Muzzling the Press

Image credit: The STAR/KJ Rosales

Freedom of the press, a revolutionary idea pioneered in Britain by courageous government critics in the 1720s and then enshrined in the American Bill of Rights in 1791, is under extraordinary assault at home in the United States and elsewhere. That’s no wonder; the right to free expression threatens politicians everywhere who equate criticism of them with criticism of all that’s right and proper.

Of course, the assault is driven partly by ego — “L’etat, c’est moi,” said King Louis XIV, a phrase echoed in various forms by Donald J. Trump and his imitators (see Ron DeSantis) who seek to tame a rambunctious press. And, in places such as Russia and China, it reflects longstanding state policy that lately is growing more troublesome. Elsewhere, the threats to journalists are from literally murderous non-state actors.

Kyle Pope of the Columbia Journalism Review outlines the varying (and vastly unequal) threats around the world. He focuses on Russia, where Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is a victim of Vladimir Putin’s ego and the fragility of the Russian military, but he sets that into a global context. “The fact is that journalism and democracy are in retreat around the world, including in the United States. The Committee to Protect Journalists, in its annual tally, reported that at least sixty-seven journalists and media workers were killed in 2022, the highest number in four years and a 50 percent jump from the previous year,” Pope writes. “Nearly as many journalists were killed in Mexico as in Ukraine.”

Jeff German, source: Las Vegas Review-Journal

Thankfully, threats to journalists’ lives are not as much an issue in the United States (though isolated assassinations have occurred, such as that last year of Jeff German of the Las Vegas Review-Journal). But other threats to American journalism are more subtle, including such matters as technological change and economic forces that are killing newspapers nationwide, as well as efforts by DeSantis and others to change laws that have protected journalism. As Pope notes, DeSantis “has proposed a series of measures that hobble reporters’ ability to do their jobs, including one that would ensure comments made by anonymous sources would be presumed false in defamation lawsuits.”

Pope also notes that threats to the media come from within, from a decline in credibility. He points to Fox’s settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, suggesting that Fox News had “essentially abandoned its role as an independent chronicler of the news.” He went on: “Here we had executives and on-air anchors at the most-watched cable network in the country admitting that their devotion was more to advancing a cause—the easily disputed notion that Donald Trump had won the presidential election—than in reporting the facts. Fox’s viewers cheered the lie along. Journalism was not what they had in mind when they turned on the television.”

In that regard, it’s heartening that in the wake of embarrassing disclosures in that case Tucker Carlson is now leaving Fox. He shredded his credibility by publicly embracing Trump while privately saying he hated the man “passionately” and calling the voter fraud claims “insane.”

Yes, there are bad actors in journalism as in any other field. Carlson’s departure suggests that the marketplace — when it includes the proper functioning of the legal system — gets things right, at least over time.

Wuhan Market, source: CNN

Matters of life and death are at stake in censorship. State restrictions and their cousins — efforts to rewrite the past — ill serve history and the lessons we can learn from it. Some governments have sought to maintain private histories at times (one thinks of The Pentagon Papers), presumably with plans to keep such accounts secret until some undisclosed time in the future. But such efforts risk bias by the authors and deprive the public of vital information on a timely basis.

Leaders of all sorts, though particularly government officials, are threatened by free expression, of course. When the public learns of their failures, it can cost them their coveted positions, something few politicians can abide. That is why the separation of media and government must be preserved.

A Chinese colleague and I in 2016 published a study in Human Rights Quarterly, “How Chinese Journalism Students View Domestic and Foreign Media: A Survey on Credibility, Censorship, and the Role of the Communist Party in Media,” detailing how idealistic young people in China at the time valued independent thought and the freedom to publish information. Since then, the leashes have been tightening around journalism there and elsewhere and, while that may serve politicians in the short run, it shortchanges the citizens of particular countries and the world.

For a couple decades, Paris-based Reporters Without Borders has published a World Press Freedom Index that assesses the state of journalism globally. In 2022, it ranked 180 nations and territories based on the health of their media environments. Some of the results are surprising (the United States, for instance, placed 42nd, with the group explaining that “chronic issues impacting journalists remain unaddressed. These include the disappearance of local newspapers, the systematic polarisation of the media, and the erosion of journalism by digital platforms amid a climate of animosity and aggression towards journalists, among others.”) Other results are more predictable: China placed 175th and Hong Kong fell 68 places to 148th, as a result of Beijing’s crackdown there. Russia ranked 155th.

Citizens across the globe are hurt when press freedom suffers. Britain, now ranked 24th in the world index, taught the world that centuries ago. It’s a lesson best never forgotten.

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Putin’s Inhumane Gambit

Reporter Evan Gershkovich is a pawn in a cruel geopolitical game

The drumbeat of condemnation in the U.S. of Russia’s detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich continues. In a rare show of bipartisanship, U.S. Senators Charles Schumer and Mitch McConnell issued a joint statement demanding “the immediate release of this internationally known and respected independent journalist.” This came a week after the Biden Administration, through Secretary of State Antony Blinken, similarly condemned Gershkovich’s arrest, blasting “the Kremlin’s continued attempts to intimidate, repress, and punish journalists and civil society voices.”

And it follows other expressions of support by news organizations such as the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, which warned that, “The arrest of Gerschkovich may signal a broader crackdown on the remaining Western reporters in Russia, which already has made it a crime for its citizens to criticize the unlawful invasion of Ukraine.” The National Press Club awarded its highest honor for press freedom, the John Aubuchon Award, to the journalist well ahead of its normal year-end schedule. A club official said: “we want to do what we can to call out his situation and stand up next to him.”

For its part, The Wall Street Journal has run a continuing series of pieces about such developments. In one piece it described how readers can offer their support for the reporter through social media posts featuring his photo and such phrases as “#IStandWithEvan. “Readers can download this collection of media assets to surface and share across their personal social-media accounts—from Twitter and Facebook to LinkedIn, Instagram and beyond,” the Journal advised. “They can be added as user profile photos, banners or posts.”

Of course, the Journal also editorialized against his detention. “The timing of the arrest looks like a calculated provocation to embarrass the U.S. and intimidate the foreign press still working in Russia,” the paper’s editorial board opined. “The Kremlin has cowed domestic reporting in Russia, so foreign correspondents are the last independent sources of news. Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest comes days after his byline was on a revealing and widely read dispatch documenting the decline of the Russian economy. The Kremlin doesn’t want that truth told.”

The New York Times also weighed in, pairing its condemnation with an attack on Putin and a defense of Ukraine. “The Kremlin’s readiness to seize an accredited journalist as a hostage demonstrates again why the United States and its allies need to stand firm to block Mr. Putin’s designs on Ukraine,” the Times argued. “Ukraine has chosen to be part of a Europe that is stable, peaceful and governed according to rules and law. Mr. Putin would supplant that with fear and force.”

Both papers also suggested that Putin may have grabbed Gershkovich in retaliation for the United States indicting Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, a Russian national suspected of spying against the U.S. Noting that Cherkasov posed as a Brazilian and reportedly entered an American university, the Times added the caveat that “there has been no indication so far that the Russians are looking to swap for him.” The papers also recalled the swap of athlete Brittney Griner for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, with the Times noting she was held for about 10 months. In an unhelpful note, the Journal took a swipe at the Biden Administration, expressing its thanks for the administration’s condemnation but adding, “But it’s fair to ask why Mr. Putin believes he can snatch Americans and come out ahead.”

All these protests are necessary, of course. If Gershkovich’s arrest were met with silence, the Kremlin would likely take away the absurd message that this distinguished journalist was spying for the U.S. In fact, what he was doing – in open sight and perhaps even more infuriating to Putin – was churning out exceptional journalism, including work about how the war in Ukraine was weakening the Russian economy. The Journal republished much of his work here.

The question, though, is whether such protests will have any effect on Putin. Instead of finding them troubling, would he take narcissistic and sadistic delight in so riling up his enemies? Would he be gladdened that in Gershkovich he has taken a prize that really stings? Will he milk that for all its worth by keeping the gifted reporter in the notorious Lefortovo Prison for months to come. Putin is, after all, a former KGB operative who understands the West’s emotional reaction when individuals are tormented and who himself is insensitive to immiserating others: witness his murderous attacks on thousands of Ukrainians and his tolerance of huge losses on the Russian side. To say the man is an animal is an insult to animals.

Sadly, despite the condemnatory reporting, Putin already has cowed Western reporters with this move – or at least made it difficult for Western media to get reporting on the ground in Russia. The Journal’s bureau chief has left and the Times has no staffers in the country any longer, as the Times reported. From his perspective, Putin has won big with this single arrest.

Western media and governments, as well as ordinary citizens, should keep up their criticisms of Putin for this appalling move, if only to remind themselves of the sort of man and government they are dealing with. However, if the past is prologue, only two things will really matter: when Putin has squeezed the arrest for all its value to him and the size of the ransom – human or otherwise — he’ll get for Gershkovich.

Will this move weaken the West’s resolve on Ukraine, moving it down the isolationist path some Republicans hope for? That is doubtful, but Putin’s gamble suggests that the reporter could be a captive as long as that war goes on. Happily, that didn’t happen with Griner. But Putin’s game with Gershkovich seems much more calculated and inhumane.