Every day should be World Press Freedom Day

Prominent Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil was killed in April in an Israeli strike that Lebanon’s prime minister described as a ‘war crime’

This Week Those Books is chock-full of crucial context — from fiction and non-fiction — to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.

Go to this link for a quick read

The Big Story:

Press freedom (or lack thereof) is a big news story, with journalism becoming increasingly dangerous, even fatal. New data underlines the need for every day — not just May 3 — to be World Press Freedom Day.

• Israel’s war on Gaza is said to be the deadliest conflict for media workers ever recorded. More journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 202³¹ than in both world wars, the Vietnam war, the wars in Yugoslavia, and the US war in Afghanistan combined.²
• India’s highest court will hear (May 13) a challenge to strict new rules on data protection that threaten the very basics of journalism — the right to information.

Our first book says a powerful ‘new censorship’ is at work:

“Authoritarian leaders always work to undermine press freedom. What makes populism different is the sophisticated way in which it weaponises democratic terminology and us, ‘the people’, to erode it in practice.”

This Week’s Books:

• A former Israeli journo says it all started with Netanyahu.
• An imaginative story about truth-tellers forced into exile.

Click to read on about the books and the back story

Originally published on Medium