Freedom of the press in an age of violence

Truly I am honored to give this lecture in memory of Mr. K.C. Mammen Mappillai so close to the 60th birthday of independent India. . It is rather daunting before this audience, for as the British historian E.P. Thompson remarked, "There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East which is not active in some Indian mind".

So if I stumble somewhere with a thought tonight I look to one of you to will kindly complete the sentence for me.

Mammen Mappillai is celebrated for many achievements.

But tonight we celebrate him as an editor at the great Malayala Manorama daily.

He was an innovative editor - he started columns for women and children. He was a brave editor. He practiced a journalism rooted not in mere rhetoric but in fact, hard-won, and reason in the face of violence. Freedom of the press existed in colonial India in 1938 only so long as the Press did not exercise it. When Mammen Mappillai did, in documenting police brutality sanctioned by Trivancore Prime Minister, he was imprisoned. When he came out two years later he found all his property had been confiscated.

In short, he was an editor who stood for something beyond the numbers for circulation and revenue.

The proper role of the free and responsible press in an era of violence can only be understood if we agree what we mean by freedom of the press and if we understand the nature and origins of violence.

Of the level of violence there is no doubt. Almost every day on this visit I have read of insurgencies challenging the DNA of the great democratic nation of India, of political parties succumbing to the virus of identity politics, one of the provocations of violence in a democracy because identity politics reduces sentient thinking human beings to one identity opposed to other single identities, when we in fact have multiple identities -- nationality, religion, family, class or caste, gender, age, income group, value system.

Identity politics are most menacing to a plural multi-ethnic democracy when political parties exploiting the emotions of a single identity forsake reason and peaceful persuasion for street violence. Of the fanaticism inherent in identity politics, Jonathan Swift said it best two centuries ago: "You cannot reason someone out of something he has not been reasoned into."

Our age imposes new strains on a free press. It is not the most violent in memory but it is the most perplexing. The last century was soaked in blood across the continents of Europe and Asia in wars between sovereign states and for much of the time editors had little freedom from censorship and much inducement to substitute propaganda for news.

The violence did not end with Hiroshima - we had wars in Korea, Cyprus, Vietnam, India-Pakistan, and violence resurged with ethnic cleansing in the Balkans where the gunshot in Sarajevo in 1914 had convulsed the rest of the century and ended the lives of hundreds of millions untold hundreds of millions their lives and great destruction.

We prayed that the new Millennium would work some magic, but the 21st century has not opened auspiciously There are many pages to the catalog of crimes against humanity by international terrorism the most hideous form of identity politics with no fixed address, as the police dockets would put it.

Not just September 11 in New York and Washington, but, December 13 in Delhi, October 12 in Bali, 1st March Madrid, 7th July London. These cowardly outrages are harder for the security forces to stop and harder for the press to report. If you publish the hideous videos of beheadings jihadists circulate or display the image of a hooded hostage, are you doing exactly as the killers wish- creating terror becoming a tool of terror?

Or are you exposing the jaws of the beast? Are you exercising freedom or are you indulging in the pornography of violence? When and how should you show restraint in the exercise of freedom if restraint helps the security forces detect and protect? Should you go further and co-operate?

And to that dismal list of international terror this century, we have to add what we call conventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Lebanon, - and in our diary of death we cannot overlook Godrha and Gujarat, stains on India's reputation and heritage.

As to the freedom of the press, we have to recognize that we will NEVER be free of restraint, never free of harassment legally or physically, still less NEVER free of criticism, since the press, if it is doing its job it is exerting power and the laws of physics, never mind politics, means that power always meets resistance. The most piquant definition of news, in fact, comes to us from Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Times long before my editorship who declared that "news is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising."

Much truth in that, but government is not the only constraint on the free and responsible press. Ownership of media by conglomerates, bundles of different businesses in which the press is but one, has yet to prove a blessing to journalism anywhere.

My experience and observation is that conglomerates hate the risk expense and discord inevitable in investigations of any kind, of which the investigation of corruption and violence are the riskiest… the risk to loss of advertising, disfavor with the authorities or with associated businesses, and of course any businesses in which the conglomerate is itself involved.

In the US the anchor of a once great television news channel now part of a conglomerate told the me the other day that their news leads are not now decided by editorial significance, but what market research has shown plays well with the sections of views that advertisers most want to attract.

Most of the best newspapers in the world, in fact, have not been owned and managed by conglomerates but by families who regard them as a public trust - like the Grahams of the Washington Post, the Sulzbergers of the New York Times, the Chandlers of the LA Angeles Times, the Thomson and Astor families who developed The Times and Sunday Times as Trusts, the Pearsons at the Financial Times and Economist, the Scotts at the Guardian, and I have to note the Mathews our hosts tonight.

But worst of all is for a national press to be dominated in any sector by foreign ownership. I do not want to sound xenophobic; there should be no custom barrier for ideas and information, no thought police at the portals to the web as in China. But I'd suggest newspapers and broadcasting media in complex, sensitive societies like India, in particular, would not be well served by foreign ownership that is blind to the traditions and subtleties, in fact sees a culture only as a marketplace and inevitably becomes a focus of resentment.

Freedom of the press is a moral concept or it is nothing. When you hear talk of the overweening power of the press, remember Joe Stalin. During World War II when he was reminded that His Holiness the Pope disapproved of the Red Army's annexation of Eastern Europe, he asked: "How many divisions has the Pope?"

We are rather in that position. The press has no guns, editors may marshal facts but do not command soldiers; in the act of seeking information, disclosing and criticizing, we must respect the rule of law on which all our freedoms depend. The right we exercise to ask and argue is derived right, for we are claiming no greater civil liberties than those of the ordinary citizen, and the freedom of the press ultimately depends on the appreciation and support of that citizenry. Ultimately since day in or day out we will be offending someone.

This nation that won its freedom by Gandhi's creation of non-violence as a political force has had full experience of the evils of violence But mark this, too, that what Indian journalists have achieved in establishing a flourishing free press in 60 years of difficulty has won the admiration of journalists world wide.

When I first came to India in the early sixties for the International Press Institute the Indian was not tiger or elephant, but distinctly a mouse. You had a population then of 465 million, 40 million able to read, but the total circulation of all the newspapers, vernacular and English, was less than three million (30 lakhs).

When we met Prime Minister Nehru he was frustrated that the Indian press was still stuck in the Victorian mode bequeathed by British imperialism, in touch with officialdom but out of touch with the millions of newly literate masses. On independence the literacy rate was 12.2%; by 1957 it was 18.3 % and rising rapidly; today it is 61% .

"I can't reach the people through the newspapers", Nehru told Jim Rose, the visionary first director of the International Press Institute who promptly got the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a program of technical training at the shirt sleeves level. It is fair to say that these IPI workshops on everything from to the wording of headlines to code for ethnic reporting started a revolution in India newspapers, broadening their appeal, reinforcing their viability and their capacity to monitor government and business.

We had some misunderstandings. I remember suggesting that a good headline consisted of simple words in the active voice such as in the old definition of News, Man Bites Dog and was angrily informed that in India there had been no case of a man biting a dog. By no means was this extraordinary first renaissance all inspired by British and American missionaries (and certainly not carried out by them but by Indian editors who became legends in their own lifetime.

Lightning struck the subcontinent early on in the form of a chubby-cheeked Asian, the sadly late Tarzie Vittachi, a predecessor at this rostrum. Editor of the Ceylon Observer at 32, he exposed the role of the government of Mrs. Bandaranaike in the incitement of race riots.

From my experiences then and since as a reporter and editor some principles suggest themselves on our topic.

1. PRINCIPLE ONE. The Primacy of Reporting

The shock of 9/11 was all the greater in America because both over years and immediately preceding the eyes of the American public had been put out. The major television companies and news magazines abandoned sustained foreign reporting, closed bureaus - and people in the US mostly get their news from television.

In the immediate months before 9/11 everyone was too bored to cover the very authoritative report from the National Security Commission headed by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, two years in its research, which laid bare the roots and scale of anti-Americanism and warned that as a consequence Americans in large numbers would die on American soil.

The majors - the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal among others - were given special briefings before the report was released in a Senate press conference with heads of the CIA, FBI, you name it. The NY Times reporter walked out saying it was a waste of time. The report was ignored and naturally network television ignored it, too, that grotesque failure was in due course followed by the failure to examine the administration's claims of WMD in Iraq. Much tragedy from those reporting failures.

 2. IT IS NO USE PRINTING THE TRUTH ONCE

Running sores in a society require more than a one-time band-aid. The seeds of violence that exploded in thirty years of urban warfare in Ireland and bombings in Britain were sown in years when nobody bothered to follow the escalating grievances of the Catholic minority. It was seen as a boring story. James Reston once said that Americans would do everything for Latin America except read about it. Indian editors, I suspect believe that applies to coverage of rural India; the challenge is to make it rive tingly interesting.

How close a watch do the elite press in India keep on what is happening in rural India and on the language press? I am sure the intent is there; the challenge is to transform the apparently routine and boring into the rive tingly interesting.

It is no use printing the truth once = the equivalent of what Hollywood calls a "courtesy read". . From our seminars I remember. Serajuddin Hussein news editor of the Bengali-language daily Ittefaq in Dacca, then East Pakistan. He , took to heart Amitabha's Chowdhury's mantra that if you stayed with a story your paper would become a magnet for people with information. A missing child was not much of a story in Dacca. Serajuddin made it one.

Every time he heard of a child vanishing in the busy streets and bazaars, he noted it on his front page and reminded everyone that this was the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth child that month and none of them had returned home.

His persistence revealed that not a handful of children were missing, but scores. He asked the authorities to investigate the possibility a kidnapping gang was at work. They laughed at him. A month or so later he went to the authorities with a tip from an informant. Police raided a remote village 80 miles from Dacca and found most of the children, deliberately maimed, blinded some of them, so that they would make pitiable beggars on the city streets.

The gang leaders were hanged. Within six months, the Ittefaq nearly doubled its circulation: he was so proud he wrote to others and me about his plans for investigating other abuses. Alas, when East Pakistan rebelled in 1971, Serajuddin was among the "intellectuals" sought out and murdered by the Pakistan army.

The deeds of men like Vitttachi and Hussein justify the claims we make to justify the freedom of the press.

4. THE STORY IS NOT DEAD UNTIL WE KNOW THE WHY AS THE WHAT

Why and how did 2000 die in Gujarat? Who was to blame for Rwanda, Sbrenica? Official commissions are often the answer after disaster. They have powers of subpoena, but they may not always have the required discipline of detachment, the energy or the imagination or investigative zeal.

A classic example of what the free press might do was the investigation by Tehelka of the killings in Gujarat and the mob violence at Godhra. I am aware of the criticisms of Tehelka. Certainly - sting journalism has its perils - entrapment, provocation, impersonation- but with crimes as horrific at Gujarat to have killers on camera boasting how they killed, why they killed, and with what sense of immunity inescapably dramatized the gravity of the challenge to India. . The argument that airing the truth of what happened would provoke more violence was nothing more than moral blackmail. : "There are things which are bad and false and ugly and no amount of specious casuistry can make them good or true or beautiful."

In the outside world, the shut down of Tehelka was as dismaying as the fact that justice has not yet been visited on he malefactors. Justice delayed is justice denied.

 5 . THE SNARE OF A TOKEN PATRIOTISM

At times when emotions run high, the press is all too often tempted to follow the official line out of a mistaken sense of patriotism. The true patriotism is in serving the country, not in following either the elite or the mob or the journalistic pack. My predecessor in the thirties as editor of The Times wrote in his diary: "Night after night I m doing everything I can to ensure e publish nothing that will offend the susceptibilities of Herr Hitler."

"He was proud of suppressing news of the violence being done by Hitler in Germany, and the extent of his rearmament, because the policy of the Chamberlain government was not to upset Hitler. The suppression cost Britain dearly in delaying a build up of it defenses.

After 9/1l, in the United States, the surge of outrage and patriotism exploited by the Bush administration allowed a reckless and incompetent administration to lead the press and people into the killing fields of Iraq - one of the most stupefying examples of what happens when the press does Not use its vaunted freedom, and none is freer in the world than the American press, belatedly vindicated in the exposure of the horrors of Abu Gharib.

6 FREEDOM LIKE JUSTICE IS INDIVISIBLE

When a newspaper or TV station is under attack for doing its job - as the Hindu has been in the Tamil Nadu state - its competitors, once satisfied of the accuracy of the reporting, should not hesitate to cover the case, and, on its merits come to its support. We must not get hung up on competitive jealousies indivisible.

7. RESIST BUT RECOGNIASE LIMITS

Freedom of the press- exercised in the name of the citizenry, cannot reasonably expose the citizenry to danger. In states facing violent insurgencies some measure of restraint, whether voluntary or imposed, may be necessary and justifiable. Curtailment of the freedom of expression as in curtailment of the right to incite the killing of innocent people is not a regression. It is a necessary element in a civilized society. The British paid dearly for allowing jihadist incitements to hate and kill in the months before the subway suicide bombings.

What is troubling is much commentary is the tendency to concentrate a disproportionate amount of attention on security measures. The first casualty of war is not truth it is the victims. Yes, they require eternal vigilance but priorities are skewed when a 52 page document from the admirable body then called the International Federation of Journalists now the World Newspaper Association - 52 alarm bells - where FIEJ describes the response of governments to terrorism as

" a devastating challenge to the global culture of human rights established almost 60 years ago. We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society."

A devastating challenge to the global culture of human rights? What about the devastating challenge to human rights of suicide bombings?

Speaking personally of challenges to human rights, I'd rather be photographed by a hidden surveillance camera than travel on a train or bus with men carrying bombs in their back-packs. Speaking personally I'd regard being blowing to bits on the street as less of an intrusion on privacy than having an identity card.

7 BEWARE MORAL EQUIVALENCY

It is too easy to blame both sides. Truth rarely resides in the comfortable middle ground. I was reporting in the Deep South of the United States in the fifties when violent crimes against blacks went virtually unreported in the north, and unpunished in the South. Editorials constantly warned against extremism, on both sides, equating non-violent activists and the white mob. When the Freedom Riders extended the campaign against discrimination, a editorial proclaimed: "They are challenging not only long held customs but passionately held feelings. Non violence that deliberately provokes violence is a logical contradiction". That was putting on a level of moral equivalency the wielder of the lead pipe and the recipient of the blow.

9. MONITOR THE WEB

The paradox is that the world is connected as never before in terms of the flow of current, but many of the wires are lethally bare.. Opinion, not fact, is the commonest traffic in cyberspace, some of it informative, some provocative, some of it amusing , but quite a lot without a factual bone in its body. Competition from half-truth masquerades as knowingness, and disinformation and misinformation, travel faster than the speed of light.

How many newspapers, television or radio stations, for instance detected and exposed the stupid canard about the 9/11 attack on the world trade center in New York - that it was the work of Jews and the Jewish secret service who had tipped off 4,000 Jews not to go to work that day so Jews were spared. In fact, hundreds of Jews died along with Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics and atheists? I took time to track the source of this lie and found it to have originated with Al Manor television in Beirut and a Syrian newspaper and was picked up by a shadowy web service in Washington ludicrously called Information Times and edited by a Mr. Sayed Adeeb.

It spread on the web as an ineradicable virus with incredible speed. Tom Friedman of the New York Times told me that on a visit to Indonesia he was stunned at the dominance of this palpable untruth. What is frightening, he said, is an insidious digital divide. "Internet users are only 5 per cent of the population - but these 5 per cent spread rumors to everyone else. They say, "He got it from the Internet. They think it's the Bible." Once upon a time Mr. Adeeb, and his shy sponsors, would be sending out smudged cyclostyled sheets that that would never see the light of day. But now the mysterious Mr. Adeeb and others like him have a megaphone to the world, with this spurious authenticity of electronic delivery.

FINALLY

10 Should we in the press co-operate in giving information to the security services? No. We should never be identified as an arm of the executive. Never. But we should not impede the security services unless they abuse the law themselves. This an area where the free individual judgment of the editor of integrity, aware of the complexities, is superior to any official edict. We must maintain our position as an agency independent of the executive. The jihadists will kill and torture come what may, but there are many other situations where the temptation of receiving the official leak, the suspicion of informing, will encourage the deliberate targeting of journalists that might otherwise not occur

The doctrines of freedom of the press ask much of front line reporters. In the world, we pay every week with the life of a reporter, a cameramen, a support worker. The world barely notices. The press in each country concentrates on its own. It should not. It is a death in the community of journalism.

The International News Safety Institute calculates that if we include all news media personnel - translators, fixers, office staff, drivers - no fewer than a thousand have died in the last ten years.

The second shocking thing is to learn how many of them were murdered. We have a wholly different situation from the sadly familiar fact that war correspondents, who knowingly risk their lives, fall victims of the accidents of combat. But the majority of journalists' deaths now are planned assassinations.

They have been targeted, sought out for death at home for a very simple reason: they did their jobs of seeking the truth. Seven out of every ten have died in their own countries at the instigation of government and military authorities, guerillas, drug traffickers and criminal gangs. Rarely do these crimes attract international attention.

Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and the sensational murder in Moscow of Anne Politkovskaka, investigator of abuses by Russian troops in Chechnya, provoked international outrage, but most of the journalists die in obscurity. I think of journalists like Moolchand Yadav who wrote for Hindi dailies, shot dead in Jhansi, Utter Pradesh, for exposing land deals. I read in The Week magazine that of the 250 journalists in the Bundelkhand region, more than half have bodyguards or have to carry guns.

The price of truth has gone up grievously and the price of murder has gone down. Nine out of ten of the killers identified in the world watchdog organizations have never been investigated, let alone prosecuted, convicted and punished. Occasionally, a triggerman is identified and brought to trial, but his paymaster goes free. In only seven per cent of cases examined by the Committee to Protect Journalists has a mastermind been brought to justice. Most go free to kill again; surprisingly, even in war zones, murder is the leading cause of death.

In view of the spotlight the military rightly gets for any violation of the rules of engagement, it has to be noted that in the wars studied armed forces, overall, regular and irregular, accounted for less than 10 per cent of fatalities: 85 per cent of the killings were by "terrorists, insurgents and other unidentified murderers." The record of government indifference to the killing of journalists is lamentably on display in countries considered more or less stable. Russia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Mexico and Colombia share the ignominy. India comes sixth in the INSI index.

Every one of the unpunished crimes disgraces the shielding countries and our tolerance of that diminishes us all. This is not a "press matter". Without the men and women of a free and plural press willing to risk reporting and investigating, and editors and publishers to stand by them, injustice and corruption flourish - within and across national boundaries.

What can be done? It is a waste of time calling on militant insurgents and terrorists to respect the rule of law. But all those states that concede immunity to the wrongdoers live in the real world. They expect to be taken seriously; they ask for aid and protection for their citizens traveling abroad. They are beneficiaries of trade agreements, of support from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and UN aid organizations.

They value their membership of the United Nations. There is virtue in pressing member states to vote for a Security Council resolution reaffirming that the safety and security of journalists is essential for the free flow of information around the world. The UN should have a central register of unsolved crimes against members of the media, but the UN itself cannot be left to follow through.

Its Human Rights Commission is the longest standing joke since Caligula elected his horse. A journalist who works for a daily newspaper in Iran testifies that UN organizations "are too conservative; they don't want to confront the government. They say the government is sensitive". The very fact a government is sensitive is, of course, the point. The neuralgic nerve should be pressed hardily state that consistently fails to investigate and prosecute murder and violence against media personnel should forfeit access, privileges and aid.

By the same token, the immunity states - the iniquity states - should have to face a persist international campaign of publicity. Not once a year, but every time they acquiesce or sanction the murder of a journalist. There are two purposes here. One is to hold them up to obloquy and shame. The other is to sustain the brave protesters, mark out their lives as significant. I think of my IPI friend Abdi Ipecki, editor in chief of Millyet, then Turkey's most influential newspaper, telling me in London in 1979 of what the example and support of his international peers meant to him in his ceaseless campaign for national unity and reconciliation against violence and terrorism.

He went home to be gunned down by Mehmet Ali Agca, member of the ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves. Agca soon escaped from prison with assistance from people in the security services and in 1981 tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II.. He is now in prison in Turkey agitating for parole. Yet in recent years almost every media outlet mentioning the prospect of Mehemet Agca's release in 2006 failed to mention that he was the murderer of Ipecki.

Memo to every news editor: report and follow up.

This brings me to a central closing point: the paramount importance of how we justify the freedom of the press. We cannot justify it by assertion but only by day to day demonstration of integrity. It is our principal defense in sustaining public support.

On World Press Freedom Fay this May, we should remind the critics - but also ourselves! - of the sacrifices represented by the 1665 journalists now named on the Freedom Forum's memorial in Washington. We should remember the common thread among the men and women of such different backgrounds, from such different cultures, who have died for journalism. What was common among the desperate circumstances of their deaths?

Their aspiration.

They believed in the purpose of journalism. They didn't, most of them, expect to die for it. But nothing in the record diminishes the conviction that they believed theirs was an honorable craft - profession if you like - rooted in reason, dedicated to truth, sustained by a sense of common good, given inspiration by the achievements of others around the world in a universal brotherhood.

Every time a reporter anywhere slants the facts, writes a story to fit his preconception, allows the unclouded face of truth to suffer wrong, he betrays Kurt Schorck . Veronica Guerin, Norbert Zongo, Orlando Sierra Hernandez, Every time a journalist anywhere foments sectional hatred, he shames the memory of Abdi Ipecki, of Thuunaasjari Baradamani Singh, Arun Narayan. Vikram Singh Bhist, Prahlad Goala.

Every time a news organization puts excessive profit before excellence- is 25 percent not enough? - it betrays all the names on the memorial. Every time a photographer grossly exploits private grief, he betrays the families of all the victims.

Every time a journalist in America abuses the First Amendment, he betrays all those around the world who have to struggle for half the freedom. Every time a news organization closes its eyes to the world, it betrays a long line of our journalists - like the man we honor tonight who gave up his liberty and all those who have given their lives in the course of letting us see. We will not deserve freedom of the press if we do not honor them and constantly remember the causes they served.