Lindsay Palmer

Defending Our Colleagues: The Committee to Protect Journalists and Global Press Freedom (1981-2021)

Defending Our Colleagues offers a critical history of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a human rights organization that advocates to end violence against journalists around the world. Launched in New York in 1981, the CPJ is now one of the most influential organizations speaking on behalf of reporters in danger of imprisonment, injury, or death. Yet, as this book will show, the Committee’s definition of “global” press freedom relies heavily on the neoliberal notion of individual journalists’ freedom from persecution, rather than emphasizing the public(s)’ right to nuanced and responsibly-gathered information. What is more, the CPJ’s vision of press freedom–one that is paternalistic and ethnocentric–disavows alternative visions that are still championed by formerly colonized nations.

Lindsay Palmer is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW–Madison. She studies global journalism from a humanist perspective, especially focusing on two primary questions: 1) What challenges inform the labor of international news reporting and documentary production in the digital age, and 2) how do international news reports and documentaries represent cultural difference, particularly when addressing human rights violations? Palmer’s first book is called Becoming the Story: War Correspondents since 9/11 (University of Illinois Press 2018). Her second book is called The Fixers: Local News Workers and the Underground Labor of International Reporting (Oxford University Press 2019). Palmer is currently working on two new book projects: one of these conducts a cultural history of the Committee to Protect Journalists. The other book project looks at gender and press freedom in the digital age.