To mark World Press Freedom Day, which falls on May 3 each year, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released on April 30 a list of the 10 worst places in the world to be a journalist. In the Philippines it was commemorated with the shooting death of a broadcaster and the ambush of another.

At the top of the CPJ list is Iraq, where 15 journalists have been killed since the United States attacked that country on March 20. One other country where the US achieved regime change, Afghanistan, also made it, as did the usual suspects: Cuba, Vietnam, Chechnya, the West Bank and Gaza, Eritrea, Togo, Colombia and Belarus.

A press freedom-monitoring group, CPJ is based in New York, and also releases in March each year its evaluation of the state of press freedom worldwide.

Absent from the CPJ list is the Philippines, which CPJ has had occasion in the past to describe as

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Luis V. Teodoro

Prof. Luis V. Teodoro is a former dean of the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication, where he used to teach journalism. He writes political commentary for BusinessWorld.

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