Iraqi journalist sees threats to press freedom

Image by Walter Parenteau via Flickr

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, February 26, 2010; A12

Before the U.S.-led invasion, billed as the liberation of Iraqis, newspaper journalist Nadjha Khadum was as close to a trailblazer in her field as the era permitted.

During the 1980s war between Iraq and Iran, she was embedded with the Iraqi army and filed dispatches from the front lines. Her 1991 exposé of corruption at the Iraqi tax agency led to a minister's dismissal.

Her latest venture -- launching an independent online news site -- offers a snapshot of the present travails of Iraqis who yearned for basic freedoms during years of dictatorship. As Operation Iraqi Freedom draws to a close, Khadum is finding that the brand of freedom the United States ushered in is at best tenuous, at worst a temporary illusion.

Iraq has been the world's deadliest country for journalists since the war began in 2003. At least 140 have been killed, many of them targeted by militia and insurgent groups, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Although freedom of the press is guaranteed in Iraq's 2005 constitution, lawmakers have not passed legislation to enforce it. Government officials and private citizens have increasingly resorted to litigation to muffle critical reporting. And a commission that reports to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki recently unveiled guidelines that Iraqi journalists and press freedom advocates call authoritarian.

"This can be described as disastrous," Khadum said, referring to the new rules. "We are now waiting and watching to see who is going to become the first prey."

New guidelines

Before the war, Khadum said, journalists could publish some tough stories if they had evidence. "At that time, nobody would kill someone else over a story without getting caught by the government," she said.

Image by Knight Foundation via Flickr

Last fall, one of Khadum's best friends, journalist Imad Abadi, barely survived an assassination attempt.

"This was an attempt to keep our mouths shut and to derail journalists from their real task," said Abadi, who was shot in the head after publishing stories about government corruption.

In recent years, as political competition intensified, litigation against journalists has also increased, according to Ziad al-Ajili, head of the Iraqi Journalistic Freedoms Observatory. At least 200 such lawsuits have been filed over the past two years, Ajili said, adding, "There is no freedom."

The guidelines that Iraq's Communications and Media Commission issued last month bar journalists from withholding the names of sources and threaten action against those who publish information that incites violence -- a criterion that is ill-defined. The rules also say news organizations must apply for licenses, register equipment with the commission and provide a list of employees.

The Committee to Protect Journalists called the guidelines "an alarming return to authoritarianism."

A commission spokesman, Majed Tofan, said the rules are not an attempt to stifle journalists, but rather a mechanism to regulate an industry that operates in a legal vacuum.

"The situation in the country is still unstable," he said. "There are those in the media who incite violence and promote terrorism."

Pulling punches again

Khadum was one of the few female journalists to cover the war between Iraq and Iran during the 1980s. After the war, she was tapped for high-profile assignments at her newspaper. Male colleagues referred to her affectionately as "one of the guys."

She was boisterous and opinionated. She smoked in public, which is something few Iraqi women do. And she had a knack for breaking hard-hitting stories without running afoul of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Although journalists operated in a highly restrictive environment, the unspoken rules were reasonably clear. Stories critical of Hussein and his family crossed a red line. Writing sympathetically about Shiite and Kurdish uprisings was out of the question, and the journalists who did disappeared.

Still, there was room for moderate criticism of the government.

One day in fall 1991, Khadum received a tip that officials at the tax agency were taking bribes from taxpayers. The informant told her about a room at the agency where she and a photographer found files containing compromising data. A few days after their exposé was published, the finance minister was fired.

"I was so proud," Khadum said. "It wasn't easy to make a minister lose his job over an article."

The provisional government established by the United States drafted laws to protect press freedom, but the parliament has not passed them, leaving Hussein-era laws in effect.

Soon after the occupation, a lively press corps emerged, with political blocs establishing and funding the most influential newspapers and television stations.

Khadum, who is Shiite, left Iraq in 2006 after her neighborhood -- Adhamiyah, in northern Baghdad -- became one of the main battlegrounds in the conflict between Shiites and Sunnis. Adhamiyah is predominantly Sunni.

She returned to Iraq in 2008 as violence ebbed. Last summer, she sold a plot of land in the south for $50,000 and launched the Ur News online news agency, designing the Web site on an old laptop in her bedroom.

Relying on a small network of correspondents around the country, she began filing stories on politics and violence. In the early days, she pulled no punches, naming names and sometimes singling out the corrupt. The site quickly became popular. Since its launch, it has been accessed more than 643,000 times, Khadum said, showing records.

After receiving a few letters and phone calls threatening lawsuits, she became more careful. After her friend was shot, she grew fearful. For now, Khadum said, she limits what she writes. "There are issues I cannot talk about," she said, lowering her voice.

A few weeks ago, she decided to leave her home of 40 years in Adhamiyah. Sectarian vitriol is creeping back into the neighborhood, she said, and killings have resumed.

As she was packing up her belongings to move to a smaller house in the adjacent, mostly Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiyah, neighbors stopped by to say farewell.

"It's very painful to lose you," one said. "But what you're doing is the right thing."

Special correspondents K.I. Ibrahim and Dalya Hassan contributed to this report.

MSNBC Not Shy About Criticizing Obama - NYTimes.com

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By BRIAN STELTER

If President Obama happened to glance at “The Rachel Maddow Show” last Monday, he might have winced.

Ms. Maddow pretended to celebrate the passage of a health care overhaul bill in the House, calling it “potentially a huge generational win for the Democratic Party” — but then halted the triumphant music and called it an “electoral defeat.”

The Stupak amendment, she said, was “the biggest restriction on abortion rights in a generation.” Then she wondered aloud about the consequences for Democrats “if they don’t get women or anybody who’s pro-choice to ever vote for them again.” She returned to the subject the next four evenings in a row.

This is how it looks to have a television network pressuring President Obama from the left.

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

“I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat.

The spectacle of Democrats sniping at one another is not new, but having a TV home for it is. MSNBC — sometimes critically called the “home team” for supporters of Mr. Obama — has even hit upon the theme with a promotional tagline, “pushing back on the president,” in commercials for “Hardball,” Chris Matthews’s political hour.

“Our job is not to echo the president’s talking points,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC. “Our job is to hold whoever’s in power’s feet to the fire.”

But is it good business? MSNBC is projected to take in $365 million in revenue this year, roughly the same amount as last year, when the presidential election bolstered its bottom line. Three years ago, before making a left turn, it had revenue of about $270 million a year. MSNBC’s parent company, NBC Universal, is on the verge of being spun out of General Electric in a deal that would make Comcast its controlling entity.

Gary Carr, the executive director of national broadcast for the media buying agency TargetCast, said the opinions matter less than the ratings they earn. With cable’s prime-time opinion shows, “you’re reaching a lot of people,” he said.

It is certainly reaching the White House. Anita Dunn, the departing White House communications director, calls Mr. Olbermann and Ms. Maddow “progressive but not partisan,” and in doing so, distinguishes them from Fox News, which she considers a political opponent. The MSNBC hosts, she said in an e-mail message last month, “often take issues with the administration’s positions or tactics and are never shy about letting their viewers know when they disagree.”

Ms. Maddow said that apart from an off-the-record meeting between Mr. Obama and commentators that she attended last month, she has heard little from the White House.

Mr. Griffin said, “We heard a whole lot more from the Bush White House.”

MSNBC’s liberal points of view have made the channel an occasional thorn in the side of G.E., but the channel has also fostered a diversity of opinions that people like Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, say were lacking in the past.

“There’s been a huge market void for a long time,” Mr. Green said. Speaking of the MSNBC hosts, he said, “They are creating an environment where progressive thinkers and activists can thrive.”

Ms. Maddow, not surprisingly, agrees. “What looks like the middle of the country ought to look like the middle on TV,” she said in an interview this month.

She paused and added, “Maybe that would have helped us make better policy decisions in the country in the past.”

Sitting down to a midnight dinner in the East Village after her program on a recent Thursday, Ms. Maddow had shed her suit for a T-shirt. Four minutes in, a fan asked for an autograph. “You’re doing great work,” he said while she signed her name.

MSNBC’s political tilt — and Ms. Maddow’s ascension to one of the most influential positions in progressive America — are still starkly new phenomena. A Rhodes scholar with liberal radio roots, Ms. Maddow started to host MSNBC’s 9 p.m. hour on the eve of last year’s presidential election, at a time when MSNBC was wrestling with its political identity. New viewers materialized overnight, peaking at nearly two million a night in October 2008. Without an election to drive viewership, her program averaged 880,000 viewers last month.

As her objections to the Stupak amendment (so named for Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan) indicate, much of her work these days involves the Democratic health care overhaul. Ms. Maddow, Mr. Olbermann and Ed Schultz, the channel’s 6 p.m. host, formerly of Air America, have all exhorted Democrats to keep the public option.

Mr. Schultz started a broadcast last month by asking, “Where is the president? I think it’s time to be clear — crystal clear. What does Barack Obama want when it comes to health care in this country? What does he want in the bill?”

Topics often tackled on Ms. Maddow’s program include the relationship between the United States military and politics (something she is writing a book about) and the repeal of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward gays in the military.

Representatives for two gay members of the military, Dan Choi and Victor Fehrenbach, approached Ms. Maddow’s producers about coming out on her show, in March and May respectively. Introducing Mr. Fehrenbach, Ms. Maddow intoned that he was about to be fired “in the shadow of these political promises left unfulfilled.”

Asked why she thought the two men had contacted her producers, Ms. Maddow said, “Maybe it’s because I’m gay; maybe it’s because we’ve covered this issue before on our air.”

Other MSNBC hosts have also objected to some of the president’s policy decisions. In April, Mr. Olbermann, the channel’s best-known voice, urged Mr. Obama to hold members of the Bush administration accountable for what he called the “torture of prisoners.”

“Prosecute, Mr. President,” he said. “Even if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn.”

Ms. Maddow, however, contrasts her channel’s advocacy with the activism conducted, she says, by others on cable news. “We’re articulating liberal viewpoints,” she said at dinner, “but we’re not saying ‘Call your congressman, show up at this rally!’ ”

On her show, she has criticized Fox News for seeming to promote tea party rallies denouncing the administration this year, and the Fox host Glenn Beck, who has promoted a “9/12 Project,” intended, he says, to restore the values that Americans sensed immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“I don’t have a constituency,” she said. “I’m not trying to form a — what would it be? — a ‘9/10’ movement.”

Libya: Drop Charges against Journalist - Human Rights Watch

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Reporter Prosecuted for Reporting Sexual Harassment Claims by Abuse Victims

October 27, 2009

(New York) - The Libyan government should investigate allegations of sexual harassment in a state-run residence for women who had been orphaned instead of charging the journalist who reported the story with criminal defamation, Human Rights Watch said today.
On October 21, 2009, Mohamed al-Sareet, a Libyan journalist, wrote on Jeel Libya, an independent news website based in London, about a rare demonstration in Benghazi by women who live in a state-run care residence for women and girls who were orphaned as children, calling for an end to sexual harassment they said they had experienced in the center. The demonstrators were also demanding the return of the center's former director. After the article appeared, the police and then the General Prosecutor's office summoned al-Sareet for interrogation and charged him with criminal defamation.
"Libya should investigate the alleged abuse and ensure the protection of these women instead of intimidating the man who wrote about it," said Sarah Leah Whitson. "A journalist should not have criminal sanctions hanging over his head for doing his job."
In the October 21 demonstration, at least 10 women and girls between the ages of 18 and 27 who live in the care center walked through the streets of Benghazi to the Center's governing body, the Social Solidarity Center, holding up placards calling for the reinstatement of the Care Center's former director, who marchers said had treated them well and protected them.
Several of the women told Libyan journalists that officials who run the center had sexually harassed them and allowed security officers into their rooms at night. One woman said that an official had propositioned her and threatened to beat her if she did not comply. Besides Jeel Libya another Libyan website, Libya al Youm, published photos of the demonstration and interviews with some of the residents.
On October 22, local police summoned al-Sareet to the Hadaek police station for questioning. On October 26, the General Prosecutor's Office summoned him for further questioning and charged him with criminal defamation, which carries a prison sentence. Jeel Libya's director told Human Rights Watch that al-Sareet had received threats to burn down his house to intimidate him into retracting his article.
On October 23, some of the women who had been quoted called another Libyan news website, Al Manara, and denied that administrators had sexually harassed them. Libya al Youm reported that officials had threatened to expel those who demonstrated from the center, and pressured them to retract their statements and to sue al-Sareet for slander. On October 26, Quryna, one of two private newspapers affiliated with Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, the son of Libyan leader Mu'ammar Gaddafi, published an article in which several of the women denied that any sexual harassment had taken place. "We are now without honor in the eyes of society after what this journalist did," the paper quoted them as saying.
During a visit to Libya in 2005, Human Rights Watch found widespread official denial that violence against women exists in Libya, and a lack of adequate laws and services, leaving victims of violence without effective remedies and deterring reporting. A group of students conducting a study on sexual harassment in Tripoli in April 2009 had great difficulty in persuading women to talk about their experiences, since some felt it would bring shame on them to discuss it.
Human Rights Watch said that countries have a duty to investigate and prevent sexual harassment, a form of violence against women. Libya was among the first countries to ratify the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, Article 8 of which requires state parties to adopt all necessary measures to prevent, punish, and eradicate all forms of violence against women. Gender-based violence is a form of discrimination prohibited by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Libya is party. Furthermore, both the African Charter and the ICCPR require Libya to protect freedom of expression. Journalists should be able to report freely without fear of imprisonment for their writings.
"Official denial and reprisals against journalists is not the way to protect women in Libyan society," said Whitson, "Women should be encouraged to bring forward complaints of sexual harassment and other forms of violence so the government can act to prevent abuses."

Iraqi Journalists Protesting in Baghdad Say the Government Is Trying to Censor Them

By SAM DAGHER

BAGHDAD — Nearly 100 Iraqi journalists, news media workers and their supporters protested in Baghdad on Friday against what they said was a growing push by the country’s governing Shiite political parties to muzzle them.

“No, no to muzzling!” they shouted as they marched down Mutanabi Street. “Yes, yes to freedom!”

The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has sought to censor certain publications and books, block Web sites it deems offensive and pass a new media law that would clamp down on journalists in the name of protecting them.

The proposed law, which was sent to Parliament last month, offers government grants to journalists and their families if they are disabled or killed because of “a terror act.” According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 167 Iraqi reporters and media support workers were killed in Iraq between March 2003 and July 2008. But the bill also defines what the government considers “moral” and sound journalistic practices.

Zuhair al-Jezairy, editor in chief of the Aswat Al Iraq news agency, who was in attendance, said that while the journalists’ grievances were legitimate, their message was diluted by the fact that most of them still viewed the government as their patron. “There are journalists who expect guns, land and salaries from the government,” he said.

Mr. Jezairy said that many Iraqi journalists — employed by outlets owned by the government, political parties and even neighboring countries with agendas in Iraq — had been turned into tools in the political struggle. There were abundant signs of this at the demonstration itself, which seemed to have as much to do with a recent spat over a bank robbery as with press freedom.

Sheik Jalaleddin al-Saghir, a Shiite cleric and member of Parliament from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq Party, lashed out last week at news media reports that he said insinuated that his party was behind the robbery, in which eight billion dinars, or $7 million, was stolen and eight people were killed. He said many of the journalists were members of Saddam Hussein’s banned Baath Party and promised to punish the offenders.

Among those leading Friday’s protest were two Shiite politicians who are rivals of Mr. Saghir’s. As the event got under way, word spread that the journalists who organized it were in the camp of the interior minister, Jawad al-Bolani, who has ambitions of becoming the next prime minister. And the event was boycotted by the Iraqi journalists’ union, which was promised plots of land for its members earlier this year by Mr. Maliki.

One journalist in particular, Ahmed Abdul-Hussein, was the target of much of Sheik Saghir’s wrath. In a recent Op-Ed article in the state-owned newspaper Al-Sabah, which is loyal to Mr. Maliki, Mr. Abdul-Hussein wrote that “we know, that they know, that we know” that the party that stole the money was going to use it to bribe people in the national elections next year. He offered no proof and did not name the party.

“How many blankets can you buy with eight billion dinars?” he wrote. Sheik Saghir took that as a reference to his party, which distributed blankets and electric heaters to voters during the provincial elections last January.

With Iran Blaming West, Dual Citizens Are Targets

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 9, 2009

Among the more than 100 people on trial after Iran's disputed presidential election are two dual citizens: Kian Tajbakhsh, 47, an American Iranian urban planner, and Maziar Bahari, 42, a Canadian Iranian filmmaker and Newsweek reporter.

Bahari was arrested June 21 at his mother's Tehran apartment, where he was staying while reporting on the post-election turmoil. Tajbakhsh, who lives in Tehran with his wife and daughter, was arrested July 9 while leaving his home to attend a party.

Friends and family members say they do not know where the men are being held. They have not been allowed visitors or access to lawyers, though both have been allowed a few phone calls and appeared in a Tehran courtroom last week.

Their arrests, along with those of opposition politicians and other journalists, came after Iranians poured into the streets protesting what they said was the rigged reelection of the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iranian officials have blamed the protests on foreign governments and news agencies, and friends of Tajbakhsh and Bahari worry that the two are being held because of their Western links.

"They are trying to make a case to their own constituents, and to international constituents, that what has taken place has a foreign element behind it, so dual nationals, people with ties to Western NGOs, are targets," said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a friend of Tajbakhsh. "I don't believe for a second that they genuinely perceive Kian to be a threat to national security."

Last month, Iranian news reports quoted Bahari as stating that "as a journalist and a member of this great Western capitalism machine," he had "either blindly or on purpose participated in projecting doubts and promoting a color revolution" similar to those in Georgia and Ukraine.

Last week, Bahari, whose partner is pregnant in London, apologized before Iranian reporters. Friends and colleagues say they think the statements were made under duress.

Both men looked haggard and tense in photos released last week by Iran's semiofficial Fars News Agency.

Their arrests follow a pattern during Ahmadinejad's tenure of high-profile detentions of dual citizens. Since he took office in 2005, at least seven have been detained, including Woodrow Wilson Center scholar Haleh Esfandiari in 2007 and freelance journalist Roxana Saberi, who was convicted of espionage this year and later pardoned.

Tajbakhsh, who has lived in Iran since 1999 and has done some projects for its government, was held for four months in 2007, during which authorities accused him of trying to foment a "color" revolution. He stayed in Iran afterward and had plans to teach at Columbia University this fall.

Friends said he had purposely avoided the election-related turmoil, even abstaining from voting. "He felt confident there was no rationale for him to be imprisoned," Sadjadpour said. Two days after the vote, Tajbakhsh wrote to him in an e-mail: "I'm keeping my head down. I have nothing journalistic to add to all the reports that are here."

Bahari had been filing reports for Newsweek and for television stations in Britain; the Iranian government has accused him of sending reports to foreign news media in exchange for payment, said Nisid Hajari, Newsweek's foreign editor.

"That's exactly what he's been doing for more than 10 years," Hajari said, adding that the Iranian government had renewed Bahari's press accreditation each year and had not complained about his work. "What they've accused him of doing is a job that they themselves had licensed and approved him to do."

Bahari's writing had not been particularly critical of the Iranian government, according to analysts. "Newsweek coverage has been quite favorable in the past, so I'm surprised that they would target him," said Ervand Abrahamian, a history professor at the City University of New York's Baruch College.

Esfandiari, the scholar who, like Tajbakhsh, spent four months in an Iranian prison in 2007, said the government may simply have looked for convenient targets to blame for the post-election unrest.

"I can guess that they were digging into the velvet revolution file, and they needed a credible voice to talk about this velvet revolution, and the only person who was there was Kian," she said. "I've heard they have rooms full of charts about universities, think tanks, NGOs and are then drawing parallels from Georgia, Ukraine and so on. And then they go after truly, truly innocent people like Kian."

Shiva Balaghi, an Iran scholar at Brown University, said the arrests are part of a historical pattern in the Islamic republic. "Whenever they feel they're losing their grip on power is when they do these things," she said.

In past weeks, as cracks have appeared in the top echelons of the Iranian government, it has been unclear who is in charge of detainees. When Tajbakhsh checked in with his Intelligence Ministry minder after the election, Sadjadpour said, he was told, " 'It's not us that's behind the imprisonment now; it's the Sepah, the Revolutionary Guard.' "

The U.S. and Canadian governments have called for release of the men, and writers, filmmakers and artists have signed petitions. Iran is also holding a French academic, who apologized in court Saturday, and three U.S. citizens who hiked over the border from Iraq last week.

Jacki Lyden, a National Public Radio reporter who has worked with Bahari inside and outside Iran, said his arrest signals an end to the reassurances journalists there used to count on.

"Every little thing you tell yourself about why they would not come after you, those little half-truths over the last 20 years, are gone," she said. "Anybody who subscribes to the idea that there's a doormat-sized civil society in the Islamic republic has found that doormat yanked out from under them."

#FreeMediaVe: Venezuelans Using Twitter to Protest Media Crackdown

by Ben Parr

Over the last few days, Venezuela has been closing down radio and media stations that are denouncing the government and its actions. This is not going down quietly, though, as protesters are fighting back against what critics consider the infringement of free speech.

However, with stations being “recovered” by the government, citizens and protesters alike have turned to a new communication platform to concentrate their efforts: Twitter (). Venezuelans are coordinating their tweets of opposition with the hashtag #FreeMediaVe, which started to pick up steam late Friday.

President Hugo Chavez, the controversial socialist leader, ordered that about 240 radio stations be closed down earlier this July, but now the media lockdown is being implemented in full force. This is where Twitter has come into play – as radio stations have fallen, opponents of the socialist leader have taken to Twitter, dominating nearly 1% of tweets at times.

In fact, there has been so much activity on Twitter that it has prompted a government response, where they said the social network was being used just by extremists.

Twitter’s power to challenge repressive governments and galvanize worldwide support was seen in full action during the dramatic events of the #IranElection crisis. It proved to be a major means of communications for Iranians as the government closed down other channels (Twitter’s role was even big enough to concern the U.S. government).

We may very well be seeing the “Twitter effect” in action again. How big it gets, how long it lasts, and how effective Twitter will be in fighting back remains to be seen. We will be watching the #FreeMediaVe movement closely.

Venezuela Mulls Tough Media Law

By Will Grant
BBC News, Caracas, Venezuela

The draft law comes at a time of tension over media regulation

A tough new media law, under which journalists could be imprisoned for publishing "harmful" material, has been proposed in Venezuela.

Journalists could face up to four years in prison for publishing material deemed to harm state stability.

Public prosecutor Luisa Ortega Diaz, who proposed the changes, said it was necessary to "regulate the freedom of expression" without "harming it".

The move comes at a time of rising tension over private media regulation.

Under the draft law on media offences, information deemed to be "false" and aimed at "creating a public panic" will also be punishable by prison sentences.

The law will be highly controversial if passed in its current form.

It states that anyone - newspaper editor, reporter or artist - could be sentenced to between six months and four years in prison for information which attacks "the peace, security and independence of the nation and the institutions of the state".

Radio risk

A case which has often been quoted in the bitter arguments over this law is a recent advert in national newspapers by a right-wing think tank, Cedice, which shows a naked woman next to the slogan "The Social Property law will take all you've got, Say No to communist laws".

The government says it has no intention of removing the right to private property and that such publications are irresponsible and designed to breed fear among Venezuelans.

But the opposition says the draft law is an unprecedented attack on private media outlets and journalists in Venezuela.

The proposed bill, which must still be debated on the floor of the assembly, comes as some 240 radio stations in Venezuela are at risk of being closed for allegedly failing to hand their registration papers into the government ahead of a deadline last month.