Fewer attacks are still disturbing
by Steve Weinberg Posted Sat, Aug 1 2009
Every year, it is difficult to figure out as a journalist working across borders how to react to the book everybody knows is coming from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The book is Attacks on the Press. The new edition brings news from Joel Simon, the Committee to Protect Journalists executive director, that 41 journalists died while on duty during 2008, “down notably from previous years.” The number of journalists imprisoned for trying to tell the truth numbered 125, “a modest decline from previous years.”
Should the lower numbers constitute cause for celebration? Not in my mind, unless the celebration is extremely muted. After all, the drop in deaths is almost certainly in large part because of journalists withdrawn from Iraq, which is no cause for celebration. A smaller portion of the decline is quite likely due to self-censorship by news organizations whose executives have been understandably intimidated by thugs who murder journalists with impunity. That is also no cause for celebration.
I have done what I do every year the book arrives: I weep at the plight of professional colleagues. I curse the murderers and the authorities within government who tolerate the violence. I eat lightly, so as not to vomit from dismay and disgust. Then I return to my investigative reporting, hoping other journalists are doing the same, because keeping on keeping on is, ultimately, the only weapon to employ against the thugs. They can kill journalists, but they can never kill the stories that need telling if journalists don’t back down.
Studying the overwhelmingly detailed book to discern trends might help journalists who are still alive, who have avoided imprisonment, to operate as safely as humanly possible. In the Preface, for example, I learned from the assertions of investigative reporter Carl Bernstein that the threats to journalists in many countries have shifted from authoritarian governments controlling news organizations to violence against individual journalists. Some of the violence is government sponsored. Some comes from the private sector, such as drug cartels that are much like multinational corporations, with the twist that the chief executives travel with machine guns rather than briefcases.
Bernstein offers no meaningful strategies or tools to deal with the finality of death or the intimidation of prison. I did not expect Bernstein to find solutions—that would take a genius, or maybe, leaving the realm of rationalism, a god. Bernstein does make the point, wisely, that all journalists who care about truth across borders should support the Committee to Protect Journalists. Sometimes, it is the only group paying attention. Contributing to the organization provides “a sophisticated network of practical and financial support that aids [the] continued pursuit of the truth, as well as to assist journalists and their families caught in the crossfire of war and conflict everywhere.”
Simon, who thinks about solutions every day because that’s his job, can offer no sweeping solutions either. He believes, however, that a signal from U.S. President Barack Obama “could limit future losses for the media.” The president “must recognize that whenever the United States fails to uphold press freedom at home or on the battlefield, its actions ripple across the world. By scrupulously upholding press freedom at home, by ending the practice of open-ended detentions of journalists, and by investigating and learning from each instance in which the U.S. military is responsible for the death of a journalist, Obama can send an unequivocal message about the country’s commitment to protecting press freedoms.”
Those eloquent words aimed at Obama presuppose he is willing to broach the topic of press freedom to its enemies. Evidence seems scarce that Obama would make violence against journalists a priority, but it shouldn’t hurt to ask.
Probably most consumers of the book will be seeking updates on the parts of the world that matter to them most professionally, rather than expecting global solutions. In that regard, the 2008 volume is outstanding. It divides the world into five geographic sections: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Central Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa. Each section begins with an analysis by well-qualified commentators. The country-by-country summaries of violence against journalists follow, topped off by news bits of “attacks and developments elsewhere in the region.”
Turn to almost any page and the geographic insights are worthy, the lists of dead or imprisoned journalists searing. If a good night’s sleep is especially vital to effective reporting and writing the week you read this review, I recommend avoiding Attacks on the Press in 2008 after dinner. Otherwise, nightmares might come.
Steve Weinberg
Steve Weinberg reviews books regularly for Global Journalist, concentrating on journalistic technique rather than summaries of content.