All posts tagged: journalists

Mapping Where Journalists Disappear | ZeroHedge

Mapping Where Journalists Disappear | ZeroHedge

Published by skeptic

August 30 marked the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. Enforced disappearances are the arrest or abduction of a person by or on behalf of the state, followed by that same authorities’ refusal to acknowledge it. The move is used as a means to silence opposition and to spread terror. The following chart, via Statista’s Anna Fleck, looks specifically at the number of media workers that have disappeared over the past 24 years. According to the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) database, at least 217 media workers have disappeared since the year 2000. This includes those who are victims of enforced disappearance as well as those who have disappeared at the hands of non-state related groups. You will find more infographics at Statista Mexico is the country from which the highest number of media professionals have disappeared in this time frame, counting 37 in total. Of these, 31 are listed as “ongoing” cases. According to RSF, an additional 152 media professionals have been verified as killed in Mexico between 2000 and 2024, three of whom died in 2024. …

From child refugee to Guardian reporter: one journalist’s extraordinary story | News

From child refugee to Guardian reporter: one journalist’s extraordinary story | News

Published by skeptic

Aamna Mohdin was a young rookie reporter when she got her first foreign assignment. She was being sent to Calais to write about “the Jungle”, an informal refugee camp that had sprung up, made up of people hoping to cross the Channel for a better life in the UK. She was nervous about doing a good job but as she walked around the chaotic maze of tents with people cooking on open fires she began to feel strange and uneasy. It wasn’t just the sadness of the stories she was hearing but something more like deja vu. When she told her mother about her trip, her mother asked a question that astonished Aamna: why would she want to go to a refugee camp when they had risked everything to flee one themselves? The question sent Aamna spiralling as she realised she had repressed her own memories of living in a camp in Kenya as a child, and how they had fled to the UK. Helen Pidd hears how that moment, and reporting on the Black …

Nearly half of journalists covering climate crisis globally received threats for their work | Climate crisis

Nearly half of journalists covering climate crisis globally received threats for their work | Climate crisis

Published by skeptic

Almost four out of every 10 journalists covering the climate crisis and environment issues have been threatened as a result of their work, with 11% subjected to physical violence, according to groundbreaking new research. A global survey of more than 740 reporters and editors from 102 countries found that 39% of those threatened “sometimes” or “frequently” were targeted by people engaged in illegal activities such as logging and mining. Some 30%, meanwhile, were threatened with legal action – reflecting a growing trend towards corporations and governments deploying the judicial system to muzzle free speech. The global survey by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network (EJN) and Deakin University is the first-of-its-kind scrutiny of the challenges faced by journalists covering arguably the most pressing – if not existential – issues of our time. The Covering the Planet report includes in-depth interviews with 74 journalists from 31 countries about what help they need to do a better job reporting extreme weather, plastics pollution, water scarcity, and mining as global heating and unchecked corporate greed pushes the planet to its …

Student Journalists Face Storm of Campus Protest Disinformation

Student Journalists Face Storm of Campus Protest Disinformation

Published by skeptic

One of the big topics of dissension was the issue of “outside agitators,” a narrative spread by both the Columbia administration and the NYPD that the protests were filled with protesters from outside of the campus community. Student journalists have been forced to deal with this too: In a story on the protests, Ventura and a classmate found that most of the 13 outside agitators identified by the university were either alumni or people associated with organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, which has a chapter at Columbia. Karam told WIRED that the Spectator is still trying to verify these numbers. Despite their reporting to the contrary, New York mayor Eric Adams still said in a statement last week that Columbia’s protests had “basically been co-opted by professional, outside agitators.” Similarly, Leon Orlov-Sullivan, a reporter at the City College of New York publication The Campus, told us that the school’s statements didn’t make clear what it meant by “outside” protesters. City College is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, meaning …

Northern Ireland police spied on investigative journalists, tribunal told | Police

Northern Ireland police spied on investigative journalists, tribunal told | Police

Published by skeptic

The Police Service of Northern Ireland covertly surveilled a group of journalists on a six-month rolling basis because they were conducting unwanted investigations into the force, a secretive tribunal has heard. Details of what the PSNI are said to describe as a “defensive operation” were heard at the latest hearing of the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) into whether two Northern Irish investigative journalists, Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, were spied on by UK police and intelligence services seeking to identify their sources. After they produced No Stone Unturned, an award-winning documentary about apparent collusion between the police and the suspected murderers in the 1994 Loughinisland massacre, in which six Catholic men were killed by loyalist paramilitaries, the homes and offices of the pair were raided – a move later criticised by Northern Ireland’s top judge. At Wednesday’s hearing at the high court in London, Ben Jaffey KC, acting for McCaffrey, said that following an additional 600 pages of disclosures from defendants, it was impossible to say how many times his client had been spied on …

Ukraine’s investigative journalists are facing intimidation – POLITICO

Ukraine’s investigative journalists are facing intimidation – POLITICO

Published by skeptic

“Look, you can be a patriot. You can want Ukraine to win this war and still be a journalist,” he told POLITICO. Sat in a café in downtown Kyiv, discussing what it’s like to be an honest reporter during wartime, he said: “Journalists should also understand they’ve got a job to do. It’s not bad for Ukraine to be transparent and to have proper journalism happening. I want us to have more air defenses and more weapons for our troops — that’s what the money should be spent on, not lining peoples’ pockets.” In some ways, corruption has been hard-boiled into Ukraine, with graft blighting the country since it secured independence in 1991. It reached a crescendo during the tenure of Viktor Yanukovych, president from 2010 until his ouster in 2014, with theft, bribery, corruption in public procurement and rigged energy prices on an industrial scale. They’re estimated to have embezzled as much as $37 billion — although the first post-Maidan revolution government claimed it could have been as much as $100 billion. The proceeds …

Journalists at Italian public media strike over Meloni government’s influence – POLITICO

Journalists at Italian public media strike over Meloni government’s influence – POLITICO

Published by skeptic

Last month, a prominent author accused RAI of censorship after the reading of an antifascist monologue was abruptly canceled “for editorial reasons.” The monologue had been scheduled to be broadcast on the RAI 3 TV channel on April 25, the public holiday that celebrates Italy’s freedom from fascism in 1945. Usigrai, the major journalists’ union at the broadcaster, said in a statement on Monday: “We strike to defend the autonomy and independence of the public radio and television service from the pervasive control of information spaces by politicians.” The broadcaster countered that it is “committed to safeguarding the values ​​of pluralism and freedom of expression.” The Meloni government, which declined to comment for this story, has been accused of making strategic use of defamation lawsuits to silence media dissent, including complaints against newspaper Domani and journalist Roberto Saviano. Meloni’s brother-in-law and cabinet minister Francesco Lollobrigida filed a criminal complaint against a TV commentator on La7, an independent channel, for saying that Lollobrigida spoke “like a Gauleiter,” referring to regional leaders of Adolf Hitler’s party. Defamation in Italy …

Female journalists under attack as press freedom falters | Press freedom

Female journalists under attack as press freedom falters | Press freedom

Published by skeptic

Female journalists are at the “epicentre of risk” as attacks on press freedom intensify around the world. According to organisations representing women in journalism, the past year has seen an escalation of smear campaigns; racist and gendered attacks; detentions; deportations; censorship; and police violence levelled at female journalists, which is leading to a “chilling” silencing of women’s voices in the media landscape. There is a very real danger the perpetrators will effectively silence women from playing an active part in the media Alison Phillips Kiran Nazish, the founder of the Coalition for Women in Journalism (CFWIJ), said: “We have seen a crackdown on women journalists in the past year from Poland to Bangladesh to Nigeria, Turkey, Canada and the US, as political will in maintaining press freedom declines. “Women and non-binary journalists are on the frontline of an increasingly hostile environment and are most at risk,” she said. Nazish pointed to multiple examples of individuals targeted in the past year. In Iran, the country that jails the most female journalists, Parisa Salehi became the latest …