Club Online Zoom Event: World Press Freedom Day: An Update from Asia’s Press Clubs
Date: 3 May 2021 08:00 PM — 09:00 PM | Venue:
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| ONLINE ZOOM EVENT World Press Freedom Day: An Update from Asia’s Press Clubs |
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| The last year has been particularly devastating for press freedom worldwide, with attacks against journalists, including by police; a proliferation of “fake news” laws; online harassment, especially against women reporters; and a weaponisation of libel laws and other court actions to stifle independent reporting. Nowhere has the trend been bleaker than East Asia. According to Reporters Without Borders’ ranking of 180 countries, only South Korea and Taiwan place among the top 50 countries for press freedom. Hong Kong ranks at number 80, and most of the ASEAN countries, including Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia and Myanmar rank closer to the bottom. In this Zoom event, a panel representing press clubs from around the region will discuss the recent developments relating to press freedom in their respective countries. Moderated by FCC President Keith Richburg. | |||
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Ed Davies is currently Southeast Asia news editor for Reuters and president of the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club. He has spent more than two decades reporting from the Asia-Pacific region and, in addition to two stints in Indonesia, has also had postings in Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. In the past year, he has been focused on coordinating multimedia coverage of Southeast Asia’s struggle to recover from the pandemic but also, more recently, the unfolding crisis since the military coup in Myanmar.
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 Ate Hoekstra is a freelance correspondent based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Besides Cambodia he covers Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos. He mainly works for the Dutch daily newspapers Trouw and Het Financieele Dagblad, as well as for the Asia-based online magazine Licas News. Hoekstra was born in The Netherlands and has lived in Phnom Penh since 2012. For the past two years, he has been the president of the Overseas Press Club of Cambodia.
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 Barnaby Lo is a freelance foreign correspondent based in Manila, Philippines. He reports and produces for CBS News and Al Jazeera English, and contributes regularly to China Global Television Network’s (CGTN) award-winning current affairs program “Assignment Asia.” He also hosts “Viewpoint,” a weekly current affairs talk show on the Philippine online media platform “Now You Know.” Lo has covered some of the biggest stories in the Asia-Pacific region, including the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the Rohingya crisis, the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Palu, Indonesia, Typhoon Haiyan and the drug war in the Philippines.
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 Gwen Robinson is editor-at-large of Nikkei Asia, a journal of Asian affairs, and past president of Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand. She is also a senior fellow at the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, where she focuses on regional issues. She was previously a senior correspondent and editor with the Financial Times in Europe, Asia and the US (1995-2013), most recently as Bangkok bureau chief covering Southeast Asia (2011-14). She has just completed two terms as FCCT president and remains a director of the club.
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