2005-2014

On 31 January 2003, RSF called on Tamil Nadu state government leader Selvi J. Jayalalithaa to either provide evidence of journalist Krishna Kumar's reported involvement in a five-year-old murder or release him at once. Kumar, of the fortnightly Tamil newspaper "Nakeeran", was picked up on 29 January, in the morning, officially in connection with the killing of a young woman five years ago. However...

RSF has condemned the 31 January 2003 murder of Parvaz Mohammed Sultan, owner and editor-in-chief of the local news agency News and Feature Alliance (NAFA), in the summer capital, Srinagar. The organisation has called on the state's chief minister and the federal home affairs minister to quickly arrest and try those responsible for the murder. Sultan, aged 35, was shot dead at his home office in...

New York, May 3, 2002 – The Committee to Protect Journalists marks World Press Freedom Day by naming the world's worst places to be a journalist – 10 places whose dangers and restrictions represent the full range of current threats to press freedom. At the top of the list is the West Bank, where Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's government has used extraordinary force to keep journalists from...

Scenes from the front lines of the American Liberal Media Expeditionary Force’s campaign to rout the forces of conservatism: CNN, which right-wingers have been known to call the "Clinton News Network," chooses as its lead commentator for George W. Bush’s spring 2002 Middle East policy speech . . . Pat Robertson. On the crucial Manhattan front, New York magazine fields as its sole national...

Kumar Badal, a reporter with the news website Tehelka.com, was freed on bail on 13 January after six months in prison, by order of the supreme court in New Delhi. His release was welcomed by Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal, who noted that the site had been victimised for the past two years. Bail was set at 50,000 rupees (about 1,000 euros). At the last minute, police tried to foil the court order...

Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières) welcomed the release today of Indian journalist Iftikhar Gilani but regretted that it came after seven months of detention without evidence and without trial. The organisation supported the request for compensation his lawyer plans to make to the government for the damage to his reputation as a journalist and his arbitrary detention. "This is a...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) welcomes the release from prison today of Iftikhar Gilani, New Delhi bureau chief for the Jammu-based newspaper Kashmir Times. Authorities had accused Gilani of possessing classified documents "prejudicial to the safety and security of the country," a charge they finally admitted was unsubstantiated. "Iftikhar Gilani's release is long overdue," said CPJ...

On 24 December 2002, RSF reiterated its call for the immediate release of detained Kashmiri journalist Iftikhar Gilani after a senior military officer told the judge in charge of the case that Gilani is innocent. On 23 December, officer O. S. Lochab, director general of the Indian military secret service, testified before Judge Sangita Dhingra Sehgal of the New Delhi Metropolitan Court that the...

One could argue that the faster we produce journalism, the more time we should be thinking about journalism, but of course the reality is just the reverse. Our breakneck, 24-7 media environment simply allows no time to contemplate what we do, or why it matters, or how to do it better. There's only time to keep shoveling--which has grave repercussions, which we should be thinking about, but there's...

The continuing conflict between press rights and privacy rights will flare up early in the year when a federal court considers a strange and extended legal skirmish over a secretly taped 1996 phone conversation that was leaked to the press. The tape's speakers were Newt Gingrich and other prominent Republicans. The leaker was a congressman from Washington state, Jim McDermott, the top Democrat on...