TORONTO, Canada, April 29 (IPS) – The United Nations will celebrate World Press Freedom Day on May 3. The following article is part of a focused IPS series of features and perspectives. on global media freedom. to the drumbeat of war, the most powerful despicables are becoming more and more autocratic, and criminal gangs are even more brazen in their violence. Extremists of various colors are also coming out of the shadows. Just when the world needs a free press the most to thrive, the liberties that societies only truly value when they are calculated are coming under more pressure from different directions, old and new. .
Farhana Haque Rahman The 2021 World Press Freedom Index as measured by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) fell last year and is down 12% since it was first issued in 2013. RSF reports ” severe decline in people’s access to information and an increase in obstacles to reporting”. The coronavirus pandemic is widely believed to be used to block journalists’ access to information. If you think this decline is a preserve of less developed nations under autocracy, RSF notes an increase in attacks on journalists and arbitrary arrests in Germany, France, and Germany. , Italy and some other European countries. This year – as we approach World Press Freedom Day on May 3 – could see even worse, particularly in Russia and China, but also in Mexico with an increase in homicides. targeted journalists by suspected drug dealers. About 200 Russian journalists and several dozen foreign reporters have left Russia since the draconian media law was passed on March 4, which stipulates “intentionally false” information crimes. It outlawed calling the Ukraine invasion a “war”. In addition, Russia is still applying the “foreign agent” law to punish and threaten important media outlets, including PASMI dedicated to fighting corruption. “The Russian regime’s crackdown on independent media is escalating at breakneck speed. Clearly not content with just blocking important news sites or forcing reporters into exile, the Kremlin is now seeking to imprison journalists covering anti-war protests or Russian soldiers. refuses to go to war in Ukraine,” Amnesty International said on April 14, commenting on the arrest of two journalists in the Russian republics of Altay and Khakassia. Journalist Alexey Kovalyov, now based in Riga, told Al Jazeera: “Apart from state propaganda, there is no media in Russia. The power of that propaganda must not be underestimated. Many people living in Ukraine told relatives in Russia that they were being bombed by the Russian military, but their family members refused to believe them. According to the RSF report, “the world’s largest prison among defenders of press freedom,” however, is China, with 115 men and women currently detained. China ranked 177th out of 180 countries and territories surveyed. “Media freedom in China is declining at breakneck speed,” the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) announced in January. China has labeled the FCC an “illegal organization” and appears in its rhetoric to encourage an exodus of foreign journalists. According to Hong Kong Watch, a British-based advocacy group, the free media in Hong Kong, one of the most liberal countries in Asia, has been almost completely dismantled. Its recent report follows the HK FCC’s announcement that it will suspend the Human Rights Press Prize because it risks violating the city’s national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020. While Russia and China are implementing “rules” against independent journalists and large companies in the developed world. suffocating the press with “harsh” litigation, it is a wasteland or legal absence of the state that is killing journalists in Mexico, and elsewhere. A wave of murders has targeted at least eight journalists so far, with seven killed in all of 2021, making Mexico under populist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador one of the deadliest. for the press. Journalists, in the words of Adela Navarro Bello, director of the weekly Tijuana Zeta, “were caught up in a wave of threats and bullets from drug dealers and organized crime and those threats, verbal attacks, and attempts to morally destroy us from federal and state governments.” Article 19 of the international human rights organization says the Mexican government’s denial of what is happening “results in no urgent measures being taken to stop this vicious cycle of violence”.
A similar pattern is seen in Bangladesh, where suspected drug dealers killed Bangladeshi journalist Mohiuddin Sarker Nayeem on April 13.
The Committee to Protect Journalists publishes every year Global Integrity Index and note that no one has been identified as responsible for 81% of journalist murders worldwide over the past 10 years. Somalia tops the list, with Mexico at sixth and Bangladesh at 11. Regardless of state-sponsored or tolerated violence and political repression, press freedoms around the world are also being profoundly eroded. implicit in places where such liberties are often seen as important in maintaining well-functioning democracies. Along with the unstoppable rise of social media as a source of information – some surveys show that 50% of adults in the US and UK get their news from the media social – the state of the majority of traditional journalism, digital or not, is far from healthy. Annual Digital news report The Reuters Institute for Journalism Research shows the United States ranks last for media trust, with 29%, out of 92,000 news consumers in 46 countries polled. (Finland comes out on top). Governments must not be passive while similarly powerful lobbying companies have spent decades fortunes spreading misinformation/misinformation about climate in the traditional media , has now relied on the swiftness of social media Big Tech, which has not published comprehensive policies to combat this. Climate misinformation as a threat to climate action is highlighted in the latest UN Climate Reports. The press offices of international organisations, especially the UN and large INGOs, also have a special responsibility to uphold the freedom of the media by moving away from the taboo corporate art of maintaining postpone, refuse, and disrupt.
A new proposal by the EU executive to protect journalists and campaigners from so-called outrage lawsuits are welcome. The move will target “strategic lawsuits against public engagement” known as Slapps, where the rich abuse legal means to silence investigative reporters and non-profit organizations. troublesome government. No freedom of the press, no democracy. Just like free speech, that doesn’t mean the free press can publish whatever they want. Both need to be identified and, in these very dark times, protected.
Farhana Haque Rahman as Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Managing Director of IPS North America, including the United Nations Office; She holds the position of General Director of IPS elected from 2015-2019. A journalist and communications specialist, she is a former senior official with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
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