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National Press Club hosts forum exploring world opinions on media freedom
May 1, 2008
By Matthew Plocher
On May 1, in advance of World Press Freedom Day, the National Press Club held an event to discuss a recent WorldPublicOpinion.org poll that assessed public attitudes and values on media freedom. A panel comprised of Dr. Steven Kull, Director of WorldPublicOpinion.org; Nadia Bilbassy-Charters, Senior Diplomatic Correspondent of Al Arabiya TV; Cheng Li, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Thornton China Center; and Frank Smyth, Washington Representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists, discussed the findings of the poll, as well as their own observations on media freedom around the world, with special emphasis on China, South America, and the Arab world. Marvin Kalb, Edward R. Murrow Professor Emeritus at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and contributing news analyst on FOX News Channel and National Public Radio, moderated the event.
Kull opened the discussion by describing the survey. Some 19,000 people were polled between January and March of 2008 on a variety of questions meant to gauge the level of importance that they attached to a free press. The majority of people polled did care about press freedom. On average, 53 percent said the subject was “very important,” with a significant number of respondents also saying “somewhat important.” Through this same information, Kull determined the nations which displayed the least concern with media freedom: Russia, Iran, and Indonesia. More specific questions often resulted in more ambiguous answers. The importance of free access to foreign press scored high across the board quite consistently. Yet the importance of Internet freedom was varied, with much reservation about Internet freedom in the Arab world, but much demand in China. Equally mixed were the responses to issues of government control during periods of national insecurity. Citizens of developing nations like Mexico, Egypt, Nigeria, Azerbaijan, and China desired more press freedom, while respondents in developed, democratic nations like the U.S. would accept less freedom in wartime. While the Freedom House assessment on press freedoms in conjunction with this poll determined that different nations topped the ‘most un-free press list’ depending on the specific categories of repression, certain countries managed to always make the cut – Azerbaijan, China, Russian, Iran, and Jordan all consistently topped the list.
Li spoke on journalistic freedom in China. Admitting, on one hand, that China was backward in its policies and needed improvement, he then insisted that, on the other hand, China had come a long way toward full press freedom, and should not be criticized from what he implied was a “Western” conception of press freedom. Instead of looking for government reform (which he deemed impossible for the communist government), he asked the audience to put its faith in the liberalizing power of capitalism, and insisted that the Olympics, with its 30,000 foreign journalists, would be a catalyst for expanded news coverage. But Li then again became defensive of the Chinese news industry, implying that Western critiques were insulting to Chinese journalists who worked hard to make do with an imperfect system.
Bilbassy-Charters told the audience that her organization had lost 11 journalists in their coverage of conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. According to Bilbassy-Charters, self-censorship – the worst kind of censorship, she said – plagues many journalists in the Middle East who fear offending the sensibilities of the public. The recent charter adopted by the Arab League promoting restrictive policies against dissenting broadcast stations would only further complicate things, she argued. But, she added, simple problems, such as widespread illiteracy and religious extremism, are as detrimental to the freedom of the press and its appreciation as any government conspiracy. The future is in satellite and broadcast television, Bilbassy-Charters said, because it can reach the illiterate and poor. However, she noted that the industry still remains underdeveloped, responsive to the news, and not yet influential.
The last panelist, Frank Smyth, said that a desire for press freedom is inherent in all human beings, they just have to be exposed to a little of it for the desire to take hold. He said his job involves trying to document and combat the numerous steps governments, mafias, corporations, and individuals take to keep the first taste of press freedom from being enjoyed. Subtle tactics like raising taxes on publishing or printing and filing anti-defamation lawsuits are often as effective as more aggressive tactics like imprisoning journalists, Smyth noted. However, the most severe tactic used against free press advocacy, murder, is also one of the most widespread. Smyth said that 70 percent of all journalist deaths were murders, and 90 percent of those killings would remain unsolved. According to Smyth, this reflects endemic problems in the industry, namely a lack of journalistic solidarity and a lack of respect for journalistic neutrality on the part of both governments and private citizens. For this reason he hopes that journalists and press freedom advocates will lobby for the release of all jailed reporters and call for full investigations into the deaths of so many lost journalists.
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