The United States has called for the immediate release of all journalists imprisoned for doing their jobs.
"We will continue to speak out when journalists are unfairly arrested and detained; we will continue to raise these issues with foreign officials at every level; and we will continue to promote journalists' physical and digital safety," US Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement Tuesday, commemorating World Press Freedom Day.
He stressed that "Freedom of expression is one of our country's core values and one which we will continue to defend both at home and overseas."
Kerry recalled that as the Committee to Protect Journalists recently reported, this is the "most deadly and dangerous period for journalists in recent history." From violent extremists and criminal gangs who abduct and kill reporters to authoritarian governments that persecute them, press freedom is under attack.
The most common reason journalists are targeted, of course, is to limit and control the free flow of information and ideas. Censorship gives power to dictators and tyrants; it allows them to mask the truth, to propagate false narratives that play to their self-serving interests. That's what's happening in places like Syria, where those in power, and the extremists present there, want nothing to stand in the way of their ability to distort the truth, according to Kerry.
The State Department last week launched the Free the Press campaign, highlighting individual journalists who remain wrongly imprisoned. The list includes Gao Yu, a 71-year-old Chinese journalist, who was sentenced to seven years for allegedly leaking state secrets to foreign media; Syria's Mazen Darwish, who remains imprisoned by the Asad regime for trying to expose the regime's brutal atrocities; Ta Phong Tan, who is serving a 10-year sentence in Vietnam for unmasking government corruption; and Reeyot Alemu, who was imprisoned in Ethiopia for writing an article critical of her government.
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