Anti media attacks cited

Posted on Tue, Mar. 21, 2006

THE MEDIA
Anti-media attacks cited
Violence and harassment are inhibiting press freedom, the Inter American
Press Association said.
BY ELOY O. AGUILAR
Associated Press

QUITO - Attacks by drug-trafficking gangs in northern Mexico and
harassment by the governments of several countries are having a chilling
effect on the news media in the Americas, the Inter American Press
Association said Monday.

In its midyear report on press freedom in the hemisphere, the IAPA
denounced hostility toward independent news media by the governments of
Argentina and Venezuela and lamented the jailing of journalists in Cuba.

''Although the news media continue to carry out their public-service
missions robustly in other countries, individual newspapers and
journalists have faced a variety of direct and indirect efforts by
governments, politicians and powerful interests to constrain them,'' the
IAPA said.

The IAPA was particularly concerned about threats and attacks from drug
gangs, notably in northern Mexico, that force some newspapers into
self-censorship, avoiding references to drug activities.

The organization noted an attack in Nuevo Laredo, across the border from
Laredo, Texas, where men shot up the newsroom of the El Mañana
newspaper, wounding a reporter. The IAPA asked the Tamaulipas state
government to protect journalists.

Mexico's federal government recently named a special prosecutor to
investigate attacks on journalists.

The IAPA asked the Mexican government not to drop investigations of
current and past killings of journalists, including that of Hector Felix
Miranda, editor of the weekly Zeta, who was killed in 1998.

Across the region, three journalists were slain as a direct result of
their work in the past six months, and another is missing and presumed
dead, the IAPA said.

The IAPA cited the ``inability or unwillingness of some governments to
investigate, prosecute and punish those who have perpetrated crimes
against journalists.''

The report also criticized Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's government
for ``harassing and punishing the independent news media through the use
of arbitrary taxation, mob intimidation and implementation of a
so-called law of social responsibility for radio and television.''

The law, IAPA said, characterizes dissent as tantamount to criminal conduct.

In Cuba, the IAPA noted, 25 independent journalists are imprisoned.

Argentina's President Néstor Kirchner, meanwhile, ''has stepped up his
hostility to independent media employing verbal denunciations and
governmental power -- raising taxes on newspapers and withholding
government advertising to newspapers to punish critics,'' the IAPA said.

It also referred to a case in Brazil where the investigation of a TV
host's murder was closed because police said there were no leads.

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