In this Aug. 1, 2009 file photo released by the semiofficial Iranian Fars News Agency, Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari attends a news conference after his trial in Tehran, Iran. Photo by: AP Photo/Fars News Agency, Hossein Salehi Ara

When the U.S. Treasury Department announced in February that economic sanctions would be imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Iran’s state-owned broadcaster, it cited human rights violations as justification for the unusual move.

“We will also target those in Iran who are responsible for human right abuses, especially those who deny the Iranian people their basic freedoms of expression, assembly and speech,” Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen said in unveiling the restrictions, which also applied to Iranian Cyber Police and other institutions involved in monitoring the Internet and producing equipment for jamming foreign broadcasts.

Treasury’s message was clear: IRIB, as the broadcaster is known, is more than a propaganda arm of the Iranian government. It is also, in Treasury’s view, actively complicit in Iranian government efforts to repress dissent.

Iran’s abysmal record on freedom of the press has been documented by advocacy groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, which last year put Iran fourth on its list of the  “10 Most Censored Countries.” Much of the advocacy focus has been on Iran’s jailing of journalists – 45 were in prison at the end of last year, and there are predictions of more repression as the country heads into presidential elections in June.

“This is a regime that has consolidated their power based on preventing information and cracking down on journalists,” said Sherif Mansour, expert on the Middle East region for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “The arrests come in waves, especially during election season.”

While police may carry out the arrests, the Treasury Department said IRIB assists in repressing free speech by broadcasting “distorted or false” news reports, and by broadcasting “forced confessions of political detainees,” such as the false confession given by Iranian-Canadian Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari before state media in 2009.

“Iran’s media strategy is more complex than it appears,” wrote CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon in a recent blog. “[T]he Iranian government believes it is engaged in a war of ideas with the West and uses the media to make its case to the global public.”

IRIB, the broadcasting arm, has four international TV channels reaching over 45 countries, eight national channels, and 30 provincial channels in local dialects. It also publishes several magazines and owns a movie production company. Under the February sanctions. IRIB cannot conduct any financial business with a company or individual that has business in the United States. Treasury also said IRIB’s director is included in the sanctions for his “involvement in the Iranian government’s censorship activities.”

Iran’s Foreign Ministry condemned the sanctions as “the latest series of hostile actions against Iran,” adding that Iran will make every effort to “neutralize the new pressure,” in different Iranian news reports.

Western experts say that international sanctions have had a significant impact on Iran, which is grappling with oil revenues that have fallen 45 percent and high inflation caused by the economic restrictions.

But sanctions so far have not succeeded in achieving their ultimate goal: to win concessions from Iran on its nuclear program. And targeting Iranian state media is not likely to change that, because media are “not linked to Iran’s nuclear enrichment,” said Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, president of the International American Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank on the Middle East.

Currently, there are no IRIB offices in the United States. PressTV, IRIB’s English-language news channel, was available in North America via Galaxy 19 satellite platform but it was dropped after the new sanctions were announced, according to reports from Al-Jazeera. Intelsat, which owns and operates Galaxy 19, said the satellite broadcasts over 250 channels in 40 languages, with content from 66 countries worldwide. A company brochure said that at least 79 percent of the Iranian-American population in the U.S. subscribes to Galaxy 19 channels.

PressTV has reported confirmation that its programming was dropped from North American service.

EDITORS NOTE AS A RESULT OF AN OFFICIAL IRANIAN GOVERNMENT BAN ON FOREIGN MEDIA COVERING SOME EVENTS IN IRAN, THE AP WAS PREVENTED FROM INDEPENDENT ACCESS TO THIS EVENT

In late January, Twitter shut down the account of the Somali militant group al Shabaab, apparently for violating the Twitter Ruleagainst publishing “direct, specific threats of violence against others.” Less than two weeks later, though, the al Qaeda-linked group was back on the social media site with a different username – the latest evidence, say critics, that Twitter’s policing policy needs an overhaul to prevent use by groups identified as “terrorists” by the U.S. government.

Twitter’s deactivation of Al-Shabaab’s account in January and the user’s return to the social media network has revived a debate about an increasingly blurry boundary between freedom of speech and censorship

Al Shabaab’s first Twitter account, @HSMPress, was launched in December 2011. Twitter deactivated that account in January after it published plans to kill a hostage – a French commando who was the target of a failed rescue attempt. CBS News reported about the tweet and posted al Shabaab’s photograph of a corpse – a man in a dusty black shirt stained with blood, with two camouflage-colored guns placed on his body.

Though Twitter did not make a public statement about its action, social media analysts said that by posting the photograph and publishing threats to execute hostages, al Shaabab would have been in violation of Twitter’s terms of service, and subject to account deactivation.

Days later, under a new account named @HSMPress1, al Shabaab tweeted its defiance: “Shooting the messenger and suppressing the truth by silencing your opponents isn’t quite the way to win the war of ideas.”

Al Shabaab’s move underscores the inconsistency in Twitter’s policing policies, said critics. “Twitter’s policy on extremists comes off like one guy who knows nothing about the subject clicking around at random looking for trouble,” tweeted JM Berger, a terrorism analyst on al Qaeda and domestic U.S. extremism.

Others say Twitter is simply taking a very liberal approach to enforcing use of its platform.

“Twitter tends to err on the side of free speech,” said Daniel Terdiman, a senior reporter for the technology publication CNET. “That seems to guide many of their decisions about whether to shut down individual accounts.”

That liberal policy is under fire from some groups calling for a ban on social media use by al Shabaab and other militant groups. In September, seven House Republicans asked the FBI to force a Twitter shutdown of accounts used by 52 groups designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the State Department. Leading the charge was Ted Poe, R-Texas, a member of the House Judiciary Committee’s terrorism subcommittee, who sought a Twitter ban on Hamas and al Shabaab.

“Allowing foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas to operate on Twitter is enabling the enemy,” Poe said in a statement to The Hill.

The Republican effort is also backed by Christians United for Israel (CUFI), a California-based group that has petitioned the U.S. Attorney General in San Francisco, where Twitter is based, to demand that Twitter ban designated terror organizations from its service. The group argues that a ban would be justified on grounds that the primary mission of such groups is “terrorizing the Israeli people and using civilian deaths to score political points.”

Calls to ban Hamas or al Shabaab from Twitter need to be based on specific tweets, according to Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “To the extent that an organization like al-Shaabab is using Twitter to disseminate unprotected speech, the government can ask Twitter to shut it down,” he said. “But apart from that, there shouldn’t be that broad right to say that we don’t like this group and they don’t get to speak.”

Although the momentum for new restrictions does not appear to be strong, there is a growing debate on the power of digital media platforms and whether their use by certain organizations should be more regulated.

U.S. First Amendment traditions and court rulings have long upheld the concept of a robust national public forum that protects controversial speech. But globalization, technology and differing standards around the world have put new pressure on the U.S. approach.

“As we move toward a world in which the United States is increasingly integrated in and dependent on the actions of other nations, we are re-encountering a realm of censorship that is reminiscent of the world as it existed in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century,” wrote Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, in his book Uninhibited, Robust and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century.

Legal and media scholars argue that technological innovation should not change the commitment to freedom of speech – and that allowing extremist groups to use a platform like Twitter does not amount to giving them “material support.”

“We do believe that designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations should still be allowed on Twitter,” said Jillian York, freedom of expression director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  “Just as The New York Times is not barred from interviewing Hassan Nasrallah,” a top leader in Hezbollah, which is on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organization list, “nor should Nasrallah be banned from using a different medium of communication,” said York.

Al Manar, Hezbollah’s media outlet based in Lebanon, has more than 43,000 followers on its Twitter account. Past efforts by the Israel Law Center, Shurat HaDin, to force Twitter to shut down the account proved unsuccessful.

Twitter’s multinational scope requires it to comply with the laws of the country where it is accessed, which has led to an emerging country-by-country policy. In Germany, Twitter moved to block a neo-Nazi group’s tweets in accordance with Germany’s anti-Nazi law. Although the group’s tweets are unavailable to the population it is seeking to reach, an international audience outside of Germany can access the account.

The action in Germany opened Twitter to criticism that it was censoring speech. In a rare public statement, the company’s blog acknowledged the difficulties of operating in a world where social and legal standards can differ from one country to another.

“We will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” the company stated. “Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. The Tweets must continue to flow.”

The photograph shows the main newsroom of PTV World in Islamabad. The 24-hour state English news channel was inaugurated on January 29th, 2013 by Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari. Photo Courtesy: Omar Khalid Butt

With the slogan ‘Changing Perspectives’ and a goal of presenting Pakistan to the rest of the world as a vibrant, modern Islamic state, state-owned Pakistan Television Network at the end of January launched a 24-hour English-language news channel called PTV World.

Amid the fanfare in the launch, there was no mention that PTV World is the fourth such broadcasting attempt in Pakistan  – or that the previous three, all failed financially.

The earlier failures may not offer much guidance on how well the state’s service will perform, though. Each was an attempt by a private broadcaster to build an advertising base that would support a 24-hour, English-language news channel. Advertising may be irrelevant to PTV World – which relies on state financing to keep it afloat – as long as the government agrees to keep funding it.

“The State TV is not concerned about profit or loss,” said veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. “It wants to do a job even if it means taking losses.”

That “job,” according to Aly Naseer Ahmed, one of PTV World’s senior staff, is to get Pakistan’s point of view out to the world – and to combat stereotypes presented about the country in the West. It’s a goal shared by other state-funded, satellite-delivered English-language news channels started in recent years by Russia, China, France and other countries.

The failures

PTV World may be state sponsored but it has a difficult journey ahead in finding a significant audience, if the previous three English-news efforts are any guide.

The first English-language TV news channel, Dawn News, was launched in 2007 by the owners of Pakistan Herald Publications, whose flagship Dawn newspaper was the country’s first English-language paper.

“The goal of Dawn News was to capture the readers of its newspaper and the niche clientele of Pakistan who have the money in the country,” said Nasir Malick, a longtime journalist who was one of the executive producers of the Dawn News channel.

Dawn News was available as a cable channel within Pakistan, and it was distributed by satellite to Europe and the Middle East. Its programming featured a steady lineup of shows anchored by polished professional journalists. The flagship nightly program Newseye was hosted by Saima Mohsin, known for her hard-hitting interviews. But despite its strong editorial content, Dawn News failed to sell enough advertising to pay its bills; after nearly three years on the air, it dropped the English format and continued broadcasting in Urdu.

While Dawn News English was still on the air, Pakistan’s largest newspaper group sought to launch a competing channel, Geo English. The Jang Group already had an Urdu-language news channel, Geo News. But its ambitions for Geo English were high; none of the editorial staffing was to be shared.

Maria Memon, who worked on plans for a Geo English talk show, said Jang Group did not want to share correspondents between its channels “because English press in the country is relatively freer.” Those hired for Geo English included journalists who had studied abroad. “The staff at Geo English had better ideas, their execution of news packages was superior, and the reporters were also more natural in front of the camera,” said Memon.

Omar Khalid Butt one of the senior anchors of PTV World sitting beside the logo of the channel. Photo Courtesy: Omar Khalid Butt

But the planned launch of Geo English in 2008 was thwarted, when Jang Group came under fire for broadcasts criticizing then-President Pervez Musharraf for ousting the country’s Chief Justice. Musharraf’s government retaliated by refusing to issue a license for Geo English; by the time Jang did receive a license, the company had concluded that a private, English-language news channel could not survive financially in Pakistan.

The third private, English-language channel, Express 24/7, was launched in February 2009 by the Lakson Group. Dawn News was already broadcasting, and Lakson wanted to undercut Geo English by getting on air before it. The channel shared resources with its sister Urdu channel, Express News.

“Express 24/7 was launched in competition with Geo English,” said Nasir Malick, who became executive producer of the new channel after Dawn News English folded. “The channel was launched without any proper thought or planning.”

Despite the rush to air, 24/7 built a reputation for strong reporting on breaking news, and for a program, ‘The Platform’, which was in collaboration with U.S.-funded Voice of America. The Platform brought guests together from Washington and Islamabad, and it brought in an important revenue stream for the channel, with VOA financing.

Express 24/7 was broadcast nationally through cable and via satellite in South Asia and the Middle East. After three years, when its contract with VOA ended, Express 24/7 had not built up enough advertising revenue to sustain itself, and it folded.

Chasing ad dollars

In Pakistan, the primary source of income for private news channels is advertisements, which are sold based on audience ratings for each channel. About 1500 monitors are placed inside homes across Pakistan to measure audience size. But most of the monitors are in Karachi, and critics of the system say there are too few monitors to accurately calculate the viewing habits of Pakistan’s 182 million residents.

Nevertheless, advertisers place ads on news channels based on the ratings recorded by this monitoring system; the higher the rating, the more ads the channel will get. English-language channels are at a great disadvantage because they compete with popular, well-established Urdu channels, in a country where the literacy rate is only 58 percent and many don’t speak English. Journalists say this system was the downfall of the three earlier attempts to establish English-language news services.

That should not affect PTV World, said Syed Talat Hussain, a prominent Pakistani television journalist. Its parent company is subsidized by the 30 rupees a month that Pakistanis pay in their utility bills as a fee to Pakistan Television Corporation.

“Dawn News closed down because of financial reasons. They should have first started an Urdu channel and then an English one,” Hussain said. “Express 24/7 relied too much on money obtained from the contract with Voice of America, so when ‘The Platform’ came to an end, the channel also shut down.”

The earlier channels were also hurt by the fact that they had to compete against foreign English-language broadcasters, whose programs are available in Pakistan, said Hassan Askari Rizvi, a political analyst and visiting professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Political Affairs.

“English language news channels have to cater to the taste of those watching international English news channels in the country,” among them, BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera English, Sky News, Fox News and Bloomberg, said Rizvi.

PTV World faces that same dilemma within Pakistan. The channel also can be seen in 62 countries via satellite. Officials of the company declined to give any details about the costs of the news channel and its global transition, though they confirmed that the government has committed to funding its programs for at least one year.

The funding underwrites 12 programs, including Viewers Digest, a magazine-style show focused on lifestyle, and Perspectives with Faisal Qureshi, an interview program. Pakistan Debate with Sidra Iqbal features experts debating current issues, and other shows focus on education and foreign policy.

As far as the news policy of PTV World is concerned, analysts are divided about how the channel will pan out. “Channels are all about brand recognition. PTV World is part of the PTV family of channels and it cannot be objective,” Hussain said. “In order to be a separate entity, it needs to be rebranded as a completely individual channel.”

But another seasoned journalist Mohammad Malick believes that PTV World will enjoy greater autonomy and will be more liberal than its state-run Urdu counterpart.

“PTV World is a promising channel and a good initiative has been taken in launching it,” he said. “The channel is having a good run, and I have noticed that when I was invited on its shows multiple times, that the government was being blasted left, right and center.”

This photo illustration shows hands typing on a computer keyboard on Wednesday Feb. 27, 2013. Security threats aren’t new and have long been part of online life. But the increased attention on them offers a good time to review ways you can protect yourself. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

When the New York Times revealed in late January that Chinese hackers had infiltrated its digital network, including reporters’ email accounts, reaction exploded on Twitter and other social media sites. People speculated that this was yet another example of China’s rising power in the world. But then there was this tweet from writer and reporter Charlie Custer, who manages the translation website ChinaGeeks.com.

On the one hand, NYT hacking is a big story. On the other hand, is it? Isn’t this happening to most foreign correspondents constantly?

— Charlie Custer (@ChinaGeeks) February 1, 2013

That reminded Howard French, the former Shanghai bureau chief of the New York Times from 2003 to 2008, of an earlier era of surveillance.

“I caught people trying to bug my room on my very first reporting assignment,” French said recently at his office in Columbia Journalism School, where he now teaches a seminar on covering China.

The Twitter conversation is a reminder that for foreign correspondents who have worked in China, the former Soviet Union, or other authoritarian regimes, surveillance is nothing new.

In the pre-Internet 1980s, for example, when media professor James Schiffman reported in Beijing for the Asian Wall Street Journal, he assumed that virtually everyone he came in contact with was a government spy. Chinese authorities assigned him and other foreign journalists to live in segregated compounds, where officials could easily track their actions and monitor their phone calls. Translators, drivers and any other employees he hired had to come from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Formal interviews were closely monitored, often with “lots of people sitting in and taking notes,” Schiffman said.

But today’s electronic surveillance is far less visible and difficult to detect, because it doesn’t take place out in the open in any physical environment. The danger for journalists is that it puts both them and their sources — people who may be under threat already for talking to journalists — at risk.

Before email became a ubiquitous form of correspondence, reporters could notice when someone was following them, or connect the messy state of their apartment with a missing notebook and know that someone had broken in.

“The difference is that it’s now possible for professional teams of hackers to access your information without breaking into your house,” said Eva Galperin, the international freedom of expression coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group based in San Francisco.

The lack of obviousness means that digital surveillance can be far harder to detect. Most people can’t tell when a digital break-in has occurred. Programs that have become installed or uninstalled on a computer, such as a firewall that has become disabled, are signs of a break-in. So are unusual IP addresses, which suggest someone might be logging into a computer from a remote location. But people usually only notice these indicators upon careful examination of their network activity and internal files.

The result of this lack of understanding and inspection for journalists is that they may not take proper care to protect their sources and the information they provide.

Galperin said the issue is particularly acute for activists and journalists reporting on the conflict in Syria because of the government’s active involvement in trying to lock down information. In the fall of 2011, for example, British journalist and filmmaker Sean McCallister put the lives of several activists in danger when Syrian authorities arrested him and seized his laptop, mobile phone, camera and footage, according to “Kardokh,” a computer expert in Damascus whom McCallister interviewed. Kardokh had been in touch with McCallister for a documentary about underground Syrian activists. Kardokh said in a report in Columbia Journalism Review that McCallister had seemed careless when it came time to encrypting his footage so that others couldn’t access it.

“He was using his mobile and SMS, without any protections,” he said.

When news broke that McCallister had been arrested, activists who had been in touch with him fled the country, including Kardokh, who immediately turned off his mobile phone and escaped to Lebanon. Those who didn’t leave Syria were also arrested, and at least one disappeared, Kardokh said.

McCallister described his fears for the Syrians who assisted him in an interview with Channel 4 News after he was released. “I didn’t realize exactly what those guys are risking until I went into that experience and my God those guys are brave,” he said.

A Syrian man connects on his Facebook account at an internet cafe, in Damascus, Syria, on Tuesday Feb. 8, 2011. (AP Photo/Muzaffar Salman)

Galperin also found that pro-Syrian government hackers were using malware, or malicious software programs, to target Syrian activists. The malware would spread through email, chat and links left on social media accounts from what activists would presume would be trustworthy accounts. They would then spy on the activist’s webcam activity, steal passwords, record key strokes and disable the notification settings for certain antivirus software programs. And just as one can’t tell when a digital break-in has occurred without careful examination, detecting malware is also difficult.

“Usually they [Syrian activists] don’t know their accounts have been compromised,” Galperin said.

The same is true for reporters from mainstream news organizations.

“I certainly operated on the assumption that my emails were read, all of them, in China,” said Melissa Chan, the former China correspondent for Al Jazeera English who is now a fellow at the John S. Knight Foundation at Stanford University.

Chan covered China from 2007 to 2012 and knows firsthand the difficulties of reporting on the ground and maintaining digital security in the country. She’s received emails of purported “Jasmine Revolution” pictures in China, for example, meant to lure her into clicking on malware. Chan has also noticed suspicious-looking vehicles appearing suddenly during reporting trips, often after she’s checked into a hotel. By law, every foreigner in China must provide passport identification when checking into a hotel so staff can send the information to a local police station.

Chan’s experience is testimony that physical espionage still occurs. But Internet surveillance has reduced the investment perpetrators need to make when it comes to spying on journalists and others, said Milton Mueller, an information studies professor at Syracuse University. The goal may be the same, but the means to achieve it has changed dramatically.

“The technologies are very different, and that creates a different set of opportunities and methods,” he said. “The main thing the Internet does is change the scale. You used to need physical spies, now you don’t need to have people on the ground.”

Journalists are especially vulnerable to virtual attacks because they are highly connected individuals whose work relies on cultivating trust, said Stephan Koch, a digital security trainer for Reporters Without Borders, a non-profit group that defends freedom of the press and information. They are like walking libraries whose sources may be those whom others are trying to target — including government officials and underground activists.

“To target journalists, you can save a lot of time,” Koch said. “That information [about sources] is only in the head of the journalist.”

But in modern-day reporting, the “head” of a journalist also includes where he or she stores information — online and in devices.

For those worried about digital security, the problem isn’t that journalists aren’t aware of the necessity of protecting sources. It’s that the majority of journalists don’t understand the gravity of cyber threats, and that everything they do online can be traced to the real world.

“Security is not about tools,” said Frank Smyth, a security expert who works with the Committee to Protect Journalists, a press freedom advocacy group. “It’s a way of thinking, and it requires a certain level of preparation and then execution.”

That means journalists shouldn’t wait until after an account is compromised before utilizing Google’s two-step verification process when logging into a Gmail account, for example. They should also know how to use a VPN, or virtual proxy network, to change the location of an IP address. These preventive measures can greatly reduce one’s risk of being hacked or found physically — but the journalist first has to have an awareness of vulnerability.

Security experts agree it’s time people lock their digital information the way they would a house, and that the journalism industry must recognize how crucial training is in helping journalists to understand the threats against them — and their sources.

“People somehow operate and act differently [online] than they would in real life,” said Chan. “The reality is, digital life is our real life now.”

“There is no technological solution that can give you complete security,” Smyth added. “Because if people know who you are, then you’re at risk. It’s just harder to figure out what that means digitally.”

Charlie Custer, the reporter who wondered whether today’s digital surveillance is really that different from the past, said he suspected he’d been targeted by hackers when he noticed that emails relating to freelance reporting on China were disappearing from his account. “I thought something was wrong with the spam filter at first, but nothing was in the spam folder and it seemed to be only emails related to freelance employment that was getting affected,” he said in an email interview.

“So I checked and saw some logins on my account from an IP address that clearly wasn’t my own, although it was also located in Beijing,” he said. “I changed my password and added two-step authentication, and that seemed to stop it.”

*******

No technological solution offers complete security. But the following resources contain more information on how you can protect yourself online:

- The Committee to Protect Journalists “Journalists Security Guide”

- “How to Secure Your Digital Parameter,” from the John S. Knight Foundation

Kashmiri journalists sit during a protest in Srinagar, India, Thursday, Aug. 25, 2011. The protest was against alleged recent attacks and harassment of journalists by the Jammu Kashmir police in Srinagar. Photo Credit: AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan

At 2 a.m. on February 9, the Indian government declared a curfew in Indian-controlled Kashmir.A few hours later, Kashmiri residents understood why: New Delhi had decided to execute Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri convicted in a 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament.

Guru’s hanging was the final act of a controversial case that India knew could spark street protests by many Kashmiris, who claimed charges against Guru were weak, and that he was used as a scapegoat. So once news of the hanging and the strict curfew—which forbade residents from even stepping out of their homes—was delivered by radio, television, and the Internet, New Delhi cut off all cable news and Internet service to the disputed Himalayan territory.

“In the aftermath of Afzal Guru’s hanging, the government put an unofficial gag on media,” said Shujaat Bukhari, Editor in Chief of Rising Kashmir. “We were asked by police—though informally—not to publish our newspapers.”

A few papers however, did not take the “order” seriously, and had to deal with the consequences. Showkat Motta, Editor of Kashmir Reader, said copies of his newspaper were seized in a police raid soon after they were printed.

The communications blackout remained in place for four days.

India’s near total clampdown on the Kashmiri press and communications with the outside world might seem at odds with its standing as the world’s largest democracy. In fact, though it’s little noticed, India routinely ranks low on international press freedom indices. And journalists in Kashmir are among the most frequent targets of the Indian government’s press freedom attacks.

“We were dealing with a week under curfew, without any passes, and severe restrictions on a journalist’s movement,” said Parvaiz Bukhari, a journalist based in Srinagar, Kashmir, who was forced to remain at home during the curfew without access to the Internet, thus delaying any reporting on the situation by a few days.

Claimed by both India and Pakistan, Kashmir has been a flashpoint for over 60 years; tensions between Indian armed forces and Kashmiris have led to more than 70,000 civilian deaths in Kashmir, according to human rights organizations. Curfews and media bans like the one in February are not unusual. Many Kashmiris complain that New Delhi represses their basic rights, so India’s national holidays tend to be seen in Kashmir as a time to protest – not celebrate. New Delhi reacts with frequent curfews and media bans, like the one in the wake of the February hanging of Afzal Guru.

India’s record in Kashmir helps explain its low rankings by press freedom advocates, but such abuses are frequent in India. The latest World Press Freedom Index released by the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders placed India 140th of 179 countries, its lowest ranking in a decade, due to increasing impunity for violence against journalists and growing Internet censorship. Last year, five journalists were killed because of their work in India, six media companies reported arson attacks, and more than three dozen other cases of threats or assault were recorded in the 2012 Free Speech Report from India’s media watch group The Hoot.

“When we launched our Free Speech Tracker in 2010, even we didn’t expect to record as many violations as we are today,” said Geeta Seshu, who works with The Hoot. “But the general climate is one where the freedom we do enjoy and have gotten used to is in peril.”

Press freedom advocates say that India’s poor record gets little international scrutiny because it is overshadowed by the country’s image as one of the world’s emerging economies. Though growth over the past year dropped to five percent, the lowest in a decade, economists predict a rebound in 2013, keeping India in place as Asia’s third biggest economy, according to a Bloomberg News survey.

And at a time when print media in most of the world are reporting ongoing economic decline, circulation and ad revenues continue to rise at Indian newspapers, creating a global perception that the country’s media are thriving.

Newspapers are sold at a very low price in India, and so they depend more on advertising revenue. “We are not in the newspaper business, we are in the advertising business,” said Samir Jain, vice chairman of Times of India newspaper, in a New Yorker interview last year. The Times boasts the largest circulation of any English-language newspaper in the world—4,300,000—but Jain says 90 percent of his paper’s revenue comes from advertising.

Local Kashmiri photographers Yawar Nazir, left and Showkat Shafi wait for treatment after they were assaulted by police and paramilitary forces during a protest in Srinagar, India, Friday, Nov. 25, 2011. Photo Credit: AP Photo/Dar Yasin

Seshu says that Indian media organizations have a poor record of taking up cases of attacks on press freedom, perhaps due to “competition or indifference,” and because many media organizations have close ties with business and politics. “Both are sources of aggression against press freedom,” she said, and so in many instances, Indian media organizations are reluctant to criticize their friends in politics who repress them.

Some editors and publishers exacerbate the press freedom situation by failing to defend their own journalists, she said. “In the case of journalist deaths, media houses in India have shrugged responsibility and even denied that journalists were employed by them, despite documentary evidence to the contrary,” she said.

In 2012, Rajesh Mishra was the first journalist reported to have been killed in India in four years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. CPJ said his death apparently came in retaliation for reporting on corruption in local schools in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. Indian police arrested at least six people in connection with his killing, but there have still been no convictions.

The Indian government’s increasing willingness to censor content on the Internet also has sent its free speech and press ratings plummeting.  The Google Transparency Report ranked India second to the U.S. in demanding removal of online content, with 2319 requests in the first half of 2012. In one well-publicized case last November, two girls from Maharashtra were arrested after one of them posted a Facebook comment criticizing a government transportation shutdown that brought Mumbai and surrounding areas to a standstill for almost two days. She was arrested, along with a friend who ‘liked’ the comment, though both were released after public outcry.

In Kashmir, several youth were arrested for ‘controversial’ Facebook status updates in 2010 as well.They were initially charged under the same Information Technology Act, which bans speech on the Internet that causes “annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will.” Shortly after, they were charged for being a threat to peace and public property under the Public Safety Act, a preventive law under which an individual’s detention can continue up to two years without trial.

Pranesh Prakash, director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, says the controversial Information Technology Act, drafted in 2008, is so sweeping and vague that most of India’s Internet users could be imprisoned under its language.

“I have 3,500 followers on Twitter, and I’m pretty sure I annoy 100 of them on a daily basis,” he said.

In the weeks since India’s execution of Afzal Guru, Kashmir’s media has returned to business as usual—which, in this heavily militarized, powder keg state means daily trying to strike a balance between direct intervention from the government and self-censorship.

Indian-controlled Kashmir is consistently ranked by press freedom and human rights groups as having one of the highest numbers of attacks on journalists and media freedom in India. Text messages on prepaid cell phones have been banned since 2010; the Indian government says texts are used to spread rumors that lead to protests. Cell phone services are blocked every year in the region on Indian national holidays. In October 2012, the Indian government blocked access to Facebook and YouTube, to “prevent access to the controversial anti-Islam video” that insulted Islam’s prophet Muhammad, and was sparking protests in parts of the Muslim world.

A few weeks prior to this ban, Azhar Qadri, a correspondent for The Tribune newspaper, was assaulted by police while covering a peaceful student protest outside a college in Srinagar.

“When I asked the police officer why I was being assaulted, he responded with more assaults,” said Qadri. “When I told him I am a journalist doing my job, he asked his armed guards to arrest me and take me to the police station.”

Qadri eventually was released, with no explanation, after his phone, diaries and other possessions were confiscated. Such instances are common experiences, according to journalists in Kashmir.

They are also a factor in India’s drop to 140th place on Reporters Without BordersPress Freedom Index.

In 2012, India was placed at 131 on the same index, in 2010, it was at 122, and the year before, it was at 105.

“That steady decline in press freedom,” said Sandip Roy, culture editor at FirstPost.com, “should be a wakeup call for India.”

James Foley, Aleppo, Syria, November, 2012. Photo credit: Nicole Tung.

James Foley was supposed to arrive by 4. It was Thanksgiving, and Foley, a freelance journalist covering the war in Syria for GlobalPost and Agence France-Presse, was going to meet his friend Nicole Tung, another journalist, in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli to catch up and rest for a couple days. But Foley never showed.

“I was starting to worry after 6, 7 p.m., when things were very quiet,” Tung said. “By 10, 11, I knew that something had definitely gone wrong.” When she was finally able to get in touch with someone in Syria who had seen Foley (the witness’s identity is being withheld), Tung learned her friend had been pulled from the cab he was riding in and kidnapped at gunpoint.

Tung knew the responsibility fell on her to get the bad news to Foley’s family in New Hampshire. Then it would be up to them to decide what to do next — and whether to make the news public.

But while there are hostile environment training programs and security handbooks that offer concrete advice to journalists on how to avoid being kidnapped, or increase their survival chances if they are, there is no guidebook or set protocol to follow once a journalist actually is taken hostage. And for families and news organizations, deciding whether to make the news public or ask media not to report it is often the first dilemma.

“Every case is different. There’s no sort of one way to approach it,” said Paul Steiger, chairman of ProPublica and the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal when Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Pakistan in 2002. “Sometimes a media blackout can help a person or group of people who have been kidnapped, and sometimes publicity is the best course.”

For the Foley family, the news of their son’s kidnapping — and the burden of choosing what to do next — must have seemed like a cruel déjà vu.

In 2011, Foley, freelancing for the GlobalPost in Libya, was captured with three other journalists when the group came under fire from forces loyal to the Gaddafi regime. Anton Harmmerl, a South African photographer, was killed in the attack; Foley and the other two were captured and interrogated, and one was accused on Libyan state television of being an American spy.

Soon after the kidnapping the Foleys and the other families decided to go public. Media attention was seen as a way to both legitimize the captives as journalists —and not spies — and put pressure on the Libyan government for their release. Six weeks after their capture — and after media publicity and very public appeals from the United Nations and the U.S. State Department — Foley and the others were set free by the Libyan authorities.

But last November was different. This time, the Foleys had no idea where or by whom their son was being held, or even whether he was still alive. In the absence of information, and on the advice of security experts, they decided to remain silent.

“I think it’s very difficult to launch a media campaign when you don’t know who you’re putting pressure on, and this was the case with James,” said Tung.

For six weeks, news of the capture was silenced. Any journalists who may have contacted GlobalPost or Agence France-Presse about Foley were asked not to reveal the kidnapping, just as journalists who contacted NBC about Richard Engel were a month later, when the correspondent and his team were also taken hostage in Syria.

Such news blackouts have become a well-established tradition among American media, particularly when a journalist is captured by insurgents seeking ransom.

In 2008, in perhaps the most elaborate media silencing, the New York Times for eight months muffled news that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Convinced Rohde was extremely valuable to the U.S. government, the captors were demanding $25 million in cash and the release of 15 Guantanamo prisoners in exchange for that of Rohde.

After some debate, Rohde’s family and Bill Keller, then the editor of the Times, decided on a blackout to avoid stoking the captors’ already-exaggerated ransom demands.

“If somebody finds out that you’re a big fish—that you’re a really big, well-known journalist,” said Frank Smyth, senior adviser for journalist security at the Committee to Protect Journalists, “it’s like, ‘man, we can get some more money out of this, or maybe get more money out of this than we get before.’”

Rohde, who escaped captivity eight months later, was grateful for the blackout. His Taliban captors “relished defying the United States,” he said. “There was no way that public attention and calls for release from journalist groups were somehow going to pressure them to release me. They loved it. They would ignore the outcry.”

But while imposing a media silencing is usually seen as the best course when captors are demanding ransom, the best course of action is much less clear when the motive is political, said Smyth.

When Jill Carroll, then a Christian Science Monitor reporter, was captured in Iraq in 2006, her captors threatened to kill her unless all female detainees in Iraqi prisons were released within 72 hours. Nearly three months later, after a huge media campaign for her freedom and the release of five female Iraqi prisoners, she was released unharmed.

28-year-old U.S. journalist Jill Carroll is welcomed by Base Commander, Col. Kurt Lohide after she landed at the U.S. Airbase in Ramstein, southwestern Germany, Saturday, April 1, 2006. Carroll was a hostage in Iraq for 82 days.  Photo credit: AP Photo/Michael Probst)

“The press [coverage] in that situation I think ended up helping her,” Smyth said, “because it raised the political pressure and raised the potential political cost of harming her.”

But press attention does not always work, of course.

When Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, was kidnapped by Pakistani militants in 2002 and accused of being a spy, his captors emailed a list of demands to the U.S. government, including the release of Pakistani nationals from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. Pearl’s plight inspired an enormous, international media campaign. But nine days after his capture, with the demands unmet, he was beheaded.

The kidnappers’ “motivations were purely political, so I don’t think [the media attention] was going to help one way or another,” said Smyth.

After Rohde’s escape, and the extent of the silencing was revealed — even Wikipedia had cooperated in censoring its page — a debate emerged over the merits of such blackouts. While most journalists and media analysts supported the Times’ decision to protect its reporter, others criticized the organization for brazenly — and perhaps selectively — contradicting its mission of serving the public interest through reporting.

“What about the next story?” wrote Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute in an op-ed directed at Times editor Keller. “Will you set aside your role as a watchdog, as the paper of record, in order to preserve a life? The next time you are challenged by a newsworthy kidnapping, I believe you’ll put journalism first. You’ll return to your role of holding the powerful accountable and informing the citizens who count on the Times to deliver the most important, accurate stories of the day.”

After his kidnapping, the Times, according to Rohde, did establish a policy, which he agrees with, of providing blackouts to even non-journalists — aid workers, contractors, soldiers — when news of their kidnapping would likely further endanger them. But still, he said, as a journalist he could see possible situations where a kidnapping’s news value might outweigh the potential safety benefit afforded by a blackout.

“I wrestle with it,” he said. “It would have to be a pretty senior public official. I would say a senior public official, not an ordinary soldier or low-level diplomat. I just think you always have to consider: ‘Is this going to potentially endanger someone?’”

There’s also no guarantee a blackout, even when requested, will ultimately be honored.

A couple of days after Richard Engel, chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, and four members of his team were captured by an extremist group loyal to the Syrian regime on December 13, Turkish outlets Hurriyet, a leading newspaper, and NTV, a national broadcast network, broke the story of the kidnapping (Aziz Akyavas, a Turkish NBC correspondent, was among the group). Still NBC, citing safety concerns, requested media organizations refrain from reporting further on the capture, and American media did — except for the website Gawker, which defied the request and reported on the Turkish dispatches.

“No one told me anything that indicated a specific, or even general, threat to Engel’s safety,” wrote Gawker editor John Cook in defense of his post on the kidnapping. “No one said, ‘If you report this, then we know, or suspect, that X, Y, or Z may happen.”

Most journalists, many of whom had sharply criticized Cook after he defied the request, weren’t convinced.

“Gawker took a lot of grief for that, and I think rightly so,” said Smyth. “It’s like ‘Well, there’s no evidence that it would put him at risk.’ There’s no evidence that it wouldn’t put him at risk, either. You’ve got to err on the side of caution.”

But what’s the side of caution when you don’t have any information to go by?

On January 2, more than six weeks after James Foley disappeared, his family decided to go public, pleading to his captors for any information about their son. The next day, in a news conference outside their snowy New Hampshire home, a somber John and Diane Foley were asked what had happened to make them change their minds about releasing the news.

“We don’t have any information,” answered Diane. “We just don’t. And that’s one of the things. We just don’t have any information.

“It’s been six weeks.”

That was January. More than three months after the Foleys went public — and more than 130 days after the kidnapping — James Foley remains unaccounted for. John and Diane are still seeking information about their son. At least four other journalists are known to be missing in Syria.

Newspaper hawkers collect the Burmese comics and daily newspapers at a distributing point in Rangoon on Friday July 12, 1996.(AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

More than a year after Myanmar’s authoritarian regime began enacting broad political reforms – including easing harsh restrictions on media — early euphoria is beginning to give way to caution and skepticism.

Among the high-profile changes that have won praise from western governments was the announcement that a new media law would be drafted by a press council, made up of 28 non-government experts.

Although the law would need approval in the national parliament, allowing civilian experts to propose how they should be governed was unprecedented in Myanmar, which was ruled for decades by military dictators..  It’s one of the reforms singled out for praise by United Nations investigator Tomás Ojea Quintana, in a recent report on Myanmar that is due to be considered by the UN Human Rights Council this month.

But within days of Quintana’s report, the Burmese government released its own press law, apparently preempting the work of the press council. The February 27edition of the official newspaper, New Light of Myanmar, published the government’s draft law. It was quickly denounced by journalists in Myanmar, and by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which criticized its ban on certain reporting topics and its call for six-month prison sentences for failing to register a news publication with the government.

The government’s draft law “threatens to reverse fragile press freedom gains,” said CPJ. The government, it seems, has given the media a stern reminder that though they are freer, they are far from free.

***

The government’s surprise action was dismaying for a press corps that only last August was freed from a censorship regime requiring media to submit articles for government approval before publication. President Thein Sein’s end to prior censorship was among the reasons that the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, which ranked Myanmar 169th out of 179 countries in its 2012 press freedom index, bumped its rating up to 151^st this year.

“These reforms would not be taking place if the ruling regime was not recognizing the fact that Burma wants to enter the global community,” said Barbara Swann, a lawyer specializing in media development who recently visited Myanmar.

Last month, Swann hosted a delegation of journalists and government officials from Myanmar, who came to the U.S. to consult legal experts and policymakers about drafting a media law. But by the time the group returned to Myanmar, the government appeared to have preempted their effort, by issuing its own draft law.

Hope for a Free Media

In addition to abolishing the decades-old censorship law the government permitted exile publications to work in Myanmar, and it allowed many foreign journalists to enter the country, particularly during historic parliamentary elections last April. Mizzima, a publication that had published in exile, moved its operations to Yangon and on February 4 announced it would begin using the name ‘Myanmar’ instead of ‘Burma,’ a political move displaying acceptance of the regime.

Writing “bye bye Burma, mingalarbar (hello) Myanmar” on the front page, Mizzima announced, “we have acknowledged the advancement in this country and the process of reform has been sufficiently inspirational to bring us into the fold. We are investing in the new Myanmar, and we are changing with the times.”

A U.S. government official specializing in Myanmar said that Mizzima’s move to Yangon, as well as that of exiled magazine The Irrawaddy, was “a real vote of confidence.”

The Irrawaddy, unlike Mizzima, continues to use ‘Burma’ instead of ‘Myanmar,’ which could be considered a snub to the regime. The Irrawaddy is considered one of the most outspoken exile publications and continues much of its operations from  Thailand rather than inside Myanmar.

Drafting a Press Law

One of the government’s most high profile media decisions last year was the naming of an interim press council. The council, whose term lasts one year, can mediate complaints from government or others about media coverage; about 40 complaints have been heard in the six months since the council was formed, according to council member Thiha Saw, a magazine editor and vice president of the Myanmar Journalists Association, who was part of the delegation in the U.S. last month studying media law.

The council also has debated a code of ethics for journalists, which will “pave the way” for a new media law, said Dr. Kyaw Zaw Naing, a law professor and journalist in Myanmar. But the government’s sudden announcement that it had drafted a press law seemed to throw the council’s purpose into question.

According to March 4 article in The Weekly Eleven, a Myanmar newspaper, the press council called the government’s draft bill “a return to the censorship of the past.”

The government’s action is a worrisome sign for those – like Thiha Saw – who arguethe real goal should be to move toward removing all laws that restrict media.

“We do want total freedom of the press, like what you have in the States,” said Saw, in an interview during his New York visit. “Ultimately, we don’t want any law at all, but we need one (temporarily), so we want it to be the best in the region.”

Among the most important changes needed, said Saw, is an end to government licensing or registration of media. Under the ministry’s draft law, a registration regime would continue, giving government authority to “suspend our licenses, thus controlling us. This is indirect censorship,” he said. Freelance journalist Kate Hodal said the government had used its licensing authority most recently to shut down Hnyo, Myanmar’s first sex education magazine, after its editors published photos the government deemed too risqué. “Given the government can revoke your publishing license at any time,” said Hodal, “many journalists say that they now self-censor to keep themselves and their publications safe.”

Ordeals Ahead

Self-censorship remains a pervasive problem in Myanmar’s  media, said Shawn Crispinof the CPJ. To avoid trouble, journalists shun topics like corruption, military issues, and criticism of the former regime, he said.

“Local publications have self-censored any backward looking reporting on the abuses that took place under the previous military junta,” which included the current president, said Crispin. “Burma is consistently ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt countries but there have been few if any stories digging into that corrupt past.”

”We don’t touch the cronies,” agreed Saw. “If you want a smooth, ‘velvet’ revolution, you can’t touch the cronies.”

The Irrawaddy and Mizzima may be more willing to test the waters on sensitive issues, since they maintain their prior exile bases in Thailand. For the independent local media, such as The Weekly Eleven and The Voice Weekly, it is a different story.

Last year, the Ministry of Mining filed a defamation lawsuit against The Voice Weekly after the newspaper published allegations of corruption within the ministry. The lawsuit was eventually dropped when it came to light that The Voice Weekly had obtained its evidence from public documents. But the threat of defamation suits has left journalists fearful, according to one journalist who did not have authorization to speak on the record.

Hodal, however, said there is a multitude of courageous youth eager to join the ranks of existing reporters. “There is a burgeoning sense of daredevilishness and audacity,” she said. “The younger journalists expect openness… they are aware of Burma’s place in the world and what else is happening outside their own borders.”

Despite the recent setbacks and the government’s seemingly unrelenting grip on the media, Burmese journalists will stop at nothing until they see change. Saw, speaking on behalf of the press council, said, “Our job is to push for reforms…until they reach a point of no return.”

Pope Benedict XVI pushes a button on a tablet at the Vatican, Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012. Photo credit: AP/Gregorio Borgia

In his last year as pope, Benedict XVI made several moves that appeared aimed at reshaping his legacy in the Catholic Church.  First, the Vatican hired Greg Burke, a top Fox News commentator to manage communications for the Holy See.  It also cooperated with the Catholic News Service’s expanded television coverage of the Vatican.  And, in perhaps the least important, but most covered move, a Twitter account was opened in the pontiff’s name (@Pontifex, which in Latin means both bridge and pope).

But none of these moves changed the fact that the Catholic Church is woefully out of date in the digital age of instant communication.

“The Church feels that the media will not accurately reflect the message that the church wants to put out,” said John Thavis, who covered the Vatican for Catholic News Service for 30 years.  “Benedict has deepened the sense of what it means to be Catholic,” but you could tell that the pope emeritus was getting “pushed into” Twitter.

Just how much church communications live in the past was evident when the pope read his resignation speech in Latin.  In theory, the message should have been immediately understandable to all clergy present in the room—Latin is supposed to be used for all official purposes. But Benedict’s announcement seemed to both clergy and reporters doing double takes: was their Latin rusty, or did the pope just resign?

Benedict’s choice of language caused a momentary lag in a usually lightning-speed globalnews cycle.  The pontiff did not even issue a tweet that he was stepping down—a social media faux pas.

“The Church thinks in centuries—it is diametrically opposed to the 24-hour news cycle,” said Rocco Palmo, author of the online Vatican-watch blog, Whispers in the Loggia, in a telephone interview from his home in Philadelphia.  Palmo, who operates using a network of Vatican insider sources, said that the Vatican offices typically close at 3 p.m., and smart phones are a rarity among its staff.

While media outlets buzz about who will be the next pope- and blogs such as Palmo’s chart daily movements inside the Vatican walls—the 2000-year old institution itself seems unsure of how to deal with media attention.

In fact, inside the Vatican, any publicity about an individual cardinal can be perceived as “campaigning” for the post of pope—and thus, decrease the cardinal’s chance of actually becoming the next pope.

“There is an Italian saying—walk in a pope, walk out a cardinal,” Palmo said, offering the example of Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson, who created a huge media buzz after he gave an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour a day after Benedict XVI’s resignation.  During the interview, Turkson said that the Catholic Church in Africa had not experienced, the same problems of sex abuse that plagued American and European churches because, said Turkson, “African traditional systems have protected its population” against homosexuality.

The interview did not help Turkson’s case to become pope, but his bigger sin may have been that he appeared on a major network television show to discuss the papacy in some detail.  “High profile brings with it high suspicion,” Palmo said.

Of the 115 cardinal electors, only nine are active Tweeters, including Cardinals Timothy Dolan, Sean O’Malley and Roger Mahony from the United States, two cardinals from Italy, one from each South Africa, Spain, Columbia and Brazil.

These nine cardinals have all been instructed to leave social media behind during the conclave- in keeping with the tradition that cardinals are locked into the Sistine Chapel, completely cut off from the outside world, until they reach a two-thirds majority decision on the next pope.  Every round of ballots is burned, and a smoke signal gives period status updates: black smoke means indecision and white smoke, a new pope has been chosen.

Secular media have been speculating that leaks about who might be the next pope will make it through the Sistine walls, but Palmo said that is highly unlikely.  No electronics are allowed into the conclave– in 2005 there was even a cell phone blocker to prevent incoming and outgoing calls, said Palmo.  “When you are a man of God, a man of prayer, it frightens [you],” to make such a monumental decision before God, Palmo said.  Breaking the vow of silence, would be a breach of the cardinals’ oath to God.

Since the papacy’s beginning nearly two centuries ago, the Vatican has been able to operate, to varying degrees, on its own schedule and its own one-way communication terms: dialogue with congregants is not encouraged.

Pope Benedict XVI pushes a button on a tablet at the Vatican, Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012. Photo credit: AP/Osservatore Romano, ho.

Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are all about democratic dialogue, but “the culture of the Church works top-down,” said Massimo Faggioli, a professor at St. Thomas University in Minnesota, in a phone interview.

But global communications move forward, leaving those inside the Vatican with a sense of confusion about how, and whether, to change.  Benedict’s Twitter account was evidence of this dilemma.  The pontiff emeritus opened his account in December with this message: “Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter.  Thank you for your generous response.  I bless all of you from my heart.”

After that, he tweeted a few dozen times, mostly thoughts about love and gratitude.  The only other Twitter accounts he followed were his own—he had a total of nine accounts in different languages and approximately 1.6 million followers.  And once he officially left office, all of his tweets were removed.

@Pontifex now awaits a new pope, who may or may not embrace social media as a way to capture the attention of an increasingly diverse congregation of over 2.8 billion Catholics worldwide.

The Vatican is unlikely to change its way in the near future, Faggioli said.  “The Vatican wants the tools, not the culture, of modernization,” he said.

Frank Coppa, author of the 2003 book “The Papacy Confronts the Modern World” agreed.  “The Catholic Church has not, does not,” and will not change quickly, he said.

Blogger Palmo is more optomistic, though.

“I see the [new] pope as carrying around a smart phone,” he said.

Eight candidates met in February, in Kenya’s first presidential debate. Photo Credit: AP.

By N G Onuoha |

Minutes before the start of Kenya’s first-ever presidential debate on February 11, Al Jazeera East Africa correspondent Peter Greste prepared for a live broadcast from a bar in the country’s capital city, Nairobi. Outside, a parked satellite truck connected Greste to Al Jazeera headquarters in Doha, Qatar. Surrounding him were the cheers, laughter and chatter of a crowd gathered to watch the making of political history.

“Doha told me that we’ll stick with [the debate] for a little while, until they go to an ad,” Greste said in a Skype interview. In fact, the channel brought the three-hour Kenyan debate to its international audience “live for an hour and a half,” said Greste. “This, on the day that the pope announces his resignation.”

Al Jazeera’s time commitment was unusual for a media outlet outside of Kenya. Pundits and journalists have called the March 4 presidential ballot the most important in Kenyan history, but with less than a week before the polls open the story is only beginning to get serious international media attention.

And much of that attention emphasizes the possibility that the elections could spark the kind of deadly violence that engulfed Kenya after its last presidential race in 2007, when current president Mwai Kibaki’s victory sparked protests over allegations of vote rigging. The political turmoil that followed also helped inflame old tribal rivalries around land and resource disputes in some parts of Kenya. International talks led to peace and a coalition government, but not before the violence claimed more than 1,000 lives. Many more were injured, and over 350,000 Kenyans were displaced.

Five years later, that violence shadows the campaign of Uhuru Kenyatta, one of two frontrunners and the son of Kenya’s first president. Kenyatta is set to stand trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague later this year, on charges of helping incite some of the deadly attacks after the 2007 poll. Polls show Kenyatta in a tight race with Raila Odinga, the other frontrunner, who in 2008 became Prime Minister in the coalition government, sharing power with Kibaki.

The memory of five years ago, when the election violence was an international story for weeks, dominates the narrative in many foreign media stories this election season.

“Kenya elections: reasons to be fearful” announced The Guardian last month.

“Neighbors Kill Neighbors as Kenyan Vote Stirs Old Feuds” read the headline on a February 21 New York Times story. “Every five years or so,” correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman wrote, “this stable and typically peaceful country, an oasis of development in a very poor and turbulent region, suffers a frightening transformation in which age-old grievances get stirred up, ethnically based militias are mobilized and neighbors start killing neighbors.” The reason, said Gettleman: “[E]lections, and another huge one – one of the most important in this country’s history and definitely the most complicated – is barreling this way.”

Gettleman’s piece sparked dozens of online comments, some charging the article overstated the dangers this year.

The sensitivities in writing about election-related violence are so great that an academic who studies media at Britain’s University of East Anglia posted a primer on the subject at  Huffington Post. Avoid “trite and simplistic” narratives, advised Martin Scott. An example: in a line used at the height of Kenya’s violence in early 2008, Britain’s ITV News reported that “The police are caught between two tribes whose thirst for blood has not been sated.”

“I hope that by remembering the past, we can find ways of improving coverage in the near future,” concluded Scott.

Writing about the possibility of violence is also pervasive and delicate for Kenyan media.

“I always say journalists are midwives of democracy,” said Uchenna Ekwo, a Nigerian journalist and director of the Center for Media and Peace Initiatives in New York City. “The media will welcome peace in their reporting. If they involve the entire society and communicate this transition it will be a great success.”

Kenya has a wide range of media, including strong national newspapers, radio and TV channels. There are also politicized outlets: some politicians own local radio stations, and owners of some larger media outlets have ties to parties or candidates.

“There is a TV station here called K24,” said Tom Rhodes, the East Africa consultant for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Kenyans, as a joke, call it ‘Kenyatta 24.’ If you work for them, you better be saying something nice about [presidential candidate Uhuru] Kenyatta. ”

Social media offers alternative news sources, in a country where mobile communications are widespread. During the first presidential debate earlier this month, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook received chart-topping spikes in activity. Tweets, wall posts, photographs and videos gave tech-savvy citizens access to a more diverse pool of election stories, reactions and ideas.

An effort to aggregate stories posted by ordinary voters was launched in early February by Google on a Kenya Election 2013 Youtube channel. The channel is actively curating video content from citizens across the country —similar to a channel created for Ghanaians during the country’s December elections. The non-profit crowdsourcing site Ushahidi is also participating in efforts to collect stories from across the country; its  interactive mapping programs could be used to identify crisis points during the elections.

In reporting for a foreign news organization, Greste, the Al Jazeera correspondent, said he feels the responsibility to reflect diverse perspectives on the elections, beyond narratives about tribalism and violence.

.“I’m conscious of being a doomsday reporter,” said Greste. “We try to find a mix of light and shade stories that place the election and country in context.”

When the polls open next week, Kenyan Ken Opalo will be in California, where he is a blogger and PhD candidate at Stanford University. Opalo said he follows the elections on Twitter and through Kenyan media news sites. He has also followed the reports of foreign media outlets like Al Jazeera and The New Yorker, writing a critique of their coverage in a recent blog post.

The March 4 poll will be the first under a new Kenyan constitution “with the most people-friendly bill of rights in the world,” said Opalo. “The focus on issues of fairness in the polls and security should not distract from the larger point of Kenyans’ attempt to better how they are governed through a new constitution.”

The first images of Syrian political cartoonist Ali Ferzat after he was attacked in Damascus last year showed him lying in a hospital bed with large bruises on his face – and, most tellingly, with his badly broken hands swathed in bandages. The symbolism was clear. The assault, wrote Committee to Protect Journalists’ deputy director Robert Mahoney, was “the calculated crushing of something seemingly so fragile but actually so powerful as the hand that holds a pen.”

Ferzat had been drawing cartoons since college, working even for state-run publications, never crossing the lines of state censorship. His work was favorably received by then-president Hafez Al Assad, and later by his son Bashar Al Assad, in part because he never depicted anyone in the Syrian government literally. Instead, he used symbols, such as a chair, to depict power.

But last year’s Arab uprisings sparked a change in Ferzat’s work. His message became more direct. In April last year, for example, Ferzat took the bold step of drawing Assad for the first time, showing him fretting over the demonstrations, giving speeches with audiences who were instructed when to applaud. And then, a few days before he was assaulted, Ferzat drew a picture of Assad hitching a ride with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was in the midst of his country’s civil war.

A cartoon Ferzat published in April 2011 showing Assad hitching a ride with Muammar Gaddafi, three days before his hands were broken by unidentified attackers. Photo courtesy of Torsten Adair of comicsbeat.com.

While the cartoonist’s attackers sought to intimidate him into downing his pen, Ferzat – who is now recovering in Kuwait – has expressed his determination to return to Syria and continue his work. Since the attack, hundreds of cartoonists have shown their solidarity with Ferzat, drawing images of Assad being attacked by pens – or images of Ferzat continuing to draw Assad, even with his broken, bandaged fingers.

Ferzat exemplifies the dangerous precipice on which political cartoonists in the Middle East dangle every time they publish. At times, they are able to express dissent more freely, by using symbolism and indirect references to challenge authority. But, when the cartoonist crosses a line, the punishment can be swift and harsh, as Ferzat learned.

Cartoons “capture and insinuate much more than you could with writing or with words. That makes them especially potent,” said Fatma Müge Göçek, a sociology professor at Princeton University and author of “Political Cartoons in the Middle East: Cultural Representations in the Middle East.”

While political satire has been around in the Middle East for centuries, the Western medium of political cartooning first came into the region with the adoption of the printing press and the introduction of daily and weekly newspapers. Political cartoons as a form of dissent gained popularity during the first Gulf War in 1991, according to Göçek. For the first time, the conflict was depicted and viewed by two different parties, as artists in Iraq took a cue from American political cartoonists depicting the war and presented their views to local audiences

“Cartoons are particularly significant because of the political repression in Middle Eastern societies where the circulation of knowledge and information is restricted,” said Göçek. And cartoons are able to reach a wider audience than text in societies that may still have high illiteracy rates.

“Especially in countries where the literacy rate is low, it’s much easier and more convenient to use visual mediums, because anyone who sees these cartoons can get a sense or interpret without needing subtitles,” said Göçek. “It’s easier to see an image in one cartoon and get the gist of the argument than reading a whole article.”

Political cartoonists in countries where free expression is repressed may be slightly less vulnerable to reprisals than traditional journalists in those same countries, said Dr. Fayeq Oweiss, an Arab-American artist and linguist.

“Political cartoons can be interpreted differently so it’s not a direct message like a journalist would say,” he said. “With cartoons, it’s left to the viewer to interpret it in their own way, so in this way, it’s much better for them to express an idea.”

Göçek agreed that even in politically repressive countries, cartoonists often enjoy a bit more flexibility than traditional journalists.

“It’s very hard to argue if they have depicted a donkey, that the donkey refers to the prime minister,” she said. “It’s that symbolism that enables them to introduce a sense of ambiguity and ambivalence which makes it harder to pinpoint.”

An example of how Ferzat used symbolism to make a point, thus allowing his work to fly under the radar of censors. Published in a Syrian satirical weekly Al Domari in 2001, it shows an unidentified authority figure spouting floral language while really representing violence with a gun. Photo: From Ali Ferzat’s Facebook page.

But that doesn’t mean the cartoonists aren’t censored. Censorship may increase during wartime or an election period, when governments are particularly sensitive about criticism. Fear of intimidation by the government, religious authorities, or  extremist groups has driven many Middle Eastern cartoonists into exile – where some continue their work, using the Internet to try to reach audiences back home.

The threat to cartoonists’ freedom of expression has not gone unnoticed. Several organizations have been set up to protect journalists and political cartoonists.

Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani’s work and journey has been supported by International Cities of Refuge Network, which offers “persecuted writers a safe haven where they can live and work without fear of being censored or silenced,” according to its website, which includes cartoonists among those it protects.

The United Nations has also recognized the need for cartoonists’ rights to be championed. In partnership with France’s Le Monde newspaper, the UN founded the Association for the Cartooning of Peace Foundation to “promote better understanding and mutual respect between people of different faiths and cultures with cartoons as a means of expression of a universal language.”

Cartoonists Rights Network International, a nonprofit group, connects a network of over 600 editorial and social cartoonists throughout the world who agree to assist each other in free speech campaigns.

“More often than not, you can basically tell the degree of democracy in a country by the way the cartoonists are treated,” Göçek asserts.  “But they do have a better chance in court because the legal system usually requires literal proof, and it’s very hard to do that with cartoons, so they may have a little more flexibility.”

Iran is one of the countries in the Middle East where political comics and cartoons have flourished as part of Persian society for centuries. However, as the current regime increasingly tightens its grip on free expression, it has become more and more difficult for Iranian cartoonists to work within their own country, leading many of them to work in exile and use the Internet to share their cartoons back home.

“The attitude of the Iranian authorities towards the domestic comic book scene has changed over time,” says Dr. Farian Sabahi, professorof Islamic history at the University of Turin. During the term of former Iranian president Muhammad Khatami between 1997 and 2005, Sabahi said, “Cartoons were a means to criticize the politics of the different factions, as well as the wrongdoings inside the municipality of Tehran.”

But the 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad led to new restrictions on media – including a ban on cartoon format publications, such as the magazine Golaghah. Under Ahmedinejad, cartoonists having been arrested, jailed for indefinite periods of time, and even received death threats, forcing many into exile.

One of the exiles is cartoonist Nik Kowsar, who was jailed repeatedly and received death threats for drawing satirical cartoons of clerics and their attitudes towards free speech. Kowsar and his family now live in exile in Toronto.

“As a cartoonist in Iran, you should be nuts,” he told the Washington Post in an article in July 2009. “I was nuts.”

Kowsar is determined to continue publishing his work, which he does on his own website, displaying his . cartoons in both Farsi and English.

“With the Internet they have found a much freer place to express things that they would not be able to do in traditional media,” says Dr. Oweiss.

Hopes that last year’s Arab uprisings would give rise to greater democracy and freedom of expression in the region have begun to fade. Tunisia was the starting point of the Arab Spring and is one of the success stories of the revolution. With popular unrest leading to then President of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali being ousted, it launched a wave of inspiration for the revolts that would sweep the Middle East.

But on April 5, Tunisia sentenced two cartoonists, Jabeur Mejri and Ghazi Beji, to seven years in prison for posting cartoons showing a naked Prophet Mohammad on a Facebook site. Even in the freer atmosphere of Tunisia, there are still red lines, and some worry that new Islamist rulers will curb free speech as sharply as the dictators deposed last year.

Dissident Kacem El Ghazzali, a board member of a leading coalition of Moroccan bloggers, said both Ghazi and Beji have always been outspoken about breaking down the taboo of religious representations in Islamic societies. The two cartoonists have published many inflammatory and provocative cartoons on the Internet, including one of a pig sleeping on the Kaaba, an Islamic shrine in the city of Mecca.

The Tunisian Justice Ministry called this cartoon a “violation of morality and disturbing public order” as the images have inflamed people with strong Muslim values. Religion remains a sensitive issue for cartoonies; even after the political revolutions of the past year, Arab countries are still grappling with the role religion and religious leadership should take in the post-revolution era.

What needs to be addressed, Göçek argues, is the fact that the Prophet Muhammad was a religious figure, not a political one.

“Freedom of expression and thoughts only apply insofar as you do not undermine the freedom of belief of others,” Göçek says. “And so the teachings of Islam and Judaism in particular are against depicting images of their prophets, and that should be respected.”

Regardless of where this debate goes, what remains clear is that political cartoonists in the Middle East will not be silenced. In fact, there are signs that some, like Ali Ferzat, are growing in influence. The horrific beating of Ferzat drew such attention to him that TIME magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in world recently included him.

Video by Erinn Cawthon.  Story by Yumna Mohamed and Purvi Thacker.

Yumna Mohamed is a student at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She can be reached on Twitter @yumzazzle
Purvi Thacker is a student at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She can be reached on Twitter @purvi21

Erinn Cawthon is a student at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She can be reached on Twitter @erinncawthon