At least two journalists have been killed in West Papua, five abducted and 18 assaulted in the past year.
Press freedom
Holmes: FoI doesn’t mean freedom to spice up the facts
Just because Freedom of Information requests cost lots of money and time, doesn’t mean that journalists should give in to temptation and beat up the facts to make the story ‘worth’ the effort, writes Jonathan Holmes.
WikiLeaks update: Corruption in Tunisia, an “Arab force” and the party of the decade
As Julian Assange fronted court in London this morning and the media storm continue to circle around the enigmatic whistleblower, his WikiLeaks website continued its drip feed of secret cables sent from US embassies around the world. Today, more than 100 extra cables were published. Here is a summary of the best of them.
Crikey Says: Mr World Press Freedom Day
As we were mulling over the idea of an editorial about WikiLeaks and the importance of the free flow of information, we stumbled across a media release this morning that captured the essence of the subject far better than we could put it …
The pyramid of corruption ruining Egypt’s free pess
The editor of independent Egyptian newspaper al-Dostour got the boot yesterday. Why? Because he wanted to publish an article written by the Opposition leader in a country where government censorship rules.
scandal 
Pentagon bans journalists from Gitmo trial
The Pentagon has banned four US reporters from the Omar Khadr trial at Guantanamo Bay after they reported the name of a witness whose identity is under protective order. It’s another embarrassment in a disastrous trial, says Scott Horton.
The 40 top predators of press freedom
Reporters Without Borders has named its annual list of press freedom “predators”. This year, Russian PM Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao join Hall of Famers like Robert Mugabe and the Italian mafia.
Mark Scott: The trouble with reporting the truth
Today is World Press Freedom Day. ABC boss Mark Scott reflects on the lack of free speech, government censorship and media control in countries — Fiji, Sri Lanka etc — less fortunate than our own.
Obama’s Soviet-style summit
Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit may have been deemed a “success”, with 47 nations signing a pact to keep nukes out of the hands of terrorists, but rumblings from the DC Press Corp is that the press’s access was so severely restricted, it felt like Soviet-era Moscow.
The price tag on doing business in Russia
You only have to spend a few days in Moscow, as I did last month, to realise that whatever advancements may have occurred under the Putin/Medvedev regime, Russia remains a highly undemocratic quasi-dictatorship, writes Crikey publisher Eric Beecher.
News Corp’s press freedom hypocrisy
News Ltd chairman John Hartigan gave quite an entertaining and interesting address for the Andrew Olle memorial lecture last Friday. However, there was a touch of hypocrisy in some of his comments when you consider what his boss Rupert Murdoch was doing in New York a couple of hours later, writes Stephen Mayne.
