Protecting journalists by committee
Oppressive governments and terrorist organisations have a propensity to confuse the truth with bad news and to further confuse the news with the messenger. They labour under the delusion that if journalists, as the modern world´s main purveyors of bad news, are leaned upon, imprisoned, tortured or killed, the bad news will stop.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based organisation founded in 1981 and backed by heavyweights of American journalism, has been keeping public tabs on the effects of this delusion for over a decade. The record it has compiled of journalists in the line of fire around the world is a sorry one.
Having said that, the truth about the latest CPJ annual report (Attacks on the Press in 1997, 443 pp, USD 30) is that it seems to have been done on a shoestring. It does not cover attacks on journalists in any of the "Western democracies", and on occasion adopts a decidedly propagandistic approach to the situations it covers in the developing world.
Take India as an example. The relevant section begins: "India´s aggressive economic liberalisation policies continued as the country celebrated the 50th anniversary of independence from Britain, but so did the harassment of the Press in some regions. India´s claims to being a modernising democracy was undermined by State-tolerated assaults on and intimidation of journalists in areas traditionally troubled by violent secessionist and sectarian movements and other social tensions."
It is unclear why the incidents cited undermine India´s "claims to being a modernising democracy". The report states that there were seven journalists killed in India last year, and includes in that number five members of a television crew killed in a bomb blast in Hyderabad. The bomb was meant for a politician-turned-film producer and the attack was allegedly planned by a businessrival. However, the report gives the impression that the journalists were the targets of a politically motivated killing. The killing of the two other journalists during 1997 was in Kashmir. Both worked for state-owned television and both were gunned down by militants and not the state, a fact which may have been worth mentioning.