Endangered & imprisoned journalists around the world

Air Date: December 20, 2010

Journalists take images of a dead man inside a coroner's van as a Mexican Army soldier, right, looks on, after a shoot-out in Tijuana, Mexico, in 2008. Mexico is among the deadliest places in the world to be a journalist. The Committee to Protect Journalists says more than 30 journalists and media workers have been murdered or have vanished since December 2006. (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias)

Hour 1

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 42 journalists were slain around the world in 2010, and that there are more journalists imprisoned around the world – 145 – than at any time in the last 15 years. Iran and China are tied for the highest number of journalists in jail, with 34 each; while Pakistan, Iraq, Mexico, and Honduras saw the most fatalities. JOEL SIMON, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, joins us to discuss the plight of jailed journalists around the globe. And we’ll hear from ROXANA SABERI, the Iranian-American journalist who was imprisoned in Iran for 100 days in 2009. Meanwhile, in neighboring Mexico, imprisonment is less a concern than outright slaughter, as more than 60 journalists have been murdered and many more disappeared in the last 10 years, especially the last four as the narco-war has claimed tens of thousands of Mexican lives. ROBERT RIVARD is editor of the San Antonio Express-News, the chairman of Inter American Press Association’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and author of Trail of Feathers, a book about the disappearance and murder of Express-News journalist Philip True in Mexico in December 1998 and Rivard’s six-year quest for justice in the case.

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[audio: 122010_100630.mp3]

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