Survey respondents join whites in opposing military action; stories on low-income groups said to miss the big picture; Bezos meets Washington Post staff; diversity not a topic; opinion editor urges writers to protest op-ed cutback; NPR's "LatinoUSA" expands to an hour; N.Y. Times offends in linking "twerking" with race, class; Pinkston, Peterson latest to connect with Al Jazeera; Liberia answers jailed journalist's N.Y. Times op-ed (9/4/13)Survey Respondents Join Whites in Opposing Military Action
Liberia Answers Jailed Journalist's N.Y. Times Op-Ed
"In an op-ed recently published in the New York Times, "Jailed for Journalism,"Mr. Rodney Sieh attempts to paint a gloomy picture of the prospect of free speech and the practice of journalism in Liberia," the Liberian government wrote Tuesday in a response to the op-ed.
"On the same day that Mr. Sieh posted the piece, a lower court, the Office of the Independent Information Commissioner, ruled in favor of a private petitioner's right to information under the Freedom of Information Law passed a few years earlier by the government. Freedom of speech is being experienced as a daily reality in Liberia.
"Obviously, Mr. Sieh blames the Liberian government for his imprisonment, and for the unanimous jury award of US$1.5 million which he believes to be excessive. . . . "
Meanwhile, Sieh's newspaper, FrontPageAfrica, reported, "Journalists in their numbers turned out at the Corina Hotel in Monrovia on Tuesday hoping to put an end to a situation that has been dragging for weeks that has seen one of their colleagues the Managing Editor of the FrontPageAfrica newspaper Rodney D. Sieh in jail for a week and another week in the hospital after falling sick in his cell, but later found that Dr. Chris Toe was determined to prolong the crisis.
"The former Agriculture Minister Dr. Chris Toe Tuesday acknowledged [the General Auditing Commission] report that accused him of his alleged failure to account for millions of United States dollars offered by the government to fight army worms that invaded two regions but claimed that the report was unprofessional. . . ."