
Joel Simon
Joel Simon has been executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists since 2006. Under his leadership, CPJ has been honored with numerous awards, including the Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights, a News & Documentary Emmy, and the 2018 Chatham House Prize, given for the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations in the previous year.
Simon has written widely on press freedom issues for publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. He is regular columnist for Columbia Journalism Review.
Prior to joining CPJ in 1997 as Americas program coordinator, Simon worked for a decade as a freelance journalist in Latin America. He covered the Guatemalan civil war, the Zapatista uprising in Southern Mexico, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the economic turmoil in Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union. A graduate of Amherst College and Stanford University, he is the author of Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge (Sierra Club Books, 1997), The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom (Columbia University Press 2015); and We Want to Negotiate: The Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages, and Ransom (Columbia Global Reports 2018).
-
Advocacy : Public Officials and Social Media
Who’s Afraid of Free Speech?
This essay was commissioned by the Knight Institute. The views expressed are those of the author. A response to this essay, also commissioned by the Knight Institute, is available here.
1.
The campus left keeps shooting itself in the...
By Thomas Healy , Jameel Jaffer & Joel Simon -
Analysis
How America Can Deliver Justice for Jamal Khashoggi
The intelligence report released today concludes that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince was likely responsible for the journalist’s murder. That can’t be the end of the story.
By Jameel Jaffer & Joel Simon -
Analysis
Why U.S. intelligence should release any Khashoggi files
It's imperative to know what U.S. intelligence agences knew about threats to journalist's life, and whether they took any steps to warn him
By Jameel Jaffer & Joel Simon