New Delhi: Editors and journalists from most of the G20 countries came together in an online Media Freedom Summit called ‘M20’ on September 6 to discuss the challenges faced by the media in their respective countries and regions.
The purpose of the M20 Media Freedom Summit was to raise the media’s shared concerns and send a message to the G20 leaders meeting in New Delhi for their annual summit on September 9-10 that freedom of the press matters.
The event was organised by the M20 organising committee, comprising 11 editors from India and a former judge of the Supreme Court.
Why an M20?
In his opening remarks, Siddharth Varadarajan, a founding editor of The Wire and convener of the organising committee, said that the need for the M20 Summit arose because media freedom was clearly not a priority for the host government and many G20 members.
“Despite the media in the G20 countries and beyond facing many common problems and threats, none of the G20 governments – and certainly not the current rotating president – appears particularly interested in the question of media freedom being debated,” he said, adding, that “it occurred to some of us here in the media in India that we should take the lead ourselves, and bring together colleagues from around the G20 so we could both have a conversation among ourselves on the problems we face, and send a clear message to the leaders of the G20 who will soon gather for their summit that none of the problems they hope to solve can be handled if the media in their countries are not free.”
Varadarajan said that the common challenges faced by the media in G20 countries include the problem of repression and the misuse of law to criminalise journalism “from Kashmir to Kansan”, intrusive surveillance of journalists via spyware, the media business model itself which under severe strain, the epidemic of fake news and disinformation, as well as the challenge and opportunity presented by AI.
Battling authoritarianism in India, Turkey, Myanmar
N. Ram former editor-in-chief, The Hindu, said that India’s ranking with respect to media freedom globally has been coming down steadily in an uninterrupted fashion over the last nine years or so, since when this government has been in power.
Ram referred to tax raids on independent news organisations, arrests of journalists using laws relating to terrorism and censorship on the internet using central laws.
“..We have one of the world’s largest disinformation industries, mostly operated by the followers of the present dispensation. They’re known as bhakts. We have the largest number of Facebook users in the world, the largest number of WhatsApp users in the world, the largest number, perhaps, of Instagram users and so on. They really descend on journalism that they don’t like,” he added.
Ipek Yezdani, an independent journalist and a former foreign editor of the Hürriyet in Turkey said that more than 90% of the mainstream media in Turkey is either under the control of the government, or directly owned by the government.
“As a result of the pressure and efforts of the government to take control of the media, journalists have been arrested, trailed, unemployed and forced to work with precarious unemployment and low wages for many years in Turkey,” she said.
She added that while the pressures on the arrest of journalists have decreased, trials and fines have increased through agencies like the public advertising agency in Turkey which was founded to distribute public advertisements fairly but has declared war on all newspapers criticising the government.
Swe Win editor, Myanmar Now, said that under the junta, media freedom has come to a standstill.
“What I want to say is that Myanmar, as a neighbouring country of India, has turned into a country very similar to North Korea in terms of repression and brutality. A lot of brutalities are going on but just because of the insignificance of our country on a geopolitical scale, we do not manage to attract a lot of attention,” he said.
Repression as fact of life in Arab media
Kareem Sakka, editor, Raseef22, said that the Arab world today “consists of a rich club and a poor club, both of which are equally plagued with censorship, self-censorship, and the patriarchy which is another big villain stifling expression.”
Sakka referred to bloggers being jailed in UAE, jailing photographers in Bahrain, journalists in Egypt, among others and said that large Arabic media are mostly state owned or controlled.
“Some think the Arab Spring came and went and we have nothing to show for it. I disagree. Everything changed in the Arab world with the digital revolution, but we need more resilience and more change.”
Need for a sustainable business model for independent media
Wahyu Dhyatmika, head of Indonesian news platform Tempo and chairman of the Indonesian Cyber Media Association (AMSI) said that a sustainable business model is crucial without which “we will not have independent media.”
“And without independent media, we will not be able to serve the public, to make sure everyone exercises their political rights democratically.”
“In Indonesia, many independent media face attacks – DDOS or digital flooding attacks that increase the cost of their servers – if they publish critical news or expose the wrongdoings or scandals of the elite and powerful.”
Dhyatmika added that this is “a new kind of censorship in the digital age.”
“By increasing the cost of news production via flooding bad traffic to independent websites and forcing them to pay for higher server cost, and by silencing critical news media with advertising that is tied to the obligation to not criticise their clients, independent publishers are forced to do self-censorship.”
Media faces counter-offensive, opinions vs information
Edwy Plenel the editor of Mediapart (France) said that his concern “is the danger that the reign of opinions, invading the public space, will undermine our profession, whose “raison d’être” is to provide information.”
“We are living in the era of the counter-offensive, with states, including those with elective democracies, repressing independent journalism, while economic powers, notably digital platforms, are ruining the quality of public debate,” he said.
“This is a very important point about our responsibility as journalists: everywhere, political powers and economic interests use opinion against information, use the freedom to say against the right to know, use the right to say anything – even lies, hatred, violence – in order to stifle our relationship with the concrete, informed, cross-checked, sourced truth.”
Three priorities of media freedom in Europe
Maurizio Molinari editor-in-chief at La Repubblica in Italy said that there are three different priorities in discussing freedom in the media from an Italian and European perspective.
This includes the need to protect copyright in the digital arena, the threat posed by fake news in social media networks, and finally the concentration of executive power.
“They have the express desire to change and to substitute the heritage of Montesquieu with the desire of Rousseau. And so, they would like to have the media organisations, the media world, basically not exercising the right of freedom of expression but just repeating the messages of the executive power,” he said.
In Brazil, a problem of judicial harassment and big tech dominance
Paula Miraglia, Co-founder & Director General, Nexo Jornal and Gama Revista, Brazil said that freedom of expression and press freedom in Brazil are at risk in many ways.
Miraglia said that along with attacks both violent personal ones and virtual ones, journalists in Brazil face judicial harassment.
“It is becoming very popular in Brazil to judicially pursue journalists and media organisations. This is a tactic that has been used a lot by political and/or religious groups to intimidate journalists.”
She added that a global risk to journalists comes from the great dependence on tech platforms and how news is distributed and marketed without very transparent criteria.
Nelson de Sa, media columnist and Asia correspondent of Folha de Sao Paulo added that the rise of AI was compounding the problem that the big tech platforms already posed to the media in Brazil.
Media freedom on paper in South Africa
Makhudu Sefara, SANEF’s Media Freedom Committee chairperson, South Africa said that there are still physical attacks that are unleashed on journalists in the country.
He also highlighted the increasing roadblocks to covering court proceedings in South Africa, where journalists are kept out and need to employ lawyers to determine whether they should be kept out or not. He added that journalists are also having to report with pen names in the face of threats.
He said that while the country looks like there are laws in place, but the reality is different.
“So on paper we are free in South Africa to do our work, but practically it’s not yet uhuru (Swahili noun that means ‘freedom’), so to put it.”
Rochelle de Kock, editor of The Herald and Weekend Post in Port Elizabeth, South Africa added that trust in the media in South Africa has waned over the years.
“This is largely because of the fake news phenomenon, but also because of experienced media practitioners and analysts going on to later join political parties or working for the government because the salaries in the media (particularly smaller media houses) are not competitive.”
In Japan, crisis of reporting on national security
Hiroki Sugita columnist at the Kyodo News Agency, Japan said that the media is facing the challenge of how to report about the national security issues, which was not much in focus in the past.
Verified information from government sources is also difficult to come citing national security issues.
“This is a very hard job for us because we know that we have to put in much more effort from various angles. Most of the reporting is very one-sided which is a very nationalistic and sometimes chauvinistic and militaristic. I think that our reports are not well qualified at this time, which sees a very difficult situation with China.”
Fake news takes its toll on the media in Korea, Australia
Chris Warren is the Media columnist of Crikey! in Australia and a former President of the International Federation of Journalists said Australia “faces a crisis of misinformation driven by the rise of ethno-nationalist populism.”
“Australia’s journalism is struggling to deal with the embrace of mis-information and downright disinformation by conservative politics and media through the craft’s traditional truth-based tools.”
Woosuk ‘Ken’ Choi editor of the Chosun Ilbo, South Korea also said that the country is learning to deal with fake news appearing in mainstream broadcasting companies and newspapers who are being probed by the prosecutor’s office.
Journalism needs solidarity, coalitions to ward off threats
Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief, The Guardian and now editor, Prospect magazine and chair, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford, UK said that solidarity was key to combating the threats that plague fearless, responsible media.
“..We can only face down the threats that we are getting, and I think we will increasingly get, with the support of others. That can be colleagues and solid solidarity with other publications, or it can be with the support of readers and it’s so clear now what doesn’t work – it’s so clear that you can’t cut yourself out of the problem. You can’t. If you get into the spiral of death, of producing less and less worthwhile journalism, then there is no reason why readers will come to your support, they couldn’t care less.”
James Lamont, director, strategic partnerships at the Financial Times and a former managing editor of the newspaper said that coalitions can work in combating the challenges facing digital media.
He referred to the work of the Trusted News Initiative, an international initiative started by the BBC, which includes publishers like the FT, the Hindu, Reuters and the Washington Post and others who have joined forces to combat fake news in dialogue with some of the big tech platforms, like Google, Microsoft and Facebook.
“One of its activities is an alert system across newsrooms and their social media teams to alert news editors to a trending piece of fake news, and to persuade the big digital platforms to deprioritise them. Another is to share verified data sets like election results when they are announced and where they are available. The point I want to make is that coalitions can work. So there’s an opportunity to frame this within the G20 agenda.”
Journalism as ‘an essential ingredient of life’
David Walmsley, editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail in Canada said that one of the challenges that the media faces today is explaining itself as an industry.
He said that the G20 can take a leading role in “ensuring that the countries of the world can unite around the belief that their citizens and those in charge should have nothing to fear about transparency and accuracy, and about the belief that journalism is an essential ingredient of life.”