30th April 2022 Belgrade, Serbia
Disinformation has become one of the defining words of our age. It is not a new phenomenon. But its present scale is unprecedented, helped by round the clock broadcasting and social media. There is a shorter word for it: lies. But ‘disinformation’ perhaps better conveys the sense of deliberate corrupting of the media environment with […]
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10th May 2021 Skopje, North Macedonia
We have all faced challenges during the pandemic that have impacted on our way of living. Media workers found themselves on the frontlines from the very start. Journalists, photographers, camerapersons while doing their jobs put their lives at risk, reporting on daily events to inform and protect the public’s interest. Last week we marked World […]
9th December 2020
Around the world, media freedom is under attack. In the last decade, over 1000 journalists and media workers have been killed. They face a multitude of challenges, from violence to repressive laws. Yet, their role in our societies could never be more vital. In the battle between facts and falsehoods, journalists play a key role […]
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30th September 2020 Skopje, North Macedonia
Two years into my posting as British Ambassador to North Macedonia, September was my first month working for the recently merged Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the whole team coming back fully into the Embassy and adapting to the “new normal”. With my Embassy team, we have been working remotely and in groups from the […]
15th July 2019 Dublin, Ireland
Welcome to the first edition of my blog. I intend to use it to share both reflections on important policy issues and some more personal impressions from my experiences here in Dublin and right across the beautiful country of Ireland. Today, however, I would like to focus on the incredibly important topic of media freedom. […]
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25th June 2019
Sheila Nduhukire has been a journalist for more than eight years, most recently working as a senior news anchor and reporter for NTV Uganda. She’s currently on a Chevening scholarship at Cardiff University in the UK. In this guest blog for the Foreign Office, she talks about being forced to prove herself as a female […]
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7th June 2019
Long-time Southern African regional correspondent Susan Njanji from Zimbabwe was one of very few black African female journalists to cover the genocide in Rwanda. Here she reflects on the challenges that she’s faced when reporting from the frontline as a woman – and why gender should never be a factor in deciding who gets the […]
20th May 2019
Berna Namata has been a business journalist for more than six years, mostly in Rwanda. She spent a year in London as a Chevening scholar. She returned in 2017 and currently works in Rwanda for the Nation Media Group’s popular regional weekly newspaper, The East African. In this guest blog for the Foreign Office, she […]
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8th January 2016
I was proud to be one of a number of Consuls General, who visited the offices of Cumhuriyet on 6 January. We made the following statement, and handed over a signed text: “As representatives of EU consulates based in Istanbul, we wish for Turkish journalists across the whole political spectrum to be able to exercise […]
15th March 2013
What links Turkey, Iceland, press freedom and Google? My recent blog “World Press Freedom Index: Turkey” was the most-read blog I have written since coming to Turkey. So I was interested to see reports recently about the balance which all countries must strike between media freedoms; genuine security concerns; and ensuring that the extent to […]