Stephen Whittle
Monday June 5, 2006
Guardian
Journalism has become a rather precarious profession. The statistics for journalists killed, imprisoned and tortured make depressing reading. Then there is that casual contempt for the craft revealed by Cherie Blair, who signed the Hutton report for a party fundraiser, not to mention the slipping ratings for trust in the opinion polls. And all of that is before you get to the challenge to professional journalism from a combination of Google, bloggers and “citizen journalists”.
No wonder one of the subtexts of the International Press Institute World
Congress held in Edinburgh last week was: Why bother? If the IPI was founded in
1950 to defend press freedom, the challenge remains as great as ever today.
Johann Fritz, the IPI director, reminded the congress of some sobering
statistics. Over the past five years, 372 journalists have been killed in the
line of duty, or because of their investigative reporting. There were press
freedom violations last year in 178 countries, with only 17% of the world’s
population living under what Freedom House describes as a “free press”.
For Allan Little of the BBC and Chris Cramer of CNN those statistics have a
personal edge. Little has lost three friends in the past year, killed on the
job. Cramer has had eight of his staff murdered.
Iraq is, of course, the most unsafe place in the world for journalists at the
moment. The Philippines comes second. Eighty journalists have been killed there
in the last 20 years. As Rodney Pinder of the International News Safety
Institute put it: “Killing journalists is the cheapest, most risk-free source of
censorship.” The shocking fact is that most of those killings go uninvestigated,
unpunished and unreported.
Wilfred Kiboro, chairman of the IPI and managing director of the Nation
Newspapers in Kenya, gave the testimony of a man who has seen government
officials and the police “trash the newsroom, dismantle or disable equipment and
burn newspapers”. He reminded his audience there is a flip side to this. “If
media had no impact … If journalists stayed away from covering the things
politicians didn’t want them to touch, would they be beaten and their presses
vandalised?”
It is tempting to think this is a developing world problem. But think for a
moment of some of the threats to freedom of expression here, ranging from the
terrorism legislation to court reporting and our libel laws. Add to that the
attitude to the role of journalists in a free society prevalent in government
and you can see that we have some challenges too. Stephen Whittle is a former
controller of editorial policy at the BBC
(Guardian)