Erdoğan’s clutch on free media tightens with ...
Update: Late on Wednesday, March 21, the Turkish Parliament approved the bill to give the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) authority to regulate online broadcasting. A daunting blow to one of the country’s few remaining spaces for free expression, the regulation will require online out... |
Kenya’s Media Shutdown and the Political F...
By James Smart Dictatorship, authoritarianism, and despotism are the very big words that have been used to describe the state of affairs in Kenya these days after three private television stations were forced off the air by the government. They are the labels being used to expound upon long-standing... |
Facebook and Google will not save us from fake n...
By Aleksander Dardeli Every day, our world produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, the equivalent of 250,000 Libraries of Congress, much of it information generated and disseminated via social media by people like you and me. It is increasingly clear that the news media no longer have a monopoly on... |
Reflections on the “Right to be Forgotten” a...
By Michael Oghia Negotiating individual privacy with the public’s “right to know” is a balancing act for which there are no easy solutions, yet has substantial implications for media development. Last month, CIMA published Information Not Found: The “Right to be Forgotten” as a Threat to M... |
Azerbaijan’s Triple Threat to Media and Freedo...
By Turgut Gambar Azerbaijan has been routinely condemned for its alarming human rights record, endemic levels of corruption, and election fraud. Not surprisingly, according to Freedom House’s 2018 Freedom in the World report, Azerbaijan is assessed as a “not free” country. While Azerbaijan has... |
The Battle for Freedom of Expression Online: Whe...
By Andreas Reventlow Online surveillance, phishing, and content blocking is familiar territory for most journalists who uncover corruption, misuse of power, or who report on human rights abuses. Although their rights to freedom of expression and privacy online are challenged on a near-daily basis, h... |
Germany’s Fight Against Fake News: Can it Work...
By Niko Efstathiou and Bebe Santa-Wood The fight against misinformation in media continues to ramp up. We are witnessing an explosion of proposed solutions and approaches in how to best filter “fake news.” Many foundations, NGOs, and tech platforms are putting money into media literacy, fact-c... |
Stoking the flames: Loaded media coverage aggrav...
While China and India prepare for next month’s BRICS summit, tensions continue to build between the two high in the Himalayas. At the disputed border of China, India, and Bhutan, Chinese and Indian forces are closing out their third month of a bitter standoff. As recently as late July, Indian repo... |
Building Coalitions for Media Reform in Africa
“Attacks on the media are the starting point of aggression, and a clear indicator that lawyers will be next.” These were the ominous words of Henry Maina, Director of Article 19 in East Africa, at a session of the annual Pan-African Lawyers Union (PALU) conference in Durban, South Africa that ex... |
Censorship in the name of security: PakistanR...
Tensions between press freedom and national security came to a head recently in Pakistan when the nation’s most widely read English newspaper, Dawn, published remarks from a closed-door government meeting last fall that offered a glimpse into the increasingly fractious relationship between elected... |