8 Mar 2010 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
The Cote d’Ivoire government suspended transmission of the broadcaster France 24 last week citing the agency’s biased reporting of political unrest in the West African country. The National Council for Audiovisual Communication scrambled the French station’s signal on 22 February and said that it will remain blocked until further notice. This followed France 24’s coverage of an incident in the western city of Gagnoa, where government forces killed five demonstrators protesting against President Laurent Gbagbo’s decision to disband the government and electoral commission. Robert Mahoney, Deputy Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, urged the authorities to reverse this ban and “refrain from censorship”.
5 Mar 2010 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
The Liberian government has been accused of resorting to intimidation to censor the nation’s media. The Center for Media Studies & Peace Building (CEMESP) has published its 2009 review of threats to freedom of expression, which urges the government to recognise the rights of others to dissent. Malcolm Joseph, Executive Director of the CEMESP, said that the use of intimidation as a means of enforcing conformance “is a treachery”. Highlighting the validity of the report, Liberian journalists were this week denied access to a meeting between former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Vice President Joseph Boakai. The CEMESP said that these tactics were more reminiscent of the regimes of Charles Taylor and Samuel Doe, the International Freedom of Expression Exchange reported.
3 Mar 2010 | Uncategorized
The Iranian authorities have banned a daily newspaper and a weekly magazine as a crackdown on reformist media escalated in the Islamic republic.
Iran’s press watchdog revoked the licences of Etemad and Irandokht on the same day that security forces arrested the 49-year-old film-maker Jafar Panahi, who is a vocal supporter of the opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.
The newspaper Etemad was banned for the first time in its eight-year history after publishing remarks made by the former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, which suggested that the country is facing a “crisis”, the Iranian Labor News Agency reported.
Mohammed Ali Ramin, Iran’s deputy culture minister for media affairs, suggested that the ban was a “bitter decision” for the government to take.
“After repeated warnings and the persistence of the paper in breaching the regulations, the watchdog had no choice but to ban it,” Ramin said.
Specifically, the board said that the newspaper had violated press law number six, forbidding media organisations from revealing secret orders or publishing discussions of parliament’s closed sessions and trials.
The Press Supervisory Board also prohibited the publication of Irandokht; a magazine run by the family of the opposition leader Mehdi Karrubi that started out as a women’s weekly, but has since altered its focus to cultural and political issues.
No official reason has been given for this decision, but the Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad told CNN that the magazine was closed after Karrubi’s wife Fatameh sent a letter to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini accusing him of abusing her son Ali.
The reporter for Etemad-e Melli said: “Now we are journalists without newspapers, and we really need help for what is happening in Iran to be heard.”
The press supervision body has been busy since the disputed re-election of president Ahmadinejad in June, with the leading business daily Sarmayeh banned in November and the popular publication Etemad-e Melli closed in August.
Highlighting the perilous situation facing many Iranian reporters, Ghanbar Naderi, a journalist for the Iran Daily, told Al Jazeera that continuing closures in the media have created a culture of self-censorship.
He said: “In these sensitive times, with the country under constant political pressure, as a journalist your first mistake will be your last.”
In a further move reflecting the continuing crackdown on dissenters, Jafar Panahi, one of Iranian cinema’s most prominent directors, is
being held at an undisclosed location after he was arrested with his wife, daughter and 15 guests at his home on Monday evening.
These arrests come just days after Iranian authorities released six journalists from Tehran’s Evin prison, including Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, spokesman for the Iranian Committee for the Defence of Freedom of the Press.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists disclosed last month that Iran is now “far and away the world’s leading jailer of journalists”. This news follows the launch of a new campaign by a number of leading press freedom and free expression groups, including Index on Censorship entitled Our Society Will be a Free Society, which aims to release the journalists and writers imprisoned by Iranian authorities.
1 Mar 2010 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
The independent newspaper Heritage has accused the Liberian government of carrying out political censorship after it was unable to publish its February edition because of state interference. The publication’s management revealed that the commercial printers Dremags refused to publish the newspaper on 7 February after receiving a warning from the National Security Agency against including a story related to the audit of a senior Grand Bassa County official. The Press Union of Liberia has previously strongly condemned the government’s policy of harassing printing houses whenever there an unfavorable story is circulated. Liberia’s president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – the only female elected head of state in Africa – had vowed in 2006 to uphold the principles of freedom of expression during her premiership.
