Gag Order

A recent visit to the website of the United Nations-funded news agency Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) provides a quick tour of the world's forgotten miseries: reports of child labor in Zimbabwe, profiles of the jobless in Sri Lanka, grisly accounts of ethnic killings in South Sudan and Central African Republic. Absent from this chronology of global grief is anything new about Syria, the world's bloodiest humanitarian crisis. In November, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which funds IRIN, quietly placed a gag order on its news agency. Its network of journalists were ordered to halt any reporting about the crisis in Syria, which has displaced millions and cost the lives of more than 100,000, according to UN sources.