OCTOBER 2025
October 22-24 Presentation at Civil Sphere Working Group Meeting, Vienna, Austria
In October 2025, the UNESCO Chair on Media Freedom, Journalism Safety and the issue of Impunity participated in the Civil Sphere Theory Working Group meeting at the University of Vienna. She presented a research paper titled: State Power and The Civil Power of The News: A Power Matrix. This work builds on and develops her work on the Civil Power of the News and her work on media freedom as the UNESCO Chair.
In the presentation, she discussed how the exercise of state power toward news journalism seeks to bring particular types of communicative conditions under which news journalism is forced to operate in constant tension with state power and she is currently writing a book on this area of her research.
May 2025
May 2-5 World Press Freedom Day, Brussels, Belgium
CFOM Researchers travelled to Brussels, Belgium, to take part in the Academic Conference as part of World Press Freedom Day. The UNESCO Chair delivered opening remarks as part of the conference alongside Dr. Tawfik Jelassi (right), Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, UNESCO and Dr. Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova (left), Associate Dean Global Engagement, University of Liverpool.
The UNESCO Chair and CFOM Researcher, Dr Diana Maynard, along with Free Press Unlimited’s Jos Bartman, hosted a panel as part of the conference. The panel spoke about their project focusing on monitoring. The project aims to improve the understanding of the contextual predictors of lethal and non-lethal violence towards journalists.
As things currently stand, adequate monitoring of attacks against journalists is currently lacking, especially in line with UN SDG 16.10.1, which specifies the categories of killing, kidnapping, enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention, torture and “other harmful acts”.The UNESCO Chair spoke specifically about how different communicative contexts in which journalists operate across the world and are decisive in understanding that attacks on journalists don’t emerge out of thin air. She provided a new typology of four different scenarios in order to better understand and assess the communicative conditions in which journalists are expected to operate.