Two days ago, after a week of courting the American news networks to the point of exhaustion, President Obama held an anxious press conference, hoping to persuade a sceptical public of the need for a second economic stimulus plan. He was right to be worried. The media had spent most of his first month in office chronicling financial scandals and looming corporate collapses, interspersed with lurid tales of Wall Street’s carefree ways with the first bailout package, its many schemes for profiting from the crisis it had created while the innocent taxpayers paid the bills. During his speech, Obama had a made-for-television moment when news arrived that the Senate had just approved his plan. His palpable relief prompted a moderately enthusiastic round of applause from the audience. Shortly afterwards, unconvinced, the stock market plunged nearly four hundred points.
If the second stimulus fails, part of the blame will undoubtedly lie at the feet of the media who refused to support the plan. There is already some evidence that the collapse of Lehman brothers and other leading financial institutions was not only due to their bad investments but also because analysts in the mainstream media publicly stated their loss of confidence in the system. This loss of confidence, as with the media’s present unwillingness to cheerlead for Obama’s stimulus, could eventually cost the American economy trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Yet, frightening as that sounds, it is undoubtedly better than the alternatives.
Consider Mexico, where an escalating drug war claims at least 5,000 lives each year (in Latin America as a whole 100,000 lives are lost to drug-related crime each year, according to an OAS report). The Inter-American Development Bank estimates that more than 500 metric tons of cocaine are smuggled through Mexico to the United States each year. But reporters who have tried to cover the rise of the narcotrafficking gangs, or the government’s ineffectual response to their activities, have been threatened, harassed, beaten, kidnapped and killed with almost complete impunity. So President Calderon’s ill-conceived war against drugs has been conducted largely beyond the oversight of a functioning press corps.
Consider Burma. Cyclone Nargis killed more than 85,000 people and severely affected the lives of more than 2 million more, but the military junta’s Press Scrutiny and Registration Division “banned publication of photographs that showed dead bodies and any critical reports of the government’s response,” according to the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists. Burma has also forced cancelled an edition of a weekly newspaper that published a report on the junta’s decision to increase fees for satellite dishes 167-fold. Recently, a critical blogger was given a 20-year prison sentence; a comedian who spoke unguardedly about the government’s appallingly inadequate response to Nargis was given a 59-year sentence.
In China the free press is equally besieged. At least 79 writers and bloggers are currently behind bars for such crimes as “encouraging separatism” and “exposing state secrets.” In the vast majority of cases, these charges have arisen from nothing more than a mild dissent from the government’s hamfisted propaganda machine – at least two journalists have been imprisoned for their reporting on the Sichuan earthquake. After a brief relaxation of its heavy censorship, so the international press could marvel at the spectacles of the Beijing Olympics, the People’s Republic has gone right back to muzzling dissent with its accustomed thoroughness.
The Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen famously wrote that an open society is often the best way to avoid the worst consequences of an unfolding crisis like famine. “Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort …a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threatened by famines can have.” From this perspective, the American press is doing its best, albeit somewhat belatedly, to provide the public with an accurate forecast of the economic climate, while the Mexican, Burmese and Chinese press have been forced to whistle past the graveyard.
Mature democracies are often distinguishable by their capacity for digesting and acting upon bad news. When autocratic governments finally understand that their apparent vulnerability to criticism from a free press is really a source of strength that democracies repeatedly use to their advantage, the sooner they are likely to acknowledge difficult realities and accept meaningful reforms.
