US President Barack Obama, who has been criticized for a distant and at times hostile relationship with the US media, hosted persecuted foreign journalists at the White House on Friday to mark World Press Freedom Day.
The day is intended as a remembrance for people killed while reporting. Obama called for reporters jailed overseas to be released.
“Journalists give all of us a chance to know the truth about our countries, ourselves, our governments,” he said. “That makes us better, it makes us stronger, it gives voice to the voiceless, it exposes injustice and it holds leaders like me accountable.”
Photo: AFP
Seated next to journalists from Vietnam, Russia and Ethiopia, Obama said that the US would continue to speak out against countries that oppress free speech. He paid tribute to Steven Sotloff and James Foley, journalists killed last year by Islamic State militants. He also urged the release of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who has been jailed by the Iranian government.
Twenty-four journalists have been killed worldwide so far this year and 158 are imprisoned, according to Reporters without Borders, a Paris nonprofit that monitors global press freedoms. Sixty-nine journalists were killed last year.
None of the deaths occurred in the US. Nevertheless, the organization ranks the US 49th out of 180 countries in its Press Freedom Index, in part because of what it called “judicial harassment” of a New York Times reporter, James Risen, by the Obama administration.
The government spent three years trying to force Risen to testify at trial about a confidential source as part of a CIA leak investigation. Prosecutors asked on Jan. 13 to drop him as a witness after he told a judge he would not answer questions about his sources. The US Department of Justice subsequently tightened guidelines for prosecutors seeking access to the records of journalists.
The organization also cited arrests of journalists covering demonstrations against the police in Ferguson, Missouri, last year and the absence of a federal “shield law” to guarantee reporters the right not to reveal confidential sources to authorities.
The Columbia Journalism Review, a magazine founded by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, said in an analysis published in its most recent issue that Obama’s White House is “determined to conceal its workings from the press, and by extension, the public.”
Obama’s meeting with reporters Fatima Tlisova of Russia, Dieu Cay of Vietnam and Simegnish “Lily” Mengesha of Ethiopia was itself mostly closed to the press. He made a statement to a pool of US reporters after the event and answered a question about the filing of charges against six police officers in Baltimore in the death of a black man they took into custody.
World Press Freedom Day, a day marked by the UN, was yesterday.
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