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Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship
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Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship
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Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship
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Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship

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Hearing a blast, journalist Anjan Sundaram headed uphill towards the sound. Grenade explosions are not entirely unusual in the city of Kigali; dissidents throw them in public areas to try and destabilise the government and, since moving to Rwanda, he had observed an increasing number of them.

What was unusual about this one, however, was that when Sundaram arrived, it was as though nothing had happened. Traffic circulated as normal, there was no debris on the streets and the policeman on duty denied any event whatsoever. This was evidence of a clean-up, a cloaking of the discontent in Rwanda and a desire to silence the media in a country most of whose citizens were without internet. This was the first of many ominous events.

Bad News is the extraordinary account of the battle for free speech in modern-day Rwanda. Following not only those journalists who stayed, despite fearing torture or even death from a ruthless government, but also those reporting from exile, it is the story of papers being shut down, of lies told to please foreign delegates, of the unshakeable loyalty that can be bred by terror, of history being retold, of constant surveillance, of corrupted elections and of great courage.

It tells the true narrative of Rwandan society today and, in the face of powerful forces, of the fight to make explosions heard.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 14, 2016
ISBN9781408866481
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Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship
Author

Anjan Sundaram

Anjan Sundaram is an award-winning journalist who has reported from Africa for the New York Times and theAssociated Press. His writing on various countries in the continent has also appeared in Granta, the Observer, Foreign Policy, Politico, Fortune and the Washington Post. He graduated from Yale and received a Reuters journalism award in 2006 for his reporting on Pygmy tribes in Congo's rain forest. His first book, Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo, was published to great critical acclaim in 2014. In 2015 he won a Frontline Club Award for print journalism for his piece, 'A Place on Earth: Scenes from a War'. @anjansun

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A whole slew of words can be used to describe how I felt on the completion of this book: appalled, angry, misled, misinformed and uninformed and just generally devastated. Hired to run a class in Rwanda for journalists, the author whom had reported on the situation in the Congo, finds journalists who are afraid for their lives. Seems things are not a democratically rosy in the Kagome regime as have been reported. After the genocide rocked the country, Kagame seized power and has ruled by intimidation, threats, fear and murder. Journalists must use word games timescale the attention of this regime because criticism carries grave consequences not only for the journalist but for his family. And many countries, including my own, give this government millions of dollars in aid and hold his country up as the epitome of reform. Seriously? How screwed up is that? What is the matter with this world?Reading this book one learns not only the problems of the journalists but of regular people swept away by what is going on and just trying to survive. The memorials of those victims of the genocide are run by the coup try are used more as a fear factor than a dedication. The United Nations is an ineffective body that generally looks the other way or chooses to not see so they do not have to confront the truth. A small book in pages but large in content, written clearly and concisely. Eventually the author's program is shut down because there are no more journalists to train. The right of reporting and the need for intensive reporting can not be overstated but is often the first thing to be threatened and taken away in these dictatorships. The appendix lists the reporters whom have been killed, threatened or who have left, naming them and what happened to them. An important book, I think but a devastating one.