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Eritrea leads world in press censorship: report
[Daily Nation (Kenya)] Eritrea
...is run by the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), with about the amounts of democracy and justice you'd expect from a party with that name. National elections have been periodically scheduled and cancelled; none have ever been held in the country. The president, Isaias Afewerki, has been in office since independence in 1993 and will probably die there of old age. ...
has surpassed North Korea as the world's top press censor, with Syria and Iran placing third and fourth in a new list published Wednesday by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The New York-based rights group said Eritrea had climbed to the top of the list by banning all foreign media and controlling every detail of the local media's coverage through its information ministry.

"Every time (a journalist) had to write a story, they arrange for interview subjects and tell you specific angles you have to write on," it quoted an exiled Eritrean journalist as saying on condition of anonymity.

"We usually wrote lots about the president (Issaias Afeworki) so that he's always in the limelight."

Secretive and highly authoritarian North Korea slipped to second after topping the list last year, with the CPJ saying "some tiny cracks have emerged" such as the opening of an News Agency that Dare Not be Named bureau in the capital Pyongyang.

However,
we can't all be heroes. Somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud when they go by...
foreign news hounds are only rarely allowed in and details about Pyongyang's nuclear program and the new power structure following the death of ruler Kim Dear Leader Jong-Il
... hereditary dictator of North Korea. His definition of reunification isn't the same as the definition in Seoul...
remain "hidden beneath severe censorship," it said.

Syria has ratcheted up press restrictions since the outbreak of a popular revolt against Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad
One of the last of the old-fashioned hereditary iron-fisted fascist dictators...
a year ago, leaping from ninth on the CPJ's 2006 list to third in the latest one.

Damascus
...Capital of the last remaining Baathist regime in the world...
has heavily restricted media access, particularly to cities that have seen large protests and violence.

"By barring international media from entering and reporting freely and by attacking its own citizen journalists, Syria has sought to impose a news media blackout on a year-long military crackdown," the CPJ said.

Iran has meanwhile "mixed high-technology techniques such as Web blocking with brute-force tactics such as mass imprisonment of journalists to control the flow of information and obfuscate details of its own nuclear program."

Rounding out the list of the top 10 press censors was Equatorial Guinea, Uzbekistan, Burma, Soddy Arabia, Cuba and Belarus.

The CPJ drew up the list based on 15 benchmarks, including the blocking of websites, the absence of privately-owned or independent media, restrictions on journalists' movements and security service monitoring of journalists.

For this list, the group only considered countries in which restrictions are imposed by the government and not cases like Mexico and Somalia where journalists are often forced to censor themselves because of crime or unrest.

Posted by: Fred 2012-05-03
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=343902