Attacks on the Press - Committee to Protect Journalists

attacks on the press in 2009middle east and north africa: analysisHuman Rights Information, told CPJ. “Much of it began online, but we now alsosee this type of reporting taking place in print.” In Egypt, for instance, the daily Al-Dustour devotes a full page each Wednesday to reporting on civil society and humanrights. The independent daily Nadhet Misr carries an entire page on the sametopic every day, and Al-Mal devotes a half page to human rights each day.“This type of journalism has raised awareness among the public—it has hada positive role,” Abdelaziz Nouaydi, human rights lawyer and president of theMoroccan human rightsgroup Adala, told CPJ.In some cases it has alsohad a positive outcome. InEgypt, police Capt. IslamA human rights defender sees amarked increase in the quantityand quality of reporting.Nabih and Cpl. Reda Fathi were sentenced in November 2007 to three years inprison for torturing and sodomizing a man in custody. In Iran, in the aftermathof the disputed June 2009 presidential elections, police chief Gen. Ismail AhmadiMoghaddam conceded that detainees had been tortured while in custody,after numerous online publications, notably Norooz and Saham News, publishedcredible reports of rape and abuse of detainees. Supreme Leader Ali Khameneiordered the Kahrizak Prison shut down after the much-publicized deaths of twodetainees there.Throughout the region, a new generation of journalists refuses to serveas ciphers at some gray government daily or as on-air mouthpieces for officialpropaganda. A 2008 survey of 600 journalists in 13 Arab countries by the AmericanUniversity in Cairo found that most believed their primary mission was todrive reform.“Seventy-five percent of journalists say that their top priority is political andsocial change,” Lawrence Pintak, lead author of the survey, told CPJ. “And yousee this playing out in this more aggressive coverage around human rights issues,whether it’s in Palestine by a Bahraini journalist or whether it’s in Egypt byEgyptian journalists,” said Pintak, who is now founding dean of the Edward R.Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University.This increased focus on human rights has prompted a backlash from regimesthat use government-friendly media to attack individual journalists and outlets.Rights defender Eid notes that the Egyptian daily Rose al-Yusef “devotes page 5 toattacking publications, journalists, and civil society organizations that are vestedin human rights investigations and reporting.” In Tunisia, government-ownedprint and electronic media routinely label critical journalists who write aboutgovernment abuses as “agents of the West” and “traitors.”Morocco has turned to a politicized court system to muzzle the press. In2008, the state-run Consultative Council on Human Rights sued Al-Jarida al-Oula in an attempt to prevent the daily from publishing public domain testimonyfrom the Equity and Reconciliation Commission. In June 2008, a Rabat court orderedAl-Jarida al-Oula to stop publishing victim testimony. The newspaper appealedthe ruling even as it continued to publish excerpts describing torture, murders,and forced disappearances. The ruling was upheld by an appeals court inIn a regional survey, mostjournalists say theirmission is to drive reform.late 2008.In Bahrain, journalists facedprosecution for reporting on humanrights. Maryam al-Shrooqi, ajournalist for Al-Wasat, was triedfor writing an article about alleged religious discrimination in hiring practices atthe Department of Civil Services. The judge dismissed the most serious chargesagainst al-Shrooqi but fined her. Similarly, judicial authorities also sued journalistLamis Deif after she published a series of articles investigating family courtjudges and their rulings. “The government has created a culture of fear among reportersand columnists,” Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for HumanRights, told CPJ. “Those few reporters who try to write about human rightsare marginalized, threatened, and often prosecuted.”While bloggers and activists are bearing the brunt of the government counterattack,all journalists are feeling the heat. Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia,and Yemen, among others, have at times suspended the operations of satellitenews channels, particularly Al-Jazeera, for highlighting sensitive human rights,political, or religious issues.“There was actually more reporting of human rights kinds of issues and democracykinds of issues a few years ago,” said Marc Lynch, director of the Institutefor Middle East Studies at George Washington University. “Over the last year orso governments and the regimes have hit back quite a bit. The general repressionof the media, the crackdown on democratic activism across the region have alsotaken a toll on human rights reporting,” said Lynch, who is well-known in theregion for his blogging under the name Abu Aardvark. He believes the satellitechannels have become a little less daring in their reporting of late.Al-Jazeera anchor Mohamed Krichen disagrees. “No, our editorial policy hasnot changed. We report on human rights cases when they arise. They are an importantpart of the news, but do not constitute the entirety of our coverage. Weare a news organization, and not a human rights group, and our coverage reflectsthat,” Krichen told CPJ.“What we have,” said Pintak, a former CBS correspondent in the MiddleEast, “is governments in a halting, tentative, confused way trying to adapt to this204205