Praising Those Who Risk Their Lives To Inform Us

(Posting may get sporadic again starting tomorrow – not sure yet…)

I should apologize at the outset because, though I was out of commission towards the end of last week anyway, I could not acknowledge Saturday May 3rd as World Press Freedom Day (of course, our media organizations with acronyms for names didn’t bother acknowledging that either since they were preoccupied with still more rehashing of a certain black Chicago preacher, pictures of Miley Cyrus’s semi-nude back, and the tragedy of putting down a horse with broken ankles in the middle of a racetrack).

As correspondent Mark Fitzgerald tells us here…

The annual snubbing of World Press Freedom Day by U.S. newspapers and other media is yet another indication of our insularity. This is a big deal in the rest of the world. There will be demonstrations in Paris and London. In Mozambique, Unesco, the UN agency that created the day 15 years ago, will present the 2008 Unesco/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize to the courageous Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho Ribeiro (pictured), who was arrested and sued for criminal libel by state authorities covering up for the ring of powerful pedophiles she exposed in her reporting.

And of course, the world’s biggest offender when it comes to jailing of journalists is the one holding the lion’s share of our debt, as it turns out…

Just this Thursday, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) said at least 10 foreign journalists based in China have received death threats.

In a poll several months ago, club members reported 180 violations of the "liberalized" media restrictions, including arrests and surveillance of journalists. The poll also included the question, "Has China kept the promise made by Olympics Games organizer Wang Wei in Beijing in 2001, that, 'We will give foreign media complete freedom of reporting.'"

Just 8.6% of members said yes it had.

The news is barely any better at many other countries in the world also, as noted here.

And Fitzgerald also tells us…

On Wednesday, for instance, the Hong Kong government denied entry to Zhang Yu, a Swedish-based editor and coordinator of the Writers in Prison Committee of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre, who was coming to the city for an international conference on freedom of expression in China.

WAN reports that this is the third time Zhang, who holds a valid Chinese passport, has turned away from his homeland in just the last year. The reason given is that his work for PEN, the free expression group, somehow endangers national security.

And lo and behold, that alleged threat to “national security” is the exact same reason Bushco opposes passage of a media shield law currently awaiting activity within Congress (based on this, it looks like the Senate has to “keep this ball rolling”; since we pretty much ignored World Press Freedom Day in this country, I think following through on this piece of legislation is the least we can do).