Donald Trump’s pugnacious defence of his under-fire Attorney-General, Jess Sessions, is part of a wider pattern of disregard for truth in which he sees the news media as his main enemy. It is the latest twist in Mr Trump’s evasion of scrutiny about the core matter on...
The British media have been accused, along with the politicians, of doing a poor job of informing the nation about the great issues thrown up by Brexit, the biggest story for a generation. Is the criticism justified? A review of the course of the great debate over the...
On Monday Sir Alan Moses, the former Appeals Court judge who chairs the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), publicly applauded the ‘implacable opposition ‘ of the British press to the controversial Section 40 of the 2013 Crime and Courts Act, which...
In many parts of Europe the freedom of the media is under serious threat not only from restrictive laws but also from a wide range of administrative and informal constraints and pressures. In Poland the government has already enacted a law to take direct control of...
CFOM Lecture by Guy Berger, UNESCO Director for Freedom of Expression and Media Development. Below is an overview of the CFOM annual lecture written by our International Director William Horsley. Lecture and debate: ‘Your right to know relies on justice for...
The Commonwealth has a credibility problem. For many years Commonwealth heads of government and senior officials have made public commitments—like those proclaimed at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting summit at Coolum in Australia in 2002—to ‘democracy, the...
On 26 September the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva adopted Resolution A/HRC/33/L.6 on the safety of journalists by consensus – that is, with no objections and no vote. It’s the latest of 8 resolutions adopted by UN bodies in the past four year alone related to the...
Journalists everywhere need to wake up to the new normal: states all around the world are using anti-terrorism, state security and other laws to constrain, harass or lock up questioning journalists. They need to up their game in response. That message has been voiced...