HONG KONG, Feb 1: Despite the high number of journalists killed or attacked in Asia in 2006 and persistent censorship, Asians are slowly gaining access to more independent, better quality news, media rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said on Thursday.

In its annual report on press freedom in Asia, RSF said abuse was still at “alarming levels”. Sixteen journalists were killed in 2006, at least 328 arrested and 517 assaulted or threatened. At least 478 media were censored.

But these disturbing figures were “paradoxically signs of greater freedom”, or at least the desire for it, the report said.

“For example, journalists in Bangladesh suffer constant assaults and death threats because they tirelessly expose nepotism and corruption among local politicians. In China, the propaganda department regularly removes editorial chiefs in an attempt to curb their desire for independence.” RSF pointed to Asia's two heavyweights, India and China, as opposite extremes in their approach to the media's role in politics.

“In the first, the media make themselves felt more every day as an effective counter-balance to government, capable of exposing even the most powerful,” it said.

“In the second, the press, although subject to competition, is still under the control of the party-state, which is sure of its authority and which has no intention of dropping its capacity to censor.” Across Asia, censorship remained extremely widespread in 2006, the report said.

Yet there were signs of hope in the form of private television stations free of government control, in the repeal of laws allowing states to throw journalists into jail and in the falling number of reporters behind bars.

On the negative front, RSF said: “A score of military or communist dictatorships view the media simply as channels for relaying propaganda”.

RSF singled out North Korea and Myanmar as extremes of state censorship. It also criticised the communist regimes in Laos, Vietnam and China, and the military junta in Thailand.

North Korea imposed “total control on news content”, the report said. In Myanmar, “at times more than a third of the articles and illustrations in privately-owned publications are banned”, as is any reference to pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Elsewhere, governments used financial control, religion and moral values to quash free speech, RSF said.

Singapore and Malaysia only award licences to press groups of whose loyalty they are assured. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, journalists who criticise religious authorities risk prosecution for blasphemy, while in Indonesia and Sri Lanka talking sex or sexuality can land you in court.

On a more positive note, privately owned television channels brought “news free from government control into hundreds of millions of homes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, China and India” in 2006, RSF said.

The number of journalists in jail fell, even in Myanmar and China, while Cambodia and Indonesia repealed laws allowing them to incarcerate reporters for defamation or “insulting the head of state”.

Finally, RSF said, moves towards reliance on advertising revenue rather than state subsidies meant some publications in Laos, Vietnam and China were now daring to handle previously taboo subjects and some had “breached state control entirely”.—AFP