World Press Freedom Day 2007
As Filipinos, we know that our current state of journalism here in The Philippines is under attack, whether you believe it’s coming from the government or the NPA. The fact is that journalist are being killed. This is why the recent worldwide observance of press freedom was very important.
World Press Freedom Day was on May 3, and the main central objective was to highlight some of the ways in which press freedom is being silenced and threatened around the world. Moscow, Istanbul, Dhaka, Sydney, and Manila, these are some of the places in which press freedom is being threatened.
The following is taken from worldpressfreedomday.org, a letter from the CEO of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN).
Dear Reader,
Major terrorist attacks and threats against countries world-wide, particularly democracies, in recent years have led to the widespread tightening of security and surveillance measures.
The objective of these measures is laudable and compelling – the protection of citizens against threats to life and property. There is, however, a legitimate and growing concern that in too many instances such measures, whether old or newly introduced, are being used to stifle debate and the free flow of information about political decisions, or that they are being implemented with too little concern for the overriding necessity to protect individual liberties and, notably, freedom of the press.
Anti-terrorism and official secrets laws, criminalisation of speech judged to justify terrorism, criminal prosecution of journalists for disclosing classified information, surveillance of communications without judicial authorisation, restrictions on access to government data and stricter security classifications, all these measures can severely erode the capacity of journalists to investigate and report accurately and critically, and thus the ability of the press to inform.
Balancing the sometimes conflicting interests of security and freedom might indeed be difficult, but democracies have an absolute responsibility to use a rigorous set of standards to judge whether curbs on freedom can be justified by security concerns and should set them against the rights protected in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which guarantees freedom ‘to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’.
This is the clear message we need to impress on governments and their agencies on World Press Freedom Day.
Timothy Balding
Chief Executive Officer
World Association of Newspapers
Add the USA to your list. Here is an excerpt from Naomi Wolf’s Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
…The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy – a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC’s Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Punditman,
I think the increase in arrests in US journalists, is part of the Bush Administration’s push to silence those voices that do not agree with their policies. By the way, Josh Wolf was released a month or two ago, only after releasing the tape, which proved he had nothing to hide in the first place.