asianaffairs-March 2008                       

                                Journalism

Hazards of the profession

It can be a dangerous business: (1) to criticise the royal family in Thailand; (2) to raise the problem of the influence of religion in Afghanistan; (3) to oppose Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore; or (4) to expose corruption among those close to prime minister Hun Sen in Cambodia. So says Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based media watchdog that defends imprisoned or persecuted journalists and fights censorship the world over.
In its annual report for 2007 the organisation says the Asian continent turned into a battlefield for journalists, with 17 killed during the year and nearly 600 assaulted or faced with death threats.
Among the worst offenders were the authorities in Pakistan, where security forces arrested 250 reporters, frequently clubbing them first for reporting protests against President Pervez Musharraf ‘or  at their own demonstrations against restrictions imposed on them under the state of emergency’.
In Sri Lanka journalists on the Tamil-language newspaper Uthayan barricaded themselves in their offices for fear of being gunned down by paramilitaries in the streets of Jaffna. In Burma, soldiers ordered to restore order in September shot dead a Japanese reporter and hunted down Burmese cameramen and photo-graphers. In North Korea one man was executed for making a telephone call to a for-eign country; and in China in the run-up to the 17th Chinese Communist Party Congress in October, the Propaganda Department closed down thousands of websites, blogs and discussion forums.
‘Not one of the promises made by the authorities to secure the 2008 Olympics was kept’, the report says. ‘At least 180 foreign journalists were arrested, physi-cally assaulted or threatened in China, even though at the time the Games was awarded in 2001 an official said: “There will be total freedom of the press”.’

Reporters Without Borders adds: Asia has never had so many privately owned TV and radio stations and news websites, all trying to provide the   public with news of which they have been deprived for so long. Seven of     the world’s ten highest-circulation dailies are now Asian and the continent boasts the largest number of Internet-users.’

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