Today’s MediaWireWorld roundup of journalism news from outside the U.S. Send tips to Kristen Hare: khare@poynter.org.
Russia
Russian President Vladimir Putin gave awards to 300 journalists, citing their “objective coverage” in Crimea, Alec Luhn wrote Monday in The Guardian.
Putin awarded medals of the “Order of Service to the Fatherland” to 300 journalists including several editors, directors and television hosts known for their Kremlin-friendly coverage in an executive order signed on 22 April that was not made public. After the well respected newspaper Vedomosti first published details of the awards on Monday, presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed that the order had been signed but declined to provide details.
No journalists with independent television or radio stations won awards, Luhn reports.
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- Putin: Appreciates some journalists’ work. (AP Photo/RIA-Novosti, Alexei Druzhinin, Presidential Press Service)
Ukraine
On Monday, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that three journalists were shot and others hurt while covering “deadly clashes between pro-Russia activists and their opponents in Odessa, southern Ukraine, according to news reports and a local press freedom group.”
The Kiev-based Institute for Mass Information (IMI), a local press freedom group, reported that three local journalists sought medical help after being shot. On Friday, Oleg Konstantinov, chief editor of news website Dumskaya was shot in the back, arm, and leg, and Anton Dotsenko, a journalist for local news website Timer, was shot in his arm. Neither could identify the assailants, reports said. Pyotr Rakul, reporter for online news portal Info-Center, was shot in his left leg on Sunday. According to a report by Info-Center, Rakul was shot by a local police officer despite wearing a yellow vest marked “Press.” It is unclear if Rakul’s attacker was identified and apprehended.
On Monday, the National Press Club called for respect for freedom of the press in Ukraine.
The rash of recent kidnappings includes the brief detainment and interrogation on May 2 of BuzzFeed correspondent Mike Giglio, his translator Olena Glazunova, and a CBS News team. The kidnappers reportedly were pro-Russian militants.
In Giglio’s account of the kidnapping, he speculated that Western journalists were being targeted by local separatists as a result of news reports by Russian state-controlled media that had blamed the violence in Ukraine on plots hatched by the United States. CBS News correspondent Clarissa Ward offered a similar view of the situation in an interview about her abduction.
Denmark
Two journalists will go on trial Tuesday for violating Danish law in 2010 for reporting the names of pig farms, International Press Institute reported Monday.
Sweden’s Göteborgs-Posten reported, in an article posted in English by the Global Investigative Journalism Network, that Nils Mulvad and Kjeld Hansen of Investigative Reporting Denmark face trial tomorrow on the charge that they violated Danish law protecting personal information when they named 12 pig farms in Denmark as the sources of the spread of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
The journalists did so in an Oct. 21, 2010 article posted on the website Aabenhedstinget.dk, a forum for debate on public law and journalism. The article reportedly focused the difficulty medical authorities in the city of Løgstør in Jutland faced in treating abscesses and ulcers in two children carrying MRSA.
In Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index, Denmark came in at No. 7.
Sweden
Part of the fun of looking through the world’s newspapers each morning on Newseum is attempting to understand what’s going on while not speaking the majority of those languages. The photos help. Sometimes. Today in Helsingborgs Dagblad, from Helsingborg, Sweden, a “Fawlty Towers” tribute, perhaps?
