PRESS FREEDOM | Informing citizens, ensuring accountability
15 January 2009
Internet Becoming Battleground for Journalists
Groups work to stop attacks against online journalists
Washington — Online journalists increasingly are being intimidated or jailed by governments seeking to silence dissent as the power and influence of the Internet grows, representatives of global advocacy groups for journalists tell America.gov.
Clothilde Le Coz, head of the Internet freedom desk at the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, said that every year “repressive governments acquire new tools that allow them to monitor the Internet and track online data.”
Le Coz said the Internet is “gradually becoming a battleground for citizens with criticism to express and journalists who are censored in the traditional media” of newspapers and broadcast journalism. The Internet “poses a threat to those in power who are used to governing as they wish with impunity.”
Governments seek to send a message of intimidation by repressing online journalists, Le Coz said. As more people are jailed for their online publications, fewer people will write on the Internet because they fear the same fate.
Le Coz’s group said in its Press Freedom Round-up for 2008 that “predatory activity” against online journalists is increasing as the jailing or killing of traditional journalists decreases.
In its 2008 list of “Internet Enemies,” Reporters Without Borders said that in Cuba, the second-worst offender after China, an Internet user can face up to 20 years in prison for posting a “counter-revolutionary” article on foreign Web sites and five years in prison for illegally connecting to the Internet.
Reporters Without Borders is organizing an “Online Free Expression Day” for March 12 aimed at fighting online censorship.
ONLINE REPRESSION SENDS CHILLING MESSAGE
Robert Mahoney, deputy director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said the crackdown on online journalists has serious implications for journalism overall.
For many countries, he said, the Internet has provided a new opportunity for journalists to reach audiences. With governments controlling traditional means of journalism, “a lot of people became very optimistic” when the Internet gave journalists a new platform, Mahoney said.
“As journalists are empowered on the one hand, governments will seek to control and take away their access to new means of technology on the other hand and that will have a chilling effect on many, many journalists in countries where a free or freer press is needed,” Mahoney said.
Repression of online journalists, he said, shows a government will “brook no opposition to its information policy, and that those who engage in independent journalism and critical reporting are lumped together with political dissidents and imprisoned to silence them.” Such repression, Mahoney said, serves “as a warning to others who would do the same. This is the fate for online dissidents who cross the line.”
Mahoney’s organization said in a December 2008 report that at least 56 online journalists are jailed worldwide, a number that for the first time surpasses the number of jailed print journalists.
The CPJ is working with Internet companies, academics and human rights groups to combat government repression through the Global Network Initiative, which sets forth a code of conduct for Internet and telecommunications companies. The code calls on companies to help safeguard freedom of expression and computer user privacy as part of their human rights risk assessment when considering expanding operations into a new country.
In a December 11, 2008, article for the Guardian newspaper, Mahoney decried the repression against online journalists, calling it a “bitter irony” that during the observance of the 60th anniversary of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “the bedrock of our modern freedoms, online journalists have become the single biggest group of writers behind bars.”
The U.S. State Department’s Global Internet Freedom Task Force, established in 2006, monitors Internet freedom worldwide and seeks to expand online access.
POLITICAL INSTABILITY FEEDS ONLINE CENSORSHIP
Silvio Waisbord, assistant professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University in Washington, said the Internet offers many avenues for freedom of expression, but some governments are very firm in not tolerating or restricting the technological opportunities that the Internet offers.
Waisbord, editor of the school’s International Journal of Press/Politics, said that in some closed societies, information that leaks out about restrictions on Internet journalism might represent only a very small part of the full extent to which freedom of expression is denied.
Besides China and Cuba, Waisbord said, online restrictions are particularly severe in nations engaged in civil war or political conflict, or are ruled by “old-line authoritarianism.”
Koïchiro Matsuura, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, told America.gov that the Internet, because “it is inherently democratic and empowering, provides unparalleled opportunities to realize the dream of a global free flow of ideas and universal access to information and knowledge." The Internet, he said, “should be guided by the same request for freedom of expression as traditional media, and UNESCO will continue to advocate the key values of freedom of expression, cultural diversity and openness that must be safeguarded on the Internet.”
More about the Global Network Initiative and the CPJ report is available on the organization’s Web site.
The Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Round-up is available on the group’s Web site.
The text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is on the U.N. Web site.
See also “Private Sector Should Resist Internet Censorship, Official Says” and “Award to Burmese Cyberdissidents Highlights Problem of Censorship.”
