PRESS RELEASES

Freedom of the Press Endangered In Many Countries

By Jane Morse
USINFO Staff Writer

May 3, 2007

Washington -- Conditions for independent media are worsening in many parts of the world, and this trend threatens both democracy and respect for human rights, say U.S. officials and experts on the media.

An independent, free press is essential to democracy and holds governments accountable to its citizens, according to Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes and Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky.

Both were featured speakers at a May 1 conference on “21st Century Threats to Press Freedom,” sponsored by the Broadcasting Board of Governors and Freedom House.  Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Barry Lowenkron also made remarks.

The conference focused on the increasing threats to journalists around the world, in particular the record number of journalists killed in 2006. Reports show that more than 110 journalists and media workers were killed in 2006, making it the bloodiest year on record for journalists.

Hughes, who worked for nearly seven years as a reporter in Texas before beginning her career in politics, said a free press is essential in cultivating free thought and in exposing crime and human rights abuses.  Unfortunately, journalists and media specialists are increasingly being killed, arrested, injured and harassed for their work, she said.

But the United States, she said, “defends the defenders of freedom.”  She said that the U.S. Department of State provides a number of professional development and exchange programs for journalists, editors and media managers from around the world through the Edward R. Murrow Journalism Fellowships and other programs.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice established last year the Global Internet Freedom Task Force (GIFT), an internal State Department coordination group that works with other U.S. government agencies and the National Security and National Economic councils, Hughes noted.  GIFT’s goal is to maximize the free flow of information and ideas, to minimize the success of repressive regimes in censoring and silencing legitimate debate and to promote access to information and ideas over the Internet.

Dobriansky said the United States considers freedom of the press to be so crucial to democracy and human rights that it has included evaluations of press freedoms in various countries in the U.S. State Department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights.

INTIMIDATION OF JOURNALISTS MAY BE "PUSH BACK" AGAINST DEMOCRACY

Jennifer Windsor, the executive director of Freedom House, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting democracy and freedom around the world, said that only 18 percent of the world’s population enjoys the benefits of a free press.

Windsor reported that press freedoms have either stagnated or decreased in many countries around the world.  Most of the decline, she said, is taking place in Asia, Latin America and the former Soviet Union.  Windsor called this “a push back against democracy.”

According to Alcee Hastings, a Democratic representative from Florida and the chair of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Helsinki Commission), authoritarian leaders around the world understand the power of the press, “that’s why they strive to control it.”  In Russia, for example, nearly 80 percent of the population gets information from just three media outlets that are controlled by the government of Vladimir Putin.  Russia, he noted, has become the third-deadliest country in the world for journalists.

Most of the former Soviet states regard free media as “a threat to be neutralized,” Hastings said.  “The only security for all is a free press,” Hastings said, and he decried efforts to cut back funding for U.S. broadcasting to the former Soviet republics. The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are needed now more than ever, he said.

EFFORTS TO STIFLE MEDIA CAN BE SUBTLE

Not all government efforts to repress a free press are obvious, some experts suggested.

In China, which leads the world in jailing journalists, censorship is delivered orally, in secret, and exerts “invisible control,” says Perry Link, professor of East Asian studies at Princeton University.

“Today the Communist Party uses the media to manipulate its message,” Link said.  “Repression 40 years ago hurt Chinese citizens.  Now it can hurt the rest of the world,” he warned, as lack of accurate information on topics such as avian influenza and HIV/AIDS outbreaks can threaten health around the world.

In Egypt, the government censors only randomly but punishes severely when it does, according to Jon Alterman, director and senior fellow at the Middle East Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  The result, he said, is to produce enough fear that the media censor themselves.