While the world welcomes the release of US/iranian journalist Roxana Saberi and the analysts pile in with their take of what it all means for US/Iranian relations, roughly 125 journalists remain behind bars around the world according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. 

The Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, arrested in Tehran on November 2008, slips on and off the media radar. However, he has received nowhere near the attention of Saberi or Current.tv journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were arrested in North Korea in March, 2009. Journalist kidnap cases fare no better. Freelance hacks Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan, who were kidnaped in Somalia some eight months ago, and Beverly Giesbrecht, held on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan since November, 2008, have all but disappeared off the mediascope along with their ransom deadlines.

It appears Roxana Saberi is a better "fit" for today’s US media – new US administration and what it might mean for US/Iranian relations and her former beauty queen status offers editors a cheap, but irresistable tag to hang the story on. Writing on Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald does an excellent job discussing the Roxana Saberi story and highlights a number of cases of journalists being imprisoned where the US media have either chosen to forget, ignore or in some way deem them less newsworthy their plight. In particular, he mentions the story of freelance photographer Ibrahim Jassam,

Right now — as the American press corps celebrates itself for demanding Saberi’s release in Iran — the U.S. continues to imprison Ibrahim Jassam, a freelance photographer for Reuters, even though an Iraqi court last December — more than five months ago — found that there was no evidence to justify his detention and ordered him released.  The U.S. — over the objections of the CPJ, Reporters Without Borders and Reuters — refused to recognize the validity of that Iraqi court order and announced it would continue to keep him imprisoned.

One finds only a tiny fraction of news coverage in the U.S. regarding the treatment of al-Haj, Hussein, Jassam and these other imprisoned journalists as has been devoted to Saberi. link

The Silobreaker graphic above illustrates the media attention given to Amanda Lindhout in Somalia, Ibrahim Jassam in Iraq, Euna Lee in North Korea, Beverly Giesbrecht on the Afghan/Pakistan border and Roxana Saberi in Iran over the last six months. Ibrahim Jassam has all but completely disappeared from the media. How convenient.

Silobreaker claims to draw upon "approximately 10,000 news, blog, research and multimedia sources" for its data compared to the 4,500+ sources Google News uses.

The parents of Roxana Saberi, the freelance journalist sentenced to eights years for espionage in Tehran, have visited their daughter in the Iranian capital for the first time since the verdict was dished out at the weekend. The 31 year old was originally arrested for buying a bottle of wine. Her subsequent one day trial puts yet more strain on a crucial few months for US-Iran relations, but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has pressed for an early appeal trial. There’s a Facebook group and website, a Twitter account and a petition to sign, but as Nicholas Kristof points out,

At the end of the day, a Web campaign may not get her freed any time soon. But it may improve her treatment and reduce the likelihood of abusive treatment in prison. And word may reach her, which may lift her spirits just a bit to know that she’s not forgotten. link

I’ve put together a dipity timeline of the case of Saberi which I’ll keep updated with items from the Frontline Newswire, that feeds into the right hand column on the Frontline Club news page, as and when the story develops.