2 Sep 2025 | About Index, Asia and Pacific, China, Hong Kong, News and features, Newsletters
The Jimmy Lai trial wrapped up last week, without a verdict. When this will come is anyone’s guess. One of the three judges, Esther Toh, said it would be announced “in good time”.
For a man who has been wrongly imprisoned for more than 1,700 days, is in his late 70s, and has serious health conditions, “in good time” is gratingly noncommittal. Of course it’s likely intentional, a way to further punish him and his family. But there’s more to it. When it comes to Lai language has always been used to obfuscate, frustrate and discredit. Hong Kong authorities, the CCP and their allies frequently twist words, calling him and his supporters traitors and other slurs. They can be bold in their denigrations – and they can be seemingly subtle.
“I’ve lost count of the number of times the Chinese / Hong Kong authorities or CCP State media have called me a “so-called human rights lawyer” leading a “so-called legal team.”,” said one of Lai’s lawyers, Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, this week on X. Gallagher made this comment following the release of a new report, titled “The Use of ‘So-called’ as a Propaganda Device in China”. By academics Linette Lim and Alexander Dukalsis (the latter an Index contributor), it looks at how China’s state-run media increasingly use inverted commas and the words so-called when talking about an idea or person that they wish to discredit.
It’s not a new trend nor is it unique to China, as the authors note (Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used these linguistic tools too). Still, it’s growing in use there. Articles on Taiwan and Hong Kong will typically employ such language, as do ones on the USA. In fact the authors were struck by how many articles tried to delegitimise the USA and believe it’s “partly in response to more hawkish US policy towards China in recent years and partly accelerated by Xi Jinping’s increased domestic control and repression”.
The report is a helpful addition when considering how information is controlled under Xi Jinping, as was James Palmer’s piece in Foreign Policy last week labelled “A guide to Censorship in China”, which was based on his many years living and working there. In it Palmer describes the censorship machine as “messy”. While people can cover most sensitive topics in China, and Palmer says it’s relatively uncommon for authorities to outright refuse to publish something, the process is unpredictable, exhausting, artistically damaging and at times high stakes, putting many off. “In better times, publishers are willing to take risks, but those better times are a long way away,” wrote Palmer.
Better times do sadly feel very distant, though I’d imagine if pressed the CCP would say they’ll arrive “in good time”.
11 Aug 2025 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine
Since 7 October, 2023, Israel’s military campaign across the Gaza Strip has claimed the lives of more than 260 Palestinian journalists and media workers: men and women, who carried nothing but their cameras, microphones, and notebooks. They were not on the battlefield, they were the battlefield. Targeted, hunted, threatened and killed alongside their families in what can only be described as a deliberate campaign to silence the truth.
Anas al-Sharif and Mohamed Qreqeh, along with five more colleagues from Al Jazeera were the new victims of truth. They did not die because they were caught in “crossfire” or in a tragic accident. Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues were killed because he refused to be silenced. Because they exposed the atrocities and crimes of the Israeli military against innocent civilians in Gaza. They reported on the massacres, on the weaponisation of starvation and thirst, and on the relentless bombardment of residential neighborhoods.
Anas paid his life as a price for his truth-telling, and so did many other colleagues. They all met the same fate.
Before them, their parents and families were also killed. These were not isolated incidents. They are part of a systematic pattern.
This is how Israel’s war on Palestinian journalism works: first, it eliminates the voice; then it erases the family; and finally it seeks to bury the story.
I know this because I am living it. I am a journalist who has reported for years from Gaza City, and my own family there has been threatened. My home has been surrounded by fear like many more, reminding us that our reporting comes at a cost. These are not random acts of intimidation. They are part of the same machinery that murdered Anas and Mohamed, a machinery designed to frighten Palestinian journalists into silence.
It doesn’t stop at bullets and bombs. Israel wages an incitement campaign against Palestinian journalists, smearing them with baseless accusations and without presenting a shred of credible evidence.
The aim is clear: to strip us of legitimacy in the eyes of the world so that when we are killed, our deaths can be rationalised, excused, and forgotten.
These accusations are amplified when parts of the Western media adopt Israel’s unverified narrative – sometimes word for word – while those same foreign correspondents are themselves barred from entering Gaza.
Yes, Israel has kept international journalists out of Gaza since the start of this war. It is not only silencing Palestinian voices, it is preventing the world from seeing the truth through the eyes of all journalists.
This unprecedented media blockade means the only witnesses left inside Gaza are Palestinian journalists, who are being systematically hunted.
By killing them, Israel is not just destroying the local press, it is choking off the world’s last source of first-hand account from the Strip.
Some will call this a tragedy for Gaza. But it is more than that. It is a tragedy for journalism everywhere.
Each time a Palestinian journalist is killed for doing their job, a bullet tears through the very heart of global press freedom.
When one government can murder reporters with impunity, threaten their families, smear their reputations, and block the international media from entering, it sends a message to every repressive regime on the planet: You too can kill the story by killing the storyteller.
What happens in Gaza does not stay in Gaza. If Israel’s campaign to silence journalists succeeds here, it will embolden governments worldwide to use the same tactics: violence, intimidation, and narrative control to shield themselves from accountability.
The chilling effect will ripple far beyond the Gaza Strip and Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Journalists covering corruption, human rights abuses, atrocities and war crimes, will all feel the shadow of what is happening in Gaza.
Freedom of the press is not a slogan. It is the breath of democracy, the safeguard against tyranny, the public’s last line of defence against lies, manipulation and corruption.
In Gaza, that breath is being suffocated. And if the world does not act; if governments, media organisations, and press freedom advocates do not unite to hold Israel accountable, then the suffocation will spread.
Anas is gone. Mohamed is gone. Too many of my colleagues are gone. I do not know how much longer those of us still reporting from Gaza can keep going under this level of threat. But I do know this: as long as we have breath, we will speak. We will write. We will record. Because the truth is worth more than our fear, and the story of Gaza must not be buried with its journalists.
Silencing Palestinian journalists is not just an assault on Gaza’s truth. It is an assault on the world’s right to know. And the day we allow that assault to succeed is the day press freedom dies everywhere.
[Editor’s note: The IDF claims that al-Sharif had been a member of Hamas since 2013. Al-Sharif and Al Jazeera had previously called these claims “baseless”.]
15 Jul 2025 | Iran, Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features
Fatemeh Jamalpour: The cost of truth in Iran
When I was invited to co-write a story with an Israeli journalist, I asked myself: what could we possibly have in common? After 46 years of political hostility between the Islamic Republic and the State of Israel, it turned out we shared more than I expected. We are both inheritors of our countries’ proxy wars – and we both carry a shame that isn’t ours. It’s the shame of war-driven leaders, the shame of bombed hospitals and civilians buried beneath flags. Somehow, in that shared grief, shame became a point of connection.
Beyond the battlefield, we share something else: the impact of censorship and propaganda. Both governments declared the recent 12-day war – which left more than 930 people dead – a victory. But every civilian killed is not a victory; it’s a human life lost. In Iran, clerics have openly called for executions and mutilations of those who dare to criticise the Supreme Leader. Any dissent – even a tweet suggesting the Islamic Republic bears responsibility for the war – can lead to interrogation, summons or surveillance. In today’s Iran, truth has a cost – and more and more, that cost is freedom.
Starting on the fifth day of the Israel-Iran war, from 17-21 June, the Iranian regime imposed an almost complete internet shutdown, as reported by global internet monitor NetBlocks. Iranians were left not only without access to news but also without emergency alerts or evacuation warnings. The entire country was plunged into darkness – like a black hole – leaving defenceless civilians uncertain whether their neighbourhoods were in danger, or if they should flee.
Amid the chaos, parliament passed a law criminalising the use of Starlink internet.
“While they had cut off our internet – and during the war, I couldn’t get any news from my family and friends because both the internet and phone lines were down – I was sick with worry for every loved one,” said Leila, a 38-year-old woman from Shiraz. “And yet, when we try to access something that is our basic right, even after paying a hundred million tomans, we’re treated like criminals. These laws have no legitimacy.”
Meanwhile, the regime began targeting journalists’ families. Several relatives of reporters working with Persian-language outlets abroad, such as BBC Persian, were arrested, threatened, and labelled “enemies of God” – a charge that carries the risk of execution.
“I barely post on social media anymore because the space is under intense surveillance by security agents, and the pressure on journalists is suffocating,” said Raha Sham, 41, a parliamentary reporter in Tehran. “Many of my colleagues have received threatening phone calls. The tone is harsh, the intent clear: delete your tweets, your stories, your posts – or face the consequences.”
Iranians now face a new wave of repression in the aftermath of the war. Across cities, new checkpoints have sprung up where security forces stop civilians and search their phone photo galleries – often without a warrant. At the same time, parliament has passed new legislation effectively criminalising anti-war activism.
“Anti-war activism is a legitimate form of civic engagement, and criminalising it is both unjust and unlawful,” a human rights lawyer in Tehran who prefers to stay anonymous told me. “What disturbs me most about the post-war crackdown is that a spirit of vengeance has taken over the judiciary. Judges now seem to think their role is to avenge those who were killed. The mindset is: ‘Our commanders have died – someone must pay.'”
But the problem doesn’t end with the state. While we’re silenced by our government, we’re also erased by much of the Western media. For many editors, it’s always about numbers, not names. They want statistics, not stories. When Western journalists do gain access, they often report only from regime-approved rallies, while just a few streets away, anti-war protests and underground art scenes go unseen.
We’re rarely shown in full light. Middle Easterners remain blurred, devout, anonymous. After years of contributing to Western outlets, I’ve learned this isn’t an accident. It’s not just regime control. It’s also the residue of a colonial gaze – still shaping coverage in 2025.
David Schutz: Control of the press in Israel
In Israel, I was under missile fire too. While everyone else huddled in shelters, glued to the news, I stood on my roof watching what looked like fireworks. But if you Google “Iranian missile hit Tel Aviv Stock Exchange” in Hebrew, you’ll find nothing – you have to know where to look to piece together the truth.
Israel’s media has always been tightly controlled: military censors, a three-second delay on live broadcasts – a well-known fact that has been confirmed by inside sources. Today it’s slicker but more repressive than ever as global opposition to Israeli policies grows. The Israeli Journalists Association said recent moves by the government “seek to eliminate free media in Israel”. But it’s worth asking whether the press here was ever truly free.
Even before 7 October 2023, it operated under a mesh of dependent commercial interests and state funding with the military and government in what journalist Oren Persico from The Seventh Eye, an independent investigative magazine focused on the media in Israel, described as a “symbiotic relationship”.
After the election of the current government in 2022, bills have been brought forward that weaken public broadcasting, including proposals to give the government increased control of the public broadcaster’s budget – effectively letting the government starve it of funds should coverage stray too far.
“Very often, journalists effectively act as representatives for the institutions they cover: legal affairs reporters serve the prosecution and the judicial system, economic reporters serve the Finance Ministry, and military reporters naturally represent the positions of the IDF [Israel Defense Forces],” Persico said.
My friend Sapir runs a WhatsApp group called Demanding Full Coverage for Gaza.
“Almost nothing about Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe gets through to the Israeli public. Not because the information doesn’t exist, but because editors don’t cover it – and when they do, briefly, the military and government have a well-honed strategy to muddy the waters,” she said.
When Haaretz reported at the end of June that Israeli soldiers had been ordered to fire on civilians at an aid centre, counter-reports appeared almost immediately in multiple outlets – often repeating the same phrasing, the same anonymous interview – claiming “Hamas gunmen” had fired on crowds. The effect was the same: to muddy the story and deny a pattern of conduct.
“The goal is to flood the market with information so people think there’s no way to know what’s true anymore, to make them give up looking,” Sapir said.
Andrey X, an independent Israeli journalist, explained that all security-related stories must legally be cleared by military censors before publication. This can be justified on security grounds in some cases but critics argue it adds a significant challenge to media freedom. In practice, most outlets ignore this – until the government decides to enforce it retroactively, as in the case of American journalist Jeremy Loffredo, who was detained for four days and threatened with jail time over his reporting for The Grayzone, showing the locations of the military targets of Iranian missiles.
Footage of Israeli vehicles and homes hit by Israeli Hellfire missiles and tank shells on October 7 were labelled “Hamas attacks”. A government spokesman admitted 200 Hamas fighters were misidentified as civilians.
Twenty months later, Gaza is a demolished wasteland of dust and decay. The military releases sparse reports of “accidents”, just enough to recast outrage as tragic inevitability rather than accountability, enabling ongoing abuses without meaningful scrutiny.
Cable news will mention that the army had “begun food distribution”, but in such vague, antiseptic terms that few readers realise this means just a handful of stations, a framing that distorts what is actually happening and why.
Softer repression is often more powerful. Journalists fear being fired or defunded for not toeing the military spokesman’s line. Many fear public backlash even more: boycotts, pulled advertising and social media campaigns branding them traitors. Mildly subversive correspondents have faced on-air abuse – often in deeply personal terms – from their colleagues, as detailed by Persico when he spoke with me.
For Palestinian journalists, the dangers are greater still. Reporting on police or military abuses can end careers or worse. Even inside Israel, Arab reporters face social hostility, public threats and constant suspicion about their loyalty. The same event, covered by an Israeli and a Palestinian journalist, carries different risks, but that gap is always narrowing.
Each day, more people choose to shed the ideological masks their states have forced upon them in ’48 Palestine, Israel and Iran. Despite relentless propaganda and censorship, the number continues to grow. The future of our countries will not belong to war-hungry leaders – it is being shaped from the ground up, in the streets and in the digital space. In this age, every post, every story, every tweet by ordinary citizens is a quiet act of resistance – a revolution in itself.
This piece is published in collaboration with Egab, an organisation working with journalists across the Middle East and Africa
8 May 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Turkey
The alarming escalation in the persecution of Turkey’s media workers is part of a calculated strategy. With the detention of Istanbul’s democratically elected mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on 19 March, the Turkish government has sent a chilling message to the public: nobody is safe, anyone can be arrested, so everybody should take caution.
Journalists make up a significant sum among the more than 1,879 detained in last month’s protests, 260 of whom were formally arrested. A further 382 people were reportedly arrested in Istanbul last week for “non-authorised demonstrations”.
Photographers, reporters, videographers, YouTubers, and social media commentators have been detained. Many have been taken into custody following dawn raids. Wearing visible press badges hasn’t helped reporters and videographers who filmed scenes of clashes outside the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality building in Saraçhane, where the opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), had organised week-long protest rallies. Covering the events became a crime as government officials warned that TV networks that gave airtime to these events would be shut down.
This was not an empty threat. On 24 March, 11 journalists were arrested in one day, including Yasin Akgül of the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Bülent Kılıç, a World Press Photo award winner and one of Turkey’s most accomplished photographers. BBC’s long-time Istanbul correspondent, Mark Lowen, was taken from his hotel in Istanbul on 26 March, held for 17 hours, and expelled from the country where he had lived for five years.
Arbitrary releases have followed the arbitrary arrests. After being released, the AFP photographer Akgül and his colleagues were reportedly re-arrested the same day, before being re-released a few days later.
Turkey’s Information Technologies and Communication Authority (BTK) and Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) have used these arbitrary shock-and-awe tactics over the past weeks.
On the day of İmamoğlu’s detention, BTK imposed widespread restrictions on social media and messaging platforms in Istanbul, including YouTube, Instagram, X, and TikTok.
Because of the restrictions, neither locals nor tourists could use messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal for days. The impact was significant, given that Istanbul has a population of more than 15 million residents, making it the most populous and wealthiest city in Turkey.
BTK achieved the digital shutdown through bandwidth throttling, which significantly slows down internet access. The global internet censorship watchdog NetBlocks confirmed the use of bandwidth throttling.
The government, meanwhile, neither accepted nor denied throttling the internet for more than 15 million citizens, adding an air of mystery to the technical operation. Imposing restrictions without any announcement or explanation is part of the same political strategy that placed İmamoğlu behind bars.
A few days later, RTÜK issued a 10-day broadcast suspension for the leading opposition network, Sözcü TV. The TV channel’s coverage of protests “incited hatred and enmity among the public”, according to RTÜK.
Officials from the board continue to threaten the opposition media by revoking their licences. This means they could be shut down for good if network editors don’t abide by the government’s rules.
“Let’s see what will happen tomorrow morning,” mused Fatih Portakal, the Sözcü TV anchor, during a news bulletin shortly following the announcement of the 10-day suspension. Portakal told viewers his channel would go dark and display RTÜK’s decision for ten days. Sözcü continued its YouTube broadcasts and is now back on air on cable television.
The Turkish government already controls 90% of the media. From TV channel CNN Turk to newspaper Hurriyet, once respected mainstream media brands now operate as government mouthpieces. The government’s biggest concern is the remaining pockets of free expression: media outlets such as Bianet, Agos, Açık Radyo, and Medyascope have been demonised by the right-wing press, charged with serving foreign interests. In response, readers and viewers have been supporting these publications through donations.
But the level of government oppression has reached new heights, even by Turkey’s standards. In March, after the opposition party CHP launched a boycott campaign against firms with links to the government’s financial networks, a court shut down BoykotYap.com, the website containing the list of boycotted firms.
Hours later, the CHP launched a new website with an altered web address, BoykotYap.net. “Transform your consumption power into resistance. We will not see those who do not see the people!” CHP MP Pınar Uzun Okakın posted on X after announcing the new website’s URL.
In the eyes of the government, the unrest that followed the jailing of Istanbul’s democratically elected mayor is an opportunity. RTÜK recently announced that it would require two YouTube channels to register with the government to continue their streams, or their accounts would be blocked. Neither channel has applied for a licence and RTÜK hasn’t yet closed them down.
Fatih Altaylı, one of the targeted journalists, has nearly 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube, several times larger than pro-government channels like Yeni Şafak (712,000) and Sabah (373,000). The move follows RTÜK announcing last September that, under new regulation, YouTubers would need to obtain a licence in order to broadcast news. While the law is yet to be fully implemented, it is clearly already being used as a threat, and licenses can already be obtained. In the ideal world of the Turkish government, its bureaucrats would be permitted to censor content about Turkey regardless of platform.
The reaction to this vision of opacity and widespread censorship has been immense. Mass street protests and social media campaigns included a boycott against government-controlled media channels CNN Türk, the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), and the news agency Demirören News Agency (DHA).
As government intimidation continues to increase, Turkey’s media workers will likely develop new outlets: YouTube channels, Substacks, websites, anything that allows them to reach a growing audience hungry for objective news that is produced by reporters on the ground, despite all dangers.
