State Control

The board of governors of the state-owned broadcaster RAI has decided to suspend all political discussion programmes on its three TV stations during the one-month run-up to regional elections scheduled for March 28 and 29, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The reason given was the difficulty of ensuring “equality of treatment.” It is extraordinary that RAI should be backing away from...

Intelligence officials in Afghanistan privately issued a ban on live coverage to news outlets on Monday, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) spokesman Said Ansari told media managers not to report live from the scene of a terrorist attack anywhere in Afghanistan in a series of individual meetings held Monday, saying the order was for the...

The Colombian attorney-general’s office Monday directly implicated four senior intelligence officials and the secretary-general of the president’s office, Bernardo Moreno, in the phone-tapping of journalists and other prominent government critics, a scandal that was first exposed in early 2009. This occurred during the trial of Jorge Noguera, the former head of the intelligence agency known as the...

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Vélez said on Tuesday that those who illegally spy on the press are “enemies of his government” during a meeting with a delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the Foundation for Freedom of the Press (FLIP). Uribe issued the statement at the urging of the CPJ and FLIP delegation, which met with the president and top government officials...

Four Radio Benghazi journalists who worked on a programme that specialises in covering corruption were arrested Wednesday evening outside the station in Benghazi (650 km east of Tripoli) and were released at midday Thursday, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) reported. Their arrests come amid a general crackdown by the Libyan authorities on news media, especially independent news websites. “We firmly...

The Day of the Journalist that Colombia celebrates Tuesday will inevitably be overshadowed by the fact that press freedom is making no progress. Despite government boasts about “successful” measures for protecting the media, endangered journalists insist that they are not any safer and this will not change until the president takes a clear position, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF)...

A court order issued on Monday banned all Kazakh media and printing houses from publishing “any information that discredits the honor and dignity” of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, a high-ranking energy executive, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said. According to the US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Kazakh service, the Medeu District Court in...

An Iraqi government plan to impose restrictive rules on broadcast news media represents an alarming return to authoritarianism, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said. New York-based CPJ denounced the rules and called on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his government to abandon their repressive plan. CPJ’s review of the plan found rules that fall well short of international...

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko on Monday signed a decree establishing extensive control over Internet access and online content. The decree is due to take effect on July 1. Decree No 6 concerning “national Internet network improvement measures” requires that all online access devices such as computers and mobile phones be identified and registered with Internet service providers. This will...

Flouting a January 15 supreme court ruling, state-owned TV stations Rupavahini and ITN continue to openly favour President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s campaign to win another term in the presidential election to be held on January 26 with a total of 21 candidates taking part. Detailed monitoring by Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has established that 98.5 per cent of the news and current affairs air-time...