World Press Freedom Day fell on May 3 this year marking the end of another year of struggle for Reporters Without Borders, which the organisation is noting with an ironic campaign, Great Year for Censorship.
May 3 also marked the 5th year in which Reporters Without Borders has been supported by BETC Paris on a pro bono basis. Great Year for Censorship is BETC’s campaign.
Great Year for Censorship, created for RSF’s 2016 World Press Freedom Index, reveals the 12 heads of state who will be throwing parties tomorrow to celebrate their victories in trampling on media freedom and gagging journalists in various spectacular ways, for example, grenades thrown at radio stations in Burundi; journalists fired over a tweet in Turkey, massive state propaganda in China, Russia and Eritrea; a blogger jailed and flogged in public in Saudi Arabia; military detention camps for journalists in Thailand – these are just a few examples of how these 12 “enemies of media freedom” behave.
RSF’s 2016 World Press Freedom Index intends to highlight the declining ability of journalists to operate freely and independently throughout the world, including these 12 countries.
“Journalistic independence is being undermined in both state and privately-owned media as a result of enhanced mechanisms for censorship and news control, propaganda apparatuses, and ideologies – especially religious extremism – that are hostile to journalism,” BETC stated in its press release.
“And all over the world, oligarchs are buying up media outlets and subjecting journalist to pressure that adds to the existing pressure from government’s often allied with leading corporate interests.”
The campaign targets these leaders:
- Salman bin Abdelaziz Al Saud (Saudi Arabia)
- Isaias Afwerki (Eritrea)
- Ilham Aliyev (Azerbaijan)
- Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (Egypt)
- Prayuth Chan-ocha (Thailand)
- Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkey)
- Kim Jong-Un (North Korea)
- Ali Khamenei (Iran)
- Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela)
- Pierre Nkurunziza (Burundi)
- Vladimir Putin (Russia)
- and Xi Jinping (China)
BETC has produced the World Press Freedom Day campaign free of charge for RSF for the fifth year running. The ad agency’s staffers even posed for the photos on which the heads of these leaders were superimposed.
The campaign’s posters can already be seen on the streets of Paris and in digital format on social networks.
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