State Control

The Director of Venezuela's National Commission on Telecommunications (CONATEL), has announced that 29 unidentified radio stations will soon be forced to cease operations. the move, which will bring the number of closures in the last couple of months to 63 radios and TV stations, was announced Saturday last by Minister Diosdado Cabello. CONATEL has said that all the cases involve stations whose...

A Tunisian court has decided to recognise a pro-government board of the National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists (NSTJ). Police Tuesday physically evicted members of the previous independent board from the syndicate’s offices, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported quoting local journalists. A court in Tunis Tuesday ordered the transfer of the syndicate’s offices to the new...

South Africa's Films and Publications Amendment Bill, described by critics as deeply flawed and unconstitutional, has been signed into law. The measure was promulgated in the Government Gazette in the last week of August, according to the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA). When it was introduced in 2006, the media industry protested that it paved the way for pre-publication censorship and...

Kuwaiti information minister, Al-Sheikh Ahmad Abdallah al-Sabah, has suspended privately-owned Scope TV’s political satire programme Sawtak Wasal after only three of an initially-scheduled series of 15 programmes had been broadcast, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The 20-minute programme, consisting of sketches that satirized Kuwaiti politicians, had been referred by the government...

Rangoon-based weekly Phoenix has been closed down for an indefinite perdiod by the military government’s censorship board, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) and the Burma Media Association (BMA) have reported. The weekly is edited by Mar-J, a writer who has been subject to bans in the past for his satirical comments. The authorities have not given any specific reason for Phoenix’s closure. Mizzima...

The Gabonese government indulged in censorship and imposed restrictions on media coverage of Sunday's presidential elections, including denials of accreditation to at least four international journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Three front-runners have emerged in the fiercely contested election to determine a successor to Omar Bongo, who died in June after a 41...

The US military is cancelling a contract with a public relations firm after coming under flak for using the company to rate the output of journalists reporting on the Afghanistan war, a Pentagon spokesman has said. "The Bagram Regional Contracting Center intends to execute a termination of the media analyst contract ... for the convenience of the US government," military spokesperson Lieutenant...

Iraqi authorities prevented the news media from covering bombings in Baghdad and the southern province of Babil on last week, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. “We wonder why the Iraqi authorities forbade journalists to approach the scenes of the bombings and interview victims,” RSF said. “Was it to reduce the broadcasting of shocking images? Was it to conceal successful terrorist...

Many embedded journalists are being screened by a controversial Washington-based public relations firm contracted by the Pentagon to determine whether their past coverage has portrayed the US military in a positive light, the Stars and Stripes newspaper has reported. Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper partly funded by the Pentagon but editorially independent, said private contractors had been...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) have urged Serbian lawmakers to throw out a package of controversial draft amendments to the Public Information Act proposed by the government of Serbia. In a letter to the President of Serbia, Boris Tadić, IFJ President Jim Boumelha urged him to withdraw the amendments. He wrote: "We are concerned...