“Sudan muffles critical speech through a long menu of direct and indirect tactics, violating the basic freedoms enshrined in the constitution,” said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Sudan should stop trying to silence anyone who says anything the government doesn’t like.”

Although Sudan’s 15 daily political newspapers have a greater semblance of freedom than the state-controlled broadcast media, the newspapers are subject to various methods of censorship and punitive measures for publishing articles on sensitive issues. The National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) is largely responsible for these tactics.

On April 3, 2013, NISS re-imposed direct pre-printing censorship on at least four independent dailies: al-Ayyam, al-Sahafa, al-Khartoum, and al-Youm al-Tali. The first two are being censored directly, required to clear the content of each edition with NISS officials in advance. The other two were later exempted from this process, but are still getting phone calls from security officials directing their coverage.

For example, after a police mutiny in West Darfur on April 21, an NISS official called al-Khartoum newspaper, one of the paper’s editors told Human Rights Watch: “They told us not to mention a single word outside the official statement of the Ministry of Interior on the events.”

On March 24, NISS confiscated al-Khartoum’s print run because the newspaper published a report about a protest planned by the families of six political detainees. Most of the detainees have been held for almost four months without any judicial review because they held talks in January with rebel groups in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

When the paper’s editors asked the NISS official who had the issue confiscated for an explanation, he said the paper “has already crossed the red lines too many times,” the editor told Human Rights Watch.

In September 2009, President Omar Al-Bashir announced the end of more than a year of pre-publication censorship for all newspapers, a system under which NISS officials visited the newspaper offices every night to screen draft copies and expunge any objectionable content on a long list of sensitive issues.

The banned topics included the armed conflicts in the country’s peripheries and the indictment of Al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court (ICC). In announcing the decision to lift censorship, al-Bashir warned journalists not to cross the “red lines” and required chief editors of newspapers to sign a document obliging them to exercise “self-censorship.”

However, NISS officials continued to use various tactics to exercise censorship, ranging from making phone calls to issuing orders about coverage to confiscating entire editions or shutting down newspapers without court orders. On January 2, 2012, the NISS closed down the anti-government Ray Al-Sha’b and 10 days later the privately owned al-Wan, both without explanation. Al-Wan was allowed to resume publishing on March 15, 2012 while Ray Al-Sha’b remains closed.

On June 11, the NISS director-general, Mohammed Atta, suspended publication of the privately owned newspaper al-Tayyar, which remains closed. NISS suspended another privately owned daily, al-Jareeda, on September 27, but allowed it to resume publishing on December 15.

In August 2011, following South Sudan’s independence from Sudan, the NISS closed down six newspapers, including the anti-government Ajrass al-Hurriya, on the pretext that their shareholders include citizens from South Sudan. And in mid-2012, the government again stepped up harassment of journalists and censorship in the aftermath of fighting between Sudanese and South Sudanese forces at Heglig oil fields. In late 2011 and early 2012, NISS effectively blacklisted 15 journalists.

While many of the journalists were later allowed to resume work, Rasha Awad, a columnist, has not been permitted to write since NISS shut down Ajrass al-Hurriya, where she had worked. Haidar al-Mukashfi, a prominent columnist at al-Sahafa, was suspended for nearly a year, beginning on April 24, 2012, when he was summoned to the NISS media office in Khartoum, interrogated for four hours and ordered not to write again until he received further notice. He was only allowed to resume writing on April 12, 2013, after his editor-in-chief obtained permission from NISS.

More recently, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper al-Sahafa, al-Nur Ahmad al-Nur, said that NISS ordered him on April 3 to resign from his position because of articles the paper had run, or the NISS would ensure that the paper was closed down for good.

Sudan’s National Security Act of 2010 gives the NISS sweeping powers of arrest, search and seizure as well as immunity from prosecution for its agents. Sudan’s interim constitution of 2005 guarantees freedom of the press, however, and does not give the security apparatus any powers of arrest or authority over the press.

Sudan is a party to both the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and as such has undertaken legally binding obligations to respect free speech. The actions of the NISS against journalists and media outlets clearly violate these obligations, and the rights of Sudanese citizens, Human Rights Watch said.

“The security agency officials’ intimidation and threats of the news media are clearly designed to ensure that the Sudanese people are kept in the dark about sensitive topics that are of huge public interest” Bekele said. “The security’s agency’s censorship also underscores the need for urgent reform of national security laws in line with international standards.”

In Greece, in 2009 there were 39 national dailies, 23 national Sunday papers, 14 national weekly papers, plus dozens of TV and radio stations for a population of 11 million. Some papers had a circulation of 100 copies but survived thanks to ads by state-owned businesses.’

In spite of the variety and richness of the media production, Nikos Xydakis, a columnist with the daily Kathimerini, argues that in Greece the big media conglomerates never bothered to analyse what was going on in society.

Freelance journalist Nikolas Leontopoulos said that Greek media owners used to be too close to political and financial hobs of power. In fact: “They didn’t care so much to earn money out of their media businesses. they cared more about winning state contracts,” he stated in an interview with Sylvia Poggioli for NPR (National Public Radio, USA).

Today, after years of economic depression, people in Greece witness a dramatic change in the national media production. Several newspapers and TV channels have closed, and more than 4,000 journalists have lost their jobs. Many reporters have seen their salaries slashed up to 40 percent.

Is it possible that those who survived so far  will remember Immanuel Kant’s famous appeal (Kant 1784) that the true good citizen should  be actively involved in society?  Hence, will they understand that one way to see a publication sell is to give voice to the worries and wishes that are really in the Greek people’s minds? Is there space in Greece for publications which contain unguided audience participation? There is no answer to this, yet.

In the meantime,  polls show that the media’s credibility has plunged. Leontopoulos is sure that worse is to come: “Recently there was a prediction that in the following year, in 2013, almost 50 percent of journalists that used to work for the media will have lost their jobs.”

As a result, one might think that a change is needed. Maybe a change that will start with the way the economic crisis is portrayed in the Greek media, as the ‘voices of the public’ seemed to have been firmly ‘angled’ in the past years.

It is not hard to see how years of ‘tracking the crisis’ have produced a language about it, a way to represent the same issues.  Reporters developed very quickly a stock of phrases, a familiar journalistic way to portray the government as opposite to the people experiencing the prolonged economic hardship – people who were mostly represented as victims. Rarely projects of active citizens who continued to work, and produce in spite of the situation, became serious material for the media. What the daily agenda dictated was nothing but ‘drama.’

However, ‘drama programmes’ presented a distorted image of the crisis and of poverty; an image in which the effects of low income were depicted as a tragedy revealed in order to be sympathetically corrected by the intervention of the media. This downplayed effectively the relevance of the phenomenon, and contributed to the creation of a polarized understanding of the crisis. The human cases depicted showed people who appeared to be deprived of essentials, but did not focus on the vast majority of the population who faced a more controlled but not less dramatic change in lifestyle. On the whole, one could state that such a coverage had somehow a voyeuristic trope to it.

Today, it seems that something is changing. First of all, in the last two years several publications were born and they run on-line. When Poggioli interviewed Press Project’s journalist Pandelis Panteloglu, he explained that the site’s purpose was to see serious public dialogue in Greece, and the site he is working for is not the only one engaged into the process.

However,  more and more Greeks are forced to give up Internet connections to pay for their daily needs, and the promising development born out of the revolutionary change the media had to face due to the crisis seems to be in danger.

It is true that on-line media are increasingly popular among young Greeks, but will they survive as independent outlets?

It is a fundamental question, which goes beyond the economic survival of the outlet as it touches its core and intentions. These publications were born out of an unsatisfactory coverage of the Greek reality by the media traditionally established in the country, and those circles of power are not too far from understanding that the Internet is the new arena for the country’s political and cultural games.

The question remains. Would the media benefit from a real confrontation with the people’s voice? What would be for Greece ‘public discourse’? Is the country that created democracy ready for it?

Soon, there will be no daily editions, at least on paper. Weeklies will be strengthened to create cash flows, necessary for news organisations to survive. Of course, structural cuts will have to wait until after the elections, since campaign budgets are rolling since after a Parliament decision, new money was channeled to political parties (and their advertisers and PR specialists)… At the same time, major television stations continue to suffer from a long lasting strategy that favored low quality competition, built upon a star system of well paid tele-personas. This is dead too.

Only 5 years ago, announcements on internet penetration in the country used to be news. Today, broadband connectivity has transformed the news market, allowing a new wave of online investments to take place. However, the crisis has turned online growth to more opportunistic than strategic. Small groups of journalists and prominent media figures are creating websites that remind first generation attempts in foreign mature markets. There is an absolute lack of innovation, even in design and layout arrangements. These ventures reflect the agony of the profession to place itself in the new web advertising market, which is about to take off, as soon as fiscal finances in Greece appear to be stable and entrepreneurial climate starts to improve.

In the last 6 months, around a dozen of ‘major’ news web sites have appeared in the Greek internet market, already causing an inflationary effect in the free news content sector. None of these relies on parameters that could fall under the category of innovation. And this is the main reason why the leading ones are those advertised by mainstream channels, television and billboards. In the first case since their owners are television personas, in the second, because owners can afford it.

The growth of internet news/content market in Greece resembles the chaotic development of private TV stations in the country, 20 years ago. This time, however, the chaotic approach is not due to the rebellious nature of the new media. It simply lacks strategy, confusing readers and advertisers. These things are about to change…

Dr. Demetris Kamaras is the Editor of AlYunaniya.