The pandemic of media repression in Asia
When do measures justified by the public health emergency trample unnecessarily on the journalism we need to keep our communities informed ask Jacqui Park and Laxmi Murthy
Here’s The Story: Across the Asia-Pacific, new digital media has brought a critical overlay of accountability journalism. It’s been fresh, challenging and provocative. It’s been renewing journalism. And now, it’s being targeted by governments mis-using emergency powers to break that challenge.
Of course, all of us — governments, media, citizens — are having to make hard choices between our everyday rights and public health. But when it comes to media freedom: where’s the line? When do measures justified by the public health emergency trample unnecessarily on the journalism we need to keep our communities informed?
We’re excited about how new digital media is energising the media landscape and delivering for communities across the region: In the last issue of The Story, we wrote about the (early, tentative) lessons from the Covid-19 shock, particularly for our business models.
Building our media needs a social framework that values and empowers freedom of expression. Separate to our work with The Story, Jacqui is working with the IPI Global Network and Laxmi continues to edit the IFJ Asia press freedom reports (that we launched together years ago). That’s given us access to lots of information that we want to share (including a story from Kashmir).
Real news about fake news
The Asia-Pacific’s emerging digital media is bearing the brunt of the violations of media freedoms inspired by (or hidden behind) emergency response to the pandemic. Even before Covid-19, governments have been taking legitimate concerns about “fake news” on-line to give themselves new powers — or repurpose old powers — to crack down on journalism and public commentary.
Most notorious right now has been the “spreading panic” police complaint against Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of Indian news site The Wire. The complaint reflects the intertwining of politics and religion and has become the focus of protests against government over-reach.
In the context of attacks on Muslims after participants at a religious gathering in Delhi spread the virus, Varadarajan had tweeted a reminder that large Hindu gatherings were held or planned even after the lockdown was announced.
According to Agence France Presse, police reports show 266 people have already been arrested under often fake news and misinformation laws across 10 countries in Asia.
Here’s a particularly shocking example: Sovann Rithy from Cambodia online news TVFB, was jailed for posting on his personal Facebook page public quotes from Prime Minister Hun Sen: “If motorbike-taxi drivers go bankrupt, sell your motorbikes for spending money. The government does not have the ability to help.”
Cambodian authorities said Hun Sen was joking and Rithy was arrested for “incitement to cause chaos and harm social security”, which carries a prison sentence up to two years and a fine of up to four million riel (€900). Some joke!
The IPI Tracker on media freedom violations related to Covid-19 reports 28 cases in the Asia-Pacific covering arrests or charges, restrictions or controls over information, outright censorship, excessive regulation of fake news and verbal or physical attacks.
Some threaten to entrench in law or practice constraints on independent journalism on-line that may outlast the current crisis.
Thailand (which has a shaky history with emergency rule) issued a time-limited emergency decree in March that made it a crime to share “misinformation” on-line about the virus. The country’s government is currently considering extending this decree.
The Philippines approved a new law last month imposing prison of two months or fines up to about $US19,500 for spreading “fake news” about Covid-19. Police filed a criminal complaint against journalists Mario Batuigas, owner of the Latigo News TV news portal and Amor Virata, an independent reporter, for allegedly spreading “fake” reports on a Covid-19 case.
In Singapore, the government used a “fake news” law passed last October to block access to the States Times Review. Facebook said it was forced to comply with the order but added: “We believe orders like this are disproportionate and contradict the government’s claim that (the law) would not be used as a censorship tool.”
Governments have been restricting access to information, particularly for on-line media. In India, while the Supreme Court rejected a government demand for pre-publication clearance on Covid-19, it directed the media to “refer to and publish” the official version. In The Philippines, the emergency regulations block independent (usually digital) media from covering official briefings on Covid-19 in the country. They can submit questions beforehand and watch by video-conference, but cannot seek clarification afterwards.
Put together in one place (and these are just examples), these constraints are shocking — but the pattern is easy to recognise. Governments use disruptive shocks to bring journalism to heel, particularly the independent, questioning journalism of the new digital media.
Locked down with 2G in Kashmir
Here, a sole news vendor in Shopian, South Kashmir is the source of news after the shutdown in August 2019. Pic credit Laxmi Murthy.
As the world stays indoors, about seven million Kashmiris struggle to stay connected with 2G mobile internet. (2G — remember that?) Now eight months into the most extraordinary internet shutdown digital journalism is barely recovering.
After the Indian Supreme Court in January declared internet access a fundamental right, the clampdown was gradually lifted — but high-speed mobile internet remains banned, to reduce “incidents of misuse of social media” by “circulating provocative audio, video content, fake news, rumour mongering, coordination of militant activities and other such acts that rely upon high speed.”
Beyond the media, this undermines public health by blocking tele-health. As the Doctors Association of Kashmir says shifting just 10 percent of consultations on-line would mean 10,000 fewer hospital visits each day.(The government order extending the restrictions until April 27 asserts: “The restrictions have not posed any hindrance to Covid-19 control measures.”)
As the government took the mobile internet back three generations in August, one start-up publisher went further back: demand spiked for the weekly paper of news site The Kashmir Walla. Now the Covid-19 lockdown has once more driven traffic back online, and printing has suspended. The team is busy writing up grant proposals to sustain the digital platform through this crisis.
The Story is a fortnightly newsletter with original content digging into the future of journalism and sharing the stories of media startups and innovators here in the Asia-Pacific. If you missed our previous issues on, say, building podcast communities or scaling beyond your national limits, you can find them (and more) here. And for more information you can use, we’ve got loads of case studies and resources up on The Story on Medium.
Laxmi Murthy is a journalist, writer and researcher based in Bengaluru. Jacqui Park is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology, Sydney. Together they write The Story.
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