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Burmese Government Continues Crackdown on Media,...
In a week where the headlines out of Burma were dominated by the final nail on the coffin of Aung San Suu Kyi’s presidential ambitions, little attention is being paid to the government’s all-out assault on the independent media company Eleven Media Group. According to a Freedom House bulletin re... |
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Turkey Election Presents Political Opportunity t...
The election June 7 in Turkey dealt a significant blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plans to transform Turkey’s government into a presidential system—which would have significantly strengthened his political dominance over Turkish politics. Turkish voters may have also provided an openi... |
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State-Sanctioned Freedom of Expression: Russia a...
Guest post by Ariana Szepesi-ColmenaresRussia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has just returned from a three-day trip to Latin America, where he met with government officials from Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Colombia. This tour comes only a month after the visit of Sergei Shoigu, Russia... |
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All Cybersecurity All the Time, Part II
As noted in an earlier blog post, cyber surveillance, cyber security, cyber threats, cyber everything has become the flavor of the month in the Washington think tank circuit lately. This week’s entry into the field was provided by the Brookings Institution at a book launch and discussion Wednesday... |
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Journal of Democracy 25 Years In: An Interview w...
Taking the Temperature of Democracy “When we started, it was a time when, suddenly, democracy was moving to the center of public consciousness,” Marc Plattner, the co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, says. “There was not a wide literature on democracy in developing countries.” Plattner, a... |
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A New World Order: Journalists versus ‘Democra...
Journalists are no longer special. That is Joel Simon’s sad but all-too-true assessment of why journalists are becoming an endangered species in many parts of the world. By CPJ’s count 60 journalists around the world were killed in 2014. “We live in an information age, and yet the people who b... |
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Russia’s Citizen Journalists
Citizen journalists played a key role in discovering evidence related to the recent Malaysia Airlines plane crash in Ukraine. Sleuths posted images of what was purported to be a missile launcher near the crash site, and fellow netizens tracked down corroborating images and information. Similar insta... |
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Soft Power on the Air: The News with a Russian T...
When the Malaysia Airlines plane crashed in eastern Ukraine last week, the Russian state media began to spread obvious disinformation and anti-Ukraine propaganda. With fabricated witnesses and unlikely hypotheses, consumers of Russian media received a disturbingly false picture of this international... |
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Treading Softly: Soft Censorship in Russia
Only a few brave souls will continue to produce objective, high-quality news when they have many incentives not to do so. Independent news sources in Russia face increasingly higher risks of litigation, verbal attacks by government news sources, or shutdown. Journalists must practice self-censorship... |
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The Last Frontier: Regulating Independent Media ...
Russian dissidents have used the Internet to organize protests and to speak out against corrupt officials and unjust practices. Putin has termed the Internet a “CIA project” and recognizes the power it gives to his opponents. The Kremlin is taking calculated steps to decrease the reach of indepe... |