Informing the Global Citizen

A Selection from The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom

Joel Simon

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231538985
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Today, anyone with an iPhone can provide firsthand accounts from the world's front lines. Despite our increased access to events around the world, journalists are more vital than ever as they bring context and perspective and help to set the humanitarian agenda. However, threats to journalists are mounting with record numbers killed and imprisoned each year. From the drug wars of Mexico to Iraq and Tahrir Square, Joel Simon explores the new challenges and dangers to the future of journalistic freedom.

1

Informing the Global Citizen

Throughout the 150-year history of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Geneva-based humanitarian organization that helps to alleviate the suffering of war has relied on journalists to serve as its eyes and ears on the frontlines. In providing firsthand accounts of wars and humanitarian emergencies, journalists have often risked their lives—and sometimes died—because they believed that their reporting would lead to action. Sometimes, a single image refocused global priorities, like the footage of emaciated Bosnian refugees filmed by an ITN television crew in 1992 or the Pulitzer Prize–winning photo of a vulture hovering near a starving child by the South African photographer Kevin Carter in a Sudanese refugee camp in 1993. From Central America to South Africa, over the last few decades journalists have helped set the humanitarian agenda.

And so it came as something of a shock when Yves Daccord, the director general of the ICRC, took the floor at a press freedom conference in Doha, Qatar, sponsored by the pan-Arab network al-Jazeera and, pointing to his iPhone, declared, “Nothing has changed our work more than this. The time when we had to wait for journalists to tell us what was going on is over. I have information. There is noise everywhere.”

Daccord cited the civil war in Syria, where citizen-journalists and “media activists” aligned with rebel factions have used smart phones to document atrocities committed by the Syrian military. He also talked about the violence in the eastern Congo, a perennial battleground where the still-simmering conflict goes largely uncovered by the international press. As Daccord noted, international human rights organizations—not journalists—have provided the frontline documentation of that war.

Reduced budgets for international news organizations mean that journalists are too often absent from the frontlines of conflict. Daccord argued they are still desperately needed. While he is overwhelmed with information, Daccord struggles to understand its implications and formulate responses. “Where is the context?” he asked. “Journalists need to be closer. Armed groups understand that—and they don’t want journalists to be closer.”

Daccord’s remarks served as a clear reminder that while professional journalists working for established media organizations continue to play a vital role, they are today just one element in a much larger and more complex media ecosystem. This is true in conflict zones, but it is also true in every corner of the world and on every major story. Journalists today amplify, contextualize, and synthesize information. But firsthand documentation is increasingly accomplished by anyone with a smartphone, including average citizens, bloggers, and activists.

Daccord, of course, is a special case because the work of the ICRC depends on its ability to access accurate and timely information from conflict zones. Yet we all have a stake in ensuring the free flow of global information because to a greater or lesser extent we are all global citizens whose well-being depends on policies and actions taken outside our countries. Information in all its forms is the engine of the global economy. It is what connects us across borders. It is what allows us to forge solutions to international challenges from global warming, to AIDS, to economic development.

Twenty years ago, most people got their international news from relatively well-established foreign correspondents working for agencies, broadcast outlets, and newspapers. Today, of course, the process of both gathering and disseminating news is more diffuse. This new system has some widely recognized advantages. It democratizes the information-gathering process, allowing participation by more people from different backgrounds and perspectives. It opens the media not only to “citizen journalists” but also to advocacy and civil society organizations including human rights groups that increasingly provide firsthand reporting in war-ravaged societies. New information technologies allow those involved in collecting news to communicate directly with those accessing the information. The sheer volume of people participating in this process challenges authoritarian models of censorship based on hierarchies of control.

But there are also considerable weaknesses. Freelancers, bloggers, and citizen journalists who work with few resources and little or no institutional support are more vulnerable to government repression. Emerging technologies cut both ways, and autocratic governments are developing new systems to monitor and control online speech that are both effective and hard to detect. The direct links created between content producers and consumers make it possible for violent groups to bypass the traditional media and reach the public via chat rooms and websites. Journalists have become less essential and therefore more vulnerable as a result. This is a subject that is explored in chapter 3, which examines the effects of terrorism on the press.

Many predicted that the quantity, quality, and fluidity of information would inherently increase as time went on and technology improved, but this has not necessarily been the case. While mass censorship has become more difficult, new and highly effective models of repression have emerged in response to the rapid changes in the way news and information is gathered and delivered. Statistics indicate that even as information technologies have proliferated, the situation for journalists on the ground has gotten worse, not better. The number of journalists killed and imprisoned around the world has reached record levels in recent years and, according to several studies, press freedom is in decline. At the beginning of December 2012, there were 232 journalists in jail according to CPJ research, the highest tally ever recorded.¹ While historically repressive countries like Iran and China contributed to the upsurge in imprisonment, the world’s leading jailer of journalists was Turkey, a country with a relatively open media and aspirations to join the European Union. Most of those jailed were being held on antistate charges, and over half of all journalists in jail around the world worked online, including a majority of those imprisoned in China.

In 2012, seventy journalists were killed while carrying out their work; this is close to the record highs recorded at the peak of the Iraq war.² The Syrian conflict has proved devastating for the press, with twenty-eight journalists killed in a single year.³ The tally once again reinforced the hybrid nature of frontline newsgathering, with high casualties among both established international media organizations and citizen journalists. Two renowned war correspondents, Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times and the French photographer Rémi Ochlik, were killed when their improvised media center in Homs was targeted by Syrian forces in February 2011. Meanwhile, at least thirteen citizen journalists who reported on the conflict from an activist perspective and provided devastating video images of the carnage and savagery of war also perished, some at the hands of Syrian government snipers.

The leading historical press freedom index compiled by Freedom House, based in Washington D.C., shows that global press freedom has waned in recent years.⁴ “After two decades of progress, press freedom is now in decline in almost every part of the world,” Freedom House noted in its 2011 Freedom of the Press Index, which tracks the state of media freedom in over 190 countries and has been published since 1980. “Only 15 percent of the world’s citizens live in countries that enjoy a free press.”

Covering Mexico in the 1990s

How did we get here? Why has it become more dangerous for journalists and other information providers even as technology has made it easier to communicate and access information across borders? This chapter seeks to answer these questions.

The best place to start is to look ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Informing the Global Citizen
• Notes