As CPJ marks its 25th anniversary, our early board members and former directors look ahead to the emerging challenges facing the international press. Moderator John Carroll, Knight visiting lecturer at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, leads the panel in a two-week discussion about Iraq, national security, Internet censorship, and the new threats to press freedom.
| Other Topics Iraq Stringers and Fixers Israel-Lebanon Conflict United States Standards China and the Internet Emerging Threats |
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Posted July 25, 2006
From John Carroll: When North Korea—which CPJ named the world’s most censored nation—launched test missiles this month, it again reminded us how little we know about this reclusive state. What should journalists do to shed light on North Korea and other states that limit access, such as Cuba? As a matter of principle, are there things that journalists should refrain from doing? What are the risks posed by failing to gain a foothold?
Use nontraditional reporting
From Anne Nelson: As we move into this new and treacherous chapter of history, we have suffered somewhat from limiting a lot of our news coverage to countries willing to play by "our rules." Obviously it is desirable, whenever possible, for journalists to go into a country fully identified and conduct their work as transparently as possible.
There have been at least three crucial countries where that approach has been impossible for the last few decades: North Korea, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia. Because there has been little reportage, gatekeepers have chosen to publish little news. (Much of the recent coverage of Cuba has actually been more coverage of the Cuban exile community.)
We have paid a heavy price for acquiescing to the news blackouts from North Korea and Saudi Arabia. Western readers were largely unaware of the devastating famine that struck North Korea in the 1990s, largely as a result of Kim Jong-Il’s criminally misguided policies, which cost up to a million lives. Accordingly, the West also missed a possibility for humanitarian response. We are now going through a cultural self-flagellation for our failure to help save the lives of a million Rwandans. When is the last time we heard about the fate of a million North Koreans? Accordingly, it is little wonder that our policy-makers should be "ambushed" by the North Korean missile crisis. Our news culture— and our policy culture—increasingly turns its attention to a region only after the crisis has fully developed.
By the same token, anyone who paid attention to Saudi Arabia over the past few decades knew that the repressive Saudi regime was working in concert with extremist fundamentalists to underwrite an expansion of radical Islam. The web of missionaries and violence has been traced through communities in Western Europe and Africa for years—but there was a general unwillingness by editors to connect the dots until the problem arrived on their doorstep. We also missed the story of our Saudi “allies’” severe repression of their own populations.
News organizations need to be more proactive in finding the story and not waiting until a Washington agenda spells it out for them. (The metaphor might be "spotting the smoke before the fire has to be put out.") Certainly news organizations have become more willing to draw on reporting from human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and CPJ, much of which is gathered in a manner that would not pass muster from a traditional news organization and depends on the imprimatur of the organization.
But there are also other extraordinary sources for information about countries like the three that were mentioned that are underutilized. These include:
• Recent exiles. When Human Rights Watch was banned from openly conducting a mission to Cuba in the 1980s, it commissioned a first-person report from recently freed Cuban political prisoner Jorge Valls. The resulting work, "Twenty Years and Forty Days," became a valuable source of information on Cuban human rights conditions.
• Academics. Columbia professor Charles K. Armstrong has traveled to North Korea repeatedly and possesses a wealth of knowledge about the country.
• Religious groups. American Christian organizations have been sending American college students to work in the North Korean countryside for years. Some of them are even journalism students. They offer a mine of on-the-ground information that hasn’t been tapped.
• Students from the countries in question. American graduate schools—including schools of journalism and international affairs—have students representing almost every country in the world. Sophisticated organizations like The Wall Street Journal and the BBC have been hiring them for their unique perspective on their countries and regions. Yes, there is a question of bias toward their country. But these news organizations have rigorous editorial processes and are aware that bias can come from many different directions, and can be dealt with—if one has good reporting to start with.
• Cold calling and Internet reporting. Radio Marti hosts make cold calls to people in Cuba for interviews, many of which are broadcast. An approach that works for a propaganda station also offers possibilities for vox pop reporting. Active chatrooms in countries ranging from China to Syria offer valuable perspectives on what’s going on behind the curtain of censorship. Obviously Western news organizations are still groping for proper procedures to use new technologies and to protect the in-country participants. My impression is that the industry has devoted more discussion to online news distribution than to online reporting ethics—an important area of inquiry.
None of these categories substitute for good professional newsgathering, conducted "by the rules." But untraditional reporting is better than no reporting.
Every time nontraditional sources of information are utilized, the story should include a reference to the lack of freedom that makes traditional reporting impossible— stressing local conditions for the local media, which suffer the worst consequences. But in dangerous times, getting the news we need in cogent packages presented with transparency, is more important than limiting news to the formats we’re familiar with. The darkest countries are likely to present the greatest threat, and we shouldn’t be too concerned as to whether we arm ourselves with a candle or a flashlight —as long as it casts an accurate light.
‘More information about those we fear’
From Peter Arnett: I don’t believe that a mainstream news organization should compromise anything that it values to cover the most important stories of our times. But then, I don’t believe that dispatching a reporter to North Korea or Cuba or Iraq in the Saddam Hussein era constitutes a compromise. I say this not just because I have reported from all three. That those nations were in conflict to some degree with the United States seemed to me a worthy enough reason to at least visit or to even set up permanent bureaus, as CNN did in both Havana and Baghdad in the 1990s. More information about those we fear surely trumps less. Of course critics will ask why consort with the enemy, particularly when censorship is in force. I would admit that such coverage provides just a part of the story, but it is an important part, giving a unique sense of presence—and an access to officials—denied those reporting from outside. Even with a news organization’s presence in these countries, much of the story comes from outside sources, particularly exile organizations and politically active groups. So, much of the truth eventually emerges. The most important basic news organizations in the world, the wire services, offer no apologies for covering countries lacking in political freedoms.
Just how much should journalists compromise to gain a footing in a police state, and are there things that journalists should refrain from doing? The stories of major news organizations are closely watched for adherence to sometimes strict and sometimes loosely applied guidelines. What I have found is that host governments carefully control the news environment, the most suspicious such as North Korea and Saddam’s Iraq providing ever-present “minders.” Reporters should routinely remind their audiences of these limitations. I have found it beneficial to avoid much in the way of personal relationships with local officials, trying to maintain my own integrity. There comes a time, however, when even the most tolerant news organization has to cry foul. In Iraq it came for me at the end of the first Gulf War when a civil war erupted in the Shia south and Kurdish north. The presiding media minder in Baghdad demanded that I not mention the story and that CNN’s anchors in Atlanta not even bring up the subject. That evening our team left town in protest.
How important is it for a news organization to gain a foothold in a potentially threatening repressive state and what risks can come from losing out on the story? If success in the news business is based on audience attention and ratings then the rewards of covering “the other side of the story” are huge. Just look at the history of CNN, the young TV news company that won the confidence of the Iraqi authorities in 1991, bartering its then-unique capability of live coverage and dissemination of news to cover the first Gulf War from Baghdad and gain worldwide recognition and eventual vast profits. Covering the story fully and well is the goal of all mainstream news organizations, but covering it pretty much exclusively is also a goal—still attainable in those repressive places in the world where few reporters can tread.
History offers guidance
From Ann Cooper: You ask: “As a matter of principle, are there things that journalists should refrain from doing” in order to report on reclusive or highly restrictive states such as North Korea or Cuba?
The answer is yes: Journalists should refrain from accepting access to a story if the price is having to compromise in telling the truth. Failure to honor that principle misinforms the public and ultimately erodes public faith in the media’s reporting.
CNN took a hit from some viewers in 2003 when then-CNN executive Eason Jordan revealed that the news organization’s Baghdad bureau had not reported certain stories, including accounts of torture of Iraqi employees of news organizations. Jordan made his revelations in a New York Times op-ed after the fall of Saddam Hussein, where he justified the suppression out of concern that Saddam’s ruthless regime would have retaliated against CNN’s sources.
Fair enough to worry about the lives of innocents, wrote one letter writer to the Times. “But it is quite another thing for CNN to have remained in Iraq and to have continued reporting on other matters, thereby communicating to the world a somewhat false impression about the nature of life in Iraq. CNN has betrayed its viewers, the people of Iraq and its own fundamental reason for existing,” according to Times letter writer Richard Joffe.
Perhaps American journalism’s most shameful example of trading away the truth for access was Walter Duranty, New York Times Moscow correspondent whose tainted coverage of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s is described in a 1990 biography, “Stalin’s Apologist.”
Duranty didn’t “cover” the Kremlin-engineered Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s; he covered it up. While American and British colleagues risked arrest or expulsion from the Soviet Union to document the Kremlin’s systematic starvation of millions of its citizens, Duranty dismissed the famine as “mostly bunk” and attacked those who reported otherwise. His stature and that of his newspaper meant his coverup reports were widely believed and quoted; meanwhile, in Moscow, he enjoyed a cushy life and exclusive
interviews with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Perhaps Duranty considered that just reward for his role in helping Stalin conceal one of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century.
Of course Duranty is an extreme case, but he illustrates the pitfalls of confusing access— permission to enter and travel in a restricted country, for example—with freedom to report honestly. If you’re a reporter on the scene when Stalin is crushing the peasantry, Hitler is rounding up Jews, or Milosevic is ethnically cleansing Bosnia—and if censors are preventing you from getting the story out to the world, it’s time to leave and file your
explosive news from someplace beyond the dictator’s reach.
Your story may fall on indifferent ears; recent history is full of examples of international failure to intervene to stop conflicts, dictatorial abuses, and humanitarian crises. But if you don’t tell it at all, you’re not fulfilling your most fundamental role as a journalist, to inform the public.
Get access, disclose limits
From Dave Marash: I would propose two painfully obvious maxims:
1) Access is the lifeblood of reporting.
2) Something is better than nothing.
Therefore it is not inappropriate, craven or dishonest to accept limitations on access in order to be able to present some good (if incomplete) information about totalitarian states. Furthermore, these kinds of deals are regularly made by newspeople covering not just "devil" states.
For example, when reporters grant (say, White House) sources "off-the-record" or "background" status, they enact both these principles. Our responsibility is to make sure our readers know what imposed or self-imposed limits on disclosure we have accepted (and as much as possible, the reasons why such conditions were imposed) in order to gather and transmit what we can.
The same rules apply to reporting the "ground rules" imposed by states. Thus, when reporting from places like North Korea or Saddam’s Iraq, we must say that we are only allowed limited access, and that all quotes have been tainted by having been given under the limitations implicit in the constant presence of government "minders," and therefore can have only limited credibility.
In some ways, this meta-story offers the best insight into the troubled reality partially revealed by "the story itself," and is therefore often worth the trouble and danger involved in getting even such a limited picture. The alternative is nothing, no information, which, as I noted above, is infinitely worse than even a cramped something.