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 Reporting in Censored Countries China and the Internet |
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Your comments and reactions are welcome. Write to cpj@cpj.org |
Posted July 27, 2006
From John Carroll:
It’s now time for our final question. I want to thank all members of the panel for their contributions. It’s been a privilege serving as moderator of such an accomplished group. Having dealt with many of these issues myself, starting as a young reporter in Vietnam and later as an editor of foreign correspondents, I thought I’d pretty much seen it all. Now, I realize I hadn’t. The comments you’ve posted have been filled with fresh facts and insights. Your depth of experience and reflection has been evident throughout. Also evident has been your generosity in helping others who face these issues now and in the future.
Looking ahead, what are the emerging threats to press freedom and the underlying political forces? What can journalists and their organizations do to meet these challenges? What role will the Internet play? And can we make creative use of the Internet to advance our cause?
Internet, war open new chapters
From Ann Cooper: Some of the emerging threats to press freedom are clear, but keep in mind that any list drafted today will surely prove incomplete in a few years. A look at CPJ’s own history—and the rapid changes in global politics and journalistic technology—tells us why.
Twenty-five years ago, when CPJ was founded, no one could foresee that the Internet would revolutionize both journalism and press freedom advocacy. For CPJ, Internet communications make research swifter and more thorough, and news about press freedom abuses is now disseminated faster and far more widely. All of that strengthens advocacy. For journalists, the Internet became an innovative route around government restrictions in such disparate locales as Ukraine, Malaysia, and China. And that strengthens independent journalism.
So from a press freedom perspective, the Internet just a few years ago looked like a powerful, positive new force. In fact, it was, and is. At the same time, governments are growing more adept at controlling the information flow on the Internet, just as they traditionally have curbed print and broadcast media. It’s particularly dismaying to see U.S. technology companies cooperating with those restrictive efforts in China, the world’s most obsessed regime when it comes to curbing Internet expression.
There’s merit to Tony Lewis’ point in yesterday’s discussion, that “even a censored version of Google and other U.S. material does expand Chinese awareness of the outside world and its values.” But if freedom of expression advocates accept a little Internet censorship in China, we open a door that repressive leaders around the world are eager to barge through. If China succeeds in taming and permanently censoring this marvelously democratic conduit for information, you can bet that others will follow its lead, and CPJ will document more and more cases of restricted expression on the Internet. This is a story that deserves greater attention from media all over the world, and it needs full attention from CPJ, including staffing of a new program that would focus exclusively on Internet abuses throughout the world.
You need look no further than today’s headlines to spot another growing threat: the spread of conflicts ignited by the “war on terror” and the international community’s failure to solve decades-old crises such as the Middle East. The threat goes well beyond the obvious danger of war correspondents dodging bullets. Today, combatants now almost routinely target news broadcast facilities to shut off information, and war correspondents on the ground feel a dramatic erosion of their traditional status as neutral observers. Increasingly, they are vulnerable to kidnapping, violence, and detention by warring factions. CPJ’s protests can have an impact, but news organizations also need to put aside competitive rivalries and band together to ensure greater safety for all journalists in conflict zones.
Politically, I see two trends that will continue to have a huge impact on global media and global press freedom.
First, the growth of media assistance programs, which took off after the collapse of communism, has fostered new media outlets and new journalists throughout eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and many parts of Asia and Africa. The Western governments that fund these programs see them as essential components of democracy building, from Russia, to Afghanistan, to Iraq. They have trained thousands of journalists and supported thousands of news outlets. But they have also angered leaders in many transitional states, who attack the outside trainers as plotters seeking to impose foreign values about news and press freedoms. Crackdowns in some states have shut virtually all the media built up by assistance efforts. But the efforts have not slowed. Global annual spending on media assistance is estimated at $1 billion, so the world is likely to see an increasing number of independent news organizations, a growing number of professionally trained journalists—and a rising number of press freedom abuses from the governments who oppose such efforts.
Finally, the vague, ongoing “war on terror” continues to take a sorry toll on press freedom. Leaders around the world have seized on terrorism as an excuse to muzzle reporting, in the name of preserving national security. They have succeeded in creating a chilly new climate for journalism, where public officials and the public itself engage in rhetorical attacks and legal threats to intimidate or punish media who dare report on sensitive topics such as human rights abuses and the erosion of civil liberties. Journalists must understand this threat is a global one and unite as never before to protect independent reporting
New strategies, alliances
From Anne Nelson: I come to this question with the advantage and the disadvantage of some distance on this subject. Recently my colleagues at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs launched a course called "Rethinking Human Rights," reviewing policies and practices to bring them up to date with a changing world. I think it’s high time to do the same with press freedom. For the past few decades, we have been working with a fairly ethnocentric, Post-War and Post-Cold War model (that has served us well enough). But it is not necessarily sufficient for the new geo-political paradigms ahead.
In Western societies, we face a double-edged threat. First, the "war on terror" is providing a smokescreen for a broad-based attack on freedom of expression, privacy, and civil liberties in every area of life—and the concept of government accountability has greatly weakened. It will take decades to reverse the damage. Second, some trends in the Western news media themselves weaken the arguments for their privilege. These trends include:
• the erosion of quality and seriousness in many traditional news vehicles;
• a convergence between news and entertainment;
• the heightened commercialism and drive for profit in news organizations;
• the increasing prevalence of new sources of news (such as Internet home pages) that cannot be evaluated by traditional standards.
The public trust in the press is low, and many believe that the news media represent just one more business, and not a highly regarded one. Making the First Amendment argument in the U.S. and other Western societies is becoming more difficult, and more crucial.
Outside the Americas and Western Europe, many feel that Americans are short-sighted in trying to universalize First Amendment prescriptions. The West is learning the hard way that "democratization" requires more than voters showing up at ballot boxes. By the same token, journalists in the former Soviet Union are frustrated by new webs of restrictive laws and regulation that limit information, without a visible "abuse" ever taking place. In Asia, punitive libel suits serve the same purpose. They point to the concentration of ownership of the media in the U.S. that has eliminated countless independent and local voices from the American scene as a form of the creeping restriction that never manages to directly involve the state—and therefore is not redressed by First Amendment principles.
The greatest menace on the scene is the process now underway to capture the Internet for commercial use. International telecoms are rapidly moving into the regulatory arena. Through their long-term strategies and lobbying efforts, they are threatening to colonize the Web in the same way that U.S. commercial broadcasters seized control of the bandwidth a few generations ago, stunting American public and independent broadcasting in their cradles. The press freedom community has become adept at addressing individual incidents. The next challenge is to develop visionary international communications theory and strategies that addresses the interests of future generations.
At this point, the press freedom community needs to open the doors and create new alliances with citizens’ groups. A broad alliance and lobbying effort—informed by advanced research—will be needed to protect our information landscape of the future, in the same way that other organizations have joined forces to defend the environment.
FOLLOW-UP
Greater focus on United States?
From Michael Massing: I’d like to add a final thought about an interesting thread that has emerged in this week’s postings in our online conversation—the ongoing and deepening threats to press freedom in the United States under the cover of the war on terror. There seems to be a consensus that the assaults on that freedom in this country are becoming ever more severe, and that this requires a more concerted defense by the press and groups dedicated to press freedom. Does that include CPJ? Since the committee’s founding, we have had a continuing and vibrant debate about how active we should be in taking on cases in this country. We most recently revisited the issue in connection with the jailing of Judy Miller—a development that, in spite of our traditional reluctance to take on cases in this country, we felt we could not ignore. Still, our involvement on press freedom issues in the US remains episodic. And there are compelling reasons for this, most notably our determination to devote our limited resources to cases in the rest of the world, where there is often no one else to advocate on behalf of journalists. But in the face of the mounting attacks on press freedom here, including most recently the threats to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, I think we need to continue revisiting this subject and assessing the extent to which our traditional wall separating cases in the United States from those in the rest of the world remains viable. I’m not ready to argue that that wall should be dismantled, but I would like to see the discussion resumed at its usual vigorous level.
U.S. Part 2
From Anne Nelson: I agree with Michael. I resisted doing U.S. cases in the past, on the grounds that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press mounted an appropriate response to the cases that arose.
We’re now seeing some new situations—such as new U.S. military and intelligence policies towards U.S. and non-U.S. journalists, U.S. military detentions of non-U.S. stringers working for US news organizations, etc etc etc.
These cases all seem to relate more closely to CPJ’s body of experience and expertise than to the U.S.-oriented organizations. (Their traditional tactics of fighting for First Amendment rights in U.S. civil courts are not relevant to many of these new cases.)
Unfortunately, we are not able to credibly point to the US legal system as a model to the rest of the world at this moment in history.
U.S. Part 3
From Ann Cooper: This has to be a topic of ongoing debate for the CPJ board. It’s not sufficient to say that the organization was formed a quarter of a century ago to help journalists outside the U.S., and that should remain its mandate. Times change and conditions change, as Michael and Anne both note, and the organization needs to remain open to adapting its work to face those changes.
’War-on-terror exceptionalism’
From Jane Kramer: Agreed. I think that for all the reasons above—plus the pressure on Internet companies in the U.S. to help monitor the online press, and in fact online communication between print and other media journalists—means we are in for some very nasty if very gradual incursions into our professional rights as well as a much broader, confused, continuing public adjustment to those incursions because of the barely disguised official conflation of war-on-terror exceptionalism and free-speech issues. The fact that it is barely disguised is an indication of how broad that adjustment has become. This discussion should be very much on our agenda right now. Especially if we are going to discuss any appropriate and realistic—not to mention honorable—response to the question of American Internet providers’ cooperation with local censorship abroad.