Entries for July 1995

Helen Thomas, after 57 years at United Press International, was known as a Washington institution and the "Dean of the White House Press Corps." Since she began her career, she has been fighting battles and opening doors for women.

Algerian journalists, embattled from both sides in the ongoing civil war, continue their daily struggle to work as well as to stay alive. As a television producer, director and reporter, Horria Saihi has fought government censorship and the threat of fundamentalism since the mid-1980s. She has been condemned to death by Muslim fundamentalists, and went into hiding in late 1994 after discovering that she was on a hit list.

One of the most respected journalists in China, Gao Yu was in prison when her award was announced. An economic and political reporter, she was sentenced in 1993 to six years in prison for "leaking state secrets," through - ironically - a pro-Chinese newspaper in Hong Kong. The charges brought against Gao led some observers to believe that the underlying goal was to send a message about acceptable boundaries of press freedom and limit media criticism of China's government.

While editor-in-chief of the independent weekly, The Sunday Magazine, Chris Anyanwu declined to publicly endorse the military regime of General Sani Abacha. Weeks later, she was arrested and sentenced to life in prison, charged with publishing stories about an alleged coup plot against Abacha and refusing to reveal the sources.