Journalists under attack worldwide, says media group

Journalists across the world are threatened and intimidated and the governments in South-east Asia are emulating China's model of media control and punishment, a media group said on Tuesday.
 
In its report titled 'Attacks on the Press', the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said in the Middle East a regional pacts threatens satellite TV and criminal gangs, paramilitaries, drug traffickers and street gangs routinely terrorize journalists throughout Latin America.
 
"Today, the greatest threats to freedom of the press are more insidious than a generation ago because they are intended to induce a climate of fear and self-censorship through systematic violence and emblematic arrest aimed at those who would practice real, independent journalism," author and journalist Carl Bernstein wrote in the report's preface.
 
Countries as diverse as communist-led Vietnam, military-run Burma, and "ostensibly" democratic Thailand are following China's censorship model, the report said, adding that governments are controlling the Internet and punishing those who circumvent the restrictions.