This commentary is by Narain Batra, professor of communications at Norwich University and the author of “Digital Freedom” and other books.
Journalism is a glorious but hazardous vocation.
In June this year, the Hong Kong police arrested top journalists of the city’s largest pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily, that had been a relentless critic of the government in Hong Kong and Mainland China. Its bank accounts were frozen and the paper was forced to shutter. Its fearless owner-activist Jimmy Lai sits in prison.
The Committee to Protect Journalists presented Mr. Lai with the 2021 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award, which is given to journalists who are imprisoned, attacked or killed.
Hong Kong’s draconian action against freedom of the press was in pursuant of China’s National Security Law passed last year that aims to silence Hong Kongers and totally integrate the Island with the mainland. Under the new law, courts have sentenced pro-democracy activists and artists to prison. Free speech and independent journalism are anathema to President Xi Jinping’s autocratic rule. China’s suppression of press freedom in Hong Kong is blatant and cruel. The pretense of “one country, two systems” is dead as the dodo.
It’s not only in China; journalists all over the world have been disappearing and some have never been heard from again. Some have been imprisoned, tortured and killed.
In 2020, 274 journalists were imprisoned and 32 killed worldwide, including two in India, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. “China, which arrested several journalists for their coverage of the pandemic, was the world’s worst jailer for the second year in a row,” the report said. In the United States — the land of the free — 110 journalists were “assaulted or criminally charged” last year during the Black Lives Matter protests.
Journalists, nevertheless, have never stopped reporting the facts as they see them, regardless of the consequences.
Former CBS News correspondent Lara Logan suffered a brutal sexual assault in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in 2011 while covering the country’s Arab Spring upheaval. In 2014, an Islamic State video showed the beheading of Steven Sotloff, a U.S. journalist who was held hostage by the militants. Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002.
Since the military coup, many journalists in Myanmar have been imprisoned; some have disappeared, or left the country. But some are still reporting clandestinely, according to Reporters Without Borders.
A good society based on democratic values cannot survive without a free, fearless and robust press. Journalists have played important watchdog roles based on their abilities to cultivate confidential sources.
For example, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post depended upon a confidential source, Deep Throat, an FBI agent named Mark Felt, for their path-breaking investigative reporting about Watergate that brought down President Nixon. Corporate whistleblowers have disclosed corrupt accounting practices, dangerous products (of Big Tobacco, for example), and other malfeasances to journalists, who dug deeper to authenticate their sources and published stories that saved millions of lives.
But today journalists face a new kind of threat to their profession: state-sponsored social media-propelled disinformation discreetly spread by countries such as Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China; non-state actors such far-right QAnon’s conspiracy theories in the United States; and fake news websites, which threaten to undermine the legitimacy, authenticity and trustworthiness of the long-established news organizations.
For four long years, our man in the White House used the Twitter bully pulpit and every other platform to demean and intimidate journalists. But the more Trump denounced journalists, the stronger became their voices.
There’s another sinister challenge to journalists. Most people get their news from their smartphones. But the smartphone has eliminated the space between news, opinions, ads and sponsored news. In the Google News platform, for example, the scandalmonger tabloid National Enquirer and The New York Times are the same.
The brand does not matter for the hurried consumer of online news. Instant social media journalism, unfiltered and unchecked, is having an adverse impact on the legitimate news media. The New York Times motto is “All the News That’s Fit to Print”; for today’s social media platforms, any hogwash is fit to print.
Some organizations with political agendas publish news leaks and classified information from anonymous sources. Some are challenging the traditional news media by launching their own investigations. Sometimes they collaborate, as happened in 2010 between Wikileaks and some major newspapers, including The New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel, regarding the release of classified documents about the Iraq War.
Now we have new media actors on the world stage, Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, and others who can spread selective disinformation to affect political discourse, especially during crisis. These non-media foreign agencies have played a definitive role in U.S. politics and may also do so in other open democratic countries, such as India, by spreading disinformation.
To re-establish trust in the age of news suppression, false narratives masquerading as online journalism, and state-sponsored hackers spreading disinformation, the news media must provide honest, fearless and vigorous journalism.
Journalists must call a spade a spade if there’s a “reckless disregard of the truth.” Excessive deference to authorities can be corrosive to democratic values. More than any other time, when China and Russia are trying to control the global narratives by spreading misinformation, journalists need to provide fearless in-depth reporting, whether it is about the Xinjiang internment camps, Wuhan Lab virus escape, Russia’s political repression, Trump’s catastrophic Jan. 6 misadventure, or the existential threat of climate change.
When journalists bring the facts to light and speak the truth, people listen and the powerful behave.
