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Battling the many forms of press censorship
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August 29th, 2007 issue

This week’s oped piece is a bit of a departure from the usual essay on current affairs. It’s part of an awareness campaign being run by a Slovenian journalist that we decided to join, for two reasons.

First, as members of the media, we’re sensitive to issues involving freedom of speech and freedom of the press, particularly in Europe.
Secondly, since Slovenia will assume the rotating presidency of the European Union in January, there’s a sense of urgency to this letter. A country taking the helm of Europe must be open to public scrutiny.
Blaž Zgaga appears to be the victim of an effort to restrict public scrutiny in his country. Censorship is certainly not unique to Slovenia, though.
Governments around the world routinely try to control and censor newspapers, Internet sites and TV and radio stations. They just happen to be getting more subtle about how they do it, according to David Dadge, deputy director of the International Press Institute (IPI), an international press freedom watchdog group based in Vienna.
In the United States, for example, the Bush administration has manipulated journalists, limited access to government documents and was caught two years ago paying flacks posing as journalists to promote the administration’s agenda in both print and electronic media.
In recent months, the new Arabic TV news channel spin-off Al Jazeera English has been frozen out of the U.S. media market by cable companies too afraid to lose advertisers and customers.
In Russia, media laws are used to restrict open access to information. BBC Radio programs were canceled this summer from the popular Bolshoi Radio FM station in Moscow after “private investors” took over.
Rather than sending thugs with guns to intimidate a TV station for broadcasting something the government doesn’t like, it’s just as easy to pressure the station by an intimidation tactic like investigating its books, Dadge notes.
And how can anyone outside of a media company really know if an editor is being replaced because of poor performance or due to government pressure?
Zgaga began crossing swords with the Slovenian government in 2000, when the state attorney general accused him of disclosing an intelligence operation between the Slovenian and U.S. intelligence services. Under Slovenian law, the possible sentence for revealing a military secret is five years in prison. It took him three years to clear himself of wrongdoing.
Could Czech media ever face the situation in which Slovenian journalists currently find themselves?
As in Slovenia, politicians here have discussed ways to make media laws more restrictive, although they have yet to follow through. A Czech defamation law says people found guilty could face up to two years in jail. And police wiretapped journalists in 2006, according to IPI, citing government sources.
In general, however, the Czech media is pretty open. It ranks fifth-best for press freedoms on the 2006 list compiled by Reporters Without Borders. (Slovenia ranked 13th on that same list, while the United States came in at 56th.) A Freedom House press survey for 2005 put the Czech Republic in 49th place, however, 20 places behind the United States at 29th.
Issues like censorship and political pressure are hard to measure. But when specific threats to press freedom emerge, we believe it’s important to identify them and speak out in support of an independent press.
It’s only through constant vigilance and hard work that reporters, editors and readers will know that they’re truly getting the “straight scoop.”


Other articles in Opinion (29/08/2007):

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