Media: The Oughts Are Deadly

[RYP]

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World Press Freedom Review

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Publisher: International Press Institute (IPI)

The International Press Institute (IPI)


is a global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists. We are dedicated to the furtherance and safeguarding of press freedom, the protection of freedom of opinion and expression, the promotion of the free flow of news and information, and the improvement of the practices of journalism.

IPI does extensive research on issues relevant to the media and circulates several publications on press freedom. We scrutinise media laws and provide governments with recommendations on how to bring their legislation in line with internationally accepted standards on freedom of expression.

Each year IPI publishes an authoritative report on media violations: the World Press Freedom Review. The annual IPI World Press Freedom Review examines the state of the media around the world, documenting press freedom violations and major media developments. Divided into specific regions, each report provides a comprehensive overview of the year's events and may be contrasted with the events of previous years.

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Current Issue: 2009

Date: 8 March 2010
WPFR: Global Overview
Press Freedom in an Age of Barbarity

Anthony Mills

One decade into the 21st Century, and IPI is now in its 60th year of defending press freedom worldwide. However, for all the progress associated with the passing of a millennium milestone, when it comes to the deliberate murder of journalists because of their work we are still mired in an age of barbarity, with the number of journalists killed in 2009, at 110, higher than the 66 killed in 2008 and far higher than the 56 killed in 2000. If anything, the number of journalists murdered is increasing. Compared to the first half of the decade, the assassination rate for journalists has risen by more than 40 percent.

This year’s bloody figures were driven skywards on 31 November, when 32 journalists were massacred in the Philippines. The reporters were accompanying family members of gubernatorial candidate and local mayor Esmael Mangudadatu in a convoy in the southern province of Maguindanao, on a trip to an election office to file his candidacy papers.

The slaughter brought to 38 the number of journalists killed this year in the Phillippines, and 93 this decade. The vast majority of these murders remain unsolved. Impunity is the outrageous norm, across the world. Far too few murderers of journalists are ever brought to justice.

Elsewhere in Asia, eight journalists were killed in Pakistan, where a military offensive launched by the government against militants in the South Waziristan region has sparked an upsurge in violence. On 22 December a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a press club in Peshawar, killing three bystanders. At the time, IPI member Owais Ali, Secretary-General of the Pakistan Press Foundation, said: “Things are getting from bad to worse.”

In Sri Lanka, despite the end of a decades-long conflict between the government and separatist Tamil Tiger rebels, it was another unacceptable year for press freedom. Two journalists were killed. One, the former editor-in-chief of the Sunday Leader newspaper, grimly predicted his own death in an editorial printed three days after his murder. He wrote: “In the wake of my death I know you [Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa] will make all the usual sanctimonious noises and call upon the police to hold a swift and thorough inquiry. But like all the inquiries you have ordered in the past, nothing will come of this one, too.”

Again, it was a chillingly accurate prediction. Sure enough, one year on, there has been no progress towards solving the killing.

In another case in Sri Lanka in 2009, a Tamil journalist was sentenced to twenty years in prison, under draconian anti-terrorism legislation, for criticising the government’s handling of a military offensive against Tamil Tiger militants.
Across the world, governments are using such legislation to cynically snuff out critical reporting. That is why, following an October 2009 conference in Vienna entitled “The War on Words – Terrorism, Media and the Law,” jointly organised by IPI and the Centre for International Legal Studies (CISL), IPI launched the Vienna Declaration calling on governments to respect media freedom in the fight against terrorism.

In the Middle East & North Africa – the focus of this year’s World Press Freedom Review – the fight against terrorism, or, more broadly, the safeguarding of ‘national security’, again served as a pretext for the crushing of media dissent.

In Iraq, the positive news that the number of journalists killed in 2009 fell to four, from 14 in 2008, was overshadowed by concerns that the government was seeking to turn back the clock on press freedom with draft legislation prohibiting journalists from “compromising the security and stability of the country” - a phrase suspiciously reminiscent of legislation in place in a host of countries, especially in the Middle East, with poor records on media freedom, and used to stifle virtually any form of criticism of the government and authorities.

In Tunisia (a staunch ally of the West), the authorities further tightened the screws on the media before and after an October presidential election. Journalists were arrested, and at least two sentenced to prison on apparently concocted charges. The family of one them, Taoufik Ben Brik, who received a six-month sentence for allegedly assaulting a woman in public, began a hunger strike in January 2010. Meanwhile, a critical Tunisian journalist living in France received death threats

Press freedom developments were even worse in Iran, where the authorities brutally cracked down on journalists following violent unrest sparked by allegations of vote-rigging during the re-election of President Ahmadinejad in June, and again following street protests in December. Dozens of journalists have been detained without trial, and several sentenced to long prison sentences.

Despite, however, the best repressive efforts of the authorities to ensure no news of the unrest and clampdown filtered out, social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube ensured it did – with much-debated implications for the future of newsgathering.

In Africa, the anarchic state of Somalia – gripped by an upsurge in violence since 2007 – held the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous country on the continent for journalists. Nine were murdered there this year.

Elsewhere in Africa, governments continued to show contempt for press freedom, by harassing, intimidating and imprisoning critical reporters, often under criminal defamation and sedition legislation.

Eritrea has dozens of journalists behind bars, 12 of whom were arrested in a post-September 11th crackdown and are a focus of IPI’s Justice Denied Campaign. They have been held incommunicado in a secret prison and there are confirmed reports that some of them may have died.

In the Gambia, President Yahya Jammeh set the tone by ominously declaring in a statement to state-owned GRTS television: “Any journalist who thinks that he or she can write whatever he or she wants, and go free, is making a big mistake.”

Not long thereafter, six reporters were found guilty of defamation and sedition for questioning the suggestion by the government that it was not behind the still-unsolved murder in 2004 of prominent journalist Deyda Hydara.
The six were ‘pardoned’ in September by Jammeh. AFP reported that five of them left prison chanting: “The truth will always prevail.”

In Zambia, an editor who sent photographs of a woman giving birth in public to Zambia’s vice-president and health minister, as well as other government and civil society officials, to highlight the effects of a workers’ pay strike, was arrested on ‘obscenity’ charges and faced up to five years in prison. Although she was acquitted, the whole affair was another example of government misuse of legislation to intimidate journalists.

Across the world, the killers of journalists are able to operate with shameful impunity.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Mexico, wracked by a violent standoff between the authorities and all-powerful, ruthlessly brutal drug cartels, where at least 11 reporters were murdered in circumstances apparently linked to their work. None of the perpetrators has been found.

Impunity was also the norm in Russia, where five journalists were killed in 2009, making it the fifth most dangerous country in the world for journalists last year. In December, AFP reported that relatives of murdered Russian journalists, bearing photographs of more than 300 journalists who were either killed or died under suspicious circumstances between 1993 and 2009, criticized the authorities for failing to carry out proper investigations into their deaths at a memorial event in Moscow.

Less violent, but nonetheless troubling, were efforts by Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, to pass anti-monopoly legislation that would undermine the position of the country’s leading media player, Grupo Clarin – a political foe of Kirchner’s – and would increase political influence in broadcast regulatory bodies.

In another political standoff, in Turkey, between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the powerful Dogan media group, the group was slapped with a record US$3.3 billion fine for alleged financial wrongdoings. According to the Financial Times, the European Union, in a recent report on Turkey’s EU accession progress, said the fines “affect freedom of the press.” In December, Dogan Holding Chairman Aydin Dogan said he would step down after he and three other Dogan Holding board members were criminally indicted. Dogan’s move was seen as an effort to mend ties with the government. Simultaneously, Ertugrul Ozkok, the prominent, respected editor of Dogan’s flagship daily paper Hurriyet, resigned from a post he had held for nearly 20 years. Analysts say his replacement is closer to the government’s line of thinking, the Financial Times reported.

Also on the legislative front, in Ecuador, President Rafael Correa and his Alianza Pais party attempted to pass a bill that would allow only people who have obtained a journalism degree to work in the media. It would also establish a watchdog to supervise the media and their content as well as sanction and even close down an outlet in the event of repeat ‘offences.’

Following a mission to Venezuela in November, IPI expressed concern about a continued deterioration of press freedom in the country – placed on IPI’s Watch List in October 2000 – due to a climate of intimidation and hostility towards journalists and media outlets, as well as to a legal and judicial system that threatens the free practice of journalism.

In July, Venezuela's attorney general introduced draft legislation on “media crimes” under which anyone who, through media outlets, provides “false” information that harm[s] the interests of the state,” could be sentenced to as many as four years in prison.

In Western countries, too, concerns about media freedom surfaced. Slovenia charged Finnish journalist Magnus Berglund with two counts of criminal defamation. He faced up to six months in prison if convicted, after a documentary he produced quoted unnamed sources as saying that members of the former Slovene government – including former Prime Minister Janez Jansa – allegedly accepted bribes in arms deals with Finnish arms maker Patria. Jansa rejected all of the allegations.

In Spain a Madrid prosecutor demanded a three year prison term - and a three year ban on practising journalism - for El Mundo deputy-editor Antonio Rubio, who was accused of allegedly “discovering and revealing state secrets” for writing about reports to Spain’s secret services by an informer warning of terrorist attacks.

In December, two more Spanish journalists were given suspended prison sentences of a year and nine months, banned from working as journalists during that period, and handed hefty fines for “revealing secrets” in an article published in 2003 listing the names of dozens of people who allegedly registered irregularly as members of the Partido Popular, as part of a recruiting effort.

In Germany, the heavily-politicised Advisory Board of public broadcaster Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) blocked the contract extension of the TV station’s editor-in-chief, Nikolaus Brender, a staunchly independent journalist, raising concerns of political interference at the public broadcaster. At the time, Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine said the decision showed that “prime ministers have the power to remove editors-in-chief of public broadcasters.”

In Slovakia, the country’s prime minister compared journalists to pigs.

Finally, in the US, progress on a federal shield law that would allow journalists to protect sources without going to jail stalled again.