Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://gijn.org/series/doc-of-the-day/)
The US Justice Department indicted five Iranian intelligence officials last week, alleging they were part of a plot to surveil and eventually abduct an Iranian-American investigative journalist living in the US. Read the indictment.
Freedom House, which released its annual report Freedom in the World this week, has documented the 15th consecutive year of decline in global freedom, finding less than a fifth of the world’s population living in what it considers “free” countries.
A November 18 press release, claiming a safe vaccine that protects 95% of people against COVID-19, by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech was greeted with excited headlines. In this article, two leading health reporters shared tips on how to read such releases and balanced cautious optimism with the provision that the release relied on interim results from a trial in an accelerated setting.
In this edition of Document of the Day, we feature a new report out from UNESCO detailing that over the past decade, a journalist has been killed on average every four days. In 2018-2019, UNESCO recorded a total of 156 killings of journalists worldwide. See our roundup with links to the full report in English and links to resources in other languages.
In this edition of Document of the Day, we feature a new report out today from Freedom House, a US-based think tank, about how the coronavirus pandemic has affected digital freedoms around the world. The report includes details on governments’ actions that have curtailed citizens’ access to open information on the web, and the website features and interactive map where users can see which countries made the “free” list and which ones didn’t.
The federal indictment of Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former senior campaign advisor, provides a chilling case study in how fraudsters can exploit the fervor of political supporters in a partisan landscape.
The United States Senate report on Russia’s efforts to sabotage the 2016 US elections offers reporters insights that go far beyond the Trump presidential campaign’s links to the Kremlin.
In a filing to the Supreme Court in the United States, a raft of media organizations including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Associated Press, The Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, The Center for Investigative Reporting, The Daily Beast, Dow Jones, VICE ,and The Washington Post, have argued that the interpretation of the country’s Computer Fraud and Abuse Act needs to be narrowed to avoid “serious constitutional concerns.” In the document, which can be read in full here, the organizations argue that an interpretation of the law by the court of appeals “chills ordinary journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment.”
The investigative team behind a story in The Washington Post that focused on two military helicopters that roared over demonstrators in Washington, DC on June 1 shared the exploratory scripts used to analyze and visualize flight data for the aircraft which monitored protesters in the city that day.
The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the way journalists work, not least because many authorities have cited the contagion as a reason to crack down on the news media. Certain dangers will subside with time but some of the measures put into place that restrict press freedom – whether intended or not — could continue well into the future.
