Even in a democracy, journalism can be fatal
Three journalists were recently killed in rural areas of India. You probably haven’t heard much about their deaths — or their lives — since they all worked for small local outlets, covering powerful interests who may have decided it was easier to murder them than to face their questions.
Their killers are unlikely to face justice. The issues the three journalists covered will continue to plague Indian society. And observers will mourn the slow decline of free expression in the world’s largest democracy.
The problem of violence against reporters is not limited to India, of course.
motivations in each case might turn out to be unique. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that many factors of contemporary life are enabling such acts of impulsive violence. Most conspicuously, those in power are using harsh new language to attack journalism and its practitioners, thus implicitly legitimizing violence against them.
The rise in violence against journalists coincides with the advent of a U.S. president who chooses to mark members of the free press as the “enemy of the people.” He and other leaders around the world, often with the aid of armies of anonymous online proxies, have whipped up resentment against journalists, sometimes even urging their followers to take the law into their own hands.
In the case of India, it’s particularly distressing. The country has more newspaper readers — more than 400 million of them — than the United States has inhabitants. You’d think that all those readers would encourage an environment friendly to reporters. Yet 11 Indian journalists were reportedly murdered in 2017.
“This is definitely a new trend. The Indian media used to be one of the most vivid in Asia, although times have always been tough for journalists working outside big metropolises,” said Daniel Bastard, of Reporter Without Borders.
The challenges facing rural journalists, who tend to write in local languages and must cope with limit the ed resources and minimal national exposure, are different from those faced by big-city reporters, who usually write for the English-language press. Both communities, though, have been affected. Last September, Gauri Lankesh, a prominent reporter and critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, was shot and killed in Bangalore, one of India’s biggest cities and capital of Karnataka state.
Indian journalists today face both the threat of physical violence when doing their jobs, but also the more widespread and insidious forms of intimidation — usually online — that are now commonplace around the world.
There is also the issue of access, which the current government has greatly limited. Modi famously does not hold news conferences and rarely gives interviews. When he does, he tends to prefer sympathetic news outlets.
But it’s the proliferation of hate speech that is helping to foster an atmosphere of impunity that makes killing reporters seem like a viable option. Bastard, of Reporters Without Borders, says that this repeated exposure to hate speech has had an “un-inhibiting effect on those who want to get rid of overcurious journalists.”
As powerful interests around the world — both governmental and private — take an increasingly antagonistic approach to critical media, this problem will only spread. Silencing journalists through arrests, online threats or physical violence — is an effective tool that paves the way for more-repressive agendas.
This is to be expected in places such as Russia, Iran, China and Egypt. It’s what those regimes do. But when attacks against members of the press become prevalent in societies with long democratic traditions, how long can we continue to convince ourselves that we are somehow immune?
Jason Rezaian is a writer for The Washington Post He served as The Post’s correspondent in Tehran from 2012-16. He spent 544 days unjustly imprisoned by Iranian authorities until his release in 2016.