Killing of Journalists Threatens Global Press Freedom Censorship, pressure to reveal news sources also inhibit media
By Eric Green
Washington -- The biggest challenges to press freedom include censorship, reporters being forced to reveal confidential sources and the brutalizing and killing of journalists, media professionals tell America.gov.
John Powers, a sportswriter for the Boston Globe who specializes in covering the Olympic Games, said that challenges to press freedom vary from country to country. The United States has issues of reporters being forced to reveal confidential sources, while journalists in totalitarian regimes are “routinely jailed, beaten, and killed,” said Powers, who shared the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting with other Globe writers for their report on the nuclear arms race.
Powers said press freedom is under attack in Russia, where reporters face very real physical dangers in carrying out their jobs. Since 2000, more than a dozen journalists have been killed in Russia in the line of duty and the cases rarely are brought to court.
China has guaranteed wide access to sources for reporters covering the Olympics in that country from August 8-24, said Powers. Press freedom for the “90 percent of us” who are in Beijing to cover just the sports angle of the games “will not be a problem,” he said.
But, Powers added, press freedom could become problematic for journalists in China who want to go beyond sports and report on the Chinese government’s policies on human rights and other issues.
The United States, Powers said, has “always had the freest press in the world.” However, in several well-publicized court cases, U.S. reporters have been sent to jail for refusing to reveal the names of confidential sources.
Powers said American media groups are calling on the U.S. Congress to pass a federal “shield law” that would help clarify the circumstances under which reporters must reveal news sources. The proposed legislation is designed to balance the public’s right to know with protecting national security interests.
JOURNALISTS FACE CENSORSHIP WORLDWIDE
Simon Reeve, a British best-selling author and broadcaster, calls censorship the biggest challenge facing journalists worldwide. Censorship, he said, can come from government repression, or from threats and violence against the media.
Censorship also can result from “pressure from corporations, shareholders and the wealthy owners of mainstream media in the developing and developed world,” said Reeve, who wrote One Day in September about the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes and coaches. Reeve won England’s One World Broadcasting Trust Award in 2005 for “outstanding contribution to greater world understanding.”
Reeve said World Press Freedom Day, to be commemorated May 3, is “just as important now as when it was launched” in 1993. That day, he said, marks the “very real physical risks journalists in the developing world take when investigating contentious stories,” and the “professional risks that journalists take in the developed world when they work on unfashionable issues that deserve wider exposure.”
DECLINING RESPECT FOR JOURNALISTS CITED AS PROBLEM
Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor and Publisher magazine, says declining respect for journalists in many parts of the world could lead to more and more rights being taken away from reporters.
The lack of esteem, he said, stems from the work of journalists no longer being valued, in part due to public criticisms of media bias on a particular political issue. Another factor, he said, is that the public might think journalists are “not really out for the full story,” but are instead “trying to do sensationalism.” An additional factor, he said, is that the public thinks it can now get its news from the Internet.
Mitchell said the future of newspapers might be exemplified by the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, which announced it would reduce staff and no longer print daily editions of its newspapers, switching instead to an online-only publication. Many are expressing concerns that a nationwide trend of print newspapers moving to online news could lead to a decrease in the number of trained working journalists.
JOURNALISTS FEEL UNEASY ABOUT JOBS
Cathy Packer, an associate professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of North Carolina, said the declining number of newspapers makes U.S. journalists uneasy about their careers.
“If you’re a reporter right now, you’re having real job insecurity,” Packer said.
Packer agreed, however, that the issues facing U.S. journalists, such as being forced to reveal confidential sources, do not compare to the plight of reporters elsewhere in the world.
Packer said the case of former New York Times reporter Judith Miller spending 85 days in jail for refusing to name sources “would look like a vacation” to journalists overseas who are being beaten or shot to death for pursuing investigations against organized crime or corruption in government.
But Packer added that the issue of revealing sources and the declining number of U.S. newspapers is leaving many American reporters feeling “defenseless.”
