An assault on the news
This has been a rotten century so far for media freedom around the world. A new report this week reaches the unhappy conclusion that freedom of the press has fallen to its lowest level in at least a decade.
Article 19, a London-based organization dedicated to promoting freedom of expression, developed a new metric to measure the threats in172 countries — everything from government censorship and pressure from organized crime, to more subtle measures exercised by the handful of giant internet companies that control the flow of information.
It’s not a pretty picture. Freedom of expression and information is being rolled back in many countries.
One of the worst is Turkey, where more than 150 journalists languish in prison and the government has closed some 170 media organizations in the wake of last year’s coup attempt. But the offenders range from the Philippines (where the government of Rodrigo Duterte is ferociously critical of any negative coverage of its lethal crackdown on drug users and dealers) to Egypt, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Venezuela, Mexico and many other countries.
Around the world, more and more journalists are being silenced, prosecuted or even killed. Last year, according to a survey by Article 19, 259 were jailed for political reasons and 79 were murdered. “Global media freedom is at its lowest level since the start of the century,” warns the report.
That’s bad enough, but it’s not unusual. Dictators and strongmen in many countries have often cracked down on media freedom as a central part of their efforts to consolidate control. The drift to authoritarianism in parts of Europe, for example, has been accompanied by predictable pressure on the media.
The newest wrinkle is the emerging threat in the country with perhaps the most robust tradition of free media in the world, the United States. Donald Trump has showcased his contempt for what he calls the “dishonest media” ever since he launched his campaign for president. But now that he’s in the White House, he has escalated his attacks, labelling journalists the “enemies of the American people” and raising the idea of cancelling the broadcast licences of TV networks whose coverage he doesn’t like.
At one point he said it is “frankly disgusting that the press is able to write whatever it wants to write.” Clearly, he’s never read the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — that one about freedom of speech and the press.
This may be mostly typical Trump blather in the U.S. itself, but there’s a real danger it will fuel crackdowns on the media in other countries, especially when the president singles out international organizations such as CNN for abuse. If the United States, of all countries, doesn’t defend the principle of a free media, why would strongmen in Cairo, Ankara or China pay it any heed? Trump is giving license to every dictator around the world to crack down on their own unruly press.
All this is not about special privileges for the news media. Long experience shows that when a free press is trampled, it’s part of a much broader assault on everyone’s rights. The new report from Article 19 serves a useful purpose in shining a light on that threat.
Media freedom has fallen to its lowest level in at least a decade