My Account
| |
Help
My Dashboard
My Dashboard
Get Published
Home
Books
Academic eBook Collections
eBook Library Collections
Graphic Novel Collections
Journal and Magazine Collection
Audio eBook Collection
Library Exhibits
Search
Support
How-To Tutorials
Suggestions
Machine Translation Editions
Noahs Archive Project
About Us
Terms and Conditions
Get Published
Submission Guidelines
Self-Publish Check List
Why Choose Self-publishing?
Home
|
Books
|
Search
|
Support
|
About Us
|
Sign in with your eLibrary Card
close
We appreciate your support of online literacy with your eLibrary Card Membership. Your membership has expired. Please click on the Renew Subscription button in the SUBSCRIPTION AND BILLING section of your Settings tab.
Close
Most Popular
New Releases
Top Picks
Kid 25's
Library Exhibits
World Press Day
Price of Freedom
World Press Day
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Freedom of the Press Wantonly Violated :...
(by
Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge (...
)
The Development of Freedom of the Press ...
(by
Duniway, Clyde Augustus
)
The Russian press
(by
Scythicus, pseud.
)
As the saying goes, “Freedom isn’t free.” It should be every free person’s daily mantra. Those born with it take it for granted. But the cost for freedom is steep, as both historical accounts and contemporary freedom fighters tell us.
The United Nations General Assembly marked May 3 as
World Press Freedom Day
in order to bring awareness to the ever-present issue of freedom of the press, reminding governments to uphold the freedom of expression as a basic human right. Human expression entails that, as written in a
simplified version
of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948
, “we all have the right to make up our own minds, to think what we like, to say what we think, and to share our ideas with other people wherever they live, through books, radio, television and in other ways.”
Each year since 1997, UNESCO has awarded the
Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize
to a person or organization that defended freedom of press and journalists especially against tyrannical or violent forces. The 2017 recipient of the award was Eritrean-Swedish playwright and journalist
Dawit Isaak
, who was imprisoned for reporting on a group called “G-15” who criticized the President Isaias Afewerki and made demands on their Eritrean government that they hold elections. He is still imprisoned today, and the President Afewerki is reported to have said in 2009, "We will not have any trial and we will not free him. We know how to handle his kind." In 2016, the Freedom Prize was awarded to
Khadija Ismayilova
, an Azerbaijani radio host and journalist who reported on undisclosed assets of the the Azerbaijan presidential family through the media investigative center
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
. Ismayilova was blackmailed and then arrested on bogus charges that she had incited a coworker to commit suicide.
The award was named after editor
Guillermo Cano Isaza
, the founder of
El Espectador
, a national Colombian newspaper.
El Espectador
was particularly critical and outspoken about the influence of drug traffickers on Colombia’s politics. “What this country really needs is not money, metal, pure materialism, but a deep resurgence of morals in both public and private sectors,” Isaza wrote. “Drug trafficking has corrupted us, the buying and selling of influence has corrupted us, the rush for easy money has corrupted us.” He was murdered in 1986 outside the paper’s offices by hitmen paid by
Pablo Escobar
.
For more reading on stories of the free press, read
Liberal Visions of the Freedom of the Press
by Michael J. Gerhardt,
Freedom of the Press Wantonly Violated
,
The Development of Freedom of the Press in Massachusetts
by Clyde Augustus Duniway, and
The Russian Press
by Scythicus.
By Thad Higa
About Us
Privacy Policy
Contact Us
Copyright © World Library Foundation. All rights reserved. eBooks from World Library are sponsored by the
World Library Foundation
,
a 501c(4) Member's Support Non-Profit Organization, and is NOT affiliated with any governmental agency or department.