Monday, August 22, 2011
News of the World
Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.(Joseph Goebbels)
Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. (Joseph Pulitzer)
If it were not for London riots, the British headlines would still be dealing with Rupert Murdoch and his infamous “News of the World”. Many of us were shocked, while not necessarily surprised, by the depths that some reporters stooped to in trying to get some juicy stories: hacking of phones, paying off police officers in return for exclusives, doing everything to get your hands on classified information. All this has lead to some disillusionment, or at least to the confirmation of the view that the press is dirty, in bed with the government, and whatever they write cannot be trusted.
While I am sympathetic to this view, I would like to offer a slightly different perspective. I have just come back from East Africa, and newspapers there are a joke. They all report about corruption, but you cannot help but feel that most of the articles are carefully vetted so as to only ever accuse the little fish and leave the big crooks to comfortably run the country. Both the scope and quality of the articles remind you more of a school or student paper than of the press of the free country- not a good sign for democracy.
In February of 2002 an American-Jewish journalist was beheaded in Pakistan. Daniel Pearl had been writing for the Wall Street Journal and a week earlier had been abducted while seeking to meet a known Islamic leader. To this day it is unclear why he was targeted, and even though a person was executed for supposedly having killed him, the reasons for Pearl's dea
th are unclear-almost. Whatever the specifics which lead to his kidnapping, he was undoubtedly chosen because he was a journalist. His paper was accused of cooperating with the US government and its intelligence community, so killing him was possibly some kind of act of revenge. But Pearl pursued his passion to get behind the immediate scoops and to unearth background facts, stories, information. And that in itself, even not in league with the CIA, was dangerous and potentially lethal.
Year in, year out, thousands of journalist do the same thing in various countries around the world, and catch hell because of it: Anna Politkovskaya was murdered for her critical views of the Moscow regime, in Latin America and the Middle East alike journalists get jailed, sentenced to death, thrown out of the country for what they seek to publish. Not all of them are simply trying to get a news story out: many are trying to hold the government or big business accountable for what they do, and this costs them dearly (see http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/ ). In other words, while not all journalists are saints, not all of them are devils either, and some of them are heroes. And whether Watergate or “Cash for Honours”, journalists were the ones who managed to have such stories exposed. So next time we bad-mouth the press, let's remember Pham Minh Hoang who is in jail in Vietnam.
# posted by tino @ Monday, August 22, 2011 
