For its 2018 Person of the Year award, Time magazine has chosen a group of Journalists which it designates as “The Guardians.” Among them are Jamal Khashoggi, two Reuters reporters imprisoned in Myanmar, an arrested Philippine journalist and the staff of a Maryland newspaper – The Capital Gazette –in whose offices five people were fatally shot in June. Time’s editor in chief praised the Guardians “for speaking up and for speaking out” and said each of them had faced “great risks in pursuit of greater truths, for the imperfect but essential quest for facts that are central to civil discourse.”
The ‘crimes’ for which these journalists have been threatened, persecuted and deprived of their liberty, or lives, show how difficult it has become to speak truth to power. In Myanmar the journalists had reported on the killings of 10 Rohingya Muslims; in the Philippines, journalist Maria Ressa has exposed the devastating fallout of President Duterte’s drug war, and before his murder in Istanbul, Jamal Khashoggi dared to criticize a despotic prince. Posthumously his case has produced a defence of the free press and a series of political aftershocks that no observer could have predicted even a few months ago. These include a vote in the US Senate, two days ago, to revoke military support for the Saudi war in Yemen and a resolution holding Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman responsible for Khashoggi’s murder.
During a week in which the UN celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Universal declaration of Human Rights, in particular its Article 19 defence of free speech, the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists found that “For the third year in a row, 251 or more journalists [have been] jailed around the world, suggesting the authoritarian approach to critical news coverage is more than a temporary spike.” CPJ’s data shows that 70 percent of the journalists have been locked up on “anti-state charges such as belonging to or aiding groups deemed by authorities as terrorist organizations”; 28 others have been jailed for publishing false news.
A recent Freedom House survey also found that political freedoms have declined globally for the 12th consecutive year. Last year 71 countries suffered a net decline in political rights and civil liberties; only 35 registered gains. Freedom House president, Michael Abramowitz, writes that “Democracy is in crisis. The values it embodies—particularly the right to choose leaders in free and fair elections, freedom of the press, and the rule of law—are under assault and in retreat globally.” Mature democracies seem “mired in seemingly intractable problems at home, including social and economic disparities, partisan fragmentation, terrorist attacks, and an influx of refugees that has strained alliances and increased fears of the “other”’. Meanwhile states like Turkey and Hungary – which seemed, quite recently, to be undergoing democratic reform – are “sliding into authoritarian rule”.
In this context, Time’s “Guardians” thoroughly deserve global recognition, particularly when the leader of the free world routinely badmouths the independent press and seeks to undermine its credibility. While, elsewhere, hundreds of journalists can be locked up, or killed with impunity, it is high time to acknowledge the courage of those reporters who refuse to be cowed by censorship and continue to report on corruption, injustice, hatred and violence at practically any price.
