Reportero, a powerful film on brave Mexican reporters

A new film Reportero has just been released documenting the daring work of Mexican reporters with the muckraking Tijuana weekly Zeta. Covering the drug wars the magazine which brands itself as "libre como el viento" (free like the wind) has been targeted by the narcos and paid a heavy price for exposing their violence.
In 2000 I had met its founder Jesus Blancornelas in Bogota where he had been awarded the prestigious UNESCO/Guillermo Cano Prize for freedom of the press. When I went out for dinner with him he wore a flak jacket and chose to sit in front of the door "just to see if they are coming". He was weakened by multiple bullet wounds that he had suffered 3 years earlier during a attack on his life by cartel drug sicarios.When he died in 2006 he was praised as "the spiritual godfather of modern Mexican journalism".
"He never sold out", said the president of a Tijuana's lawyers association. 32 years after the launch of the news weekly a team of reporters are still there, refusing to sell out and doggedly investigating the drug business and official corruption. Their work is a lesson of journalism, it is a lesson for all journalists.
The film should also lead to a reflection on how a personal drug addiction, sometimes seen as inoffensive and "hip", contributes to the brutal death of thousands of people and undermines press freedom and human rights in countries like Mexico.
Read CPJ's blog on the film which was presented this week in New York at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.
http://cpj.org/blog/2012/06/film-reportero-features-tenacious-mexican-magazine.php

Reflections on the BBC's Arab Spring coverage

Edward Mortimer, a distinguished British journalist, has analyzed the way the BBC has covered one of the most complex stories of last year: the Arab spring. His conclusions offer very valuable advice and tips on how to report fast-moving events that often divert from conventional formats.
Edward Mortimer's judgment is largely positive although it highlights a few issues that might serve as interesting lessons and warnings for the media in general: the lack of anticipation, the weakness of validation when resorting to User generated content (videos, etc.), the failure to do follow up stories, the tendency to cover the opponents less critically and widely than the government forces, the apparent difficulty to identify the next developments, etc.
The BBC summary of the report: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18576502?print=true
The report itself: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/arabspring_impartiality/arab_spring.pdf

 

Kyrgyzstan, a campaign to free Azimjon Askarov

In June 2010 Azimjon Askarov, a Kyrgyz journalist of Uzbek descent, was arrested and brutally tortured by police officers. Now he is serving a life prison term on charges that has was complicit in an officer's muder and had committed a series of other anti-state crimes.
As CPJ researcher Muzaffar Suleymanov documents in a recent report on the case Askarov was convicted "on the thinnest of evidence" and in an "atmosphere of intense intimidation of the defense".
Askarov is a leading investigative journalist and human rights activist who has exposed corruption and arbitrariness in high places.
Press freedom and human rights groups have taken up his case as a symbol of the absence of the rule of law in Kyrgystan. They are putting pressure on the government to abide by its own obligations under international law and advocating with foreign governments and intergovernmental organizations to publicly call on the Kyrgyz government to release Askarov immediately and unconditionally.
The challenge will be of course to give a higher profile to a case and a country which have not been regularly and intensely covered in the international media as well as convincing key donor agencies and economic partners like the US and the EU to insist on compliance with international standards as the  basis for continued economic cooperation with the Kyrgyz government.
http://cpj.org/reports/kyrgyzstan2012-english.pdf

Exiled journalists in Africa: a CPJ report

The Committee to Protect Journalists has just released its "journalists in exile" report with a special focus on Africa. Since June 2011, seven journalists have fled Somalia—making it the country with the highest number of journalists forced into exile in this 12-month period. It is closely followed by conflict-ridden Syria and Pakistan. Three other East African countries—Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Rwanda—also rank among the top 10. In fact, while the global number of journalists going into exile has decreased to 57 cases from 67 in the previous period, the proportion of East African exiles remains steady. More than a quarter of those who fled their homes from June 2011 to May 2012 came from an East African nation.
Like many other refugees exiled journalists suffer from isolation, discrimination and sometimes arbitrary repression. Most find it difficult to find a job in the press. "A few string for local or international outlets, and many work for independent websites that do not remunerate them. Instead, journalists said they often rely on grants from international organizations like CPJ to cover basic needs".
For further reading:  http://www.cpj.org/reports/2012/06/journalists-in-exile-2012-crisis-in-east-africa.php

Preventing genocide: the press should shout loud

Talking about genocide prevention in the shadow of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camps inevitably brings an intense and unique gravity to the discussions. The academic presentations cannot extract themselves from the looming presence of the barbed wires and grim towers surrounding the Nazis’ most infamous “death factory”. The past overwhelms all thoughts as a constant reminder of a barbaric killing system and its cold-blooded annihilation of millions of innocent lives.

How could it happen? What made it happen? How can we make sure today that we would have the right reactions if something similar would emerge? Last week some 25 diplomats from around the world gathered in the small town of Oswiecim, the Polish name of Auschwitz, to find answers to these questions and make real the oft-repeated promise of “never again”.

Genocide is a concern for the whole humanity. In the past century mass atrocities devastated not only the Old continent but also countries of the South. German South-West Africa, Ottoman Anatolia, the European “bloodlands” at the time of the Ukraine famine and the Holocaust, Cambodia under the Pol Pot, Srebrenica, Rwanda: the world map is dotted with the dark red flags of exterminationist policies. And the first years of the 21^st century have already had their share of mass atrocities, from Darfur to Syria.

Sponsored by the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation (AIPR) and the UN Office of the Special Advisers on the Prevention of Genocide the seminar covered a huge ground, from Keene State University James Waller’s groundbreaking reflection on “becoming evil: how ordinary people commit genocide” to former Pentagon official Clifford H. Bernath’s presentation of the role of the US Army in genocide prevention. My role was to reflect on the role of the media in covering and preventing genocide.

The exception and the rule

Indeed during all these somber moments of history journalism has systematically been put to the test. The Armenian genocide during the First World War was intensely covered by the U.S. and European press. In 1915 the New York Times published an article every two or three days, thanks in particular to the information it received from the US ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau.

However this is the exception that confirms the rule. The first genocide of the past century –the “Kaiser’s Holocaust”, the killing of Hereros in South West Africa (currently Namibia) – was hardly mentioned in the world media. In the early 30s the Soviet-organized mass starvation in Ukraine went mostly unreported, except by Welsh journalist Gareth Jones and Manchester Guardian reporter Malcom Muggeridge.

During the Second World War the Holocaust was “buried” in most mainstream US newspapers. Although well-known journalists like Dorothy Thompson or CBS News Berlin correspondent William Shirer had rung the alarm bells on the nature of the Nazi regime, “American media took the measure of the killings in the Ottoman Empire much more quickly than the press was able to discern Hitler’s policy for Jews a generation later”, wrote Berkely journalism professor Thomas C. Leonard in America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915. 

Why? In 1986 U.S. historian Deborah Lipstadt underlined one of the reasons by giving the title Beyond Belief to her insightful essay on the American press and the coming of the Holocaust. While not neglecting the other explanations and responsibilities she echoed Varian Fry’s famous December 1942 article in The New Republic : “There are some things so horrible that decent men and women find them impossible to believe, so monstrous that the civilized world recoils incredulous before them”, wrote this intrepid journalist who a few months earlier had run a rescue network in Vichy France that helped save from 2000 to 4000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees. 

Rwanda and Darfur

Four decades later the world and the press did recoil before another genocide. According to Carleton University professor Allan Thompson, editor of The Media and the Rwanda Genocide there were only two journalists present in Rwanda on April 6 1994 when the shooting down of Rwandan President Habyarimana’s plane triggered a murder machine that killed close to a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu. For most of April, the most intense month of killings, there were no more than 10 to 15 special envoys in the country at any time.

In Darfur, ten years later, most of the media waited until late January 2004 and even April 1994, around the 10^th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, to cover the mass killings committed by the Karthoum regime and its Janjaweed henchmen in the course of a repression campaign that had started in March 2003. “Journalists do not cover genocide, they cover anniversaries of genocide”, moaned a human rights activist.

In his laudatory blurb to Lipstadt’s book late Senator Alan Cranston had referred to “the indispensable role an inquiring press must play when human and human lives are at stake”. His remark remains valid today, inevitably raising the eternal and nagging questions on journalistic “neutrality” and “commitment”.

“We have no dogs in these fights”, a journalist had said last year at a Montreal conference on genocide prevention while referring to the coverage of mass atrocities in far away lands. However is neutrality ethically defensible when a murderous regime is slaughtering masses of civilians based on their religious, ethnic or cultural identities? Years ago Polish journalist and former dissident Adam Michnik had given another response and proposed another standard for journalism: “Our responsibility”, said the editor-in-chief of the daily Gazeta Wyborcza, “is to speak with the voice of the victim, not with the voice of the butcher”.

The duty to report

In Auschwitz many participants agreed that reporting mass atrocities is a commitment. The media cannot passively wait for the “event” to occur: they must be the canary in the mineshaft that alerts the miners of the impending explosion. They cannot just observe: they must dig and search, like Pulitzer-winning reporter Roy Gutman who in 1993 exposed the Bosnian Serb army’s “death camps” in Bosnia. They cannot just report: they have to connect the dots in order to provide meaning to the confusing avalanche of facts and data. As veteran journalist and media scholar Malvin Kalb, paraphrasing Elie Wiesel, wrote in his preface to the book Why didn’t the press shout? American and International Journalism During the Holocaust, information must be converted into knowledge “crowned with a moral dimension that can be transformed into a call for action”.

But can information really lead to action? Gutman’s exposure of camps in Bosnia is credited of saving thousands of lives by forcing the Bosnian Serbs to close them, but media scholars disagree on the “CNN effect” and the media’s capacity to push for action.

The murderous regimes however won’t take any chance. As CPJ reports show, these rogue states increasingly want to exclude journalists from the killing fields. By refusing them visas, by bombing Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn or Homs’ makeshift press center, they prove that journalism matters and can be the conscience trigger that shakes the international community from its regular indifference to evil.

(A shorter version of this blog was published by the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Huffington Post. 

www.cpj.org

 

How to help the Arab media? A NOREF briefing

Online media, global TV and social networks played a significant role in the Arab springs. They will be an important factor in determining the direction of these “Revolutions”.

A positive contribution of the media to the consolidation of democratic systems requires a dismantling of the old media order, a reform of journalistic institutions and a change of paradigm in the conception and practice of journalism. The keywords of these changes are freedom of expression, independence, public interest, ethics and excellence.

The profession is divided between the heirs of the old order, the “fellow travelers” of the new (mostly Islamist) majority, and a minority of “liberals” that see the media as a watchdog on the old and new powers.

The role of international actors

International actors can play a positive role in supporting the democratic transition if they devise a long term strategy based on the creation of a new journalistic and media culture.

A selective approach is needed to focus resources on reinforcing press freedom groups, reframing training institutions, supporting key quality media, institutionalizing public service broadcasting, strengthening press ethics not as an alibi for censorship but as a lever for responsible journalism, and promoting diversity and gender equality in the newsrooms and in the media contents.

A democratic media culture

Creating a democratic media culture also requires reinforcing so-called “citizen journalism”, i.e. the media empowerment of the people, teaching media literacy especially in through the school system, strengthening civil society’s communications and media skills and setting up a state-funded but independent and impartial public information system. 

http://www.peacebuilding.no/Regions/Middle-East-and-North-Africa/Publications/The-media-and-freedom-of-expression-in-the-Arab-world