Editorial: Thursday Was World Press Freedom Day

Yesterday, 03 May, was World Press Freedom Day; a day above the petty squabbles of advertisement rates and circulation wars. A day when the world press fraternity remembers those who stay true to their profession in the face of the most trying challenges. This is a day reserved for the heroes of the information age. It is after all the media that makes the planet a global village, connecting people, linking events and keeping concerns alive in the public memory. The UN recognised the path-breaking role played by New Media in informing people by flagging “New Voices: Media Freedom Helping to Transform Societies” as the theme for the observation of the day this year. The highlighting of New Voices is significant because, as the Joint World Press Freedom Day Message of UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, and UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova, underlines, “Change in the Arab world has shown the power of aspirations for rights when combined with new and old media.  Newfound media freedom is promising to transform societies through greater transparency and accountability. It is opening new ways to communicate and to share information and knowledge. Powerful new voices are rising – especially from young people – where they were silent before.” The UN’s inclusion of New Media practitioners in the ambit of journalists is important because as media moves online, more online journalists, including bloggers, are being harassed around the world. Because of the important role they play in informing people, it becomes important that even as demands are made of them to adopt more professionalism, they also receive the same protection as traditional media workers. This, of course, is not to say that the traditional media workers are any safer today than they were earlier, but at least they have the organisational support systems and networks which look out for them, something which the online community has still not acquired. This scenario, applicable to all media, is fleshed out in some detail in the latest report released by “Freedom House” which states that for the first time in eight years, global media freedom did not experience an overall decline. However, “due to downgrades in some previously free countries, the percentage of the world’s population living in societies with a fully free press has fallen to its lowest level in over a decade,” the report adds. The report points out that Burma made significant advances due to a broad political opening, and numerical improvements in press freedom were seen in Nepal as well. But these were balanced by “declines” in press freedom in India and Pakistan.  The Centre’s attempts at controlling media have been obvious for a while, but democracy, thankfully, has strong roots here and will weather this phase as well; it did come out stronger from the Congress-imposed Emergency of the 1970s.
That said, journalism remains a poorly paid profession [at least in comparison to other professions which make far fewer demands] and now it is becoming increasingly dangerous. In the year 2011, as per data released by Reporters Sans Frontiers, 67 journalists, 2 media assistants and 3 ‘netizens’ and citizen journalists, were killed either in the line of duty or in backlash to their work. Year 2012 is shaping up even worse with 21 journalists already murdered for their work and staggering six citizen journalists meted out the same fate. Not all these killings were in places of conflict with ‘peaceful’ zones like India, Bangladesh and Brazil having already silenced two free voices each. It is obvious that in these cases, the threat to the profession did not come from war in the traditional sense but from a conflict of interest between journalists seeking to inform and the nexus of the corrupt seeking to cover-up. The advent of New Media and the increasing convergence between the New and the Traditional Media has also made information local and global at the same time. Information travels much further nowadays, riding on the wings of different media, and this ‘reach’ should now be leveraged to not only build stronger networks to stare down suppression, but also ensure that no important story is sidelined anymore just because it is born in the margins. The greatest strength of New Media is its power to bypass mainstream media and its prejudices and get the stories out. It will have to embrace improved professionalism to succeed, but once it does, its own strength, sourced from its audience, will secure it the freedom to continue...