Of Firewalls and Executions: Journalism in the 21st Century

THE NEW CENSORSHIP: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom.
Joel Simon
192 pp.
Columbia University Press, $27.95

In early November, a young Peruvian reporter died on the way to the hospital. Fernando Raymondi, who reported for the news magazine Caretas, was shot in the chest by two gunmen in his father’s grocery store in Canete. Raymondi had been investigating gang-related contract killings in his hometown. Raymondi is one of this year’s series of journalist deaths, a list including German photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus in Afghanistan, French photographer Camille LePage in the Central African Republic and the horrific on-camera beheadings of American freelancers James Foley and Steven Sotloff in Syria. Just this past weekend, photojournalist Luke Somers died in a failed hostage rescue attempt in Yemen, where he had been held by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula for over a year.

The sense of urgency in Joel Simon’s book, The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom, is entirely appropriate. Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, frames the discussion right in the book’s title: calling it a “Global Battle.” Let there be no question that the stakes are high.

The New Censorship comes at a reckoning point for the system of new and old media co-existence. The brutal murders of Foley and Sotloff by the Islamic State, and the continued disappearance of Austin Tice inside Syria, demonstrate in cruelest fashion the extreme vulnerability of freelance journalists reporting from the frontlines for major news organizations.

The New Censorship provides recent history as backdrop to these events — particularly in chapters three and four, “The Terror Dynamic” and “Hostage to the News.” It is testament to the book’s timeliness that it brings up many of the issues made internationally and acutely known with the deaths of Foley, Sotloff and their aid worker compatriots. The forewarnings of worse to come shadow Simon’s narration of the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Islamic State’s antecedent organization. From the debate over hostage ransoms to the rising security costs of reporting and the increased efforts by terrorist organizations to design and disseminate their own media, Simon’s accounting makes clear the events that have led us to today.

Simon writes cogently on the ways in which violence in places like Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen have seen spikes in attacks on journalists, and active targeting of journalists for kidnapping and murder. Journalists also become objects of suspicion in such environments, factors to be controlled by governments and their militaries. The effect has been not only danger to the lives and safety of reporters, but a narrowing of the focus of reporting as journalists retreat to more secure environments and are denied access to others.

A year ago Italian journalist Francesca Borri published an essay for the Columbia Journalism Review slicing through the myth and romanticism of frontline freelance work. In it, she recounts an editor of hers, thinking she might have been kidnapped, emailing to say “Should you get a connection, could you tweet your detention?”

This is what it means to be a war reporter in the 21st century — beholden to the demands of online media traffic and publications paying piecemeal for blood-and-guts reporting, but in increasingly precarious positions both financially and physically inside war zones where terror groups have their own glossy magazines and Twitter accounts.

The war on terror and its attendant threats and fears is only one of the realms of concern for journalists and for free speech. One of The New Censorship’s more painful accounts is of the death of María Elizabeth Macías Castro, a Mexican blogger murdered in 2011 by the Los Zetas and considered the first person killed in direct response to social media activity. Her death marked a brutal moment when repression and targeting intersected with the changes brought to journalism and online activism by digital media.

Much of the book unpacks the darker side of the information age, detailing how repressive governments have reacted to new means of information gathering and sharing and sought to use them for their own rigid and self-protective purposes. China is a notable villain in this with its “Great Firewall” and its push for a decentralized system of national cyber-sovereignty that will allow it to exert still greater control to protect itself from external surveillance and internal dissent.

Simon’s book is a discussion of what these new dynamics of digital and print media means for journalists and the global information system in which they participate. Refreshingly, he dismisses early on the overplayed notion of a digital media world at odds with an analog predecessor it means to overthrow. “It’s not an either/or scenario,” he writes, “and it’s not necessarily a pretty picture.” Over the course of 192 pages, Simon seeks to map out the evolving system, jury-rigged and fragile as he says it is, and look to a future where its challenges can be met.

Simon’s book is very of this moment. It is a call to action that focuses on the events of the most recent years, and on the demands those events and this particular media environment create. The book is written with an advocate’s purpose, rather than a historian’s. The book is intended to have punch and practicality. Reminders like these have value — it is long forgotten the ways that the Western press was controlled and shuttled around the desert in the first Gulf War, boxed in by restrictive guidelines about what they could cover and requirements that reporting be subject to military review.

The New Censorship is above all a demand the struggle to protect journalists and their craft be recognized as the monumental challenge that it is.