Turkey captivated the world’s attention recently as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s seemingly unstoppable accumulation of power ground to a halt in a series of humiliating defeats in local elections. To the surprise of many, digital news media emerged as a potent medium for information and mobilization for the largely victorious opposition forces in the campaigns.
At least 59 Twitter accounts that belong to journalists and media outlets, with a combined following of six million, have been censored in Turkey. Their crime? Doing journalism.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from March 26 to April 1 finds @washingtonpost on fatal police shootings, @decodeurs mapping Europe’s terrorist attacks, @DagmedyaVeri’s open data resources for Turkey and an undated chart of shrinking donut holes from the @smithsonian archives.
Global press freedom has continued its decline, now at its lowest point in 13 years in 2016 due to unprecedented threats to journalists and media outlets in major democracies, intensified crackdowns by authoritarian states, and moves by Russia and China to increase their influence beyond their borders, according to Freedom of the Press 2017, the latest edition of Freedom House’s annual report on media freedom worldwide.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is out with its annual census of journalists in prison, and, as always, the report makes for grim reading. Check it out, anyway — it’s important our community knows what’s happening to our colleagues around the world. Here’s the quick and dirty: Globally, CPJ found 199 journalists in prison because of their work on December 1, 2015, a modest decline from record highs of the past three years. (There were 221 in 2014.) CPJ’s list does not include the many journalists imprisoned and released throughout the year.
