Suleymanov 22. Journalists Overcome Obstacles through Crowdfunding and Determination Declining revenue poses one of the greatest challenges to today’s media.Yet many journalists are scraping by with help from new platforms and their own ingenuity. By Jessica Jerreat

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23. Trends in Press Freedom: 10 Most Censored Countries Threaten Jail Terms, Restrict Internet to Silence Press

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Index

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Foreword By Christiane Amanpour

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n Pakistan, an unknown gunman shoots a news anchor multiple times. No one is arrested for the crime, though the journalist is— for his reporting. In Paraguay, a journalist goes into hiding, with bodyguards armed with submachine guns, because of threats to his life made by a smuggling cartel unhappy with his reporting. In Egypt, three journalists spend a year in prison after being arrested in their Cairo hotel room by a government that disapproves of their coverage of the military’s seizing power. In Greece, two photojournalists are attacked by right‐wing militants outside an Athens courthouse, simply for being there, covering the news. Somewhere in the Syrian desert, two journalists are brutally executed, not for their reporting but to gain attention for the terrorists who kill them. And in Paris, eight journalists with the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo are murdered in a terrorist attack by two gunmen who were reportedly angry over the magazine’s portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad.

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Such are the kinds of dangers journalists face around the globe. From government surveillance and censorship to computer hacking, from physical attacks to imprisonment, kidnapping, and murder, the aim is to limit or otherwise control the flow of information—an increasingly complicated effort, with higher and higher stakes. In November 2014, when the Committee to Protect Journalists held its annual International Press Freedom Awards event in New York City, which I had the honor of hosting, John and Diane Foley took to the podium to address the beheading of their son, journalist Jim Foley, by ISIS the preceding August. The Foleys voiced the shared anguish of family, friends, and journalists over one of the most horrific and visible crimes against journalists in a year that brought far too many of them. As if we needed a reminder that true evil exists in the world, ISIS provided one. Along with Jim and fellow journalist Steven Sotloff, ISIS also beheaded countless civilians, children, and captive soldiers. Other journalists were murdered, killed, or kidnapped elsewhere, in many cases without news coverage or publicity. It would be terrible enough if the tragedies that befell journalists in 2014 had been isolated episodes—if we could write the year off as a nightmare and move on. But with well over 1,000 journalists having been killed since 1992, and with the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo early in 2015, it is clear that the threats are not limited to bad years, nor are they going away. The dangers the Foleys addressed, like those explored in these pages, transcend calendar years and international boundaries. They are expanding in seemingly every direction, morphing in new and disturbing ways. At stake are not only journalists’ lives but also the public’s ability to know what’s going on around them. Conflict reporting has always been a risky endeavor, and it is becoming more so in an era of widespread political turmoil and rapid transmission of information through electronic technology, particularly social media. One reason the ISIS murders strike a chord is their high visibility: The group has repurposed one of the most archaic and gruesome forms of execution for the Internet age, with videos of its beheadings distributed like news releases on the Web. Though the highly publicized beheadings of Western journalists have brought the risks home to a public that may not have fully grasped what is at stake, countless other journalists have been compromised,



Foreword

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attacked, harassed, kidnapped, imprisoned, or killed, often with scant public awareness. The majority are freelancers, who tend to have limited funding and training and, often, no established media outlet to fully support them. Freelancers are increasingly crucial to global reporting, and the broadest array of threats is aimed at them. From cybersecurity to physical safety, the challenges facing journalists today are more complex than ever, and they come from familiar hot spots such as the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America as well as from comparatively stable countries in Europe, Asia, and North America. In some cases, such as in South Africa, hard‐won press freedoms are under siege by an establishment that seeks to shield itself from the gaze of a thriving investigative press, which is the subject of an essay in this anthology by Ferial Haffajee, who, along with three fellow journalists—Iranian Siamak Ghaderi, Russian Mikhail Zygar, and Burmese Aung Zaw—received CPJ’s 2014 International Press Freedom Award. Also included here are reports about journalists’ needs for better personal safety and electronic security measures; about how new legal restrictions, particularly in the Middle East, seek to constrain online media outlets that are often the public’s only source of independent news; and about how the Western world is adapting—in very different ways—to the pervasiveness of online information. Each story is a cautionary tale. Taken as a whole, they illustrate that vigilance has never been more crucial, or more difficult, for the free press around the world. The greatest threat isn’t to one or two individuals, nor is it confined to any given country or year. An information battle is under way worldwide, and it is evolving in extremely dangerous ways. The one constant, as always, is that reporters are on the front line.

Christiane Amanpour is chief international correspondent and host of CNN International’s “Amanpour,” a nightly global affairs program. She is a member of CPJ’s board of directors.

1.  Going It Alone: More Freelancers Means Less Support, Greater Danger By Robert Mahoney

A female reporter runs with a rebel fighter while evading snipers near Aleppo, Syria, October 10, 2014. Source: Reuters/Jalal Al‐Mamo

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atthieu Aikins probably wouldn’t saunter into Afghanistan again in the way he did six years ago. “I did a classic ‘pitch up with your backpack and notebook in a war zone’ thing as a freelancer,” said the Kabul‐based Canadian journalist. “I took some fairly reckless risks in the beginning without much of a clue about what I was doing or connections to people who could advise me.” Aikins not only survived, he actually thrived, and he has a string of awards for his global reporting to show for it. Such a daring lack of preparation might make safety experts in the news industry shudder, but it’s the way in which many of today’s successful journalists got their first break. Aikins said that he sympathizes with freelancers who take risks to advance their careers, though he recognizes that security is crucial. Asked whether he would do things differently now, he hesitated, then said, “Difficult to answer that question, but, no, I would like to think that I would find smarter ways to approach this.” He now has age and experience on his side, but for journalists starting out, particularly freelancers, the world is even more dangerous today. The neutral space in which journalists can operate as independent witnesses has been shrinking for some time. The beheadings in 2014 in Syria of U.S. freelancers James Foley and Steven Sotloff, by militants belonging to the group known as Islamic State or ISIS, highlighted the danger. Journalists are now targets. Insurgent groups no longer use reporters to transmit news but instead kidnap them to make news. “The media is quite a good target if you want publicity because it makes a fuss about its own,” said Richard Sambrook, chair of the International News Safety Institute (INSI) and a former head of news gathering for the BBC. “If you capture a journalist or you murder a journalist, you get a lot of attention.” Sambrook has watched the risk profile for reporters during INSI’s 12‐year existence progress from physical security through the dangers of trauma and stress to kidnapping for ransom or propaganda. Big news organizations have responded to that increasingly dangerous trajectory by pouring resources into hostile‐environment and first‐aid training, known in industry parlance as “HEFAT,” including providing safety equipment for staff and hiring security experts.



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But the changing economics of the news business have prompted small or struggling outlets to shrink their foreign footprint and rely increasingly on freelance coverage. Growing demand should have raised freelance rates, but other factors, including falling technology and communications costs, have boosted the number of young foreign reporters venturing into the field and kept pay rates relatively low for all but the most established freelancers. With the added cost of personal security, such as protective equipment, vests, helmets, and insurance, freelancers are caught in a perfect storm of low pay and high risk. Within their ranks, freelancers fall into different categories when it comes to risk. “You have the core of very professional responsible freelancers who work for established news organizations and have built their skills and their reputations over many years,” said John Daniszewski, vice president and senior managing editor for international news of The Associated Press, which hires freelancers around the world. “Then you have freelancers who are essentially starting out and hoping to make a name for themselves or to draw positive attention by daring work, and, finally, you have local journalists who may be working for a small news organization in their own country and sell material to international news organizations.” Louisa Loveluck, a 25‐year‐old British freelancer in Cairo, is in the middle group. She is lucky to average $1,000 a month from a variety of stringing assignments and must pay for a translator and rent out of that. “The most difficult thing about being a freelancer is the constant mental wear and tear of thinking about money,” Loveluck said, “and the fact that you don’t know whether someone has your back if something goes wrong.” The point was brought home to Loveluck when she was attacked and threatened while covering the turmoil of 2013 in Cairo. A friend in a similar situation who was on the staff of a news outlet was pulled out. Loveluck had no money with which to evacuate and had to stay. “Pay and security do go hand in hand,” she said. Loveluck said that she once worked for a publication that avoided any discussion of its duty to care for freelancers and had no plans in place for dealing with an emergency. “The only conversation about

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safety that would take place before an assignment would be ‘Take care’ or ‘Stay safe’ at the end of an e‐mail,” she said. Many publications pay as little as 25 cents per word, which hardly covers the cost of reporting complex and dangerous stories. “There is a huge mismatch between the amount of effort involved in writing a piece of journalism and how much money you get back from it,” said another Cairo‐based freelancer, Tom Dale. Dale, who went to Libya “on spec”—a speculative basis, without assurance that his reporting would find an outlet—to cover the conflict there, said that he would do it again. “It’s inevitably going to happen as long as competition for jobs in journalism is what it is,” he said of young reporters taking risks to make names for themselves. “Jobs are so scarce and there are so few entry routes that people are going to be making those choices. I know people who got good jobs after [Libya]. It’s not as if a lot of freelancers are saying to themselves, ‘I still want to be freelancing at 40.’  ” Against the backdrop of low pay and growing danger, ­freelancers— mainly those who work for media in the developed world—have begun organizing themselves outside the traditional media development groups and charities that already help freelancers. Among those organizations is the Frontline Freelance Register in London, whose members commit to uphold professional journalistic standards, take a HEFAT course, buy appropriate insurance, and follow basic security protocols before deploying to a conflict zone. “We got together and tried to work out what would make a difference,” said Vaughan Smith, a veteran freelance cameraman and founder of London’s Frontline Club (a physical space for international journalists; the Frontline Freelance Register is a group organized under the auspices of the club). “Our frustration was that there were organizations supporting freelancers  . . .  but they didn’t have a mandate to represent us, so we thought we would do something that’s never been done before and build a representative body for conflict freelancers.” The Frontline Freelance Register has more than 400 members and is seeking to engage with media companies to improve freelancers’ pay and conditions. “The freelance safety solution is to pay us better so that we can afford our own insurance and our own safety equipment—and we are a long way from that, but we’d like to move toward it,” Smith said.



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“We believe that if freelancers can demonstrate to the news industry that we are capable of organizing ourselves and capable of taking our safety seriously and collectively, then the industry will work with us, and journalism will benefit hugely when one considers the degree to which the industry has become reliant on freelance content.” Like the freelance community itself, the news industry is not monolithic in its approach to security. Some broadcasters and wire agencies treat international freelancers and local stringers in conflict zones much as they do their own staffs, providing security equipment and support; cash‐strapped outlets often pay only for the reporters’ submissions, which tend to be offered on spec. The holy grail for independent journalists is an assignment or a retainer with one of the big media organizations that cover international news. Because such outlets have had reporters killed or kidnapped during the past two decades, they tend to be serious about security and treat freelancers on a par with their full‐time staff. That is the case with Reuters, said its editor‐in‐chief, Stephen Adler. He said the agency provides safety training, equipment, and medical coverage to all conflict reporters and has reorganized editorial structures to ensure safety. Reuters will not send a freelancer to a place that it would not send a staff member, although it would consider accepting material from a freelancer who was already working in such a place, said Adler, a member of CPJ’s board of directors. “We are not going to deprive somebody of their livelihood or ability to work for us because they happen to work in someplace dangerous,” he said. (Some journalists have criticized Reuters for relying on young photographers, including those affiliated with rebel groups, after local freelancer Molhem Barakat was killed in battle in December 2013.) After the ISIS beheading videos were circulated in August 2014, the French news agency Agence France‐Presse (AFP) made public parts of its security policy. Its news director, Michèle Léridon, published a blog entry noting that AFP would not send journalists into areas held by ISIS or Syrian rebels. “The idea is to dissuade potential journalists from taking such huge risks and to say to them, ‘Look, if you go there on your own and even if you bring us back great material, we won’t take it,’  ” Léridon told CPJ. By going public, Léridon said, she also “wanted to spread the

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message within AFP, because it’s hard for a photo editor, for example, to pass up a good image.” She added, “I stressed that we don’t take foreign material, but we continue to take news and photos from people who live there, from Syrians.” Likewise, The Associated Press will not accept spec material and treats its freelancers the same as staff when it comes to safety, according to foreign editor Daniszewski. “I think maybe there is a competitive short‐term disadvantage in some of these cases, but, otherwise, the alternative of having a race to the bottom, of having no rules and causing people to take irresponsible risk, and having to be responsible for them if they were giving you material, we feel that in the long run as a responsible news organization we need to set and follow some standards,” Daniszewski said. “We feel strongly that if someone is providing you material, you are morally responsible for them.” Some experienced freelancers, however, believe that they are the best judge of their risk and balk at the idea that all spec material would be rejected. “I work with responsible outlets,” said freelancer Toby Muse, who has worked in Latin America and the Middle East, among other hot spots. “If anything, I think some outlets can be too cautious. The whole idea of ‘We will not purchase anything from freelancers who have been in Syria or in Baghdad,’ I disagree with that fundamentally. I think these things that are put in place with the idea of protecting freelancers can actually end up cutting off avenues of work for freelancers.” Muse said that refusing spec material limits freelancers’ ability to report crucial news. “One way of freelancing is: A big story explodes— often it’s in a dangerous part of the world—and they get there quickly; they can get there before others, or maybe they’ve been there already, just hanging out, and the major media wasn’t there for reasons of security or reasons that their correspondent was covering something else in another part of the region,” he said. “So when you shut that down, I don’t think the freelancer benefits at all.” The aim of employers not to encourage risky behavior and the need for stringers to exploit their competitive advantage are key to discussions about a code of ethics and best practices in conflict zones. Initiatives led by the Frontline Freelance Register seek commitments



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from freelancers to respect basic safety protocols and not work without safety training and insurance. Ideally, news outlets would agree not to hire untrained or uninsured freelancers and to pay in a fair and timely manner for freelance content. At the time of this writing, no agreement on such guidelines had been reached. “Everyone in the journalist community who deals with international and conflict reporting should step up their game,” said Philip Balboni, president and CEO of GlobalPost, the online news site to which James Foley, a freelancer, contributed. “We need to get behind these new guidelines, and they should be as tough as possible,” he said. A few advocates for tougher safety protocols have suggested a system of accrediting freelancers who enter conflict zones such as Syria. Accreditation would depend on journalists showing proof of HEFAT qualifications and insurance. The idea is controversial among freelancers, who see it as giving power to an arbitrary authority that would decide who may and who may not gather news. INSI’s Sambrook welcomes a code of ethics but questions going beyond that. “It is quite difficult for there to be an enforced code of practice or getting as far as accreditation,” he said. “Some groups want to put in place some kind of accreditation or professional standard and enforce it either for freelancers, or training. . . it is quite a difficult road to go down. Where you shift responsibility of risk, it’s quite problematic.” If the trend toward greater awareness of safety concerns continues, accreditation may not be necessary because both new freelancers and Internet‐born news outlets understand the need, some industry experts say. Also, many mainstream freelancers want to dissociate themselves from the “war tourists” who sometimes appear on the front line. “No question, there are unprofessional freelancers,” Smith, of the Frontline Freelance Register, said. “There are people out there who haven’t had enough love as children. . . . Wars attract certain characters, some of whom can be the greatest journalists; others are looking for something that they are probably not likely to find there. They are not serious, and we don’t want to be associated with them. We need distance from them, because the industry is never going to take us seriously unless we can separate ourselves from them.” Freelancers are also aware of the need for training and of the offerings of charities such as the Rory Peck Trust in London and Canada’s

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Freelance Forum Fund, which helped pay for training for some of the stringers interviewed for this article. “We have definitely seen an increase in interest from freelancers wanting to get hostile‐environment training,” noted Frank Smyth, founder and executive director of Global Journalist Security, a U.S.‐based training firm. “That’s a trend that’s going up. People seem to be getting the idea that that’s a dangerous world out there and freelancers are on the front lines, and training is essential,” Smyth, who is also a senior journalist security adviser to CPJ, said. “The presence of ISIS, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and Al‐Shabaab in Somalia has gotten everyone’s attention.” One reason that more reporters are resorting to training support from such nonprofits is that it can be expensive. A standard five‐day HEFAT course runs between $500 and $700 per day, plus travel and accommodations. Some online news outlets with an edgy approach to conflict reporting, such as VICE News and BuzzFeed, are also beginning to recognize the need to treat reporters working in conflict zones fairly and providing safety training and protocols. “But,” INSI’s Sambrook cautioned, “there will be other new upstarts that don’t have the same experience or same resources, and that is a worry. Part of the responsibility of support groups like ours is—without wagging a finger, or accusing—to try to help them understand what they need to think about as they start to enter dangerous kinds of coverage.” Smith, of London’s Frontline Freelance Register, hopes to at least convince news executives that it is in their financial interest to treat freelancers better. “A more generous engagement with freelancers would still be very good value for money and is certainly part of the solution to the troubles we face in gathering the news,” Smith said. “If we don’t want to withdraw from the world, which is clearly what we are doing, freelancers are a way of doing this. It’s part of what’s needed for the challenge we face in covering the world with broken business models.”

Robert Mahoney is deputy director of CPJ and writes about press freedom issues. He has worked as a correspondent in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.

2.  Covering War for the First Time—in Syria By Erin Banco

Journalists are trained in battlefield medicine by Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues, or RISC, in New York City. Mike Shum, left, and Holly Pickett prepare to move a training dummy simulating an injured person during a care‐under‐fire exercise. Source: AP/RISC, James Lawler Duggan

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he small room in the back of the Monsours’ house was set up for two people: two desks, two nightstands, and two beds. The beds had matching sheets and pillowcases adorned with Superman cartoon characters.  Jihad Monsour, 13, slouched on the edge of one of the beds. He used to share the room with his older brother, Ali, who was killed in their hometown of Al‐Bab, Syria.  “Everything reminds me of him,” Jihad told me in an interview in Al‐Bab in August 2012. Jihad was wearing a yellow collared shirt that his brother sported in a photo framed on a table across the room.  He told me that Ali was on his way to school for a tutoring session with a friend when the bullets hit him, one in the arm and one in the stomach. Propping his body up on the back of the bike, the friend rushed Ali to the local hospital for treatment. But Ali’s injuries were too severe. He was evacuated to a hospital in Kilis, Turkey, where he died on July 19, 2012. I interviewed Jihad at a time when the Syrian civil war was shifting direction. President Bashar al‐Assad’s forces were beginning to target the opposition stronghold of Aleppo. In many ways, the opposition was still forming itself. The only well‐known group that existed at that time was the Free Syrian Army, but it was not as organized as it is now. In the north, it mostly consisted of groups of men living in the same neighborhood who formed their own battalions, acquired their own weapons, and threw themselves into the fighting without any coordination.  Not only was the battleground changing, but so, too, was the environment for journalists. In the summer of 2012, many staff reporters began to leave Syria. The fighting was becoming too fluid. Several journalists were kidnapped by unidentified groups of men who, we now know, were affiliated with Jabhat Al‐Nusra (the Al‐Qaeda offshoot in Syria), and some better‐known reporters, such as Marie Colvin and Anthony Shadid, had died on the job. More and more news organizations began pulling their staff out of Syria, but they were still desperate for content from what would become one of the deadliest and geopolitically sensitive wars in history. Some organizations tried to hire local stringers to send photos and video footage, and others turned to a different alternative: freelance journalists. I was one of them. 



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At that time, interviews with local, average Syrians, many of whom were trying to avoid aerial bombardments and to, more or less, survive, were lacking in the global media sphere. That was my goal in reporting in Syria: to tell stories that people could connect with. I wanted to report on war without focusing on who was winning or who had acquired more weapons.  But I had never covered a war. I spent months reporting the Syrian crisis from its borders and filed dispatches dozens of times as a freelancer, but never from within Syria. My mentor, Anthony Shadid, who graduated from the same college and wrote for the same school newspaper, had pushed me to move to Cairo and pursue a career in journalism as he did after he graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. When he died, there was no one in the profession to whom I could turn for advice about how to freelance in conflict zones. Some of the editors I worked with had started their careers in Bosnia, not as freelancers but as staff members. As I soon learned, the distinction between the two, especially in conflict zones, was important.  The Arab Spring, in many ways, was new territory for young freelance journalists. Never before had we reported on so many newsworthy stories in one region. And never before in recent history had coverage of a conflict depended to such an extent on people like us, who were often undertrained and lacked the backup an established news organization can provide. Most of us were in our 20s and reported from Cairo. Some of us moved there to study Arabic; others studied on Fulbright scholarships. Living there was cheap, and the city offered flights to other Arab Spring countries for low prices. It was an ideal place in which to try to break into the profession.  All of the freelance journalists knew one another, and although many of us were competing for contract positions at the same news outlets, we shared sources, contacts, and fixer recommendations. We didn’t have any other choice. Editors were not willing to provide us with any logistical guidance, let alone safety measures. Many of them offered no advice or guidance at all. There were, however, a few freelancers in the region who were older and had reported in war zones previously. One of these

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freelancers was Jim Foley, an incredibly talented writer and one of the only journalists willing to help me when I first started out. Over time, this group of freelancers grew bigger and expanded east to Istanbul, where many moved after the ousting of President Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and still live today. Lacking any formal structure, we developed social media groups through which to exchange information and offer advice on reporting in places such as Syria. We could not formally vet fixers, so we relied on one another for recommendations. We even rented out flak jackets to one another and passed them off in airport lobbies.  We did not have any official medical or security insurance. Some used the insurance that Reporters Without Borders offered, but many of us did not—it was another expense. Our only insurance was the knowledge that friends and family were keeping track of us as best they could on social media. When I was in Syria the first time, I had an international data plan on my cell phone. If I drove far enough toward the Turkish border, I could send a text message to my parents telling them that I was OK. One time I even had to file a story by way of text message. That was all I had, and often the service from cell towers crashed and I had no way to communicate. Satellite phones were not an option; they were too expensive.  Eventually, we freelancers organized ourselves into a more formal support system. We enrolled in Sebastian Junger’s Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC) and signed up for the Frontline Freelance Register, cofounded by Anna Day, who often reports from Syria. Over time, other freelance journalist support and advocacy groups emerged. Lauren Bohn, one of the only freelance journalists in Egypt during the revolution, started Foreign Policy Interrupted, a service dedicated to disseminating women’s reporting, much of it written by freelancers.  I am often asked by young, aspiring journalists how to begin a career in journalism. Many of them fundamentally believe that the only way to start out is to move to a different country and start pitching stories. I tell them how I started my career but caution them that I do not know whether that is the correct answer to the question. The truth is, I think about whether I made the right choice reporting from places like Syria as a freelancer. I question some of the decisions I made



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and wonder what might have happened had I stayed longer. Jim Foley and Austin Tice were kidnapped only weeks after I left. What I do know is this: Now there is space for an aspiring journalist to begin a career if he or she wants, but that career may have to begin with freelancing, especially if one wants to write ­internationally. In an industry that seems to constantly tell younger journalists to find other professions because there are no jobs left, the shrinking news staffs and increasing reluctance of many news organizations to put those that remain in harm’s way encourage the young journalist to take a big risk and begin a journalism career by delivering content from remote and often dangerous locations. In many ways, these reporters go it alone, facing challenges ranging from physical attacks to cyberhacking to tell the story to the wider world.

Erin Banco is a Middle East correspondent for the International Business Times and a graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

3. The Rules of Conflict Reporting Are Changing By Janine di Giovanni

Free Syrian Army fighters are filmed as they run toward the fence of the Menagh military airport, trying to avoid snipers loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al‐Assad in Aleppo’s countryside on January 6, 2013. Source: Reuters/Mahmoud Hassano

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n the icy‐cold morning of February 22, 2011, Marie Colvin, a 58‐year‐old Irish‐American reporter, was killed by the blast of a rocket in the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs, Syria. Colvin had been awakened in the early morning by the thud of artillery. She was bending down, trying to retrieve her muddy boots so she could head to a shelter, when she was hit. She and I were friends, and the only comfort I took was in being told that she’d been killed instantly and suffered no pain. Colvin was almost the cliché of a foreign correspondent: Hard‐ drinking, chain‐smoking, glamorous, and witty, she had been thrice married and was something of a Dorothy Parker persona. She was also driven, compassionate, and devoted to her craft, specifically to reporting the on‐the‐ground facts in Syria. We had met some 20 years before, beside the photocopier machine at the old Sunday Times in London, where we both worked— two Americans who had washed up in another country and were passionate about the Middle East. She was older, already established, and a legend, having been around since the days of the Iran‐Iraq War. I was just starting out, struggling to push my way out of the “news review” section and onto the foreign desk. (I eventually bullied my way into a reporting assignment in Bosnia, and my career as a conflict journalist began.) Colvin’s death was a wake‐up call for many in our field. Colvin was a professional to the end—she had walked over the Georgian mountains to report the Chechen War (getting lost in the process and having to be rescued by helicopter) and had been badly injured reporting in Sri Lanka and lost an eye. During the war in Kosovo, she had camped out with the Kosovo Liberation Army, and she had refused to leave the United Nations compound during the violence in East Timor. She was a personal friend to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. And she was not afraid to stand up for what she believed. But Syria was her undoing, at the end of a long and hard career. And it seemed to me, and to others, that the country had become the embodiment of threats to conflict journalists today, the likes of which even such pros as Colvin had not seen before. Colvin had always managed to see humor in bad situations. “It’s like a health farm without



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booze!” she once joked to me about being stranded in Misrata, Libya, during that country’s siege, when she existed on cans of tuna fish, far from her beloved bottles of vodka. But when the subject of Syria came up, we would look at each other in despair and say, “How do we keep doing this?” The night before she was smuggled into Homs, she told friends in Lebanon of her misgivings about going there. In the time since, the rest of us have debated what lessons can be learned from a war that could kill Marie Colvin. The reporting community mourned Colvin and went on reporting the war, but it was clear that something had changed. As with the death of another legendary reporter, Reuters’ Kurt Schork in Sierra Leone in June 2000 (killed by Revolutionary United Front rebels), it seemed that if such a highly skilled journalist could die, anyone could. It was no longer only a question of being experienced, prepared, and brave. The next two years brought more horror to the arena of reporting in Syria. There have been more deaths—CPJ reports at least 79 journalists killed there since the war started in 2011, and though the number of journalists killed in Syria has decreased each year since 2012, that seems to be more a reflection of the fact that fewer journalists are working there than a reduction of danger. Kidnapping, always a concern, also entered the game with a ­vengeance. Friends and colleagues disappeared. Some came home. Others did not. “Steve’s gone dark,” came a message in my inbox one gloomy August 2013 morning regarding Steven Sotloff. A year later, Sotloff would also be dead, beheaded on camera by the murderous Islamic State, which had become every journalist’s waking fear. Sotloff had spent a year in captivity along with other journalists and humanitarians, including Jim Foley, a much‐loved reporter whom ISIS also beheaded. Terrible things had happened in Libya, in Lebanon, in Chechnya, and in Ethiopia and other conflict zones, but Syria presents new challenges and, with digital media and social media so prevalent, has attracted a new breed and tribe of young reporters. Another change— which is key—is that we as journalists do not have the trust of the local population there. As photojournalist Nicole Tung, who has reported extensively from numerous conflict zones, told me: “Covering Syria means facing a multifaceted set of problems, from bombardments to snipers to kidnappings by the government, Islamic extremists, or

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criminals. It is a place where journalists and Syrian activists must operate in a free‐for‐all conflict of staggering destruction and desperation and where no side believes in the benefit of truth‐telling any longer.” In light of all that, the question faced by war journalists today is how to carry the job forward and continue to bear witness—one of Colvin’s stock phrases—while managing to keep ourselves intact and out of dungeons in Aleppo cellars. How do we remain safe but still manage to tell the truth? My old friend and Times of London colleague Anthony Loyd, a former officer in the British Army and a highly experienced reporter, was beaten and shot in 2014 after being captured by jihadists in Syria. Anthony and I have gone through a lot together, from losing friends to suffering through disastrous editors, and his injuries were so heinous that he has rethought his way of working (although when I last heard from him he was in northern Iraq, which shows that even grave danger will not dissuade a dedicated reporter from working). Loyd believes that the nature of reporting has changed in Syria. At one time, as in the Bosnian War, during which he and I met, we could establish relations with the local population, who would, in some way, protect us. “Journalists need some sort of consent from a segment of the local populace in order to do their work,” Loyd said. “They had that consent in Syria for a while. For over two years, most Syrians—especially those in Sunni areas—considered foreign reporters as their likely moral champions and the agents of a possible change that might alleviate their plight. “But,” he added, “as time passed and the war’s atrocities grew worse and the suffering increased, most Sunnis came to realize that the West would not, after all, intervene on their behalf. With this realization, many came to regard journalists not as their moral champions but as the epitome of Western cynicism, recording an exquisite pain that they—the journalists—knew would never be alleviated. With this changed perception came anger, and the graph line of abductions of journalists and attacks upon journalists grew correspondingly.” In 2014 I wrote an essay for Nieman Reports at Harvard that was an attempt to sketch out a process that journalists might follow to adapt to the new realities of conflict reporting, taking into account the added dimensions of reporting against ISIS and the threat of kidnapping. I



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suggested, somewhat gingerly—because it is a controversial topic that often causes freelancers to bristle—that one possibility was a system of journalist accreditation. Even if such accreditation did not require that conflict reporters have an assignment and insurance, it could, at the very least, provide a mechanism for keeping up with who was working where. I also suggested border press bureaus, where we could have some kind of coordination of equipment, fixers, drivers, and the like. Most reporters don’t like accreditation, which, they feel, smacks of elitism. We also loathe the pool system, which tends to undermine creativity and competitive spirit. Yet in Sarajevo, some of the most competitive reporters in the world joined forces to create the Sarajevo Agency Pool, which saved many lives during the worst days of the shelling. It also resulted in extraordinary documentation of war crimes—which is, really, a perfect example of why we’re conflict journalists. We want to document war to ensure that someone is held accountable for crimes against humanity. But how do we prepare the next generation of journalists—or, for that matter, ourselves—for the escalating, and changing, threats? One option for less experienced reporters is hostile‐environment training, though such courses tend to be expensive and uneven when it comes to practical value. I’ve taken four hostile‐environment training courses, paid for by employers who could not get me insurance coverage without the certificate, in addition to others during my time working for the United Nations. Most were useful, but others were a waste of time. Hostile‐environment courses taught by former special forces soldiers can be outrageously expensive, arduous, and, in some cases, ­repetitive. Reporters are less equivocal about first‐aid training, such as that offered by Sebastian Junger’s RISC (Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues), which trains freelancers in battlefield medical treatment. Given the increasing dangers, first‐aid training is crucial and encourages people to take conflict reporting more seriously—to travel with medical kits and to learn what to do if someone is hit to make sure that person doesn’t bleed out when he or she doesn’t have to die. In my view, insurance, no matter how strapped you are as a freelancer, is also essential. It’s important not only if you’re shot or grievously injured but also if you suffer any kind of calamity, such as a car crash, which is something that

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happens with great frequency in war zones. Insurance is also useful for aftercare, in the unlucky event that you do get injured. Bruno Girodon, a senior staff reporter for France 2 and the father of my son, was shot by a sniper in the jaw the day Qaddafi fell in Tripoli. Had the bullet landed a hair closer to an artery, my son would be fatherless. Bruno’s organization medevaced him out of Libya by way of the Tunisian border within a day, and follow‐up care for him went on for more than a year. Because he is French, Bruno got excellent state health care. But what if you don’t have good health care, or any health care, and get hurt in a place like Syria? You need to make sure that you have the necessary support. Watching Bruno’s injury and his healing process as a freelancer (I am now a staffer at Newsweek) made me think about how I would continue to cover Syria. It’s a matter of strategy. Covering the war from Damascus is not an option for many reporters—getting a visa is extremely difficult and usually reserved for larger organizations that have kept their regime/rebel coverage strictly separated. Most reporters must either continue to cross the border illegally from the north or report from the border regions. Still, insurance and first‐aid training address the outcome, not the source of the problem. There is still a gap in experience and knowledge about conflict reporting, made even more critical by the changes taking place. In my proposal for establishing press centers at conflict zone borders, I envision a way to better enable journalists to share knowledge, including who is going in and who is going out, and to provide a clearinghouse of information about things like insurance, training, and equipment. Such a center could employ a full‐time security expert to advise freelancers who don’t have access to the expertise of a more experienced journalist. Digital security experts could also be on hand. There could be a system for renting “trackers” to trace reporters who go dark. I put forth the idea as a potential way to better prepare ourselves for the changing realities of conflict reporting and since then have been talking with, listening to, and approaching people at every level to try to work out a way for us to continue to cover the Syrian war—in all its horror—so it is recorded forever. That is essential.



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But it isn’t just about Syria, which will not be the last war to ­present these new horrors. How we respond to the changes there will dictate how we cover war from now on. It has been more than 20 years since I met Marie Colvin at the photocopier in Wapping, and I have gone through more than a dozen wars and lost more than that number of reporter and humanitarian friends whom I loved and relied upon. I don’t want to lose any more. I don’t want any more of those phone calls or e‐mails at daybreak telling me that another one of us is gone. The war in Syria has significantly changed the way we view c­overage. Gone are the days of sending reporters into the battlefield in a cavalier way. We need to think before, during, and after assignments. And it’s time we start thinking long term—as a community with common goals.

Janine di Giovanni is Middle East editor of Newsweek, an Ochberg fellow at Columbia University’s Dart Center on Trauma, and author of the upcoming book Seven Days in Syria (W.W. Norton/Bloomsbury).

4.  Broadcasting Murder: Militants Use Media for Deadly Purpose By Joel Simon and Samantha Libby

A militant uses a mobile phone to film fellow Islamic State fighters taking part in a military parade along the streets of Syria’s Raqqa province on June 30, 2014. Source: Reuters

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ews of the August 19, 2014, murder of journalist James Foley broke not in the media but instead on Twitter. News organizations faced the agonizing questions of how to report on the killing and what portions of the video to show. If a group or individual commits an act of violence and then films it, how can traditional news organizations cover it without amplifying the propaganda message? Journalists who flocked to Syria when the conflict first erupted there in 2011 did not struggle as often or as publicly with these issues. The war was covered by both veteran war correspondents and local citizen journalists, and reports focused primarily on the violence and its tremendous toll on the civilian population. By the fall of 2013, though, the reporting landscape in Syria had changed dramatically. Sixty‐two journalists had been killed, and journalists were being kidnapped at a rate of one a week. Rebel groups that had once welcomed journalists were now targeting them. For The Associated Press (AP), which had regularly dispatched staff reporters and freelancers inside Syria, the rising level of risk forced a recalibration. “Going to war is nothing new for us,” said AP’s vice president and director of photography, Santiago Lyon. “The game changer for us was kidnapping for ransom.” Unable to put its own reporters on the ground, the AP relied on “user‐generated content,” mostly images provided by local activists and citizens or culled from social media. This approach created challenges in terms of ensuring veracity and countering bias, but, as Lyon noted, “Some insight is better than no insight.” The result was a delicate balance between nonprofessional citizen documentation and carefully vetted news stories. The rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, shattered that balance. As ISIS grew to become the dominant rebel force inside Syria, the organization suppressed all independent sources of information in areas under its control while disseminating through its own channels gruesome videos showing executions of captives, civilians, and enemy forces. The videos were simultaneously intended to sow terror and recruit followers. Lyon struggled with how to report on the ISIS videos even before the beheadings of freelance journalists Foley and Steven Sotloff. The videos often showed events that were clearly newsworthy, such as what ISIS claimed was the killing of more than 1,700 Shiite soldiers near



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Tikrit. Lyon decided to distribute screenshots and video clips to AP clients, omitting the most graphic details. “They are putting this stuff out for [a] reason,” Lyon said. “The challenge is to show the reality without succumbing to the propaganda.” Lyon, of course, understood that through the use of social media and the Internet, the ISIS videos would reach a mass audience, regardless of the careful deliberations made by AP or other news ­organizations. He recognized that the ISIS strategy is to bypass established news organizations and reach the intended audience directly. After all, ISIS fighters do not give interviews. They speak directly into the camera. Despite the international attention and condemnation that the ISIS videos have drawn, the documentation of violence by those perpetrating the acts is not new. From the Nazis to the Khmer Rouge, bureaucratic states have systematically documented their own grave abuses, including genocide. In fact, many modern human rights mechanisms were built on the indignation evoked by these images. The Mubarak government in Egypt and the Assad government in Syria are among the many regimes to have documented their own torture sessions. Soldiers—including U.S. service personnel who filmed the torture and humiliation in Abu Ghraib—have historically chronicled their actions in the theater of war. But none of these images was ever intended for public consumption, and journalists who disseminated them fulfilled their professional role by exposing hidden abuses. The dynamic presented by a new generation of what could be termed perpetrator videos is very different because there is no way to report on the videos without advancing, to some degree, the interests of those perpetrating the violence. The paradox is the same in the coverage of videos produced by ISIS in Syria, the Mexican drug cartels, or other nonstate actors, such as Boko Haram in Nigeria. These organizations are not merely producing videos; they are acting as competing media outlets. ■  ■  ■

The Islamic State’s media strategy did not develop in a vacuum. It was adapted from those employed by other Islamist groups, notably Al‐Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), from which the Islamic State evolved.

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Before the 9/11 terror attacks on New York City and Washington, Al‐Qaeda had a fairly conventional approach to media relations. As many criminal, political, and insurgent groups had done historically, Al‐Qaeda relied on the global media to convey its message to the world. Osama bin Laden himself hosted press conferences attended by Western journalists and gave exclusive interviews to CNN’s Peter Arnett and ABC News’s John Miller. He used the 1997 interview with Arnett to publicize his declaration of jihad against the United States. When asked about his future plans, bin Laden said, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing.” Journalists felt safe conducting these interviews because the militants needed the media to disseminate their message. Peter Bergen, who served as producer for the Arnett interview, noted, “Once you came into bin Laden’s inner circle, you never felt threatened.” But Al‐Qaeda’s relationship with the international media changed dramatically after the January 2002 kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. That beheading was not an orchestrated media event in the same way that the ISIS killings were. In fact, bin Laden reprimanded his operations chief, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who carried out the Pearl execution, for bringing “unnecessary attention on the network,” according to a report published by The Pearl Project, an investigation carried out by Georgetown University students. In 2003, a Jordanian called Abu Musa’b al‐Zarqawi, who had trained in the Al‐Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, assumed leadership of AQI. Though Zarqawi had pledged allegiance to bin Laden, the Al‐ Qaeda leader found him difficult to control. Zarqawi’s brutality earned a reprimand from Al‐Qaeda’s central command, which argued, as in the Pearl execution, that excessive violence alienated both the local populace and potential international supporters. Zarqawi was undeterred. Not only did the murders continue, but Zarqawi also became infamous for using the media to publicize his violence. He is believed to have personally carried out several videotaped beheadings, and his enduring contribution to the iconography of the jihadi snuff film was to dress his victims in orange jumpsuits, a reference to the uniforms worn by prisoners held in the U.S. detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The U.S. and British hostages later killed in the ISIS videos were forced to dress in the same manner.



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Zarqawi set up a compartmentalized media operation in Iraq to disseminate these beheading videos, which J. M. Berger, editor of INTELWIRE.com and author of Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, called “a gritty and grisly precursor to IS videos.” Before the days of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, this type of video was far less accessible and existed only on websites and message boards. The videos were also sent out of the country of origin to jihadi‐run media production houses that turned them into mini‐documentaries and then pushed them out to sympathetic websites. Bin Laden himself continued to rely on video and audio messages sent to Al‐Jazeera to reach a mass audience in the Arab world. Even as “jihad media” rose, Al‐Qaeda’s reliance on traditional media to amplify its message meant that graphic violence was often contained. The killing of al‐Zarqawi in a U.S. airstrike in June 2006 accelerated a transition in AQI, which was absorbed into a coalition of insurgent groups dubbed the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI). The civil conflict in neighboring Syria that erupted four years later provided the perfect opportunity for ISI to expand and recruit. A former U.S. detainee and AQI midlevel commander, Abu Bakr al‐Baghdadi, would eventually emerge as the leader of this reconstituted force, which he renamed the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Al‐Shams), or ISIS. When Al‐Qaeda once again complained of ISIS’s brutal tactics, fearing that they would have the same alienating effect that AQI had had in Iraq, al‐Baghdadi challenged the Al‐Qaeda‐aligned Syria affiliate, Jabhat al‐Nusra, and emerged as the dominant military force in the region. In February 2014, Al‐Qaeda denounced ISIS as too violent and denied any alliance with them. Bin Laden’s former deputy and successor, Ayman al‐Zawahiri, who once recognized the powerful role of the media by saying, “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media,” took strong exception to the ISIS videos. ISIS, Zawahiri said in a statement, “is not a branch of Al‐Qaeda, has no links to it, and the group is not responsible for its acts.” The ISIS leadership was unmoved and continued not only to engage in extraordinarily brutal acts but to document them. “They don’t dispute the characterization of them; in some ways, they embrace it,” Berger explained. “They are more concerned with promoting their

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own image than denying their actions.” The videos served strategic purposes by terrorizing enemies, creating a patina of invincibility, and aiding in the recruitment of foreign fighters. ISIS spokesman Abu Bakr al‐Janabi told VICE, “Social media is good for building a network of connections and recruitment. Fighters talk about experiences in battle and encourage people to rise, and supporters defend and translate ISIS statements.” Richard Barrett, a former counterterrorism chief at MI6, noted that the rapid advance of ISIS through northern Iraq and Syria allowed the militant group to outpace the comparatively slim media output of Al‐Qaeda. “For the last 10 years or more, [Zawahiri] has been holed up in the Afghanistan‐Pakistan border area and hasn’t really done very much more than issue a few statements and videos,” he told Agence France‐Presse (AFP). “Whereas Baghdadi has done an amazing amount—he has captured cities, he has mobilized huge amounts of people—he is killing ruthlessly throughout Iraq and Syria.” ISIS has used social media strategy to promote its advances and to publicize its ruthlessness. It has effectively gamed Twitter’s hashtag and sharing metrics to distribute slickly produced videos to the widest possible audience, according to Profiling the Islamic State, a report from the Brookings Doha Center written by Charles Lister. ISIS has launched its own Android app; swarmed popular Twitter hashtags, including those used during the 2014 World Cup; and developed a decentralized network of social media activists around the world to promote its content. ISIS’s dependence on social media is suggested by its reaction to an August 2014 effort to remove all Twitter accounts linked to the organization, an operation reportedly carried out by the U.S. government in collaboration with Twitter. What was once a thriving and vast network of official accounts with tens of thousands of followers was decimated. The takedowns were devastating, acknowledged Abdulrahman al‐ Hamid, an ISIS supporter with 4,000 followers on Twitter. Al‐Hamid tweeted on September 14, 2014: “We talked a lot about the deletion of accounts and the means of staying steadfast and to push people to continue if their accounts were deleted or suspended. . . . We have to admit that this is a disaster and we have to be patient.” ■  ■  ■



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The Islamic State is not the only contemporary group producing perpetrator videos. Other nonstate actors, such as Boko Haram, have used YouTube broadcasts to communicate with the world. Criminal organizations in Mexico have engaged in this practice for nearly a decade. “Mexico has been a pioneer in the use of YouTube and social media for publicizing terrorizing videos,” according to Latin America media expert and University of Texas at Austin professor Rosental Calmon Alves. “Mexican cartels were well ahead of ISIS in terms of using gruesome images.” The cartels have demonstrated a willingness to use graphic imagery to send a message—often a darkly twisted one. The decapitated head of one online journalist killed in 2011 in the border city of Nuevo Laredo was posed wearing headphones and set next to a keyboard. Three years later, traffickers who captured a social media activist used her own Twitter feed to announce her murder. They posted this message on October 16, 2014: # reynosafollow FRIENDS AND FAMILY, MY REAL NAME IS MARÍA DEL ROSARIO FUENTES RUBIO. I AM A PHYSICIAN. TODAY MY LIFE HAS COME TO AN END. Two photos followed. One showed Rubio alive, staring into the camera. The second showed her dead on the floor from a gunshot wound to her face. Social media provided the Mexican cartels with a means of disseminating visual records of the terrorizing practices that they already employed. These included leaving mutilated bodies in public places, hanging threatening “narco‐banners” from bridges and buildings, and, in one notorious incident, rolling decapitated human heads across the floor of a discotheque. These acts served as public messages, both to the community and to rival cartels. Initially, the gangs sought to manage media coverage of their activities by intimidating news outlets and reporters. Later, as social media became integrated with the mainstream media, Mexican cartels, like ISIS, changed their strategy. No longer limited to the “town square,” the cartels used social media to reach a far wider audience. Many of the YouTube videos follow a standard format: A captured member from a rival cartel is forced to answer questions

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from an off‐camera interrogator. A message or “confession” is extracted. Then the victim is executed, sometimes spectacularly. One of the videos featured decapitation by chainsaw. Cartels began to put pressure on journalists to report more aggressively on these videos. Mexican news agencies faced the same questions that international outlets grappled with in covering the Islamic State videos, namely, how to report the news without advancing cartel propaganda. In 2011, most leading news organizations in Mexico agreed to collective guidelines for covering the trafficking organizations. The 10‐point voluntary agreement, signed by 50 leading executives, called on the media to reject the violence of the drug cartels, cover it in a measured way, and refrain from portraying cartel leaders as “victims or heroes.” The agreement was hailed by government officials, but several leading news organizations refused to sign on, denouncing the pact as a form of self‐censorship that would limit coverage of a vital news issue. Sensationalized coverage was reduced but hardly disappeared. As Alves noted, the videos provide “dramatic visual narratives that are hard for news organizations to resist.” “We never signed on to this pact because we have a different vision of journalism and how to cover aspects of the violence,” said Ismael Bojórquez, editor of the Culiacán, Sinaloa–based daily Ríodoce. “In Sinaloa, the war of the so‐called narco‐banners continued and we generally covered it. We don’t feel we were used by the drug ­traffickers. These are facts, and many of them have journalistic value. This is a moment that requires greater and more profound coverage of drug trafficking, not a retreat.” The cartels soon found a new outlet, an immensely ­popular website called Blog de Narco. Castigating the mainstream for self‐censorship, the website made a point of publishing everything without taking sides—but merely hosting the videos allowed the violent handiwork of the cartels to be seen by an increased audience. In Nigeria, a similar cat‐and‐mouse game played out, with heavy‐ handed efforts by the authorities to restrict the dissemination of videos produced by Boko Haram putting journalists at greater risk. Ironically, Boko Haram gained international notoriety because of a successful Twitter hashtag campaign focused on the mass kidnapping of schoolgirls



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by the militant Islamist group. The #BringBackOurGirls campaign brought global attention to the longtime violence and unrest in northern Nigeria and brought Boko Haram into the spotlight. But at the end of 2014, 219 schoolgirls remained in their custody; this number includes all except those who managed to escape from the original group of 276. In late 2014, videos from Boko Haram mocked supposed government negotiations to free the girls and claimed that they had been married off to Islamist fighters. Boko Haram supporters also used the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag to disseminate retaliatory messages by way of YouTube. In July 2014, AFP distributed a video showing Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, laughing and dancing while singing: “You’ve been going around saying, ‘Bring back our girls.’” He then adds, “Bring back our army.” ISIS released a similar mocking statement, altering Michelle Obama’s plea for the missing schoolgirls to read “Bring back our Humvee.” Nigerian journalist Ahmad Sakida said that Boko Haram uses social media and videos distributed to individual journalists to convey its messages to the public. Sakida grew up in Maiduguri, in Borno state, a region he called “the vortex of Boko Haram activities.” Boko Haram leaders trusted Sakida with information, and for several years he served as the main media contact for the organization. He was regularly sent videos that documented the group’s actions and demands. Sakida posted the videos on his newspaper’s website and routinely shared them with competitors. The videos consistently made news, and they often contradicted government accounts of major bombings, such as the attack on the United Nations headquarters in Abuja in 2011. “The authorities want there to be a single narrative when it comes to the subject of terrorism,” Sakida pointed out. Eventually, Nigerian journalists came under so much pressure from the authorities that they refused to report on Boko Haram’s activities. This, in turn, angered the militants who relied on the media to disseminate their message, and they began launching physical attacks on media outlets, such as the bombing of the two offices of ThisDay for which Boko Haram claimed responsibility. Sakida, who was forced to leave Nigeria because of government pressure, now lives in exile in the United Arab Emirates. Ultimately, Boko Haram’s lack of access to the Nigerian media did not stop the flow of information. They regularly upload their video

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messages directly to YouTube, where they rack up hundreds of thousands of views. Because of the pressure on Nigerian media, Sakida says, they now distribute their videos to the AFP. An October 2014 video first made public by AFP refutes claims that Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau had been killed and incorporates images of graphic violence, including the stoning of alleged adulterers, the amputation of an alleged thief ’s hand, and the apparent beheading of a captured Nigerian air force pilot. The graphic videos distributed by Mexican cartels and Boko Haram have been used in Mexico and Nigeria to undermine the governments’ claims that they are making strides in containing violence and protecting citizens. The videos are intended to highlight government powerlessness and incompetence in significant regions of each country. The more widely they are disseminated, the greater the impact. Therefore, the militants have intensive interest in ensuring media coverage, whereas governments seek to suppress it. Journalists in both countries are caught in the middle. ■  ■  ■

“The advance of an army used to be marked by war drums. Now it’s marked by volleys of tweets,” Berger wrote in The Atlantic. When the conflict first erupted in Syria, much of the international policy debate was focused on how to alleviate the suffering of civilians and confront the Assad regime’s record of relentless violence. Today, the debate is about containing the Islamic State and preserving regional stability. This is because the nature of the conflict has changed, though it is also a function of how the conflict is perceived and the effectiveness of the ISIS messaging machine. As the AP’s Santiago Lyon noted, the original images emerging from Syria presented the perspective of victims. Today, many of the images show the conflict from the perspective of the perpetrators of violence. Although ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Mexican cartels have divergent strategies and goals, they are all nonstate actors with highly evolved media systems that take full advantage of the rise of social media to advance their message. Though states have at times documented atrocities that they commit, their intended audience was the



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internal bureaucracy. In contrast, these nonstate actors seek to use existing media structure to amplify the stage for their violent acts. In an evolving media landscape in which social media are becoming increasingly embedded in more traditional reporting, perpetrator videos have the opportunity to become the news. There is now near‐instant access to atrocities taking place across the world. The trend is not confined to organized militant groups. In this media ecosystem, the opportunity exists for a perpetrator of violence to not only publicize the act but to also use the publicity to amplify the terror. “This issue has become more prevalent and more recognized because of social media,” said Madeleine Blair, Human Rights Channel curator at Witness, which trains activists to use video for human rights documentation, “but even back before YouTube we saw and wrote about a number of patterns of perpetrators’ recording and filming their own violence and using film as part of the abuse tactic.” The trend, Blair believes, poses a unique challenge to those monitoring and documenting human rights violations, including journalists. “On one hand, the video is exposing and documenting the abuse and, on the other hand, either perpetuating the abuse or furthering the endangerment of the victim,” she said. The prevalence of perpetrator videos has raised grave ethical questions not only for journalists and media organizations but even for the technology companies that host the content. In September 2014, the Guardian reported that a special British police squad now works directly with companies such as Twitter and YouTube “to block and delete about 1,100 pieces of gruesome content a week, which they say contravene U.K. terror laws.” This has inevitably raised questions about free speech online and who controls the content on the Internet. Twitter has not divulged its practices around the takedowns but has publicly stated: “We review all reported accounts against our rules, which prohibit unlawful use and violent threats.” For Alves, traditional media needs to balance the public interest with an awareness that the “information was created as a propaganda weapon.” Because the violent videos can never be totally suppressed, traditional media should embrace a different role, not as information

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gatekeepers but instead as “instances of verification,” providing context and perspective. “We are moving from a media‐centric ecosystem to an I‐centric ecosystem,” Alves explained. “The person is the medium.” Mexican editor Ismael Bojórquez said that because of his experience in Sinaloa he advises international media not to shy away from showing graphic violence if it is essential to the story. He cautioned journalists to “never tie your hands or cover your mouth. This is fatal to journalism.” The new realities require a fundamental shift in the way that journalists and news consumers relate to information, particularly information disseminated by violent and extreme forces. In the days when the media exercised an information monopoly, journalists could collectively choose to exclude certain voices. Today, that power is gone. Though social media and new information technologies enable everyone to speak, they do not require everyone else to listen.

Joel Simon is executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Samantha Libby is CPJ’s advocacy officer. The section on Al‐Qaeda’s media strategy is adapted from Simon’s book The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom (Columbia University Press, 2015).

5.  Lack of Media Coverage Compounds Violence in Libya By Fadil Aliriza

The mother, right, of photographer Nadhir Ktari, who disappeared with fellow journalist Sofiane Chourabi in Libya in September 2014, attends a demonstration held in solidarity with the missing pair, in Tunis on January 9, 2015. Source: Reuters/Anis Mili

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ear the end of August 2014, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates launched airstrikes against what were characterized as Islamist‐allied militias fighting near Tripoli, Libya. Or maybe they didn’t. The New York Times broke the story on August 25, 2014; Egypt denied it, the UAE didn’t comment, and U.S. officials made seemingly conflicting statements. In Libya, the facts are still hostage to politics. The Tobruk‐based government and forces under the umbrella of “Operation Dignity” that are allied with Egypt parrot Egypt’s denial; meanwhile, the competing Tripoli‐based government, tied to the “Operation Dawn” military coalition that was allegedly targeted in the airstrikes, sticks with the Times’ version. Increasingly, information in and about Libya is colored by the conflicting narratives of warring parties rather than based on facts investigated and confirmed by professional reporters. One immediate cause of this phenomenon is the dearth of reporters, and one immediate consequence is misinformation that further fuels violence. That violence in turn kills, impedes, or scares journalists away, ensuring that the cycle continues. The danger of reporting in Libya first hit home for the international press with the deaths by mortar fire of two of its own during the revolution in 2011: photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros. Freelance journalist James Foley, who was executed in Syria in August 2014 by the group calling itself the Islamic State, had been captured by pro‐regime forces in Libya in 2011, while covering the war, in an incident in which a colleague, Anton Hammerl, was killed. Libyan journalist Mohammed al‐Nabbous, who started Libya Al‐Hurra TV at the start of the uprising against the regime, was also killed that year. Since then, and in alarming numbers, the vast majority of journalists who are killed, threatened, or kidnapped in Libya are locals. Before the revolution, there was virtually no independent press in Libya. Muammar Qaddafi’s authoritarian state violently suppressed anyone brave enough to speak out. The toppling of the regime created a space in which young journalists and media outlets could operate in relative freedom and start learning the craft of reporting; however, it also created a space in which armed groups could operate freely and consolidate their power through violence. As a result, the biggest threat



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to journalists now comes from a diverse array of armed groups operating outside central control who punish journalists they see as working against their interests. One early example of this came in July 2012, when two journalists from the city of Misrata, Abdelgadir Fassouk and Yusuf Badi, were kidnapped by Qaddafi loyalists near the town of Bani Walid. When ordinary Misratans took to the streets in February 2011 to protest against the Qaddafi regime, the regime’s violent response had come swiftly. Ordinary Misratans had picked up arms and begun to group together to fight back. Because they lived in a port city, they managed to survive the regime’s siege, receiving arms and supplies by ship. With NATO’s intervention, the battle turned in favor of Misrata, and these loosely armed groups made their way to the capital, Tripoli. There, at the end of August 2011, they were one of the two primary armed groupings that liberated the capital from Qaddafi’s forces (the other main revolutionary grouping came from the western mountain town of Zintan; ensuing divisions and turf battles between Zintani and Misratan militia groups continue to play an important role today). Bani Walid, on the other hand, is a town that had strong ties to the Qaddafi regime, and many of its residents claim tribal links to Qaddafi’s tribe. As a result of this allegiance to Qaddafi (and perceived role in the military siege of Misrata), Misratans continued south to Bani Walid after capturing Tripoli. There, they lay siege to the town until the eventual cessation of hostilities. Tensions between the two cities continued after the war. On July 10, 2012, during a reporting trip in Misrata, only a few days after Fassouk and Badi had been captured, locals told me that elders from the city were meeting to discuss how best to respond, and everyone perceived the capture of the journalists as being linked to the political and military hostility between Misrata and Bani Walid. Over the next several days, tensions ratcheted up, and there were reports that Misratan militias had surrounded Bani Walid and were preparing to lay siege. Fassouk and Badi were ultimately released, but only after intense negotiations between elders from both cities and the then‐interim governing body, the National Transitional Council. Since then, journalists have increasingly been caught in the crossfire between two opposing sides. Dozens of journalists have been

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kidnapped and captured, and some have been killed. In the past two years, CPJ has confirmed that two journalists were killed in direct relation to their work. Saleh Ayyad Hafyana, a photographer for Fassato News Agency, was killed covering a protest on November 18, 2013, when a militia opened fire on the demonstrators. On May 26, 2014, Muftah Bu Zeid, editor of the newspaper Brnieq, was murdered by unknown gunmen in Benghazi as he distributed his paper, which had been critical of Islamist militias. Other members of the press have been killed in less clear circumstances or for reasons that may not be related to journalism. The kidnappings, killings, and unexplained deaths have caused journalists to be wary of covering the violence. “Fearing for my own safety will always limit my ability to go to places like Derna, for example,” said Mohamed Eljarh, a journalist and nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center who is based in Tobruk, only 170 kilometers from Derna—a comparatively short distance, given Libya’s massive geography. At the time that Eljarh spoke, in late November 2014, Derna was controlled by violent extremists, some of whom had declared their allegiance to the Islamic State, well known for its abductions and executions of journalists. As a result, the city existed in a kind of media void. Trying to figure out the very basics of what is happening in such places, including who is in power and how that fits into the Libyan and the larger regional picture, is limited to tidbits of secondhand information, YouTube videos, and Facebook posts from the city. And even those who provide that secondhand information put their lives at risk. On November 11, 2014, three young activists in Derna—Siraj Ghatish, Mohamed Battu, and Mohamed al‐Mesmari—were found beheaded. All three had been quietly conveying information about what was happening in the city, using social media networks. In the absence of objective and complete reporting, extremists are free to control the dissemination of information. As far as anyone in the world can know about Derna, violent acts and violent extremists exist in opposition to other violent acts and violent actors, apart from any social, historical, political, or economic context. Meanwhile, if war crimes take place in Derna or between other groups, there is a good chance that no one outside will know.Yet even the suspicion that



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such crimes are taking place may be enough to prompt further violent responses. Although Derna’s is an extreme case, rampant violence and chaos is taking its toll on the rest of Libya, too. In the absence of a state and in the thick of what many are calling a civil war, there is no professional police force or court system capable of investigating the motives or finding suspects behind any of these killings. At the same time, no group claims responsibility for the killings, and the anonymity of such killings sends a chilling message to anyone who would speak up. Another part of the problem is a lack of professionalism in journalism, which some say has resulted in the targeting of reporters who are unambiguous about their biases. According to Reporters Without Borders, the late Motassem al‐Warfalli was known as a supporter of the U.S.‐designated terrorist group Ansar Al‐Sharia. Conversely, many friends and supporters of peace activist and radio presenter Ben Saud and activist Sami Elkawafi have been quoted saying they believe the two were killed by Ansar Al‐Sharia on September 19, 2014, because of their political positions. (None of the three victims appear in CPJ’s database of killed journalists because the organization has not established a link between their deaths and their work.) But the problem of how journalists in Libya behave extends beyond a lack of professionalism and a lack of objectivity. Some media outlets have outright called for violence. The main dividing line politically in Libya is between those in the “Dignity” (Karama in Arabic) camp and those in the “Dawn” (Fajr in Arabic) camp. Each of these camps represents a loose coalition of forces, and identifying which groups fall into which camp is difficult given that alliances shift rapidly, public leaders are not fully in control of the armed forces they claim to lead, and each group inflates the size of their coalition in their public announcements. In its assessment of the opposing coalitions, The New York Times described Dawn as “the powerful militia from the commercial city of Misrata as well as both moderate and extremist Islamist groups.” Dignity, according to the Times, includes “a portion of the recently elected Parliament meeting there [in Tobruk]; fighters from eastern tribes and the western city of Zintan; militias of former Qaddafi soldiers; and military units under the control of a former Qaddafi general, Khalifa Hifter.” Dawn receives support from

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Turkey and Qatar, whereas Dignity receives support from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Many Libyans working in the media sector have taken sides among these two major groupings. One Dignity‐allied TV station, itself called Karama and based in Cairo, has regularly called for violence against its opponents. “I’ve watched as a presenter on Karama channel would name X family for possibly harboring [someone from the U.S.‐designated terrorist group] Ansar Al‐Sharia and then, a couple of days later, him correcting himself, saying: ‘No it wasn’t the same person, but same name,’  ” recounts one journalist who has been based in Libya for many years and asked to remain anonymous for this report out of concern for personal safety. “You just think to yourself: What if people who saw the first broadcast didn’t watch the second broadcast?” the journalist adds, noting that no one is in a position to rein in militias who might act violently on faulty information. It isn’t just such big media outlets that are inciting violence. Eljarh has seen dangerous misinformation and incitement to violence spread through rumors and dubious social media posts. “Someone on Facebook here from Tobruk posted that ‘blah, blah’ has been killed and ‘blah, blah’ killed him. He named the wrong family as the one that killed that person, and, because of revenge, people will actually take up arms  . . .  people were actually getting their arms ready in case someone would attack them because of a Facebook rumor,” Eljarh observed. The Dawn coalition that controls Tripoli, the capital, has also helped create a dangerous media atmosphere. The head of the foreign media office in Tripoli gathered the representatives of foreign media outlets in the city on November 13, 2014. At the meeting, the official allegedly told them to stop referring to the competing government based in Tobruk as the internationally recognized government and to stop referring to Dawn forces as militias. The details of the meeting, as well as some journalists’ vehement objections to an attempt at censorship, were subsequently leaked on Facebook. One journalist who was present described the meeting as a “form of intimidation,” compared the tactic to ones used previously by the



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Qaddafi regime to silence the press, and expressed anxiety that militias beyond the control of any central political command may interpret the meeting as a license to attack journalists or their families. More than that, the journalist said, despite the Dawn alliance’s public narrative that it considers its opponents in Dignity to be made up of ex‐Qaddafi forces, the Dawn alliance has in fact employed some of the same people whom the Qaddafi regime used to employ to shadow visiting broadcast reporters. The extreme polarization of the media landscape, as well as calls for violence through the media and the bullying of journalists by militias, has contributed to a discrediting of the few real remaining journalists who are trying to report the facts. “Now the media is not respected by normal people, by the community,” said Ghaith Shennib, formerly a Benghazi‐based journalist working for international news outlets. “Media reflect the reality, and if the reality is good, like what happened in 2011 [the successful uprising against the former regime], then people will love the media and the journalist and help them with all they have. But the reality now is very bad, so the media is not very welcome and they think things became this bad because of media and their propaganda.” The Libyan press was shackled under the Qaddafi regime. More than that, it was nearly impossible for young people to even imagine becoming journalists, given that the education system was devoid of liberal arts and humanities studies. As the strictures of the Qaddafi state collapsed with the uprising and NATO intervention, average citizens began to share information and debate freely in the public sphere, primarily on the Internet through Facebook. Many young activists without experience moved into this free space to take up the specialized role of reporting. Shennib noted that a big part of the current media problem stems from the fact that many of these young reporters never learned the trade properly. “The media in Libya is in a very bad level, where only a few journalists became real journalists,” Shennib said. “The others became more political activists by mentioning their opinions or what they want as the truth rather than saying the truths.” Subjective reporting has both encouraged violence and damaged the credibility of the media, and the violence has stymied training

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programs aimed at developing young talent to build the foundations of a budding Fourth Estate. “Some of the journalists left the country looking for an opportunity outside,” noted Talal Burnaz, a university student and project officer at 1Libya, a local nongovernmental organization that trains journalists. “Some of them left because they got threatened. There are only a few left who are still working and facing the bad situation here, and most of them are working with the international press.” Apart from the danger that the current media climate directly poses to people’s lives and reputations, the fact that media is increasingly dominated by extreme partisans rather than professional reporters is having an effect on the big picture. Real stories are not getting chased down. Libya’s fundamental challenges, such as reconciliation, state‐building, federalism, economic development, land rights, and oil‐ wealth distribution—issues that festered under Qaddafi and contributed to the revolution—are subjugated to competing narratives and resulting violence. There are a “lot of stories you think this would be good to chase, but  . . .  bureaucracy doesn’t help, there is zero transparency, no chain of command, and you don’t know where to start,” said the journalist, who has been based in Libya for many years, who requested anonymity. “One of the problems in the last three years is [that] we live on sources and trusting certain sources to get reliable info, but you’d be lying to yourself as a journalist here if you say this person is 100 percent ­reliable. . . . There’s no independence when it’s people you talk to, whether its analysts or journalists. . . . Sometimes you’ll come across a character you don’t know, and in the back of your head you think: ‘Who does he know? Which militias is he associated with?’  ” The problem is morbid for journalists still brave enough to work in Libya. “For me, half my contact list is either dead or in exile,” the journalist said, noting that the “narrative is definitely driven by those who hold the guns. It feels like the entire country is being held hostage. Not just elected officials—anyone trying to work.” All of Libya’s underlying structural and political challenges are subsumed by the media promotion and media coverage of war, as narrated by the warring parties themselves. More than that, the Dawn and



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Dignity coalitions are encouraging a simple black‐and‐white reading of events on the ground, with Dawn groups accusing Dignity of representing the old regime of Qaddafi, ostensibly allied with autocrats in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. In contrast, the Dignity alliance sees the Dawn group as part of a violent, anti‐nationalist, Islamist monolith allied with Qatar and Turkey. Like any powerful narrative that inspires young men to risk their lives in battle, both stories contain some truth and some myth. The reality is more complex. Neither Dawn nor Dignity is monolithic, nor is either a completely unified coalition. In post‐revolution Libya, there are many arenas of conflict occurring simultaneously and across different battlefields throughout the country. There is a wide range of armed groups, from tribal networks to neighborhood militias, city‐state militia blocs, militias grouped around political ideology, and militias representing ethnic groups. As the root causes of these layers of conflicts go unreported and therefore untreated, the Dawn and Dignity coalitions are each trying to gain a monopoly over these numerous arenas of violence. “Libyans are being drawn into these opposing corners. In their hearts they know it’s more complex, but the lines are being drawn,” said Frederic Wehrey, a senior associate in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “These lines are instrumentalized and temporary—let’s remember the 2012 clashes between Zintanis and Hifter,” he said, referring to militia groups from the city‐state of Zintan and the general in charge of Operation Dignity (two groups that clashed in the past but are in an alliance at the time of this writing). “Nothing is immutable.” The success of these myopic war narratives is possible largely because Libya lacks a myth‐busting Fourth Estate. The leaders of the major warring parties tell their stories and garner supporters without concern that the media will closely examine the truth of their claims, their financial interests, their battlefield conduct, or their links abroad. For the moment, it seems that these narratives are winning and fighting groups are consolidating their gains. This polarization of Libya’s politics leaves no group untouched. “The fact that you have very well‐funded, polarized media outlets based in Cairo or the Gulf that are pushing these opposing narratives

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doesn’t leave many people in the middle ground that can focus on core issues and steer a pragmatic path,” Wehrey said. The consequences of the lack of objective reporting are potentially dire, and not only for Libya. The violence has created significant threats to its neighbors by making production of Libya’s vast oil reserves extremely volatile, by creating free space for violent extremists with regional ambitions to operate and train, and by opening unregulated avenues for smuggling. None of Libya’s neighbors can properly assist in responding to these threats without accurate facts and details researched and investigated by objective journalists. Nor can Libyans themselves stop the violence when they do not have the facts to make informed decisions. Ordinary Libyans desperately desire an explanation for the violence and revenge killings in post‐uprising Libya and for the collapse of their country. If the information available is almost exclusively propaganda, they are likely to latch on to whichever story suits them best. They then align themselves with one of the opposing and inflammatory narratives that are inevitably predicated on violence, which is itself enabled by the lack of a functioning state police force, military, and judicial ­system—and so the cycle continues.

Fadil Aliriza is a journalist who has worked in Libya, Tunisia, and Turkey. He is pursuing a master’s degree in Middle East politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Follow him on Twitter @FadilAliriza.

6.  Reporting with Bodyguards on the Paraguayan Border By John Otis

Cándido Figueredo, veteran border‐beat reporter for Paraguay’s largest newspaper, travels with armed bodyguards on the rare occasions that he leaves the safety of his home. Source: John Otis

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ike a riveting lead to one of his stories on cocaine smugglers and crime bosses, Paraguayan journalist Cándido Figueredo makes a dramatic first impression. When Figueredo meets a visitor from CPJ in his hometown of Pedro Juan Caballero, located on Paraguay’s eastern border with Brazil, two bodyguards with submachine guns occupy the back seat of his pickup. Trailing his vehicle is another pickup filled with police agents, and in front two police motorcycle escorts lead the way to Figueredo’s home and office. Sixteen surveillance cameras monitor his one‐story house; on the journalist’s desk lies his trusty Browning pistol. The protection is warranted. A veteran border‐beat reporter for ABC Color, Paraguay’s largest newspaper, Figueredo faces constant danger. Gunmen have twice riddled his house with bullets. He has lost count of the many death threats he’s received. He has lived flanked by police bodyguards since 1995 and, because of the complicated logistics of moving around the city, he rarely leaves home. “It’s like living in jail,” Figueredo, 58, tells CPJ. But the tight security has kept Figueredo alive in one of the most dangerous regions in Latin America for journalists. Pedro Juan Caballero and other Paraguayan border cities have become havens for smugglers of everything from cocaine and marijuana to cigarettes and electronics. There are widespread allegations of collusion between local politicians and drug smugglers, some of whom react violently when they come under scrutiny from the news media. For example, on October 16, 2014, another border reporter for ABC Color, Pablo Medina Velázquez, died after four gunshots and a coup de grâce shotgun blast to the face. Medina had received numerous death threats in response to his reports on cocaine and marijuana trafficking on the border. His assistant, Antonia Almada, was also killed. State prosecutors said that the prime suspect in the murders is Vilmar Acosta Marques, the mayor of the border town of Y   pehú, who remains at large. Medina had linked the mayor to cocaine trafficking in some of his stories; according to news reports, Acosta in 2010 had threatened the journalist in a cell phone message, saying: “Watch what you write  . . .  everyone knows you.” Acosta is reportedly in hiding and has not publicly responded to the murder accusation.



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In Pedro Juan Caballero, two journalists have been gunned down in the past two years. One of these homicides—the May 18, 2014, killing of radio journalist Fausto Gabriel Alcaraz Garay—was directly related to the reporter’s work, according to CPJ research. All told, CPJ research shows that five journalists have been killed for their work in Paraguay since 1992, including Medina’s brother, radio journalist Salvador Medina, who was murdered in 2001 after denouncing political corruption. As a result of factors ranging from botched investigations to official misconduct, none of the masterminds behind these killings has been convicted or imprisoned, judicial officials told CPJ. In the Medina case, public prosecutor Nestor Cañete was removed from the investigation for allegedly having intervened on behalf of Acosta in previous criminal cases, according to news reports. CPJ interviews conducted in Pedro Juan Caballero in September have revealed that widespread impunity adds to the sense of danger and vulnerability and has led to widespread self‐censorship among reporters covering the Paraguay‐Brazil border. “There are lots of things I do not report on,” Raúl Ortíz, the host of a news program on local Radio Oasis, told CPJ. “I am very prudent because I fear for my life.” Through it all, Figueredo has managed to break important stories on drug cartels and political corruption and has emerged as one of Paraguay’s most respected journalists. But he is also acutely aware that with one false move he could join the list of the dead. “This is a place where the perfect crime exists,” said Figueredo, whose smartphone ringtone is set to the foreboding theme from The Godfather. “The state just washes its hands. The most that will happen is, they will give you a bodyguard.” At first, the enlarged color photos of the pine forests, mountains, and fjords of Norway decorating the walls of Figueredo’s one‐story house in sunbaked Pedro Juan Caballero seem a bit incongruous. Figueredo explains that after marrying a Norwegian woman he moved to her homeland in 1973 and found work in a steel mill. However, the marriage fell apart, and Figueredo was, by then, anxious to return to Paraguay, where dictator Alfredo Stroessner had finally been ousted after 35 years in power.

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He was in for a shock. Although similar in size and population, Paraguay seemed like the polar opposite of safe, orderly, and prosperous Norway. Paraguay is South America’s poorest nation and one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International. It has long served as a transit corridor for Andean cocaine on its way to Brazil and Europe and is now Latin America’s second‐ largest producer of marijuana after Mexico, according to InSight Crime, a think tank that tracks organized crime in Latin America. Appalled by the lawlessness of his hometown, Figueredo gravitated toward journalism and was hired as a border correspondent for the relaunched ABC Color, the Asunción‐based daily newspaper that had been closed between 1984 and 1989 by Stroessner. In the early 1990s, Figueredo says, the new atmosphere of press freedom encouraged reporters to start digging deeply into issues of organized crime and political corruption. “There was no in‐depth coverage of these issues under Stroessner. It was impossible,” says Anibal Gómez Caballero, who hosts news programs on Radio America, as well as the cable station Gosi TV in Pedro Juan Caballero, “but, afterward, there was huge competition for stories and scoops, and that raised the profile and the prestige of journalists in Paraguay.” But the backlash was immediate. In 1991, Santiago Leguizamón, the border reporter for the now‐defunct Noticias newspaper and the owner of a local radio station, was shot dead in Pedro Juan Caballero. Leguizamón, who often focused on drug trafficking, was the first journalist murdered in the post‐Stroessner era. “In this way, the mafia was sending an order to the news media: silence,” a 2012 news story in ABC Color observed on the 21st anniversary of the death of Leguizamón, whose murder remains unsolved. Figueredo received his first death threat in 1995, just four months after he was hired by ABC Color. He has lived and worked in the presence of a rotating crew of police bodyguards ever since. Figueredo says that criminals “will think twice about shooting you if you are with the police,” because killing a law enforcement officer could lead to a major security crackdown and disrupt smuggling operations along the border. Still, his bodyguards haven’t deterred all attacks. Gunmen first shot up Figueredo’s house in 1997. A more serious attack came in



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2003, when his house was hit by 14 bullets. One of them was stopped by a picture frame in the kitchen; another bullet lodged in a book Figueredo had brought back from Norway. Thirteen years later, sunlight streams through three bullet holes in Figueredo’s front door. In 2012, Brazilian police informed Figueredo of an intercepted phone call in which a Paraguayan fugitive, Barón Escurra, discussed plans to kill Figueredo in retaliation for his stories about Escurra’s involvement with clandestine airstrips. The most recent death threat, Figueredo says, came in May. To avoid making himself an easy target, Figueredo avoids going out. He and his current wife, Patricia Bellenzier, have almost no social life. They watch DVDs at home and cook their own meals in a large kitchen furnished with an extra freezer and bread, ice, and espresso machines. They often take meals with their guards, with whom they converse in Guaraní, the widely spoken indigenous language of Paraguay. The only time they really relax, Bellenzier says, is on periodic trips to Asunción. Figueredo’s daily routine involves working the phones and monitoring the Internet, radio stations, and a police scanner. He also relies on stringers and photographers, as well as on Bellenzier, a psychologist, to gather material at crime scenes. He will venture out with his guards for important interviews but tries to do most of his work from the office. There is much to investigate. Drug smuggling is the lifeblood of border cities like Pedro Juan Caballero, a city of 115,000 people that sits just across the street from the Brazilian town of Ponta Porã. Moving contraband across the frontier is simple because there are no immigration or customs controls. As you drive around these twin border cities, it can be hard to tell whether you’re in Paraguay or Brazil. Other factors are making the border even more dangerous. Paraguay’s anti‐drug chief, Luis Rojas, claims that Pedro Juan Caballero and other border towns have become operational centers for Brazilian criminal groups such as the First Capital Command (PCC), Red Command (CV), and Amigos dos Amigos. Because there is no extradition treaty between the two countries, Brazilian criminals often hole up in Pedro Juan Caballero, and Paraguayan bandits frequently hide in Ponta Porã, law enforcement officials tell CPJ.

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“Here, the narco‐traffickers are in charge,” said José Carlos Acevedo, the mayor of Pedro Juan Caballero, in an interview with CPJ at City Hall. “They are a parallel power. They decide if you live or die.” In addition, many Paraguayan politicians have been accused of protecting drug traffickers in exchange for payoffs and other favors. For example, it has been alleged in Paraguayan news reports that Congresswoman María Cristina Villalba, known as “the Queen of the North,” was a close friend of Acosta, the fugitive mayor accused of killing Medina, and helped him escape—an allegation that she has denied. “The drug traffickers give money to politicians for favors and ­protection. They also buy off the police,” Katia Estela Uemura, a public prosecutor in Amambay state who focuses on drug trafficking, told CPJ. “When the anti‐drug police do a mission, they don’t say anything to the regular police, because they will tip off the narcos.” In writing about these issues, Figueredo regularly rubs shoulders with criminals and corrupt politicians and police agents. But, as he wryly noted, “You’re not going to get information from priests.” Such figures will sometimes seek out reporters to smear rival trafficking organizations, deny allegations, or justify their actions. Figueredo recalled a massive police dragnet in Pedro Juan Caballero set up to capture a cocaine smuggler. As a way to poke fun at inept authorities, the smuggler arranged for Figueredo to interview him at a ranch just outside the city. The ethics of such encounters can be tricky. Figueredo has been offered vehicles, cash, and other perks from criminals seeking favorable coverage or promises not to write about them. Drug traffickers have also accused Figueredo of demanding payoffs in exchange for not publishing stories about them, accusations that the journalist denies. “If they can’t pay you off, they try to attack your credibility,” Figueredo said. He added that the politicians he sometimes writes about often go on local radio and claim that Figueredo is gay. Figueredo says that he ignores the slurs and tries to use his access to shed more light on the criminal underworld. He recalls receiving a phone call from Brazilian drug lord Fernandinho Beira‐Mar, who complimented the journalist on a story he had written because, unlike most news accounts about the trafficker, Beira‐Mar said, it was ­accurate. Beira‐Mar asked how he could repay Figueredo, who, in turn, asked for and received an exclusive interview at a Brazilian prison.



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“You have to use them,” Figueredo said, “and not let the drug traffickers use you.” For all the dangers and deprivations of his work, Figueredo acknowledges, he holds a privileged position among border reporters. He is a staff writer with a steady paycheck and counts on the strong support of Paraguay’s most prestigious newspaper. However, similar status did not save Pablo Medina, the ABC Color reporter killed in October, and the vast majority of Figueredo’s colleagues are even more vulnerable because they are poorly paid part‐timers with little, if any, journalistic training, according to law enforcement officials. “Cándido reports on corrupt police officers and businessmen and he names names, and that has led to threats. But at least he has the backing of ABC Color,” observed José Gabriel Valiente, a criminal court judge in Pedro Juan Caballero. “Most journalists here are on their own, so the forces of organized crime have no fear about attacking them.” In addition, many journalists produce stories and sell ads for the radio and TV programs they work for. Their watchdog role can be compromised if they accept ad money from public institutions. And unscrupulous reporters sometimes demand payments from politicians, businesspeople, and drug traffickers in exchange for ignoring or playing down scandals, criminal activities, and other bad behavior. “There are serious journalists here, but there are many others who extort people,” said Pedro González Ramírez, the governor of Amambay state, which surrounds Pedro Juan Caballero. “When a journalist starts talking about an issue, and totally focusing on that issue and nothing else, it is probably because the person he is reporting on didn’t give him any money—and then the reports stop and people say that the journalist was probably paid off.” Such unethical behavior can lead to retaliation. But Figueredo and other reporters also blame politicians who own several local media outlets and use them to attack their rivals. Journalists working for these media outlets, in turn, can become identified with the politics, causes, and pet peeves of these politician/station owners—putting them at greater risk. A prime example is the May 16, 2014, killing of Alcaraz, 28, who cohosted a morning show on Radio Amambay called “De frente a

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la mañana” (“head‐on in the morning”). He was returning home from work when two unidentified assailants on a motorcycle shot him 17 times, according to local press reports. Radio Amambay is owned by the family of Mayor Acevedo, whose brother, Roberto Acevedo, is a federal senator. The Acevedos are political rivals of Governor González, whose family owns Gosi TV. The politicians often use their stations to lash out at each other, according to Gómez, the Gosi TV host who used to work for Radio Amambay. These rival political clans, Gómez says, have frequently accused each other of being in the pay of drug traffickers. “We bought the station to defend ourselves” from attacks from Governor González and other politicians, said Mayor Acevedo during an interview at City Hall. Shortly before he was killed, Alcaraz had been denouncing several drug traffickers by name on his morning program. Figueredo, Gómez, and other reporters told CPJ that Alcaraz was probably instructed to do so by the Acevedo family. Samuel Valdez, the public prosecutor investigating the case, says Alcaraz was likely targeted in retaliation for his denunciations and that his killers “were sending a message” to the Acevedo family. But in an interview with CPJ, Senator Roberto Acevedo, who was wounded in an assassination attempt in 2010, denied that he ordered Alcaraz to denounce drug traffickers by name. He said that Alcaraz was responsible for his own statements and that, because of the danger, Acevedo had often warned the reporter to back off. “Gabriel did not realize the powerful interests he was touching,” Acevedo said. The Alcaraz killing remains unsolved. Valdez said that in such high‐ profile cases it is nearly impossible to persuade witnesses to testify because they fear for their lives. Another problem, he said, is that prosecutors and judicial police agents are often abruptly transferred when they begin investigating local power brokers suspected of criminal activity. Asked by CPJ what would happen to her if she went after a prominent politician in Pedro Juan Caballero, Uemura, the anti‐drug prosecutor, stated bluntly: “They would try to fire me.” Under these conditions, hard‐hitting reporting would seem an almost impossible task in Pedro Juan Caballero and other Paraguayan



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border towns. But 19 years after publishing his first ABC Color story, Figueredo still takes great delight in scooping his rivals and denouncing wrongdoing. “There is no alternative,” said Figueredo, who admits that he would be bored reporting from a more sedate city such as Asunción, “so I can’t bang my head against the wall.” Ortíz, the Radio Oasis news show host, told CPJ, “We don’t want to be spectators to all this violence. We want to be protagonists of change.” Like Ortíz, Figueredo has become more cautious. To avoid standing out, he will often wait for a corruption scandal or a drug bust to become prominent in the news cycle before denouncing the involvement of local politicians or traffickers. But Figueredo also knows that, as it did for his colleague Pablo Medina, his luck could run out. He points to his Browning pistol and declares that he will not go down meekly. Then he recalls a recent conversation with a drug trafficker who had threatened him: “I told him: ‘If you are going to try to kill me, I will put a bullet in your head first. I am a journalist, not a saint.’  ”

John Otis is a U.S. journalist based in Bogotá, Colombia, where he reports for NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and other media.

7.  Between Conflict and Stability: Journalists in Pakistan and Mexico Cope with Everyday Threats By Daniel DeFraia

Mexican journalists hold photos of killed colleagues during a demonstration in Mexico City on February 23, 2014, against the kidnapping and murder of Veracruz reporter Gregorio Jiménez de la Cruz. Source: Reuters/Henry Romero

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he Pakistani journalist knew the risk, but he wrote the story about the militants anyway. Years earlier he had been shot, after reporting on another taboo subject, but for him the freelance work was thrilling, even after he had to marry his girlfriend in secret and flee Pakistan without her—and still now, since the nightmares began. Constant stress and anxiety made sleeping hard, and the days were harder. “I can’t even stand in one place for five minutes,” he said. “My legs get tired.” He tried to laugh it off. “If you see my picture way back in 2010 and see my picture now, with every passing day, my friend, Dan, I got less and less handsome.” He liked big stories and his passion to report them kept him going, but everyone has a limit. Now, after five months of panic attacks in a refugee camp in Europe, he finds himself between a world of death threats and the promise of safety. If his request for asylum is rejected, he could be sent back to Pakistan. The middle‐aged journalist is among many local (rather than international) journalists I interviewed by phone, e‐mail, or Skype during eight months as a Committee to Protect Journalists Steiger ­fellow. Some had been attacked or had received a death threat, and they often had little money and needed help. Most were resilient despite horrific experiences. Others appeared traumatized and troubled by relentless stress. Their sleepless nights weren’t always about a single traumatic event; for many, they were the result of long‐term cumulative experience. It is difficult to quantify the psychological costs of that kind of stress for journalists, and there are few studies on how it affects them, their families, or their reporting. But there is no question that the effects are felt in small and big ways and invariably affect journalists’ lives and their ability to report—resulting in both personal challenges and an issue of press freedom. The journalists I interviewed worked in Mexico and Pakistan, both places where journalists are regularly targeted for murder and their killers go free. Although the number of journalists killed each year is not as high as in such war zones as Syria and Iraq, these borderline conflict zones are far more dangerous than more stable places. Mexico and Pakistan consistently rank high in CPJ’s annual Impunity Index, which



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calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country’s population. Government forces and militant groups in Pakistan, and cartels and corrupt officials in Mexico, have intimidated the free press and become arbiters of what journalists may say and, therefore, what people may know. Journalists are regularly threatened not to cover certain stories—or ordered to cover certain viewpoints—or else they or their families will be harmed. And each time a journalist is threatened, attacked, or killed with impunity, a message of intimidation is broadcast and reinforced. My interviews with Mexican and Pakistani journalists, mental health professionals, researchers, and press freedom groups between October 2013 and May 2014 revealed the consensus that journalists in these countries face a unique array of threats and possible responses to them. Some journalists interviewed feared violent reprisal and requested anonymity. “A threat has so much power in terms of emotional impact for a journalist and their colleagues,” said Ricardo González, global protection officer for the free speech advocacy group Article 19. “We have to say that this kind of intimidation will also affect their most immediate circles of family, friends, and colleagues.” And when the threat comes, journalists often receive inadequate support from uncaring employers and their governments, the latter of which they often fear and distrust. To make matters worse, getting basic psychological care is difficult. With the limited help of a few nonprofits and each other, journalists cope as best they can. ■  ■  ■

Though most media coverage of attacks against the press around the world is focused on international or well‐connected journalists, 9 of 10 journalists killed are local people covering local stories. Mexican and Pakistani journalists who work amid the endemic violence of their home countries cannot easily seek respite or safety by taking the next plane home. In northern Mexico, drug‐related violence is common, and so are threats to close relatives. In Chihuahua, in August 2012, armed men abducted and tortured journalist Luis Cardona. They left him with

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a message, he said: “Their sentence was that I couldn’t return to my home, or they will kill me or my family.” “I’m in this because of a calling, and I know the risks,” added Cardona, who now lives apart from his family. Other journalists I spoke with also accepted risk because of their deep love of the job. As a journalist in the restive Baluchistan province of Pakistan said, “I have accepted these threats as a part of my life now.” However, that journalist added, “It is the risk to my colleagues and my family members that is of a particular concern to me, at all times.” “One of the things that plagues journalists are the ethical dilemmas they face,” said Elana Newman, lead researcher for the Dart Center, which researches and supports the responsible coverage of trauma. “And I think we’ve made a mistake in focusing too much on posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD],” she added. “I think we need to just focus on stress and the important work that journalists do.” On November 13, 2008, a gunman murdered El Diario de Juárez crime reporter Armando Rodríguez Carreón while he was parked in his driveway, with his 8‐year‐old daughter in the back seat. Chihuahua journalists and their families felt the weight of the attack deeply, according to Jeannine Relly and Celeste González de Bustamante, both journalism professors at the University of Arizona. During their field research in 2011, a journalist from Chihuahua told Relly and de Bustamante: “I can’t take [my daughter] to the movie theater  . . .  or let her go to a party in someone’s house, because, no, I can’t let her do that. So we ourselves as parents have been those who imprison our children, because we have to protect them, right? And this generation, the poor things, have suffered enough.” Adding to the stress of deliberate attacks on colleagues and direct threats to themselves and their families, journalists in borderline conflict zones must regularly cover general violence, and they risk being caught up in that violence themselves. On June 11, 2011, a bomb exploded at a Peshawar restaurant and Safiullah Gul Mehsud went there to report. As CPJ wrote at the time, “A second, larger explosion, apparently a suicide bomb, went off after the crowd had grown.” Two reporters died, but Mehsud, severely injured, survived. He kept reporting, and in 2012, again in Peshawar, militants launched a rocket attack on an airport near his home.



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“When I heard the first explosion, I just left my house, took my car, and rushed to the spot and called someone at the bureau,” Mehsud said. “Then all of a sudden there was a second and third explosion.” That’s when his brother called and told him to speak with his son. “He was at that time just four, four‐and‐a‐half,” Mehsud recalled, “and he was crying and he was just shouting and crying.” The son remembered that his father had been injured in a second blast, and he thought that his father might be injured again, “and that was when I realized that even if you are strong enough, your family or people around you really can suffer from trauma,” Mehsud said. After the airport attack, Mehsud sought information on trauma. He found Dart’s 2013 Ochberg Fellowship, in which journalists take a short reporting course on violence and mental health, which he did in Bangkok. Now Mehsud is bureau chief at Dunya TV, an Urdu‐­ language channel whose coverage ranges from talk shows to terrorism news. He oversees about 50 employees, and he feels responsible for their well‐being. Not everyone feels that way. Journalists and researchers in both Pakistan and Mexico frequently told me that managers dismissed their employees’ emotional distress. “I must say that, besides a few exceptions, communication companies usually remain indifferent when faced with this problem,” said Rogelio Flores, a trauma journalism researcher from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In his 2011 study on Mexican journalists covering the drug wars, Flores reported that many had shown symptoms of anxiety, depression, and PTSD. In 2012, Dr. Anthony Feinstein, a leader in the field of journalism and trauma, published a study suggesting that Mexican journalists reporting drug‐related news showed signs of psychological distress similar to those seen in war correspondents. Yet many media companies fail to assume responsibility for their employees, Flores said. “I’ve known cases in which, rather than care for a journalist’s mental health problem that arose from their work, media companies will fire them,” he said. Other sources I interviewed, both in Mexico and Pakistan, made similar observations. American journalist and professor Sherry Ricchiardi told me that she had spoken with hundreds of local journalists, in part as a trainer for the International Center for Journalists, a media‐development

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nonprofit. In terms of psychological care, she said, “Nobody is doing anything for them, outside themselves.” “We do try to form a network, where we talk to each other and share our experiences and feelings,” a Pakistani journalist observed, “but, beyond that, we don’t do much.” Mehsud’s newsroom is an exception. “We are just like a family,” he said. Employees have peer support, and Mehsud is trained in trauma awareness and basic self‐care techniques. “Now I’m more vigilant to the situation of my staff and my colleagues,” he said. In Pakistan, where professional psychiatric health services are limited, Mehsud’s training is mostly limited to peer‐to‐peer support. At a training session in Lower Dir, Mehsud met two journalists in their mid‐40s who had been kidnapped and tortured by militants. “It’s been almost more than a year, and they keep on calling,” Mehsud said. “We are now friends.” Similarly, Javier Garza Ramos, who was deputy editor of Mexico’s popular El Siglo de Torreón newspaper at a time when its offices were shot at with AK‐47s and some of its employees were kidnapped, ­figured out ad hoc how to handle his newsroom. After a traumatic event, Ramos (also an Ochberg fellow) gave a journalist paid leave to “decompress.” He also temporarily took another reporter off the police beat. And he offered to arrange counseling for traumatized staffers, though most just said, “OK, thanks, I’ll keep that in mind,” he recalled. As in Mehsud’s newsroom, there was a sense of solidarity at El Siglo de Torreón. “When we experienced attacks, the newsroom really came together,” Ramos said. “We tried to develop ways where we could all look out for each other,” even though the paper could not guarantee everyone’s safety. But what happens when media management fail their employees? Pakistan has a dynamic network of small and large press clubs but not much else in terms of psychological support. Mexico’s media support network appears slightly more organized, though with only limited psychological support. In Mexico, Article 19 partnered with Vinland Solutions, a private psychological training and support group, and its owner, AnaMaria Zellhuber, to provide journalists with counseling. Though the program has been in place for seven years, Ricardo González said, the response



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has been spotty because some journalists see psychological care as culturally taboo. “In Mexico, the way we really deal with it is drinking alcohol,” Zellhuber said. “That’s how they cope with it, by avoiding it.” Still, the partnership has assisted between 300 and 350 journalists through counseling, González said. Program staff also help distressed journalists better evaluate decisions about their security so they don’t mistakenly minimize or magnify threats and help get them back to reporting the news. “It’s really terrible to go and visit someone in their own city after a threat, and a year goes by, and then you come back and the journalist has quit their job, they are divorced, and have developed some sort of addiction,” González said. After his kidnapping, Luis Cardona received three months of in‐ person therapy and almost a year of counseling over the phone with Article 19’s help. “It made me stronger,” he said. “With help from the psychologist, I was able to return to the fight from another point of view, with precaution but without fear, and I decided to continue informing. I can’t imagine life in any other way.” On December 19, 2013, Cardona and other Mexican journalists displaced by violence launched a news website, Diario19.com. Although the Mexican government provides aid, including psychological support, to victims of violence, Zellhuber said the program— originally known as PROVÍCTIMA but replaced with the Executive Commission of Attention to Victims in 2014—has had limited success because journalists generally don’t trust the government. The government’s “mechanism,” which protects journalists with safe houses, bodyguards, and the like, has also been heavily criticized for incompetence and its inability to keep journalists safe. So more nonprofits have stepped in to provide support. Another Mexican organization, Periodistas de a Pie (“Journalists on Foot”), was initially intended to train journalists covering poverty, but it soon became a “crisis center,” according to one of its cofounders, Mexican journalist Marcela Turati. The remote hot spots where journalists live and work lack qualified mental health professionals, and many, meanwhile, find it hard to seek support in urban centers such as Mexico City. “They [journalists] have one day off, and they can’t go there,” Turati told me, “and they are afraid, and they don’t have money.”

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Trauma education and peer support are essential, though neither offers a complete solution, Turati and others told me. “We ask people to share their experience and how they deal with this and what they do to be better,” Turati said. “That was really good. It was painful but not hopeless.” ■  ■  ■

Javier Garza Ramos recalled that the cartel’s warning, issued to another news outlet, was unequivocal: There could be no stories about murdered cartel members. But then a rival cartel murdered members of the cartel that had threatened the newspaper and dumped their bodies with the message “Now you have to publish these,” Ramos said. Similar rivalries complicate coverage in Pakistan. In the country’s tribal belt, which borders Afghanistan, it is “so difficult to identify this thing—who is on whose side,” said a journalist who received threats from the Taliban, as well as from the state’s powerful agency, Inter‐ Services Intelligence (ISI), “so when you report it’s like walking on a thin line.” “You are working in complete isolation, from within the country and the world,” said another Pakistani journalist. “Caged in home” is how another one put it. Multiple threats from different groups or rivals can make maintaining long‐term security difficult. Yet finding a safe environment is crucial for coping with a traumatic event, and constantly living with danger and chronic stress may compromise journalists’ resilience and increase the severity of their stress symptoms. “To where would they flee?” Rogelio Flores asked. “Where could journalists give themselves a rest?” Journalists in distress can escape to a different part of their country, or flee the country—legally or illegally. If their requests for political asylum are rejected, they may become an unrecognized refugee or undocumented immigrant at the mercy of human smugglers. Even assuming all goes well, there is still the question of how to work and live in a foreign country, a problem millions of refuges face worldwide. But, in fact, most threatened journalists in Mexico and Pakistan cannot or choose not to leave. They continue to report, despite the culture of impunity that reigns. Mexico’s organized crime can target a



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journalist safely, knowing the authorities won’t investigate. In Pakistan, the military, the ISI, gangs, separatists and terrorists attack journalists without fear. In April 2014, popular Geo News anchor Hamid Mir survived being shot multiple times. There has been no accountability for the attack, though two arrest warrants were issued against Mir for his reporting. In Mir’s case, there were greater repercussions for reporting the news than for attempted murder. An attack against a journalist is sometimes intended as a public statement signaling to other journalists and their families that they are vulnerable and that the attacker is in control. As one Pakistani journalist noted, if Mir could be attacked with impunity, lesser‐known local journalists would feel more vulnerable when reporting on government agencies or militant groups. In light of the danger and the lack of publicity, accountability, or support, I asked a Pakistani journalist awaiting a ruling on his asylum request, “Why don’t you quit?” “And now you tell me to write about flowers,” he said. “Why not?” “Writing and journalism is not just a career. It’s my passion. It’s my moral responsibility.” Cardona, who can no longer live with his family, had a similar take. “I’ve lost my family,” he said, “but if I can teach my children anything, it’s to not be cowards, nor mediocre—to devote themselves completely to what they believe. Journalism is not an act; it’s a way of life.”

Daniel DeFraia is a freelance journalist and American studies PhD student at Boston University. He was CPJ’s 2014 Steiger Fellow and worked in the Journalist Assistance program.

8.  Conflating Terrorism and Journalism in Ethiopia By Jacey Fortin

Exiled Ethiopian journalists perform a traditional coffee ceremony in a shared, cramped apartment in Nairobi. A wave of arrests prompted at least 30 Ethiopian journalists to flee into exile in 2014. Source: CPJ/Nicole Schilit

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t the Lideta courthouse in Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Ababa, stands a statue of a blindfolded woman holding a set of scales in her outstretched hand—a universal symbol of justice, here cast in metal of pinkish gold and wearing thick braids in her hair. Not far behind her is a brick‐and‐concrete building where some of Ethiopia’s most controversial court hearings in recent years have taken place. Journalists Eskinder Nega, Reeyot Alemu, Woubshet Taye, Martin Schibbye, and Johan Persson have all turned up for high‐profile cases in those high‐ceilinged rooms, in front of wooden benches packed to capacity with diplomats, friends, and family. The year 2014 was a busy one for Ethiopia’s judiciary—and a bad one for media professionals. In July, photojournalist Aziza Mohamed was arrested on the job. In August, the justice ministry pressed charges against five independent magazines and one newspaper. In October, former newspaper editor Temesgen Desalegn was sentenced to three years in prison for criminal defamation. The wave of arrests prompted at least 30 journalists to flee into exile during 2014, according to CPJ research. By late in the year, 17 journalists were in prison in Ethiopia— more than in any other African country except for Eritrea. The most contentious case of 2014 came to Lideta’s Federal High Court in July, when seven bloggers and three journalists were charged with planning terrorist attacks. Nine of the 10 defendants, who were arrested in April and held without bail, smile and wave during their courthouse outings. A long prison sentence might be in their future, but hearings at least allow them to catch glimpses of the friends and family members who crowd around the courthouse doors to shout greetings and blow kisses. On one such occasion in early November, the crowd outside the courthouse chattered in Amharic, Ethiopia’s national language. As the prisoners filed in, one well‐wisher piped up in English—“I miss you so much!”—while security guards moved to block the narrow door to the hearing room. “Bota yellem,” they said. “There is no space.” One onlooker pulled out a smartphone to take a photo of the scene, but a guard snatched it away in warning. The others acquiesced and settled onto benches; they knew not to push their luck too far. On that bright and breezy day, the hearing was inconclusive. Two of the three judges had recently been replaced, and the new panel



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needed more time before they could rule on the defendants’ objections to the charges. For the accused, it was back to prison for another spell of waiting. The seven bloggers—Befekadu Hailu, Natnail Feleke, Mahlet Fantahun, Atnaf Berhane, Zelalem Kibret, Soleyana Shimeles, and Abel Wabella—were part of a group called Zone 9, which used social media to campaign for human rights in Ethiopia. “As a collective of bloggers focusing on human rights, we have three major activities,” said Soleyana, who escaped arrest because she was in Nairobi at the time; she then fled to the United States and has since been charged in absentia. “The first one is advocacy work and campaigning for the rule of law. We have had four major online campaigns, which were highly focused on demanding the Ethiopian government to start to respect the constitution. We have also encouraged the citizens of Ethiopia, religious groups, ethnic leaders, opposition political groups, and civic society groups to respect the constitution.” The three other journalists charged—Asmamaw Hailegeorgis, Edom Kassaye, and Tesfalem Waldyes—did not write for Zone 9 but were friends of the bloggers. According to their charge sheet, the accused individuals “knowingly committed acts of crime by working with a terrorist organization,” though the defendants and human rights groups around the world say they are guilty of nothing more than exercising their right to free speech. Outside the courtroom, Belay Manaye watched as his friends and colleagues were marched away from the hearing, wondering why he wasn’t right there with them. He, too, is a young journalist who has written critically of Ethiopia’s ruling party. He, too, has contributed articles to the Zone 9 blog. “Just a day before their detention, I was with Befekadu. We were traveling in the same taxi home, and he was telling me that security people were following us. He was afraid we were going to be detained,” Belay said. “The following day I heard that he was arrested. That was very shocking. I was just waiting for the people to come and take me because we had been calling each other, and we were together the day before.” Until recently, Belay was a reporter for the Ethiopian Herald, a state‐owned newspaper where he wasn’t allowed to write critically of

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the government. By day, he filed articles chronicling positive developments in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country. By night, he penned a novel about a university professor who mounts a peaceful campaign to change Ethiopia’s system of governance. The work of fiction was published in 2014. It infuriated his employers, who pushed him to resign. Now Belay contributes to independent newspapers that allow him to write more critically, though he must still exercise caution. “The very important thing is that journalists are self‐censoring because there is the Anti‐Terrorism Proclamation, which is very restrictive and repressive,” he said, “so you can’t exercise your profession freely.” Ethiopia’s anti‐terrorism proclamation became law in 2009 and has been strongly criticized by local activists and global human rights groups. It threatens jail sentences of up to 20 years for anyone who “publishes or causes the publication of a statement” that could be understood as an inducement “to the commission or preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism.” Anyone convicted of planning terrorist acts could face life in jail or even a death sentence. This doesn’t mean that critical views are absent from public ­discourse. In Addis Ababa, people who can afford satellite television packages can watch news broadcasts from all around the world. Consumers can also access foreign media online, though a state monopoly over telecommunications enables the government to block several opposition websites. There are also a few independent magazines and newspapers that regularly pick apart government policies, but their numbers have been dwindling. “In my opinion the media still gives space for decent voices, even though it has very limited space and government feels insecure about it,” said Soleyana, “and, in the last two years, so many magazines changed their focus to politics from social and fashion issues.” In the rural areas where most Ethiopians live, information is even harder to come by. Almost all who own a TV are limited to government‐ owned stations, which run repeated specials on development projects interspersed with music videos showcasing the country’s natural beauty. Radio is also state‐dominated, and the Internet access rate in Ethiopia is one of Africa’s worst at around 2 percent, according to the International Telecommunication Union.



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The most recent media sustainability study supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was published by the International Research and Exchanges Board in 2012, found that “state media not only fail to follow a public‐service model, but that they have unequivocally devolved into a one‐party propaganda machine. … Editors and reporters at these institutions see their role as serving and protecting the ideology and interests of the ruling party.” The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, or EPRDF, has been the country’s ruling coalition since overthrowing a brutal communist administration in 1991. With help from Western donor aid, it has presided over a period of impressive economic growth and can boast that Ethiopia enjoys relative stability in a volatile region. But since the 1990s, said Belay, the media situation has gone “from bad to worse to worst.” The security apparatus flexed its muscle after a closely contested election in 2005, when a crackdown on political opponents led to hundreds of deaths and landed thousands more people in jail. And in 2009 the anti‐terrorism proclamation gave officials even more leeway to go after perceived threats. A federal election scheduled for May 2015 has raised further concerns that the recent arrests and terrorism accusations mark a fresh attempt to quash dissent ahead of the vote. Government Communications Minister Redwan Hussien said that the response to the proclamation has been overblown, noting that similar policies exist all over the world. “If you take the anti‐terrorism law, it is strictly copied from the well‐developed and matured democracies of the West, and none of the sentences are even changed. It was just a carbon copy, and this was the language we used,” he said. But, unlike other versions, Ethiopia’s law omits some key limitations on the definition of terrorism, and, as CPJ wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn shortly after the law was passed, the Ethiopian judiciary cannot be counted on to interpret the text fairly: “In principle, the Anti‐Terrorism Proclamation and the existing criminal code have high requirements for government prosecutors to prove intent in charges against the press, according to legal experts and CPJ analysis. In practice, however, Ethiopian judges have leniently interpreted these requirements, giving them little or no consideration.”

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Prime Minister Hailemariam has defended the proclamation, saying that the country has a duty to defend itself against a web of terrorist networks in the region, including Somalia’s Al‐Shabaab and such homegrown organizations as Ginbot 7, an exiled opposition group with links to Ethiopia’s archrival, Eritrea. “I don’t think becoming a blogger makes somebody immune. If somebody involves into this terrorist network, that destabilizes my country. This is a clear message,” Hailemariam said during a press conference in July 2014. Had he been free, journalist Tesfalem Waldyes would have been at that press conference, dutifully recording the prime minister’s words. Instead, he was behind bars at the Kilinto prison, a large compound surrounded by gray‐brick walls. The Kilinto facility is on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, but it’s far out enough for one to see auto rickshaws and horse‐drawn buggies, which are banished in the city center; far out enough that visitors to the jail must spend hours traveling along bumpy and congested roads; far out enough that the family members’ waiting area, a dirt patch shaded by corrugated steel, looks out over wild green fields stretching toward the mountains. Foreigners are not easily allowed inside Kilinto, but through his Ethiopian visitors Tesfalem sends word that he has little hope of being freed anytime soon. “They should have been charging me according to press laws, not terrorism laws,” he said from behind bars on a hot afternoon in mid‐ November, in a message memorized and delivered by a friend who asked to remain anonymous, “and, even if they had, I’d be innocent. I know I would be free if this were a fair trial, but I don’t believe that will happen because from the beginning, our detention was political.” Along with the other eight defendants, Tesfalem was first detained at Addis Ababa’s Federal Police Crime Investigation Sector, commonly known as Maekelawi. The detention center is notorious for detainee complaints of torture, solitary confinement, and forced confessions. Before his arrest, Tesfalem wrote business and politics stories for English‐language publications, including the Addis Standard and Fortune. “I considered myself a professional journalist,” he said through the friend. “I was not a member of Zone 9, but at Maekelawi I was



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forced to sign a paper saying I was. The interrogators were very ­unprofessional.” He remembers constant intimidation and days of solitary confinement in a dark room and said that he signed the false confession to avoid further mistreatment. After being charged in July for allegedly taking part in trainings to incite public violence and for associating with Ginbot 7, he was moved to Kilinto. Tesfalem hopes that he won’t share the fate of other journalists such as Woubshet Taye, who once worked for the independent weekly Awramba Times and was arrested in 2011. His wife, Berhane Tesfaye, recalls the day he was taken away in front of their son, then a toddler. “The security forces called him from the house, and he went out; he said he’d be back in five minutes,” she said. “After half an hour, they brought him back inside the house. They stayed for about an hour, searching through papers, books, phone contacts, and everything. Then they took him away, and for one month I never saw him. I didn’t know what his condition was, and I was not allowed to visit him. He was in Maekelawi.” Woubshet was charged under the anti‐terrorism law and accused of associating with Ginbot 7. Both he and Berhane still testify to his innocence, but in 2012 he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Once he’d been moved to Kality, a prison not far from Kilinto, Woubshet told his wife that he had been subjected to prolonged solitary confinement at Maekelawi. After a series of inexplicable transfers, the prisoner was, as of December 2014, back at Kality, where his wife and son—now 6 years old—visit as often as they can. The prisoner’s son is named Fiteh, which is Amharic for “justice.” “Woubshet chose the name,” Berhane said. “He always had hope for Ethiopia, and especially for Ethiopian journalists, because now they don’t have freedom. I think things will stay like this in the near future, but, after some years, I hope Ethiopia will be better. I hope it will change.” For foreign correspondents based in Ethiopia, the risks are fewer. Some have been deported—most recently in May 2014, when Egypt’s Hamdy al‐Anany, who served as the Addis Ababa director for the Middle East News Agency, was subjected to forced repatriation—and many have been detained briefly at local police stations for lengthy accreditation checks that can foil attempts to cover breaking stories.

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But when it comes to unfair charges, long detentions, and harsh sentences, local journalists bear the brunt of the injustice. In recent years there has been only one case in which foreign correspondents have been sentenced to long jail terms. In June 2011, Swedish journalists Martin Schibbye and Johan Persson crossed illegally from Somalia into Ethiopia’s Ogaden region in an attempt to investigate the activities of a Swedish oil company there. Ogaden has long been plagued by instability; a Somali separatist group based there, called the Ogaden National Liberation Front, or ONLF, has been labeled a terrorist group by the Ethiopian government. After gaining access to the area with help from the ONLF, Schibbye and Persson were apprehended by Ethiopian forces in the wake of a firefight during which both sustained gunshot wounds. From the beginning, the two journalists faced threats of execution, denial of medical treatment, and attempts to force false confessions. Then came a stint at Maekelawi, followed by another at Kality. “Everything in Maekelawi is about confessing,” Schibbye said. “I heard people being beaten regularly—with hands, with sticks. I saw people wounded on their ankles and hands from being hanged upside down. Some were tortured badly by being beat on their balls with a thin iron stick. Everything was about ‘confess’ and ‘sign here.’  ” In Kality, too, the situation was dire. Schibbye recalls overcrowding, rampant disease, rats emerging from filthy shared toilets, and a pervasive atmosphere of fear. Schibbye and Persson were charged under the anti‐terrorism law, found guilty, and sentenced to 11 years behind bars. But international pressure helped secure a pardon request from the highest levels of the Ethiopian government, and the two were released in September 2012 after 14 months in detention. The same could not be said for the Ethiopian journalists they met in prison, including Woubshet and Reeyot Alemu, who was also charged and convicted under the anti‐ terrorism law. “When I look back and think of Reeyot and Woubshet, who were left behind in the chaos, on the concrete floor between walls of corrugated steel, I feel sick to the stomach,” Schibbye said. Minister Redwan maintains that the government does not condone mistreatment at any of its detention and interrogation centers.



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“What must be taken seriously is that there is a law in this country, and that this country has adopted regional, continental, and international laws that each prisoner must be handled with due care,” he said. “If the government in any way came across such an act which is committed by any one of individuals there, then it would have acted accordingly and swiftly.” Schibbye disagrees. “In our case, [the mistreatment] was sanctioned from higher up, for sure, from day one,” he said. “We believed that being journalists would set us free. Instead, being journalists was why we were charged and sentenced.” Belay said that even while suffering physical and psychological torture at Maekelawi, his imprisoned colleagues sought to educate the prison guards about basic human rights. “When I asked them about this, they were laughing, but they were very sad, too,” he said. “These people have to be trained; they have to learn the laws and know the constitution so that they can respect it.” Until that day comes, Ethiopia’s imprisoned journalists are stuck in a world of steel and concrete. They see their loved ones only at court days, where they are closely guarded so they cannot hug their families, or during rushed prison visiting hours, during which they are separated by two sets of bars so they cannot reach their friends. But the fight for press freedom goes on in their absence. Belay said that despite—or perhaps because of—what happened to his friends, he is not afraid of speaking out. “If you arrest them while they’re exercising their rights, then come arrest me while I’m exercising my rights,” he said. “I want to deliver my message, too—so I will fight to the end.”

Jacey Fortin is a freelance journalist based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

9. We Completely Agree: Egyptian Media in the Era of President El‐Sisi By Mohamed Elmeshad

Journalists protest the imprisonment in Egypt of Al‐Jazeera staffers Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy, and Baher Mohamed outside the network’s offices in Sanaa, Yemen, on June 25, 2014. Source: Reuters/Khaled Abdullah

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f there were any doubt about who the presidential frontrunner would be in Egypt’s May 2014 elections, the Egyptian media made sure to strongly suggest that then‐Defense Minister Abdel‐Fattah el‐Sisi was the only choice. No matter how prominent the other presidential candidates were, each was unceremoniously sidelined, discounted, or even ridiculed, and most soon withdrew their names from contention. Owing to the media’s unwavering support for el‐Sisi, the scene was set for a return to a state‐aligned media monolith. All of the media figures, owners, and journalists who had flourished under ousted President Hosni Mubarak now found a new champion. Today, many popular television hosts who came to prominence after or as a result of the January 25 Revolution, or are considered less‐than‐­enthusiastic supporters of el‐Sisi, are being purged from the airwaves—most through acquiescent internal media organizational actions. There have been instances of direct government intervention or censorship, such as the shutdown of opposition Islamist channels, but most censorship now comes from a zealous state‐aligned media ­establishment. The result is that the media in Egypt today is essentially the voice of the military state. The trend was plainly evident in the run‐up to the elections. In interviews by major private television stations with el‐Sisi and Hamdeen Sabahi (who alone endured as an opposing candidate), the difference in treatment was stark. El‐Sisi gave pretaped roundtable interviews to reverential interviewers at special locations, as if dispensing wisdom to studious deputies. Sabahi, who sees himself as the torch‐ bearer for Nasserism, only gave live in‐studio interviews, with typically probing and combative hosts taking him to task over his presidential program and recent statements. Sabahi was treated as an opposition candidate, el‐Sisi as a president. When he was defense minister, among the first orders that el‐Sisi gave after President Mohamed Morsi was deposed on July 3, 2013, was shutting down two newspapers and all nine privately owned pro‐Morsi television stations airing out of Egypt. Many of the employees and owners were subsequently jailed. It was clear that the relationship between the regime and the media was going to be crucial during el‐Sisi’s early days in power. On



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May 3, 2014, during one of his taped roundtable discussions (this one in his residence), he met with a who’s‐who of Egyptian media and lectured them on the importance of media in “unifying the nation.” Within four months of his election, he held three more such meetings with representatives from the media and journalism institutions. None challenged him, though a few did propose progressive steps that could be taken for media freedom. The state’s obvious preoccupation with the role of the media has reaped dividends; the popular media has shifted its coverage to support the government, and this has inevitably resulted in biased reporting and internal censorship. Although many journalists face real danger covering protests or Muslim Brotherhood–related activities, their ability to perform even routine duties has been constrained by a media hierarchy that takes its cues from the regime. As Mohammed Helmy, head of the reports unit at CBC Extra TV in Cairo, put it, “It is clear that the media agreed with the president that ‘there is a war on terror and the media must play its part.’ However, these are very loose terms, and unfortunately many media organizations are translating them to mean that anyone who has any opinion contrary to that of the state’s must be restricted [from appearing or publishing].” Helmy spoke to me while on a two‐month leave in Germany. On October 25, 2014, the CEO of Al Nahar TV walked into the dressing room of prominent Egyptian talk show host Mahmoud Saad moments before the airing of his live nightly television show to let him know that he would not be presenting that night. Saad, an amiable and relatively balanced media personality, dutifully obliged, leaving the station and taking his production team with him, according to some of the show’s journalists, who declined to be identified by name for this report. The night before, Saad had hosted a guest who critically psychoanalyzed el‐Sisi, and who, among other things, spoke about the psychological effects of popular support for the military. The guest, Manal Omar, also mentioned a 1967 Egyptian military defeat by Israel that led to a seven‐year occupation of Sinai. The day that show aired, units of the Egyptian military were under attack in Sinai. Al Nahar, a private station, never revealed why Saad was taken off the air, but its management issued a public statement saying “substantial

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changes” would be made to its political programs. “The channel will prohibit the appearance of a number of guests who promote ideas that weaken the morale of the Egyptian army,” the statement noted. A few days later, Al Nahar issued another statement saying that Saad would resume his position and that he was in agreement with the channel that they must work together on “unifying the ranks” and working toward “prioritizing  . . .  the national interest.” On October 29, 2014, Saad took back the reins from his temporary replacement, Khaled Salah, a vociferous supporter of the current regime and editor‐in‐chief of a newspaper with similar inclinations. Saad’s only comment on his hiatus: “I honestly don’t know why I was not on air these past few days.” The Al Nahar episode was not big news outside Egypt, but it illustrates the current state of the media in country. Though journalists in the field often find themselves in physical danger or involved in legal entanglements having to do with political unrest, public and private editorial boards have been bent on purging or at least quieting influential figures whose views run counter to the regime’s narrative, which requires obsessive nationalism and a unified political voice, ostensibly to fight terrorism. Even talk show hosts who nominally supported el‐Sisi but had a tendency to be honestly critical have lost their places on the air or in the newspapers, despite being prominent and widely watched. “After June 30, the general trend and atmosphere in Egyptian media has been one of widespread support for the regime, paralleled with a hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Mohamed Nasser, an executive producer and editor at major private television stations such as Al Nahar and Al‐Modon. News broadcasters and talk show hosts such as Yosri Fouda (ONtv) and Deena Abdelrahman (CBC TV) were frozen out of the private television stations where they dominated the airwaves in the nightly and daily primetime slots, respectively. In Fouda’s case, multiple high‐ ranking insiders at OnTV who requested anonymity for this report because of the potential for repercussions said that one year before his contract was to end, he was told he would no longer have his nightly show but could stay on with a weekly show—an offer he was sure to refuse, in light of his popularity and the show’s ratings.



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Abdelrahman, who had been presenting a nightly talk show highlighting social issues, was released in March 2014, ostensibly because of what her employers described as her “decreasing stock in the media,” according to a statement reported by the news outlet Youm7 online. CBC is the same network that pulled Bassem Youssef (known as Egypt’s Jon Stewart) off the air in November 2013, when his satirical anti‐establishment show was reaching dizzying commercial heights as the most‐viewed program in the Arab world. Youssef ’s cancellation coincided with his taking jabs at the president‐to‐be; he had dedicated a segment to mocking the way in which Egyptian media outlets were dropping unsubtle hints regarding el‐Sisi’s presidential credentials. Abdelrahman had used time on her show to criticize her employer’s treatment of Youssef, a cardiac surgeon turned political satirist. Others, such as talk show hosts Reem Maged and Alaa el‐Aswany, simply chose to retreat from the field, both after offering very public reasons. Maged wrote a letter to her employer (also ONtv) that was made public, stating that she was invoking the “conscience clause” and stepping down from her nightly talk show because her principles regarding her job “do not coincide those of my employer.” The common factor for all of the departing media figures was that they were among the preeminent media voices of the January 25 Revolution, which is when they became household names. They were all liberals who opposed Morsi, whose media supporters had already been taken off the air. They were not averse to hosting guests or entertaining topics spawned by the June 30 demonstrations that could be seen as running averse to the regime. Writers such as Belal Fadl, Seif Abdelfattah, and others who were acclaimed columnists with broad, established audiences also found themselves frozen out of publications for which they had written extensively. Fadl’s latest television drama, Alexandria’s People, was pulled from being aired in all local private and public broadcasting. According to a 2014 report by the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) titled “Freedom of Expression After the First 100 Days of el‐Sisi’s Rule,” one of the reasons cited by station heads for pulling Fadl’s show was that “it would be improper to air a television drama that criticizes the performance of police” before the 25 January revolution.

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Gamal Eid, director of ANHRI, observed, “There is a return to the Mubarak‐era system of unofficially blacklisted public figures who are persona non grata on television stations.” According to Eid, privately owned media with allegiances to the regime decide among themselves to bar certain guests from appearing as pundits. Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb announced in April 2014 that there would be no government censorship, that “no free pen would be chopped down.” Yet the reality is that the government has on occasion directly intervened, and it has made clear the ramifications of media opposition to its stated goals. Ahmed Ragab, formerly an executive producer of Yosri Fouda’s show Akher Kalam and a managing editor of one of Egypt’s largest independent newspapers, Al‐Masry Al‐Youm, observed that “pens are chopped down, columns discontinued, and media is definitely silenced.” However, Ragab believes that much of the censorship is the product of the general atmosphere, that there is no systematic censorship or official government‐mandated bias. Instead, Ragab contends, the lack of objective media stems from a combination of social hysteria regarding terrorism and the threat of political instability and commercial interests that drive media outlets to toe the government line. “The market for neutral, level‐headed news shows, like Fouda’s, is decreasing while the market for sensationalist nationalism is on the rise,” Ragab said. “Right after the 25 January Revolution, the power was in the streets, so the media had to follow suit,” said Khaled el‐Balshy. “Now the businessmen who run the media are back with the state and doing their work for them.” El‐Balshy, who has been editor‐in‐chief of the independent newspaper Al‐Badil since 2008, said he believes the state has been “abusive” to journalism by dealing harshly with offending reporters through limits on information access and various legal procedures. A TV news presenter working for a private network who spoke on condition of anonymity said that since the run‐up to the June 30 protests, he has received direct orders from his superiors not to sanction the appearance of any Muslim Brotherhood members on any of their programming. The presenter claimed that he was told that this was a national duty, despite the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood was still



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in power and had not yet been declared a terrorist organization, as it is now. Many media insiders support Ragab’s contention that news coverage by private stations is not directly dictated by the regime—not officially, at least. “Most media executives would agree, the government has not directly released any gag orders against any of these personalities,” Nasser, who is also Cairo bureau chief of the Lebanese TV station Al‐Mayadeen, observed. One incident that appears to contradict that view involved Aida Seoudy, who hosts a variety show on Radio Hits, a publicly owned radio station. Seoudy took to her program on November 29, 2014, to voice her frustration that the legal case against former President Hosni Mubarak had been thrown out on procedural grounds, leaving him free to go. She did not criticize the court’s ruling itself, which would have been illegal and could carry a jail sentence and serve as grounds for her suspension from work. Her annual contract, which she had been renewing regularly for more than five years, was due to expire on December 1, 2014, and on the day after her outburst, Seoudy said, she was told that her contract would not be renewed. After making headlines, Seoudy said she received a phone call on December 2 from a policeman working in el‐Sisi’s office, informing her, “The president has ordered your [contract] renewed  . . .  and sends his regards.” A representative of the president’s office called in to a talk show presented by Yousef el‐Hosseiny to confirm that the president had ordered Seoudy back to work, el‐Hosseiny noted in his on‐ air comments. Seoudy also recounted the conversation in a television interview with Mahmoud Saad the next day. Observers were left to wonder whether the conflicting actions regarding Seoudy’s contract signified a disconnect between decision makers in the media and the presidency or other executive authorities. That is a topic that Seoudy, who is back on the air, has also raised. Other editorial executives contend that the close relationship between major newspapers and TV stations with different state apparatuses means that state intervention in local news reporting sometimes comes in the form of informal telephone conversations. Ragab subscribes to this theory as well: “The majority of media owners find it in their best interest to be in the state’s good graces [such] that they

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would not refuse direct requests [such as] avoiding certain subjects or figures. I feel that, on the contrary, they go overboard in trying to prove their loyalty.” A day after the incident with Mahmoud Saad, while the country was consumed with news of terrorist attacks in Sinai, the editors‐in‐chief of all of the major newspapers met and issued a statement to collectively declare that they would “support all of the measures taken by the government in combating terrorism and protecting the national security of the country.” The meeting followed another incident on “Dream TV” in which host Wael el‐Ibrashy’s show was cut short while he was criticizing the Ministry of Education. In Egypt, most prominent newspaper editors also run TV news talk shows, and many TV journalists and producers are also print journalists. The phrase “prioritizing the national interest,” a recurring theme among government and media officials, is obviously open to interpretation and largely within the government’s purview. Another producer on a private television show, who requested anonymity for the same reason cited by others—fear of retribution—said that he had received direct orders from his superiors to refrain from covering any Muslim Brotherhood protests or gatherings. “Just watch TV on most Fridays— you will see no coverage of protests on television, but Facebook will be filled with photos from them,” the producer said. Gamal Eid said that he has heard similar reports from other sources, that their stations had ordered them to avoid covering the Muslim Brotherhood. Those who do cover Muslim Brotherhood protests face clear ­perils. Some have been killed and wounded during violent encounters and, at the very least, have found little support for their reporting. “I have reporters who were slapped around by police for covering an MB protest, and others attacked by the MB supporters, for thinking they were there to misrepresent them,” Helmy, of CBC Extra TV, said. For many Egyptian journalists, supporting the government’s positions is a given and is not even seen as bias. British journalist Imogen Lambert recalled a job interview with a news network’s online English portal in which she was unabashedly told that the network supported the government. “The editor that was interviewing me had no qualms saying, ‘Here, we support the government, we support the



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president, and we support the military, and we do not like the Muslim Brotherhood,’  ” Lambert said. The editor, Lambert recalled, also said that if she were to report a foreign story, she should remember that the network was averse to Turkey, Qatar, and Iran. She would, however, be free to cover the Scottish referendum. “See, this is something that your BBC would not let you cover freely. That’s how we are with the Brotherhood,” the editor added, according to Lambert, who quit the job after two weeks. Some view such positioning as a return to operating under similar restrictions imposed during the Mubarak era. But others, including Ragab, are more pessimistic. “For journalism, these days are the worst we’ve seen recently,” Ragab said. “During the time of Mubarak we had boundaries, but we covered many more topics openly. These days I don’t hear much talk about journalistic integrity as much as I [do] hysteria regarding this concept of national priorities.” From the early days of the new Egyptian Republic, each president has had a minister of information who would regulate and manage the entire media establishment in Egypt, in direct coordination with the regime in power. That position has been canceled; in its stead, a National Media Council is being created under a directive in Article 211 of the 2104 Egyptian Constitution. Among other things, the article states that the council is responsible for guaranteeing and protecting the freedom of press and media; safeguarding its independence, neutrality, plurality, and diversity; and preventing monopolistic practices.” On the surface, the council appears to be an Egyptian version of the Federal Communications Commission in the United States but with broader jurisdiction. The concern, said CBC Extra’s Helmy, is over how far that jurisdiction will extend to ensure compliance with “national goals.” The Egyptian Radio and Television Union, a government body, is authorized to compile a list of 50 people to choose the council’s 25 members, excepting the two members whom the president selects. The president also has the authority to choose the council’s chair. In light of the current close alignment of the media and the state, many observers are circumspect about the chances that the council will be able to effect meaningful change. But el‐Balshy, who is also a board member of the Press Syndicate, said that limiting direct state regulation

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of the media and limiting media monopolies could help reduce state control. “We are either looking at an oppressive system in Egypt between private businesses and the state that will only get more oppressive in the future or we have a glimmer of hope in new progressive legislation that, if applied, could lead to a truly free press,” el‐Balshy said. El‐Balshy’s caveat, “if applied,” is a crucial question concerning the future of the media in Egypt.

Mohamed Elmeshad is a freelance journalist who has worked for Egypt Independent, reporting primarily on social issues, economics, and the Egyptian revolution (2011). He is pursuing a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London.

10.  Finding New Ways to Censor Journalists in Turkey By Yavuz Baydar

A journalist holds a placard at the headquarters of Zaman daily newspaper in Istanbul on December 14, 2014. Turkish police raided media outlets close to U.S.‐based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, including Zaman, and detained 23 people. Source: Reuters/Murad Sezer

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he flood was foretold and seemed inevitable. Even I, with my limited resources as a journalist and media monitor, raised the alarm years ago. During the past five years, step by step, the Turkish media has fallen into full compliance with the structures of power, most notably those of President Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an. In a series of articles in publications including the Guardian, Huffington Post, Today’s Zaman, and Al‐Monitor, I have sought to point out that the tsunami that is overwhelming Turkish journalism is far beyond the worrisome, unacceptable number of journalists and dissidents in jail, that the future of the Turkish media itself, with its professional values and conduct, is in serious danger. As a result of systematic attacks and cunning operations by both the government and complicit media organizations, Turkey now has a toothless mainstream media lacking efficiency and influence, with almost no trust among the general public. The airing of official statements and the publication of news releases without scrutiny have become routine. The media’s daily practices are little more than stenography. The watchdog has lost almost all of its functions, with the exception of a very few struggling independent dailies and TV channels and online news sites. According to Aslı Tunç, an expert on media ownership and head of the Media School at Bilgi University in Istanbul, two‐thirds of the Fourth Estate is now either institutionally embedded with or submissive to the ruling Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, having been eclipsed by the rage of President Erdog˘an. The country’s national broadcaster, the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, or TRT, has fallen under total control of state power, as has the Anatolian News Agency, one of the oldest, best‐established institutions of the republic. Loyal bureaucrats with little or no knowledge of journalism, carefully chosen by Erdog˘an and his close circle of aides, have been appointed to key positions. ˙Ibrahim S¸ahin was, until he became an undersecretary of the Ministry of Transport and Communications, general director of TRT and a former governor with a background in law who had served in various small provinces and as director of the National Post Office. Kemal Öztürk, with minor experience as



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a documentary filmmaker, was appointed director of the Anatolian News Agency after having served as an adviser to Erdog˘an. Both were removed in the fall of 2014, allegedly for political reasons. The absence of objective public broadcasting has led to widespread reporting of government propaganda—a condition that is sadly familiar to Turkish citizens from earlier decades. TRT’s bias reached such levels that in 2014, for the first time in its history, it was penalized by the High Electoral Board, known as the YSK, which is one of the very few independent bodies in Turkey. Citing TRT’s uniformly pro‐Erdog˘an stance during the two elections in 2014, the YSK blocked the airing of 25 episodes of the offending program. The AKP also has a significant majority in the regulating Supreme Board of Radio and Television (RTÜK), which has been exercising its policies in favor of censoring the critical content of the news and comment in socially influential channels. According to a report by the KONDA polling institute, 72 percent of the Turkish public relied on television as a prime or single source of news as of the summer of 2013. In the eyes of the global public, Turkey had long been known for having the highest number of imprisoned journalists—by some counts, more than 100 in 2010. (CPJ confirmed that at least 61 detainees were being held in direct relation to their journalism on August 1, 2012.) Since then, mainly as a result of domestic outcry and external pressure, the rate of incarceration of journalists has displayed a downhill trend. In particular, there has been a sharp decrease in the number of journalists behind bars since late 2013. Joel Simon, CPJ’s executive director, announced a bit of rare good news regarding the Turkish media at November’s 2014 Press Freedom Awards ceremony in New York City: the number of Turkish journalists in jail had dropped to a low of seven. Some organizations, using different methodology, put the number somewhat higher, but most agree that those imprisoned are primarily Kurdish journalists or left‐leaning reporters and editors. Almost all are serving prison sentences, as opposed to pretrial detentions, based on Turkey’s dubious Anti‐ Terror Law. Falling numbers of journalist incarcerations are indeed a (relative) relief, though they do not mean that a new clampdown is out of the

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question. Unless several articles in various laws—such as the Anti‐ Terror Law or in the penal code or Internet Law—are amended in a way to ensure press freedom in accordance with the European Treaty of Human Rights, the sword of Damocles will continue to hang over journalism in Turkey, in particular the partisan press. Often overlooked by the global public is that the imprisonment of journalists in Turkey has been cyclical and almost always related to the Kurdish issue. The waves of arrests have always served as a mechanism for the government to exercise oppressive measures over journalists who are in one way or another affiliated with the opposition, legal or illegal. The ups and downs in journalist incarceration are telling of the political climate, with the Kurdish issue at the forefront. Yet the troubling fluctuation in the jailing of journalists explains only a part of the grand ordeal that journalism in Turkey has been going through. The grand ordeal, in a nutshell, is this: Whereas the number of journalists in prison in Turkey is falling, thousands of other journalists with print and audiovisual outlets are now being forced to operate in what many describe as prisons without walls. In the conglomerate media, which is controlled by four or five companies, every newsroom is essentially an open‐air prison characterized by severe, routine self‐censorship where the punishment for professional resistance is to be fired and essentially declared a toxic human resource, making it very difficult to get a job elsewhere. I was among those who were targeted in this way, having been fired from my own position as a result of my insistence on honest reporting. In most of the big media newsrooms, top editors who receive astronomical salaries operate regularly as reverse gatekeepers, or censors on the payroll, whose job it is to reject stories and comment that would frighten the proprietors and infuriate Erdog˘an. In all such media groups, reporters have to a great extent either been told or have chosen to give up on chasing stories that would be of public interest, particularly those on corruption and abuses of power. And in all of those media groups, the number of critical opinion columnists has fallen to a minimum, as more such voices disappear month



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after month. As a result, they have lost whatever has remained of their influence to hold those in power accountable. Two observations are important: • Although law‐enforced censorship remains as a tool, self‐­censorship has become the normal, widely internalized practice. • Imprisonment as a punitive measure is on the decline, replaced by firings. We owe much of the eye‐opening exposure to the big picture to widespread urban unrest, sparked by the Gezi Park protests during the summer of 2013. From then on, all the illusions about the role of the mainstream media as an autonomous force, symbolized by high‐rise headquarters and high‐tech infrastructures, disappeared. The lack of coverage and the distortion of news stories, day after day during the riots, showed that the media proprietors had sealed an alliance with the AKP government that was based on a system of mutual serving of each other’s interests, agreeing, in practice, that journalism in the public interest would not only be replaced by propaganda and lies but also, whenever necessary, punished. This unholy alliance between Erdog˘an and media moguls reached new heights with the massive graft probes of 2013, which targeted some AKP ministers and Erdog˘an’s family circle. From December 17, 2013, until the end of 2014, most of the audio recordings and leaked documents—almost all with news value, in the public interest—were deliberately ignored and self‐censored by the same media that had refused to cover the Gezi Park protests. Perhaps not surprisingly, some 20 or more audio leaks between then–Prime Minister Erdog˘an and the proprietors or top managers of the conglomerate media made it clear that the political executive of Turkey was directly interfering with the editorial decisions, such as when Erdog˘an ordered the removal of tiny news tickers from TV channel screens or scolded a repentant media proprietor to tears over a scoop in the peace talks by the daily Milliyet on the Kurdish issue on February 28, 2013. In a leaked audio recording, Erdog˘an was heard bashing Milliyet’s proprietor, Erdog˘an Demirören, saying that offending columnists or TV

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pundits should be “punished.” The conversation ends with the elderly proprietor reduced to tears. As a result, one of the most highly respected journalists in Turkey, 70‐year‐old Hasan Cemal, was fired from the newspaper, followed by Can Dündar, a columnist, and Derya Sazak, editor‐in‐chief of Milliyet. A few months after the Gezi protests, we witnessed Erdog˘an publicly confirming that he indeed had been personally calling proprietors and top editors to say that “they”—anyone who diverged from his view of journalism—“need to be taught.” The confirmation took place during a joint press conference with Mariano Rajoy, Spanish prime minister, when Erdog˘an was asked whether the audio recordings were genuine. During most of the past two decades, owning a media outlet was a lucrative business. Media companies could make use of weak coalition governments for their own benefit as they established a system of journalism whose main function was to simultaneously serve whomever was in power and their business interests. That is no longer true. The massive, impositional presence of a ­single‐party AKP government, and Erdog˘an’s total intolerance for even the slightest critique, has made it impossible for the media barons to be seen as reliable sources of news and therefore to turn a profit. Of the roughly 15,000 active journalists in Turkey, only 4.5 percent have the courage to be members of the unions, according to a recent report on media by the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, known as CHP. Fear of losing income, as a result of the lack of collective bargaining rights, means that Turkish journalists have no job security and no editorial independence. With thousands of journalists shackled at their desks, the vacuum in the centerfield is immense: Among the once‐influential trio of giants in print, Milliyet, Sabah, and Hürriyet, the first two are now under the total eclipse of Erdog˘an’s rule, and Hürriyet is operating as a lame duck. In the independent print segment, very few newspapers— some with considerable financial troubles—struggle to fulfill their role of informing the public. With the black hole in the middle, the ground is now left to pro‐government or power‐submissive media on one side and a group of fiercely partisan opinion‐based newspapers on the other.



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Until I was fired from the daily Sabah—for which I was working as an independent news ombudsman—in July 2013, my analysis was based on a deep concern that the unholy alliance of political power– media owners would inevitably lead to destruction of a key sector. I brought the issue to the global attention in an op‐ed for The New York Times, arguing that if media proprietors continued to deceive their employers’ dignity and role, it would only help accelerate a shift to autocratic rule. I was fired as a result of the article and joined those who had been sacked and branded toxic, who now number close to 1,000. My experience was part of a pattern than represents a Turkish media purge. As news reports from elsewhere also point out, elected political leaderships in many parts of the world are now busy mastering ways to stifle the media. It is high time to expose this new dirty media order, which destroys the public’s right to know. Erdog˘an seems to have realized that he no longer needs to resort to jailing journalists. Having the subservient media proprietor declare certain journalists persona non grata and obstruct their opportunities to find jobs is a much more efficient, cunning method of stifling the free press. As Yücel Sayman, former head of the Istanbul Bar Association and a human rights expert, put it astutely in an interview for independent daily Taraf: We have become so used to this order that whenever we are asked whether or not there is press freedom, we answer “there are no journalists in prison.” This is a mentality that equals the press freedom with the prison sentences and lawsuits. The greatest problem of the media is the identity of the media bosses. Almost all of them are people who have had nothing to do with the profession of journalism. They pay enormous fortunes to purchase newspapers and TV channels, in order to be able to win public contracts. As a matter of fact, there is no longer any need for throwing the journalists in jail! The political executive tells anyhow the bosses what sort of news stories to be published in return for the public tenders and which journalist to be recruited.

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The year 2014 was one of despair for Turkey’s mass‐targeted journalists—an annus horribilis, a horrible year, which leaves no doubt: when any Turkish journalist says, “We have never had it so bad,” that person simply states a bitter truth. Some have given up, but others—a small minority—continue to battle against hard winds. Since the Gezi protests, many—especially young—journalists have resorted to online journalism, which still offers limited opportunities for honest reporting. Some news websites, such as T24 and Diken, are on the rise, although they are able to address only a limited, mainly urban audience. Otherwise, Turkish journalists are subjected to polarization within, acrimonious infighting, selective engagement in common professional causes, and lack of solidarity. One step taken to overcome these challenges was the establishment of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization (which I cofounded) that since late 2013 has been involved in large‐scale monitoring of the media ordeal, as well as the training of young journalists and the funding of investigative journalism projects. Paradoxical as it might seem, Turkey may in 2015 end up with fewer journalists and, I hope, none of them in jail. But should such an outcome lead us to conclude that the state of journalism is any better in that utterly important country? And how should we deal with the self‐imprisonment through self‐censorship, which keeps polluting journalism and keeps the public in the pitch dark? As Turkey’s tragic story indicates, this is the time to approach such issues boldly and resolutely. Otherwise, indications are that the purge will continue unabated. Murat Aksoy was one of the roughly 1,000 journalists who had to pay a price for simply doing the job. On the night of December 25, 2013, as police were conducting searches of private homes, including some that belonged to members of the close circle of then–Prime Minister Erdog˘an, Aksoy appeared on a TV program, calling for accountability and respect for the rule of law. At the time, Aksoy was writing regular columns for the daily Yeni S¸afak, a pro‐government newspaper. “I realized afterwards that what I said in the TV had upset the newspaper’s management,” Aksoy was quoted saying in a recent report on media clampdowns that was compiled by four deputies of the main opposition party CHP, titled “Journalists with Broken Pens.”



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“More interestingly,” Aksoy said, “a columnist with daily Sabah, somebody I had not seen for six years, happened to call me that night and said in clear terms that he had watched the program together with a high‐level person from the AKP, and although he did not doubt that I am a democrat, what I said was wrong. “I went to the newspaper building the following day, filed my column. Soon, though, the managing editor called and told me that they would not print my piece. He said the reason was what I commented in the TV program. There was no longer any tolerance for diverse views. Then I took a break, but when I returned I was told I no longer had a job there.”

Yavuz Baydar is a Turkish journalist, blogger, and cofounder of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24). He was awarded the European Press Prize in 2014 for excellence in the profession.

11. Treating the Internet as the Enemy in the Middle East By Courtney C. Radsch

Supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi shout slogans against the military and government during a protest in Cairo on November 28, 2014. Source: Reuters/Mohamed Abd El Ghany

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he snow and freezing temperatures that struck Saudi Arabia unexpectedly in December 2013 were newsworthy in a desert kingdom better known for its extreme heat. But the fact that the ensuing power outages at a regional prison left prisoners without power or heat for nearly a week was apparently off‐limits to reporters. Mansour al‐Mazhrm, a correspondent for the Saudi daily Al‐Watan Online, reported on the outages on Twitter, only to find himself hauled into court for defamation on “information technology devices.” Al‐ Mazhrm served seven days in prison and was forced to pay a fine for violating Article 3 of the country’s Anti–Cyber Crime Law. In much of the Middle East and North Africa, the local press has limited independence and operates within strict red lines, and activists and journalists have turned to social media to provide reporting or commentary on issues of public concern. Blogs and posts on Facebook and Twitter have filled a void created by the predominance of state‐ run media and the lack of independent journalism in the region before 2011. Authorities who feel threatened by domestic reform efforts or criticism after the overthrow of authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen in 2011 have fiercely cracked down on online journalism and freedom of expression more broadly. The Internet is no longer as welcoming to independent journalism as nondemocratic governments erase the legal distinctions between speech online and off. The digital space for independent journalism and free speech is likely to be constricted further by the impact of restrictive laws, surveillance, and ensuing self‐censorship. In this environment, laws against disrupting public order and spreading false news have been passed or updated to apply to online expression—all in the name of preserving stability, preventing terrorism, and avoiding anarchy. Journalists who violate these regulations face criminal penalties, sometimes including lengthy prison sentences and fines. In countries that adopted new constitutions in the wake of popular uprisings or in an effort to stave them off, there are often provisions that specifically address digital journalism and online communications. In Egypt, the 2014 constitution established regulation of journalism online, whereas previously Internet journalism was largely unhindered.



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“Generally speaking, in the Middle East there’s been an increased effort in limiting journalists’ and people’s ability to work freely,” Ramsey George, editor of the online Jordanian news site 7iber, told CPJ. In the United Arab Emirates, foreign journalists were barred from covering the 2013 trial of 94 suspected Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers. Coverage by local journalists was biased and incomplete, according to human rights groups and Matt Duffy, a visiting assistant professor at Berry College who covered the backlash prompted by the trial for Al‐ Monitor. As a result, trial watchers turned to Twitter to report on the case, which included accusations of torture and procedural irregularities. “Why is there no investigation in regards to the torture of  Salem Sahouwa, IbrahimYasi and Mohammed Abdul Razzak, although it was mentioned in court? # Violations _ despite_ trial # trial_free_Emirates,” tweeted one such commentator, Abdullah al‐Hadidi. His observations and critical questions about the trial and treatment of defendants provoked his arrest on charges of spreading false news, a criminal offense under the penal code. He was sentenced to 10 months in prison after being reprimanded by the judge of a newspaper “for crossing the limits of free expression by trying to incite public opinion,” according to Gulf News. Duffy told CPJ that “the evidence of their ‘plot’ appeared to be no more than discussions, criticism, and dissent.” Cybercrime legislation, publicly justified as a means of preventing terrorism and protecting children, is a growing concern for journalists because the laws are also used to restrict legitimate speech, especially when it is critical or embarrassing to authorities. According to CPJ’s 2014 annual prison census, 30 of the 41 journalists who were imprisoned in the Arab Middle East worked online. Nearly half of the Internet journalists were imprisoned under anti‐state laws, such as violations of vague cybercrime or anti‐terrorism provisions. In 2012, for example, the UAE updated its cybercrime law to make it illegal to defame the government or injure its representation, using the vague language common to so many such laws in the region. Duffy called the update “repressive in its vagueness.” “These laws are targeting social media activists who are playing the role of journalists,” Duffy said. “Nobody is practicing critical journalism in these countries, so social media activists are the only ones really pushing the boundaries, and they’re being cracked down on.”

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Vaguely worded laws and the elision of criticism with terrorism or national security threats have created an increasingly perilous situation for online journalists. At the same time, licensing regimes that restrict free speech in print and broadcast media are being extended to online journalism. Requiring news websites and/or blogs to register with the government and blocking sites for noncompliance, as in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, appears to be aimed at monitoring and controlling communication online in the hopes of preventing independent journalism from fueling domestic discontent. “The Arab Spring has had two consequences,” said Hisham al‐Miraat, a Moroccan physician and blogger who works with the Association for Digital Rights. “It showed that you can change things in your country, but it was also a wake‐up call to those governments—it was a paradigm shift in the online world. Before, those governments thought the Internet could not undermine the structures they had spent centuries building. But the Internet is ubiquitous; you can’t just shut it down.” Jessica Dheere, cofounder of the Lebanon‐based Social Media Exchange (SMEX), said that the region’s governments had a singular goal in mind with respect to the Internet: maintaining power under the assumption that if they can control information, they can control the outcome. “Everything the Arab governments are doing now is about trying to control the Internet. All the legislation that’s been passed, especially since the Arab Spring, and even before, is about trying to control the Internet, and the way that they are treating activists and detaining them and harassing them is all about control.” Saudi Arabia extended repressive press laws to online media amid the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in January 2011, and in 2014 the government criminalized reporting on protests by way of social media under a new anti‐terrorism law. Kuwait, meanwhile, has proposed a law that would empower authorities to block websites and restrict access to the Internet without providing a reason under the guise of protecting public morals, health, or national security. Kuwait has the highest per capita Twitter use in the world, according to a study by Northeastern University, and critics saw this as an effort to restrain discussion of sensitive topics and election coverage with the threat of harsh penalties, including jail time. In Qatar, an ambiguous cybercrime law passed in September 2014 imposes heavy fines and prison sentences on anyone found guilty of



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violating social values by publishing “news, pictures, audio or video recordings related to the personal or family life of individuals, even if true.” Like many such laws in the region, it includes prohibitions on spreading false news but also includes penalties for creating or managing a website to do so. By criminalizing the creation and dissemination of a range of vaguely defined content, it opens up journalists and others to prosecution for engaging in standard reporting and commentary. The Gulf Center for Human Rights called the law “vague at best.” Sixteen countries in the region have laws criminalizing blasphemy or apostasy, according to the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religious & Public Life, and their application to online media dampens the public’s ability to even discuss religion or religious matters. In some cases, such as in Saudi Arabia and Libya, those convicted could face the death penalty. And because truth is not a defense against libel or defamation in most countries, according to my analysis for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) publication World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development, journalists lack basic mechanisms with which to protect themselves. In Egypt, the protest law that was implemented in November 2013 “has had a direct effect on content, keeping activist journalists away from street politics, and keeping street politics out of the papers,” according to an analysis by the free expression group Article 19 of online news media in the country. According to CPJ research, several journalists, bloggers, and activists have been jailed under this law, which carries penalties of up to seven years in prison. As of late 2014, a draft cybercrime bill was being considered in Tunisia that contains criminal penalties for defamation. Although the penal code already criminalizes defamation, “the difference is that it makes these provisions specific to the Internet,” said Afef Abrougui, a consultant on information and communications technology and human rights in Tunisia. Unfortunately for journalists, there appears to be broad public support for tightening control of the Internet. According to a survey by Northwestern University, public opinion in the region tilts toward regulating the Internet more tightly, with 50 percent of respondents in an eight‐country survey favoring broader regulations and only 16 percent opposed. In most countries, less than

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50 percent of respondents felt that people should be free to criticize governments online. Another study found that most users surveyed in the region supported government censorship to “protect” them from content deemed inappropriate or out of line with cultural values. “The anti‐terrorism law [in Jordan] has had an impact on what people say and what journalists write,” George told CPJ. “It’s stifled the debate about what’s happening; the main narrative that comes out is what the government wants to come out.” In Egypt, a draft anti‐terrorism law approved by the cabinet would give authorities wide latitude to interfere in online communication and broaden its surveillance powers. If the law passes, the state could impose criminal penalties on those who “promote [material] that is intended to mislead the security or judicial authorities in matters [related to] the crimes of terrorism” and shut down websites ostensibly used for such purposes. As of late 2014 the bill awaited President Abdel-Fattah el‐Sisi’s final signature to take effect. George’s 7iber was blocked in Jordan for much of 2014 after he refused to comply with a new law requiring news websites to register with the government and imposing onerous staffing and educational requirements to do so. Although the local news site posts some of its content on Facebook and elsewhere, the law has “had the impact they wanted; it reduced certain visibility,” George said, adding that he is considering acquiescing to the registration requirement to remain viable. “Any type of reform, and discussion about it, has been stifled,” George said. “People who were widely known to be pushing a reform agenda have reverted to focusing on very local issues, like [collection of] trash, but no one is calling for transparency and accountability on military budgets, for example.” According to my analysis for the UNESCO report on media development trends, journalists in the region are typically required to obtain licenses to practice, and because there has been, until recently, a clear distinction between online and traditional media, Internet‐based journalists have been exempted from these licensing and registration requirements. The failure to recognize online journalists has been a double‐edged sword. Most countries in the region require registration with state‐endorsed journalist syndicates, which typically do not recognize Web‐based journalists or media outlets and therefore exclude such



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journalists from the benefits and certification that these institutions provide. However, efforts under way to extend registration requirements to online‐only publications and, by extension, their journalists, risks putting control over who is or is not a journalist even more firmly in the hands of the government. For those who work for Web‐based media or practice journalism online only, the inability to register as a journalist and obtain media credentials can prevent them from being able to cover public demonstrations and official events, opening them up to prosecution under draconian protest laws or public disorder ordinances, as in Egypt. Amid this tightening legal atmosphere, cyberattacks against media websites, journalists, and social media accounts have become a popular tactic for quelling even the most basic journalistic efforts. Pro‐­government trolls have launched slanderous campaigns against critical journalists in several countries. Defacement of websites, particularly opposition and Western news sites, and hijacking of their social media accounts have been used by state and nonstate actors alike. Syria may have formalized a military capacity to launch cyberattacks, if the attacks claimed by the pro‐government Syrian Electronic Army on The New York Times, Huffington Post, and Washington Post are to be believed. “Many of those who are still crazy, brave enough to speak their mind online, fall victim to similar types of attacks,” Hisham al‐Miraat said. “They get their e‐mail or Facebook accounts attacked, or, if you’re very popular, you get sophisticated spyware sent to your accounts, like da Vinci, a Trojan horse. This type of stuff is becoming more common but [it’s] hard to prove it’s a concerted effort or coordinated.” The region’s governments seem eager to extend their authority into the broader realm of Internet governance at the global level as well. In October 2014, the 22 member states of the Arab League claimed that “policy authority for international Internet‐related public policy issues is the sovereign right of states.” This is contrary to the current “multistakeholder” model, which gives civil society, academia, and the technical community roles equal to those of states in Internet governance. This tendency was on display at the third Arab Internet Governance Forum, held in Beirut in late November 2014, which few high‐level government officials outside of Lebanon attended, according to several civil society participants. “I think the Arab IGF is a place for discussion

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and debate, but it doesn’t have a decision mechanism [so states] focus on the ITU [International Telecommunications Union] because there is some power there and they can actually control the Internet more,” Mohamed Najem, a member of CPJ’s Internet Advisory Group and the other cofounder of the Social Media Exchange, told CPJ. Najem said that the 2013 Arab IGF, in Algeria, was attended by high‐level officials from several countries but that governments in the region are not now interested in an open discussion or debate with civil society. “There was some good discussion [in Lebanon] about freedom of expression online, privacy, terrorism, but the elephant in the room was that the governments don’t care and don’t listen,” he said. “Their strategy is more control over the Internet, over online speech, and trying to do as much as possible, legally or illegally, either at the ITU or by drafting new laws that restrict human rights, or by breaking their own laws to prosecute their own citizens.” Dheere said there is a lack of strategic vision in the region about the Internet’s role in economic, social, and political development, resulting in the governments’ focus on preserving the status quo. She said that governmental control over the Internet is not just happening unilaterally but is instead a coordinated effort by the Arab states. “In the near future, we all need to work together on the issue of governance model for the Internet,” Moez Chakchouk, chair and CEO of the Tunisian Internet Agency, the country’s wholesale provider of Internet services, told CPJ. “We must learn to be open and transparent. The relationship between policy makers and citizens is still fragile, and only rebuilding the trust will strengthen it.” Given the prevalence of violent attacks by armed groups in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya and the ongoing fight against militants who call themselves the Islamic State, such trust will likely be harder than ever to build. In Tunisia, Afef Abrougui said, the government has taken steps to break away from censorship only to have officials backpedal amid the outbreak of violence there. “Especially with last year’s [2013] attacks by armed groups on police and military, there has been a surge in this debate,” the journalist‐turned‐Internet consultant told CPJ, “particularly the interior minister, who is saying they need to monitor and censor the Internet, like the Internet is the only or main reason these attacks are taking place.”



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The same excuses have been used by governments throughout the region and have fueled more concerted attempts to expand surveillance across digital platforms, particularly amid revelations of mass surveillance by the United States and other Western spy agencies. “Instead of censoring, all you need to do is spy on everyone or instill the idea that everyone is potentially being spied on, which has a terribly chilling effect on freedom of expression,” said Miraat. In June 2014, the Al‐Watan newspaper published a leaked government tender for real‐time social media surveillance technology that detailed a long list of content and “destructive ideas” that the Egyptian government sought to monitor. The leak followed a report by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab earlier in the year that Egypt was using spyware to target journalists and human rights activists and intercept their communications. Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were also among the governments identified by the researchers as using the exceptionally perfidious surveillance and hacking software. Tunisia, which had one of the most sophisticated censorial apparatuses in the region under President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, no longer maintains the same level of monitoring and control that it once did, according to Chakchouk. But in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, with reports of targeted spying on journalists and the hacking of media, including the internal communications of Al‐Jazeera, governments are making noise about needing their own surveillance programs and data localization to ensure that they have access to communications flowing through their borders. Journalists will need to navigate not only an increasingly perilous legal landscape in their work online but creeping self‐censorship spurred by surveillance and harsh criminal penalties as well.

Courtney C. Radsch, PhD, is CPJ’s advocacy director. She previously worked for UNESCO’s Section for Freedom of Expression and was senior program manager for the Global Freedom of Expression Campaign at Freedom House, where she led advocacy missions to more than a dozen countries. She has also worked for Al‐Arabiya in Dubai, the Daily Star in Lebanon, and The New York Times.

12.  Overzealous British Media Prompt Overzealous Backlash By Liz Gerard

A protester in London, dressed as a caricature of News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch, burns a government report on media abuses, while another wearing a mask depicting Prime Minister David Cameron sits tied to a chair, November 29, 2012. Source: AP/Sang Tan

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n 2010, Andrew Norfolk was driving to an appointment when he heard a radio news report about a gang of men who had been con­ victed of the systematic sexual abuse of a teenager. Norfolk was The Times’ correspondent in the north of England, where there had been a handful of court cases involving Asian gangs preying on young girls. It was a difficult story to report. Norfolk’s path into the story became clear when he found it being obstructed by the very people he thought should be most concerned for the girls. At almost every turn, the authorities seemed more inter­ ested in preventing the story from being reported than in the crimes being committed on their doorstep. And they were prepared to use any weapon to silence him—an approach that many say is becoming more common and poses a threat to press freedom in the United Kingdom. James Harding, then editor of The Times (and now head of news at the BBC), at the time told Norfolk to focus exclusively on the child sex abuse story for as long as it took to ensure that justice was served. What Norfolk discovered along the way worried him as much as the crime itself. After publishing a story about the plight of a 12‐year‐old girl from Rotherham, England, Norfolk received a bundle of confidential police and social services files showing that the authorities had known for more than a decade what was going on. As he later told the audience at the British Journalism Awards ceremony in December 2014, “They knew the names of the men, the girls, and the places they were taken. They had effectively sat back and done almost nothing to stop it.” After The Times published a story based on the leaked documents, Norfolk recalled, “I thought those at the top of each organization would be so horrified that they would immediately seek to establish what could have gone so terribly wrong. Instead, they seemed inter­ ested only in discovering how we got hold of the documents. The council had already threatened High Court action to block an earlier story. Now it demanded a criminal inquiry into the leak. It also hired a firm of solicitors to expose the ‘security breach.’  ” As Norfolk carried on with his digging, Rotherham authorities eventually did feel compelled to commission a public inquiry into the crimes, which in August 2014 reported finding that at least 1,400 chil­ dren had been abused over a 12‐year period and that official failings had been “blatant.”



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Norfolk’s coverage earned him the Orwell Prize for investigative journalism, the Paul Foot Prize for campaigning journalism, and the British Journalism Awards’ (BJA) top prize, Journalist of the Year. The night after Norfolk was presented with the BJA award, another group gathered to consider the state of British journalism. There, at the second Leveson Anniversary Lecture, organized by Article 19 and the Media Standards Trust, an audience listened to a Labour member of Parliament (MP) accuse owners and editors of “the big papers” of propagating the myth that their journalism served the public good by holding the powerful to account. “They have operated like a mafia, intimidating here, bribing there, terminating careers and rewarding their most loyal operatives and toad­ ies,” said Labour MP Tom Watson. “For years they could fix any legisla­ tion that affected them, in a way that no other industry could. But it didn’t stop there. Their influence was so great that for many, it became impossible to know who was really running the country.” Naming the proprietors of the Sun, Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Star, Daily Telegraph, and Daily Mirror and their Sunday stable­ mates (omitting only the Guardian, Independent, and Financial Times from his attack) and addressing their editors, Watson declared: “Where there is a threat to freedom it comes from you. You have shown again and again that you don’t care about freedom of expression. “You have never told the truth about your wrongdoings and you do all you can to suppress the reporting of them.” Watson continued: “You don’t care about the freedom of journal­ ists to report on systematic intrusion into all our lives by the security services. … You don’t care about the freedom that ordinary British people should enjoy from cruel treatment by your employees. … The only freedom you care about is your own, to do exactly what you like, without consequences.” The event at which Watson spoke was held to mark the publication of Sir Brian Leveson’s report on his inquiry into the press, which was established in the wake of the News of the World phone‐hacking scandal of 2011. In 2012 Watson coauthored a book about the hacking saga, Dial M for Murdoch. His Leveson Lecture audience included members of the Hacked Off group (many of whom had their voice mail messages

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intercepted by News of the World journalists), which has since cam­ paigned for tougher press regulation. Watson told them that, in his view, a small group of media moguls, executives, and senior journalists had become “the power in this country.” Many journalists disagree and see their profession as besieged in the United Kingdom, with police, Parliament, pressure groups, pub­ lic relations people, and even publishers undermining their ability to report. Roy Greenslade, a former Daily Mirror editor who is now a lecturer and commentator, observed: “There is a growing feeling that the press has become too powerful, which is strange because it is actually weaker than it has been at any time in its history.” The fallout from the Guardian’s investigation into phone hacking includes: • The closure of News of the World. • Scrutiny of the British Press in a £5 million public inquiry led by High Court Judge Sir Brian Leveson. • The arrest of more than 60 journalists, jailing of four, and disrup­ tion of others’ work and personal lives as these journalists were kept on police bail for months or years and then cleared of any wrongdoing without ever appearing in court. • The disbanding of the Press Complaints Commission, widely criticized for failing to address the excesses of Fleet Street, as the United Kingdom’s national newspapers are still collectively known. • Establishment of a royal charter by Parliament to oversee regulation of the press—the first state intervention in more than 300 years. These developments are all directly linked to the hacking scandal, and many have public support. Yet there have also been less overt and potentially more dangerous assaults on press freedom in the United Kingdom. The two most wor­ rying trends are the use of anti‐terrorism legislation to spy on journal­ ists’ phone and e‐mail records (something that is happening in many countries and which, among other things, enables authorities to dis­ cover sources) and the increasing use of public relations staff to hamper journalists’ efforts to build direct relationships with people in authority.



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In a speech to the news vendors’ charity NewstrAid in October 2014, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre also identified threats from Europe “in the grisly shape of the right to be forgotten” (an EU ruling that has led Google to remove certain details, including criminal convictions, from search results) and threats “to the sanctity of our content by the undermining of copyright protection.” Dacre also predicted a “defama­ tion derby for all those who want to gag or punish the press” as a result of the royal charter. Though no regulator has emerged to seek recognition under the charter, if one appears, any news organization that declines to accept its authority and inherent arbitration service will put itself at risk of hav­ ing to pay both parties’ costs in any dispute that goes to court—even if the news organization wins the case, according to the charter. When Dacre’s speech was published after the event, press crit­ ics were quick to note that he presides over the United Kingdom’s most‐complained‐about and most‐censured news organization. Hacked Off—which Dacre characterized as “a tiny, unrepresentative pres­ sure group run by zealots, priapic so‐called celebrities, and small‐town academics [who had] united to cast the debate as a biblical fight to the death between good and evil, with the press cast in the role of the devil”—produced a point‐by‐point rebuttal. Others noted the Mail’s antipathy to the Guardian: After the phone‐ hacking trial of former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks and former News of the World Managing Editor Andy Coulson, the Mail published an essay casting the man behind the paper’s investigation as “the man who did for the British Press,” and it has called Edward Snowden a traitor for his revelations about the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), published in the United Kingdom in the Guardian. For most British journalists, the greatest concern is the collapse of trust between the police and the press at both the local and national levels. In Greenslade’s view, “We are seeing played out in front of our eyes an amazing war between police and journalists.” Greenslade attrib­ uted the antipathy to police embarrassment over a series of blunders, including: • The perfunctory investigation of initial phone‐hacking allegations at the News of the World in 2005.

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• The exposure of police lies, which sought to blame unruly football fans rather than police misjudgment for the deaths of 96 spectators in the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster. • The flawed investigation of the murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, in South London, after which a public inquiry concluded that the Metropolitan Police were guilty of institutional racism, though the decision failed to prevent further cover‐ups or attempts to smear Lawrence’s family (his mother now sits in the House of Lords), and a new independent investigation is now under way. • The shooting of an unarmed Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, on an Underground train after the 7/7 Al‐Qaeda bomb­ ings in London in 2005. • The death of Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper seller who suffered a heart attack after he was struck by a policeman and pushed to the ground during G20 protests in London in 2009—video footage showed that Tomlinson had been walking down the road with his hands in his pockets and had nothing to do with the protests when he was assaulted. Relentless coverage of such episodes, most of them at the hands of London’s Metropolitan Police, put the police on the defensive and emboldened some to act against journalists. As a result, gone are the days when the desk sergeant showed his daybook to a reporter who dropped by the police station for a cup of coffee and a chat each morning. Information is now funneled through public relations (PR) people, which makes developing a rapport with contacts increasingly difficult. The trade magazine Press Gazette reported recently that 1,500 communications staff were employed across 20 central government departments, and parish councillors—the lowest tier of British democ­ racy, who represent groups of villagers—have been told not to talk to reporters without clearing their comments with the council clerk. People who serve in the armed forces must report all encounters with journalists, even if they are family or friends in a social setting. In the view of Press Gazette editor Dominic Ponsford, “PRs’ stop­ ping journalists having healthy relationships with all sorts of people is



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infantile. We’re in a weird, warped place where police regard an officer speaking to a journalist without permission as a serious crime. But if the police and journalists are at war, it’s a bigger problem for the police than the press, because a frosty relationship doesn’t help them to get their information out.” The march of the PRs, as public relations workers are known in the United Kingdom, means that covert contacts and whistleblow­ ers have become even more important to journalists researching pub­ lic interest stories. That, in turn, makes the protection of those sources more vital, which is where the police use of anti‐terrorism legislation to spy on journalists’ phone records and identify their sources comes into play. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), passed in 2000 to combat perceived terrorism threats, allows public bodies to conduct surveillance and access computer and telephone records in the interest of national security or to prevent serious crime. But soon after RIPA went into effect it began to be abused, with local councils spying on families for trivial reasons, such as to determine whether they put their trash out on the right day. The rules were tightened so a mag­ istrate had to authorize any council use of the powers, but police still needed only to approach a senior officer to get permission. Official statistics show that about half‐a‐million applications a year are made to access data under RIPA, and even media critics have expressed concern that journalists are being targeted. Hacked Off, which has fought the press over phone hacking through the Leveson inquiry and over the establishment of a new regulator, is on the same side as journalists in calling for changes to the law. George Brock, former head of the journalism department at City University in London, contends that the law is invasive even if the police are only looking at calls made. “This underlines the importance of metadata,” he said. “When Edward Snowden started releasing mate­ rial showing the scale of NSA and GCHQ [the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters] surveillance, the line from the authorities was, ‘We’re not reading e‐mails or listening to calls. We’re looking at metadata.’ Well, you can learn a hell of a lot about a person—and their sources—if you know who they’re talking to, when, and how often.”

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Brock is a trustee of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, known as BIJ, which in August 2014 submitted a case to the European Court in Strasbourg arguing that the use of RIPA to monitor journalists’ phone calls was contrary to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects freedom of expression. The action coincided with CPJ’s “right to report” petition urging U.S. President Barack Obama to ban the surveillance of journalists and the hacking of their computers. The two most notorious examples of the way the act has been used relate to political stories in the Sun and the Mail on Sunday. Tom Newton Dunn, the Sun’s political editor, broke a story about a senior government minister accused of swearing at police officers who refused to allow him to ride his bicycle through the main gates at the end of Downing Street rather than use the pedestrian entrance. Andrew Mitchell was eventually forced to resign over the incident and has since lost a libel action against the Sun that is expected to cost him £3 million (about $4.5 million). Afterward, the Metropolitan Police went through Newton Dunn’s phone records to discover who had leaked the story. As a result, three officers were sacked for gross misconduct, although Crown Prosecution Service decided that they should not be charged because there was a public interest in the events being made known. A fourth officer was jailed for giving a dishonest account of the incident, having lied about witnessing it. The whistleblower, former Police Constable Jim Glanville, who now works as a car salesman, told the Sun that the case had cost him his career and his marriage and had left him £13,000 (about $20,000) in debt but that he had no regrets. “I’d do it again tomorrow,” he said. “I thought the public had a right to know how someone that senior in the government behaved.” In the case of the Mail on Sunday, Kent police went through phone records of the news desk and a freelance reporter to find the source of a story about Energy Secretary Chris Huhne having persuaded his wife to take his speeding penalty so he would not lose his driver’s license. The checks were made and the results passed to prosecution law­ yers despite a judge ruling that the newspaper’s sources should not be ­disclosed. The minister, his wife, and the source—a judge who eventu­ ally was found to have lied to the police—all ended up in jail.



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After the Newton Dunn disclosure, the Press Gazette began cam­ paigning for the law to be changed so a judge had to give permission for RIPA to be used. The Press Gazette’s Dominic Ponsford also sent freedom of infor­ mation requests to every police force in the country, asking about its use of RIPA. Most refused to say. The information commissioner, who oversees data protection and freedom of information, has issued similar requests as part of an investigation into the use of the act and expects to report early in 2015. Politicians of all parties have backed the Press Gazette’s campaign, and the Home Office indicated in October 2014 that the code would be changed by Christmas. It announced in December, however, that the only alteration would be the requirement for police to note when checks were made on the phone or e‐mail records of journalists, law­ yers, doctors, MPs, or the clergy. Senior police officers would still be able to approve a check without outside authority. Ponsford had wanted a journalist’s relationship with a source to be classed in a special category regarding confidentiality so it would be treated in the same way as relationships between solicitor and client or patient and doctor, but the proposed adjustment would not give the records that privilege. “Journalists’ having their privacy invaded isn’t the worst horror in the country,” Ponsford said. “People have little sympathy with journal­ ists after the News of the World listened to people’s voice mails. But our concern is not for the journalist but for the sources. “If police can look at journalists’ phone records secretly and at will, it puts all sources and whistleblowers at risk. Without those there can be no investigative journalism, and without investigative journalism there will be more corruption and wrongdoing in public institutions.” Others are less convinced about making special provisions for jour­ nalists, who are, after all, supposed to have the same rights and respon­ sibilities as any citizen. Brock prefers the idea of a better and stronger protection of the public interest. “I’m in favor of legally protecting disclosures which can be judged in the public interest because laws organized around that principle don’t get into the complication of try­ ing to establish who’s a journalist and who isn’t,” he said.

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Brock posed the question of whether David Miranda, who was detained at Heathrow while carrying Snowden’s NSA material to his partner, journalist Glenn Greenwald, could be regarded as having been involved in a journalistic endeavor. Gavin Millar, the barrister who is leading the Bureau of Investigative Journalism case in Strasbourg, is in favor of a shield law for journalists of the kind seen in some U.S. states. He told the Society of Editors conference in November 2014, “We need a free‐standing law that pro­ tects confidential information and confidential sources and that judges and law enforcement agencies cannot bypass or miss because it is sit­ ting there in front of their faces in black and white.” Millar told the Society of Editors that police had been abusing sur­ veillance powers since 2008, when Sally Murrer of the Milton Keynes Citizen was charged with aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office after police bugged her conversations with a detective sergeant with whom she was close. The officer was suspected of passing confidential information to her, and she was accused of paying him for it. The case was thrown out when it came to court. Papers relating to the authorization for the bugging did not men­ tion that Murrer was a journalist or whether the intention was to identify a source. “This was a startling omission because the right of the journalist to protect the identity of such a source is strongly pro­ tected in our law and in European human rights law,” Millar told the Society of Editors, according to a transcript. “It can only be overridden if a judge decides that there is an even more important public inter­ est requiring the source to be identified—and that the evidence being sought cannot be obtained in some other way. Examples of such an overriding public interest might be the need fully to investigate terror­ ism or serious organized crime.” Millar said that the case should have caused alarm, but the sit­ uation has in fact worsened since. He also noted that the charge against Murrer—misconduct in a public office—was a novel one against a journalist. Previous unsuccessful attempts to prosecute journalists in similar situations had alleged that the journalist had acted corruptly, as defined by a 1906 statute. Misconduct in a public office was a vague charge based on a very old common‐law offense



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without the clear elements of modern statutory criminal legislation, he said. The charge is, however, now being used routinely against journal­ ists suspected of making illegal payments to contacts who work in the public sector. The most obvious front in the conflict between journalists and the police has been the clutch of investigations arising from the phone‐ hacking saga and a series of prosecutions for historic alleged offenses. In 2006 a News of the World reporter and a private investigator were jailed for hacking into Prince William’s voice mail. The paper’s owner, News International—which also owns the Sun, Times, and Sunday Times—insisted that this was a case of one “rogue reporter,” and Scotland Yard officers charged with investigating any wider criminality accepted the assurance. Greenslade saw the force’s embarrassment over its failure to probe more deeply as one explanation for the scale of the investigations started after the scandal blew open five years later, when Nick Davies of the Guardian reported that the News of the World had intercepted the voice mails of Milly Dowler, a missing schoolgirl who was later found murdered. That disclosure caused mayhem. The police were embarrassed, as were the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, and Prime Minister David Cameron, who had installed the News of the World’s former editor Coulson in 10 Downing Street as his director of communications. In response, the prime minister ordered the Leveson inquiry; after­ ward, the Metropolitan Police commissioner—Britain’s most senior police officer—resigned. Murdoch closed the News of the World. News Corporation’s bid to buy British Sky Broadcasting (known as BSkyB) was then withdrawn, and in New York the stock value of News International’s parent company, News Corporation, plummeted. Company lawyers were concerned that the scandal would cross the Atlantic and lead to corporate charges that would threaten the entire business. To appease them, a “management standards committee” was set up at News International’s Wapping headquarters, and millions of documents were handed over to the police. As Dominic Ponsford put it, the foot soldiers were “thrown to the wolves” while Brooks, a former editor of the News of the World and the Sun who had risen to

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become chief executive, was left with an £11 million (about $16.7 million) payoff. Fueled by the News International dossier, police operations spawned by the scandal combined to become Britain’s biggest crimi­ nal investigation yet. Police accounts put the cost to the taxpayer at more than £40 million (about $60,000), and even now, three years after the closure of the News of the World, there are still a hundred offi­ cers working on the inquiries full time. Sixty‐four journalists have been arrested and more than 100 questioned “under caution”—but not arrested—by officers working on operations known as Weeting (regard­ ing phone hacking), Elveden (paying public officials) and Tuleta (com­ puter hacking). In August 2014, Coulson was jailed for 18 months after being found guilty of conspiracy to intercept voice mails. Three senior jour­ nalists were given shorter sentences; two others and a private investiga­ tor were given suspended sentences. Brooks was found not guilty of all charges, as were her husband, secretary, security chief, and former News of the World managing editor, Stuart Kuttner. Elveden prosecutions have tended to involve the same charge that Sally Murrer faced: aiding and abetting or conspiracy to commit mis­ conduct in a public office. To date, only one journalist—a News of the World staffer who, for legal reasons, cannot be named—has been con­ victed of this offense, for paying a prison officer for snippets about an inmate who killed a toddler when he was 10 years old. A num­ ber of police, prison officers, and soldiers have, however, been jailed for accepting money from journalists. In the United States, paying for stories is generally regarded as taboo, but in Britain there had been a long tradition of rewarding contacts for tips with a drink, tickets to a sporting event, or hard cash. Though the Bribery Act of 2010 changed the landscape, few journalists previously had any idea that it was against the law to pay whistleblow­ ers for information. Even the journalist’s legal bible, Essential Law for Journalists, does not mention that paying officials for stories is illegal, though it specifically states that witnesses in trials and criminals should not be paid. At the time of this writing, six Sun journalists were on trial over alleged payments to officials. Another, the paper’s former Whitehall



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editor, Clodagh Hartley, was found not guilty in a separate trial in which the judge told the jury that the key point it had to decide was whether Hartley had been acting in the public interest when she paid a tax official for stories that included government budget leaks. Hartley was the second journalist to be acquitted by a jury on a charge of misconduct in public office. The first, from the Daily Star, was cleared in the trial relating to the child killer. A third journal­ ist, Nick Parker of the Sun, was also found not guilty on misconduct charges related to paying a policeman for tips but was convicted and given a suspended prison sentence for handling a stolen mobile phone that belonged to a Labour MP. Parker had agreed to pay the man who gave him the phone £10,000 (about $15,000) if its contents produced a story, but he found nothing of use to him and handed the phone to the police the next day. Fourteen more journalists were awaiting trial on misconduct charges, and a 15th was to be retried after a jury could not decide on his case, which involved a £500 (about $750) payment to a policeman. All of these alleged offenses date to before the hacking scandal. Trevor Kavanagh, associate editor of the Sun, has been forthright in his condemnation of the police investigations, which he and many others regard as disproportionate. (This is not a view shared by Hacked Off, which takes the position that some in the press are irresponsible and should be reined in.) “Their alleged crimes amount to writing or paying for stories the authorities wanted kept under wraps,” Kavanagh wrote. “The cost to taxpayers is stupendous. . . . The cost in wrecked private and profes­ sional lives is beyond calculation. And for what? The stories were all true. They were stood up. Nobody in the prison service, health service or HM Treasury ever complained to the police or to the newspapers involved. There were no leak inquiries.” Just as the use of RIPA to spy on journalists revealed the extent to which ordinary people are being put under surveillance, so the treat­ ment of the journalists arrested in the post‐hacking police operations has exposed how thousands of lives are left in limbo while police and prosecutors decide whether to bring them before the courts. Nick Parker, whose trial ended on December 9, 2014, was first arrested and suspended from work on February 11, 2012. Clodagh

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Hartley, who was acquitted on November 26, 2014, was arrested on May 25, 2012. She was kept on police bail for a year before being charged and then had to wait a further 18 months before her trial started. She was unable to work or travel abroad and has since said that she will not return to journalism. This long gestation period—which the police put down to spend­ ing cuts and lack of resources—has been common in the cases of journalists accused of hacking or paying officials. Neil Wallis, a former deputy editor of the News of the World who worked as a PR consultant for the Metropolitan Police, was arrested on suspicion of phone hack­ ing in July 2011—the month the Milly Dowler story broke and the paper was closed. He was on police bail until February 2013, when he was told that no action would be taken against him. This year he was rearrested and is now awaiting trial, three and a half years after his ini­ tial arrest. Many of the journalists arrested in the Weeting, Elveden, and Tuleta operations were cleared after months on police bail. Four from the Mirror group—including two who were serving Sunday newspaper editors—are still in limbo 21 months after their arrests. RIPA and the hacking investigations have been the toughest battles in the conflict between journalists and police, but there have also been cases involving alleged secret databases, “excess phone data,” and harass­ ment orders. Half a dozen journalists are taking the Metropolitan Police to court after discovering that its “domestic extremists” database contains more than 2,000 references to journalists, logging their professional activities, their appearances, and such details as their families’ medical histories. The six, five of whom have previously won apologies or compensation from the police for assault or unlawful searches while they were doing their jobs, want the files destroyed. The chief executive of News UK (formerly News International) has meanwhile protested to Vodafone and the police after the discov­ ery that more than 1,750 mobile phone records of journalists, lawyers, and secretarial staff had been passed to police in error. The police had sought one reporter’s record as part of an investigation, and Vodafone mistakenly sent the entire database, covering almost anyone who owned one of the company’s phones between 2005 and 2007.



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The Metropolitan Police transferred the material to CDs, made a spreadsheet, and checked on five other journalists before reporting that it had been given “excess data” and surrendering the records—seven months after Vodafone first noticed the error and asked for their return. Ponsford of the Press Gazette compares this with the case of Nick Parker: “The reporter has a look at the phone, hands it in the next day, doesn’t write a story—and ends up in court.” Speaking at the BJA cer­ emony, Andrew Norfolk mourned the change of environment: “Senior officers you once had a relationship with based on what you thought was mutual trust and respect are suddenly too scared to speak to you, or perhaps it’s not that. They’ve just got so much on, the poor dears: planning your arrest, wading through your phone records—I think it’s 1,700 phones from my company alone.” In November 2014, a former U.K. Independence Party press officer, Jasna Badzak, was sent a cease‐and‐desist notice by the Metropolitan Police, alleging that she had harassed another former party worker “by providing information to reporter Glen Owen [of The Mail on Sunday] of a false nature” that had resulted in the “vic­ tim being subjected to numerous phone calls and e‐mails.” Owen had made one phone call and sent three e‐mails to the complainant to check on information given to him by an entirely different source. Earlier in the year, Gareth Davies, a London newspaper reporter, was served with a similar notice by three policemen from the Metropolitan Police who visited the Croydon Advertiser office. It required him to stop “harassing” a woman who had complained that he had contacted her by Twitter and e‐mail to ask her about allega­ tions made against her. She was subsequently jailed for 30 months for a $360,000 (about £35,000) fraud, but the harassment notice was not rescinded. On December 8, 2014, The Sun published a story about a Con­ servative MP playing Candy Crush Saga on his iPad during a Commons committee meeting discussing pensions. The MP, Nigel Mills, apolo­ gized and will face no further action, but the House of Commons ordered an investigation to find out who took the incriminating pho­ tograph, which was published on the paper’s front page. The Press Gazette has noted a growing number of internal leak investigations by public authorities. In October 2014 it reported that

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the Metropolitan Police had conducted 300 such inquiries, most of them involving the use of RIPA, during the previous five years—not all relating to the disclosure of information to the press. Five central government departments had held 60 leak investigations during the same period. In a succession of published statements after the daughter of an elderly patient exposed lethal failings at her local hospital in Mid‐ Staffordshire, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt promised protection for whistleblowers. Julie Bailey, the patient’s daughter, was quoted saying that she was threatened and eventually felt compelled to move, yet her persistence led to a public inquiry that found that as many as 1,200 patients may have died needlessly because of the poor treatment and neglect at the hospital. Still, stories continue to emerge of whistleblowers being disci­ plined, sacked for misconduct, or hounded out of their jobs. As the MP–Candy Crush Saga story and Andrew Norfolk’s experience dem­ onstrate, the default response is often to order an investigation into who let the cat out of the bag rather to investigate the incident itself. The day after its Candy Crush story broke, the Sun ran a lead arti­ cle that noted, “This is Britain since the Leveson Inquiry, that declara­ tion of war on the press by the elite we are here to hold to account. “Leveson’s biased witch‐hunt empowered them to try to stop the press revealing inconvenient truths the public has a right to know,” the article continued. “One MP playing Candy Crush isn’t the biggest scandal ever—and we welcome that Mr. Mills had the good grace to own up and swiftly apologise. The authorities’ reaction, though, is of graver significance.” In his acceptance speech at the BJA ceremony, Norfolk said that Leveson had invited newspapers to submit their best examples of pub­ lic interest journalism to his inquiry. In Norfolk’s view, the final report had rightly condemned much that was wrong in the world of news­ papers and had significantly contributed to public contempt for the entire profession. The examples of public interest journalism were “buried in a tiny section of the 2,000‐page report labeled good practice—Sir Brian’s fleeting concession to the possibility that not everything we do as journalists is sleazy and wrong,” Norfolk said. He added, “The judge



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said that he had omitted one or two because they were not without controversy.” “I wish he were here tonight,” Norfolk said, “because I would like to have told him, ‘You know, Brian, sometimes it’s the uncomfortable truths, those not without controversy, that are the most important for a journalist to tell, even if they cause discomfort to a High Court judge, because they’re so often the stories—like Rotherham—that those in authority least want us to reveal.’  ” In Norfolk’s view, “A free society needs an unshackled press. For years there were people in Rotherham, desperately concerned about what was happening, who tried their best to raise the alarm. Frontline youth workers told their bosses, parents pleaded with police. “Reports were written, seminars held, letters sent to chief consta­ bles, MPs, and government departments. Nothing happened. Nothing changed. When all else failed, someone very brave decided to put their trust in our derided profession. And finally the truth came out. “As requested, The Times sent five stories to the Leveson inquiry,” Norfolk said. “He accepted four of them. All but one. And, you know, I really am quite proud to be able to stand here this evening and say: ‘Guess which one he chose to discard?’  ”

Liz Gerard, a former senior editor at London’s The Times, writes and edits the journalism website SubScribe.

13.  Outdated Secrecy Laws Stifle the Press in South Africa By Ferial Haffajee

A woman from the Right2Know campaign protests with her child against the Protection of State Information Bill, which would enable the prosecution of whistleblowers, public advocates, and journalists who reveal corruption, in Cape Town on April 25, 2013. Source: AP/Schalk van Zuydam

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elson Mandela regularly harangued the media once he’d been freed after 27 years of imprisonment by South Africa’s apartheid government. He would call individual journalists when he liked or disliked something they had written or when he wanted to advance a political lobby. He once rattled the industry by complaining that black editors had not changed the template of journalism to match the requirements of a democratic era. Did he want the editors to be sweethearts? The question caused a stir. In 1994 Mandela made a seminal speech on media freedom at a congress of the International Press Institute that set the bar high for what media freedom and free expression should look like in a democratic South Africa. He did so in one unequivocal proclamation: “A critical, independent, and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy.” As an editor of the new era, I can attest that the South African media is, in fact, critical, independent, and investigative. I worked in decidedly un‐free times and reported on the arrival of freedom. We in the media have taken our place, under constitutional protection, as a vital institution of society. We hold power to account. We are proud of our robust investigative bent and trenchant style. We are undoubtedly part of the lifeblood of our democracy. Yet not everyone agrees, and as a result that lifeblood is under threat. In his speech Mandela also observed, “The press must be free from state interference.” Here, things get more complicated. The instinct of the powerful (both corporate and political) is often to stifle the dissemination of uncomfortable information. That, unfortunately, is taking a toll on press freedom in South Africa, where the media faces the real threat of an outdated secrecy law with the potential to harm a critical, independent, and investigative press. The South African media still labor under old apartheid laws in which defamation is criminalized, unlike in more progressive countries that limit litigation over insults and alleged media harm to civil cases. South Africa’s antiquated National Key Points Act, legislation promulgated by “securocrats”—members of the police and Security Service that dominated the South African government in the 1980s—to prevent access to key points such as police stations, the public broadcaster,



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politicians’ homes, and nuclear facilities, can be used to prevent reportage. In 2014 the media was consumed by a controversy over the spending of 300 million rand (about $30 million) on the president’s private estate, and the Key Points Act was invoked to prevent the publication of images of the property. Though the attempt to stifle publication of the images was unsuccessful—people used social media to post images of the estate and also created satirical memes about it—the law’s invocation in this and other instances, including the prevention of protests at key points and denial of information requests, set a dangerous precedent for censorship in a country still finding its way as a democracy. I have been saddened and surprised to observe firsthand how power corrupts and how the lure of easy wealth has turned revolutionaries into conspicuous consumers. Quick wealth accumulation may not always be ill gotten, but it often is. When that happens, the media have a responsibility to expose corruption. I often remind officials and politicians that Mandela once said, “It is only such a free press that can have the capacity to relentlessly expose excesses and corruption on the part of government, state officials, and other institutions that hold power in society.” But those officials and politicians tend to dismiss Mandela’s words. Revolutionary values dissipate in the face of material acquisition, and the corrupt spare no expense in keeping their ways hidden. We in the media often end up in court, at great expense, to keep open the promise of freedom that Nelson Mandela so eloquently made 20 years ago. The most common writ we face is the interdict, a form of prepublication censorship that can tie up reportage in legal knots for years. The other common court action concerns disputes over South Africa’s freedom of information law, which is often used to limit rather than ensure access to public information. A truism especially applies in South Africa today: The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The temptation to secrecy is easy, and in South Africa that temptation is increasingly limiting government transparency. Next door to South Africa, in Swaziland, Africa’s last remaining absolute monarchy, there is no media freedom. There, two colleagues— Thulani Maseko and Bheki Makhubu—are jailed for exposing how

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judges have played fast and loose with the public purse. In late 2013 I had the privilege of meeting Bheki’s wife, Fikile, when she accepted the CNN/MultiChoice African Journalist of the Year award for press freedom on his behalf. She was poised and smiling as she accepted the honor, but when we exited the stage, she burst into tears. Her little boy, Siwakile, comforted his mum. Even honor can be troubling when your loved one is in jail. When I accepted the honor of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2014 International Press Freedom Award, I did so in the name of Bheki and my colleagues Woubshet Taye, Reeyot Alemu, and 15 other journalists jailed with them in Ethiopia. South Africa enjoys a position of leadership and solidarity on our continent. If media freedom slips in South Africa, it will slip elsewhere. And as Africa rises, her journalists should not be seen as enemies of the state but instead as the critical patriots we often are. Ethiopia is among the fastest‐growing nations, but its view that development and media freedom cannot coexist deserves robust challenge. A journalist’s place is not in jail. It is in the street, the newsroom, raking the muck, holding power to account to make a better country and continent. As Mandela said in that great speech 20 years ago, “It is only such a free press that can be the vigilant watchdog of the public interest against the temptation on the part of those who wield it to abuse that power.”

Ferial Haffajee is editor‐in‐chief of City Press, a South African investigative weekly.

14. Amid Ebola Outbreak, West African Governments Try to Isolate Media By Sue Valentine

A man walks past a burial report including known Ebola cases at the Western area emergency response center in Freetown, Sierra Leone, on December 16, 2014. Source: Reuters/Baz Ratner

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n the first Saturday of November 2014, when media owner and broadcaster David Tam Baryoh switched on the mic for his weekly “Monologue” show on independent Citizen FM in Freetown, Sierra Leone, he had no idea that criticizing the government’s handling of Ebola would mean 11 days in jail. The three West African countries in which the epidemic is ­concentrated—Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone—are among the poorest in the region. According to a report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa released in December 2014 on the socioeconomic impact of Ebola, the economies of the three together account for only 2.42 percent of West Africa’s gross domestic product and 0.68 percent of the African continent’s as a whole. The report concluded that, “at least in economic terms, there is no need to worry about Africa’s growth and development prospects because of EVD [Ebola virus disease].” It also makes this recommendation: “Africa media and communication houses—print and audio‐visual—should be encouraged to provide accurate and fact‐ based accounts on EVD. They should cover progress made to reverse its spread and impact.” The idea was laudable: that the media (in Africa and elsewhere) should report accurately and avoid playing into stereotypes that the continent is a place of disease and despair. But focusing only on the good news of “progress” against Ebola would be a disservice to the citizens of the three countries, say journalists in the affected countries who spoke with CPJ. Although the UN report may be correct in stating that the continent’s rising growth and development prospects will not be endangered by the impact of Ebola, the potential exists for profound long‐term effects in the three West African nations. Already impoverished by conflict and with inadequate health care systems, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone must cope with the trauma and tragedy of individual deaths, as well as the loss of a great many who have died of the disease from their small pools of skilled medical and other professionals. Without a robust, independent press to ask questions and hold governments to account about how money is spent and how society should be rebuilt and sustained, the prospects for genuine socioeconomic development that benefits all seem dim, says Sierra Leone radio journalist Mustapha Dumbuya.



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Yet, as David Tam Baryoh’s experience illustrates, even asking such questions on the public airwaves can carry a price in the current environment. Baryoh’s “Monologue” program is more than its name suggests in that it includes interviews and call‐ins from listeners. On the show in question, Baryoh’s criticism of Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma likely precipitated his arrest, local journalists told CPJ. Baryoh had questioned Koroma’s intention to run for a third term and interviewed an opposition party spokesman who criticized the Koroma government’s handling of the Ebola outbreak, according to local news reports. The Monday after the show aired, November 3, 2014, police officers arrested Baryoh at his office without a warrant. Kelvin Lewis, president of Sierra Leone’s Association of Journalists, told CPJ that they later showed him an executive detention order, signed by Koroma, that accused him of incitement. The day after his release, on November 14, Baryoh was behind the mic again, but he has since stayed off the air as a safeguard against further offending the authorities, he told CPJ. Baryoh said that no charges have been filed against him and that each Monday he must report to the police, who have confiscated his passport and said that they will not release it until they hear “from above” when they may do so. “If you don’t have your passport, you are not free,” Baryoh said. The lesson for other Sierra Leonean journalists is clear: Self‐censor or run the risk of arrest, said Dumbuya. “Journalists have lots of questions about how Parliament is spending the millions of dollars donated for Ebola, but at the moment they are scared to ask,” Dumbuya said. “They are worried they might be arrested. Under this state of emergency, the government doesn’t need to explain if it makes an arrest. Accountability has been shelved. MPs [members of Parliament] just say, ‘Ask your questions after Ebola.’  ” The government of Sierra Leone imposed the state of emergency in July 2014, ostensibly to help contain Ebola. The order provides sweeping powers to the military to restrict the movement of people, enforce curfews, and conduct house‐to‐house searches for those who might be infected with the virus. In December 2014, Sierra Leone’s Parliament extended the emergency regulations for another 90 days. In a speech on December 17, President Koroma maintained the prohibition

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on all public gatherings, suspended trading on Sundays, and limited “traders and market women” to trading between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays and half‐days on Saturdays “until further notice.” Schools also remain closed in Sierra Leone, prompting one journalist (who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal) to remark that the suspension of classes made little sense when people were still mingling freely at markets. “They could rather open the universities and schools to educate people on how to fight the sickness, yet young girls are allowed to wander through the market,” he told CPJ. “It doesn’t make sense.” In fact, the routine quarantining of citizens and lockdown of communities have failed to combat the epidemic, according to Sharon Ekambaram, the head of Médecins Sans Frontières South Africa’s Dr. Neil Aggett Unit, who spent a month as an advocacy liaison officer in Freetown. While there, Ekambaram observed that quarantine confined the healthy and the sick together and concluded that the top‐ down, authoritarian approach allowed no space for people to express opinions publicly about how the crisis is being handled. “Patients have no voice and there are no media willing to speak about human rights,” the South African Ekambaram—who is also a veteran AIDS activist—told CPJ. “During the struggle for [AIDS] treatment in South Africa, the media took a stand and learned with us, but there are no civil society organizations in Sierra Leone.” Ekambaram said that fear and the stigma of Ebola are still the key issues driving the disease underground. The absence of strong patient advocates in Sierra Leone means that there is little opportunity to personalize the issue, get beyond the statistics, and focus media attention on an appropriate response. Baryoh, for his part, is reluctant to speculate on the record about what he said during his broadcast that drew such a swift reprisal from the president, and his absence from the airwaves means one less voice in Sierra Leone to raise critical questions and the concerns of citizens. In a country with a high illiteracy rate, where newspapers are expensive items available mostly to those earning a salary and living in the city, radio is a vital source of information, and listeners tune in enthusiastically, said another journalist from Sierra Leone who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.



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“People love independent media because we raise questions that affect them, such as ‘Why go to hospital when you don’t get service, and why is every sickness now being classified as Ebola?’  ” the journalist said. “People send text messages, even e‐mail if they can afford it, but then, when you raise these issues in the media, government gets angry.” “Ebola brings to the forefront not just the issue of accountability but also of trust,” Anne Bennett, the executive director of the Hirondelle Foundation, told CPJ. The foundation supports and trains community radio stations across West and Central Africa, and, Bennett said, many of the stations with which they work in Guinea and Sierra Leone were alert to the presence of Ebola long before the government acknowledged and announced an epidemic. “People don’t trust government, but they do trust local reporters who come from their own communities,” Bennett said. Small media operations need support, whether in the form of funding, management training, or a reformed legal framework that enables them to operate freely, she said. In many ways, Bennett said, Ebola has highlighted problems not only with health services and other public institutions but also with the media. “It’s not just about training and financing but about the media framework . . . We need strong and credible media,” she said. “Media has a vital role to play in informing communities to become resilient.” In a report titled “Ebola and Freedom of Expression in West Africa,” the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) urged governments in the region to “provide education and access to information concerning health problems by recognizing and respecting the role of freedom of expression, particularly media freedom, can play in raising awareness about Ebola.” In an interview about the report with the International Press Institute, the MFWA’s program officer for free expression rights monitoring and campaigns, Anjali Manivannan, observed, “Trust is key in spreading timely, accurate information about any subject.” Manivannan noted that the countries most affected by Ebola are also recovering from armed conflicts or authoritarianism and that, as a result, “trust in government authorities is weak.” She added that community radio stations play a key role by providing a means for trusted religious, traditional, or community leaders to relay information to

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people in towns and villages across the region. When respected fellow citizens talk about Ebola—its symptoms, prevention, and containment methods—they may be more effective than state officials, she said. Without trustworthy information there is also the potential for ill‐ informed community members to unintentionally spread inaccurate information. In Guinea, fear and misinformation about Ebola ended in tragedy for a journalist with the privately owned Liberté FM and two radio technicians from Radio Rurale de N’Zérékoré, who were murdered by villagers, along with five health care workers, in the southeastern Guinean village of Womey. The mob was reportedly afraid that the workers, part of an Ebola public awareness campaign, were spreading the disease. Guinean authorities promised to investigate and bring the perpetrators to justice, according to news reports, but in late 2014, Alpha Diallo, a director at Liberté FM, told CPJ that no one had been charged despite more than 40 arrests. Independent media have also come under threat during the Ebola epidemic in neighboring Liberia, where the government imposed a state of emergency in early August and journalists were subject to a general curfew and threatened with arrest for talking to patients in the Ebola treatment units. Liberian police assaulted a journalist from the independent FrontPage Africa who was covering a demonstration against the imposition of a 90‐day state of emergency, and other independent publications have seen their staff harassed or have been closed down. Journalists were later exempted from the curfew, but access to patients in the treatment units was strictly controlled. “We were warned by government that the patients needed privacy,” said FrontPage Africa journalist Mae Azango, who reported on issues such as a lack of food in certain units but says that she was also unable to report from the high‐risk areas because “there were no PPE [personal protective equipment] suits.” In a September 2014 letter to Justice Minister Christiana Tah, the Press Union of Liberia listed numerous incidents of harassment of the media, including threats against the privately owned Women Voices for a story alleging police corruption in the distribution of Ebola crisis funds, according to news reports; against FrontPage Africa—a critical paper whose editor has been harassed on previous occasions, according to CPJ research; as well as the National Chronicle, which has been closed since an August 2014 police raid.



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Police forced the closure of the privately owned Chronicle after the publication of three stories in a planned 10‐part series about a group of Liberians who want President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to step down over allegations of corruption and misrule and to form a new government, National Chronicle publisher Philipbert Browne told CPJ in September 2014. Browne told National Public Radio’s On the Media program in December 2014 that the subsequent police report had resulted in no charges being brought against him but that his paper remained closed as an “administrative action,” which he is fighting in Liberia’s Supreme Court. “If the Chronicle is opened today, it will start reporting just where it left off. . . . They should not think they can subdue me,” he said on the program. Azango, a 2012 recipient of CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award, said, “Instead of fighting Ebola, they have been fighting journalists. . . . The president asked for absolute power to jail anyone who spoke against the government.” Azango contends that the two state‐ owned media channels report only what the government says but that privately owned newspapers and TV and radio stations report on the realities of life in Liberia and help create awareness about Ebola. “The people phone the radio station or read the newspaper before they believe anything—most of the burden [of explaining Ebola] has been resting on our shoulders,” she said. “We report what we see.” Azango is concerned about how Ebola treatment is consuming Liberia’s health care resources, leaving patients with malaria and diabetes untreated and pregnant women at risk of death because Ebola health facilities will not accept them. “Our health system was crippled before, but Ebola came and killed it,” said Azango emphatically. Liberia lifted its state of emergency in mid‐November, but the midnight–6 a.m. curfew remains and the crisis is far from over. “Children are not in school; no one knows when schools will reopen. We have to rebuild the entire health system, the education system, the civil service—everything has been hit by Ebola,” Azango said. “Two hundred and fifty medical doctors have died. We have no doctors again.” In addition to publicizing how the epidemic is being fought, in Azango’s view, the media have a responsibility to highlight the stories of survivors and the challenges they face. “They are coming home to

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nothing—their homes and all their possessions were burned as part of the fight against the virus, but they are getting nothing,” she said. In the face of immense grief and need and the potential for discontent in the three nations, the media offer a mechanism for communication between citizens and their governments and for ensuring that elected officials do not assume authoritarian roles as a result of the crisis, Anne Bennett said. Bennett, whose Hirondelle Foundation is based in the United States, is concerned that the international community has been tacitly complicit in the control of local media by governments in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea under the pretext that it’s necessary to deal with the current crisis. “We would never tolerate that in our own countries, so how committed are we really to free and independent media [in West Africa]?” she asked. The importance of a vigilant and independent media was highlighted on December 8, 2014, after the National Ebola Response Centre’s revelation that some 6,000 “ghost” names had been discovered in its weekly payroll order. Lewis, with the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists, responded to the disclosure with a statement that read, in part, “As journalists, we are going back to our watchdog role of unearthing corruption where it is practiced. This does not mean we are going to abandon our role of educating and sensitizing Sierra Leoneans about the Ebola disease, but we believe this action will ensure monies meant to fight the spread of the virus are used judiciously and for the intended purpose.”

Sue Valentine is CPJ’s Africa program coordinator. She has worked as a journalist in print and radio in South Africa since the late 1980s for private media, public broadcasting, and the nonprofit sector, covering a range of topics, including South Africa’s transition to democracy and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

15.  For Clues to Censorship in Hong Kong, Look to Singapore, Not Beijing By Madeline Earp

Wong Wing‐yin, a reporter for Hong Kong’s public broadcaster, RTHK, is escorted to safety during a pro‐government protest on October 25, 2014, during which three journalists were assaulted. Source: Reuters/Damir Sagolj

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hen journalists covering pro‐democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong on September 28, 2014, got word that protesters were having problems with cell phone service, it appeared to be a familiar response from governments across the world to dissent. After a Hong Kong radio station reported that police were threatening to shut down mobile networks altogether, the news hit social media, and protesters began sharing links to apps that create a mesh network with the use of Bluetooth and radio frequencies and can function independently of telecommunications towers. International headlines the following week described the territory’s “Internet shutdown,” summoning the specter of a tactic aimed at limiting the ability of protesters to communicate with each other and the public. There was some justification for those concerns. Bandwidth invariably falters during mass uprisings because of the number of people sharing information to coordinate protests, but authorities from Cairo to San Francisco have intentionally shut down cell phone and Internet service as a supposed security measure during demonstrations. In Hong Kong, the possibility of an intentional interruption struck a particular nerve because interference with mobile and Internet services is a tactic used by censors in mainland China. In the summer of 2013, telecommunications networks in part of China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region were severed for several weeks and the communications app Weixin disabled to suppress news reports of a clash between security forces and Muslim protesters, according to The New York Times. Residents and observers feared that Chinese censorship had finally caught up with the special administrative region of Hong Kong. In fact, the supposed Hong Kong Internet shutdown never ­materialized. Such a drastic intervention is unlikely there because telecommunications are an integral part of the highly developed urban infrastructure, and a comparatively strong rule of law helps protect digital media from blunt censorship. As the pro‐democracy news website InMediaHK reported on October 1, 2014, in a state of emergency two Hong Kong ordinances grant the chief executive power to seize control of telecommunications stations, but only by serving a warrant to the heads of several network operators in a competitive market.



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“One can imagine the huge impact should … a warrant be issued,” wrote Oiwan Lam, a voluntary editor for the site, in an interview with legislative councillor Charles Mok translated by Global Voices. Network providers must satisfy consumers accustomed to the world’s second‐fastest Internet speeds, as measured by Akamai, and those consumers are part of a significant financial sector that includes many supporters of Beijing. In other words, economic influence protects the telecommunications infrastructure for everyone. That is the good news for Hong Kong. The bad news is, the actual threat there is more insidious. Commercial institutions may help sustain journalists’ access to the Internet, but the same institutions can also erode media outlets’ independence or marginalize their reporting online, acting as a check on press freedom even as freedom of expression appears to flourish. As tensions between democracy advocates and Beijing loyalists continue to mount in Hong Kong, this dynamic is of growing concern. “Pro‐democracy online news outlets are under huge pressure,” Lam observed in an e‐mail in November 2014, adding that unless founders have the support of someone in the government or business sector—which undermines their independence—“the commercial model is a dead end.” InMediaHK is supported by foundations and local donors. A team of volunteers gets by on a shoestring budget thanks to in‐kind contributions of such items as office furniture. “The cash flow is relatively small,” Lam noted. In July, another Web outlet, The House News, closed its doors after two years of curating news and blog posts for an estimated 300,000 unique daily visitors. Mok, an IT entrepreneur as well as a legislative councillor, wrote a public response to the news: “You believed there could be a Huffington Post of Hong Kong, an online media with its own independent voice and sustainable in its own right.” That concept, however, was not sustainable, House News cofounder Tony Tsoi added. “Some people asked me if any of our clients withdrew their ads,” he wrote in a farewell post, translated by Global Voices. “My answer is no. They never advertise on our site in the first place.” Apple Daily, Hong Kong’s flagship pro‐democracy tabloid, published by the Next Media group, weathered a discriminatory advertising market for years, thanks in part to founder Jimmy Lai’s personal

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fortune; he invested $100 million to launch the paper in 1995. The company adapted to the digital market with its Taiwan‐based subsidiary Next Media Animation, which produces satirical news videos, and Lai embraced digital operations, driving traffic to his Hong Kong website up to 20 million page views per day, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Coverage of intensifying political tensions during 2014 appeared to have brought pressure on the outlet to a head. Lai was threatened in 2013, and accused of corruption on the basis of documents leaked after an apparent cyberattack against an associate in 2014, according to the Guardian. On December 12, 2014, he resigned as Apple Daily’s publisher after police clearing the city’s Central district of protesters briefly detained him, along with around 250 of the democracy movement’s other holdouts, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, despite surging popularity online, Apple Daily’s financial standing looks increasingly precarious. Two banks, HSBC and Standard Chartered, discontinued a long‐standing advertising relationship with Next Media in 2014, leaving the company short more than $3 million in revenue, according to The Wall Street Journal. The unfriendly advertising market may reflect China’s growing influence, but it is a challenge faced by online news outlets around Southeast Asia. The Internet offers freedom from traditional media controls, and journalists have successfully embraced the new medium to diversify the information environment—but they remain outside the financial mainstream. Web editors in the region are so aware of this trend that some are reversing the global norm, trying to break into a print market that their counterparts in the United States and Europe are finding increasingly unprofitable. Malaysia’s 13‐year‐old online news portal Malaysiakini applied for a print license in 2010 but was rejected by the Home Ministry. Though the ministry no longer requires news outlets to renew their licenses annually, it retains sole discretion over the licensing process—power it has historically used to silence critical journalists. Appeals courts declared the ministry’s rejection of Malaysiakini’s application unconstitutional, yet the ministry again rejected the license application in October 2014, according to local news reports. Separately, in Burma, the formerly exile‐run weekly The Irrawaddy has gone in and out of



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print over the past two decades but has used its Web presence to maintain its reputation for independent reporting. In 2014, after The Irrawaddy launched a Burmese‐language print edition from Rangoon, Burma’s Ministry of Information began pressuring the publication to change its name, saying that it had approved the paper’s registration under the recognized brand by mistake. Newly launched publications in Burma rely on state‐owned papers with wide distributions to advertise their content to the wider readership that they established under the junta’s official sanction. Yet those advertisements are watered down before publication, with mentions of human rights and corruption investigations removed, The Irrawaddy reports. More information is available since such publications launched, but authorities seem determined to limit their audience. Irrawaddy editor Aung Zaw, who was awarded CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award in 2014, has operated from exile in Thailand for two decades, and his news organization was branded an “enemy of the state” by the former military regime. In 2014, Zaw warned in an editorial, “Burma’s vaunted media reforms are not as promising as they may seem. We expect the pressure to grow.” The government began releasing imprisoned journalists in 2011 and lifted print and online media censorship in 2012 but has yet to abolish punitive laws that inhibit free expression. In 2014, for the first time since the amnesty, at least 10 journalists were jailed. Though Burma and China serve as cautionary tales, the model of media pressure most pertinent to Hong Kong may be that of Singapore, which has maintained tight control of the media despite the Internet’s revolutionary potential and which, unlike China, has avoided technical censorship through website blocking or the deliberate slowing or interruption of service. Approximately 73 percent of Singapore’s 5.5 million population enjoys high‐quality Internet access, compared with 74 ­percent of Hong Kong’s 7 million residents, according to the International Telecommunication Union. “They both have a privately owned press, with self‐censorship being the main day‐to‐day form of control,” Cherian George, a media scholar and former journalist from Singapore who recently joined Hong Kong Baptist University, wrote in an e‐mail. Singapore has adapted media regulation to the Web. In May 2013, the government introduced a new licensing scheme for news portals

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that report local news and are viewed from at least 50,000 unique local Internet Protocol (IP) addresses per month. The licensee is required to take down “illegal” content on request or lose a $40,000 bond based on terms outlined in the Broadcasting Act. Though multiple blogs and online platforms meet the conditions to require such a license, the ­government enforced the rule selectively through notifications to individual websites, and just 10 were affected—but they included Yahoo! News Singapore, one of the few major news platforms without government‐linked management. The new license appeared to have been designed to extend government regulation to Yahoo!, signaling officials’ intent to minimize the Internet’s ability to disrupt traditional media controls.Yahoo! cooperated with the changes, though Alan Soon, managing editor for Southeast Asia, described them as “redundant.” Since then, three separate digital startups founded by veteran journalists have been instructed to register for licensing under a 2013 amendment to the Broadcasting Act, a process that requires them to submit the names of all staff and donors and bars them from receiving foreign funding, according to local news reports and Human Rights Watch. The notifications to register—which were not publicly disclosed by the government—extended existing regulations to new sites that had yet to reach the legal benchmark of 50,000 visitors: The Independent Singapore, which was contacted by the government in July 2013; The Breakfast Network, contacted in December 2013; and The Mothership, contacted in March 2014. A fourth, more established website, The Online Citizen, was similarly notified in September 2014, despite being pressured to register as a political association, which limits investment from abroad, in 2011. Both Malaysiakini and The Irrawaddy relied heavily on support from overseas foundations in the past, and InMediaHK gets 30 percent of its resources from social‐development foundations, according to Lam, its volunteer editor. Singapore’s regulator, the Media Development Authority, appears to be aware of this trend. Responding to a statement by local nongovernmental organization Maruah, which criticized the expanding registration requirements, the Media Development Authority at once rebutted and, ironically, acknowledged its intent to stymie digital news reporting. “While it is convenient to blame MDA’s registration requirement for causing online commercial enterprises to



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be unviable, it is also true that many online sites struggle to be commercially viable in the first place,” the response said, according to The Online Citizen. The Breakfast Network declined to comply with the requirement and shut down its operations, though it still posts content to its Facebook page. “The demand to register or else has created a wrinkle in our barely formed plans to become a sustainable and professional outfit,” founder Bertha Henson wrote when she announced her decision not to register her largely pro bono staff according to the MDA’s requirements. “People have asked us about our shareholders. There is really just one: me. … I should carry the risk on my own, because everyone, even the Media Development Authority, knows that getting online advertising is tough.” Although Henson’s reluctant farewell is similar in tone to the one Tony Tsoi would write in Hong Kong a few months later, the restrictions in Singapore are far more extreme, according to Cherian George, who left Singapore after his reputation for outspoken commentary caused his employer, Nanyang Technological University, to block him from obtaining tenure until his contract expired. “What’s happening in Hong Kong is a globally more familiar problem, that of taming the media by exploiting their soft spot—their owners’ other business interests,” George wrote by e‐mail from Hong Kong. “In Singapore, licensing means that even if you find a way to insulate yourself from the government’s economic pressures, it can just ban you from publishing.” The licensing protects what George describes as the media duopoly, made up of government‐owned MediaCorp, which dominates broadcasting, and government‐leaning Singapore Press Holdings, which has a virtual monopoly on newspapers. “By law, newspaper companies must accept government nominees to its board of directors,” George added. Yet Singapore’s media environment could still be instructive for journalists in Hong Kong, and not because of resemblances with their own city but, instead, because it represents an alternative manifestation of the Chinese Communist Party’s approach to information control. Before China became the global power most likely to be cited by authorities wishing to implement effective media restrictions, that role was played by Singapore, according to a 2003 analysis by Foreign Policy.

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China first allowed private Internet accounts in 1995 and launched the technological Internet‐filtering project known as the Golden Shield in 1998, according to CPJ research. What happened in between was a trip to Singapore made by the head of the Chinese propaganda department, Ding Guan’gen. After his return, the propaganda department instructed all cadres to study an internal document detailing Singapore’s successes, the South China Morning Post reported. Singapore itself soon abandoned the technical model of filtering that Chinese authorities embraced and embellished. By 2005, tests conducted by the OpenNet Initiative found website blocks in the city‐state to be so minimal as to be largely symbolic, despite a technical infrastructure that would enable much broader controls. Yet legal and economic restrictions on media freedom have not changed. The Broadcasting (Class License) Notification under the Broadcasting Act, which was updated in 2013 to pressure a new generation of online outlets, was first passed in July 1996. Although China maintains a uniquely elaborate censorship apparatus, the way in which it is implemented still merits comparison with Singapore, where news and opinion become a threat only when they have momentum from foreign foundations or the influence of 50,000 local readers. In September 2013, a judicial interpretation issued by China’s top legal authorities outlined specific conditions for prosecuting illegal content online, including information that is viewed more than 5,000 times or reposted more than 500 times, according to Human Rights Watch. The interpretation has precipitated the detention of members of the business elite with millions of followers on social media, including venture capitalist Charles Xue. Independent, anti‐government views proliferate online in both China and Singapore, and neither state can stifle them all. Increasingly, it is views with a platform, and individuals and reporters who boast influence, that are targeted for censorship and reprisals. Press freedom in Hong Kong reached new lows in 2013 and 2014, thanks to physical attacks, self‐censorship, and partisanship. In many ways, journalists in the territory are squeezed between two models that pose threats of news censorship: the blunt but complex methods used on the mainland and the less overt legal and economic pressures in Southeast Asia. Hong Kong’s size and economic development will



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not necessarily protect it; in both models, the city of Singapore leads the way. But Hong Kong retains a major advantage. As of late 2014 there was still room for independent media, for the same reason that hundreds of thousands of people will still take to the streets to protect fundamental rights such as universal suffrage. “There is a healthy degree of pushback [in Hong Kong], a striking contrast with Singapore,” George observed. Civil society and press freedom groups may not be able to entirely combat the economic pressures facing online news outlets, but they have an opportunity to increase the stakes in other ways. “You can raise the political cost to owners and editors of giving in too easily to pressure,” George wrote. The hope is that an informed, engaged public can ensure that although the price for independent reporting is rising, the payback for interrupting it is higher still.

Madeline Earp is a research analyst for Freedom House’s “Freedom on the Net” report and a former senior researcher in CPJ’s Asia program.

16.  Surveillance Forces Journalists to Think and Act Like Spies By Tom Lowenthal

Graffiti attributed to the street artist Banksy is seen near the offices of Britain’s eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, in Cheltenham, England, on April 16, 2014. Source: Reuters/Eddie Keogh

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nce upon a time, a journalist never gave up a confidential source. When someone comes forward, anonymously, to inform the public, it’s better to risk time incarcerated than give them up. This ethical responsibility was also a practical and professional necessity. If you promise anonymity, you’re obliged to deliver. If you can’t keep your word, who will trust you in the future? Sources go elsewhere and stories pass you by. Grizzled correspondents might recall this time with nostalgia. For many young journalists, it’s more like historical fiction—a time when reporters could choose not to give up a source, gruff editors chain‐ smoked cigars, and you could spot a press hack by the telltale notebook and card in the brim of a hat. The experience of a new generation of news writers tells a different story. Whether you choose to yield a source’s name is secondary. Can you even protect your source to begin with? Call records, e‐mail archives, phone tapping, cell‐site location information, smart transit passes, roving bugs, and surveillance cameras—our world defaults to being watched. You can perhaps achieve privacy for a few fleeting moments, but, even then, only with a great deal of effort. Yet this is journalism’s brave new world. In the United States, the National Security Agency, otherwise known as the NSA, seeks to listen to every electronic communication sent or received. In the United Kingdom, the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, has succeeded in intercepting and storing every peep that passes over the wires. Commercial spy software FinFisher (also called FinSpy) monitors citizens in at least 20 other countries, according to a report by the Citizen Lab, a research group based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada. Global Information Society Watch’s global report details the state of communications surveillance in plenty more. Even Canada’s spy agency may be watching Canadians illegally, though the GISWatch report could not say so conclusively. If a journalist can protect the identity of his or her sources at all, it’s only with the application of incredible expertise and practice, along with expensive tools. Journalists now compete with spooks and spies, and the spooks have the home‐field advantage. Shadowy worlds of subterfuge and surveillance should not be a journalist’s habitat. The time a journalist spends learning to play Spy



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vs. Spy could be better spent honing his or her craft. Every hour spent wrangling complex security tools could be an hour spent researching and writing. All the staff on a newsroom’s security team could be writers and editors instead. Each geeky gizmo and air‐gapped computer (a computer that is never connected to a network) could be another camera or microphone, or the cost could be spent on payroll. All the extra labor and logistics dedicated to evading espionage is a loss. This poses sometimes steep financial costs on newsrooms. If journalists and media organizations are to protect themselves, they must buy more tools and adopt practices that limit their efficiency. Robust security practices are complex and time‐consuming, imposing logistical costs. The psychological toll of constant surveillance leads to exhaustion and burnout. Few journalists do their best work when they know that government thugs could break down the door at any moment— as they did at the home of independent New Zealand reporter Nicky Hager in October 2014, according to The Intercept. Many have worked to slow the swing of the pendulum from privacy to panopticon, increasing development of anti‐surveillance tools and advice for journalists. The response to widespread knowledge of the long arm of the surveillance state has been gradual but impressive. Developers have increased work on surveillance‐resistance projects and anonymous tip lines. Experts have put together numerous digital security guides and training programs, all intended to help reporters from falling under the focused gaze of government surveillance. Perhaps the flagship of this proliferation is SecureDrop, a secure and anonymous submission system for journalists. First pioneered by the former hacker and current digital security journalist Kevin Poulsen and the late programmer and political activist Aaron Swartz under the moniker DeadDrop, SecureDrop is intended to allow a potential source or whistleblower to get in touch with journalists without leaving any dangerous records of his or her identity. SecureDrop combines several pieces of security and privacy software into an integrated system, ensuring that only the journalists can read anonymous tips. Messages are protected with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), the tried‐and‐true gold standard for this task. Sources’ anonymity is provided by Tor, the anonymity network that underpins private communications for everyone from the U.S. Navy and CIA to

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large businesses and survivors of domestic abuse. The result is safely encrypted messages and no metadata trail. With SecureDrop, journalists don’t just choose not to reveal a source’s identity. Unless a source chooses to reveal his or her identity, the reporters could not unmask the source even if they tried. Initially just an idea and some prototype code, SecureDrop was mostly theoretical until early 2013. The first major deployment was at The New Yorker. The project was soon adopted by the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), which was founded with the specific mission of facilitating journalism that governments oppose. FPF, as the foundation is known, soon took over SecureDrop’s development and maintenance, as well as outreach and funding. More than a dozen other news organizations and prominent journalists have now deployed SecureDrop. With an ongoing crowdfunding campaign, FPF plans to bring it to many more. SecureDrop works hard to evade even targeted attacks and ­surveillance. Making use of cutting‐edge technology and contemporary security best practices, SecureDrop separates different tasks onto different computers. Each machine only performs part of the puzzle, so it’s very difficult to compromise the whole system at once. This makes SecureDrop quite expensive to deploy. FPF estimates that a single SecureDrop installation would set a newsroom back around $3,000, which is a lot to ask for a tool designed to protect the most important of tips from the most advanced of snoops. Other organizations have developed and distributed best practices and training materials. Universities have deepened their research into the threats journalists face. The Citizen Lab, already discussed in this piece, is dedicated to deep research about how technology and security affect human rights and is the source of some of the most detailed and comprehensive technical reports of recent years. If you want to know about the threats facing journalists and human rights groups, Citizen Lab is the place to go. Yet, as deep as Citizen Lab’s work goes, it is as likely to induce security nihilism as it is to produce savvy security practices. An August 2014 report tells of terrifying new tools for state attacks on the media. Called “network injection appliances,” these devices insert malicious software into otherwise innocuous traffic. Used right, one can modify



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an online video, adding malware that takes over a journalist’s computer. If a journalist is using a service such as YouTube or Vimeo, session cookies allow the journalist to be targeted precisely. This makes these attacks very difficult to detect and prevent. With this new technology, journalists don’t have to make a mistake to be compromised. Gone are the phishing days of opening a malicious attachment or clicking a suspicious link. There’s no trap to notice and avoid. Just browsing the Web puts one at risk, and avoiding online video is an impractical ask of a journalist conducting research. Network injection appliances have likely already been deployed in Oman and Turkmenistan, according to Citizen Lab, and because they’re commercially developed by private companies, the price of these devices will only continue to drop as their capabilities expand. Another Citizen Lab paper paints a disturbing picture of government cyberattacks. Journalists, among the principal victims of this sort of technological espionage, face state‐level threats while lacking the funds and expertise to protect themselves. Attacks on computer systems can reach across borders into seemingly safe locations, allowing attackers to disrupt communications and impairing journalists’ ability to do their core work. Sometimes attacks are simply a nuisance or a resource drain; at other times they present major risks to individuals’ safety. It’s all but impossible for journalists to learn the strategies of the state and appropriate countermeasures on a shoestring budget. Websites and service providers are often better positioned to protect journalists from these attacks. Securing the everyday tools of the trade works much better than does demanding that journalists jump through arcane hoops to stay safe. Simple measures can go a long way. Just enabling secure HTTPS rather than insecure HTTP can make a huge ­difference. The New York Times has called on all news sites to adopt this very measure by the end of 2015. As noted security expert The Grugq puts it: “We can secure the things people actually do, or we can tell them to do things differently. Only one of these has any chance of working.” Since we first saw Edward Snowden’s face, in 2013, computer‐ security guides for journalists have multiplied, but using computers safely is hard when a government is trying to get the drop on you. Many guides only scratch the surface, detailing basic—but

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important—steps. Turning on automatic software updates or using password managers and two‐factor authentication for online accounts make a big difference. These first steps make journalists slightly harder to attack. In fact, simple practices probably have a greater impact than do more complex ones. Esoteric security strategies are a lot of work and sometimes only inconvenience a savvy attacker. Simple measures completely stymie simple attacks and force advanced attackers to change their tactics. A sophisticated attacker will never use an advanced technique when a simple one will do. More sophisticated attempts require more work, cost more, and are more prone to detection. Changing the game by forcing attackers to use scarce resources helps everyone stay safe. Other guides delve deeply into advanced principles of operational security. Abbreviated “OPSEC,” the term is military jargon for measures taken to keep critical information out of hostile hands. If the phrase sounds more at home in a spy thriller than in a journalism manual, that’s a hint at the problems posed by press surveillance. Mainstream journalists and press organizations openly acknowledge their need to learn spies’ tactics and techniques to stay a step ahead. The adoption of military tactics and an espionage mindset has a substantial downside. The Grugq explains: “OPSEC comes at a cost, and a significant part of that cost is efficiency. Maintaining a strong security posture … for long periods of time is very stressful, even for professionally trained espionage officers.” Yet even in apparently free democratic societies, compromising a free press is the day‐to‐day work of the security services. Intelligence services sometimes target journalists for surveillance, even when the missions of the agencies involved are ostensibly centered around foreign intelligence. Iranian spies orchestrate elaborate campaigns to bamboozle journalists; they even pose as journalists when targeting think tanks and lawmakers, Wired has reported. The FBI has also admitted using the latter tactic and actually defended it publicly when criticized. In the United Kingdom, security services have abandoned restraint when it comes to surveillance of journalists and civil society, Ryan Gallagher wrote in The Intercept, summarizing: “An investigative journalist working on a case or story involving



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state secrets could be targeted on the basis that they are perceived to be working against the vaguely defined national security interests of the government.” ■  ■  ■

Some journalists have risen to this challenge. After meeting with Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald realized that traditional newspapers and media groups were not well suited to this world of watchers. They needed a new sort of organization—one ready to play spy games with professional spies from the very start. They founded the First Look Media group with help from fellow investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and funding from eBay mogul Pierre Omidyar. First Look’s flagship online magazine, The Intercept, is dedicated to exposing the abuses of the surveillance state. Choosing such powerful foes meant that The Intercept had to stay one step ahead from the start. Micah Lee is The Intercept’s resident security expert. Formerly a staff technologist at technology civil rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Lee was on The Intercept team from the ­beginning. He designed and implemented the security measures that Greenwald, Poitras, and Scahill—and now a team of 20—use to stay safe. When asked about the infrastructure needed to protect the publication, he frankly admitted: “When we think it’ll make us safer, we normally just buy another computer or device. We’re willing to spend money on these things when there’s a clear security benefit.” Lee was referring to security practices typically only needed when one is facing adversaries with the sophistication of governments. Protecting important information on separate air‐gapped computers is a common practice at The Intercept. Lee and other technologists are fond of a security principle called “defense in depth,” an approach that assumes that some security measures will fail and calls for systems that remain secure even when that happens. In the planning for defense in depth, a process should become insecure not when one security measure fails but instead when dozens do. Systems built this way demand more hardware than do those where security is more brittle. Several computers ensure that the

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compromise of one will leave the others safe. Smartcards protect cryptographic keys even when other things go wrong. All of this tech costs money and requires experienced technologists like Lee to design and operate. In keeping with this level of prudent paranoia, Lee and his colleagues often eschew regular smartphones in favor of the CryptoPhone. These $3,500 devices, made by German manufacturer GSMK, don’t just provide encrypted calls; they’re heavily customized and locked‐down Android devices loaded with a whole host of custom software. They even try to detect anomalies in cellular networks that might be indicative of an attack or targeted surveillance. These practices and this technology are the best that media organizations can buy. It’s a far cry from the James Bond–esque gadgetry that one might see at MI6 or the CIA, but, used correctly, it can keep the spooks at bay long enough for you to meet with sources and write the stories that need to be written. Staff at The Intercept use PGP for e‐mail encryption by default. Lee estimates that more than 80 percent of the e‐mails he sent in the past six months were encrypted in this way. For most people who aren’t security experts, PGP is a niche tool with a notoriously steep learning curve. Getting started requires hours of training and practice to wrap one’s head around complex and unintuitive principles of public‐ key cryptography. The process takes even longer if one doesn’t have an experienced guide. Between building sustainable long‐term security strategies and jetting around protecting the magazine’s VIP writers, Lee quickly ran out of the time needed to show each new hire how to use PGP. But he noticed that he wasn’t always needed: “Folks learn PGP the same way they do any other tricky technical thing—they Google it, or they ask their nerd friends, and sometimes they get bad advice,” he said. At The Intercept, new hires were learning PGP from folks already there—­ journalists and editors as well as technologists. The Intercept had developed what Lee calls a security culture, an operational security term that has its roots in activism. In a security culture, a community adopts customs and norms that protect its members. It’s a wholesale adoption of operational security practices into the everyday work and activities of the group. The Intercept team considers security a



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core value, so people there are willing to work together to protect one another, even when that’s outside their usual work. “Of course, having Erinn in New York helps, too,” Lee joked, referring to Erinn Clark, the most recent member of First Look’s security team. Clark came to First Look from the Tor Project, the nonprofit group responsible for developing Tor. Another security virtuoso, Clark is more than familiar not only with the nitty‐gritty of security tools but also with the adoption of secure practices across an organization. In technology circles, the Tor Project is famous both for the exotic ways in which states have tried to infiltrate and attack it and for the extreme security measures its members have adopted to protect themselves. Leading the incredible heavy hitters of First Look’s security team is Morgan “Mayhem” Marquis‐Boire. A security superstar, Marquis‐Boire worked on Google’s security incident‐response team, and he is a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab. This incredible brain trust isn’t just there to keep just First Look safe. Once First Look’s basic security needs are met, the group plans to branch out. “We want the security team to start developing tools and hardware and doing bigger research.” Lee said. The team members plan to use their skills and expertise to help other organizations that can’t afford their own elite security teams. The challenge is always resources. First Look has a billionaire on call to pay for the latest technology and fancy technologists. This is a rarity. Other journalists may face a stark choice between hard‐hitting stories and staying safe. What does information security look like at publications that don’t have First Look’s billionaire funding? FPF regularly sends technical experts to help newsrooms install, set up, and upgrade SecureDrop. Every time they set foot in a newsroom, FPF techs find themselves flooded with security questions from reporters and editors. Questions aren’t just about SecureDrop or FPF; news teams want to know about everything from the ins and out of other tools, such as OTR and Tails, to the sort of advanced operational security measures that can help them keep their heads above water when spies come snooping. Runa A. Sandvik, a member of FPF’s technical team, said, “Even if you wanted to use these tools and had all the patience to learn them, there’s still so much conflicting information—it’s very confusing, very intimidating.” And though few media organizations have the ability to

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hire technologists to work with their reporting staffs, Sandvik notes that the situation for journalists not affiliated with a major organization is even bleaker: “If you have a technologist, someone to help you, that’s one thing. If you’re freelance and not overly technical, I don’t know how you’re going to work this stuff out.” She added, “Many feel overwhelmed; they don’t know who to ask for help.” Just having a technologist to help with analysis and security may not be enough. The newsroom has to commit to understanding the issues and taking good advice. Barton Gellman, who currently writes for The Washington Post, was one of the recipients of the document cache Snowden assembled, and he knew that he didn’t have the technical skills to work on the documents alone. He brought prominent security researcher Ashkan Soltani (now chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission) on board to help. Soltani bolstered Gellman’s security practices and helped Gellman analyze and understand the more technical material in the collection. To make matters worse, intelligence agencies encourage confusion and misunderstanding when it comes to secure tools and practices. They try to associate a need for privacy with wrongdoing. This association makes it even harder for journalists to protect themselves and their sources. Persuading a source to protect him‐ or herself is harder when the tools of safety are associated with suspicion. In some cases, making secure tools seem suspicious actively endangers sources who live in less tolerant environs, such as dissidents in mainland China who use Tor. This doublethink is a strange flip side to the surveillance state: First, watch everyone, always, then vilify any attempt to recover some ­privacy. This is especially disruptive to journalists and their ability to serve as watchdogs. Even without state propaganda and unforced errors, covert action takes a substantial toll on the press’s ability to hold leaders accountable. Espionage targeting journalists and their sources impairs the healthy function of the states where it occurs. And these practices are not just a feature of regimes known to be restrictive or autocratic. In 2013, David Miranda was detained for most of a day while making a connection between flights at Heathrow Airport in London. Miranda was changing planes on a journey from Germany to Brazil on which he was transporting documents and video footage between



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Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. British police held him under measures designed to combat terrorism. Their reasoning? Miranda was promoting a “political or ideological cause.” In July 2013, surveillance agency GCHQ destroyed computers at the Guardian newspaper in London. The security agency had already threatened the newspaper’s editors, demanding that the Guardian stop reporting on government surveillance. A security service literally knocked on the doors of a prominent and critical newspaper in western Europe. They ground a computer into pieces with the use of power tools. All of this was done in a vain attempt to prevent the publication of more articles on a topic that discomfited the government. These are the tools the state has at its disposal to discourage dissent. It is understandable that, for some, the risk of challenging this authority is simply too great. When these are the consequences of hard‐hitting reporting, sticking to “safe” topics and innocuous pieces is a reasonable response. But even for those who choose to continue the hard work of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, evading the panopticon comes at a tremendous cost. There are the costs incurred in avoiding simple tools in favor of secure ones. The costs of using extra hardware to protect sensitive materials. The costs of hiring elite security teams instead of extra editors. The costs of worrying that you’ve made a mistake in your security measures. The costs of wondering whether your hotel room will be undisturbed when you get back. The costs of hoping that today isn’t the day that a government agent knocks at the door and asks to destroy your work, or worse. When journalists must compete with spies and surveillance, even when they win, society loses.

Tom Lowenthal is CPJ’s resident expert in operational security and surveillance self‐defense. He is also a freelance journalist on security and tech policy matters.

17. Two Continents, Two Courts, Two Approaches to Privacy By Geoffrey King

Mario Costeja González speaks on his mobile phone outside a court in Barakaldo, Spain, on June 25, 2013. As a result of a lawsuit he filed against Google, Internet companies can be made to remove irrelevant or excessive personal information from search engine results, Europe’s top court ruled. Source: Reuters/Vincent West

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t 3:20 a.m. on August 24, 2014, the strongest earthquake in a quarter‐century rocked the San Francisco Bay Area, causing damage widely estimated at between $300 million and $1 billion. The quake spared Silicon Valley and other areas farther south, where many of the world’s biggest tech companies—including Twitter, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Yahoo!—are based. Yet proximity means that the region is subject to the same tectonic perils, which is likewise true of a dangerous rift in the increasingly volatile digital information landscape: In both cases, disruption in one region points to potential trouble elsewhere, even if the effects are not immediately felt. The most pressing danger facing California’s tech companies involves shockwaves from the rupture of doctrinal tensions between two legal Western philosophies that have long been under pressure. The first, a distinctly American notion of free speech and privacy that tends to sacrifice the latter to the former, is all but unique in the world, providing unmatched protection for news and other information in the public interest. This can lead to uncomfortable results in which speech of questionable merit remains untouchable by the state. Born of the American colonists’ experiences with occupying British forces, the underlying philosophy is that in a so‐called “marketplace of ideas,” good ideas will prevail. These principles are applied so broadly that U.S. courts have held that search engine results are a form of free speech. By contrast, European courts and lawmakers tend to take a more ad hoc approach that sometimes sacrifices newsworthy information to individual privacy. This approach also has its rationale: “The privacy protections we see reflected in modern European law are a response to the Gestapo and the Stasi,” Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of law, told The New York Times in 2010. Two cases decided in 2014—Riley v. California, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, and Google Spain v. AEPD and Mario Costeja González, decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union—illustrate the schism between these two philosophies. Each case also represents a break from traditional ways of viewing these complex issues. Taken together, they create uncertainty about the delicate balance of free expression, privacy, and the power of states to surveil and censor journalists and the platforms they use.



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Riley suggests that the United States has finally broken from its reluctance to protect digital data from unwarranted seizure; at the same time, U.S. free expression principles remain intact. The EU, by contrast, is moving toward allowing governments to quash newsworthy speech in the name of individual privacy, a trend that González accelerates. Should the European trajectory toward censorship continue, it will limit tech companies’ ability to host newsworthy information, with potential consequences for press freedom around the world. ■  ■  ■

Down on his luck in 1998, Mario Costeja González likely never imagined that he would send one of the richest companies in the world scrambling to scrub the fact of his misfortunes from its corner of the public Internet nearly a generation later. González began his quest against Google in earnest in 2009, when he learned that a search for his name on the website brought up an old advertisement announcing the repossession of his home to pay a tax debt. González, who told the Guardian that he had long since put his money troubles behind him, felt it unfair that the 36‐word advertisement could still be found so easily, and set out to have it buried. Applying the European Union’s Data Protection Directive, the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) rejected González’s claim against the newspaper in which the advertisement had been placed but upheld it in regard to Google. Faced with removing the links to the otherwise lawful article, Google Spain and Google Inc. appealed, and the issues ultimately found their way before the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the highest court in the EU. The court ruled for González and, in doing so, created the so‐called right to be forgotten. In an age in which so much personal information can be found online, it is easy to see how a “right to be forgotten” might seem seductive. Worldwide, the ability to control what can be learned about one’s self is a topic of widespread public concern. A May 2014 report of a study led by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute found that two‐thirds of global Internet users believe that organizations, companies, and agencies ask for too much personal information online. In the United States, attitudes are even starker. For example, 91 percent

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of respondents to a November 2014 Pew Research Center poll of U.S. consumers said that they agreed or strongly agreed that consumers have lost control over how information is collected and used by companies. The abuse of private information can be especially dangerous for journalists. All too often, journalists are subjected to harassment— and worse—facilitated by information gleaned from the Internet. Sometimes these harms are the result of online research, such as when, in January 2013, The New York Times reported that reporters and editors from the Journal News, in suburban New York, had their home addresses posted online after publishing a story about gun ownership in the state, causing some staffers to temporarily move into hotels. At other times, malevolent actors may end up abusing information in their possession, such as in November 2014, when BuzzFeed reported that a top executive at the car‐sharing company Uber had tracked a journalist’s movements without her permission; that same month, the outlet reported that while at a dinner in Manhattan, Uber’s senior vice president for business had suggested looking into the private lives of journalists. Although there is legitimate cause for concern about the collection, security, private misuse, and public disclosure of individuals’ data, the right to be forgotten is not a cure, and it represents what many see as a dangerous precedent. The rule that González established holds that search engines can be required to erase links to content upon request by an individual. The breadth of the ruling cannot be overstated: it allows an individual to demand that data be removed from a site’s servers, even if the content is truthful and lawfully published and causes the person no prejudice. As CPJ has previously written, the ruling largely ignores free expression values that are vital to online journalism. It also represents a radical break from the carefully constructed legal philosophies underscoring privacy, which is already a newer and much more volatile right than the free expression values with which it often collides. The right to be forgotten is also unworkable, a notion that has been expressed by British Justice Minister Simon Hughes, the country’s House of Lords, the European Network and Information Security Agency, and others. Although EU Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding has optimistically claimed, “It is possible to handle the copyright



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question, so it should also be possible to handle the takedown requests on personal data questions,” according to the Guardian, this analysis is flawed. Notice and takedown requests—in which a website or other platform can escape liability by removing content that allegedly infringes on a copyright—are frequently abused, often to the detriment of journalists. Reding’s statement is also untrue: copyright protections are much more clear‐cut than the near‐limitless scope of the right to be forgotten. As EU Advocate General Niilo Jääskinen argued in a formal recommendation not to adopt a broad right to be forgotten, submitted to the ECJ in 2013, “‘notice and take down procedures,’ if required by the Court, are likely either to lead to the automatic withdrawal of links to any objected contents or to an unmanageable number of requests handled by the most popular and important Internet search engine service providers.” Although Google is not the only target for the right to be forgotten, the company was an obvious choice. Google.com is the most visited website in the world, according to the traffic‐­ranking site Alexa.com. The company has a greater audience share than Netflix, Facebook, and Twitter combined, according to the research firm Deepfield. Its servers index 30 trillion Web pages every month. Google’s search algorithm is a closely held trade secret, and a profitable one: the company is one of the world’s richest, reporting a revenue stream totaling more than $115,000 per minute. For many, the tech behemoth stands for American hegemony, yet it is also an example of the kind of ingenuity that at once thrives on, and grants unprecedented access to, information. The huge amounts of information on which Google and other tech companies thrive can play a key role in supporting the future of journalism. However, the right to be forgotten threatens the ability of journalists, and the companies building the platforms they use, to put information to its most productive ends. More fundamentally, the right to be forgotten corrupts history, as CPJ noted shortly after the ruling by the ECJ. “The right to access history is important,” World Wide Web founder Tim Berners‐Lee told the LeWeb conference in Paris in December 2014, according to CNET. “It’s our society. We build it. We can define the rules about how to use data  . . .  that’s much better than trying to pretend a thing never happened.”

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That sentiment is shared by Eduardo Bertoni, director of the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression at the Palermo University School of Law in Argentina and the former Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter‐American Commission of Human Rights at the Organization of American States. Calling the right to be forgotten an “insult to Latin American history,” Bertoni wrote in a blog post for Huff Post Tech, “[R]ather than promoting this type of erasure, we have spent the past few decades in search of the truth regarding what occurred during the dark years of the military dictatorships.” Among other horrors, the abuses that occurred under these dictatorships include the censorship, murder, and disappearance of journalists—crimes that in some cases are only now coming to light. And, as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told journalists in London, in August 2014, according to The Washington Post, “I would never, ever use any kind of legal process like this to try and suppress the truth. I think it’s deeply immoral.” Though less than a year old, the nascent right to be forgotten is sparking controversy from South Korea to South Africa, Canada, and Chile. Efforts to expand the ruling  are already under way, and the threat of  copycat laws looms. In addition to generating enormous uncertainty about the future of free expression, as well as the right to receive information, the ECJ has forced difficult jurisdictional issues to the fore, possibly prematurely. And because the right to be forgotten allows individuals to censor truthful information, the harm caused by the decision is limited not just to the ability of individual journalists to publish what they choose but also to the interconnected and freewheeling nature of the Internet itself, leading Google cofounder Larry Page to warn, “We’re not going to see the kind of innovation we’ve seen” as regulations such as the right to be forgotten take hold. If the González case is exceptional, the norms from which it so radically departs bear examining. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis first articulated “the right to privacy” as a concept in Western legal philosophy in an eponymous 1890 Harvard Law Review article that is as famous as it was prescient. The article remains deeply influential, showing up in U.S. legislation, U.S. Supreme Court case law, and contemporary debates about new technologies. Even EU Advocate General Niilo Jääskinen’s



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recommendation that the ECJ reject the right to be forgotten began with a discussion of the article’s influence. As Warren and Brandeis imagined it, the right to privacy consisted of a “right to be let alone,” which differs from the contemporary right to be forgotten. Derived primarily from common‐law judicial decisions in cases between private parties but also deeply embedded in the American 4th Amendment’s prohibitions on unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to privacy is meant to protect an individual’s ability to set reasonable boundaries for one’s life before publication or other intrusion. That said, the right is far from absolute. Because of the importance of protecting the free exchange of ideas, news, and culture, the right to privacy is tightly cabined by free expression principles. For this reason, an individual would be unlikely to win a lawsuit alleging invasion of privacy after thrusting themselves into the public light, or a case in which newsworthy facts were reported, or if information was reported from public proceedings or documents. And, as with most matters, a potential plaintiff would have to show that he or she was harmed in some way. By contrast, these limitations on liability for speech are largely absent from the right to be forgotten. Although the essay “The Right to Privacy” remains powerful, it is also true that the U.S. Supreme Court tends to be dilatory in taking up matters of digital privacy. Cautious about ruling too broadly, for years the court has clumsily attempted to apply real‐world analogies to newly developed technological issues. But, as Chief Justice John Roberts remarked in the unanimous opinion in Riley, to say that a search of all data on a cell phone is “materially indistinguishable” from a physical container “is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon.” The pithiness of Roberts’s observation belies the significance of an extraordinary doctrinal shift. Riley makes real a concept first recognized  nearly a half‐century ago: that “  . . .  the Fourth Amendment [to the U.S. Constitution] protects people, not places.” In Katz v. United States, the Supreme Court struck down a warrantless wiretap used to convict a Los Angeles man who was running an illegal gambling ­operation. In so doing, the court created a legal test that looks to an individual’s “reasonable expectation of privacy,” which in turn hinges on cultural and factual context.

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The facts of Riley are similarly routine, and they are inconsonant with the effect the case may have on journalists’ privacy. In Riley, the Supreme Court held that  a long‐standing doctrine allowing police to search arrestees as a matter of course should not extend to the electronic devices they carry. Writing for the court, Chief Justice Roberts noted, “A phone not only contains in digital form many sensitive records previously found in the home; it also contains a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form—unless the phone is.” Just as the actions of a bookie in LA ultimately meant that journalists in the United States are unlikely to see their telephones wiretapped (even if the same cannot be said of other forms of surveillance), Riley is a boon for journalists who have struggled to protect their privacy and that of their sources in the post‐Snowden era. “The fact [is] that everybody’s digital media device in their pocket is a potential source of newsgathering,” Stanford Law School professor and Supreme Court litigation clinic co‐director Jeffrey Fisher told CPJ. Fisher, who argued Riley at the Supreme Court, said that privacy and speech are often complementary values, noting that news and information “flow in a more uninhibited way if people aren’t subject to confiscation and search of whatever’s on their device.” Riley has other far‐reaching implications. “When it comes to individual privacy,” Fisher told CPJ, “whether it be collection of phone records, whether it be cell site information being compared to the old‐ time use of beepers or other tracking devices, the third‐party disclosure doctrine—all of those things that have developed in a certain form in the analog world now need to be rethought in the digital world.” Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees. “Old cases involving older technologies don’t necessarily apply the same way to new technologies,” Fakhoury told CPJ in October 2014. “Now you have to assess the technology for what it’s revealing; you can’t just blindly apply old precedent.” Riley’s reaffirmation that both privacy and technology are socially beneficial has powerful implications. As companies begin to push back against government pressure and implement encryption by default, journalists end up having to spend less time figuring out technology and more time doing their jobs, as CPJ staff technologist Tom Lowenthal explains elsewhere in these pages.



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Although both Riley and the right to be forgotten relate to the protection of privacy, they approach the problem in very different ways. The right to be forgotten forces tech companies to delete potentially newsworthy information after it has been reported—even if it isn’t particularly negative; Riley focuses on the power of the government to seize, search—and thus censor—in the first instance. “I don’t think it’s an accident that the leading American opinions are cases that involve the state, because our constitution speaks to state power,” Fisher told CPJ. “Both as a cultural matter and a constitutional matter, the focus of American privacy law tends to be more on state actors rather than private parties or corporations  . . .  Europeans, I think, see a threat to privacy perhaps to some degree coming from different sources, or with different force from different sources.” Though well intentioned, the right to be forgotten carries significant dangers for online journalism and has caused some commentators to question the extent to which U.S. tech companies should engage with Europe. Writing in Computerworld in December 2014, journalist Mike Elgan argued that Google should pull out of Europe entirely, “just as it did China.” In fact, European regulators are attempting to expand the right to be forgotten to the rest of the globe. Brandeis, coauthor of “The Right to Privacy,” later became a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the first wiretapping case to reach the nation’s high court, later overruled by Katz, Brandeis offered a foreshadowing of how journalists should view the “right to be ­forgotten.” When the court’s majority put its imprimatur on warrantless wiretapping, Brandeis wrote in dissent, “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. . . . The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well‐meaning but without understanding.”

Geoffrey King is CPJ’s San Francisco‐based Internet advocacy coordinator, working to protect the digital rights of journalists worldwide. He is a constitutional lawyer who also teaches courses on digital privacy law and on the intersection of media and social change at the University of California, Berkeley.

18.  Journalists Grapple with Increasing Power of European Extremists By Jean‐Paul Marthoz

Supporters of the extreme‐right Golden Dawn party raise flares as they celebrate poll results in Thessaloniki, Greece, on May 6, 2012. Source: Reuters/Grigoris Siamidis

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thens, May 6, 2012. Journalists attending Golden Dawn’s triumphal election night news conference are ordered to stand up when the group’s leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, enters the room. “Rise up! Rise up! Show your respect!” barks the master of ceremonies, an agitated black‐clad, bald‐headed toughie. The journalists who refuse the injunction are asked to leave the room. Welcome to Golden Dawn, a group known for its Nazi symbols, jackbooted militants, violence against migrants, and growing electoral force. Welcome to a party that hates and attacks the press. On November 4, 2012, SKAI TV reporter Michael Tezari was beaten by party militants and had his mobile phone and press card stolen while covering a demonstration against immigrants. On December 10, 2013, Star TV journalist Panagiotis Bousis was physically abused while reporting on a Golden Dawn demonstration in an Athens suburb. On July 4, 2014, two photojournalists were assaulted by Golden Dawn militants demonstrating in front of an Athens court where their leaders were standing trial. The cradle of democracy is no exception in the European Union. In recent years, the most extreme right‐wing groups have been on the march. “The rightwing extremist scene remains of considerable concern,” the 2014 EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report stated. The “fachosphere,” as their adversaries have dubbed the groups in reference to their perceived fascist approach, includes neo‐Nazis, Blood & Honor skinheads, white supremacists, virulent counter‐jihad associations, extremist religious traditionalists, and lone wolves, such as Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who often operate on the margins of the law. It also includes hardcore far‐right parties that, despite their extremism, have been able to attract a significant share of Europe’s disgruntled voters. Although Golden Dawn barely scrounged 0.1 percent of the vote in the 2009 European parliament elections—which are organized at the national level, with each member state sending a number of deputies designated by population—its share rose to 9 percent five years later. Likewise, in Hungary the ethnonationalistic and anti‐Semitic party Jobbik grabbed 15 percent of the vote and sent three deputies to the European Parliament.



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There is another form of right‐wing radicalism, however, that evolves in a gray zone in which it “simultaneously distances itself and intermingles with the extreme right,” wrote University of Munich researcher Britta Schellenberg in a groundbreaking 2009 Berlelsmann Foundation report. These right‐wing populists who prefer suits to boots rocked the May 2014 European parliamentary elections. The French National Front and the Danish People’s Party even came first with a quarter of each nation’s vote. To be sure, some luminaries of the new right lost ground: In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ Islamophobic, anti‐immigrant, and anti‐EU Party for Freedom (PVV) fell from 17 percent to 13.3 ­percent of the vote in the 2014 European Parliament elections; in Italy, the Northern League went from 10.2 percent to 6.2 percent; and the British National Party even lost its representation in Brussels. The trend, however, is unmistakable. Far‐right and right‐wing populist parties gained a record number of members of the European Parliament, or MEPs. In the wake of the European elections, a number of mainstream politicians and commentators chose to de‐dramatize the electoral rise of the radical right. In fact, mainstream political groups, including the center‐right European People’s Party, the center‐left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, the middle‐of‐the‐road Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, the United Left, and the Greens maintain a large majority among the 751 MEPs. Radical right‐wing groups are often deeply divided on issues of national identity, economic philosophy, or anti‐Semitism. However, because these groups have already demonstrated their capacity to influence the mainstream political discourse at the national level, many observers fear that the populists’ illiberal views will undermine the EU’s fundamental values and corrode its human rights and press freedom policies. The most extreme far‐right groups have an unpalatable record of violence against the press. In September 2011, the United Kingdom’s National Union of Journalists claimed in a motion that “it had received numerous reports of journalists being harassed, racially abused, and having bottles and fireworks thrown at them by the anti‐Islamic group English Defence League.” “Far‐right attacks on media workers are aimed at deterring them from carrying out their work and are designed to stop the media

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reporting on far‐right activity,” the National Union of Journalists said. In France on November 19, 2012, militants beat up Caroline Fourest, a journalist and writer known for her essays on religious fundamentalism and on the National Front, while she was covering a demonstration convened by the ultra‐Catholic group Civitas against gay marriage. In Sofia on June 27, 2013, shock troops of the far‐right Ataka party, led by their president, Volen Siderov, forced their way onto the premises of the Bulgarian public broadcaster BNT and partially disrupted its operations. In June 2014, Britain First, a uniformed group conducting “Christian patrols” in Muslim areas, threatened journalists with “nonviolent direct action” after Channel 4 broadcast a documentary about it. “If you print something that you know not to be true, then we’ll find out where you live, we’ll leak it to all your neighbors,” the group’s leader, Paul Golding, told BuzzFeed. Reporting on the most extreme far‐right groups has always been a dangerous assignment. It is a subgenre of investigative journalism practiced by a small number of hardheaded reporters who move into these dark waters as they might wade into the criminal underworld. Swedish journalist and writer Stieg Larsson, famed author of the Millennium trilogy, was the role model for this deeply political and activist form of journalism. His Expo magazine was created in 1994 to expose the far right and its infiltration of Swedish society and institutions. At the time, similar journalistic ventures—including Searchlight Magazine in the United Kingdom and CelsiuS in France and Belgium—were being developed in a number of European countries, part of an “antifascist” media movement often rooted in militant left‐wing politics and usually distrustful of corporate‐owned media. In those days, the far‐right sphere was already a tense and often thuggish world. In his 2000 essay “Surviving the Deadlines: A Handbook for Threatened Journalists,” Larsson recalled the advice of English journalist Graeme Atkinson, editor of Searchlight: “What do you do if you are attacked by the Nazis? Run like hell.”   “In the 1970s,” Larsson added, “Atkinson was badly beaten up and had his nose broken by Nazis. For the last 15 years he has been forced to live in virtual anonymity.” Journalists usually went undercover to infiltrate extremist groups; far‐right militants retaliated with threats and, at times, physical attacks.



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“Expo cut Stieg’s life short,” wrote human rights author Kurdo Baksi in his 2010 memoir Stieg Larsson, My Friend, “because of all the threats it received and the financial crises it suffered.” Baksi also wrote, “In May 1996, fifteen months after Expo’s launch, the magazine’s printer’s premises were sabotaged. Every window was smashed and totally ­demolished. Walls were sprayed with the message ‘Don’t Print Expo!’  ” “When I worked with CelsiuS [a Belgian‐French magazine], we were keenly aware of the risks involved,” Manuel Abramowicz, founder of the Belgian online anti‐fascist magazine RésistanceS, told CPJ. “We received death threats on the phone. Some investigative journalists were harassed during public events. We were on alert all the time as a band of conjurors leading an uphill battle against the far right.” Right‐ wing extremists also set up a number of U.S.‐based websites called Redwatch that published personal information on activists. In 2006, Redwatch–Poland posted a list of 15 allegedly left‐wing and liberal journalists whom it threatened with reprisals for hostile coverage. In January 2014 the German journalists’ union announced that neo‐Nazis were using press cards to better spy on journalists and place them on their watch lists. Nowadays, undercover journalism remains the best option for covering the most extreme groups. Spanish journalist “Antonio Salas” (a pseudonym) infiltrated Real Madrid Ultras Sur fans to investigate football far‐right hooliganism. German journalist “Thomas Kuban” (also an alias) has spent 15 years disguising himself as a skinhead so he may clandestinely film neo‐Nazi rock concerts, “the conspiratorial heart,” as he puts it, “of Europe’s diverse and burgeoning neo‐Nazi scene.” ■  ■  ■

Journalists use more conventional fact‐finding methods while reporting on right‐wing populist parties. They request interviews and ask for accreditation to their events but sometimes face push‐back and exclusion. In fact, even if they seek respectability as they court the general electorate, right‐wing populist parties have continued to accuse the media of tyranny and to label mainstream journalists “limousine liberals” or stenographers of Brussels and Wall Street. The parties play upon

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what they perceive as a profound resentment against an allegedly elitist, cosmopolitan, and “bobo” (bourgeois bohemian) media establishment, distanced from the real, hard‐struggling, and truly patriotic common people. In France, members of the right‐wing sphere have created a media criticism website, l’Observatoire des journalistes et de l’information médiatique, and every year Polémia, a foundation set up by Jean‐Yves Le Gallou, a former National Front MEP, organizes the Bobards d’Or (Golden Canards) ceremony to denounce journalists who, it says, are deliberately lying in the service of political correctness.  Despite its electoral successes, the French National Front remains deeply suspicious of the press. Reporters from allegedly adversarial media, such as the muckraking online magazine Mediapart or cable TV channel Canal+, have been excluded or expelled from the party’s public meetings. Others have been harassed with defamation lawsuits or threats of legal action. The National Front is suspected of keeping files on critical journalists and of encouraging its militants to harass them, although the party denies this. On May 1, 2013, stickers with the personal home addresses of a Le Monde journalist, Abel Mestre, and of Caroline Fourest were distributed on the margins of a National Front rally. In 2012, Sylvain Crépon, author of a penetrating sociological study on the party, was directly targeted on Twitter and sarcastically accused of being a “far‐right sociologist” because of his comments qualifying the National Front as “d’extrême droite,” undermining the rebranding strategy of the party as a respectable and democratic organization. In Hungary, the radical ultranationalist Jobbik party has adopted similar tactics. Despite the party’s ethnonationalist ideology and militaristic trappings, it dismisses the far‐right label. In early June 2014, the party’s rejection of the far‐right characterization was supported by Hungary’s Supreme Court: TV channel ATV was judged to have violated the 2010 media law’s restrictions on commentary by describing Jobbik as “far‐right” in a newscast. “The court’s rationale,” Human Rights Watch Central Europe researcher Lydia Gall told CPJ, “was that as Jobbik doesn’t call itself a far‐right party, referring to it as such expresses an opinion and may leave viewers with a negative impression. Given Jobbik’s blatant anti‐Roma and anti‐Semitic agenda, ‘far right’ seems like a fair comment that courts ought to protect.”



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In recent years, some of these far‐right and right‐wing populist parties have tried to dissociate themselves from their most unsavory allies and have condemned anti‐Semitism and claimed their democratic credentials. The process of de‐demonization of the far right has been particularly successful in France, where Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, even clashed with her father, party founder Jean‐Marie Le Pen, a man known for his controversial and rowdy statements and surly jokes about the Holocaust or Islam. The result is that a more palatable vocabulary has been imposed upon some militants, and the most thuggish groups have been shoved away from the limelight. “When I was among the public in a National Front Congress in Paris,” Manuel Abramowicz told CPJ, “security people were telling militants to stop shouting words like bougnoules [“niggers”] or bicots [a derisive term for Arabs]. There might be journalists in the crowd, they said. Such words should be avoided, in the interest of the party.” If some journalists have normalized their coverage of the National Front, many remain unconvinced and continue to use the far‐right label. “Don’t be fooled,” warned Christine Ockrent, one of the more famous French journalists and a target of Jean‐Marie Le Pen’s xenophobic taunts. “Marine Le Pen talks patriotism rather than nationalism, the love of France rather than the fear of foreigners, and she disputes the term extrême droite, [but] for all the rebranding, the National Front remains true to itself.” Despite its dark history of authoritarianism, the far right has held aloft the banner of free speech as a shield against its enemies in the press. What right‐wing politicians call liberal or leftist journalists have been accused of censoring inconvenient truths on multiculturalism, immigration, European integration, and globalization. On a continent where, in the aftermath of World War II atrocities, hate speech was severely restricted, the far right, despite its traditional anti‐ Americanism, has positioned itself as a boisterous apostle of the First Amendment. European laws against racism, hate speech, and Holocaust denial have been denounced as state censorship. In 2005 in Denmark, the Jyllands‐Posten Muhammad cartoon controversy was shamelessly hijacked by the extreme right. Whereas liberals were torn between their defense of freedom of expression and their fear of stigmatizing Muslims, right‐wing organizations such as Lars

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Hedegaard’s International Free Press Society relished muddling the debate by mixing free speech absolutism with Islamophobic discourse. The far right also makes claims to unlimited free speech in its own media sphere, a ragtag mix of magazines, journals, books, radio stations, and websites, which has considerably boosted its outreach. The far right has been able to navigate a “dark network” as Norwegian journalist and author Øyvind Strømmen calls it—where the most extreme groups mix and conspire. It has also skillfully exploited the legal Web and social media networks to circumvent the mainstream media and directly address its constituencies, particularly the young. The far right’s concept of free speech is, however, partial and sectarian. Its leaders and sympathizers are much less liberal when free speech allegedly hurts their nation’s traditional institutions and faiths. In Greece, Golden Dawn proclaims itself the protector of the Orthodox Church and aggressively uses blasphemy laws to attacks its opponents. In France, members of far‐right Catholic groups have campaigned for the restoration of blasphemy laws and against so‐ called Christianophobia. “In 19 years of existence we have been sued 13 times by the Catholic far‐right and once by Muslims,” the late Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Stephane Charbonnier joked on November 13, 2011, after his no‐holds‐barred satirical weekly published an issue deriding Islamic fundamentalism. Charbonnier, who was widely known by his penname Charb, was shot dead in the January 7, 2015, attack on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo by heavily armed Islamist militants, which killed 12 people, including eight journalists. ■  ■  ■

Far‐rightists and national populists have shown no qualms about cultivating close relations with authoritarian and press‐restrictive states, in particular Russia, Syria, and even, in the case of Jobbik, Iran. Of the 14 far‐right parties that sent representatives to the European Parliament in 2014, “at least eight of them are pro‐Russian,” said an August 2014 Human Rights First report bluntly titled We’re Not Nazis, But  . . .  In the report it was also noted, “Some analysts assert that Kremlin cultivation of far‐right parties is part of Putin’s strategy to weaken the E.U. from the inside and to blunt anti‐Russian policies in the E.U.”



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According to most EU observers, right‐wing parties are expected to provide their authoritarian allies with a political echo chamber in the heart of the European Parliament. They will relay their illiberal positions on Internet governance or surveillance. They will also strive to delegitimize EU foreign policies aimed at supporting civil society in authoritarian states, in particular human rights nongovernmental organizations and independent journalism, under the pretext of respecting national sovereignty. In 2009 the BBC raised a storm when it invited British National Party leader Nick Griffin to its flagship program, “Question Time.” “Should democracy, should the media, give the floor to those who reject democracy and the media?” asked French sociologist Erwan Lecoeur in a 2013 interview. “Should we denounce Golden Dawn and demand that they be banned?” wondered Greek journalist Xenia Kounalaki. The issue of whether to give the floor to the far right profoundly divides the profession. In some countries journalists have tried to set up quarantines, refusing to consider the far right as just another political party despite its presence in national legislatures and the European Parliament. In the 1980s Anne Sinclair, then the anchor of “Sept sur Sept,” one of the more popular French political TV shows, refused to interview National Front founder Jean‐Marie Le Pen. In 1993 the Belgian journalists’ association recommended a “critical approach of the far right and racism.” Others have shied away from covering too extensively hot‐button issues, such as alleged disproportionate rates of criminality and welfare cheating by migrants, which are seen as playing into the hands of the extreme right. This electoral rise of the far right has put journalism on the frontlines of controversy. While the right‐wing populists continue to slam the establishment media, anti‐racist and leftist groups often accuse the press, in particular the tabloids, of echoing the far right’s slogans. They have also slammed commercial TV channels for inviting right‐wing leaders too generously to their talk shows. In Greece, masked militants pelted with yogurt and eggs a journalist who had interviewed the Golden Dawn spokesman. “Journalists have to cover the far right and all the relevant issues,” said Ricardo Gutiérrez, general secretary of the European Federation

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of Journalists. “It is the journalist’s duty to report.” And quarantine has proved ineffective. According to Sinclair, now editor‐in‐chief of the French edition of the Huffington Post, “ostracizing the National Front does not work.”  When radical populist parties reach a certain threshold of popular vote, some media outlets are inclined to adopt policies of accommodation under the mantra of journalistic impartiality and fairness. Others drop adversarial journalism to avoid upsetting an electorate that is part of their audience. “Marine Le Pen has so successfully laundered the image and the core rhetoric of the National Front that the mainstream media have adjusted as well,” wrote Ockrent. “No more soul‐searching about the diabolical dimension of the far‐right, or the moral implications of interviewing its representatives. Marine Le Pen sells. Radio and TV want her. Magazines put her winning smile on the cover, making the story of the National Front less political and more human interest.” For journalists, the political stakes are high. “The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis of journalism,” Walter Lippmann famously wrote in his seminal 1920 essay “Liberty and the News.” Nearly a century later, the equation between journalism and liberal democracy is pivotal. At such a decisive moment, when archconservative movements are skillfully using liberal institutions and principles to emerge from the silos where they once were safely contained, journalists are being called upon to define themselves and their profession and, in many cases, to take a stand. As such, the rise of the far right directly challenges the soul of European journalism.

Jean‐Paul Marthoz is CPJ’s Europe correspondent, a columnist with Le Soir (Brussels) and professor of international journalism at the Université de Louvain (UCL, Belgium).

19.  Indian Businesses Exert Financial Muscle to Control Press By Sumit Galhotra

A man reads a newspaper in front of closed shops along the roadside in Delhi, India, on October 10, 2014. Source: Reuters/Ahmad Masood

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n the late summer of 2014, Indian freelance journalist Keya Acharya found herself embroiled in her own version of the War of the Roses. That August, Acharya was forced to respond to a nine‐ page legal notice demanding that she pay a staggering 1 billion rupees ($16.3 million) to a company whose owner was upset about her article on India’s lucrative rose industry. Acharya, an environmental journalist, was served the notice by Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, founder and managing director of Karuturi Global Ltd., a Bangalore‐based, publicly held exporter of cereals, vegetables, and flowers. The notice accused her of defamation and demanded compensation for an article she published with the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency that explored Karuturi’s operations in East Africa and its alleged impact on the Indian rose industry. Acharya had shed light on the legal, financial, tax, labor, and land problems of the company in Kenya and Ethiopia. After the notice was served, IPS posted a disclaimer in the spot where Acharya’s Web article had previously been: “We are suspending the contents of this article so as to ensure their veracity and that of the sources on which it draws and, therefore, request our subscribers not to republish or use it in any way.” Ramesh Jaura, director general and editorial coordinator for Rome‐based IPS, told CPJ that the news agency was also served a legal notice by Karuturi and added, “We suspended Keya’s piece on the advice of our lawyer, who might have to defend us if the defamation notice takes the form of a defamation case in an Italian court of law.” Acharya had been reporting on environmental issues on a freelance basis for about seven years with IPS. Acharya’s legal troubles—and her employer’s response—provide a window into a new challenge facing journalists in otherwise stable democracies where big businesses are exerting increasing influence on publishers, often using antiquated defamation laws, to silence criticism of their operations and dictate what is reported in the media. Beyond the familiar and emerging threats that journalists face around the world, including cyberattacks, kidnapping, and murder at the hands of terrorist groups, the efforts of such businesses to control the flow of information pose an insidious new menace in India and elsewhere.



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Businesses are attempting to exert greater control of media coverage in three ways: using their financial power to silence journalists through lawsuits that chill critical reporting, influencing publishing decisions through advertising revenue, and, in some cases, taking ownership of news outlets to reduce or eliminate editorial independence at the source. The public relations wings of big companies have always attempted to control media access and guide the resulting message. That is part of their job. In an era of understaffed newsrooms, they have become more crucial sources to reporters who can make quick use of reports organized internally by the companies. PR staffs also arrange interviews with executives and special visits and trips—known in common parlance as press junkets—and provide hospitality and gifts. Such relationships and perks, which are frowned upon in many countries, are less antithetical to the Indian media, where a culture of responsible journalism and ethics has yet to take root, and carry their own potential for abuse. But, as Geeta Seshu, consulting editor for The Hoot, a South Asian media watchdog, observed, when “problem issues crop up, this machinery works towards either minimizing the damage or altering the narrative substantially.” One way to do that is for businesses to use their capital, power, and influence to silence journalists through the courts. In 2014 alone, at least five journalists have had to defend themselves and their critical reporting in courtrooms across India, often over dubious company claims that are potentially devastating financially for journalists and their employers. Legal actions such as the notice Acharya received fall under what are known as strategic lawsuits against public participation—more familiarly known as SLAPPs—which Acharya described as a tactic intended to censor, intimidate, or silence critical voices by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their ­criticism. Such tactics are increasingly being used by large corporations to threaten the media into silence in India, Acharya told CPJ. “My ­particular case is not just to intimidate me but [also] to silence all further reports on [Karuturi] and his company’s operations in Africa,” she said. Karuturi Global Ltd. did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment. As in Acharya’s case, the damages sought by companies in such defamation suits are often exorbitant and disproportionate to the harm allegedly caused.

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Gautam Bhatia, a lawyer at the Delhi High Court who specializes in free speech issues, argues that India’s defamation laws need to be revised to prevent them from being misused as a tool for ­intimidation. In India, both civil and criminal defamation lawsuits may be filed against a journalist once a legal notice has been issued, and civil and criminal proceedings may proceed simultaneously, according to Freedom to Publish, a legal guide published by the Manas Saikia Foundation. Bhatia said that the detrimental impact of those laws on reporting is difficult to measure. “Proving the chilling effect is like trying to prove a negative, but the comparatively small amount of critique that the Indian public sphere has of big corporations is no doubt in part due to the threat of defamation,” he said. Data on the use of defamation laws is hard to come by, “especially because the primary use of defamation is as an intimidatory tactic—a notice claiming heavy damages is sent to the journalist, to scare him into a retraction or, at least, to cease writing in the future,” Bhatia said. Seshu agreed: “It is definitely much worse than before, and when journalists and business houses get mere notices they rarely fight them, preferring to take down the news or then going slow on follow‐ups or more news—even if they have documentary evidence. So they end up suppressing the news.” There has been a sharp uptick in the number of defamation suits and legal notices threatening defamation, according to a year‐end report published in December 2014 by The Hoot. The report documented 21 such instances in 2014, a significant jump from the seven cases documented by the media watchdog group in 2013 and the two cases recorded in 2012. Among journalists who have recently been threatened with legal proceedings are three authors of the book Gas Wars: Crony Capitalism and the Ambanis, released on April 15, 2014, which explores suspected irregularities in the pricing of natural gas in India. The month the book came out, Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) and Anil Ambani of Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group served defamation notices on the authors through their respective corporations. The Ambani brothers are among India’s wealthiest and most powerful business owners. Mukesh, who has been named India’s richest person by Forbes for eight years in a row, and his younger brother,



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Anil, are involved in an array of businesses, including energy and telecommunications. The notices demanded that the authors—Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Subir Ghosh, and Jyotirmoy Chaudhuri—offer an unconditional public apology, take down the website promoting the book, and immediately halt sales, publication, distribution, and circulation. The notice threatened “civil and/or criminal proceedings” if the demands were not met, the Times of India reported. Though the book’s authors issued legal replies to the notices, there has been no movement on the case, according to Ghosh, an independent journalist. The legal threat failed to deter the authors, who published and distributed the book themselves. “These [notices] are intended to psych out people,” Ghosh said. “We knew from the very beginning that neither of the Ambani brothers would take it lying down. But I know of others who have buckled under pressure of similar SLAPPs. Books have been pulled off [the shelves] or have had court orders nip them in the bud.” Reacting to the notice, lead author Thakurta said that he and his co‐authors had been “more than fair to RIL,” according to news reports. In a statement to journalists, he said that he viewed the legal notice as “an attempt to intimidate and harass” and described it as “an attempt to scuttle and suppress my fundamental right under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India, which guarantees Freedom of Speech and Expression.” Reliance Industries and Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group did not respond to CPJ’s requests for comment. In another case, the finance and real estate conglomerate Sahara India Pariwar, headed by Subrata Roy, one of India’s richest men, filed a 2 billion rupee ($33 million) defamation suit in December 2013 against Tamal Bandyopadhyay, then deputy managing editor of Mint, an independent business daily, and his publisher, Jaico Publishing House, for Sahara: The Untold Story, which details the story of the Sahara India Pariwar conglomerate and its recent legal battles with the Securities and Exchange Board of India, or SEBI. Later that month, the Calcutta High Court ordered a stay on the book before its release, according to news reports. The parties reached an out‐of‐court settlement in April 2014 that resulted in the book’s

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carrying a disclaimer by the Sahara group stating that it includes defamatory content and that the company is not happy with it, according to Bandyopadhyay and news reports. The stay on publishing was lifted and the defamation case withdrawn, he told CPJ. “The fight was tough. Being an individual, it was not easy to fight a business conglomerate like Sahara,” Bandyopadhyay said. “It took [a] toll on my health—I lost weight and got gray hair. There was a lot of stress, and I could fight because my family and [Mint] stood by me. Besides, the law firm worked pro bono, and, above all, the media supported me to the hilt.” But, he warned: “There is [no] denying the fact that such defamation suits will act as a deterrent to fair and honest reporting.” Mint has come under legal pressure from the business groups before. Reliance Power Ltd., a part of the Reliance Group, sued HT Media Ltd., publisher of Mint, in the Bombay High Court over a May 12, 2010, front‐page story in Mint that the company disputed. HT Media is still contesting that case. Sahara has filed a defamation case in a Patna court against Mint’s editor and some reporters over the newspaper’s coverage of the company’s dispute with SEBI. Mint is contesting that case, which is ongoing. Sahara did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment. Raju Narisetti, founding editor of Mint, who left the paper in 2009 and now serves as senior vice president of strategy at News Corporation, explained that Reliance also brought a several‐billion‐rupee lawsuit against him in 2008 for running a New York Times story at a time when there was a syndication deal in place between the Times and Mint. The lawsuit remains unresolved, Narisetti told CPJ. The glacial pace of the Indian court system means that many other lawsuits are in limbo, which makes it difficult to determine their ­validity. In some cases, journalists or publications reach settlements with plaintiffs, which could indicate that the lawsuit was justified or that the defendant opted for the least costly solution. As evidence of the slowness with which these cases tend to be resolved, in June 2014, Vir Sanghvi (then editor), Arun Roy Choudhary (then resident editor), Sudhi Ranjan Sen (author and journalist), and Rakesh Sharma (then printer and publisher) of the Hindustan Times were sentenced to one month each in prison for writing,



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printing, and publishing an article titled “Mumbai NCB Chief under CBI scanner,” which appeared in the December 4, 2001, print edition of the Hindustan Times, according to news reports. The case was brought against the four in 2004 by Ajay Ubale, then chief of the Narcotics Control Bureau in Mumbai, who alleged that the article incorrectly accused him of extortion. The sentence was stayed and the case was under appeal in late 2014, according to reports. Another form of pressure exerted by big business interests on the Indian media is advertising revenue. Almost all private outlets in India get most of their revenue through advertising, because they charge consumers little or nothing for news content, Narisetti said. “Advertisers know the health of the media is dependent on them. They’re not hesitant to use their clout to their advantage,” he said. A 2014 report by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN‐IFRA) detailed the official use of financial leverage and regulatory powers to influence reporting and the very viability of media outlets in various countries. The report found that these tactics fall under “soft censorship.” “Soft censorship is less noticed than direct attacks on press freedom like assaults on journalists but is even more widespread,” said Larry Kilman, secretary general of WAN‐IFRA. Although businesses are also involved in such practices, the findings of the report were focused on the state. “The promise of more advertising or the threat to withdraw advertising provides the other filter for news about businesses,” Seshu of The Hoot said. Revenue is the lifeblood of any media house, and questionable economic practices—such as publishing paid “news” disguised as the real thing and accepting bribes or committing extortion for favorable ­coverage—have expanded beyond smaller or regional outlets, according to news analyses. That, in turn, has created a crisis of confidence in the media for many Indians. In addition, newsrooms have to contend with the possibility of being denied crucial access. “It’s not uncommon to get threatening calls saying, ‘We won’t give you access,’  ” Narisetti said. There is little recourse for journalists if companies decide that they don’t want to speak to them because of past unfavorable ­coverage. In many countries journalists can rely on public documents about

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corporations to supplement their reporting, but in India there are few alternative avenues of information, Narisetti noted. “The media ownership, the lack of self‐governance by the media, and current media business models that put you at the mercy of advertisers is a fatal combination that makes it a challenge to do quality independent journalism,” he said. The third threat stems from nonmedia businesses’ assuming direct ownership of news outlets and controlling the news about their business interests, Seshu said. In India, there are no restrictions on ownership of media outlets; any citizen, nongovernmental organization, or business can own one, Seshu noted. Traditionally, media houses have been owned by small independent publishers or by members of political parties or organizations, but, increasingly, big businesses are acquiring media holdings. That phenomenon is not unique to India, but it poses a particular challenge there, given the other weapons that big business can use against the media. “There are some structural challenges in the pursuit of independent, unbiased business journalism, which, while not unique, are peculiar in the Indian context,” Narisetti said. “One of the biggest challenges comes from ownership structures of media in India. With one or two exceptions, media outlets are usually part of a major business conglomerate that has significant business interests.” In May, Reliance Industries Ltd., which is India’s largest company, made headlines when it announced its acquisition of one of the country’s largest media companies, Network 18 Media and Investments Ltd., which owns television news channels CNBC‐TV18 and CNN‐IBN and news websites including Firstpost.com and Moneycontrol.com, and publishes magazines such as Forbes India, according to reports. In late May 2014, immediately after the “hostile” takeover, as Mint referred to it, the entire top management at Network 18, including Raghav Bahl, its founder, and B. Sai Kumar, its chief executive officer, quit the company, according to reports. A few week later, the editor‐in‐chief of the IBN Network, Rajdeep Sardesai, and his wife, Sagarika Ghose, host of Face the Nation on CNN‐IBN and deputy editor of the English‐language news channel, both resigned from their positions, according to news reports. In a farewell letter to staff that was published in several news outlets, Sardesai wrote, “After nine wonderful years at IBN 18, it’s time



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to say goodbye. I must confess it’s not easy to leave a baby that one has helped create/build/grow and to leave such great colleagues. But I guess certain things in life are written in the stars. Editorial independence and integrity have been articles of faith in 26 years in journalism and maybe I am too old now to change!  . . .  I hope the new management will always put journalism first and I wish them well.” Sardesai did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment. In a November interview with News Laundry, an independent website, he said that although big businesses across the world own media, citing General Electric’s stake in NBC in the United States, it was necessary “to set clear and transparent rules and create some kind of a wall between the corporate and the newsroom,” prompting host Madhu Trehan to interject: “But that’s not happened at TV 18, clearly,” to which Sardesai offered no further comment. In late July, Nikhil Wagle, editor of the Marathi‐language news channel IBN‐Lokmat, which is part of the same group, also resigned, complaining to Reuters of persistent editorial interference by the new owners. “Every day you can find some example of interference by Reliance—direct interference in news,” Wagle told Reuters. “They don’t send any mail. They give oral instructions. They give hints.” Other staffers have complained about coverage during India’s national elections, particularly around the candidacy of Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), with whom Reliance Industries has had a contentious relationship, according to news reports. Kejriwal, who served a short stint as Delhi’s chief minister this past year, rode into power on anti‐corruption rhetoric and made public allegations against RIL and Mukesh Ambani, according to numerous news reports. In July, Quartz India reported that after RIL’s takeover, coverage of Kejriwal and his party had significantly diminished and said that some staffers felt a clear message had been handed by higher‐ups that the AAP should be ignored in its daily coverage. The owner of the news organization also served a legal notice against Sardesai after he invited Kejriwal for an interview on his show, according to News Laundry. The channel saw Kejriwal’s interview as defamatory. It is noteworthy that a news organization handed its own journalist a legal notice in connection with sensitive coverage.

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In an e‐mail to Reuters, Reliance said that it did not interfere in editorial decisions. “There has never been contact between Reliance and journalists of Network 18,” a spokesman wrote. Reliance did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment. “If India’s biggest corporate conglomerate is also India’s biggest media company, what does it do to diversity of opinion, plurality of opinion, what does it do to unfavorable news coverage?” Gas Wars coauthor Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, who also served as former member of the Press Council of India, told Forbes. “What happens when big business interests get into the media business? They influence what comes out into the public, what is heard and read. . . . [Suddenly]  you have your large business groups, conglomerates determining what people read, hear, watch. It does raise concerns and questions about what happens to the voices of not just those who are contrary to RIL, but the marginalized.” “On the face of it, it is a legal transaction,” Seshu said of such takeovers, “but it is still a completely cynical and cold‐blooded operation and clearly affected the editorial independence of the media house in question.” Asked whether the trend will have a significant effect on India’s independent media, Seshu said, “Yes, because it obviously impacts Network 18 and its freedom to report, so it definitely kills one potential voice.” Venezuela and Indonesia are among the other countries where corporate interests are exerting control over reporting through the purchase of media outlets. In 2014, many critical columnists at the Caracas‐based El Universal newspaper lost their jobs after the paper was sold to a mysterious business group, according to CPJ research. In Indonesia, ownership of news outlets remains concentrated among a handful of media moguls, mostly in Jakarta, which limits reporting on differing viewpoints in a country that is home to hundreds of languages and ethnicities and several major religions, CPJ found on a December 2014 joint mission to the country. Corporate pressure is also coming to bear in the United States. In 2013, Sheldon Adelson, chair and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corp., sued Wall Street Journal reporter Kate O’Keeffe in a Hong Kong court for libel in connection with a report in which she characterized the



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billionaire casino magnate as “a scrappy, foul‐mouthed billionaire from working‐class Dorchester, Mass.,” news reports said. In keeping O’Keeffe on the beat, the Journal signaled that it would not allow the subject of an article to dictate coverage, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. The case was still pending at the end of 2014. Yet the trend appears most pronounced in India, where the common refrain is that the country’s businesses grow at night when the government sleeps, suggesting that the nation advances in the private sphere despite the failings of the state. India’s defining feature since the country attained independence almost seven decades ago is that it is the world’s largest democracy. Critics say that any effort to stifle the climate for free and critical journalism presents a potential threat not only to India’s national legacy but also to its continued growth.

Sumit Galhotra was CPJ’s inaugural Paul Steiger fellow and is now an Asia program research associate. He has worked for CNN International, Amnesty International USA, and Human Rights Watch, reporting from India, Indonesia, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the United Kingdom.

20. The Death of Glasnost: How Russia’s Attempt at Openness Failed By Ann Cooper

Russian opposition leader and anti‐corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, right, talks with his brother and codefendant Oleg inside a defendants’ cage during a court hearing in Moscow on December 30, 2014. Source: Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin

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efore Maidan, before Tahrir Square, before the “color revolutions” that overthrew entrenched autocrats, there was the Soviet revolution of the late 1980s. Perhaps it should be called the Stealth Revolution. This revolution unfolded over years, not weeks or months, and not through angry demonstrations but in newspapers and on TV, where journalists uncovered mountains of information long kept secret by the Soviet Communist Party. The catalyst for the revolution was the party leader himself, Mikhail Gorbachev. He was no human rights activist; his calls for freer speech never invoked the grand promises of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For Gorbachev, glasnost—as he called his policy of greater ­openness—was realpolitik. He had inherited a system encumbered by corruption and in danger of economic collapse. The country needed changes, badly. But to build support and pressure for those changes, Gorbachev would have to let people see some of the problems that his Communist Party had so zealously hidden from public view. And so, in the mid‐1980s, glasnost was begun as a bold experiment to allow more freedom while trying to maintain party control over what could be made public and what would still be decreed secret. It didn’t work as Gorbachev planned. The party soon lost control, thanks in part to courageous journalists who pushed the boundaries of freedom well beyond the lines Gorbachev tried to maintain. By 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolved by Gorbachev, media in Russia were as lively—and seemingly as unfettered—as those in the freest Western societies. They had helped foil a coup attempt that year, earning the respect and gratitude of millions. The stage seemed set for a new era—perhaps even for the “bright future” that Soviet communism endlessly promised yet never delivered. But almost a quarter‐century on, only remnants are left of that golden media era, and the few outlets still publishing bold, independent work are under constant threat. Vladimir Putin, now in his 15th year as Russian leader, has systematically dismantled independent media and rolled up press freedoms within his own country. How is it possible that the powerful journalism born in the glasnost era has become endangered? The answer lies in the legacy of



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Soviet journalism and in the actions of Russian journalists ­themselves. And it lies in the post‐Soviet global shifts that have created a new form of autocrat, dubbed by CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon “the democratators,” who embrace the trappings of democracy “while working surreptitiously to subvert it.” ■  ■  ■

In 1986, the year after Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, an explosion rocked the Chernobyl power station in the Soviet republic of Ukraine. Today, it is impossible to imagine that such a catastrophe could be covered up, but that is exactly what the party attempted to do. For three days, no word of the Chernobyl accident appeared in Soviet media, which was in the party’s iron grip. Soviet journalists were Communist Party members, editors were reliable party stalwarts, and an entire censorship bureaucracy called Glavlit backed up the system of control. Even after Europe began detecting signs of radiation wafting over the continent, the party’s instructions on how to report Chernobyl were strict. Soviet media could tell their audiences only what had been issued by the official Tass news agency: “An accident has occurred at Chernobyl nuclear‐power station. One of the atomic reactors has been damaged,” and steps were being taken “to eliminate the consequences.” It was the classic obfuscating language in which Soviet media had addressed the Soviet people for decades. But reading between the lines in Moscow, Vladimir Gubarev, science editor at Pravda, could tell that whatever had happened in Chernobyl was a major catastrophe. He told one of the newspaper’s correspondents in Kiev to get to the scene, but the reporter was stopped by police and KGB. Gubarev himself took a train to Ukraine, where he encountered utter panic. In the absence of information and any kind of government action, rumors abounded. “People were storming the trains leaving Kiev,” he told the BBC a few years later in an interview for its remarkable series on the Gorbachev years, “The Second Russian Revolution.” Gubarev returned to Moscow and shared his findings with editors but also requested a private meeting with Gorbachev and his closest

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ally in the Politburo, Alexander Yakovlev. The two party leaders asked him to write a more detailed report for their eyes only. The scathing account he delivered, Gubarev later told the BBC, was “the best thing I’ve ever written.” “The main reason for the panic in Kiev is the lack of information,” Gubarev wrote. “Nothing about what had happened, not even on radiation in the city, not one Ukrainian leader has appeared on TV to explain.” Gubarev’s report was full of the kind of criticism and truth‐­telling that might once have landed him a spot in the gulag. His harshest assessments were not included in the article he published in Pravda, though they informed a highly critical play he published the next year, Sarcophagus. The report’s real impact was behind the scenes, where it helped influence the party to be more open about Chernobyl. The accident, though shrouded in secrecy at first, eventually marked the beginning of a broader easing of censorship and secrecy. One of the early signs of change was a new television program, “Spotlight of Perestroika,” which began airing after the staid nightly news program “Vremya.” Each episode of “Spotlight” focused on bureaucratic bungling or malfeasance: Who was responsible for tons of tomatoes being left to rot on a ship in Astrakhan? Why were there constant shortages of popular newspapers? These 10‐minute stories were reported by journalists who were part of the system that had obeyed, in lockstep, the Chernobyl directive earlier in Gorbachev’s term. In fact, their “Spotlight” stories were still carrying out the party’s wishes. But now what the party wanted looked a lot more like investigative journalism than cover‐up and propaganda. “The perception of the role of journalists is obviously changing through such programmes” as “Spotlight of Perestroika,” noted the authors of a 1989 book, Gorbachev and Gorbachevism. The mini‐investigations of “Spotlight” pointed the finger at individuals and specific offices but not at the Communist system. In that sense, they served Gorbachev’s goal of reforming the system without overturning it. But once the rules were eased, journalists began to explore well beyond mini‐documentaries about bad bureaucrats. Pushing this process were middle‐aged editors such as Yegor Yakovlev at Moscow News and Vitaly Korotich of Ogonyok.



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In their younger years, Yakovlev and Korotich had been deeply affected by Nikita Khrushchev’s 1960s “thaw.” When Khrushchev was ousted and repression returned, they went along with party rules, rising through the journalistic ranks until, under Gorbachev, they were appointed to positions that gave them real opportunities to test glasnost. Yakovlev and Korotich created two of the liveliest glasnost‐era publications by exploring a host of once‐forbidden topics. Ogonyok’s 1987 series on Afghanistan revealed for the first time the deprivation and death faced by young Soviet soldiers sent to fight there. Moscow News dared to publish a letter from Soviet émigrés, calling on Gorbachev to withdraw from Afghanistan. Unvarnished truths and criticisms of official policies were brand‐new features in Soviet journalism, and circulation figures for Moscow News and Ogonyok soared. So did circulation at other publications that began to explore a broad range of social problems. Street gangs and prostitutes were profiled, and issues such as homelessness, pollution, and AIDS were written about honestly for the first time. It was possible, in the late‐1980s Soviet media, to read about life as it was actually lived. There were far fewer airbrushed party accounts, in which crime barely existed and economic plans routinely exceeded expectations and were often completed well ahead of schedule. Some who warmly embraced glasnost reporting had worked obediently in the old system, but many were young people who had not known the censor’s constraints. Ogonyok had some of the best new reporters, and, in a 1987 interview with The New York Times, Korotich explained his mandate to them: “I told the staff: ‘I don’t want you bringing in articles on anything you don’t talk about at home. If a subject does not interest you, it does not interest me.’  ” A combination of veteran journalists and newcomers were also breathing life into state‐controlled broadcasting, where some of the more innovative programming came on late‐night TV shows such as “Vzglyad” and “Before and After Midnight.” They mixed and matched genres—talk, entertainment, hard‐hitting storytelling—that riveted audiences and caused frequent journalistic sensations. One of the biggest outcries followed a 1989 “Vzglyad” appearance by a liberal theater director who suggested that Lenin’s embalmed body should be removed from Red Square and buried. Days later, the

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program was the focus of a Central Committee meeting during which many party leaders argued that “Vzglyad”—and perhaps Gorbachev, too—had gone too far with glasnost. In fact, the glasnost years were beset by push‐and‐pull, with journalists pushing into new, once‐forbidden topics and party leaders trying, sometimes successfully, to pull them back. The most contentious topics were often those that reexamined dark moments in Soviet history. But the movement for greater freedom, for more spotlights on more dark secrets, continued to advance. By August 1991, when hardline conservatives put Gorbachev under house arrest, banned most national newspapers, and surrounded the state broadcasting house with tanks, many journalists vowed that they would not get away with it. Some worked together to publish underground papers in Moscow. TV journalists conspired to sneak one story onto the air showing Boris Yeltsin and his supporters defying the hardliners. These efforts helped persuade the coup leaders to stand down; within three days the putsch had ended and Gorbachev was back in power—until the end of 1991, when he declared that the Soviet Union was over and stepped down. Glasnost had opened up the system, allowed it to be deeply examined, and produced an information revolution that “swept across Soviet existence, touching every nook of daily life, battering hoary myths and lies, and ultimately eroding the foundations of Soviet power,” wrote journalist Scott Shane in his 1994 book Dismantling Utopia. Having helped to thwart a coup and topple an empire, what was next for journalists? ■  ■  ■

Russian media entered the post‐Soviet era staffed with a cadre of energetic young journalists who had helped build huge audiences for their work. More young people were eager to join the profession. Whistleblowers sought out the media, and investigative exposés of sensitive topics—corruption in the military, financial malfeasance by elected leaders—were vigorously pursued. Journalistically, Russian media had a lot going for them. What they did not have, though, was an economic model.



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Under the Soviet system, every media outlet belonged to the state or to a party institution. Newspapers cost a few kopecks—the equivalent of pocket change—and had no advertising; government and party subsidies kept papers in business. When Soviet‐era subsidies began to dry up, editors scrambled for survival. Reporters sometimes went months without pay. Some sought economic salvation in a practice that came to be known as zakazukha, taking money to write a story on demand. The story might be a promotion of a new business—or a smear of a political enemy. The buyer told the news organization what he or she wanted. Another economic model involved investors with new fortunes made in the Wild West privatization program of the early 1990s, when lucrative Soviet assets, such as state‐owned oil companies, were sold off. Two of these oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, built media empires in the 1990s that included Russia’s first independent TV channels, Berezovsky’s ORT (formerly state TV’s Channel One) and Gusinsky’s NTV. In a country of 11 time zones, national TV is Russia’s most important news medium—and now it had two channels that were not controlled by the state. NTV in particular built a reputation for hard‐ hitting journalism, with its Sunday night political analysis show Itogi and its graphic coverage of the 1994 war in Chechnya. Frontline images beamed back by NTV’s scrappy young war correspondents “shocked Russians, who had never seen war played out on their television screens before,” wrote Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in Kremlin Rising. Oligarch financing did not come without strings attached, though. Although journalists were left alone to report independently on most topics, Berezovsky and Gusinsky also used their TV stations to settle political scores. It was increasingly obvious to the public, watching a political attack or reading a zakazukha story, that Russian journalism was far from genuine independence. Then, in 1996, as Boris Yeltsin ran a tough race for reelection, professional ethics seemed to be abandoned altogether by some prominent media houses, particularly NTV. Yeltsin, a hero when the 1991 coup was thwarted, had turned into a disastrous leader for post‐Soviet Russia—so much so that significant numbers of voters were now nostalgic for their communist past. A

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victory by the Communist Party was unthinkable to many journalists; their response to that possibility was to ignore Yeltsin’s faults and cover him in glowing terms that contrasted sharply with their dark portrayal of his Communist rival. NTV went the furthest, sending one of its founders to work on Yeltsin’s campaign at the same time that he continued his duties at the TV channel. “The NTV crew rationalized its pro‐Yeltsin advocacy by concluding that the return of the communists would mean the end of free press,” wrote Baker and Glasser. Yeltsin was returned to office, but Russian journalism’s image was permanently tainted. Although there were still media outlets doing strong investigative journalism and accountability coverage of government, by the late 1990s much of the Russian public had grown disenchanted with the media—only a decade after their heroic role in glasnost. ■  ■  ■

Yeltsin abruptly resigned on New Year’s Eve 1999, anointing the little‐ known Vladimir Putin as his successor. In the scramble to learn about this mysterious new leader—a former KGB officer and aide to St. Petersburg’s mayor—three Russian journalists sat down with him for a series of interviews, published in early 2000 as a book‐length Q&A, First Person. In one exchange, the journalists raised the case of reporter Andrei Babitsky, whose coverage of the second Chechen War was highly critical of the Russian military. Babitsky, a Russian, wrote for the U.S.‐ funded Radio Liberty, and the military had arrested him in Chechnya just days after Putin took office. In the First Person interviews, Putin made it clear that he considered the reporter an enemy collaborator. He began a thought on this: “What really happens to people when they fight on the side of the enemy? . . .” One of his interviewers interrupted: “Journalists don’t fight.” Putin’s response: “What Babitsky did is much more dangerous than firing a machine gun.” Putin’s anger at critical media coverage is far from unique among world leaders. But while others may only fume, Putin shows



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little hesitation in taking bare‐knuckled action to silence critics. In the absence of strong public support and an independent justice system, media owners and their journalists in Russia have found that they have little protection once they are targeted. Under Putin, actions against the press often come in the guise of regulatory enforcement. An early example was the raid by masked, gun‐ toting “tax police” on Vladimir Gusinsky’s media empire in early 2000. In some cases, targets allege that they have been given hardball choices behind closed doors. After going into exile in 2000, Gusinsky and Berezovsky each alleged that the Putin administration had forced them to choose between jail and giving up their media holdings. Both surrendered their companies and fled the country, allowing eventual state takeover of the once‐independent NTV and ORT channels. In her book Putin’s Kleptocracy, Karen Dawisha suggests that Gusinsky and Berezovsky were complicated poster children for press freedom. “The idea that a free media was intrinsic to a democracy meant nothing to [Putin], who had seen television used by oligarchs in their own battles with each other and with the Kremlin,” she wrote. But the more Putin spoke about his views on media, the clearer it became, wrote Dawisha, that, “for Putin, taking a stand against a state policy was equivalent to spewing disinformation.” In the years since the takeovers of NTV and ORT, the space for free speech and independent media in Russia has continued to shrink. New laws—or regulatory inspections designed as harassment—have been used repeatedly to target outspoken media. Phone calls from the Kremlin can persuade a business to withdraw advertising from a news outlet deemed unfriendly to Putin’s policies. Self‐censorship is one of the few ways to protect against such repression. And sometimes the risks are more grave. The justice system under Putin has failed to pursue those who have murdered journalists in reprisal for their hard‐hitting investigations. Although there is no evidence that the government is linked to the murders, even prominent cases that have prompted global protests, such as the 2004 murder of Russian‐American Paul Klebnikov and the apparent contract killing of Novaya Gazeta’s Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, remain unsolved. Russia’s 2014 involvement in post‐revolution Ukraine has opened a new era of media repression. The largest national TV channels, all

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owned by the state or Kremlin sympathizers, cover the story as a necessary, patriotic effort to protect Russians in eastern Ukraine from alleged persecution by the new government in Kiev. Media outlets that deviate from that line, or report critically on Russian military actions in Ukraine, are labeled traitors or fifth columnists. Putin, for his part, has countered criticism of Russian media bias by saying that it is Western coverage that is biased. In light of the relentless actions of Putin’s government over the past 15 years, perhaps the most surprising thing to say about independent media in Russia is that it still exists. Analysts have long puzzled, for example, over the survival of the Moscow‐based radio station Ekho Moskvy, which has operated continuously since 1990. Some argue that Putin allows Ekho, Novaya Gazeta, and a handful of other critical outlets to stay in business so he can say that Russia has independent media. CPJ’s Joel Simon suggests another explanation. Democratators like Putin, Simon wrote in The New Censorship, “do not seek to exercise absolute control over the media because they recognize that to achieve this in the Internet age they would have to close their societies to the world.” Instead, Simon contends, the democratators have learned to “manage” the media through “national security prosecutions, punitive tax audits, manipulation of government advertising,” and other methods. Putin’s skills at media management—and manipulation—are indeed impressive. Another technique he developed for muting criticism was to pour tens of millions of state rubles into RT and Sputnik— English‐language TV and digital mouthpieces for the Kremlin that laud Russia while vigorously attacking the West, particularly the United States. Even the Internet, where critical bloggers have been less subject to repression than traditional journalists have, looks increasingly vulnerable in the wake of new Kremlin‐supported laws. Protests against these moves are relatively small and nearly always unsuccessful, perhaps because the Kremlin has seemingly convinced much of the Russian public that the West seeks nothing short of Russia’s economic and political collapse. That message was hammered home throughout 2014 in media coverage blaming Western sanctions (in retaliation for Ukraine) and a Western‐led information war for most of the country’s problems.



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Putin’s continued high ratings in public opinion polls indicate that the message has been accepted—and not just at home. His democratator techniques have been adopted in Turkey, Hungary, and elsewhere by leaders who seek new, more nuanced tools for stifling their critics. The danger, of course, is that the story of the rise and fall of the independent Russian media will be viewed by such leaders not as a cautionary tale but instead as a successful model for containing and manipulating the flow of information.

Ann Cooper is a professor at Columbia Journalism School; from 1998 to 2006 she was executive director of CPJ, and before that she was a foreign correspondent for NPR, including serving as Moscow bureau chief from 1987 to 1991.

21.  Media Wars Create Information Vacuum in Ukraine By Muzaffar Suleymanov

A masked pro‐Russian protester poses for a photo inside a regional government building overtaken by his group in Donetsk, Ukraine, on April 25, 2014. Source: Reuters/Marko Djurica

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ore than a year after the December 2013 mass attack against journalists at Kiev’s Maidan Square, which coincided with the Ukrainian police’s violent dispersal of protesters rallying against the policies of then‐President Viktor Yanukovych, the press in the beleaguered nation continue the battle for survival. The biggest problem remains impunity in attacks against journalists. At least 51 journalists who covered the early days of the protest movement in Ukraine were attacked by police and government‐ hired protesters during clashes in Kiev and other cities. The assault at Maidan Square took place as the Ukrainian capital was to host a high‐ level event: the Ministerial Council of the Organization for Security and Co‐operation in Europe, an annual meeting of foreign ministers and heads of state representing 56 nations who were members of the Vienna‐based human rights and democracy watchdog group. The fact that the Ukrainian government did not bring the perpetrators to justice brought more violence against the press in 2014, research by CPJ and the Kiev‐based Institute of Mass Information show. Throughout the year, scores of local and international journalists who covered the political crisis faced physical violence and obstruction to their work. Among the perpetrators were Russian authorities, pro‐ Russia separatists, and newly elected Ukrainian officials who took the helm during Ukraine’s tumultuous year. At least seven journalists and media workers were killed with impunity in 2014 while covering the crisis; many more were abducted or detained by the separatists or Ukrainian military. Although the police investigated one murder, of journalist Vyacheslav Veremiy, and detained several suspects, judges released a key suspect into house arrest, from where he disappeared; a trial in the case was pending at the end of 2014. Independent Ukrainian broadcasters and news outlets were taken off air and blocked by rebels in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and newsrooms were subject to rebel raids and ultimatums demanding changes to their editorial policies. The deteriorating media climate prompted CPJ to send me on a fact‐finding mission to Ukraine in July 2014. During a brief interview in Kiev, Aleksei Matsuka, chief editor of the regional news website Novosti Donbassa (News of Donbass), told me that there were no independent Ukrainian journalists left in Donetsk, the contested city and



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region in the eastern part of the country. “They have fled the region since pro‐Russia separatists started targeting and kidnapping reporters,” he said. Separatists—particularly those who were local residents—knew many regional reporters and threatened and targeted them in retaliation for their coverage of the conflict with Ukrainian forces, Matsuka said, adding that it was something he learned firsthand. One April night, he said, a security camera at his apartment building in Donetsk  recorded an unidentified man approaching his car, pouring liquid on it, and torching it. Before that attack—which prompted Matsuka to flee Donetsk for Kiev—the journalist said, he received numerous  death threats and experienced one attempt on his life  in connection with his reporting. As is usually the case with press freedom violations, the ultimate victim in Ukraine has been the public. CPJ research in Ukraine found that the ongoing attacks on journalists have resulted in a lack of reliable information, leaving people on the ground—especially in the conflict areas and Crimea—in the dark about developments, even those nearby. Those outside the conflict area received a distorted picture of the human toll and the critical needs of the affected population. In eastern Ukraine, Matsuka told me, there were very few Ukrainian television or radio broadcasts, most of them having been shut down and replaced by Russian broadcasters after separatists wrested control of the regional broadcasting center in April 2014. Russian TV has been accused on numerous occasions of spreading lies about Ukraine, carrying Kremlin propaganda, and  comparing  Ukraine’s government officials to Nazis. None of this had changed by year’s end. “They [the separatists] have thoroughly wiped clean the media—it was one of the first steps in the ongoing information war,” Matsuka said. Other journalists with whom I spoke in Kiev said much the same thing. “Separatists see Ukrainian reporters as enemy number one,” another local journalist told me. This journalist had been briefly detained by separatists while reporting in eastern Ukraine in early summer and, for security reasons, did not wish to be identified. He is one of more than a dozen journalists to be held by the separatists. Shortly before my trip to Kiev, journalist Anastasiya Stanko and cameraman Ilya Bezkorovainy,

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both with the Kiev‐based online broadcaster Hromadske TV, were detained for two days in the eastern Lugansk region. Speaking about the incident involving Stanko and Bezkororvainy, Mustafa Nayem, their now‐former colleague at Hromadske TV who quit journalism to join the Ukrainian Parliament, told me in Kiev, “The separatists knew precisely who they were holding.” Although attacks and detentions limited reporting by Ukrainian media, international correspondents generally had access to both sides of the conflict, provided they obtained the required accreditation—routinely denied to Ukrainian journalists—from the self‐ styled information ministries of the self‐declared people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, freelancers working for international outlets told CPJ. This unequal treatment of reporters became most visible after the crash of Malaysian Airlines MH17, when few Ukrainian journalists were able to visit the site where the plane was shot down by a suspected missile and, in most cases, those who did concealed their affiliation, local journalists told CPJ. On July 23, 2014, separatists in Donetsk banned journalists from the conflict area, including the MH17 crash site, and briefly held a CNN fixer, though international broadcasters were still reporting from Donetsk in the following days. International journalists who spoke with me said that American journalists were being watched closely. In April 2014, Simon Ostrovsky, a reporter with the New York‐based website VICE News, was detained by separatists for two days in the eastern city of Sloviansk. After his release, Ostrovsky told CPJ that during his detention at an improvised separatist checkpoint he saw a leaflet with his photograph on it. Ukrainian authorities have also detained journalists, CPJ research shows, and have erected such bureaucratic hurdles as requiring journalists to seek accreditation with security services before entering the conflict zone and to travel only with a military escort. Both local and foreign correspondents have publicly decried the demands. Though press freedom was being restricted by both sides, reporters and rights activists told CPJ that at least it was obvious which state official to contact in regard to detentions or demands issued by Ukrainian authorities. There was no such clarity when dealing with ­separatists. Another journalist who traveled to eastern Ukraine described conditions



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in the ranks of the separatists as having descended into anarchy, with armed men behaving unpredictably, according to their mood. Ukrainian authorities meanwhile received little praise for their response to abductions by the separatists. Both local and foreign journalists told CPJ that the government did not seem to have any strategy for dealing with such cases, and no agency took ­responsibility. According to various accounts, including  official statements, by mid‐2014 separatists held close to 400 hostages from among local residents, including several journalists. In December 2014, Valentin Nalivaychenko, head of Ukraine’s national security service, told local press that separatists held 684 hostages, including four journalists, but did not reveal the reporters’ names or affiliation. During my trip to Kiev, journalists said that there was little understanding of what was being done to free the hostages, though it was hoped that the situation would improve after Ukrainian authorities and the rebels negotiated a ceasefire agreement during their September meeting in Minsk, capital of neighboring Belarus. Exchange of hostages and prisoners of war was one of the points in the agreement. Separatists in the eastern Lugansk region initially held two journalists: Roman Cheremskoy, who was detained on August 15, 2014, and Sergey Sakadynskiy, detained on August 2, 2014. On December 27, 2014, regional and Ukrainian media reported that Cheremskoy had been released during a mass prisoner exchange that day. On December 29, Ukrainian media quoted Sakadynskiy’s wife, Mariya Gavak, saying that he was still in the Lugansk region but that separatists had changed his status from prisoner of war to “victim in an illegal detention case.” Gavak was quoted saying that the so‐called interior ministry established by Lugansk separatists was investigating her husband’s unsanctioned detention and imprisonment by one of their combat groups but that separatists had not told her when they might let him go. Then, on January 5, 2015, Ukrainian media reported that Sakadynskiy had been released in Lugansk. Sergei Lefter, a Ukrainian reporter with the Warsaw‐based Open Dialogue Foundation, spent 17 days in the  separatists’ custody  in Sloviansk. He told me that to his knowledge the Ukrainian government played little role in winning his release, that it appeared to have been made possible by activists. Neither did the authorities rush to take

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his statement after he was released. Security services eventually got in touch with Lefter, he said, but, to his surprise, asked him only about the fate of other detainees, not his own case. He also encountered Ukrainian bureaucracy when trying to restore his passport, which had been confiscated by the separatists. He said that the government’s corruption had survived the regime change: “Generals were removed from power, but the system they built is still there.” Threats and obstruction pushed some reporters to favor pragmatism over journalistic ethics and openly side with the authorities under the banner of war and add their own thoughts and patriotic sentiments to reporting of developments in the east. The Institute of Mass Information and the news website Telekritika, both of which have been monitoring Ukrainian media, highlighted the problem of ­partiality during our meetings. So did activists with StopFake, a website run by journalists who volunteer their time to  expose  falsehoods spread by Russian and Ukrainian media about developments in the country. Beyond discussing the professional ethics and standards of local reporters, the activists said that they lacked the reach and power to counter the well‐funded, far‐reaching propaganda machine of Russia, where independent media has been all but obliterated by the Kremlin. During my stay in Kiev, Russian state‐funded broadcaster Perviy Kanal (Channel One) aired a highly dubious story, still  available on its website, featuring what they called a “refugee from Sloviansk.” The woman allegedly told Russian journalists that after Ukrainian soldiers recaptured Sloviansk from separatists she saw the soldiers crucify a 3‐year‐old boy and kill his mother by tying her to a tank and dragging her through the city’s main square. The soldiers had forced Sloviansk residents to the square to witness the crime, the woman allegedly told Channel One. The Moscow‐based Novaya Gazeta, one of the few remaining independent newspapers in Russia, sent a correspondent to interview Sloviansk residents on camera, but the correspondent found no evidence or testimony to back up the woman’s supposed claims. Though the newspaper discounted the report, its circulation is 231,700 and its online reach 12,437,491 visits per month; by contrast, Channel One claims an audience of 250 million people worldwide. The plethora of Russian news outlets available in Ukraine and other countries, including the United States through Internet and cable



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networks, has ensured a wide reach for such stories since the protests in Kiev began in November 2013. After my visit, in November 2014, Channel One produced a report saying that Ukrainian authorities had promised to reward each soldier participating in the conflict with a piece of land and two slaves. A week later, the channel’s primetime show reported new “evidence” in the MH17 tragedy: a photograph, allegedly taken by a satellite, showing a Ukrainian jet fighter launching a rocket in the direction of the Malaysian Boeing 777. The anchorman claimed that a U.S.‐based airspace expert interested in probing the tragedy had obtained the image and sent it to the Russian Union of Engineers, who allegedly confirmed that it was not a fake. The report was quickly picked up by a score of Russian news outlets. Both reports were publicly questioned and in some cases ridiculed by Ukrainian media, Russian bloggers, and press freedom watchdogs, including the OSCE freedom of the media representative, to no avail. By the end of 2014, Ukrainian authorities had decided to create an information ministry to, among other things, counter Russian propaganda, but neither local reporters nor press freedom groups liked the idea: Protests were held nationwide by reporters against what they called an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.” Oksana Romanyuk, director of the Institute of Mass Information, told CPJ that the press was shocked that authorities had not publicly discussed the idea to create another public agency, which would pose an added burden to the already decrepit state budget, and had not sought advice on how to deal with propaganda. Romanyuk’s view— shared by many of her colleagues who joined the Stop Censorship campaign and signed a petition to be submitted to the government— was that authorities needed to focus on introducing reforms such as countering corruption, developing the media market, and creating a public broadcaster. As for countering propaganda, Romanyuk said, Ukraine already has institutions to deal with it, from national courts and security services to journalists who want to do their work without obstruction. Meanwhile, in Crimea, which was under the de facto control of Russian authorities, the situation for journalists was getting worse, Romanyuk said. As a result of raids and attacks on local journalists and broadcasters,  documented by CPJ, many reporters had fled the

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region, often leaving relatives and belongings behind. Staff members of Chernomorskaya Teleradiokompaniya (Black Sea TV), a popular independent broadcaster that aired programming throughout the Crimean conflict from its newsroom in the regional capital, Simferopol, were forced to pack and leave for Kiev after pro‐Russia authorities issued shutdown orders in early March 2014, one of the journalists who fled told CPJ in Kiev. Soon after our meeting with regional reporters in Kiev, another local journalist, Elizaveta Bogutskaya, was forced to leave the region overnight after masked and armed police agents stormed into her house early one September morning and took her in for an hours‐ long interrogation. She told CPJ that authorities said during the raid they had been tipped off that she was storing illegals guns, drugs, and extremist literature. However, she said, the interrogation was focused not on those allegations but on her reporting on the region’s annexation by Russia. Fearing for her safety, Bogutskaya—a contributor to the Crimean service of the U.S. government‐funded Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty—fled Crimea. Ukrainian TV channels in Crimea experienced a similar fate: the new authorities shut down their broadcasts and allocated the airwaves to Russian state TV. Seeing no prospects for doing business under a Russian government, many Ukrainian cable operators closed their local offices and stopped serving the region. The few left behind, including ATR, a broadcaster owned by Crimean Tatars, and a handful of newspapers have been necessarily cautious in their reporting, journalists told CPJ. Even self‐censorship did not spare those remaining outlets from repression. In mid‐September, regional anti‐extremism authorities—the same ones who had interrogated Bogutskaya—accused the TV ­channel of inciting extremism and demanded that the management submit documents, including its registration and licenses and staff names and schedules, according to Ukrainian and regional media. ATR denied the accusations and said in a statement that a witch hunt unleashed by pro‐ Russia authorities could effectively shut down the newsroom and leave Crimean Tatars without access to news in their native language, IMI reported.



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Another news outlet, Avdet—an official newspaper of the Tatars’ parliament—was forced to leave its newsroom after authorities evicted the lawmakers from the building that they shared with reporters. According to Romanyuk and others who spoke to CPJ, selective measures against regional journalists and news outlets were part of a human rights and press freedom crisis in Crimea. The draconian laws adopted by the Kremlin since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in May 2012 were slated to take effect in Crimea on January 1, 2015. (In late September, regional authorities announced that by the end of 2014 all regional news outlets would have to seek registration with Roskomnadzor, the Russian state media regulator.) Such laws, journalists told CPJ, would choke the remaining media and civil society groups. “There is a need to monitor violations of all types of civil rights, not only press freedom, in Crimea, and the international community must do so on the ground,” another journalist exiled from the region told CPJ.

Muzaffar Suleymanov, research associate for CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program, has a master’s degree in international peace studies from the UN University for Peace in San José, Costa Rica.

22.  Journalists Overcome Obstacles through Crowdfunding and Determination By Jessica Jerreat

The rubble of a school bombed by the Sudanese government in 2012. Crowdfunding was central to setting up a news agency to cover the conflict. Source: AP/Ryan Boyette

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uring South Africa’s Boer War, at the turn of the 20th ­century, a determined news organization relocated reporters, copy edi­ tors, and printing presses to the front line to ensure accurate reporting. In the Warsaw Ghetto, during World War II, a literal under­ ground press, established to counter Nazi propaganda, required the nightly movement of cumbersome printing equipment to evade capture. Throughout history, innovative journalists have devised ways to overcome logistical obstacles, censorship, and other impediments to reporting the news. Today, the adaptation is likely a backpack containing a laptop and satellite phone with access to the Web, where blogging and appeals for funds help ensure the dissemination of independent news. Such innovations are essential. Journalists have been imprisoned in China, Iran, and Eritrea, and bloggers in Vietnam, Cuba, and Russia have been placed under surveillance and, in some cases, jailed. Reporters and photographers covering civil wars from Syria to Sudan are systemati­ cally targeted by governments and terrorist groups. Journalists world­ wide are vulnerable to lawsuits, cyberattacks, politically motivated firings, withdrawal of advertising, kidnappings, and murder. Crowdfunding—an online appeal for donations and backers—is one way to ensure independent and investigative reporting in coun­ tries with repressive laws governing advertising and funding, or where violence has prompted conventional news organizations to retreat from the field. In China, where the Communist Party–run government sup­ presses and jails independent voices, crowdfunding has provided a cru­ cial way for journalists to work outside state‐controlled media. Chinese journalist Liu Jianfeng, with 14 years’ experience at three mainstream publications, made an appeal for financial backing on the social media site Weibo in July 2013. In return for 250,000 yuan (about $40,000), Liu promised to provide his subscribers with up to six investigative pieces per year. Realizing that he had a readership hun­ gry for details on underreported issues such as government land grabs, but with no employer willing to risk supporting his investigations, Liu decided that a solo project was the only way forward. “I didn’t want to work with my hands tied anymore,” Liu told CPJ guest blogger Yan Cong in February 2014. Although Liu fell short of his target sum, he managed to raise enough money to support himself while he reported. His base of donors



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also provided an immediate readership. The first report he produced, about a land dispute in Shandong province, garnered more than 1,000 subscribers in addition to the 2,472 hits it attracted on his website, Yan reported. For Liu, crowdfunding proved that an audience existed for inde­ pendent reporting in China, and his experience and reputation as a journalist gave credibility to his work. “Both sides in the story read the piece, and agreed it was executed with objectivity,” he told Yan. Nuba Reports, a Sudan‐based team of reporters and editors covering the conflict in that country, also used crowdfunding—to support the investigation of claims that the government was bombing and attack­ ing citizens. A conflict waged between the government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement–North in South Kordofan state has endangered tens of thousands of citizens living in the Nuba Mountain region, and movement has been restricted for journalists, aid agencies, and UN personnel. According to 2013 figures from conflict watchdog International Crisis Group, more than 700,000 people have been dis­ placed by the fighting as government forces bomb villages suspected of housing rebel fighters. With limited coverage of atrocities, civilians caught up in the fight­ ing began documenting what was happening on their own. Such ama­ teur coverage sparked the idea for Nuba Reports, which was founded by humanitarian worker Ryan Boyette and freelance photographer Trevor Snapp in 2012. Boyette and Snapp saw the documentary efforts of those who were most affected by the violence as evidence of the need for a credible news outlet. “Using cell phone cameras and whatever was available, they tried to show the world the war that was engulfing the region,” Snapp told CPJ. Snapp and Boyette turned to crowdfunding to pay for the pur­ chase of professional‐grade cameras and to develop a website. “We launched a crowdfunding initiative on Kickstarter and managed to raise $40,000,” Snapp said. “Because all of the staff were volunteering we were able to launch a website, conduct training, and get gear to our remote team of aspiring filmmakers. The reason we launched with Kickstarter is that it was the only option. We had no resources, and the war was getting worse.”

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Even established, mainstream media outlets struggle with the costs of maintaining expensive bureaus in remote or dangerous locations, but Nuba Reports was able with $40,000 “to prove that it was possible to get a sustained flow of news and information out of a war zone,” Snapp said. “Our website provided the only on‐the‐ground perspective of the conflict, and our videos offered a verifiable way to understand what was happening.” In addition to the dangers of frontline reporting, Snapp said the group has received death threats and its website has been hacked sev­ eral times, including after the publication of reports about alleged gov­ ernment bombings. (The Sudanese military has denied bombing in the Nuba Mountains.) “Doing this kind of work is dangerous, and the gov­ ernment has consistently shown their willingness to torture and detain journalists in Sudan. We live with this near‐constant threat,” Snapp said. CPJ has documented multiple cases of journalists being detained and attacked in Sudan. In one case, in 2012, critical freelancer Somaya Ibrahim Ismail Hundosa was abducted in Khartoum; she was whipped and had her head shaved by a group she believed to be National Intelligence and Security Services agents. She had been questioned by agents over her reporting two days before being kidnapped, local news reports said at the time. Although crowdfunding helped get Nuba Reports up and running, Snapp concedes that it may not provide a sustainable financial model. “This is dangerous work,” he said. “You can’t compromise things like security. You can’t just say, ‘Sorry, no funds for digital security this month.’ But people’s generosity was critical to making all this possible, and it showed that people in the U.S. cared about this faraway conflict, which was inspiring.” The success of the outlet’s initial foray into con­ flict reporting attracted funding from other organizations, which made it possible for Nuba to expand, pay salaries to its staff, and continue to report on the conflict. The outlet has four journalists in the Nuba Mountains who use teams of as many as four observers trained to col­ lect raw footage of breaking news. A small team of reporters also works in the Blue Nile region and collaborates with a network of journalists inside Sudan. Turning to social media for funding has also helped independent outlets grappling with increasingly repressive governments, including



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that of Hungary, which has imposed a series of restrictions on the press. After coming to power in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán pushed for the passage of a media law that raised concerns in the European Union about how regulators for the proposed Media Council would be selected by Hungary’s parliament. The law also drew criticism from Neelie Kroes, the then–EU commissioner for the digital agenda and a vice president of the European Commission. In a June 2012 interview with Budapest weekly Figyelo˝, she said that the law “only addresses 11 of 66 recommendations made by the Council of Europe without guar­ anteeing the independence of the Media Authority or clarifying all ambiguities.” Orbán’s government has also used the allocation of state advertising and a tax that increases with an outlet’s profitability to put pressure on independent news outlets. In June, the government of Hungary banned Norway Grants, a $17 million fund from the Norwegian government for civil society groups, to the detriment of investigative news outlet Átlátszó, a beneficiary that uses freedom of information requests to hold the government to account. Undeterred by the sudden cut in its financing, Átlátszó turned to its readers for help and managed to raise enough money to cover the shortfall. The nonprofit outlet started in 2011 in response to what its found­ ers saw as a lack of independent reporting in Hungary. Its reporters look in depth at issues that include election fraud, misuse of public funds, and claims of government control of the media. Editor‐in‐chief Tamás Bodoky told CPJ in October 2014 that the outlet’s frequent freedom of information act queries led the government to pass a law to stop “excessive requests” for information. “The government handles the media as a propaganda tool. . . . Comm­ ercial media companies become more and more cautious [and] journal­ ists are forced to avoid sensitive topics,” Bodoky told CPJ. “The result is a very limited freedom of the press in Hungary. There are many taboos, many important stories that remain untold, and numerous corruption cases go undisclosed, even if there are whistleblowers who provide evidence.” Since its founding, Átlátszó has moved from a free blog platform to a website staffed by four reporters, a full‐time and a part‐time editor, three lawyers, and numerous freelancers. The website receives 500,000

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unique visitors each month, Bodoky said. Átlátszó turned to its base of supporters in June 2014, when it switched to a crowdfunding appeal. In the first few months of using financial aid from supporters, the site attracted 1,500 subscribers, Bodoky told CPJ. Crowdfunding may not cover long‐term running costs, and its use for covering journalists’ expenses is still in an experimental phase, but there are indications that when governments cut access to information, some readers are eager to fill the void, even if that means financing independent reporting to access stories being left off the agendas of the mainstream press. A vacuum of independent reporting is helping drive strong blog­ ging communities in Vietnam and China. In both countries the Internet provides a platform for reporting and documentation of vital issues such as land grabs and anti‐China protests in Vietnam and minority rights and corruption in China, beyond what is issued by state‐run outlets. In Vietnam there is a push for legitimacy for blog­ gers and attempts to confront the government about the harassment they face. Although most write under pen names, many gave up their anonymity in 2013 when the Network of Vietnamese Bloggers cam­ paigned against press harassment. Through the network, 130 bloggers signed a petition calling for legal reform. Despite the risk of arrest, harassment, and surveillance, Vietnam’s bloggers are undeterred. Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, who writes under the name Me Nam (Mother Mushroom), told CPJ: “It was ugly what was happening in our society. My blog asked: Why must we agree with the government on everything? Why can’t we have different opinions?” Even when they have been imprisoned, bloggers have voiced sup­ port for a free press. Among the more prominent bloggers, Nguyen Van Hai, who wrote under the name Dieu Cay (Peasant’s Pipe), was impris­ oned from 2008 to 2014, during which he was at times held in solitary confinement, was limited to restricted visits from his family, and waged a hunger strike. Hai, who had blogged about disputes and concerns over Chinese intervention in Vietnam, was jailed on anti‐state charges. Despite his suffering, and being expelled from his country after authorities released him, Dieu Cay remains determined to push the cause for bloggers and access to independent reporting in Vietnam. In a speech at CPJ’s International Press Freedom Awards after his release



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in 2014, he asked: “Why were we oppressed with such harsh sentences while all we did was merely express our aspirations peacefully on the Internet?” He added, “Information technology has given us a new tool. We use blogs, Facebook  . . .  to exercise our right to freedom of the press and freedom of speech.” For journalists facing surveillance by governments or militant groups, and whose lives could be endangered if their identities or locations were revealed, advances in technology have offered some ­protection. Partly in response to revelations about the reach of National Security Agency surveillance programs in the United States, companies such as Apple and Facebook have developed ways to protect those using the Internet and mobile devices to communicate. Apple’s latest software operating system has automatic encryption, and at the end of 2014 Facebook announced a secure Tor connection that enables users to log in without giving away their username or location. The Tor Project has become a vital tool for journalists, providing them with a level of ano­ nymity when contacting sources, filing stories abroad, or gaining access to information and news that has been blocked by the firewalls of repressive regimes. By hiding the user’s location and browsing history, the free software enables independent journalism in places where the government has tight control over the Internet and media. Whereas some journalists need to hide their locations, GPS tech­ nology has also been a vital tool for Nuba Reports, which uses the positioning of its on‐the‐ground reporters to validate accounts of bombings and other atrocities. The reporters film interviews with wit­ nesses and evidence of bombing and use GPS locators when uploading the files to remotely based editors. “This is a way to prevent bias in reporting and also legitimizes out stories,” Snapp said. “Sudan has constantly denied bombing civilian areas; however, our database of thousands of bombs dropped with GPS coordinates is a powerful piece of reporting that says otherwise.” Snapp added that beyond creating short news films about the impact of the war on civilians, “We were able to verify found footage that showed a student who was detained and tortured. Our team hiked three days across dangerous territory to find him.” On another occa­ sion, Nuba journalists combined statements from residents of a town that had been razed with found footage of a “match brigade”—a group

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Snapp said had been ordered by the Sudan government to burn vil­ lages in the region. The outlet’s content has been used by international outlets including The Associated Press, Reuters, France 24, BBC, All Africa, and Voice of America, he said. “Nuba Reports is a bold experiment in how we cover conflicts when foreign reporting has almost disappeared and local people are the ones who can and will cover the news for us,” Snapp said. “Only one or two journalists have visited South Kordofan in the past year—so a war affecting hundreds of thousands of people, with massive running tank battles between larger armies and an intensive bombing campaign, would literally not be covered if we weren’t there.”

Jessica Jerreat is CPJ’s senior editor. She previously edited news for the broadsheet press in the United Kingdom, including The Telegraph and the foreign desk of The Times. She has a master’s degree in war, propaganda, and society from the University of Kent at Canterbury. CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative Shawn Crispin, Europe and Central Asia program coordinator Nina Ognianova, and guest blogger Yan Cong contributed to this report.

23. Trends in Press Freedom: 10 Most Censored Countries Threaten Jail Terms, Restrict Internet to Silence Press

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ritrea and North Korea are the first and second most censored countries worldwide, according to a list compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists of the 10 countries where the press is most restricted. The list is based on research into the use of tactics ranging from imprisonment and repressive laws to harassment of journalists and restrictions on Internet access. In Eritrea, President Isaias Afewerki has succeeded in his campaign to crush independent journalism, creating a media climate so oppressive that even reporters for state‐run news outlets live in constant fear of arrest. The threat of imprisonment has led many journalists to choose exile rather than risk arrest. Eritrea is Africa’s worst jailer of journalists, with at least 23 behind bars—none of whom has been tried in court or even charged with a crime. Fearing the spread of Arab Spring uprisings, Eritrea scrapped plans in 2011 to provide mobile Internet for its citizens, limiting the possibility of access to independent information. Although Internet is available, it is through slow dial‐up connections, and fewer than 1 percent of the population goes online, according to UN International Telecommunication Union figures. Eritrea also has the lowest figure globally of cell phone users, with just 5.6 percent of the population owning one. In North Korea, 9.7 percent of the population has cell phones, a number that excludes access to phones smuggled in from China. In place of the global Internet, to which only a select few powerful individuals have access, some schools and other institutions have access to a tightly controlled intranet. And despite the arrival of an Associated Press bureau in Pyongyang in 2012, the state has such a tight grip on the news agenda that newsreel was re-edited to remove Kim Jong Un’s disgraced uncle from the archives after his execution. The tactics used by Eritrea and North Korea are mirrored to varying degrees in other heavily censored countries. To keep their grip on power, repressive regimes use a combination of media monopoly, harassment, spying, threats of journalist imprisonment, and restriction of journalists’ entry into or movements within their countries. Imprisonment is the most effective form of intimidation and harassment used against journalists. Seven of the 10 most censored countries—Eritrea, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, Iran, China, and Burma—are also among the top 10 worst jailers of journalists worldwide, according to CPJ’s annual prison census.



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More than half of the journalists imprisoned globally are charged with anti‐state crimes, including in China, the world’s worst jailer and the eighth most censored country. Of the 44 journalists imprisoned— the largest figure for China since CPJ began its annual census in 1990—29 were held on anti‐state charges. Other countries that use the charge to crush critical voices include Saudi Arabia (third most censored), where the ruling monarchy, not satisfied with silencing domestic dissent, teamed up with other governments in the Gulf Cooperation Council to ensure that criticism of leadership in any member state is dealt with severely. In Ethiopia—number four on CPJ’s most censored list—the threat of imprisonment has contributed to a steep increase in the number of journalist exiles. Amid a broad crackdown on bloggers and independent publications in 2014, more than 30 journalists were forced to flee, CPJ research shows. Ethiopia’s 2009 anti‐terrorism law, which criminalizes any reporting that authorities deem to “encourage” or “provide moral support” to banned groups, has been levied against many of the 17 journalists in jail there. Vietnam (sixth most censored) uses a vague law against “abusing democratic freedom” to jail bloggers, and Burma (ninth most censored) relies on its 1923 Official Secrets Act to prevent critical reporting on its military. Internet access is highly restricted in countries under Communist Party rule—North Korea, Vietnam, China, and Cuba. In Cuba (10th most censored), the Internet is available to only a small portion of the population, despite outside investment to bring the country online. China, despite having hundreds of millions of Internet users, maintains the “Great Firewall,” a sophisticated blend of human censors and technological tools, to block critical websites and rein in social media. In countries with advanced technology such as China, Internet restrictions are combined with the threat of imprisonment to ensure that critical voices cannot gain leverage online. Thirty‐two of China’s 44 jailed journalists worked online. In Azerbaijan (fifth most censored), where there is little independent traditional media, criminal defamation laws have been extended to social media and carry a six‐month prison sentence. Iran, the seventh most censored country, has one of the toughest Internet censorship regimes worldwide, with millions of websites blocked; it is also the second worst jailer of journalists, with 30 behind bars. Authorities there

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are suspected of setting up fake versions of popular sites and search engines as part of surveillance techniques. Government harassment is a tactic used in at least five of the most censored countries, including Azerbaijan, where offices have been raided, advertisers threatened, and retaliatory charges such as drug possession levied against journalists. In Vietnam, many bloggers are put under surveillance in an attempt to prevent them from attending and reporting on news events. In Iran, journalists’ relatives have been summoned by authorities and told that they could lose their jobs and pensions because of the journalists’ work. And in Cuba, which has made some progress, including resuming diplomatic relations with the United States and proposing an end to Castro rule by 2018, the few independent journalists trying to report in the country are still subject to harassment and short‐term detention. Restricting journalists’ movements and barring foreign correspondents is also a common tactic used by censoring governments. In Eritrea, the last remaining accredited international reporter was expelled in 2007, and the few outside reporters invited in occasionally to interview the president are closely monitored; in China, foreign correspondents have been subjected to arbitrary delays in visa applications. Four heavily censored nations that nearly made the list are Belarus, Equatorial Guinea, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, all of which have little to no independent media and are so tightly closed that it can be difficult even to get information about conditions for journalists. The list of most censored countries addresses only those where government tightly controls the media. In some countries, notably Syria, conditions are extremely dangerous and journalists have been abducted, held captive, and killed, some by forces loyal to President Bashar al‐Assad but also by militant groups such as the Islamic State. The list of 10 most censored countries is based on CPJ research, as well as the expertise of the organization’s staff. Countries are measured with the use of a series of benchmarks, including the absence of privately owned or independent media, blocking of websites, restrictions on electronic recording and dissemination, license requirements to conduct journalism, restrictions on journalists’ movements, monitoring of journalists by authorities, jamming of foreign broadcasts, and blocking of foreign correspondents.



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10 Most Censored Countries 1. Eritrea Leadership: President Isaias Afewerki, in power since 1993. How censorship works: Only state media is allowed to disseminate news; the last accredited international correspondent was expelled in 2007. Even those working for the heavily censored state press live in constant fear of arrest for any report perceived as critical to the ruling party, or on suspicion that they leaked information outside the country. The last privately owned media outlets were suspended and their journalists jailed in 2001. Many remain behind bars; Eritrea has the most jailed journalists in Africa. None of those arrested are taken to court, and the fear of arrest has forced dozens of journalists into exile. Those in exile try to provide access to independent online news websites and radio broadcasts, but the opportunity to do so is limited because of signal jamming and tight online control by the sole state‐run telecommunications company, EriTel. All mobile communications must go through EriTel, and all Internet service providers must use the government‐­controlled gateway. Access to the Internet is extremely limited and available only through slow dial‐up connections. Less than 1 percent of the population goes online, according to UN International Telecommunication Union figures. Lowlight: Five independent journalists who were arrested in 2001 may have died in prison, according to recent exiles. With limited access to information in Eritrea, CPJ cannot independently confirm the deaths and continues to list the journalists on its prison census as a means of holding the government accountable for their fate.  2. North Korea Leadership: Kim Jong Un, who took over after his father, Kim Jong Il, died in December 2011. How censorship works: Article 53 of the country’s constitution calls for freedom of the press, but even with an Associated Press bureau—staffed by North Koreans and located in the Pyongyang headquarters of the state‐run Korean Central News Agency—and a small foreign press corps from politically

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sympathetic countries, access to independent news sources is extremely limited. Nearly all the content of North Korea’s 12 main newspapers, 20 periodicals, and broadcasters comes from the official Korean Central News Agency, which focuses on the political leadership’s statements and activities. Internet is restricted to the political elite, but some schools and state institutions have access to a tightly controlled intranet called Kwangmyong, according to the AP. North Koreans looking for independent information have turned to bootlegged foreign TV and radio signals and smuggled foreign DVDs, particularly along the porous border with China. Although cell phones are banned, some citizens have been able in recent years to access news through smuggled phones, which rely on Chinese cell towers. South Korean newspapers have reported that North Korea in 2013 started manufacturing smartphones that run on a network built by the Egyptian company Orascom and the state‐owned Korea Post and Telecommunications Corporation. Traders in street markets are regularly seen with 3G phones that can support video exchange and texting, according to travelers returning from North Korea. Lowlight: After Kim Jong Un ordered his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, executed (around the time of the second anniversary of his father’s death), any mention of Jang was removed from state media archives, including official video from which Jang was carefully edited. Jang was vilified in the media as the “despicable human scum, who was worse than a dog.” 3. Saudi Arabia Leadership: King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who took power in January 2015 after the death of his half-brother, King Abdullah. How censorship works: The Saudi government has progressively intensified legal repression since the Arab Spring. Amendments to the press law in 2011 punished the publication of any materials deemed to contravene Sharia law, impinge on state interests, promote foreign interests, harm public order or national security, or enable criminal activity. In 2014, the government issued a new anti‐terrorism law and regulations that Human Rights Watch said will “criminalize virtually any expression or association critical of the government and its understanding of Islam.” The  law granted



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the Specialized Criminal Court, established in 2008, the ability to hear unchallenged testimony while the defendant or the defendant’s lawyer is absent. The General Commission for Audiovisual Media announced in April 2014 that it will monitor online and YouTube content to ensure that Saudi contributors, among the largest audience for the online video‐sharing site, adhere to government guidelines.YouTube is used by many Saudis to address controversial issues, such as women driving, and to document events not covered in the media, such as the stabbing of a Canadian in a Dhahran city mall in November 2014. Saudi Arabia also used its regional influence in the Gulf Cooperation Council to pass restrictions that prevent media in member states from criticizing the leadership of other member states. Lowlight: A string of arrests and prosecutions of those expressing independent views took place in 2014. Many of those arrested were accused of press‐related charges after covering protests. In October the government used a 2007 anti‐cybercrime law to charge at least seven Saudis in connection with their use of Twitter to allegedly criticize the authorities and to call for women to be allowed to drive. 4. Ethiopia Leadership: Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, in power since September 2012. How censorship works: As Ethiopia prepared for its May 2015 elections, the state systematically cracked down on the country’s remaining independent publications through the arrests of journalists and intimidation of printing and distribution companies. Filing lawsuits against editors and forcing publishers to cease production have left only a handful of independent publications in a country of more than 90 million people. Ten independent journalists and bloggers were imprisoned in 2014; authorities filed a lawsuit in August accusing six publications of “encouraging terrorism,” forcing at least 16 journalists to flee into exile. There are no independent broadcasters, though broadcasts from the U.S.‐based opposition Ethiopian Satellite Television (ESAT) intermittently air within the country. The state‐controlled telecommunications company Ethio Telecom is the sole Internet provider and routinely suspends critical news websites. International journalists work in Ethiopia, but many are under surveillance and face harassment.

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Although journalists have not had difficulties acquiring accreditation in the past, newer arrivals say that they face challenges. Lowlight: Authorities in 2014 unleashed the largest onslaught against the press since a crackdown in 2005 after disputed parliamentary elections. Ten independent journalists and bloggers were arrested on anti‐state charges, and at least eight independent publications were shut down. 5. Azerbaijan Leadership:  President Ilham Aliyev has been in power since October 2003, after being named successor by his father.  How censorship works: The main sources of information in Azerbaijan are broadcasters, which are  owned and controlled  by the state or its proxies. International broadcasters are  barred or their satellite signals are jammed. Critical  print outlets have been subjected  to harassment from officials, including debilitating lawsuits, evictions, a ban on foreign funding, and advisories to businesses against advertising. Online speech is subject to self‐censorship because of a  criminal defamation law that carries a six‐month prison sentence. News and social media websites are blocked arbitrarily. At least 10 journalists and bloggers, including the award‐winning reporter Khadija Ismayilova, are in Azerbaijani jails. Several critical journalists fled the country in 2014, and those remaining faced attacks and harassment, were banned from traveling, or were prosecuted on fabricated charges. Lowlight: Emin Huseynov, director of the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety (IRFS), was forced into hiding in August after authorities raided his office, confiscated all of the IRFS’s documents, and sealed the premises. Several other international nongovernmental organizations that supported the local media were also forced to cease work in Azerbaijan after authorities accused them of tax evasion, raided their offices, and froze bank accounts. Staff at these organizations and their families faced harassment from officials.   6. Vietnam Leadership: Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has been in power since 2006.



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How censorship works: Vietnam’s Communist Party–run government allows no privately held print or broadcast outlets. Under the 1999 Media Law (Article 1, Chapter 1), all media working in Vietnam must serve as “the mouthpiece of Party organizations.” The Central Propaganda Department holds mandatory weekly meetings with local newspaper, radio, and TV editors to hand down directives on which topics should be emphasized or censored in their news coverage. Forbidden topics include the activities of political dissidents and activists; factional divisions inside the Communist Party; human rights issues; and any mention of ethnic differences between the country’s once‐divided northern and southern regions. Independent bloggers who report on sensitive issues have faced persecution through street‐ level attacks, arbitrary arrests, surveillance, and harsh prison sentences for anti‐state charges. Vietnam is one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists, with at least 16 behind bars. Authorities widely block access to websites critical of the government, including such popular foreign‐ hosted blogs as Danlambao, which covers politics, human rights issues, and disputes with China. In September 2013, a new law extended state censorship to social media platforms, making it illegal to post any material, including foreign news articles, deemed to “oppose the state” or “harm national security.” Lowlight: Authorities have increasingly used Article 258, the anti‐ state law that vaguely criminalizes “abusing democratic freedoms,” to threaten and prosecute independent bloggers. At least three bloggers have been convicted under the law, which allows for seven‐year prison sentences. 7. Iran Leadership: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been supreme leader since 1989. Hassan Rouhani has been president since August 2013. How censorship works: The government uses mass and arbitrary detention as a means of silencing dissent and forcing journalists into exile. Iran  became  the world’s leading jailer of journalists in 2009 and has ranked among the world’s worst jailers of the press every year since. Iranian authorities maintain one of the toughest Internet censorship regimes in the world, blocking millions of websites, including news and social networking sites. They are

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suspected of using sophisticated techniques, such as setting up fake versions of popular websites and search engines, and the regime frequently jams satellite signals. The situation for the press has not improved under Rouhani despite the hopes of UN member states and human rights groups. Rouhani also failed to uphold his campaign promise to reinstate the 4,000‐member Association of Iranian Journalists, which was forced to close in 2009. Lowlight: Iranian authorities control coverage of certain topics by tightening the small circle of journalists and news outlets allowed to report on them. In February, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council filed a lawsuit  against conservative journalist Hossein Ghadyani and the newspaper he works for, Vatan‐e Emrooz. The newspaper, which supports former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had published four articles that criticized Iran’s international nuclear negotiations and alleged corruption in the government’s dealing with an oil company.  8. China Leadership: President Xi Jinping, in office since March 2013. How censorship works: For more than a decade, China has been among the top three jailers of journalists in the world, a distinction that it is unlikely to lose any time soon. Document 9, a secret white paper dated April 22, 2014, which was widely leaked online and to the international press, included the directive to “combat seven political perils” and reject the concept of “universal values” and the promotion of “the West’s view of media.” Document 9 made it clear that the role of the media is to support the party’s unilateral rule. The paper reasserted the necessity for China’s technological and human censors to be ever more vigilant when keeping watch over the country’s 642 million Internet users—about 22 ­percent of the world’s online population. In late November 2014, Xu Xiao, a poetry and arts editor for the Beijing‐based business magazine Caixin, was detained on suspicion of “endangering national security.” The Central Propaganda Department warned editors not to report on the investigation into Xu, raising fears that the tactics used to stifle political dissent would broaden to publications looking critically at the arts. International journalists trying to work in China



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have faced obstacles, with visas delayed or denied. Although some visa restrictions between the U.S. and China have eased, during a press conference in Beijing with U.S. President Barack Obama in November 2014 Xi argued that international journalists facing visa restrictions had brought the trouble on themselves. Lowlight: Gao Yu, one of 44 journalists behind bars in China, was detained on charges of illegally providing state secrets abroad, days after details of Document 9 appeared in Mirror Monthly, a Chinese‐­language political magazine in New York. Gao, 70, confessed on official state broadcaster CCTV, but during her closed trial, on November 21, 2014, she said that the confession was false and made only to prevent her son from being threatened and harassed, her lawyer said. 9. Burma Leadership: President Thein Sein, a former general, has led a quasi‐civilian administration since 2011. How censorship works: Despite an end to more than four decades of pre‐publication censorship in 2012, Burma’s media remains tightly controlled. The Printers and Publishers Registration Law, enacted in March 2014, bans news that could be considered insulting to religion, disturbing to the rule of law, or harmful to ethnic unity. Publications must be registered under the law, and those found in violation of its vague provisions risk deregistration. National security‐related laws, including the colonial‐era 1923 Official Secrets Act, are used to threaten and imprison journalists who report on sensitive military matters. For example, five journalists with the independent weekly newspaper Unity were sentenced to 10 years in prison with hard labor, reduced on appeal to seven years, for reporting on a secretive military facility allegedly involved in chemical weapons production. Journalists are regularly barred from reporting from the military side of conflict with ethnic groups. Aung Kyaw Naing, a local freelance reporter who had embedded with rebel forces, was shot dead while in military custody in October 2014 after being apprehended by government troops in a restive area near the Thailand‐Burma border. Lowlight: Three journalists and two publishers of the independent newspaper Bi Mon Te Nay were sentenced to two years in prison on charges of defaming the state. Their offense: publishing a false

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statement made by a political activist group that claimed that pro‐ democracy opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and ethnic group leaders had formed an interim government to replace Thein Sein’s administration. 10. Cuba Leadership: Raúl Castro, who took over the presidency from his brother, Fidel, in 2008. How censorship works: Despite significant improvements in the past few years—such as the elimination of exit visas that had prohibited most foreign travel for decades—Cuba continues to have the most restricted climate for press freedom in the Americas. The print and broadcast media are wholly controlled by the one‐party Communist state, which has been in power for more than half a century and, by law, must be “in accordance with the goals of the socialist society.” Although the Internet has opened up some space for critical reporting, service providers are ordered to block objectionable content. Independent journalists and bloggers who work online use websites that are hosted overseas and must go to foreign embassies or hotels to upload content and get an unfiltered connection to the Internet. These critical blogs and online news platforms are largely inaccessible to the average Cuban, who still has not benefited from a high‐speed Internet connection financed by Venezuela. Most Cubans do not have Internet at home. The government continues to target critical journalists through harassment, surveillance, and short‐ term detentions. Juliet Michelena Díaz, a contributor to a network of local citizen journalists, was imprisoned for seven months on anti‐ state charges after photographing an incident between residents and police in Havana. She was later declared innocent and freed.Visas for international journalists are granted selectively by officials. Lowlight: Though the government has for the most part done away with long‐term detentions of journalists, author‐turned‐­ critical blogger Ángel Santiesteban Prats has been imprisoned since February 2013 on allegations of domestic violence. The writer and other local independent journalists maintain that he was targeted in retaliation for writing critically about the government on his blog, Los Hijos que Nadie Quiso (The Children Nobody Wanted.)

Index

A Abdelrahman, Deena, 78–79 Abramowicz, Manuel, 171, 173 Abrougui, Afef, 99, 102 Acevedo, José Carlos, 50, 52 Acharya, Keya, 178, 179 Acosta Marques,Vilmar, 46 Adler, Stephen, 5 Agence France-Press (AFP), 5 Aikins, Matthieu, 2 Aksoy, Murat, 92–93 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr, 27 al-Hamid, Abdulrahman, 28 al-Janabi, Abu Bakr, 28 al-Habbous, Mohammed, 36 al-Mazhrm, Mansour, 96 al-Miraat, Hisham, 98, 101, 103

Al-Qaeda, 25–27 al-Zarqawi, Abu Musa’b, 26–27 al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 27 Alcaraz Garay, Fausto Gabriel, 47, 51–52 Alemu, Reeyot, 72 Alves, Rosental Calmon, 29, 33–34 Ambani brothers, 180–181 Anti–Cyber Crime Law (Saudi Arabia), 96 Apple Daily, 137, 138 Arab Internet Governance Forum (2014), 101 Arab Spring, 11, 98 Associated Press, 6, 24 safety policy of, 6 231

232

index

Ataka party, 170 Átlátszó, 215 Azango, Mae, 132, 133–134 Azerbaijan, censorship in, 221, 226 B Babitsky, Andrei, 196 Badi,Yusuf, 37 Baksi, Kurdo, 171 Balboni, Philip, 7 Bandyopadhyay, Tamal, 181–182 Barakat, Molhem, 5 Barrett, Richard, 28 Baryoh, David Tam, 128, 129, 130 Bennett, Anne, 131, 134 Bergen, Peter, 26 Berger, J. M., 27, 32 Berhane, Atnaf, 67 Berners-Lee, Tim, 161 Bertoni, Eduardo, 162 Bezkorovainy, Ilya, 203–204 Bhatia, Gautam, 180 bin Laden, Osama, 26 Blair, Madeleine, 33 Blog de Narco, 30 Bodoky, Tamás, 215–216 Bogutskaya, Elizaveta, 208 Bohn, Lauren, 12 Bojórquez, Ismael, 30, 34 Boko Haram, 29, 30–32 Bousis, Panagiotis, 168 Boyette, Ryan, 213 Brandeis, Louis, 162–163, 165 Breakfast Network, 140, 141 British media, overzealousness of, 105–121

Brock, George, 111–112, 113–114 Brooks, Rebekah, 109, 115–116 Browne, Philipbert, 133 Burma, censorship in, 229–230 Burnaz, Talal, 42 BuzzFeed, 8, 160 C Cardona, Luis, 57–58, 61, 63 Cate, Fred H., 158 Chakchouk, Moez, 102, 103 Charbonnier, Stephane, 174 Charlie Hebdo, terrorist attack on, xi, xii, 174 Chaudhury, Jyotirmoy, 181 Cheremskoy, Roman, 205 China, censorship in, 228–229 Choudhary, Arun Roy, 182 Citizen Lab, 148–149, 153 Clark, Erinn, 153 Colvin, Marie, 10, 16–17 Conflict reporting, rules of, 15–21 Coulson, Andy, 109, 115, 116 Crépon, Sylvain, 172 Crowdfunding, journalists and, 211–218 CryptoPhone, 152 Cuba, censorship in, 222, 230 D Dacre, Paul, 109 Dale, Tom, 4 Daniszewski, John, 3, 6 Davies, Gareth, 119 Davies, Nick, 115 Dawisha, Karen, 197 Dawn alliance (Libya), 39–41, 43



Index

233

Day, Anna, 12 Desalegn, Hailemariam, 69–70 Desalegn, Temesgen, 66 Dheere, Jessica, 98, 102 Diario19.com, 61 Dignity alliance (Libya), 43 Duffy, Matt, 97 Dumbuya, Mustapha, 128, 129

European extremists, increasing power of, 167–176 EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report (2014), 168 Executive Commission of Attention to Victims (Mexico), 61

E Ebola virus, 127–134 Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) report on, 131 Egyptian media, 75–84 Eid, Gamal, 80, 82 Ekambaram, Sharon, 130 el-Balshy, Khaled, 80, 83–84 el-Sisi, Abdel-Fattah, media support for, 75–84 Elgan, Mike, 165 Eljarh, Mohamed, 38, 40 Elkawafi, Sami, 39 Erdog˘ n, Recep Tayyip, 86, 89, 90 Eritrea, censorship in, 220, 223 Ethiopia, 65–73, 221, 225–226 censorship in, 221 conflating terrorism and journalism in, 65–73 anti-terrorism proclamation, 68 Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), 69 Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), 72 sustainability study, 69

F Fakhoury, Hanni, 164 Fantahun, Mahlet, 67 Fassouk, Abdelgadir, 37 Feinstein, Anthony, 59 Feleke, Natnail, 67 Figueredo, Cándido, 45–53 FinFisher (FinSpy), 146 First Look Media, 151, 153 Fisher, Jeffrey, 164, 165 Flores, Rogelio, 59, 62 Foley, James, xii, 2, 7, 12, 13, 17, 24 Foley, John and Diane, xii Foreign Policy Interrupted, 12 Fourest, Caroline, 170, 172 “Freedom of Expression After the First 100 Days of el-Sisi’s Rule” (2014 report), 79 Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), 148 Freedom to Publish (Manas Saikia Foundation), 180 Freelance Forum Fund, 8 Freelance journalists, safety risks of, 1–8 French National Front, 172, 173 Frontline Freelance Register, 4, 6, 12

234

index

G Gall, Lydia, 172 Gallagher, Ryan, 150–151 Gas Wars: Crony Capitalism and the Ambanis, 180, 186 Gavak, Maria, 205 Gellman, Barton, 154 George, Cherian, 139, 141, 143 George, Ramsey, 97, 100 Ghaderi, Siamak, xiii Ghosh, Subir, 181 Girodon, Bruno, 20 Glanville, Jim, 112 Glasnost, death of, 189–199 Chernobyl power station accident, 191 Global Journalist Security, 8 Golden Dawn party, 167–168 Golden Shield Internet-filtering project (China), 142 Gómez Caballero, Anibal, 48 González, Mario Costeja, 157, 159 González, Ricardo, 57, 60, 61 González de Bustamante, Celeste, 58 González Ramírez, Pedro, 51 Google Spain v. AEPD and Mario Costeja González, 158, 159, 160, 161 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 190, 194 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), 146, 155 Greenslade, Roy, 108, 109, 115 Greenwald, Glenn, 151, 155 The Grugq, 149, 150

Gubarev,Vladimir, 191–192 Gutiérrez, Ricardo, 175–176 H Haffajee, Ferial, xiii Hafyana, Saleh Ayyad, 38 Hager, Nicky, 147 Hailegeorgis, Asmamaw, 67 Hailu, Befekadu, 67 Hammerl, Anton, 36 Harding, James, 106 Hartley, Clodagh, 117, 118 Helmy, Mohammed, 77, 82 Henson, Bertha, 141 Hetherington, Tim, 36 Hondros, Chris, 36 Hong Kong, censorship in, 135–143 Hostile-environment and first-aid training (HEFAT), 2, 8, 19 House News, 137 Hussien, Redwan, 69, 72 I Indian businesses, control of press by, 177–187 strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), 179 InMediaHK, 136, 137, 140 Institute of Mass Information (Ukraine), 206 The Intercept, 151 International Center for Journalism, 59–60 International News Safety Institute (INSI), 2



Index

International Press Freedom Awards event (2014), xii, xiii, 87 Internet journalism, in Middle East, 95–103 Iran, censorship in, 222, 227–228 The Irrawaddy, 138–139, 140 Islamic State (ISIS), xii, 2, 5, 17, 24–25, 26, 28 social media strategy of, 28 Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), 27 J Jääskinen, Niilo, 161, 162–163 Jabhat Al-Nusra, 10, 27 Jobbik party (Hungary), 168, 172 Junger, Sebastian, 12, 19 Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon controversy, 173–174 K Karuturi Global Ltd., 178 Kassaye, Edom, 67 Katz v. United States, 163, 165 Kavanagh, Trevor, 117 Kejriwal, Arvind, 185 Kibret, Zelalem, 67 Kilman, Larry, 183 Klebnikov, Paul, 197 Koroma, Ernest Bai (Sierra Leone president), 129 Korotich,Vitaly, 192–193 Kounalaki, Xenia, 175 Kremlin Rising (Baker & Glasser), 195 “Kuban, Thomas,” 171

235

L Lai, Jimmy, 137–138 Lam, Oiwan, 137 Lambert, Imogen, 82–83 Larsson, Stieg, 170 Lecoeur, Erwan, 175 Lee, Micah, 151, 153 Lefter, Sergei, 205–206 Leguizamón, Santiago, 48 Léridon, Michèle, 5–6 Lewis, Kelvin, 129, 134 Libya, lack of media coverage in, 35–44 Lister, Charles, 28 Liu, Jianfeng, 212–213 Loveluck, Louisa, 3–4 Loyd, Anthony, 18 Lyon, Santiago, 24–25, 32 M Maged, Reem, 79 Makhubu, Bheki, 125–126 Malaysiakini, 138, 140 Manaye, Belay, 67–68, 69, 73 Mandela, Nelson, 124–126 Manivannan, Anjali, 131 Marquis-Boire, Morgan, 153 Maseko, Thulani, 125 Matsuka, Aleksei, 202–203 Medical/security insurance, 12 Medina Velázquez, Pablo, 46 Mehsud, Safiullah Gul, 58–59, 60 Mestre, Abel, 172 Mexican cartels, and use of social media, 29–30, 32 Mexico and Pakistan, journalists in, 55–63

236

index

Middle East, Internet journalism in, 95–103 Militants, and use of videotape, 23–34 Millar, Gavin, 114 Mills, Nigel, 119–120 Mir, Hamid, 63 Miranda, David, 154–155 Mohamed, Aziza, 66 Mok, Charles, 137 Monsour, Jihad, 10 Most censored countries, 219–230 Azerbaijan, 221, 226 Burma, 229–230 China, 228–229 Cuba, 222, 230 Eritrea, 220, 223 Ethiopia, 221, 225–226 Iran, 227–228 North Korea, 220, 223–224 Saudi Arabia, 224–225 Vietnam, 227 Murdoch, Rupert, 115 Murrer, Sally, 114, 116 Muse, Toby, 6 Muslim Brotherhood, 80–81 N Najem, Mohamed, 102 Narisetti, Raju, 182, 183, 184 Nasser, Mohamed, 78, 81 National Security Agency (NSA), 146, 217 National Union of Journalists (UK), 169–170 Navalny, Alexei, 189 Navalny, Oleg, 189

Nayem, Mustafa, 204 The New Censorship (Simon), 198 Newman, Elana, 58 Newton Dunn, Tom, 112 Norfolk, Andrew, 106–107, 119, 120–121 North Korea, censorship in, 220, 223–224 Nuba Reports, 213, 214, 217, 218 O Ockrent, Christine, 173 Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), 72 O’Keefe, Kate, 186–187 “Operation Dawn,” 36 “Operation Dignity,” 36 Operational security (OPSEC), 150 Ortíz, Raúl, 47, 53 Ostrovsky, Simon, 204 P Pakistan and Mexico, journalists in, 55–63 Parker, Nick, 117 Party for Freedom (Netherlands), 169 Pearl, Daniel, 26 Periodistas de a Pie (“Journalists on Foot”), 61 Persson, Johan, 72 PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), 147, 152 Pickett, Holly, 9 Platform for Independent Journalism, 92



Index

Poitras, Laura, 151, 155 Politkovskaya, Anna, 197 Ponsford, Dominic, 110–111, 113, 115, 119 Poulsen, Kevin, 147 Press Union of Liberia, 132 Privacy, approaches to, 157–165 abuse of private information, danger to journalists, 160 right to be forgotten, 160–162, 165 right to privacy, 162–163, 165 Profiling the Islamic State (Brookings Doha Center report), 28 Putin,Vladimir, 190, 196–197, 198–199, 209 Q Qaddafi regime, collapse of, 41 Qatar, cybercrime law in, 98–99 R Ragab, Ahmed, 80, 81–82 Ramos, Javier Garza, 60, 62 Reding,Viviane, 160–161 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), 111, 118 Reliance Industries Ltd. (India), 180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 186 Relly, Jeannine, 58 Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC), 12, 19 Reporters Without Borders, 39 Reuters, safety policy of, 5

237

Ricchiardi, Sherry, 59–60 Right to be forgotten, 160–162, 165 Right to privacy, 162–163, 165 Riley v. California, 158, 159, 163–164, 165 Roberts, Chief Justice John, 163–164 Rodríguez Carreón, Armando, 58 Romanyuk, Oksana, 207, 209 Rory Peck Trust, 7 Rubio, María del Rosario Fuentes, murder of, 29 S Saad, Mahmoud, 77, 81 Sahara India Pariwar, 181–182 Sakadynskiy, Sergey, 205 Sakida, Ahmad, 31 “Salas, Antonio,” 171 Sambrook, Richard, 2, 7, 8 Sandvik, Runa A., 153–154 Sanghvi,Vir, 182 Sarajevo Agency Pool, 19 Sardesai, Rajdeep, 184–185 Saud, Ben, 39 Sayman,Yücel, 91 Scahill, Jeremy, 151 Schellenberg, Britta, 169 Schibbye, Martin, 72, 73 Schork, Kurt, 17 SecureDrop, 147–148 Security culture, 152 Sen, Sudhi Ranjan, 182 Seoudy, Aida, 81 Seshu, Geeta, 179, 180, 183, 184 Shadid, Anthony, 10, 11

238

index

Shane, Scott, 194 Sharma, Rakesh, 182 Shennib, Ghaith, 41 Shimeles, Soleyana, 67, 68 Shum, Mike, 9 Simon, Joel, 87, 191, 198 Sinclair, Anne, 175, 176 Singapore, control of media in, 139 Smith,Vaughan, 4–5, 8 Smyth, Frank, 8 Snapp, Trevor, 213, 214, 217 Snowden, Edward, 149, 151 Social media, use of by militants, 23–34 Soltani, Ashkan, 154 Sotloff, Steven, xii, 2, 17 South Africa, outdated secrecy laws in, 123–126 National Key Points Act, 124–125 Stanko, Anastasiya, 203–204 Strømmen, Øyvind, 174 Surveillance, journalists and, 145–155 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), 146, 155 National Security Agency (NSA), 146 SecureDrop, 147–148 “Surviving the Deadlines: A Handbook for Threatened Journalists” (Larsson), 170 Swartz, Aaron, 147 Syria, covering war in, 9–13, 15–21

T Taye, Woubshet, 71, 126 Tesfaye, Berhane, 71 Tezari, Michael, 168 Thakurta, Paranjoy Guha, 181, 186 Tice, Austin, 13 Tor Project, 153 Trehan, Madhu, 185 Tsoi, Tony, 137, 141 Tung, Nicole, 17–18 Turati, Marcela, 61–62 Tunç, Aslı, 86 Turkey, censorship of journalists in, 85–93 U Ukraine, media wars in, 201–209 Institute of Mass Information, 206 StopFake, 206 Telekritika, 206 V Valiente, José Gabriel, 51 VICE News, 8 Videotape, use of by militants, 23–34 Vietnam, censorship in, 227 Vodafone, 118–119 W Wabella, Abel, 67 Wagle, Nikhil, 185 Waldyes, Tesfalem, 67, 70–71 Wales, Jimmy, 162 Wallis, Neil, 118



Index

Warren, Samuel, 162–163 Watson, Tom, 107–108 Wehrey, Frederic, 43–44 West Africa, isolation of media in, 127–134 World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), 2014 report, 183 World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development (UNESCO), 99

Y Yahoo! News Singapore, 140 Yakovlev,Yegor, 192–193 Yeltsin, Boris, 195–196 Youssef, Bassem, 79 Z Zaw, Aung, xiii, 139 Zeid, Muftah Bu, 38 Zellhuber, AnaMaria, 60–61 Zone 9, 67 Zygar, Mikhail, xiii

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