Press, The Neuralgic Nerve

India ranks 105 out of 175 nations on the press freedom scale of Reporters Sans Frontieres

• Freelance journalist Hemchandra Pandey is killed by cops in an alleged encounter in July 2010 in Adilabad district, Andhra Pradesh
• Hindustan correspondent Vikas Ranjan is shot dead in Bihar in November 2008
• Indian Express correspondent Vijay Pratap Singh dies in a bomb explosion in July 2010 that was aimed at killing a local politician
• Konsam Rishikanta of Imphal Free Press is blindfolded, gagged and shot dead by unknown gunmen in November 2008
• Photographer Javed Ahmed Mir is shot dead allegedly by security forces in August 2008

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I met a beautiful young woman on a lovely September day in Vienna. She was tall and blonde and had an intriguing smile. I got into conversation with her and found we shared some passions. It would be nice if that were the start of a romantic short story. It isn’t. The passion we shared was for finding and telling the truth through journalism, but hers had been tested in a crueller fire than mine. She was blown up by a bomb placed under her car in Beirut. She lost her left leg and her left arm and the supposition must be she was blown up for protesting, as she did, the assassination of Lebanon’s prime minister, Rafik Hariri. More than a million people did that, too, gathering in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square to demand the withdrawal of the Syrian military from Lebanon. May Chidiac carried a stronger voice because she had made a point of speaking out on a television show, Good Morning Lebanon, and voices and messages had warned her to hold her tongue. After the attempted murder, she had resumed her broadcasting on a prime-time television show called With Audacity. When I met her in Vienna, she’d had 33 surgeries.

The occasion of our encounter was the 60th birthday conference of the International Press Institute (IPI), the premier organisation of top editors and journalists and media executives from 120 countries dedicated to monitoring and defending the freedom of the press. For the birthday celebration, the institute had invited 60 men and women to Vienna to be acclaimed “world press heroes” (to say “heroes and heroines” is carrying political correctness a noun too far).

It was inspiring to meet the Iranian refugee Akbar Ganji, one of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in the overthrow of the Shah. The firebrand Ganji came to believe that a fascist interpretation of Islam was an intellectual corruption and a betrayal of the ideals in whose name he had gone on the streets. One despotic regime had merely been replaced by another. He was outraged that 134 Iranian writers who had protested in an open letter headed ‘We are the Writers’ were denounced in a hardline publication menacingly entitled ‘We are the Dead!’, a description vindicated soon after by a series of murders of signatories. Ganji worked with another investigative journalist to point the finger at a number of politicians and clerics. His co-worker was shot in the face. Ganji, convicted of “endangering national security and spreading propaganda”, spent six years in Tehran’s brutal Evin prison, in solitary confinement and torture.

Ganji was there for the Vienna ceremonies to hear the acclaim (he escaped Iran in 2006). A number of world press heroes were not, too many of them murdered for telling the truth: Veronica Guerin, gunned down for exposing criminal gangs in the Republic of Ireland; Guillermo Cano, killed in Colombia for investigating government complicity in the crimes of the Medellin cartel; Tara Singh Hayer, an immigrant to Canada from the Punjab, murdered for attempting to preach tolerance to separatist Sikhs in British Columbia. On awards night in Vienna’s great Town Hall, I remembered my friend Abdi Ipekci, editor of Turkey’s Milliyet (Nation), who was shot for the same crime of reasonableness by the odious Mehmet Agca, a rightist Grey Wolf who later tried to kill Pope John Paul II. Maddening to think that Agca was let out of a Turkish prison this year.

In Memoriam: Palestinian scribes light candles for Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana, killed in Israeli shell fire. (Photograph by AFP, From Outlook Magazine Nov 01, 2010 Issue)

These world press heroes are exceptional people. They give freedom of the press its moral justification—while others betray it. The reporters on the British News of the World, who found a way to penetrate the e-mail of ordinary citizens for the sake of tittle-tattle gossip stories, dishonour the brave heroes. The thieves are on the side of the oppressors just as surely as the censors and ownerships who seek to manipulate media for their own selfish ends. It was heartening that the scandal was exposed by another newspaper, The New York Times. Newspapers, like doctors and surgeons, have traditionally been leery of attacking within the profession—“dog doesn’t bite dog”—but the higher obligation is to maintain professional standards.

There are any number of reasons to worry that the media is in crisis.

• There are ownerships that twist the news to fit their own political prejudices or commercial interests. No one can reasonably object to ownership expressing opinions in columns clearly designated as opinion, but reporters bring shame on themselves when they are accessories to the pollution of news columns. The governor of Louisiana in the ’30s had a colourful way of ridiculing the way the media moghul, Henry Luce, did this in his successful Time magazine. “He’s like a shoe store owner who stocks only the shoes to fit hisself.”
• There are laws conceived for good purposes that end up prohibiting disclosure in the public interest. Editors have a duty to resist, as world press hero Arun Shourie did in fighting all the way to India’s Supreme Court to defend The Indian Express report on the Bhagalpur blindings, winning a victory for all Indian journalism.
• There is understandable concern in print media about the way the internet is eating into core print revenues, which newspapers and magazines need to cover foreign news and undertake risky and expensive investigations. It is a serious issue, particularly when websites have not yet achieved the revenues to fill the gap. There are some excellent websites (disclosure: my wife edits The Daily Beast), but the internet is also a vehicle for an unverified flow of messages, with falsehood masquerading as fact in cyberspace. Take that crazy notion that thousands died in the 9/11 World Trade Centre outrage because of some plot by the CIA, Mossad and Jews. It’s a lie that has been exposed time and again, but it keeps circulating on the internet even though Osama bin Laden claimed it was the work of Al Qaeda. Just this September, this lie was expounded by Iran’s president in a speech at the United Nations. (“Some segments within the US government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and save the Zionist regime.”) The American-educated Pakistani neuroscientist, Aafia Siddiqui, whose jury conviction in New York on terror-related charges upset segments of Pakistani opinion, declared, “I am not anti-Israel, but yes, I have said that they masterminded 9/11, and I have proof.” In his memoir, former British prime minister Tony Blair commented that actual terrorists are few in number, but the narrative has a bigger hold. “Muslim leaders often feel impelled to go along with this narrative for fear of losing support.”

That poisonous absurdity first entered the bloodstream through the spurious authority of publication on a website called Information Times. It claimed an office in the Press building in Washington, DC, but there was no office and it took me some time to track down the editor of Information Times, one Syed Adeeb, a Pakistani who seems to use it as a vehicle for propaganda against Hindus. I asked him what evidence he had for the 9/11 story. Answer: None. He got the idea, he said, from Lebanon’s Al Manar channel, either unaware or uncaring that it’s a propaganda vehicle for Hezbollah dedicated to “waging effective psychological warfare against the Zionist enemy”. And unaware that the victims working in the Twin Towers were of many nationalities, races and religions: Muslims and Catholics, Presbyterians, agnostics and atheists—and 130 Jews.

The Fearless Lebanese journalist May Chidiac; Cate Blanchett as Veronica Guerin; Iranian press hero Akbar Ganji

It’s painful to think of the deaths so casually demeaned by sedulous lies, as it is painful to reflect on the risks, privations and deaths suffered by world press heroes. The price of truth has gone up grievously. We pay every week with the life of a reporter, a cameraman, a support worker, an editor. The first shocking thing is just how many are dying. The International News Safety Institute calculates that if we include all news media personnel—translators, fixers, office staff, drivers—no fewer than a thousand have died in the last decade. In Mexico, democracy is undermined by the drug cartels. In the last four years, more than 30 journalists have disappeared or been murdered for daring to report and comment. Mexico’s Televisa group has reported that “vast self-censorship” has taken hold in the area where the drug cartels rule. The excellent El Diario newspaper in Ciudad Juarez published a sensational open letter, beseeching the drug cartels: “Tell us what you want from us. We didn’t ask for this war.... Tell us what we are supposed to publish or not publish, so we know what to abide by. You are at this time the de facto authorities in this city, because the legal authorities have not been able to stop our colleagues from falling.”

Clearly, the Mexican government needs to take resolute action to investigate and vigorously prosecute the murderers of the press. Not just for the sake of the victims and their families, but for all those citizens whose lives will be vulnerable when democracy and civil rights are not protected by honest reporting and responsible governments. Nothing less than the survival of Mexican democracy is a stake. Ireland set an example. The outcry over the murder of Veronica Guerin (immortalised by Cate Blanchett in the eponymous movie) by drug barons galvanised the government to crack down on the leaders of the criminal gang. Copy that to Pakistan’s political, military and intelligence leaderships. No civilised country can tolerate the intimidation of journalists for doing their jobs; it’s a disgrace that nobody has been held to account for the abduction and beating of Umar Cheema, an investigative reporter for The News, the largest English-language newspaper in the country.

Murdered Reason: Milliyet editor Abdi Ipekci, left, killed by the rightist Agca; Tara Singh, killed by separatists

The organisations concerned with the freedom of the press and human rights have played a significant role in the cases where justice has been done. Print, internet and broadcast media must keep a relentless focus on measures that will make a real difference. It is a waste of time calling on insurgents and terrorists to respect the rule of law. It is idle to think any international legal formula will restrain the madmen. Jonathan Swift said it well. You cannot reason someone out of a position he has not been reasoned into.

But all those states that concede immunity to the wrongdoers live in the real world. They expect to be taken seriously; they ask for aid and protection for their citizens travelling abroad. They are beneficiaries of trade agreements, of support from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and United Nations (UN) aid organisations. They value their membership of the UN. There is virtue in pressing member-states to vote for a Security Council resolution reaffirming that the safety and security of journalists is essential for the free flow of information around the world. The UN should have a central register of unsolved crimes against members of the media, but the UN itself cannot be left to follow through. The UN Human Rights Council is a travesty, an anti-Semitic mafia under the risible chairmanship of Libya, prejudice masquerading as conscience. UN committees are generally weak vessels. A journalist who works for a daily newspaper in Iran testifies that they “are too conservative; they don’t want to confront the government. They say the government is sensitive”. The very fact that a government is sensitive is, of course, the point. The neuralgic nerve should be pressed hard. Effectively that will have to be done by individual states and ngos. They must start holding immunity states responsible for their negligence and, in many cases, complicity. Any state that consistently fails to investigate and prosecute murder and violence against media personnel should forfeit access, privileges and aid.

By the same token, the immunity states—the iniquity states—should have to face a persistent international campaign of publicity. Not once a year, but every time they acquiesce or sanction the murder of a journalist. There are two purposes here. One is to hold them up to obloquy and shame. The other is to sustain the brave protesters, mark out their lives as significant. I think again of my IPI friend Abdi Ipekci, telling me in London in 1979 of what the example and support of his international peers meant to him in his ceaseless campaign for national unity and reconciliation against violence and terrorism. Yet in recent years almost every media outlet mentioning the prospect of the murderous Agca’s release in 2006 failed to mention that he was Ipekci’s killer.