24 Sep 2013 | News, Uganda
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
In May this year, the Ugandan government closed two newspapers. The crime The Monitor and The Red Pepper newspapers committed was publishing a letter by the now renegade former Coordinator of Security Services, General David Sejusa, in which he claimed that President Yoweri Museveni was grooming his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba to succeed him. In the same letter, General Sejusa claimed that there was a plot to assassinate all army officers and senior government officials who are against the president’s succession plan.
The letter had been written to the Internal Security Organization (ISO) boss to investigate the allegations, but was leaked to the media. Despite this, the government went ahead and closed the two media houses which had run the story for two weeks. They were only allowed to reopen after meetings with the minister of internal affairs, where the editors were told that government would not hesitate to close the media houses for good if they did not stop “reporting irresponsibly.” These are the only privately owned dailies in the country.
This was not The Monitor’s first run-in with the government. At its inception in the early 1990’s, it was the only privately owned daily that competed with the government-owned New Vision. New Vision towed the government line as a mouthpiece and enjoyed all the advertising deals from all government ministries and agencies. The Monitor was totally denied all government adverts, with the intention of killing it off because it was the only paper that was questioning government decisions on different issues. It was the readership plus some support from private businesses that kept it alive. The African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME) has also criticised the paper and its sister FM station, KFM, for bending under government pressure. This came after it pulled down a critical story about the president, claiming that it had been badly written.
Print media is not alone in being targeted. During the 2009 riots that rocked Uganda, the government closed five privately owned FM radio stations reporting on it. Four of them were reopened after six weeks, after they had publicly apologised to the president and promised never to do that again. Central Broadcasting Services (CBS), however, was closed for over a year. It took a lot of pleading to the president from the media, church, monarchy and other wealthy and influential people to reopen CBS. Since it went back on air, most of the political discussions were bumped off air and some individuals who government felt were anti-establishment were barred from appearing as panelists on the different radio talk shows.
To add to the problem, the government also directly controls a wide range of media. New Vision is run under the government-owned Vision Group and is building up a powerful media conglomerate with four other newspapers publishing in local languages, three television stations, three radio stations in the capital Kampala, plus other local radio stations in at least all the other regions of the country. All these are strictly government mouthpieces, and management will not allow opposition politicians or activists to use these platforms to reach the masses. The national broadcaster, Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC), which runs the national television station and a multitude of radio stations in the countryside, is also tightly under government control.
Furthermore, while Uganda is seen in the East African region as having the best and less repressive media legislation, the government has of late tended to make amendments to the existing media laws to make them restrictive. The African Media Barometer (AMB), which is made up of leading media practitioners in the country from private and government-owned media houses, as well as lawyers and representatives from civil society, reported in 2012 that there are a few positive developments in Uganda with the licensing of more print and electronic media outlets. However, AMB also notes that the media freedom declines ahead of elections as the government grows increasingly nervous and attempts to clamp down on freed speech. Private media houses, especially radio stations, also practice self-censorship in order not to annoy the powers that be.
Ibrahim Bisika from the government’s Media Centre says the friction between media and government arises out of “editorial mismanagement” where media houses publish stories that bring them in direct confrontation with government. Moses Serwanga, a director at the Uganda Media Development Foundation (UMDF) says that media freedoms in the country are getting curtailed because of the creeping political dictatorship where political leaders do not want to leave office.
24 Sep 2013 | Americas, Mexico, News
This September marks the anniversary of the murders of four Mexican journalists. Alejandro Zenón Fonseca Estrada, Norberto Miranda Madrid, Luis Carlos Santiago and Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro were each killed within a year of each other, from 2008 to 2011. They were all covering drug cartels and corruption, and not a single person has been brought to justice in these murder cases.
Alejandro Zenón Fonseca Estrada, 33, host of a popular morning call-in show called “El Padrino Fonseca” (The Godfather Fonseca) was gunned down on September 24, 2008, by unidentified men as he was hanging up anti-violence posters.
Norberto Miranda Madrid, 44, was a Web columnist and host for the online station Radio Visión. He was shot multiple times by two masked gunmen in the offices of the radio station on September 23, 2009.
Luis Carlos Santiago worked as a photographer with the local daily El Diario. On September 16, 2010, he was shot and killed by unidentified gunmen. He was 21.
Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro, 39, tweeted about activities of criminal groups and covered the topic on the website Nuevo Laredo en vivo (Nuevo Laredo Live) using the pen name “La NenaDLaredo” (The girl from Laredo). On September 24, 2011, her decapitated body was found with a note that identified the website and her pseudonym.
Speak Justice Now is a campaign against impunity by the Committee to Protect Journalists. We encourage you to join thousands around the world to tweet Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto today demanding an end to impunity using the hashtag #SpeakJusticeNow.
18 Sep 2013 | Guest Post, News, Politics and Society, United States
Josh Stearns argues that the US shield law sets a dangerous precedent by allowing the government to decide who is a journalist. (Photo: Wikipedia)
The Free Flow of Information Act – also known as the “Shield Law” – is meant to protect journalists from having to reveal their sources during investigations by the U.S. government. The bill comes amidst news organizations’ growing concern about the impact of surveillance of the press by the Justice Department and the National Security Agency.
Last week a Senate committee approved the bill. The next step would be a vote by the full Senate. However, as currently written, the bill creates two classes of journalists and sets a dangerous precedent for press freedom.
The first class is protected by default. It includes people who have been employed by newsrooms for at least one year in the last 20 years, or for three months in the last five years. This is actually an improvement over an earlier version, but still excludes many freelancers, bloggers and citizen journalists.
For those not in that class, the bill allows a judge to decide if “such protections would be in the interest of justice and necessary to protect lawful and legitimate newsgathering.” This “judicial discretion” catchall means a broad range of acts of journalism could be protected, but raises questions about the necessity of the first definition of journalist.
The judicial discretion inclusion is significant because the case law in this area strongly asserts protection for all acts of journalism, not just some pre-defined set of “legitimate” journalists. For example, in a 2006 decision a California state appellate court wrote:
We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes “legitimate journalis[m].” The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here. We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish “legitimate” from “illegitimate” news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment.
This point is echoed in decisions by the Second, Third and Ninth Circuit federal courts of appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. And there is a growing consensus amongst leaders inside traditional journalism institutions that we should protect all people engaged in the journalism process regardless of their occupation or affiliation. The Society for Professional Journalists recently passed a resolution that “rejects any attempts to define a journalist in any way other than as someone who commits acts of journalism” and even considered changing its name to reflect this.
Which raises the question, why did some Senators work so hard to create two tiers of journalists and spill so much ink trying to limit those who can be covered?
One answer might be to send a message about who they see as “real” journalists and to further chill sources who might talk to independent reporters. This bill has to be seen in the context of Washington’s ongoing war on leaks and some elected officials’ efforts to criminalize journalism.
The debate over this bill exposed a deep and troubling thread of concern about the shifting media landscape and the nature of a truly participatory fourth estate. During the Senate committee meeting, Sen. Feinstein made it clear that she wanted to limit the bill so it wouldn’t protect people like “the 17 year old who drops out of high school, buys a website for five dollars, and starts a blog.” Other Senators made even more troubling statements, speculating and wringing their hands about spies hiding in newsrooms, foreign journalists at Al Jazeera, and protections for Edward Snowden and Wikileaks.
Most such concerns are baseless because the bill includes a huge “national security” loophole that would let prosecutors force journalists to testify about their sources, or face jail time. This exception makes the bill useless for a huge number of journalists who are most often in possession of leaked material. Yet it’s widely believed that this provision was critical to getting White House support of the bill.
What’s at stake here is not just the narrow purview of this bill, but the precedent of allowing government to define who is and is not a journalist. It is a sad irony that a bill meant to expand press freedom could in fact erode First Amendment rights of non-traditional media makers.
This could all be avoided, and the bill could be greatly strengthened and simplified by defining journalism as an act, a process that anyone can participate in, instead of a profession limited to a few practitioners. As the bill moves forward, making that change should be our top priority.
This article was originally posted on 18 Sept 2013 at indexcensorship.org
13 Sep 2013 | Asia and Pacific, India, News
In the aftermath of a murder of a delivery driver and discovery of explosive devices in his van, a small underground group took responsibility, but news editors refused to carry the group’s statement, leading to a print blackout in Manipur.
Newspapers in the state reported on 19 Aug that the cold-blooded killing of Okram Gyanendro had led to a road blockade of the Imphal-Moreh highway in protest. The Imphal-Moreh Road Transporters’ Union and the All Manipur Road Transport Drivers and Motor Workers’ Union strongly condemned the murder and called for a 13 hour general strike across the state as the story gained more attention.
As reported by the Indian Express, in the aftermath of the murder, a small underground group took responsibility for the attack. However, senior editors refused to publish the group’s statement, as they believed this small group could not have carried off the attack and only sought to gain legitimacy through media attention. By August 28th, a letter from the group had been issued to hawkers who distribute newspapers in Manipur, to halt distribution, which was ignored. On September 1st, the All Manipur Newspaper Sales and Distributors Association received a phone call saying that if the hawkers did not stop distributing newspapers, they would be shot dead.
Caught between the ongoing violent rivalry between insurgent groups in Manipur, newspaper distribution was stopped. The All Manipur Journalists’ Union (AMWJU) staged a protest along with the Editors’ Forum and the All Manipur Newspaper Sales and Distribution Association to protest the threats issued to media workers and the freedom of the press in Manipur. Some of the complaints that were made were that insurgent groups force newspapers to carry news, whether it is true or not, and even force them to carry press releases without any changes. The chief minister of Manipur was approached, and asked to put in safety measures for media persons.
However, with the backdrop of the newspaper distribution ban, the editors of major newspapers decided to distribute their papers on their own. On September 7, it was reported that “editors of the leading newspapers published from Imphal created history on Saturday morning by selling their newspaper copies in the streets of Imphal city.”
In the meantime, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has issued a statement of support, stating that, “we call on the state government in Manipur and the security agencies of the Indian government deployed in the state, to respond to the urgent calls from All Manipur Working Journalists Union (AWMJU) that conditions be secured for safeguarding journalists, rights and the public right to know.” And the chairman of India’s Press Council of India also requested the Chief Minister of Manipur to ensure that newspapers can function normally.
By 8th September, hawkers had decided to resume work in Manipur, in light of appeals from various civil society organizations and also for the sake of their livelihood.
