Media freedom … and the double standards
The observance of World Press Freedom Day on May 3 this year went, as the day annually does, according to plan in many capitals around the world. Stress was laid on the need for the media to be accorded greater importance, for journalism to be freed of the straitjacket it is in nearly everywhere around the globe. That is indeed as it should be or should have been, for the right to information and to freedom of speech and writing is today a core principle of individual liberty.
It is against such a backdrop that individuals and organisations everywhere reflect annually on the state of journalism in the various regions of the globe, especially those where governments consistently impede the march of truth. In Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and the Americas, the media are in a state that cannot properly be described as conducive to the growth or expansion of free ideas and therefore to the development of human potential. When the police storm a television station in Australia, when right-wing television networks in the United States brazenly go on upholding the Big Lie touted by Donald Trump and his camp followers about the November 2020 presidential election, when Julian Assange is incarcerated because he dared to expose some unpalatable truths, we see the ugly image of how media freedom is progressively being undermined in the world's developed regions.
Of course, there are the sordid realities of how journalists have suffered, and go on suffering, in states which have little compunction in muzzling the media through the exercise of draconian laws. In the Philippines, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Iran, Turkey, Rwanda, Egypt, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia — to name a few countries — journalism is not in a state of good health. Jamal Khashoggi is as good as forgotten. And yet the struggle to assert the rights of the media, to ensure their role as the legitimate voice of people everywhere, as the fourth estate, goes on.
The plight of journalism does not begin and end in our part of the world. Note that on World Press Freedom Day this year, many have been the individuals who have focused on what they see as state repression exercised by those who govern the Russian Federation, particularly where the issue concerns a dissemination of credible information about the tragedy engulfing Ukraine. That is perfectly understandable. But, then again, there is the other side of the picture. In all this clamour in the West about the need for media freedom, silence on a banning of RT, the Russian television network, in the West, has been rather loud. With such networks as the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, EuroNews and France24 focusing their cameras and their comments on all the ugliness Putin's men are said to be committing in Ukraine, it is the other side of the story, the Moscow side, which has been blocked by the West.
So much for media freedom in lands where talk is always about the freedom of keeping people informed. Back in 2003, when Anglo-American forces pummelled Iraqis into surrender and smashed their beautiful country into splinters, the western media efficiently ignored the sufferings of Iraq's men, women and children. Nothing of the kind which today we are made to witness every day about Ukraine on television networks in Europe and North America happened to be there when Baghdad fell. The propaganda had to do with Saddam Hussein's 'crimes'. No media outlet raised the question of the war crimes which were cheerfully being committed by American and British soldiers. Today it is Vladimir Putin's 'crimes' and Volodymyr Zelenskyy's 'heroism' the western media — and that includes newspapers and periodicals — are pushing into drawing rooms around the world.
RT remains banned, which simply means people have no way of getting to hear the other point of view. It is thus a crude violation of the principles of global media freedom. One may or may not agree with Moscow's point of view about the Ukraine war, but when one is prevented from listening to its version of the conflict, it is hypocrisy which takes centre stage.
And don't forget that not long ago similar behaviour was put on display when the Chinese official network CGTN was taken off the air in Britain and Germany. In their enthusiasm for upholding the freedom of the media, governments in the West have gone cheerfully into the business of silencing those segments of the media they are uncomfortable with.
World Press Freedom Day 2022 has come, and gone. It has in its wake left a number of questions that defenders of media freedom in the West have conspicuously stayed away from answering.
