freedom of the press

The Medill Alums listserv has been updating on this fairly recently, but I thought I'd throw in my two cents. Roxana Saberi, a Medill alum, is an Iranian-American journalist (born in America, has dual citizenship) who has spent the last six years working in Iran and was arrested recently. I'm pretty sure it was initially for working as a journalist without the proper credentials, but the charges have since been upgraded to spying for America. Espionage, as you might imagine, is a pretty serious charge, so people have been following the case pretty closely.

It's cases like this that make me grateful to have grown up in a country with a free press. And it really makes me appreciate journalists who go out on a limb, reporters who put themselves at risk because they believe the public has a right to know what's going on in their country and with their government.

I often wonder about the state of the press in the rest of the Middle East, especially here in Egypt. Egypt doesn't have the best track record when it comes to press freedoms, and many bloggers in particular have gotten into trouble for speaking out against the government. There have been arrests, or journalists have been "disappeared," and there's certainly some amount of censorship. Obviously it's not as bad as in Iran, but I have to wonder if things are bound to get worse here -- after all, they're certainly not getting any better.

Anyway, you can read the full article here.