Thursday, August 31, 2017

From CNN.com
Cambodia's dream of democracy is dying

According to this article, the Cambodian government is finally cracking down on The Cambodian Daily.

The Cambodia Daily -- an English-language newspaper founded by American journalist Bernard Krisher in 1993 -- was slapped with a $6.3 million tax bill on August 4 and given 30 days to pay. Unable to comply, it looks set to collapse.

I've got to say, I've always been surprised at how much The Cambodian Daily got away with in the first place.
As I mentioned in my review of Cambodia's Curse by Joel Brinkley.

To quote myself from 2014:

Much of Joel Brinkley’s analysis of Cambodia can be found by just daily reading the newspapers here.  Both The Phnom Penh Post and The Cambodia Daily contain daily articles that detail just about all the problems Joel Brinkley writes about.
            I’ve talked to members of The Phnom Penh Post, who have essentially confirmed to me what Joel Brinkley wrote about the press freedoms in Cambodia.  “I’ve got to say,” I said to one of them, “I’m surprised that you guys get away with printing all the stuff that you do.”  (A surprising amount of the government corruption is blatantly laid out every day in The Phnom Penh Post and The Cambodian Daily.)
            “Well, yes, there is a significant degree of press freedom in Cambodia,” he told me.  “But we get away with a lot because we only publish in English, so very few Cambodians can read what we publish.  And even after that there are limits.  We can’t directly criticize high-ranking government officials.”  (All of this is pretty much exactly the same thing Joel Brinkley writes about the Phnom Penh Post.)

However, having been given this leniency ever since 1993, I had assumed that it would always continue.
The Cambodian Daily was already an old and respected institution when I arrived in Cambodia in 2011.   I just assumed that if they had made it this far without any problems, they would make it forever.
I read The Cambodian Daily every day when I lived in Phnom Penh.  It was an established part of the landscape, and it seems kind of surreal now that now it might be gone by the end of the month.

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