POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

American journalists are rightly concerned about President Trump’s almost continuous attacks on the press in general and on individual journalists. For although the freedom of the press is very easy to take for granted, it is very difficult to restore once it has been lost. The Washington Post’s editorial board reminds us of this grim reality in a op-ed honoring this year’s recipients of the International Press Freedom Awards presented by the Committee to Protect Journalists:

Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh was in a Vietnamese prison in August when she learned she had won an International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Thankfully, she will be free and present in New York on Tuesday to accept the prize. Vietnam allowed Mother Mushroom, as she is known to her readers, to go into exile in the United States with her family.

 But Ms. Nguyen will not be celebrating. She sees the award as “not for myself,” she said during a visit to The Post last week, but for all her fellow bloggers and human rights defenders in Vietnam, many of whom remain behind bars. And she herself would rather be in her home country, doing her work, she told us as she eyed our newsroom with envy. Vietnam needs a free press, she said, but the media are all state-owned and state-controlled. Every Tuesday, media outlets receive their orders — print this, retract that, glorify this one, lie about that one — from functionaries relaying instructions from the Communist Party Politburo.

 Ms. Nguyen’s fellow prize winners Tuesday will no doubt share the same bittersweet combination of pride in the recognition of selfless work and sadness at how dangerous that work remains in so much of the world. Others being honored are Amal Khalifa Idris Habbani, who has been attacked, threatened and imprisoned as she has reported over the past decade on protests and official corruption in Sudan; Luz Mely Reyes, hounded by Venezuela’s dictators for her honest reporting; Anastasiya Stanko, who has braved harassment from both occupying Russian forces and her own government in Ukraine; and Maria Ressa, the founder and chief executive of Rappler, an independent news site under constant attack from the Philippines’ bullying president, Rodrigo Duterte.

Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh

Amal Habbani

Luz Mely Reyes

Anastasiya Stanko

Maria Ressa

The complete editorial is available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-selfless-courage-of-this-years-press-freedom-award-winners-is-an-inspiration–and-a-reminder/2018/11/18/2fbf2e1e-e9c3-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html?utm.