Whether in Mumbai, Teheran, Havana, or in Madagascar, bloggers and
other online journalists across the world are finding themselves under
threats and assaults similar to what mainstream journalists often face from governments intent on choking off access to information.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, the organization that assists and champions imperiled journalists in some of the darkest corners of the globe, issued last week its annual survey of journalists imprisoned around the world as well as reports on the conditions of bloggers in Cuba and the Middle East. CPJ then held a luncheon at its New York headquarters to discuss the issue with various stakeholders.
CPJ Deputy Director Rob Mahoney, who moderated the discussion, said governments are using varied means of suppressing information as blogging gains ground as a serious medium for social and political commentary.
“Everywhere we look, we find that bloggers, independent, and online journalists are increasingly under threat,” Mahoney said.
Taking their cues from China, Middle East nations are using tactics like closing entire platforms and shutting down Internet service providers to keep offending information from getting out into the open. When those tactics fail and even when they don’t, the governments then round up people who put up the offending posts.
Forty-five percent of all journalists in jail are now bloggers, Web-based reporters, or online editors, the new CPJ reports found.
In our increasingly interconnected world, where seemingly everyone has a twitter account and could quickly upload a video of a developing news event from their camera-equipped cellular phone for all the world to see, this development has increased manifold the challenges CPJ itself faces.
The task becomes not just protecting journalists but determining who exactly is a journalist.
CPJ is an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1981 to promote press freedom worldwide by defending the rights of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal. Before, CPJ protected a finite number of journalists all over the world. But, increasingly, people inadvertently find themselves engaging in random acts of journalism, or “committing journalism.”
Such as when the first person in Iran held up her cell phone to shoot a video of government thugs beating up people protesting a stolen election, then promptly streaming that video online on twitter.
Is she a blogger, a journalist deserving the help and protection of CPJ?
“Very often, we have a hard time deciding who is a professional journalist and who is an activist,” CPJ’s Asia Program Coordinator Bob Dietz admitted.
María Salazar Ferro, CPJ’s Journalist Assistance Program Coordinator, talked about influential Cuban blogger Laritza Diversant who has struggled against major obstacles to become a major pain to the Cuban government. Cuba is very poor and not many people have personal computers. In fact, just 13% of the population, at the most, has access to the Internet.
Yet, utilizing point-to-point, node-to-node efforts–by e-mailing friends overseas, burning posts onto DVDs and smuggling them across the border, or using Internet cafes—points of views get expressed, information is disseminated, and posts are uploaded to blogs.
And Diversant has suffered reprisals, including confiscation of her passport. CPJ is telling the world about her plight in print and video reports online at its website and in news reports that it participates in.
Mohamed Abdel Dayem, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, said the explosion in connectivity has led to a corresponding expansion in blogging across the Middle East and North Africa.
“We obviously saw how much headache bloggers could be to a particular government,” he said, referring to Iran during the June elections.
Middle East and North African governments are responding with restrictive penal codes that put forward laws against “disrespect of the state” or religion, banning the bloggers from travel abroad and other forms of intimidation, including blocking people’s Internet
access, hacking their e-mail, and deleting whole databases.
“When none of those things work, they start round people up, usually the most popular bloggers,” Abdel Dayem said. “Despite of all this, blogging has continued to flourish.”
The point is that there are simply too many people online to shut all of them down. One website would get blocked only to have the offending content pop up elsewhere, often posted by proxy.
Which is not to say that the Internet itself is not vulnerable to censorship. CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon, in a Slate Magazine piece, said the convergence online of new formal and informal news organizations, including traditional media–text and broadcast, public and private, partisan and nonpartisan, for-profit and nonprofit–is creating an “information chokepoint” that repressive governments can shut down when a story gets out of control.
Where governments used to have to shut down dozens of newspapers and individual radio stations, now they can simply halt the circulation of information by pulling the plug on the Web.
CPJ’s Mahoney is the organization’s representative to the Global Network Initiative, an organization CPJ helped found to get human rights groups, academics, socially responsible investors, and Internet leaders such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo together to a set of principles that will help push back against censorship.
So much of what the world learned about some of the less than lofty practices in China before, during, and after the Summer Olympic Games, the November 2008 Mumbai
terrorist bombings, and the less than democratic elections in Iran came from these sources. But, to take Iran as a case in point, many of the “independent journalists” filing some of the most memorable reports seen in that coverage were people working for publications aligned with particular political parties and candidates.
So when the government of Iran began suppressing the popular uprising including arresting journalists—pretty much anyone with a camera—were they going after people that they perceive as their political opponents and tools of the West?
The people who gathered and disseminated information that rubbed the government of Iran the wrong way were punished dearly for their enterprise.
CPJ, in its annual census of imprisoned journalists, found for the first time that half of all journalists jailed around the world worked online as bloggers, reporters, or Web editors. Most of them are freelancers with little or no institutional support. A total of 136 journalists are in prisons around the world, an increase of 11 from the previous year. Sixty-eight of them worked online, the vast majority of them freelancers.
China, with 24 behind bars, remains the world’s leading jailer of journalists for the 11th year in a row. It is followed closely by Iran, where 23 journalists remain in jail, out of dozens rounded up in the aftermath of the disputed June 12 election. Cuba, Eritrea, and Burma round out the top five. This year, 18 of the 24 journalists imprisoned in China worked online.
Simon said the same dynamic is at work in the other nations, which points to the danger for the independent, online blogger when a government comes knocking down their door: They are utterly alone when the authorities come to take them away. They lack the legal assistance or the backing of an employer who can provide support for their families.
Other advocacy organizations are also springing up to trumpet the perils that online journalists and bloggers face around the world. For instance, Global Voices, an aggregator of blogs from around the world, has created Threatened Voices, which the organization describes as a collaborative mapping project to build a database of bloggers who have been threatened, arrested or killed for speaking out online and to draw attention to the campaigns to free them.
Dietz said a lot of nations, recognizing the double-edged sword that the Internet poses, have encouraged the growth of the medium but then punish severely people who transgress.
“It is a pattern that we’re seeing develop through much of Asia,” he said.
“The governments recognize that a vibrant economy needs an Internet infrastructure,” Dietz added. “You see this vibrant online community in China where the government is criticized directly. . . . Then, the government will single someone out to make an example of them. In China it’s called cutting off the chicken’s head to frighten the monkey.”