COLLEGE PARK, Maryland – On the morning of April 30, 2018, journalists in Kabul heard a familiar thunder. They grabbed cameras and tote bags, rounded up colleagues and rushed out of their safe offices to find a familiar sight: the aftermath of a suicide bomb. Reporters from the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty were among…
COLLEGE PARK, Maryland – Natalia Sedletska’s award-winning journalism in Ukraine has led to government investigations and prosecutions and become the basis for official efforts to recover millions in taxpayer money stolen by corrupt officials. Recently she and her colleagues at the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe have produced dozens of programs investigating wrongdoing in the administration,…
COLLEGE PARK, Maryland – Uzbekistan’s new government has released hundreds of political prisoners in last two years, but still has more behind bars than all other former Soviet states combined. Until early February, Aziz Yusupov was one of them. He was imprisoned for three years as the government’s way to force his older brother to…
COLLEGE PARK, Maryland – As Russian television cameras rolled, one of the last Ukrainian journalists remaining in separatist-held Donbas stumbled over his espionage confession, barely five minutes long. Stanislav Aseyev’s employer and colleagues said the confession, filmed by Rossiya 24 and published in August, was forced and untruthful. “This was done to illustrate…that no Ukrainian…
COLLEGE PARK, Maryland – Recently freed from a Turkmen prison, a journalist once working undercover for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty recently told Capital News Service he still feels “very bad (as a result of) the sores and consequences of torture in prison.” The rare email exchange from authoritarian Turkmenistan was cut off shortly after it…
COLLEGE PARK, Maryland – Award winning photojournalist Mahmoud Abou Zeid is still in prison despite serving his term behind bars. According to his lawyer Karim Abdelrady, “Shawkan’s” health condition is not bad and his family often visits him in prison. His lawyer also told Press Uncuffed that the prison awaits the verdict from the court…
COLLEGE PARK, Maryland – The last text message novice Vietnamese journalist Nguyen Van Hoa sent was to his editor at U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia on Jan. 10. “Yes, What’s up?” he asked. At 7:59 a.m. the next morning, his editor, Chan Nhu Hoang responded: “Call me back ASAP.” But the 22-year-old videographer was never heard…
COLLEGE PARK, Maryland – In 2011, Murat Sabuncu, the editor-in-chief of Turkey’s oldest, most respected newspaper, Cumhuriyet, made regular trips to visit the notorious Silivri Prison. He would travel about 60 miles from Istanbul to a beach town where Turkey’s highest-security prison, now Europe’s largest penal facility, held his friend and colleague, investigative journalist Nedim…
COLLEGE PARK, Maryland – Just months after returning home from self-imposed exile in London, one of Turkey’s most accomplished investigative reporters rose to address a packed, stifling hot Istanbul courtroom, and refused to defend his writings, the state’s main evidence against him as an alleged terrorist supporter. “This is not a statement for my defense,…
It used to be that if you wanted to know what happened at the local school board meeting, or city council debate, or even in your own neighborhood, you could open up a local paper and read about it. But cutbacks have hit local newsrooms hard — and now a once robust industry is on…
Any American with a social media account in 2016 has seen friends share political news articles, speeches, and memes regarding the year’s presidential election. This latter category may have included “Bernie or Hillary?” posters alleging Sanders’s admiration of lizards, edited images of Donald Trump with small hands, or maps predicting Jeb Bush to win in…
The United States is one of the most highly propagandized societies in the world.[1] Through a combination of cultural insularity, strategic internal messaging, almost constant warfare and overwhelming monetary support for particular political ideologies, the United States presents a case study in autocratic control of dominant institutions that service centers of ideology and power.[2] While…
Ukrainian journalist Roman Sushchenko wasn’t reporting in Moscow when the Russian secret police arrested him there. A friend of 20 years lured him from his home in Paris so Russia’s intelligence agency, the FSB, could arrest him, said his lawyer, Mark Feygin. For the past ten months Sushchenko has been held in Lefortovo, a Soviet-era…
A pounding on the door cut through Loay Hesham’s Wednesday afternoon at his home in Cairo. National security agents were at his doorstep. They swarmed inside, tore the house apart and fired a barrage of questions at the 22-year old journalist about his political beliefs. But he sensed he wasn’t their target. “I knew they were…
Turkish writer Asli Erdogan has always gone where there is pain. As a young girl, she would shelter small animals under her coat in bad weather and feed them in her home. In her late 20s, she traveled through the slums of Brazil, collecting accounts of poverty, disease and hunger for a novel she was…
Inside Ward 350 of Iran’s notorious Evin prison, two hours each Friday are reserved for Golgasht, a talent show. Among the performers playing musical instruments, sharing poems, celebrating birthdays and delivering political speeches, is Arvin Sedaghat Kish. Kish is a fixture in the program, plucking the traditional setar, a Persian, gourd-shaped instrument, as background music…
Caged like an animal, only bundled in a thick knitted hat and sweater, the skeleton-of-a-man watches his trial through metal bars. Azimjon Askarov, 65, has grown thinner and weaker in the six years he has spent in a basement cell in Kyrgyz, according to photographs and people who have visited with him. Glasses sit on…
The Cairo summer sun was just beginning to shine on Rabaa al-Adawiya Square in 2013 when BuzzFeed Correspondent Mike Giglio saw tanks roll up to the protesters’ encampment and soldiers begin firing tear gas into the crowd. As the protesters tried to dodge the streams of gas flooding their maze-like campground, stones and bullets also…
As editor-in-chief of the Islamist news website Xeber44.com in Azerbaijan, Araz Guliyev crusaded for religious freedom and against what he saw as local corruption. Guliyev used Islamic rhetoric to criticize the government, but not to provoke violence or a religious revolution, according to family and friends interviewed recently by Capital News Service. The local government…
SPOKANE, Wa.-Baby Lea breaks a toothless smile as her grandmother whispers sweet Russian words into her ear. Her big brother Aron runs into the room and gives his sister a kiss. “Manyunya,” he calls her; Russian for “little one.” His father yells for him to clean up his toys. The aunts giggle at the toddler’s…
Pressuncuffed.org seeks to encourage and promote rigorous student reporting, scholarly research and debate on the role of, and obstacles to, independent journalism in the United States and abroad. Our website features reporting by University of Maryland students about press freedom in the United States and abroad. It also offers resources to instructors elsewhere who may want to teach classes or hold workshops on this theme. In the near future, this site will become a place for student work from around the country and abroad.
Dana Priest, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner at The Washington Post and Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland.
