Press Freedom & Safety

In mid-August, Poland’s ruling right-wing Law and Justice party, or PiS, introduced a bill that would ban non-European ownership of Polish media properties. Detractors saw a blatant attack on TVN, the biggest independent television news source in the country and frequent PiS critic, which is owned by U.S. media conglomerate Discovery. Despite the opposition, PiS pushed the bill through the lower chamber of parliament with the help of some dubious procedural maneuvers and the votes of several MPs from an allied party, sparking widespread—and at times colorful—accusations of political corruption. The resulting political maelstrom leaves Poland with its freedom of [...]

Back in 2000, Paula Silva de Melo, a veteran journalist, took to Guinea-Bissau’s national television channel, RTGB, to read aloud a communique that openly criticized the government. Guinea-Bissau had just come out of a civil war that had left media institutions and journalists in a precarious position. Many broadcasters and publications had suffered serious damage to their equipment, and the few outlets that remained active were little more than propaganda tools for the war’s belligerents. But the country was embarking on a liberalization process that promised to expand press freedoms. Journalists like de Melo were eager to hold power accountable, [...]

Editor’s Note: China Note will be off for the holidays next week. It will return Jan. 6. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive China Note by email every week. It has been a bad year for foreign journalists in China, to say the least. The year began with the expulsion of three reporters from The Wall Street Journal after the headline of an opinion piece referred to China as “the real sick man of Asia.” By March, more than a dozen journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post had been expelled [...]