OPINION:
Having a ringside seat for history being made is its own reward, but it comes with a price: When the news is unwelcome, and it often is, there’s a temptation to shoot the messenger, and the messenger is often a reporter for a newspaper, a magazine, a television network and sometimes a blogger for an Internet news site. Dodging the gunfire is ever more difficult, and the threat is not only to the press, but to the free flow of information necessary to make governments work across the globe.
The number of reporters killed in 2015 rose to 110, according to Freedom House, which published its Freedom of the Press 2016 report on World Press Freedom Day earlier this month. That’s a steep increase from 61 in 2014 and a grim indicator that government repression of those it governs is proliferating, not abating. So far this year, 16 reporters have been murdered, and 10 of the killings were work-related. This is workplace violence, writ large.
The bloodshed at the offices of the Paris-based magazine Charlie Hebdo last year, in which eight editors and reporters were slain by radical Islamic gunmen, awakened the world to the precarious state of a free press. Correspondents are particular targets in the Middle East and North Africa, with Iraq, Syria, Yemen and South Sudan the most dangerous places to cover the news. Murder is only the most extreme threat. There are other “punishments,” including prison, for reporters who write of events in a way that government officials don’t like. Skepticism of official versions, which is what honest reporting is all about, is not regarded as a virtue in the toils of governments both small and large. Last year 153 reporters were arrested for doing their jobs, and 54 were taken hostage.
Freedom House found that last year press freedom fell to its lowest point in 12 years. Only 13 percent of the people of the world live in nations with a free press. Forty-one percent reside where the press is “partly” free, and the remaining 46 percent enjoy no free press at all. Turkey, once regarded as the rare nation in the Muslim world where freedom is allowed to flower, if only delicately, is no longer such a haven. Since January, the nation’s largest opposition newspaper was ordered closed, and two reporters were arrested and charged with spying after they wrote about the smuggling of government arms to Syrian rebels. More than 700 journalists have been fired from their jobs and 100,000 websites blocked, according to the Turkish Journalists’ Association.
The Internet has expanded the flow of information and with it has flourished the deceptive arts of propaganda. Where government officials cling to power, trying to manipulate reality, they assume that the organs of the media play the manipulative games they themselves play — hence the urge to crack down on the competition. But in the end shooting the messenger doesn’t work. A dead reporter is replaced by another, eager to finish the job that is never finished. The debt we all owe to these intrepid messengers is a large one.
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