Press Freedom Blog

Exile, torture and persecution are an every day issue of the Ethiopian Media industry today. Social media and Ethiopian journalists writing from abroad are increasingly prominent. But why are western journalists so quiet about Ethiopia?

Press freedom and free speech are terms that involve complex intricacies even in our modern and democratic societies. There are whole communities of people who do not benefit from these freedoms as fully as they should. And we still keep our taboos.

The heroes of free speech don’t live in the Nordics but in poverty stricken, dangerous countries.

From a foreign students’ perspective, Finland is doing great with freedom of expression. But as we see elsewhere in Europe, the waves of hate speech are rising. Freedom of speech should not be about insults, but a commitment to a healthy, compassionate society.

Perhaps the best way to calm the fiery debate over freedom of expression is to pay more attention to democracy.

Freedom of expression is a feature of the Nordic welfare model - at least for the time being. Not everyone in the world has that right. It’s more a privilege enjoyed by the few.

Finland is a major country for press freedom, but its journalists are white and they write for whites. People from different ethnic minorities can use social media to do “for us by us” journalism, writes editor-in-chief Koko Hubara.

Nowadays we’re free to write about anything and information is readily available. And yet there’s less interest in other countries than there used to be and a dearth of journalism on them. Maybe we’d understand the world better if more efforts were devoted to changing this, writes Rauli Virtanen.