Censored

Iran's deputy culture minister lashed out at Western media on Sunday, branding them "dishonest, cocky cheats," who will be banned from an annual press fair in the autumn, the ILNA news agency reported. "This year none of the Western media are allowed to participate in the fair," said Mohammad Ali Ramin, who is also a press watchdog official. "We have eliminated them, because Western media are...

Control of media that are affiliated to or support the Red Shirt movement has been reinforced considerably since a state of emergency was imposed in Bangkok and many other provinces. A TV station, radio stations, websites and newspapers have been censored, banned, forcibly closed or prosecuted. Most of these media supported the Red Shirt demonstrations, sometimes issuing forceful calls for...

Authorities arrested a journalist on Tuesday on criminal defamation charges in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hours earlier, in an unrelated incident, armed men briefly forced the city’s three main opposition broadcasters off the air, according to local journalists and news reports. Pascal Mulunda, editor of weekly Le Monitor, has been held in Kinshasa's Penitentiary and...

The Tunisian government confiscated copies of AlMowqef, the weekly newspaper of the Progressive Democratic opposition party, without giving any justification and without a court order being issued on July 16, according to the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI). Members of the Progressive Democratic Party and newspaper readers were surprised to find the paper missing from all...

Thai authorities, using the emergency decree, have recently shut down 26 more community radio stations in nine provinces, media reports said. The Nation said six more stations were pressured to discontinue their operations. The English-language newspaper also reported that 35 people working for these stations, like radio hosts, station managers and executives, are facing lawsuits for allegedly...

The provisional government in Kyrgyzstan has taken over all of the country’s TV stations and is busy nationalising them. Osh TV, an Uzbek language station based in Osh, the capital of southern Kyrgyzstan, is a case in point. The government has acquired a controlling interest in its shares and has arbitrarily fired its director, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. All of the country’s...

Al-Mawkif, an opposition weekly belonging to the Progressive Democratic Party in Tunisia has apparently been censored, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Rachid Khechana, Al-Mawkif editor-in-chief, told CPJ that 10,000 copies of the newspaper’s Friday edition disappeared from newsstands, apparently confiscated by security agents. Although a small number of...

The Security and National Intelligence Service in Sudan has barred publication of the daily Al-Intibaha. Authorities suspended the newspaper last week because of the newspaper’s supposed role “in strengthening separatist tendencies in the south and the north,” a security official told local reporters. The suspension stemmed from a July 4 article by Editor-in-Chief El-Tayeb Mustafa that criticised...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on authorities in Gaza to allow three pro-Fatah Palestinian papers published in the West Bank to be allowed entry into the territory. The newspapers say they were told they had to sign an agreement stating they would not criticise the government before they’d be allowed to distribute in Gaza. The West Bank-printed newspapers had been banned...

The Indian government has refused to renew the visa of Shogo Takahashi, the New Delhi bureau chief of Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK). After making repeated attempts to get his visa renewed, the 46-year-old Takahashi, who had been the bureau chief since 2008, returned home Sunday. A NHK spokesperson said that the broadcaster was surprised at the Indian government’s abrupt decision. The...