Does the media want to be free or feel secure?
The press can claim autonomy and rights only if it is independent from states and governments
Journalism is in a delicate state in the world. The day when it seemed secure in its own freedom is gone. As June Jodie Ginsberg, the CEO of Index on Censorship, has observed: “It does seem as if the world is more authoritarian now.” Authoritarian leaders are increasingly confident in their rule, and the subordinate role of the news media. As democratic states in Europe and the Americas weaken, they assert more firmly that journalism is too important to be left to journalists, since politicians can better judge what information and opinions will secure good government.
It is the autocratic leader, largely in command of what can and cannot be said and shown (while providing the most engrossing, patriotic and popular entertainments) who now provides a template for despots and semidemocrats. It’s a style honed in Russia and China, applied in Turkey, Egypt and Ethiopia, and elements of which are adopted in Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. Among democratic states, a weak but electorally-effective form was pioneered under Silvio Berlusconi’s Italian premierships in the 1990s and 2000s.
In August 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping told the National Propaganda and Ideology Work Conference that workers in propaganda and ideology — that is, the media — had become lax: “they speak without restraint ... cheered on by hostile forces.”
Western countries, he said, “flaunt ‘press freedom,’ but in fact, they also have ideological baselines ... there are no completely independent media.” This is a correct observation, but one that neglects the fact that independence from states and governments is the indispensable baseline for a journalism that can claim autonomy and rights.
After his speech, Chinese journalism, which in the early 2000s had developed a means of gently critical editorialising and had done several important investigations, was buttoned up. Journalism in other autocratic states was too, in different ways. Russian President Vladimir Putin gradually took over the oligarchic broadcast channels and brought the main newspapers and magazines into line.
In Turkey, news media largely controlled by different industrial groups — some allied to the exiled imam Muhammed Fethullah Gulen, who is the alleged inspiration for last year’s coup — have been either closed or disciplined into obedience. In Egypt, after the assumption of power by Field Marshal Abdel Fattah El Sisi by acclamation in 2014, and in the wake of a terrorist attack killing around 30 in the Egyptian military, a group of editors and television presenters gathered to agree that their resources become “tools of the state” against terrorism.
Many Middle Eastern journalists, especially in Turkey, hate this. But not all yearn to breathe free. Journalists in authoritarian societies often yearn to be secure, and are conscious that their audiences often prefer state-sanctioned media, with upbeat, patriotic messages, to more discomfiting, and at times hypercritical, broadcasts and publications. This isn’t the case in India, the world’s largest democracy: The television news is famously raucous and aggressive, and the newspapers are diverse in their views. The media are relatively independent, but do far too little reporting on the vast poverty and discrimination that blights hundreds of millions of lives. Prime Minister Narendra Modi comes from a lower-caste family, but he appears less concerned by the lack of coverage of social misery than he does about an independent media.
In early June, Central Bureau of Investigation officers raided the home and offices of Prannoy and Radika Roy, founders of the first independent Indian news station and frequent critics of Modi, alleging loan defaults. The channel had aired a documentary in Hindi a few days earlier, claiming that Delhi’s news media now worked in an “atmosphere of fear” because of government pressure.
In the West, national institutions like the UK’s The Guardian, France’s Le Monde and The US’s The Boston Globe — all historically loaded with honours — struggle under large losses. Some find billionaires willing to support them, like the Washington
While living in Russia, I was struck by how often journalists there turned to the US example to orient themselves Post did with Jeff Bezos of Amazon. The public appetite for informed news and comment on Donald J. Trump’s presidency has buoyed the circulations of The Post and The New York Times. But the longerterm trends of falling print advertising, along with digital advertising that increasingly goes to Google and Facebook, remain.
And now, there is a new, dangerous enemy of press freedom. The United States has always been an inspiration to those that wish for and try to practice independent, inquiring journalism. While living in Russia as the Soviet Union came to an end and in the first years of the post-Soviet states, I was struck by how often journalists there turned to the US example to orient themselves, as they have in China, the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere.
Today, Trump’s uniquely unwavering focus has been on destroying trust in the US news media. He is deliberately tearing at one of the greatest institutions of US “soft power.” This, like all of his moves, is designed to bolster his own position, but it attacks a journalistic culture that has been, at its frequent best, the most prominent example in the world of freedom combined with civic responsibility. The greatest institutions of US journalism are rising to the challenge. So should we all. —The New York Times John Lloyd is a contributing editor to
the Financial Times