Journalism is a glorious but hazardous vocation.
In June, the Hong Kong police arrested top journalists of the city’s largest pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily, which 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 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 pursuant to China’s national security law, passed last year, which aims to silence Hong Kong’s citizens 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.
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 a report by 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 Kimball Union Academy graduate 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 — FBI agent Mark Felt — for their path-breaking investigative reporting about Watergate that brought down President Richard Nixon.
Corporate whistleblowers have disclosed corrupt accounting practices, dangerous products (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 kinds of threats to their profession: state-sponsored, social media-propelled disinformation discreetly spread by countries such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China; nonstate actors such as far-right QAnon conspiracy theorists in the United States; and fake news websites, which threaten to undermine the legitimacy, authenticity and trustworthiness of long-established news organizations.
For four long years, the man in the White House used the bully pulpit of Twitter, and every other platform, to demean and intimidate journalists. But the more Donald Trump denounced journalists, the stronger their voices became.
There’s another sinister challenge to journalists. Most people get their news from their smartphones. But the smartphone has eliminated the space between news, opinion, ads and “sponsored” news.
In the Google News platform, for example, the scandalmonger tabloid National Enquirer and nation’s paper of record, The New York Times, are indistinguishable. The brand seems not to matter to hurried consumers of the online news. Instant social media “journalism,” unfiltered and unchecked, is having an adverse impact on the legitimate news media. The New York Times motto “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is being supplanted by today’s social media platforms, on which any hogwash is fit to print.
Some organizations, with their political agendas, publish news leaks and classified information from anonymous sources. Some are challenging the traditional news media by launching their own investigations.
Sometime 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. Russia, China and others 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 journalism and state-sponsored disinformation efforts, the news media must provide honest, fearless and vigorous journalism. Journalists must call it out if there’s a “reckless disregard of the truth.” Excessive deference to authorities can be corrosive to democratic values.
Now more than any other time, as China and Russia try to control the global narratives by spreading misinformation, journalists need to provide in-depth reporting — whether it is about the Xinjiang internment camps, the Wuhan lab’s role in the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s political repression, Trump’s deadly Jan. 6 insurrection or the existential threat of climate change.
When journalists bring the facts to light and speak the truth, people listen and the powerful behave.
Narain Batra, of Hartford, is a contributing columnist for The Times of India, author of The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation, and a professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University.