Hard Times for Press Freedom

In times of war, the truth may be one of the first victims, as Aeschylus wrote, but journalists are some of the first to pay the price -- sometimes with their lives. The war in Iraq has turned the western media’s attention once again to the dangers that reporters face in war and crisis regions. Nine journalists were killed in Iraq while covering events there. Two others remain missing.

Statistics released by Reporters without Borders (RSF), the Paris-based press freedom watchdog, in honor of International Press Freedom Day on May 3, show that journalism remains a dangerous profession. A total of 17 reporters have been killed since the beginning of the year, two of them in Columbia earlier this week.

“We are disturbed that attacks against journalists have escalated in the past three months,” Sabina Strunk, spokesperson for RSF-Germany, told DW-WORLD. The fact that there are currently more “hot spots” means that more journalists are risking their lives in the field,” she explained.

RSF says eight reporters have been killed while working in Columbia, India, Israel and the Ivory Coast since January 1. Almost 250 journalists have been threatened or harassed and 136 have been arrested during the same period. Nearly 130 reporters are being held captive in prisons around the world.

Though the deaths of foreign journalists reporting from Iraq have attracted attention, the practitioners most at risk are locals like the two journalists murdered in Columbia, RSF reports. Twenty-five of the 23 reporters killed in 2002 were working in their native countries. Alarmingly, “around half of the violent attacks against journalists were carried out by state authorities last year,” Strunk points out.

She refers to a recent wave of arrests in Cuba, in which both dissident journalist Raul Rivero and RSF’s correspondent on the island were put in jail.

“And now Cuba has been re-elected as a member of the United Nations Human Rights Commission. It’s a setback for human rights.” Strunk expressed dismay that the German government endorsed Cuba’s confirmation to sit on the commission, the U.N.’s human rights watchdog -- and that it did so one day before International Press Freedom Day.

Enemies of the press

Cuban President Fidel Castro is one of 42 heads of state, leaders of armed groups and terrorist organizations singled out by RSF as the main persecutors of press freedom in the world, the so-called “enemies of the press.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, too, graces the list. RSF says Russia shows how effectively a state can employ economic weapons against critical media organizations. It accuses Putin of controlling Russia’s media through the media companies the state entirely or partially owns, censoring reporting about the war in Chechnya and ignoring violence against journalists.

But RSF is anxious to point out that it's not blind to abuses of press freedom at home in western democracies.

In its latest survey of worldwide press freedom, the organization responds to the critics, “If we were in the business of food aid, we would be helping those with nothing to eat more than those with not enough. We think this approach applies all the more to freedom of expression and information in a world where many more countries are trying to stamp it out than are largely respecting it.”