Rating Press Freedom

Michael Hedges February 18, 2008

Press freedom, institutionalized, serves to inoculate us against the evils of absolute power. It’s a vitamin jab; instant sunshine, instant energy. Calling out press freedom failures is also a jab, like a blood test for a dread disease – painful but necessary.

Each year the Paris institution Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières - RSF) reports the state of press freedom in the world. Its Annual Report (released February 14) details and categorizes nations that succeed and those that fail. RSF’s Annual Report 2008 draws particular attention to Western democracies and institutions, and in quite dramatic language.

“The spinelessness of some Western countries and major international bodies is harming press freedom,” said RSF General Secretary Robert Ménard in the reports introduction. “The lack of determination by democratic countries in defending the values they supposedly stand for is alarming.”

Defending journalists is RSF’s and Ménard’s mission. In introducing the 2008 Annual Report with scathing criticism of international organizations and western governments, many points shared with others who tend to lighten their words, RSF passed a threshold. Enablers, it claims, are equally threatening to journalists and press freedom as dictatorial governments. The report accuses the UN Human Rights Council of “duplicity.”

All of the seemingly perennial violators of journalists rights – Pakistan, Russia, Iran, Sudan, Chad, Burma – are roundly criticized. No country received more condemnation than China, at a time when it is the focus of so much worldwide attention.  “Nobody apart from the International Olympic Committee seems to believe any longer that the (Chinese) government will make a significant human rights concession before the Games start,” the report charges. “Not one of the promises made by the authorities to secure the 2008 Olympics was kept.”

“Almost two-thirds of the world’s imprisoned journalists are being held in Asia,” says the RSF report. Burma’s ruling junta faced down criticism the old fashioned way, shooting protesters, killing 55 including a Japanese photojournalist. Not content with arresting journalists, the military rulers cut internet access, banned foreign publications and taxed the purchase of satellite TV equipment far above the public’s reach. Burma has the dubious distinction of holding the world’s oldest jailed journalist – 77 year old U Win Tin.

African nations came under harsh criticism in the harshly critical RSF report. Dictators well-known – Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugaba, DR Congo’s Joseph Kabila, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame – and of lesser repute cracked down on “journalists who annoyed them.” Twelve journalists in Africa were killed and 150 arrested in 2007.

The RSF Annual Report mentions the practice of ‘envelope’ journalism, well-known in media development circles for undermining journalist and media credibility. The report seems to imply that this practice, handing over cash for favorable or unfavorable articles or reports on an event or individual, is French-speaking African in origin. It is not. The genesis can be traced directly to Europe.  

Chinese influence in Africa has been noted by many sources, as it is in the RSF report. A supply of money, workers and technology with, seemingly, no questions asked are for dictators a welcome buffer to the irritating Western practice of harping on human rights issues. It is Chinese technicians, the report notes, who man Zimbabwe’s radio jamming equipment. The report omits, however, the widely held suspicion that a French company supplied China with the jamming transmitters.

On-line media in general and  bloggers specifically are targets for repressive tactics. The Chinese government monitors internet cafés, closing access to critical website. Europe’s ‘last dictator’ Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko vowed to “put an end to (online) anarchy and would “not allow humanity’s great technical achievement to become a news sewer.”  

Western democracies did not completely escape RSF’s criticism. Press freedom is virtually absolute in Iceland (at the top of the annual RSF Press Freedom Index, released each autumn, for several years) and the rest of Scandinavia. Rather than worry too much about journalists maimed or killed in the West, RSF’s Annual report notes the worrying trend of forcing journalists to reveal notes, tapes and sources. French, German, Italian and Canadian courts have seized journalists’ records.

Most Western democracies have journalist ‘shield’ laws. French President Nicholas Sarkozy, quoted in the report, promised to push through legislation to protect journalists’ sources saying, January 8th, “Proper journalists do not reveal their sources. Everybody must understand and accept this.”  The United States House of Representatives passed in October the Free Flow of Information Act, which gives journalists the right not to reveal sources at the federal level. US President George W. Bush has threatened to veto the bill.

Taken in total, the Reporters Without Borders Annual Report 2008 is gloomy and depressing, and clearly meant to be. Corrupt and cynical governments have become far less circumspect about using new technology and new media for their own ends. For them press freedom is like happiness, to parse John Steinbeck, “so overrated.”