World Press Freedom Day
May 3, 2007 |
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Washington -- Conditions
for independent media are worsening in many parts of the
world, and this trend threatens both democracy and respect
for human rights, say U.S. officials and experts on the
media.
An independent, free press is essential
to democracy and holds governments accountable to its citizens,
according to Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy
and Public Affairs Karen Hughes and Under Secretary of State
for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky.
Both were featured speakers at a May 1 conference
on “21st Century Threats to Press Freedom,”
sponsored by the Broadcasting Board of Governors and Freedom
House. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human
Rights and Labor Barry Lowenkron also made remarks.
The conference focused on the increasing
threats to journalists around the world, in particular the
record number of journalists killed in 2006. Reports show
that more than 110 journalists and media workers were killed
in 2006, making it the bloodiest year on record for journalists.
Hughes, who worked for nearly seven years
as a reporter in Texas before beginning her career in politics,
said a free press is essential in cultivating free thought
and in exposing crime and human rights abuses. Unfortunately,
journalists and media specialists are increasingly being
killed, arrested, injured and harassed for their work, she
said.
But the United States, she said, “defends
the defenders of freedom.” She said that the U.S.
Department of State provides a number of professional development
and exchange programs for journalists, editors and media
managers from around the world through the Edward R. Murrow
Journalism Fellowships and other programs.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice established
last year the Global Internet Freedom Task Force (GIFT),
an internal State Department coordination group that works
with other U.S. government agencies and the National Security
and National Economic councils, Hughes noted. GIFT’s
goal is to maximize the free flow of information and ideas,
to minimize the success of repressive regimes in censoring
and silencing legitimate debate and to promote access to
information and ideas over the Internet.
Dobriansky said the United States considers
freedom of the press to be so crucial to democracy and human
rights that it has included evaluations of press freedoms
in various countries in the U.S. State Department’s
annual Country Reports on Human Rights.
INTIMIDATION OF JOURNALISTS MAY BE "PUSH
BACK" AGAINST DEMOCRACY
Jennifer Windsor, the executive director
of Freedom House, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization
dedicated to promoting democracy and freedom around the
world, said that only 18 percent of the world’s population
enjoys the benefits of a free press.
Windsor reported that press freedoms have
either stagnated or decreased in many countries around the
world. Most of the decline, she said, is taking place in
Asia, Latin America and the former Soviet Union. Windsor
called this “a push back against democracy.”
According to Alcee Hastings, a Democratic
representative from Florida and the chair of the Commission
on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Helsinki Commission),
authoritarian leaders around the world understand the power
of the press, “that’s why they strive to control
it.” In Russia, for example, nearly 80 percent of
the population gets information from just three media outlets
that are controlled by the government of Vladimir Putin.
Russia, he noted, has become the third-deadliest country
in the world for journalists.
Most of the former Soviet states regard
free media as “a threat to be neutralized,”
Hastings said. “The only security for all is a free
press,” Hastings said, and he decried efforts to cut
back funding for U.S. broadcasting to the former Soviet
republics. The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty are needed now more than ever, he said.
EFFORTS TO STIFLE MEDIA CAN BE SUBTLE
Not all government efforts to repress a
free press are obvious, some experts suggested.
In China, which leads the world in jailing
journalists, censorship is delivered orally, in secret,
and exerts “invisible control,” says Perry Link,
professor of East Asian studies at Princeton University.
“Today the Communist Party uses the
media to manipulate its message,” Link said. “Repression
40 years ago hurt Chinese citizens. Now it can hurt the
rest of the world,” he warned, as lack of accurate
information on topics such as avian influenza and HIV/AIDS
outbreaks can threaten health around the world.
In Egypt, the government censors only randomly
but punishes severely when it does, according to Jon Alterman,
director and senior fellow at the Middle East Program of
the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The
result, he said, is to produce enough fear that the media
censor themselves.
A fact
sheet on U.S. support for press freedom can be found
on the State Department Web site.
For more information on U.S. policies, see
Press
Freedom.
Jane Morse
USINFO Staff Writer
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