Reporters Without Borders

• Martin took a leave from the Winnipeg Free Press in 2023 to spend a year in Ukraine, chronicling the impact of war on civilians on her Substack platform.
• Between frequent air raids and bombings, Martin produced vivid and compelling dispatches on the resiliency of the people living amid fear and loss.
• Judges considered nominations from across Canada for the annual press freedom award, the career achievement prize in honour of committee co-founder Spencer Moore, and our new student journalism prize.
• The luncheon theme, to mark the United Nations' World Press Freedom Day, is Free Press, Fair Elections and Democracy.

• We are deeply concerned this has resulted in Alsu not receiving any regular consular visits yet."
• The civil society group letter further noted its concerns about Moscow's growing pattern of unjustly detaining journalists, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
• Founded in 1908, the National Press Club is the world's leading professional organization for journalists.
• Media Contact: Bill McCarren for the National Press Club, 202-725-7534, [email protected]
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• Authoritarian leaders might be good at damaging democracy, but unless they are pure dictators they often still need to worry about winning elections.
• In the last few years, Europe has seen the rise of a number of authoritarian populists who rely on winning mass support among ordinary people – as opposed to just rigging the vote.
• It’s similar in many countries presided over by authoritarian populists.

Why media ownership matters

• Yet a closer look reveals an interesting structural feature of media ownership networks in authoritarian populist countries.
• For instance, in Hungary, the Central European Press and Media Foundation (Kesma) is a huge right-wing media conglomerate that controls more than 500 national and local media outlets.
• Kesma was established in 2018, when most pro-government private media owners transferred their ownership rights to the foundation, which is headed by a board of trustees full of Orbán loyalists closely associated to the ruling party.

Love your enemies

• You might expect authoritarian populist governments to be more like the old totalitarian regimes which pulled out all the stops to silence any dissenting voices.
• This was the strategy of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin.
• It’s also convenient for an authoritarian regime to set up an “us versus them” situation, where “they” can be vilified and ridiculed by regime-friendly media.
• In Hungary, for instance – in a wider strategy to discredit independent media news – pro-government media outlets have launched smear campaigns against independent media outlets funded by international grants.
• This allows them to set up internal enemies as a target for their supporters.

• In a conflict like the war in Ukraine, many journalists risk their lives to report the truth and reveal war crimes committed by both sides.
• But when journalists themselves are targeted, these war crimes almost always go unpunished.
• At least 15 media workers have been killed in Ukraine since Russia began its full-scale war in February 2022.
• Threatening, attacking, disappearing and murdering journalists is not a new tactic of war in general – and certainly not unknown in Russia.

A dangerous (but vital) occupation

• In both instances, the media workers were able to survive the attacks and live to tell us the story.
• The same day, Ukrainian photojournalist Maks Levin, covering the war for Reuters, and his bodyguard Oleksiy Chernyshov were killed.
• He and his colleague Corrado Zunino were targeted by snipers, despite wearing vests clearly identifying them as press.

Heat of battle or coldblooded murder?

• Journalists are protected as civilians under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which Russia ratified in 1954.
• They are also considered civilians, but have the additional protection of being treated as prisoners of war if captured (from the third Geneva Convention).
• How many killings are in the heat of battle and how many are state-sanctioned?
• Kelly Bjorklund is a senior writer and editor with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.