Losing the battle for press freedom
Few people may realize that today is actually World Press Freedom Day 2009, and for those that support the fight for free and unfettered journalism it may come as a surprise, but unfortunately we have just lost the battle.
At least this is the result of an informal referendum passed today by voters that attended the Frontline club event: World Press Freedom Day 2009 UK Debate.
The event was organized by the UK National Commission for UNESCO, in a panel debate chaired by William Horsley, the director of the Centre for Freedom of the Media. Speakers included Evening Standard columnist Andrew Gilligan, Al Jazeera English correspondent Alan Fisher, General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists Jeremy Dear, and the director of policy planning for NATO Jamie Shea.
In favour of the motion “Governments at war are winning the battle of controlling the international media”, Gilligan said: “It was reported that [during the war in Iraq] the British forces had taken the city of Basra about two weeks before they actually took it…we saw a number of other stories that were simply plain wrong, but not wrong to the British sides disadvantage.”
“Wars create a seller’s market in news,” he said. The demand for news vastly increases while the supply of reliable news diminishes, as journalists are often denied access to conflict zones and fed information from government sources.
War is extremely confusing under any circumstances, and it is in the interests of those running the battles to create further confusion.
Gilligan points out that 99 per cent of the British reporting in the Afghan conflict is done through imbeds and official visits. Imbeds are nothing short of subtle propaganda, he adds, which is psychologically enforced by the fact that journalists are reliant on the military for their well-being, and few are unsusceptible to bonding with military personnel. As a result, impartiality suffers.
However, Dear rejected the motion, and Gilligan’s criticism, arguing that good journalism will prevail.
“The irrepressibly spirit of independent journalism is alive and well,” he told the panel.
“Cameras in the hospital in Gaza city, Salem Pax’s blogging, even the crude video tapes of Al Qaeda, all evade the censors’ grasp.”
If governments were winning the war there would not have been a 10 per cent rise of US citizens using foreign media as their main source of news during the first 6 days of the Iraq conflict.
“Don’t allow the Gilligan Shea spin machine to undermine independent journalism,” he said.
Shea, NATO representative and token government baddie of the debate spoke in favour of the motion, offering illuminating insights to the NATO propaganda machine.
“[The job of NATO’s PR office] is keeping the journalists always busy and occupied, feeding them with constant briefings so they don’t have much time to go out and find the facts for themselves.”
Shea says increasingly to get its message across, NATO no longer needs the media, they can make their own. NATO even has its own TV station where “people employed by NATO interview people from NATO.”
But Fisher is apt to point out that quite simply, “who watches NATO TV other than NATO?”
Despite the consensus on all sides that there is a professional and efficient PR machine operated by most if not all government institutions, Fisher says that this challenge to journalism has been in full force since WWII and in fact, the journalists are wising up.
“We challenge authority more than we have ever done before,” says Fisher, because journalists can report from the frontline as the battle is being waged.
He says that it is “an ethnocentric view” to say that because “the old guard of western media” wasn’t allowed in Gaza there was no media presence there. In fact there was heavy supply of local Palestinian reporters.
“People tend to think that if a tree falls in the forest, and an American broadcast network isn’t there to record it, did it really fall?”
We don’t just need the BBC or the Times, Fisher explains, now there are many other places to go. Of course it helps that Fisher represents one of those “other places”, coming from the emerging trend-setting news channel Al Jazeera.
My own two cents to be added to the debate is that while there are local journalists that have access to conflict zones which western media is often prohibited from, for example during the recent conflicts in Gaza and Sri Lanka, do we actually ever hear what they have to say?
The winner of the UNESCO journalism competition Annabel Symington notes in her winning entry that accounts by local journalists of the war in Gaza were often ignored by western media because they ‘lacked the credibility of western journalists’. And given the dominance of western media within the international media, it is often the case that these stories never reach a wide enough audience.
Until western media outlets either accept more local stories or simply lose prominence, this is a battle lost. I think the direction of my vote at least goes without saying.
Tags: Alan Fisher, Andrew Gilligan, Annabel Symington, Gaza war, government propoganda, Governments are winning the battle of controlling the international media, Iraq war, Jamie Shea, Jeremy Dear, local journalists in Gaza, National Union for Journalists, NATO, NATO TV, Salem Pax, Sri Lanka conflict, the Frontline Club, UNESCO, UNESCO journalism competition, William Horsley, World Press freedom day, World Press Freedom Day 2009
http://willjordanuk.blogspot.com/2009/05/governments-at-war-are-winning-battle.html