Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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Thinking
internationally
An editor visiting as part of ASNE’s International
Journalism Exchange opens eyes about the plight of our brethren overseas
For four weeks last October, the Deseret News, the afternoon daily in
Salt Lake City, hosted Andrey Sidorin, an editor from the former Soviet
state of Tajikistan, now an independent country. Andrey came to us as part
of the International Journalism Exchange sponsored by ASNE and The Freedom
Forum.
While we have in our newsroom staffers who have traveled widely, and
who speak a variety of languages from Spanish to Japanese to Vietnamese,
none speaks Tajik. None has visited Tajikistan.
No problem. Andrey spoke Tajik, Russian, English and Esperanto. In his
quest to find out how journalism is practiced in a democratic society,
he was quickly at ease. He went to a prison with one of our reporters.
He covered city council meetings with another. Each day he worked with
a different writer, editor, artist or columnist. Invited to speak to the
local Society of Professional Journalists chapter on press rights in Tajikistan,
he performed with aplomb. He was a panelist on a PBS television show I
moderated about the former Soviet states.
A self-starter, with boundless curiosity, he merged quickly with the
community outside the newspaper. We housed him with the family of one of
our copy editors. From day one he disdained lifts to work by car, and took
the bus. In the city, he walked. He became a "fan forever" of the Utah
Jazz basketball team. By contrast the most boring thing he found in Utah
was a Brigham Young University football game.
In a piece he wrote for the paper, he said he’d never seen so many fat
people as he did in Washington, D.C. ("Food is the all-American temptress
… few Americans can resist her.") After a supermarket visit, he thought
people here who cook were very lucky, but very lazy. ("The only thing (one)
must do to prepare these products on the shelves is add a little water,
stir, and put in the microwave. What would an American do with one potato,
a tomato and a chunk of beef?"). He was agitated by American waste. ("The
lights are always on, the computers are always running, pounds and pounds
of paper are in the trash cans and there is food in the sink. A Tajik wouldn’t
think of throwing away a piece of bread.").
These and some of his other observations helped our staff better understand
the society from which he’d come and the hazards of practicing his journalistic
craft in a country like Tajikistan.
For instance, the International Center for Journalists, which handles
logistics for the exchange, warned us that he "might have a little trouble"
getting out of Tajikistan to come to Salt Lake City. The trouble was that
his country is gripped by an ugly internal war in which 30,000 people have
been killed, among them 30 journalists in the line of duty, some of them
Andrey’s friends. He had to leave by a tortuous route that took him through
neighboring Uzbekistan before flying to America. When he ended his visit,
the borders to his country were closed. He got home by tramping for six
days through the mountains.
Because of the situation in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, Andrey had
earlier dispatched his wife to her parents in Russia.
Andrey’s newspaper, Posuh, is a daily in name only. It publishes when
it can, beset by shortages of money, newsprint, equipment. Once selling
20,000 copies per day, it is now down to 3,000 copies a week. Its 18 journalists
each earn about $10 a month. Though we would like to ship the paper some
surplus Deseret News photo equipment, we haven’t found a way to deliver
it without it being pilfered.
But the core of Posuh’s problem is that it is published jointly by Tajikistan’s
Union of Journalists and the Ministry of Culture and Information — somewhat
akin to trying to put out The Washington Post in partnership with the White
House Press Office. Though Andrey hopes to start an independent newspaper
or radio station, an alliance with the government is presently the only
way Posuh can survive.
If his challenges seem severe enough, they are paltry compared to the
trials and dangers of many of our other colleagues around the world.
In their quest for truth, some die, some go to jail, many are assaulted
and many more are threatened or hobbled by restrictive laws.
In May, The Freedom Forum added the names of 39 journalists who died
pursuing news in 1996 to its Journalists Memorial in Arlington, Va. The
highest number of these deaths occurred in Algeria and Russia. In Algeria,
fundamentalist Muslims seeking to establish a religious state killed eight
reporters or editors who worked for news organizations or who offered independent
reports on the strife. In Russia, six journalists were killed in conflicts
involving clashes between government and fighters in the former Soviet
Union or in suspected organized crime "hits."
Last year, the carnage was probably no less. Journalists were murdered
in Algeria, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan,
Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Ukraine, and Yemen. Several
hundred journalists are imprisoned for what they have published.
In December, New York-based Freedom House, which monitors freedom around
the world, fired a somber warning shot about freedom’s progress.
Many were heartened by the recent wave of democratization — not only
in Russia and Eastern Europe, but in Asia and Latin America. But Freedom
House found that this trend may be weakening. According to its figures,
22 percent of the world’s population is free, 39 percent is "partly free",
and 39 percent is not free.
Not surprising, then, that a Freedom House report focused on the press
chronicled "an epidemic" of new legislation in 43 countries that would
impose fresh legal restraints on the news media.
According to Leonard Sussman, Freedom House’s expert on press freedom,
the laws take various forms, but are couched in vague and all-encompassing
terms:
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A bill in Cameroon would ban newspapers that attack "the public order."
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A new act in Croatia makes it a crime to divulge undefined information
"vital to state interests."
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A law in Belarus allowed a newspaper to be suspended for writing about
the police and military, including an article on the president’s elite
guard.
Some legislation purports to protect economies, again by offering the vaguest
definitions of journalistic offense. The Honduran parliament, for instance,
approved three- to six-year prison sentences for disclosing "false, exaggerated
or tendentious news which puts the national economy at risk."
Particularly troublesome is a flurry of "insult laws" — laws that punish
journalists for "insulting" or "offending" officials. Some of this legislation
targets journalists who report on — or investigate — the personal wealth
of public officials.
Croatia’s parliament approved a seditious libel law that punishes journalists
for offending or slandering the president, parliament speaker, prime minister
or judges. In Swaziland, two senators called for a bill to ban the press
from criticizing the monarch. In the hands of autocratic regimes, the interpretation
and implementation of such laws goes well beyond the normal application
of standard libel laws.
As the World Press Freedom Committee’s Leonard Marks recalled when he
once asked a minister of justice who determined what constituted an insult,
the minister responded immediately: "I do." No jury, no judge. Just "I
do."
This assault on press freedoms is not necessarily the work of wild-eyed,
ranting dictators. Freedom House’s Sussman points out that sensational
reporting on the British royal family and official corruption across Europe
stimulated the Council of Europe to ponder laws to assure press "responsibility."
And now, a new drive by several former heads of state to supplement
the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights may resurrect a form of
the vanquished New World Information and Communication Order — a Third
World campaign to place media under government control, license journalists
and impose censorship
The supplement, called the "Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities"
has free press organizations — including ASNE — worried. They argue that,
though the move may be well-intentioned, it would open the door for authoritarians
who would like to tell journalists what to write on the basis of what officials
deem "responsible." (See ASNE on the Move, TAE, October 1997.)
The trials of some of our journalistic colleagues abroad underline that
the right to freedom of opinion and expression is far from universal reality.
As our visiting editor from Tajikistan wrote us in his somewhat fractured
English: "The foundations of free press (in Tajikistan) have been laid.
The country is in critical need of alternative media voices. Our republic
has made only the first step towards the establishing of the real democratic
society. A freedom of word is part of this. And still there is a long way
to go. It may take years and years. ... The bases for the future democratic
society and the free press should be laid presently."
It is a touching faith in the future of press freedom, to which we need
to give tangible support whenever opportunity presents itself.
Hughes, a past president of ASNE, is editor of the Deseret News, Salt
Lake City.
