Last week a New York jury recommended an $8 million fine against a mayor who seized copies of a local newspaper which had criticized him and his police department. The jury also held that Philip Amicone, the Mayor of Yonkers, had not been defamed by a 2007 article which described him visiting a strip club and procuring a lap dance from a woman named Sassy. The mayor’s humiliation was undoubtedly compounded by the fact that his legal nemesis, the owner of the Westchester Guardian, is a classic self-made man: a real-estate millionaire, strip-club owner, and, according to the New York Times, the “self-appointed scourge of whoever in Westchester County’s political establishment offends him, Democrat or Republican.” Unperturbed by the provenance of this First Amendment victory, a Times editorial concluded that the mayor had been given an expensive lesson in “basic Constitutional rights” and ought to have known that “[e]ven if a newspaper publishes things that you say are untrue and hurtful to your family and to your re-election bid, and even if the paper seems to be on a political crusade against you, you cannot respond by making the paper’s news racks disappear from city streets…”
Victories like this are the exception. Usually Goliath wins. In Mexico, for example, many critical journalists are offered the choice of “plomo o plata” (lead or silver). Those who refuse to trade silence for silver (bribes), are well aware of the ease with which criminal organizations, and their allies in the notoriously corrupt state security forces, can deliver the lead. (At least 30 journalists have been killed since President Felipe Calderón launched his drug war in December 2006.) In a preface to ‘Silence or Death’ in Mexico’s press, a recent report on impunity, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists recalls that when he worked as a reporter in Mexico during the ’80s and ’90s, journalists “didn’t worry about printing the names and faces of the country’s most powerful cartel leaders. In fact, the journalists claimed, the capos loved the attention because reports on their ruthlessness stirred fear among their enemies.” When, however, the press disclosed details on “the web of corruption that supported the drug trade” they did so at their peril. “The cartels made investments in buying the cooperation of corrupt police, mayors, governors, soldiers, and customs agents, all of whom became integral to their operations. If you exposed this network and got some official fired, you were disrupting their business.” Without recourse to a legal system in which freedom of expression was a sacrosanct right, Mexico’s journalists learned the hard way that investigative reporting could cost them their lives.
The correlation between press freedom and other democratic freedoms is most striking in countries that exert the tightest control on the media. The current World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders ranks the following states lowest (out of 178): Sudan, Syria, Burma, Iran, Turkmenistan, North Korea, Eritrea. You don’t need a great deal of geopolitical knowledge to grasp the differences between these places and those at the top of the list (Finland, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden), but countries in the middle zones also offer instructive contrasts. India, the world’s largest democracy, appears two-thirds of the way down the list (between Qatar and Zimbabwe), Guyana appears much higher up, at 59 (between Brazil and Togo) and Jamaica, the Caricom nation with the best ranking, at 25, just after the UK, USA and Canada. (Mexico appears at 136 and Cuba, unsurprisingly comes thirty places lower, close to the bottom.)
The varieties of press freedom are indicative of the political traditions which have shaped the countries. In the Netherlands, free speech has become so ingrained in the culture that insults against religion, that most inflammatory trespass in other Western democracies – and an offence which motivated the brutal murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004 – barely registers in the vocabulary of civic society. Whereas in India, earlier this week, a book-burning protest the youth wing of a nationalist party managed to intimidate the University of Mumbai into removing a novel by from its English syllabus. In fact one of the protesters shamelessly told a local TV reporter that the novel’s author, Rohinton Mistry, was lucky that he lived in Canada, otherwise they would have burned him instead. All of this took place because Such a Long Journey – a highly acclaimed literary novel which had been on the university syllabus for four years – was deemed by the Shiv Sena party, none of whose members seem to have actually read the book, to insult residents of Mumbai and the memory of the party’s founder, Bal Thackeray. In countries at the bottom of the press freedom index, there is no need to encourage censorship with book-burnings. Burma, Iran and Eritrea routinely subject writers and journalists to arbitrary detention, physical abuse, torture and long prison sentences.
At first blush, the right to publish details of a mayor’s conversation with a lap-dancer may not seem to be one of the more edifying or important uses of free speech, but one only has to consider alternative scenarios – self-censorship in Juarez, torture in Tehran, intimidation in Maharastra – to grasp the wisdom of the Westchester jury’s verdict. (It is also worth noting that not too long ago Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, was forced to resign after the media exposed his dealings with an expensive escort agency.) As the political philosopher Paul Woodruff has written, “Democracy is difficult to define, but failures of democracy are fairly easy to spot.”
In the first democratic assembly in ancient Athens, parrhesia (a citizen’s right to address the Assembly) did not simply mean the right to speak one’s mind, it also entailed the government’s obligation to listen to you. Our modern ideas of free speech tend to emphasize the first aspect of this freedom, but perhaps we should pay more attention to the instincts of censors all around the world, who recognize the terrible power of the right to be heard.
