Tag: Press Freedom from the Perspective of Women Journalists

Journalists across the Mediterranean are facing mounting challenges in carrying out their profession due to an increasingly oppressive media environment in the region. When they do not pay with their lives after publishing brave investigative work, like Gauri Lankesh (India) and Daphne Caruana Galizia (Malta), both assassinated in 2017, women journalists are more often than not hindered by the authorities they disturb. They are threatened by Decree 54 in Tunisia, imprisoned in Turkey when addressing the Kurdish question, harassed by agro-food lobbies in France, while in Palestine , they find themselves "stuck between the occupation’s bullets and the oppression of the authorities". Additionally, media outlets in Algeria, as in many ...

While the Palestinian media sector may have filled gaps that existed before and created new sources of information, separate from the Israeli occupation’s media environment, it remains beset with huge challenges that Palestinians have yet to overcome.

They lived on opposite sides of the world from each other, and yet, they were alike in every way. Gauri Lankesh and Daphne Caruana Galizia were murdered in 2017, the former in Bangalore, India, and the latter in Malta, for having continued to carry out their investigations at all costs, ignoring the harassment campaigns against them. The journalist collective Forbidden Stories has taken on their investigations.

Seen from the outside, political and cultural phase in Italy would even be interesting from the perspective of feminist analysis. For the first time since the end of the World War II, both the national government and the largest opposition party are led by two women, one the opposite of the other.

Morgan Large is a field journalist in Brittany, France, who works at Radio Kreiz Breizh (Côtes-d'Armor). In her daily flagship show, she tackles environmental topics, and her investigations—particularly those on the Breton productivist system—have caused her to become the target of threats and violence.

I’m an Egyptian researcher in my thirties working with “The Sex Talk- بالعربي” (The Sex Talk-in Arabic) initiative. I’m passionate about architecture and feminism, and I practice resistance as an essential part of my daily life. I started thinking about how to define space after a colleague asked me the following question: “What are the spaces even available for feminists to participate in public space?” This made me think, what is intended by “public space” in women’s case?

It would have been surprising if women took up as much space in Algerian media as men do, when they only exist as a minority in the public sphere. If one were to rely on television broadcasts, they would think that Algeria is a country devoid of women, as this is what the images broadcast on national news imply. To find these women, one must be interested in the cooking, family, beauty, and tabloid sections.

In a regime that severely restricts the freedom of the press and represses the opposition, those who defend the Kurdish people, considered to be the main enemy of the state, are especially at risk. Numerous journalists, writers, intellectuals, artists and activists accused of terrorism and of supporting the PKK, are imprisoned and many seek asylum abroad. A documentary tells the story of some of them who have become symbols of the struggle for justice and freedom.

Young Algerian women have gradually gained more and more access to newsrooms, but this access has only increased their numbers in these spaces, not their decision-making power. In fact, women are often relegated to tackling the “light” topics, even though they exclusively possess inherent knowledge about violence against women, and about women’s issues in general. All themes that are still only marginally present in Algerian media.