The year of reporting dangerously

The precarious state of truth-telling around the world was brought home to me during an international gathering of journalists in Singapore. One of the participants, CEO Maria Ressa of the independent news site Rappler, spoke of the harassment she and her staff were encountering because of their efforts to expose corruption and extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.

Freelance columnist and filmmaker Audrey Jiajia Li spoke bravely about the fear and intrusion that Chinese government operatives try to inflict on journalists like her who dare to veer from the official line. During her appearance on a panel discussion, a government lackey furiously took notes in the back of the room — and then tried to dominate the question-and-answer period with challenges to her characterization of the free press in China.

Other participants told of being censored or jailed, or losing colleagues.

One of the main takeaways from that Singapore conference was that democracy was in retreat in many parts of the world, and that suppression of independent reporting was one of the principle tools of authoritarian regimes. Another was that the United States, once regarded as a beacon of press freedom, was now offering comfort to dictators and despots through President Trump’s unrelenting attempt to delegitimize the Fourth Estate by calling respected organizations “fake news” and “enemies of the people” — and threatening to cut off access and to use the power of government to undermine the business interests of the watchdogs.

And the danger to the free press and its practitioners, here and abroad, has only become more apparent since then.

This was the year an American president shrugged at and rationalized the torture and dismemberment of a resident of this nation, a writer for one of its most prestigious newspapers, inside the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul. U.S. intelligence traced the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi to the highest levels of the kingdom, almost certainly with the knowledge, if not at the direction, of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

It was, by all appearances, an attempt to silence a truth teller.

Yet for Trump, the issue was all about money and realpolitik. He has continued to cite the crown prince’s denial, call the Saudi’s “a very good ally” and note the billions of dollars in defense contracts.

It is a time to take sides on matters of morality and democracy, and credit Time magazine by doing so in giving its “Person of the Year” award to “The Guardians of the War on Truth.” Khashoggi is on one cover. Ressa is on another. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two Reuters reporters imprisoned in Myanmar for exposing the deaths of 10 minority Rohingya Muslims, get their due. A fourth cover features the solemn but determined faces of the staff at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., where five colleagues were killed in June by a gunman reportedly angered by a news article about him.

Time could have made plenty more covers about journalists acting bravely, or even losing their lives in pursuit of truth. As of Friday, the Committee to Protect Journalists, which keeps a running count, reported that 53 journalists who had been killed this year, and 251 others were in prison.

As CPJ noted in a post last week, the “authoritarian approach to critical news coverage is more than a temporary spike.” Egypt, China and, yes, Saudi Arabia were among the nations that jailed more journalists in 2018 than in 2017. The Khashoggi killing was merely the most gruesome of the Saudis’ assault on independent reporting. Among the 16 Saudi journalists in jail at the start of the month were four women who dared to write about gender inequality in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia is not “a very good ally” of press freedom.

News alerts on the CPJ blog just this month document incidents of official crackdowns on journalists in Spain, Thailand, Serbia, Israel and Nicaragua. Even as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemns the Khashoggi killing, his own government currently holds at least 68 journalists in jail — by far the most on the planet.

The vast majority of jailed journalists around the globe are being held on various anti-state charges — “enemies of the people,” to coin a phrase.

To be sure, in the context of the global situation, American journalists are relatively safe and free. But the climate is getting more ominous. A CNN office in Manhattan was among the destination of 16 pipe bombs mailed to critics of the president in October. The packages were traced to a Florida man, Cesar Sayoc, whose van was coated with stickers and posters hailing Trump and ripping the “dishonest media” generally and CNN specifically. Sayoc had been seen as an enthusiastic supporter at Trump rallies, where anti-media vitriol is a staple, with the candidate — now president — leading the chants.

In the worst of authoritarian states, journalists are deemed “good” or “bad” by their fealty to those in power — and the bad ones lose access and, quite often, are tarnished with phony accusations of wrongdoing. Such was the case with CNN’s Jim Acosta, whose access was suspended — and a doctored video was cited as “evidence” of his overaggressiveness toward a White House intern reaching for his microphone — until the administration relented in the face of a lawsuit.

That Trump was a finalist for “Person of the Year” was a reflection of Time’s assessment of an individual’s impact, rather than his or her rectitude. Adolf Hitler (1938) and Joseph Stalin (1939) were among past selections.

“Can you imagine anyone else other than Trump?” Trump said when asked to speculation on the 2018 cover.

Time just did. Truth prevailed in a year it was challenged as seldom before in modern times.

John Diaz is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: jdiaz@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnDiazChron