Think Pieces

Alberto Spampinato, president of Ossigeno per l’Informazione. He spoke during the CFOM Panel session on ‘media capture’ at the Sheffield Hallam University International Journalism Summer School on June 28, 2019.

Addressing Global Challenges to Journalism and Press Freedom” was the theme of the International Summer School hosted by Sheffield Hallam University in cooperation with the University of Sheffield in the last week of July 2019. On 28 July CFOM’s international director William Horsley chaired a Panel Session on “Media Capture as a threat to democracy and press freedom.

On a snowy February 2019 evening over 150 demonstrators gathered in front of the public television (TVP) building in the centre of Warsaw. We shouted “Shame!”, “Employ journalists!”, and “TVP lies!”. The old theme tune of communist era TV news blared out of loudspeakers as an accompaniment to the protest. A squad of police officers had cordoned off the entrance to the building and was escorting TVP employees as they came out through the angry crowd.

New research and analysis supports the UN Special Rapporteur David Kaye’s findings from his 2017 Japan report and presents fresh cases pointing to need for remedial actions by the Japanese government.

In 2017 the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation handed down an exceptionally important decision. It struck down a series of previous convictions handed down against Elena Nadtoka, the editor of a local newspaper in the Rostov Region, and instructed the local courts concerned to reverse their verdicts. The move followed a final ruling from the European Court of Human Rights on what was seen as a crucial test case in the struggle for survival of free media in Russia.