Category: Free Expression – Asia

When oligarchs go shopping…

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CP 20 juillet 2016_EN

“IT IS a worldwide trend. From Turkey and Russia to China and India, new media empires are emerging, usually with governmental blessing. Their owners comply with capitalist laws of supply and demand and the need for technological development. But, at the same time, they take strict control of news coverage or replace journalistic content with entertainment.”

In its latest report, “When Oligarchs Go Shopping,” Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres) looks at this curious, dangerous phenomenon. Excerpts from the report follow:

IMAGINE a world in which the mass media were the exclusive property of a handful of people, all business tycoons. Many people think that world has already arrived. Businessmen of every kind have been seized by the disturbing desire to buy up large numbers of major newspapers, TV channels and radio stations around the globe. No country, no continent – neither India, China, the United States nor Europe – seems to escape the appetite of these new oligarchs for media acquisitions.

Their latest feats include Jack Ma’s purchase of the South China Morning Post, one of the last champions of the free press in Hong Kong, a newspaper that did not hesitate to criticize the government in Beijing. Ma is the owner of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Where will these new media owners stop? Their ambition often matches their financial resources, which are limitless. In a recent book, Indian historian Nalin Mehta said his country, “the world’s biggest democracy,” has around 800 TV channels but all those that provide news coverage are owned by shadowy billionaires – including real estate barons, politicians and captains of industry – and that some of these channels are used to blackmail, promote personal interests and even launder money. “There is a coup underway in India,” writer and journalist Manu Joseph says. “Some people who are inconvenienced by democracy have taken over nearly all the country’s television news channels.”

Some of these billionaire businessmen boast of being able to make and unmake governments. Others enter into alliances with governments, offering them mass media support in return for economic favours. In all cases, their financial power combined with their control of media flagships gives them almost limitless influence, one far removed from the journalistic principles that their employees sometimes try to defend.

The victims of such unholy alliances include Turkey’s leading media, which are subjected to censorship that is much more insidious and sophisticated than the government’s usual repressive methods, censorship in which the oligarchs are accomplices.

“While the world is focused on the issue of jailed journalists in Turkey — almost all of whom are Kurds — the kiss of death to our profession has been bestowed by owners who consciously destroy editorial independence, fire journalists who voice scepticism and dissent and block investigative reporting3,” Yavuz Baydar wrote in 2013, while ombudsman of the daily Sabah after holding the same position with Milliyet.

Along with dozens of other journalists, he was fired for being too critical of the Erdogan government, which did not need to intervene because the media owners anticipated its wishes.

These new media oligarchs have prospered under Prime Minister and now President Erdogan, who anointed them and to whom they have remained loyal. “The problem is simple: one need only follow the money,” Baydar says. As in so many other countries, the leading media in Turkey have wound up in the pockets of businessmen active in such strategic sectors as telecommunications, banking and public works, a sector described by Baydar as a “fertile ground for carrot-and-stick policies.”

Media owners who support government policy can count on being rewarded with state contracts, licences, advertising and even tax concessions. The critical ones are silenced slowly and quietly. President Erdogan’s current “best friends” include such oligarchs as Ferit F. ?ahenk, the head of the very powerful Dogus Group (which controls NTV), Turgay Ciner, an energy sector billionaire who owns Haberturk TV and the Haberturk newspaper, and Yildirim Demirören, the CEO of an oil, gas, tourism and public works conglomerate who bought the prestigious big-circulation daily Milliyet in 2012.

Other media outlets have been bought up by pro-government oligarchs with disastrous consequences for media freedom. “Editorial content is strictly controlled by media bosses who have other business interests and are submissive to the government,” said Baydar. “With, or more often without, any direct government intervention, they impose self-censorship on a daily basis and silence colleagues who defend basic journalistic ethics.”

Furious with the way Milliyet “grovelled” before the government after it was taken over, the newspaper’s star columnist, Hasan Cemal, stormed out in 2013. The same year, thousands of Turks took to the street in protest against the government’s growing authoritarianism.

Dubbed “Occupy Gezi” after the Istanbul park that became its symbol, the protest movement held the international media spellbound for several weeks until forcibly crushed by the police. While all this was unfolding, Turkey’s leading TV channels contented themselves with broadcasting animal documentaries or debates on completely unrelated subjects. Their owners must have had other things on their minds.

Read RSF’s latest report “When Oligarchs Go Shopping” here.

Sheila Coronel: A Golden Age of Global Muckraking at Hand

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By Sheila Coronel*
From Global Investigative Journalism Network

Editor’s Note: We are pleased to present this transcript of the keynote speech by Columbia University’s Sheila Coronel at the 2016 conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors on June 19. Coronel, who has played a key role in spreading investigative journalism worldwide, spoke to 1,850 people — the largest ever gathering of investigative journalists — about networks, collaborations, nonprofits, and a new golden age of global muckraking.
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TEN YEARS AGO, when I first moved to New York and gave my first lecture at the Columbia Journalism School, I told students that I believe we are at the dawn of a Golden Age of global muckraking. They were a great class, but they didn’t believe me.

But look at where we are now: It may not feel like it to some of you, but we are seeing, like never before, an explosion of investigative reporting around the world. There are now over 100 investigative reporting centers and organizations outside the U.S. Today, there are muckrakers even in places like Armenia, Bulgaria, Nepal, Venezuela, the Arab world.

Ten years ago, I told my students that I believe we are at the dawn of a Golden Age of global muckraking. They didn’t believe me.

These watchdog groups have seeded the unprecedented collaboration of journalists working across borders and across newsrooms. This past year has shown us how far international investigative reporting has come. Three examples.

This was the year the Panama Papers shook the world. Some 400 reporters from nearly 80 countries produced stories that made headlines everywhere. Their reporting on a leak of 11 million documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca caused the downfall of Iceland’s prime minister, Spain’s industry minister and Armenia’s most senior justice official. It also sparked tax evasion and money laundering investigations in several continents.

Working together under the direction of the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists, these reporters proved ¬– once and for all – that there is no such thing as offshore secrecy. Thanks to them, tax-evading billionaires, kleptocrats, drug lords and assorted money launderers are quaking in their private jets. They can run but they can’t hide.

Also this year, Seafood from Slaves, an investigation by the Associated Press, won the Pulitzer Prize’s highest honor. A global team of AP reporters found thousands of poor workers from Laos, Burma, and Cambodia held in bondage by operators of Thai fishing vessels.

The AP’s reporting led to the release of 2,000 slaves like Myint Naing, who had been trafficked from Burma and found on one of the Spice Islands in Indonesia. He had been kept 22 years a slave.
Finally, this is also the year the Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova was released from prison.

Khadija was arrested in Dec. 2014 and found guilty of tax evasion, embezzlement and abuse of power. Her reporting had exposed how Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev and his family had snapped up state assets. Using shell companies and nominees, they squirreled their wealth in luxury goods and real estate around the world. And yet it was Khadija, not them, who was accused, tried and jailed.

Khadija would still be behind bars today. But journalists all around the world, including many of you in this room, wrote about her and advocated on her behalf with their own governments and with the EU and the UN.

Her colleagues in the Organized Crime and Corruption Project and elsewhere also collaborated on stories exposing the corruption of the Aliyevs. They called it the Khadija Project, after the IRE’s own Arizona Project.

A lot has been said about how technology has empowered the new global investigative reporting. But it’s not machines that made all this great work possible. It’s people. People like us.

Many of you know that in 1976, a team of investigative reporters from IRE got together after Dan Bolles, an investigative journalist at the Arizona Republic, was killed by a car bomb. They agreed to continue reporting the story that Bolles had not lived to tell.

Their principle was: You can kill the journalist, but not the story.

Similarly, the Khadija Project’s message to the Aliyevs was: You can jail Khadija, but you cannot put an end to exposés. In the end, the Aliyev government realized that the political cost of keeping Khadija in prison outweighed the benefits of setting her free.

Last month, Khadija was released.

A lot has been said about how technology has empowered the new global investigative reporting. The Panama Papers and similar stories benefited from software that allows reporters to communicate and share documents securely across oceans, and from algorithms that enable them to search millions of documents in real time wherever they are.

Dateline New Orleans: Coronel’s record crowd included journalists from 32 countries.

Technology has given us new tools for dealing with big digital leaks and new sources of information, including, as in the case of Seafood from Slaves, ship sensors and satellites.

But let me tell you this: It’s not machines that made all this great work possible. It’s people. People like us. The successes I’ve described demonstrate not so much technological power as collaborative power… the power of individual reporters working together to produce journalism that is greater than the sum of each of their individual efforts.

Since the late 1990s, journalists from around the world have been meeting regularly in conferences and training workshops – like this one — and working jointly on increasingly ambitious cross-border reporting projects. These activities – and also those spirited discussions after hours (and by spirited, I mean alcohol-fueled) – have fostered camaraderie and trust. They have laid the groundwork for a truly global and networked journalism.

The era of the lone wolf is over.

Local and national accountability reporting will continue to be important, but the muckrakers of the future will no longer be so tightly tethered to the nation-state. Crime, corruption, you name it, pollution, human trafficking, money laundering, tax evasion, viruses like Zika, purchases of luxury real estate, the food we eat, the clothes we wear: All these breach national boundaries.

Since the 1990s, journalists from around the world have been meeting regularly in conferences and workshops. These activities have laid the groundwork for a truly global and networked journalism. The era of the lone wolf is over.

And thanks to a global community of muckrakers, the barriers to doing cross-border reporting are no longer insurmountable.

A borderless world needs watchdogs who can transcend borders. The Panama Papers, the Khadija Project, Offshore Leaks are examples of how this can done. They showcase the new global, networked investigative journalism.

Today, the news industry is facing huge challenges in terms of falling revenues. Moreover, all around the world — even in countries that have a free press — governments, corporations and in too many cases, terrorists and demagogues, autocrats and mafia lords, are stifling independent reporting.

There is no silver bullet, no Holy Grail that will end this crisis of news. We are in uncharted terrain. The new, global, networked journalism provides us ONE path forward, ONE model for doing ambitious, high-impact accountability reporting efficiently, rigorously, more cheaply, also more securely.

The most daring and cutting-edge accountability reporting around the world is being done by nonprofits, financially fragile papers or online news sites, and freelancers. They are extremely vulnerable.

This network model is still fluid and evolving. Unlike traditional newsrooms, networked journalism is, for better or for worse, horizontal and non-hierarchical. Membership in the network is informal – there are no membership lists or dues. Members are linked by bonds of reciprocity and trust, and also by self-interest. Units within the network may be competitive, but they choose to share and to work together on specific projects and for particular goals.

Crime and corruption networks work this way and so do jihadist groups. Their activities and lines of communication reach across national borders. Like the mythical Hydra–many heads, hard to find, difficult to exterminate. There are hubs, but no single mission control. Cross-border journalist networks operate the same way, that’s why they are effective. As the Pentagon has now realized about fighting jidhadists, “It takes a network to defeat a network.”

But how can networked journalism be sustained? Until about a decade ago, investigative reporting in the US was robust because it was propped up by a support structure of profitable news organizations that invested in reporting, independent courts that protected press freedom and the right to information, journalism schools that trained the next generation of muckrakers, and prizes that celebrated outstanding work. And of course, there’s IRE. You don’t know how lucky you were, and still are.

Crime and corruption networks reach across national borders. There are hubs, but no single control. Cross-border journalist networks are similar. As the Pentagon now realizes, “It takes a network to defeat a network.”

Elsewhere, there are huge gaps in the support structure. The most daring and cutting-edge accountability reporting around the world is being done by nonprofits, financially fragile newspapers or online news sites, and freelancers. They can barely scrape the money for ambitious reporting. They are also extremely vulnerable to legal harassment and physical threats. In these places, the courts are compromised and governments are unable to protect journalists from those who would them harm.
In too many places, investigative reporting is a high wire act – without a safety net.

Behind its many successes, cross-border investigative reporting is a flickering flame. It needs to be funded and protected. But how and by whom? Who pays for a global public good?

For sure, we have vibrant organizations that keep the fire burning. The Global Investigative Journalism Network is the communications & resource hub for watchdogs around the world. GIJN organizes meetings that bring international journalists to talk about tradecraft. Many of the early collaborative reporting projects were conceived in the corridors of these global conferences.
We have watchdog groups in Latin America, Europe, Africa, and the Arab world that train journalists, bring them together to discuss common issues and problems, and also fund their work. The OCCRP reports on the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, and other regions on the issues of crime and corruption. And of course, you are all familiar with ICIJ’s stellar work as a hub for distributed, cross-border reporting. It’s headquartered in Washington, D.C. but its staff is a microcosm of the world: The ICIJ director is Irish & worked in Australia, his deputy is from Argentina; the data team is headed by a Spaniard, my former student Mar Cabra, and the chief data analyst is Costa Rican. And there are some very talented Americans there, too, of course.

But funding is tight. David Kaplan, the guru of GIJN, estimates that donors invest at most $20 million a year in international investigative reporting.

That’s about 0.2% of the 7 billion pounds worth of London real estate secretly purchased by prime ministers, business magnates and others using offshore companies established by Mossack Fonseca. Thanks to the Panama Papers, The Guardian found all these properties. Seven billion pounds.

In other words, the investment in global investigative reporting pays off. Massively. The reforms that the Panama Papers have set in motion worldwide will hopefully result in billions of dollars in recovered wealth or unpaid taxes. The OCCRP estimates that the total of money frozen or paid in fines since it started work has reached $3 billion.

The Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism has nearly single-handedly introduced investigative reporting techniques and the notion of accountability in the Arab world. In the past 10 years it has trained 1,600 journalists, including the Arab reporters who worked on the Panama Papers. If we know now that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his allies skirted international sanctions by registering shell companies in places like the Seychelles, it’s because of ARIJ.

What a spectacular return on investment.

Where there is despair that nothing can be done, we offer some hope that if we shine the light on the wrongdoing, the world can be a better place. I am proud to be part of this global community of muckrakers.

In the end, however, the most valuable investments in global watchdog reporting have been made by individual journalists willing to put their lives and their freedoms on the line in order to expose wrongdoing. Khadija Ismayilova remained in Azerbaijan to report, knowing that she would sooner or later end up in jail. Not many of us – I hope – will ever be in her situation but we’re inspired by her courage and strength of purpose.

Hamoud Almahmoud continued teaching an investigative reporting course at the University of Damascus, despite the artillery fire around him. “The university was very close to the frontlines of the fighting,” he recalled “I was teaching despite all the shelling.”

Hamoud is in Amman now, where he is research director of ARIJ. But many of his colleagues in Syria have been killed or fled the country. “We see the window of hope is narrowing,” he told me, “but we are surviving and we are still doing stories.”

Lina Attalah edits the independent website Mada Masr in Egypt that could be closed any time under onerous press laws. But she and her young staff continue to do investigative reporting in order, she says, to “activate the conversation, to reopen the political space, and engage the public in conversation.”

Oscar Martinez heads the investigative unit of El Faro, an online news site in El Salvador. He’s received numerous threats for his stories on gang violence and extrajudicial killings. Last year, he had to flee the country. He’s back but he has panic buttons and other security systems in his house. He can’t even take his three-year-old daughter to the park for fear of attack.

Oscar writes beautifully about the most horrific things that people do to each other. Recalling his reporting on migrants crossing from Central America to the US, this is what he told the Texas Observer:

If there are women who had the courage to tell you how they’d been raped along the path… you as a journalist don’t have the right to just pit that back out onto a page. You have to take the time, dedicate energy and put in a lot of work to write this the best way you can so that that person’s story can generate the feeling of impotence, the rage, the compassion and the hate that it should generate.

Writing, he said, is an ethical responsibility.

For Oscar, for Lina, Hamoud and Khadija, as it is for me, and I’m sure many of you, investigative reporting is more than just exposing the bastards, although that is immensely satisfactory. I started reporting during the twilight of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, when the press was so heavily censored, we couldn’t even publish photographs showing Imelda’s double chin. For me, investigative reporting is about opening up spaces, providing facts to inform intelligent public debate, making readers empathize with the suffering of others.

Where there is despair that everything is broken and nothing can be done, we offer some hope that if we shine the light on the wrongdoing, the world can be a better place. I am proud to be part of this global community of muckrakers. We can; we should; we must keep going and I hope – I KNOW – we will all stand together.

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*Sheila S. Coronel is Dean of Academic Affairs at the Columbia Journalism School and director of the school’s Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. She is co-founder and former executive director of the pioneering Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, based in Manila.

Philippine Data Summit marks Int’l Anti-Corruption Day on Dec. 9

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THE UNITED NATIONS will lead the global observance of International Anti-Corruption Day on Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015. Its theme highlights a global clamor — Break the Corruption Chain!

In the Philippines, the Office of the Ombudsman, in partnership with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, will mark the day with the conduct of an inaugural “Philippine Data Summit.”
Its theme, a clamor of all Filipinos, — Open Data We Want, Open Data We Need, Open Up Government.

The forum will be held from 8 am to 5 pm at the Crowne Plaza Manila Galleria Hotel in Quezon City.

Organized by the Office of the Ombudsman and the PCIJ, the event is being supported by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank.

The Summit celebrates the shared, firm resolve of state agencies, civil society organizations, civil servants, professionals, academe, and private sector to take the first steps in building a meaningful open data infrastructure that could serve as a pillar of good governance, transparency, and accountability in the Philippines.

It assumes greater urgency and relevance in light of the synchronized national, legislative, and local elections on May 9, 2016 that will usher in a new political administration.

Commissioner Heidi Mendoza of the Commission on Audit (recently appointed Undersecretary-General for Oversight Services of the United Nations) will deliver the keynote address. Commissioner Mendoza is the original proponent of the conduct of this multi-stakeholder national data summit.

A panel of resource persons will discuss thematic issues in the data supply-demand chain. They include:

* Deputy Ombudsman for Luzon Gerard Mosquera, who is also lead prosecutor in the pork-related corruption/plunder cases pending with the Sandiganbayan;

* Budget Undersecretary Richard Bon Moya of the Open Data Task Force of the Philippines;

* Atty. Nepomuceno Malaluan, lead convenor of the Right to Know, Right Now! Coalition; and

* Mr. Mario Demarillas of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners-Philippines.

The Summit and subsequent activities it is designed to enable will seek to achieve the following objectives:

* Harness the supply-demand chain of data on public policy and governance from the perspective of data producers and data users.

* Enhance the skills, capacity, and practice o all stakeholders in appreciating, accessing, sorting, analyzing, and popularizing data with governance metrics to inform public policy discourse, advocacy, and state-citizen engagement.

* Promote the cross-training, data-sharing, and institutionalization of data teams of content producers and tech teams in public agencies and civil society.

* Foster media and citizen awareness, use, analysis, and demand for data, in both quantity and quality, as these are relevant to public policy discourse, graft investigation and prosecution, delivery of basic services, and citizen engagement and participation for transparency, accountability, and good governance. — PCIJ, December 2015

Thai military detain reporter for ‘attitude adjustment’

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THE MILITARY in Thailand arrested on Sunday a prominent reporter and columnist of The Nation newspaper daily for “attitude adjustment.”

In a statement, Reporters Without Borders (RWB) called for immediate release of Pravit Rojanaphruk, who has reportedly been held incommunicado by the military since yesterday afternoon.

Pravit Rojanaphruk, who works for the The Nation daily, “was detained after responding to a summons for what the military authorities call ‘attitude adjustment,’” RWB reported.

Two military officers had previously visited the home of Pravit but failed to find him there.

According to RWB, the reporter “went to Army Region 1 Headquarters in Bangkok with Pawinee Chumsri of Thai Lawyers for Human Rights and UN representative Pokpong Lawansiri but they were not allowed to accompany him when he arrested. His mobile phone was also confiscated.”

“Pawinee was subsequently told that Pravit had been taken to another military base, the name of which the authorities have not revealed,” RWB said. “When questioned today by The Nation, the military officers responsible for issuing the summons continued to refuse to say where or why Pravit is being held.”

“We strongly condemn Pravit Rojanaphruk’s arbitrary detention by the military junta and demand his immediate and unconditional release,” said Benjamin Ismaïl, the head of the Reporters Without Borders Asia-Pacific desk.

“If the National Council for Peace and Order thinks he has committed a crime, it must refer the matter to the judicial authorities, who will announce what he is charged with and not hold him incommunicado without a valid reason. This is the behaviour of a dictatorship that is trying to intimidate independent journalists and encourage media self-censorship,” Ismael added.

Pravit is “a well-known critic of the junta and Thailand’s draconian lèse-majesté law, Pravit was already detained for seven days in May 2014, shortly after the military seized power,” RWB said.

Thailand is ranked 134th out of 180 countries in the 2015 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.

Leader, dealer, tyrant, thug?

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TINKER, TAILOR, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief.

That is an ancient rhyme.

President, prime minister, statesman, strongman, leader, dealer, tyrant, thug?

That could well be a rhyme for our time.

In their own words, see how some heads of state and government speak about, talk to, or pipe down the press, according to the latest report of Reporters Without Borders.

* Gen. Prayut Chan-o-cha of Thailand, asked at a news conference on 25 March 2015 what the government would do to journalists who do not stick to the official line, said: “We’ll probably just execute them.”

On 5 March 2015, celebrated as “Reporters Day” in Thailand, he said journalists should “play a major role in supporting the government’s affairs, practically creating the understanding of government’s policies to the public, and reduce the conflicts in the society.”

* Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung of Vietnam has tagged journalists as malevolent enemies and dismissed revelations about communist party corruption as “despicable stratagems by hostile forces.” Dung has threatened outspoken bloggers with “severe punishments,” and sent at least 27 citizen-journalists and bloggers to jail. In 2012, the Vietnamese authorities prosecuted 48 bloggers and human rights defenders, sentencing them to a total of 166 years in prison and 63 years of probation.

* President Xi Jinping of China, at a joint news conference with US President Barack Obama in November 2014, was asked by a New York times reporter if Beijing was going to lift its restrictions on foreign journalists working in China. The New York Times had run in 2012 a report on the wealth of then Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s family. Xi replied: “In Chinese, we have a saying: ‘The party which has created the problem should be the one to help resolve it.’ So perhaps we should look into the problem to see where the cause lies.”

The New York Times has not been able to appoint new China correspondents because the government systematically refuses to give them visas.

* President Thein Sein of Burma has waned media during a radio address in July 2014, his words were not taken lightly. “If media freedom threatens national security instead of helping the nation, I want to warn all that we will take effective action under existing laws.” Seven journalists have been jailed in Burma since the start of 2014. Usurping the press council’s role, the authorities have taken it upon themselves to act as the guarantors of journalistic ethics and to severely punish media outlets deemed guilty of professional misconduct

* Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia often uses the newly-reinforced Sedition Act to order prosecutions of journalists, bloggers and other critics including the cartoonist Zunar. Najib does not hesitate to directly and publicly threaten media outlets with legal action, saying he is ready to listen to “constructive criticism” from journalists, but when they cover abusive government practices, he orders police raids designed to censor and deter media from continuing to cover Malaysian politics freely.

.President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela rarely misses an opportunity to accuse foreign news media such as CNN en Español and the Miami Herald of waging an “international campaign” against Venezuela. In September 2014, he referred to a plan to “poison and dump their poison on Venezuela and elsewhere in the world,” using virulent language to accuse the media of being biased and pursuing a hidden agenda.

* President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, in his weekly TV broadcasts known as “Enlaces Ciudadanos” (Citizen Liaisons). attacked the editor of the Crudo Ecuador website, threatening to “respond with the same weapons/” In reaction to a TV presenter’s comments on plans to eliminate term limits for elected politicians, he accused journalists of using “the opposition’s dishonest discourse to demonize what is perfectly legitimate, democratic and transparent.”

* President Juan Orlando Hernández celebrated 25 May 2015 as the Day of the Journalist but in response to allegations of his ruling National Party’s involvement in embezzling social security funds lashed out at “pseudo-journalists [who] dissemble, distort and invent.”

* President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an of Turkey has called journalists who criticize him as “ignorant”, “agents of subversion”, “foreign spies” or even some kind of “terrorist.”

* President Ramzan Kadyrov of Chechnya, who mixes private and public posts on Instagram, says Muscovite and foreign journalists systematically distort the truth. His nefarious reputation, the summary methods employed by his militiamen, and the tragic fate suffered by many of his opponents lend a great deal of weight to his words.

Journalists who dare to highlight structural problems or criticize the government directly receive immediate warnings that can quickly turn into direct threats or intimidation of family members, RWB said. “The Turkmen, Uzbek and Kazakh leaders have suppressed pluralism so effectively that virtually no critical journalists are left.”

* President Milorad Dodik of the Republika Srpska, the Serbian part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, on 14 March 2014, in response to a question from Gordana Katana of the independent daily Oslobodenje during a news conference about a relative of his who had been given a prison sentence and was on the run. His response: “When I look at you, I understand why you are always negative. Nothing positive can come from you, anyway (…) The fact that you raise these subjects is not surprising. You come from a newspaper of a certain kind and, obviously, from an ethnic background of that certain too. You do it on purpose.” Dodik subsequently ordered all government departments to cancel their Oslobodenje subscriptions.

When a woman journalist with the TV programme 60 Minutes asked him a question, he replied: “You work for 60 Minutes? It’s a really lousy programme, it’s complete crap (…) I see that you at least are presentable. But you’re not pretty.”

* Hungary’s deputy prime minister last year described investigative journalists as “traitors” and said they were working for a “foreign power.”

* In France, the leaders of the far-right National Front often insult and intimidate journalists, treating them with a hostility that is increasingly seen across the entire French political spectrum.

Journalists in Africa are often treated as spies, terrorists or traitors, and are subjected to threats and physical attacks (that are rarely punished) and to judicial harassment designed to discourage them from investigating potentially embarrassing stories.

* President Yayah Jammeh of Gambia said in 2011: “The journalists are less than 1 percent of the population, and if anybody expects me to allow less than 1 percent of the population to destroy 99 percent of the population, you are in the wrong place.. I don’t have an opposition. What we have are people that hate the country, and I will not work with them.”

Investigative journalism is too often accused of being a form of opposition politics. Obviously there are politicized news media in Africa, but journalists who do nothing more than call on the authorities to account for their actions or draw attention to the population’s problems find themselves accused of “hating their country and government.”

* President Alpha Condé of Guinea in November 2014 said journalists “can do anything they like (…) They can write what they want. It is of no importance. I don’t read newspapers, I don’t go online and I don’t listen to radio stations… I don’t give a damn what Reporters Without Borders writes (…) they don’t rule Guinea. I’m not scared of international law or human rights (…) Everyone will respect the law in Guinea.”

* The bodyguards of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, at an African Union summit in Cairo in 2010, manhandled a British journalist who dared to ask on what basis he considered himself president. “Are your security guards going to hit me in front of the cameras?” the journalist asked. The enraged Mugabe replied: “Stop asking stupid questions. You are an idiot.”

Mugabe brushed aside a journalist’s questions in a similar fashion in April 2014, saying: “I don’t want to see a white face.” His security detail forced several journalists to delete the photos they had taken of him falling as he left Harare airport in February 2015.

Instead of direct verbal attacks on journalists, Middle Eastern leaders usually resort to illegal arrests, arbitrary prison sentences, torture and enforced disappearances when expressing their contempt for the media.

Journalists in the Middle East are often convicted on such charges as “disseminating false information endangering state security,” “supporting or condoning terrorism” or “disturbing public order.” Many have been treated as spies, liars or idiots, but few presidents have publicly voiced such accusations.

* President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has been very inaccessible since the start of the crisis in Syria although it is the world’s deadliest country for journalists.

* President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria has also been rarely exposed to the media since his health deteriorated.

* Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei of Iran has never given an interview or news conference since taking over in 1989. In 2000, he described the pro-reform press that had emerged since President Mohammad Khatami’s election in 1997 as “a base of operations by foreign enemies inside our country.” The comment was accompanied by an order to carry out raids on journalists and media outlets.

Since then, at least 300 media outlets have been closed as “foreign enemies within the country,” thousands of news websites have been censored and more than 500 journalists, bloggers and other online information activists have been arbitrarily arrested, tortured and given long jail terms, while many others have had to flee abroad. New media and satellite TV stations broadcasting to Iran from outside the country are the latest targets. Iran is now one of the world’s biggest prisons for journalists.

* President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt has accused journalists who do not toe the government line of being “terrorists.” Not that a great deal is said on the subject. Sisi’s regime prefers imprisonment to insults.