Journalism Is Not a Crime
Press freedom must not be taken for granted
Press freedom. It sounds like an abstract concept. Something you take for granted — until it disappears, until reporters are jailed, intimidated or murdered, until the publishers and editors buckle under pressure from their own government. Then you start to wonder what kind of world it would be if there were no press freedom.
That’s not a hypothetical question. We can see for ourselves what happens.
Look at the last four years in Syria. Journalists who have tried to cover the war have been harassed, attacked, kidnapped, detained, or murdered, some of whom ISIL beheaded as part of its vile propaganda. Any journalist inside Syria must be extremely careful where they go and what they write. Brave citizen journalists have tried to fill the information gap and expose the gruesome atrocities and humanitarian disaster. But there are too many untold, searing stories of the widespread suffering and violence that are destroying Syria and taking so many people’s lives. So this catastrophe is unfolding largely out of sight and out of mind.
Look at the hall of mirrors constructed by Russia in Ukraine. The Russians have weaponized information in an attempt to portray an invasion as a civil conflict and to undermine the genuine efforts of Ukrainians to build a democracy. Their big lie is that there are no Russian troops in Ukraine. Repeated often enough, people accept a lie or, in resignation and confusion, decide everyone lies and the truth doesn’t exist. The true reality has been exposed by a handful of reporters who have managed to interview Russian soldiers sent to Ukraine, but the lie — and the threat it represents — persists.
Russia’s self-serving alternate reality is constructed with smaller lies, too. A recent photo in the Russian-backed media showed bodies in a morgue in eastern Ukraine, identifying them as Ukrainian military. But the photo was taken in 2009 in the morgue of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and the dead were victims of drug violence.
In another instance, Russian-backed social media posted a photo of a forlorn child supposedly orphaned by the Ukrainian military. It went viral. But the photo is actually a still from a press release for a 2010 Russian war movie. For similar examples, visit stopfake.org
I confess that I have a bias in favor of the truth. Before joining government, I spent 37 years as a newspaper reporter and editor.
I believe that truth exists and that good journalists try to get as close to the truth as possible. They represent our best defense against disinformation, corruption and governments that want to operate behind a shroud.
Attending UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day conference on May 3 and 4 in Riga, Latvia, I was reminded how much journalists are risking to expose corrupt public officials, ethnic cleansing, criminal cartels, and disinformation campaigns around the world. Democratic governments and civil society try to protect them. Authoritarian governments and their accomplices try to stop them. I’m not sure the good guys are winning.
On panels at the conference, journalists and human rights workers described the ways governments try to silence them, using tools ranging from intimidation to arrest to violence. Journalists currently in jail, like the Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian and Syrian Mazen Darwish, were highlighted. One of Darwish’s countrymen read a sobering list of numbers: hundreds of Syrian journalists arrested; dozens more tortured or murdered; many who have simply disappeared. “We are journalists, not soldiers,” he pleaded.
Efforts to undermine press freedom are sometimes more subtle. Often journalists find themselves targets of government-backed smear campaigns aimed at destroying their credibility, if not their lives.
And too many governments are trying to censor the Internet, a practice that is the equivalent of 21st century book burning. It seems counterintuitive, but the same technology that gives us access to unimaginable amounts of information is being blocked by authoritarian governments and used as a tool of suppression and defamation.
Democracies are fallible, and no one has a monopoly on the truth. But democracies are accountable — and that is a distinction that makes all the difference. We make mistakes. Rather than try to hide them, we try to fix them.
In the United States, the world saw police in Ferguson, Missouri, mistreat journalists and try to restrict coverage of protests about the shooting of an unarmed black teenager. The Ferguson police chief lost his job and the Justice Department opened an investigation. When Baltimore was engulfed in protests over the death of a black man in police custody, no one kept the press away. And no one tried to paper over the tragedy. President Obama called attention to the crime, and Maryland authorities charged six police officers in the death.
Later this month, the United Nations Security Council is scheduled to debate the security of journalists in conflict zones. The debate is necessary, not least because statistics show that only 1 in 10 crimes against journalists have been prosecuted over the last decade worldwide.
No, there is nothing abstract about press freedom. All of us have a responsibility to fight those who try to replace truth with lies and those who try to turn journalism into a crime. We are strongest when we act in ways that respect our values. Since press freedom is both enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and celebrated among democracies as a universal human right, it is time to act.
