

FOX is the defacto US governmental press organization and the only press organization that the present Executive and Judicial branches are authorizing for information releases to the general public. The judicial branch is publicly supporting control of the press by not allowing open access to information releases. Do note in the link, if you glance at it, that Barr has selected only FOX and the WSJ for his personal press release. With the first free elections in 15 years taking place next year, he is in the same spot Meles was, and is considering restoring some of the press controls he had canceled.Ģ019 is a repeat of the same process.

Some in the newly freed press are publishing sometimes inaccurate stories – whipping up ethnic and tribal enmity and attacking Abiy. Now, with a new reformist prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, in office for just one year, Ethiopia has made so much progress in freeing jailed journalists and lifting press controls that it is hosting World Press Freedom Day.īut don’t celebrate yet.

Ethiopia quickly became one of the world’s top jailors of journalists. So he had cracked down, introducing laws criminalizing what he called “insults” to the government and fining and imprisoning journalists for inaccuracies. Since Meles's guerillas had ousted a repressive Soviet-backed dictatorship a few years before, there had been an explosion of exuberant and sometimes wildly inaccurate little newspapers, many of them attacking Meles. NEW YORK – On a trip to Ethiopia in the 1990s, I met with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi to try to persuade him to stop jailing journalists.
