Skip to main content

It's downright dangerous being a journalist

We might like having the news brought to us in our living rooms - be it via TV, radio or the print media - but the dangers facing the journalists working out there to bring us that news has risen greatly.   The will come a time when unless they are foolhardy, journalists just won't venture into various countries or areas.

"2014 has been a grim year for journalists. Two leading press freedom groups have released their annual reports on the abuse and imprisonment of journalists around the globe and the evidence paints a world increasingly "barbaric" for those seeking to report on global events.

Reflecting what the group says is a "global surge in authoritarianism," the annual census by the international nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists has found that, for the third year in a row, more than 200 journalists are behind bars.

The CPJ report, published Wednesday, says that 220 journalists are currently in government custody, marking the second highest number of imprisoned journalists worldwide since the group began keeping records in 1990.

Of those jailed, 132 journalists, or 60 percent, are being held on anti-state charges such as "subversion" or "terrorism." Further, there have been no charges disclosed for 20 percent of the journalists held. According to the tally, with 44 imprisoned journalists, China tops the list as the "world's worst jailer of 2014," with Iran as second, with 33.

CPJ's prison tally only includes those being held by the government and not those in custody of nonstate actors, such as the Islamic State (or ISIS), nor does it include those identified as "missing" or "abducted."

Reporters Without Borders' annual roundup of abuses against journalists, published Tuesday, found that 66 journalists were murdered this year and a total of 119 were kidnapped, an increase of more than 35% from 2013. According to their estimates, 40 journalists are currently being held hostage."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...