State Control

Chinese security officials' concerted attack on the foreign press in a busy commercial street near Tiananmen Square in Beijing Sunday is a return to the restrictions international reporters faced before they were eased in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics. Police briefly detained more than a dozen foreign journalists and assaulted at least two at the site of a planned anti-government protest in...

The worsening situation of the Tajik media has been detailed by the National Association of Independent Mass Media in Tajikistan (NANSMIT) in a report of its press freedom monitoring in 2010. Independent media and journalists have been subjected to constant pressure for more than six months and ten media prosecutions are currently under way. NANSMIT said in its report that it registered 58 cases...

A Bloomberg News journalist was assaulted Sunday in Beijing while covering the deployment of police in response to online calls for protests in the Chinese capital, the agency reported. At least five men in plain clothes, who appeared to be security personnel, punched and kicked the reporter at Beijing’s Wangfujing shopping street at 2:45 p.m. local time Sunday. They also took the video camera he...

The Singapore government has announced, as part of the nation's annual budget, that the radio and TV licence has been abolished effective January 1, 2011, according to the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union. The licences were first introduced in 1963. Premises with TV or radio sets, owners of vehicles with radios and dealers selling broadcast apparatus, paid for these licences. The fees collected...

Several sources in Iran have told Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) that the authorities have again been blocking the Internet and mobile phone networks since the start of a big protest at 3 p.m. on February 20. Internet connections have been slowed right down or entirely disconnected in certain neighbourhoods in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and Mashad, making it hard or...

The Bahraini security forces had previously been restrained in the way they obstructed journalists but snipers in a helicopter fired at New York Times reporter Michael Slackman and cameraman Sean Patrick Farrell as they were filming the violence in Manama’s Pearl Square on February 18. The US network security company Arbor Networks reports a 20 per cent decrease in Internet traffic in and out of...

The violence against journalists has been continuing in Yemen. In one of the latest incidents, security forces assaulted Zaki Saqladi, a correspondent of the news website AlmasdarOnline, Tuesday in the southern province of Ad-Dali, confiscating his car and his camera, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Swiss Info correspondent Abdel-Karim Salam was the...

The Libyan authorities have imposed a news blackout on what is going in the country. It was already very difficult to interview people on the spot before the government began to trying to crush the uprising. It is now virtually impossible for a journalist to work. The few foreign correspondents who were already in Libya before the crisis are kept under extremely close surveillance and have to...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has described as “inadequate” the response of the European Commission’s Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes to Hungary’s controversial new media law and urged the country’s MPs to amend the measure. It said Croes’ demands to the Hungarian government were “in the right direction” but “not enough to remove all the threats to media...

Iran has launched a renewed crackdown of the past few days including a wave of arrests of journalists that began on February 14 and cases of harassment of journalists’ families. The authorities have stepped up cyber-attacks on news websites and disruption of the Internet in a sweeping form of censorship designed to stifle the protest movement and prevent information about demonstrations from...