According to Sulzberger, in 2017, a US government official contacted the paper to warn that Egyptian authorities were poised to arrest Cairo-based New York Times reporter Declan Walsh over a report he had written linking an Italian student’s death to Egyptian security forces.
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The Trump administration’s refusal to make any effort to hold the Saudis accountable was, in her view, ‘very influential to the decline in press freedom worldwide’.Ī less-publicised incident from the previous year underscores the extent of the Trump administration’s indifference to the plight of journalists. As the CPJ’s Courtney Radsch observed, Trump ‘very publicly decided that economic and security relationship with Saudi Arabia outweighed concern over the fact that murdered a journalist’. Never was this more apparent than after the brutal 2018 murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
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And the Trump administration’s unwillingness to defend journalists has produced a culture of impunity. Sulzberger pointed out last year, by consistently mocking and threatening reporters and news organisations, Trump has ‘effectively given foreign leaders permission to do the same with their countries’ journalists, and even given them the vocabulary with which to do it’. US President Donald Trump’s near-daily coronavirus briefings have devolved into attacks on reporters who challenge his lies and disinformation about how his administration has handled the crisis.Īs New York Times publisher A.G.
#TRUMP FREEDOM OF SPRESS FREE#
From Egypt to Turkey to Cameroon, journalists have been harassed, intimidated, fined and detained over dubious claims that they were spreading fake news.Īnd when it comes to discrediting journalists’ efforts to hold the powerful to account, the United States-historically the world’s foremost defender of the free press-has been showing these countries how it’s done. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government has proposed new legislation that would allow authorities to punish anyone spreading ‘false information’ about the virus.Īccording to a recent CPJ report, both authoritarian and elected governments are increasingly introducing legislation ostensibly intended to curb ‘fake news’ and cybercrime, but which, in many cases, effectively criminalises journalism. It is now using state-owned media outlets to try to rewrite history. The Chinese government suppressed any reporting when the virus was first ravaging Wuhan, denouncing doctors who issued early warnings and detaining others who tried to give voice to those warnings. As the virus made its way around the world, it gave authoritarian governments an excuse to seize even greater control over information. The Covid-19 pandemic has made the situation even worse. Thomas Hughes, the organisation’s former director, partly blames governments’ use of ‘digital technology to surveil their citizens, restrict content and shut down communications.’ In fact, three out of every four people worldwide ‘are experiencing a deteriorating environment for freedom of expression’, the Article 19 report notes. And a new report by the UK-based charity Article 19-named for the article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that enunciates the right to seek and receive news and express opinions-concludes that freedom of expression is at its lowest point in a decade, and declining. Today, according to a tally by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 64 journalists remain missing and 250 are in prison. Since my release in November 2008, 626 journalists worldwide have been killed while doing their jobs. Eleven years later, that safety net is gone-and journalists are in more danger than ever. (I was released a couple of weeks later in a prisoner exchange.) But the US government’s willingness to help find me, a Canadian journalist who had been kidnapped while on assignment in Afghanistan, represented some semblance of a safety net for people doing a dangerous job.
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The negotiators were unable to secure that concession. They told negotiators to get me on the phone the next day, when the United States military would be flying a drone over where they thought I was being held, so they could determine my whereabouts. I had been captive in Afghanistan for about two weeks when the government of my home country, Canada, contacted those attempting to negotiate my release.