Shooting a glance at the uncanny paraphernalia on my desk feels like watching a “Breaking Bad” teaser: A fist-sized rock near my monitor, a half-burnt tear gas canister on the rock, holding a pen, and a handwritten letter from a … Read more
Today, nearly every African country holds multiparty elections of some kind, but – as in the case worldwide – relatively few fully respect political rights and civil liberties. This situation was already worrying before the pandemic. In 2019, advocacy group Freedom … Read more
On the morning of July 20, 2020, a group of men arrived at the Harare home of Zimbabwean journalist Hopewell Chin’ono, smashed a glass door to gain access and took him away. “They are breaking into … Read more
Many news consumers in the United States may have no idea that some of the world’s best reporting on what is happening in authoritarian societies and fragile democracies comes from news services that are funded by the U.S. government but … Read more
preI thought I’d grown accustomed to daily attacks on the press. Being a journalist in Serbia often means you spend more time fending off pressure from politicians than doing your work. In the 1990s, I witnessed firsthand the brutal attacks … Read more
On May 28, Ilya Azar, 35, a Novaya Gazeta journalist and activist, was arrested near the entrance to Moscow’s police department, where he was picketing, holding a small placard. On the placard were the names of … Read more
When Australian investigative journalist Nick McKenzie arrived at his desk one morning in 2014, he was surprised to find a bunch of flowers had been sent up from the mailroom. “In the flowers there was a note that said, ‘There … Read more
Every weekend, Tom Grundy plays a game of cat and mouse. The Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) editor-in-chief opens his computer to 12 livestreams of the Hong Kong protests while trying to untangle dozens of threads on the encrypted … Read more
In their press freedom ranking of 180 countries, Reporters Without Borders this year named Norway its valedictorian. So free is the country from censorship, political pressure, or violence against journalists, that the headline atop the annual … Read more
On February 26, 2018, Slovak investigative journalist Marek Vagovič rushed through the morning traffic of Bratislava. Early that morning his boss, Peter Bárdy, editor in chief of online news portal Aktuality.sk, summoned him to the office for … Read more
