It’s not just Trump: US media freedom fraying at the edges

About this report

This non-exhaustive study of threats to media freedom in the United States researched over 150 publicly reported incidents involving journalists. It uses the criteria developed for and employed by Mapping Media Freedom, Index on Censorship’s project launched in May 2014 that monitors the media landscape in 42 European and neighboring countries. This survey reviewed media freedom violations that occurred in the United States between June 30, 2016, and February 28, 2017.

Reports were submitted by a team of researchers. Each incident was then fact-checked by Index on Censorship against multiple sources.

Index on Censorship is a UK-based nonprofit that campaigns against censorship and promotes freedom of expression worldwide. Founded in 1972, Index has published some of the world’s leading writers and artists in its award-winning quarterly magazine, including Nadine Gordimer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Samuel Beckett and Kurt Vonnegut. Index promotes debate, monitors threats to free speech and supports individuals through its annual awards and fellowship program.

Acknowledgements

Author: Sally Gimson
Editor: Sean Gallagher

Research: Hannah Machlin,
Elise Thomas, Amanda James,
Laura Stevens, Alex Gibson,
Gary Dickson,  Courtney Manning, Madeline Domenichella

Additional research/editing:
Ryan McChrystal, Melody Patry, Atticus O’Brien-Pappalardo,
Esther Egbeyemi, Samuele Volpe, Jemimah Steinfeld

Illustrations: Eva Bee
Design: Matthew Hasteley

This report is also available in PDF format

Smears about the media made by US President Donald Trump have obscured a wider problem with press freedom in the United States: namely widespread and low-level animosity that feeds into the everyday working lives of the nation’s journalists, bloggers and media professionals. This study examines documented reports from across the country in the six months leading up to the presidential inauguration and the months after. It clearly shows that threats to US press freedom go well beyond the Oval Office.

“Animosity toward the press comes in many forms. Journalists are targeted in several ways: from social media trolling to harassment by law enforcement to over-the-top public criticism by those in the highest office. The negative atmosphere for journalists is damaging for the public and their right to information,” said Jodie Ginsberg, CEO at Index on Censorship, which documented the cases using an approach undertaken by the organization to monitor press freedom in Europe over the past three years.

The US study shows journalists have been on the receiving end of online and offline harassment, as well as being arrested and charged with criminal offenses just for doing their job.

Reporters traveling into the country have also been caught up in the move to tighten border security, a trend that began during President Barack Obama’s administration but gathered pace after the Trump inauguration on January 20, 2017. Without clear guidelines, journalists have found themselves at the mercy of Customs and Border Protection agents who have seized and searched their electronic devices.

The arrests and border searches come as states are introducing new legislation or interpreting older laws in ways likely to have a detrimental effect on reporting.

For citizen reporters and freelancers, who do not have the protection of media organizations, the climate was already hostile and is now becoming more so. As the experience of Gawker has shown, even large media websites can be driven out of business if they rile the rich and powerful.

“Attention on the media has focused on the very public spat between Donald Trump and major news outlets,” Melody Patry, head of advocacy at Index on Censorship, said. “But this survey shows that threats to media freedom are far more deep-rooted and affect local journalists, bloggers and investigative reporters across the country. This is a serious cause for concern in a country that prides itself on the First Amendment principles protecting a free press.”

Arrests and detainments

The arrest of journalists covering demonstrations poses one of the largest direct threats to the freedom of reporters performing their professional duties. Not only are they physically removed from the protests but they are also being charged with serious criminal offenses. Previously journalists may have been charged with misdemeanors – the most serious of which only carries a large fine or up to a year in prison. Now they are being charged with felonies, which can carry decades in jail.

“This trend towards treating reporters at protests as active participants is alarming. Although these charges are most often dropped, the continuing arrests could cause journalists to think twice about covering a demonstration or reporting on police abuses against participants,” Hannah Machlin, project officer for Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom, said.

This pattern did not begin with the election of Trump. These decisions were also taken during the Obama administration by local law enforcement agencies and state attorneys.

Six journalists who were covering protests at Trump’s inauguration were arrested in the capital and charged with felonies, the most severe punishment under Washington DC’s law against rioting.

They included two reporters, a documentary producer, a photojournalist, a live-streamer and a freelance reporter. However, charges against four of the journalists were dropped nine days later. Charges against videographer Shay Horse were dismissed on February 21. Only freelance reporter Aaron Cantu remains charged with felony rioting.

Other examples of reporters targeted during protests include those covering the Dakota Access Pipeline and Black Lives Matter demonstrations discussed in more detail below.

More incidents suggest law enforcement officers need training and directives to respect journalists’ rights to cover events – like the case of Chris Hayes, a Fox 2 St. Louis journalist, who on June 30, 2016, was handcuffed and shackled to a bench in Kinloch, Missouri. He was detained after objecting to being barred from a public meeting on uninsured and unregistered police cars, a story that Fox 2 had originally investigated. Hayes was issued a court summons for failure to comply and disorderly conduct.

North Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and associated protests

Several journalists and documentary filmmakers covering protests against the controversial oil pipeline project have been arrested and charged with felonies.

The law enforcement response to protesters and reporters has been increasingly militarized in the state according to the American Civil Liberties Union. In August 2016 the former governor of North Dakota Jack Dalrymple (R) declared a state of emergency.

Among journalists arrested and charged were Amy Goodman, host of the news program Democracy Now! She was taken into custody on September 3, 2016, after she filmed private security guards employed by Dakota Access LLC using dogs and pepper spray to disperse the protests against construction work. Her video has been viewed over 14 million times on Facebook. At first Goodman was charged with a misdemeanor offense of criminal trespass, but that was escalated by the state attorney to a rioting felony. A district judge finally dismissed the charges in October.

I don’t see why I would not be allowed to get a photo of peaceful protesters being arrested. If that is off limits, what else is?

In another pipeline protest, documentary filmmaker Deia Schlosberg was detained while filming a demonstration on October 11, 2016, where climate change activists manually closed off the TransCanada Keystone Pipeline in Walhalla, North Dakota, which brings tar sands oil across the border from Canada. It was one of five similar demonstrations that day held by climate change activists as an act of solidarity with the campaign against the DAPL. Schlosberg was charged with three offenses which could have landed her in prison for 45 years: conspiracy to theft of property, conspiracy to theft of services and conspiracy to tampering with or damaging a public service. The charges were eventually suspended and will be formally dropped, but only if she commits no further crimes for six months. Schlosberg told The Guardian that she hasn’t covered a protest since October to avoid serious consequences were she to be arrested again,  demonstrating the effect that such actions can have on journalism.  

On the same day, at another protest near Skagit County in Washington state, documentary producer Lindsey Grayzel and her cinematographer Carl Davis were arrested and held for 24 hours for filming activist Ken Ward manually closing off the Trans Mountain pipeline. Grayzel is in the process of making a documentary about Ward.

Though neither Grayzel nor Davis were on pipeline property, they were charged with second-degree burglary, criminal sabotage and assemblage of saboteurs, all felony cases which could lead to a 30-year prison sentence. The charges were ultimately dismissed, but Grayzel said the police still had her memory cards with footage on them, her phone and her notes.

The charges against other filmmakers, who also filmed activists on October 11, are still pending and they could still face prison sentences.

CASE STUDY: TRACIE WILLIAMS

Tracie Williams is an experienced documentary photographer. She had been covering the main protest camp at Standing Rock for three weeks before she was arrested on February 23, 2017, during a police operation to evict protesters from the site. She says the police arrived at the camp with humvees, helicopters and automatic weapons. “I feared for the protesters’ safety and felt a duty to photograph their imminent arrests,” Williams said, recalling the photograph she made as members of the Morton County Sheriff’s Department advanced towards two men praying near the sacred fire with weapons aimed at them at point-blank range. Officers approached her from the side, without notice or warning, Williams said, and she was arrested while photographing the arrests. She was covering the protest for the National Press Photographers’ Association and told police she was a journalist, but they did not seem to care, she added.

Williams was handcuffed with zip ties and transported first to the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, where she, along with seven other women were held in chain-link cages in a drafty garage. They were asked to strip down to their base layers and all their belongings, including their jackets, were placed in clear plastic bags. They were then transferred to McLean County, where they were charged with “Obstruction of Gov. Function.” The plastic ties they used to handcuff her, she said, have caused her nerve damage. She now faces a class A misdemeanor charge, which carries a possible sentence of up to a year in prison and $3K in fines. All of her gear including her camera, phone, audio recorder and memory cards, were confiscated as evidence. Williams got the equipment back but not until she had harnessed help from two lawyers, several advocacy groups and a local senator. She is still facing charges in North Dakota.

Black Lives Matter protests

Journalists at Black Lives Matter and similar demonstrations have been arrested by police, even though they clearly identified themselves as members of the press.

Ryan Kailath was on an assignment for National Public Radio covering the New Black Panthers protests in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on July 9, 2016, when he was arrested. The incident took place following the killing of Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, by Baton Rouge police officers. Kailath said he was standing on a grass verge covering the protests but as things got violent he retreated into another line of police officers who arrested him. Kailath said he repeatedly identified himself as a journalist but was ignored. As he tweeted on July 11, a police officer said to him: “I’m tired of y’all saying you’re journalists.” Kailath explained that when he was arrested, the police identified him as a black man although he is an Indian-American.

Kailath said of his experience: “I was transferred between six locations, searched naked, given an orange jumpsuit and a medical and mental health screening, and finally checked in to the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. In the morning, we were given the local paper, The Advocate. It was only when an inmate paging through it looked up at me and said: ‘Hey, you’re in here!’ that I learned I was being charged with simple obstruction of a highway.” Within the week all charges against him had been dropped.

I was transferred between six locations, searched naked, given an orange jumpsuit and a medical and mental health screening, and finally checked in to the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison

Two other journalists were also arrested at the same demonstration. WAFB (a CBS-affiliated TV station for Baton Rouge) assistant news editor Chris Slaughter, who was clearly identified by his staff shirt and media credentials, and Breitbart News reporter Lee Stranahan were charged with obstruction of a highway.

Two black reporters were briefly handcuffed by police in Rochester, New York during similar protests over the shooting of black men. Carlet Cleare and Justin Carter of WHAM-TV were detained in the early hours of July 9, 2016, for a short time before being released with a public apology from the mayor and chief of police.

On August 22, 2016, in Asheville, North Carolina, Dan Hesse, a reporter for the local paper Mountain Xpress, was arrested while covering a sit-in protest by Black Lives Matter. He was with protesters who were occupying the lobby of the police and fire department when it was cleared by police. He told officers and protesters he was a journalist. He was nevertheless arrested and charged, though charges were dropped a week later. “I don’t see why I would not be allowed to get a photo of peaceful protesters being arrested,” said Hesse. “If that is off limits, what else is?”

On November 9, 2016, two reporters, Jason Silverstein and EJ Fox, were arrested while covering protests outside Trump Tower in New York. Silverstein said in an article for the Daily News, New York that he was handcuffed with plastic ties by a police officer who accused him of blocking the sidewalk. He was charged with disorderly conduct and refusing an order to disperse. Fox said he was held from 9pm until 2am and considered himself lucky, but hoped that the behavior of the NYPD had not been affected by the Trump presidency.

US border detentions

Many journalists have found themselves detained at the US border. Over the period covered by the survey, there were several reports of journalists being stopped by US Customs and Border Protection agents, detained and asked to hand over equipment and notes. Some of these incidents occurred before Trump was elected and before he signed an executive order for a travel ban. According to NBC News, data provided by the Department of Homeland Security shows that searches of all travelers’ phones by border agents has grown fivefold in just one year, from fewer than 5,000 in 2015 to nearly 25,000 in 2016. DHS officials told the network that 2017 would be a “blockbuster” year. Some 5,000 devices were searched in February 2017 alone, as many as in all of 2015.

The most disturbing aspect of these detentions is that journalists (and indeed any US citizen) can have their phones and electronic equipment searched at the border without customs officers or Homeland Security officials having to prove any suspicion of wrongdoing. Only journalists and US citizens actually inside the country are protected by a 2014 Supreme Court ruling which says police must get warrants to search phones. Otherwise they have no protection under the Fourth Amendment at the border.

Customs and Border Protection officials should respect the right of journalists to protect confidential information, and refrain from demanding access to people’s devices and passwords

In one incident, a Wall Street Journal Middle East correspondent and US citizen, Maria Abi-Habib, was detained on July 14, 2016, by border control officers at Los Angeles International Airport and asked for access to her two phones. She recounted in a Facebook post how she managed to hold them off by threatening to call WSJ lawyers because the phones were the property of her employer. Another journalist, Kim Badawi, was held at Miami International Airport for 10 hours when he flew in from Rio for Thanksgiving. A US citizen who works for Le Monde in Rio, Badawi was questioned by Customs and Border Protection agents about his passport stamps for Middle Eastern countries, his political views and his religious affiliation. His baggage was searched and he was forced to surrender the password of his phone so agents could go through all of his contacts, photos and messages, including confidential WhatsApp messages from Syrian refugees. Badawi wrote a first-person account of his experience for the Huffington Post.

After the travel ban was imposed in January, more journalists found themselves detained. BBC journalist Ali Hamedani, a British citizen born in Iran, live tweeted his detention. He was held for two hours on January 29, 2017, and said he was subjected to “invasive checks” after he had flown into Chicago. Hamedani said he was forced to hand over his phone and its password. Sama Dizayee, a Washington-based Iraqi journalist who planned to fly to London in February 2017, told NPR she was afraid to travel because of her belief that she might not be allowed back in the country. Although she has a green card, she said, she had no certainty that her rights to live in the USA would be guaranteed if she left and tried to come back into the country. Meanwhile, senior CNN editor Mohammed Tawfeeq filed a lawsuit against the travel ban after being detained at Atlanta’s airport over the weekend of January 28 and 29, the days following Trump’s signing of the travel ban executive order. He is an Iraqi citizen with a US green card. The lawsuit argued that officials have used Trump’s executive order “to subject returning residents like Mr. Tawfeeq to inappropriate exercises of discretion with regard to their right to return to the United States, and to lengthy delays and interrogations at ports of entry”.

“Officials should respect the right of journalists to protect confidential information and refrain from demanding access to people’s devices, online accounts and passwords. Journalists must be aware of possible requests by border agents, which may compromise their security and that of their sources,” Mapping Media Freedom’s Machlin said.

CASE STUDY: ED OU

Ed Ou, an award-winning Canadian photojournalist, tried to cross the US-Canadian border to cover the Dakota Access Pipeline protests on October 1, 2016. He found himself detained for six hours, had his phone searched, his journal photocopied and was then refused entry. Border security was not interested in Ou’s concerns about protecting his sources. In a letter to Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security, American Civil Liberties Union attorney Hugh Handeyside wrote: “[W]e believe that CBP took advantage of Mr. Ou’s application for admission to engage in an opportunistic fishing expedition for sensitive and confidential information that Mr. Ou had gathered through his newsgathering activities in Turkey, Somalia, Iraq and elsewhere.”

Most of the physical assaults against journalists across the country have been at demonstrations. For instance, on August 14, 2016, two reporters were physically attacked by about a dozen people in Milwaukee during violent demonstrations against the police shooting of Sylville Smith, a black man who was killed fleeing a traffic stop. The reporters were filming a BP gas station which had been set on fire by protesters. Their equipment, including cameras and satellite packs, was stolen and one of the journalists had to go to hospital for an evaluation. At a Black Lives Matter protest, which took place on September 21 in Charlotte, Virginia, Mary Sturgill, an anchor for the Columbia, South Carolina, station WLTX, was tackled by demonstrators and her photographer was punched.

The only solution is a greater awareness of both media organizations and police departments

On October 18, 2016, in North Dakota, activists at the Sacred Stone Camp were accused of assaulting journalist Phelim McAleer, who was making a documentary called FrackNation in favor of fracking. His microphone was taken away and he was assaulted after he asked DAPL protesters about their use of fossil fuels. When McAleer and colleagues went back to their car, a group of about 30 individuals surrounded the vehicle and the journalists were forced to call the police for help.

On November 3, 2016, during “water protector” protests over the DAPL at Standing Rock Indian Reservation, journalist and activist Erin Schrode said she was hit by a rubber bullet from “militarized police” while she was in the middle of an interview. The impact of the bullet knocked her over. She posted a video of the incident on Facebook.

Journalists were also targeted at election protests. In Portland, Oregon, a woman spat in the camera of a news crew covering demonstrations in the early hours of November 9, as the election results were being reported. The woman, who was an anti-Trump protester, yelled directly into the KOIN 6 News camera held by video journalist Karl Petersen before spitting.

During separate protests in north Baltimore on the evening of November 9, Fox45 reporter Keith Daniels and photographer Ruth Morton had to be moved to safety by police. An angry crowd had surrounded them and ordered them to leave the scene. The end of the encounter was broadcast live on Fox45. Daniels reported that this had never happened to him before. The crowd had told him they did not believe that he would put the “correct narrative” on his coverage.

The inauguration protests in Washington DC on January 20, 2017, also turned violent. Photographer Vanessa Koolhof, working for ABC affiliate news station WJLA, was knocked over and injured in the middle of a stand-off near the National Mall when a Trump supporter came into the crowd and police tried to break up scuffles. She was slightly injured before being assisted by police officers.

There have been other physical incidents against journalists in the period. For instance, a reporter and photographer from NBC6 were injured on November 21, 2016, when a man drove a stolen SUV into the news crew’s car in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In December 2016, a woman accused of faking her own abduction threatened a reporter from the same TV station and shouted at a photographer. She said: “I will knock your ass out. Get that shit out of my face.” She also threw a rock at another station’s crew and was detained by police. She was released after the crews declined to press charges.

Having equipment stolen is an occupational hazard in some areas. In two incidents within a week of each other in the San Francisco East Bay area, reporters had their cameras stolen. In the first incident, on September 19, a field manager from KGO TV had his camera taken from him at gunpoint by two men in Alameda near Robert W Crown Memorial State Beach. On September 23, Raquel Maria Dillon, a multimedia journalist with NBC Bay Area, was approached by a man who pulled her camera from her hands. She had just finished covering a story and was walking back to her car when she was attacked. As a result of these and other robberies, some news organizations in the area have hired security guards to look after their journalists and crews.

In Niagara Falls on October 22, a reporter and photographer from the local Buffalo station WIVB, a CBS affiliate, were cornered in an alley by four men with a gun, who asked them for money and for the camera. The crew was out covering an art installation when they were physically attacked: the photographer had to go to the hospital and the reporter suffered minor injuries. On October 13, 2016, in Bedford County, Virginia, Tim Saunders, a reporter from local station WDBJ7, was shot at when he was in the station’s vehicle. A mentally ill 18-year-old was wandering around the streets with a rifle shooting at vehicles and knocking on doors before he was arrested. Saunders was unhurt and no one else was injured in the incident.

“Journalist safety must be taken extremely seriously by law enforcement. Whether the perpetrators of violence are police officers or private citizens, violence against journalists, cases of robbery or harassment must be investigated vigorously and charges filed promptly to ensure that a culture of impunity is unable to take root,” Mapping Media Freedom’s Machlin said.

 

CASE STUDY: DALTON BENNETT

Dalton Bennett, a video reporter for the Washington Post, has experience covering demonstrations all over the world, from Greece to the Arab Spring. He was filming demonstrators on inauguration day when he was pushed over and grabbed by a police officer. Most of the protesters were peaceful, he said, but a smaller group of black bloc protesters were causing trouble, which was unusual for Washington DC. At one point during the protest “all hell was breaking loose” and the police began using pepper spray and stun grenades before kettling the protesters.

“In the process of getting kettled, we’re filming it, which is what a video reporter is supposed to be doing, and a police officer felt that I was too close, and decided to get me away from the situation and so pushed me,” Bennett said. “My backpack was being grabbed and I was pushed by another guy and fell to the ground in the process. I wouldn’t say it was a concerted effort to prevent us from capturing the moment, there were a lot of journalists there. I think it was, more than anything, just a police officer, just authorities generally caught up in this ebb and flow of the demonstration. I mean I don’t think it was done out of malice, or to prevent us reporting. That being said, I don’t think it was necessary at all, it definitely wasn’t necessary, and the city itself has issued a report saying some of its tactics weren’t exactly kosher.”

Bennett doesn’t believe the right to film protests is under threat in the USA, but he said: “Inevitably as more and more protests happen across the country, this is a question which is going to continue to arise. I think the only solution is a greater awareness of both media organizations and police departments on the role that the media plays in covering these protests and better practice among media organizations, [understanding] how demonstrations work, how to keep safe covering the protest.”

Criminal charges / civil lawsuits

Since the election of Trump there has been anxiety around his claims that he would loosen US libel laws. At a rally in Fort Worth, Texas in February 2016 Trump declared: “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

However, current US libel laws have already led to one news organization, Gawker, closing after a lawsuit alleging the site had invaded the privacy of a celebrity.

Others, like conservative political commentator and television host Glenn Beck, have found themselves on the receiving end of defamation suits. Beck, along with other journalists, including commentators from Fox News, were sued for the comments they made about a boy who brought a clock to school in a suitcase and was arrested in September 2015 after it was mistaken for a bomb. The boy from Irving, Texas, was quickly released, but Beck suggested on a show aired by The Blaze that the clock bomb hoax story was possibly a conspiracy to “turn Texas blue [Democrat]”. The boy’s father filed a lawsuit. However, a judge ruled on January 9, 2017, that Beck’s free speech was protected under the First Amendment.

Most criminal charges against media professionals have been related to journalists caught up in protests, which we have detailed above.

However, there is another worrying case of a publisher from Blue Ridge, Georgia, and his attorney, who were arrested on June 24, 2016, for requesting public records. They were charged with three felonies – identity fraud, attempted identity fraud and making a false statement on an open records request – which carries up to 20 years in prison. Fannin Focus publisher, Mark Thomason, said he was held for two days before being granted bail, but only after a $10,000 bond had been posted. An outcry in the national press led to the charges being dismissed three weeks later. Thomason and attorney Russell Stookey were charged in part because they requested copies of checks written on the operating accounts of the judge’s office, which were “cashed illegally”. Chief Judge Brenda Weaver, who presides in the three-county Appalachian Judicial Circuit, had urged the district attorney to seek an indictment. Weaver, who was in control of one of those accounts, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution she pushed for the case because “I don’t react well when my honesty is questioned.” She was eventually forced to resign.

“US libel law has long been a model for the rest of the world. Lowering the burden of proof or otherwise loosening restrictions on lawsuits would pose a serious threat to press freedom in the country. At the same time, the misuse of the criminal justice system to silence journalists is a common occurrence in some European countries. This is not something that journalists in the USA should be exposed to,” Index’s Patry said.

CASE STUDY: GAWKER

Gawker went bankrupt and was shut down in August 2016 after a jury in Florida awarded $140 million in damages against it for invading the privacy of Hulk Hogan by publishing a sex tape of the celebrity wrestler. The lawsuit was funded by Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal. Thiel told the Wall Street Journal: “I am supporting other people who have been harmed by Gawker, which routinely relied on an expectation that their less wealthy victims would have no legal recourse even against clear violations. I do not support legal actions against any other organizations.” Gawker’s assets were sold out of bankruptcy to Univision Communications Inc, and the publishers eventually settled with Hogan and others connected with the privacy suit in November 2016.

Legal measures

What laws are passed and how the law is interpreted can have an impact on journalists’ ability to report. Even when laws are not intended to restrict access to public information, they can be used to do so.

For instance, the so-called Marsy’s Law, which protects victims’ rights, has been enacted by some states. Although not its original intention, the law is being used by police forces in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to justify withholding all information about crime locations, car accidents and crash victims in the area from journalists, according to a report in the Argus Leader on December 4, 2016. Journalists and others argue the law states that information should only be withheld “on request of the victim” and so a blanket ban on information is not justified. Similar laws have now been passed in North Dakota and Montana.

Another law, proposed by Utah State Representative Scott Chew (R) on January 31, 2017, to ban drones near livestock – with jail time for those who do – has faced criticism. Chew argues the drones may harass farm animals.

“Even well-intentioned laws can have a deleterious effect on journalists. In the case of Utah, the proposed legislation could penalize reporters doing investigative pieces around animal welfare and food safety. Even the Humane Society of the United States has expressed reservations about the draft bill,” Index’s Patry said.

The other pattern that is emerging concerns journalists who, all over the country, are being asked to hand over unpublished documents they have used in investigations, potentially compromising key sources.  State “shield” laws should give legal protections for journalists, but this principle is being increasingly challenged. In Nashville, Tennessee, television reporter Phil Williams, who reported on the district attorney Glen Funk, was told by a judge on February 2, 2017, to hand over key documents. To add further pressure Funk has filed a $200 million defamation suit against the journalist and his employer, News Channel 5. The channel has condemned the actions as “an attempt by an elected public official to silence and intimidate a journalist and news organization that has accurately reported on questionable conduct and judgment by that official”.

Meanwhile in San Bernardino, California on January 17, 2017, a judge ruled that numerous journalists will have to take the stand in a corruption case on which they had reported. Prosecutors want them to testify on 56 statements contained in stories dating back 12 years. Journalists fear taking the stand because they may be forced under oath to compromise their sources.

CASE STUDY: PUBLIC BROADCASTERS

A provision added into the National Defense Authorization Act signed into law on December 23, 2016, has abolished the bipartisan board running Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and other news outlets. The board is to be replaced with a single chief executive appointed by the US president. Supporters argue that the change will make the $800 million media operation more efficient, but critics say it will give the president the ability to jeopardize the political independence of the operation.  

“Politically independent public broadcasters are a vital segment of the media landscape at a time of increased propaganda. We’ve documented a series of moves by European governments to nationalize the public media in ways that make it more likely to toe the ruling party’s line,” Index’s Ginsberg said.

Works censored or altered

There is little information about works censored during the period we examined.  This may well be because journalists tend not to report these kinds of incidents out of fear of negative repercussions for their career or because the pressure is more subtle. The case study below, however, is taken from a New York Times article from February 17, 2017.

On university campuses, there were more published examples of censored works. A report entitled Threats to the Independence of Student Media, published in October 2016 by the American Association of University Professors and others, explains how “college and university officials threatened retaliation against students and [media] advisers not only for coverage critical of the administration but also for otherwise frivolous coverage that the administrators believed placed the institution in an unflattering light.” The document details particular cases, including when “California’s Southwest College mounted a campaign of intimidation and bullying of student journalists – including freezing the newspaper’s printing budget, cutting the adviser’s salary and even threatening staff members with arrest – as part of an effort to conceal high-level wrongdoing.” There are many other examples given in the report of censorship and intimidation on campus, and of media advisers who have lost their jobs or been demoted as a result of not exercising enough censorship.

CASE STUDY: RICK CASEY

Rick Casey is the host of a show called Texas Week for San Antonio television station KLRM. At the end of every show he presents a short commentary. On this occasion, Republican representative from Texas, Lamar Smith, was on his agenda for giving a speech on January 24, 2017, about the unfair way he believed the media covered Trump. Smith suggested the only way of getting the truth was from the president himself. Casey was so outraged that he ended his commentary: “Smith’s proposal is quite innovative for America. We’ve never really tried getting all our news from our top elected official. It has been tried elsewhere, however. North Korea comes to mind.” Some 40 minutes before the show, the president of the station, Arthur Rojas Emerson, called Casey to tell him the commentary had been pulled. Emerson said he was worried that the commentary could affect the financing of the station, which is publicly funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It was also the case, as The New York Times reported, that Emerson had left journalism for several years to work in advertising and Smith had been a client. After the affair was publicized in a local newspaper column, another prominent local journalist took Casey’s censored commentary up with the PBS board and Emerson finally agreed to run the clip. He admitted to the Times it was a “mistake”, but he only had 20 minutes to make a decision. Casey is 70 years old and said that he was more ready to push back because of his age. He said he didn’t know whether he would have acted differently at 45, when it could have affected his career.

Blocked access

Blocking access to events, places and – more crucially – information is a way of government, lawmakers and others preventing journalists in the USA from covering their activities.

“Mapping Media Freedom has documented a growing list of incidents from across Europe and neighboring countries where journalists have been barred from reporting in the public interest. Though this survey looked at a small number of cases in the context of the American media market, we expect there were many more cases during the same period that were not reported by the media or located by our researchers,” Mapping Media Freedom’s Machlin said.

Reporters have recently been blocked from covering the airport protests over the travel ban in January 2017. Time journalist Charlotte Alter tweeted early on January 28, 2017, that reporters were asked to move from terminal 4 of JFK airport in New York because it was a “private space”.

Later that same day, the Council on American-Islamic relations barred a Breitbart News reporter, Neil Munro, from one of its press conferences where it criticized the travel ban.

On January 10, 2017, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert (R) prevented a photojournalist from taking pictures of protesters during attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearings. Back in his home state of Texas in January, at about the same time, the Senate ruled to stop journalists wandering the floor and doing interviews. This was justified in the name of order and propriety but is seen by Texan reporters as a way of blocking access to local politicians.

On October 11, 2016, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D) banned Kenneth Burns, a WYPR radio reporter, from her weekly press briefings based on allegations of “verbally and physically threatening behavior,” because she did not like his aggressive questioning at her small regular meetings with the press.

On January 12, 2017, The New York Times petitioned the New York State Executive Department for the right to see public records relating to a billion-dollar development scandal in Buffalo. The newspaper accused New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s (D) office of repeatedly stonewalling attempts to see the documents relating to a lobbyist and one of his aides.

Courthouse News Service has documented the challenges they have encountered getting  information from court clerks about the scheduling of civil cases, including multi-million dollar lawsuits. The news service won a First Amendment case against the clerk in Manhattan’s state court in mid-December 2016, which granted them access to newly filed civil cases.

Press organizations were banned and their accreditation canceled arbitrarily

The service also launched a First Amendment case in Santa Ana, California, on January 24, 2017, against a similar policy brought in by Orange County’s county court clerk.

“Having access to this information is important for journalists, because without knowing what cases are being scheduled, they cannot cover them. And without general access, plaintiff’s lawyers are then able to leak cases to friendly news outlets,” Machlin said.

In Wyoming, the highway patrol records office said it was charging local newspaper, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, $1,800 to fulfill a public records request put in on October 31, 2016, concerning state troopers deployed to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

“Imposing expensive fees to fulfill public records requests can deter investigative journalism, especially for publications already struggling for funding in a shifting media landscape,” Machlin said.

Reporters have been prevented from accessing information held by public bodies that relate to President Trump. On January 31, 2017, Newsweek national security correspondent Jeffrey Stein filed a federal complaint because he was not allowed to see documents that detail the process by which Trump aides are vetted. Stein argued, for example, that three of Trump’s children and Rex Tillerson, the new US Secretary of State, had extensive business ties to foreign nations that normally would raise clearance alarms. Stein explained that these requests sought “all records, including emails, about any steps taken to investigate or authorise (or discussions about potentially investigating or authorising) [15 individuals] for access to classified information.”

Other journalists reported they were not allowed to examine documents that Trump piled up on a table at a widely publicized press conference on January 11. Trump said the papers detailed how he was divesting himself from his business interests.

Blocked from Trump’s campaign and White House briefings

During the presidential election campaign, numerous press organizations were banned and their accreditation cancelled arbitrarily. Targeted organizations included Politico, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, Univision and the Des Moines Register. In June 2016, the Washington Post had its credentials canceled. Trump accused the Post of being “dishonest” and “phony” after the newspaper published an article critical of Trump’s comments about shootings at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Trump declared The New York Times coverage of him “very dishonest” at a campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio, on August 1, 2016 and suggested he could take away their accreditation too.

By September 7, 2016, Trump and his team changed their tactics and lifted the ban on news organizations attending his rallies. However, this meant reporters attending could be penned and harangued by the crowds.

Since Trump won the election, CNN, in particular, has been targeted by the administration and questions from the network’s reporters have been refused at press conferences. In a further escalation of these tactics, an off-camera press conference on February 24, 2017, organized by press secretary Sean Spicer, was held without outlets such as The New York Times, Politico, CNN, BuzzFeed and the BBC. This exclusion of a good proportion of the media came despite Spicer’s previous assurances to White House journalists that bans, such as those imposed during the Trump campaign, would not happen once Trump was in the White House.

“Picking media outlets friendly to the country’s government is a tactic often deployed in illiberal democracies or by political parties on the far-right, like France’s Front National or Germany’s AfD. In the context of Mapping Media Freedom, the Trump administration and staffers have repeatedly and routinely threatened press freedom before and after the election,” Machlin said.

Intimidation

Intimidation is probably the most widely reported form of violation against press and media freedom. It takes various forms of offline and online harassment, including defamation, psychological abuse and sexual harassment.

“As we have seen increasingly in Europe, groundless, derogatory and corrosive comments by a country’s leaders – specifically in Hungary, Russia and the Balkans – have a tendency to permeate into law enforcement and local administrations, and undermine trust in media coverage among the general public. In addition, the use of pro-government media outlets to target journalists further undermines press freedom in some European countries. Though it remains to be seen whether this trend will continue at an alarming rate in the United States, it is certainly something for press freedom organizations to be alert to,” Index’s Patry said.

Much of the most prominent intimidation has come from both Trump and his aides during the presidential campaign, after his election and after his inauguration. This intimidation and harassment has also been mirrored by people who appear to be his supporters.

CASE STUDY: ALTERNATIVE FACTS

The argument over the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration dominated the first few days of Trump’s presidency. On a visit to the CIA headquarters on his first full day in office, he called journalists “the most dishonest people on earth” for saying that he had attacked the agency during his campaign. He also derided media reports, which showed far fewer attendees at his inauguration ceremony than the 1.5 million he claimed. Sean Spicer later held his first press conference in the briefing room of the West Wing, where he said that news organizations had deliberately under-estimated the size of the crowd, which was allegedly “the largest in history”, in order to sow disarray when Trump was trying to unify the country. Spicer threatened the media by saying the new administration would “hold the press accountable”. Kellyanne Conway appeared on the media the next day to say that Sean Spicer wasn’t lying when he claimed that Trump’s inauguration drew the largest crowd in history. Rather, he was presenting “alternative facts”.

Trump and supporters before the election

During Trump’s election campaign, journalists were routinely jeered and intimidated.

His campaign rallies frequently became places where the media and journalists in general were accused of being part of a broad conspiracy against him and his supporters. During a weekend in mid-August 2016 when his poll numbers were dropping, Trump went on the offensive against media bias. On Friday August 12, at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump called journalists the “lowest form of humanity”. At a rally the following day in Fairfield, Connecticut, he declared: “I am not running against crooked Hillary Clinton, I’m running against the crooked media.” On Sunday August 14, he issued a series of tweets including claims that the biased media was affecting his poll ratings and that The New York Times wrote fiction.

In October 2016, when reporters uncovered stories about Trump’s abusive behavior towards women, his public attacks on the “mainstream media” intensified.

At one large rally of 15,000 supporters in Cincinnati, Ohio on October 14, Trump claimed that Hillary Clinton and her campaign “control the mainstream media” and use it “quite viciously”. The New York Times described how the organizers penned in journalists behind metal barriers at the same rally and then got the crowd to boo, insult and flip middle fingers at them.

Trump’s public personal attacks on journalists were virulent during the same period. He singled out Katy Tur, a reporter for NBC, at a November 2 rally in front of a crowd of 4,000 people. He blamed her for under-reporting the size of the crowd. It was the third time he had intimidated her at one of his rallies.

CASE STUDY: BERATING THE PRESS

Even before Trump was inaugurated, his supporters berated the press. Texas Congressman Randy Weber (R) tweeted on January 12 that Jim Acosta, CNN’s White House correspondent, should be fired and prohibited from press conferences. Kellyanne Conway also said in an interview on January 29 that journalists who showed bias against Trump during the campaign should be fired.

Trump after he won the presidency

After Trump’s election, intimidation of the media changed, in part because he was making the comments personally, often through Twitter, while holding the office of president. Trump devoted a whole press conference on February 17 to berating the media as “the enemy of the people”, a phrase news organizations reported is more commonly associated with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and other dictators throughout history. Since his election, Trump’s official spokespeople, most notably Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway, have been brought more prominently into the frame. Both have repeatedly attacked journalists and defended lies told by the president.  Conway has gone so far as to say in an interview with Fox News on January 27, 2017, that it was “dangerous for democracy” for journalists to accuse Donald Trump of lying.

Other Trump administration staffers have also threatened journalists. In February 2017, reporter April Ryan accused Trump staffer Omarosa Manigault of physically intimidating her. Ryan, a onetime friend of Manigault’s, also said the communications official made verbal threats, including the assertion that Ryan was among several journalists on whom Trump officials had collected “dossiers of negative information”.

“Collecting ‘dossiers’ about journalists is the type of tactic practiced in countries like Azerbaijan, which routinely targets anyone trying to hold the regime to account. The US executive branch should not be seeking to emulate the behaviors of some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes,” Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg said.

“Alternative facts”, or the more frequently used “fake news”, have been the catchphrases of the Trump administration to describe news stories they do not like, or that challenge statements they have made. Trump also uses the phrase generally to discredit news organizations and claim they never report the truth. In one instance, Trump accused CNN on Twitter of cutting off Senator Bernie Sanders (D) because he was exposing the fact they reported fake news. Sanders was in fact doing the opposite, joking about Trump’s tendency to dismiss any negative reports as “fake news”.

In a series of tweets from his personal account, Trump has called some of the USA’s major news organizations “failing” and purveyors of “fake news”, including the Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC news, CNN and ABC.

The other way that Trump and people speaking on his behalf have tried to intimidate the media is to call for the sacking of individual journalists. The most prominent calls have come from members of congress and Trump aides.

Online harassment

Online harassment is a growing problem for journalists. On December 5, 2016, Fox News host Megyn Kelly accused the president’s social media director Dan Scavino of being directly responsible for stirring up the nastier elements of the internet to harass and intimidate. Kelly said that she received death threats and has had to employ armed security.

On January 31, Rosa Brooks, a professor of law at Georgetown University, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine about threats Trump poses to the US Constitution, and what would happen if he arbitrarily decided to carry out some form of military action. Two days later she was accused by Trump-friendly Infowars of inciting a military coup. Although Brooks said that she had concerns about the way executive power was used under Obama, the intimidation she has received – including death threats – for suggesting the dangers under Trump, went far beyond anything that had happened before. She wrote: “Here’s the other thing that’s different now: The alt-right has long occupied the internet’s darker corners, but with the elevation of Bannon to the Trump White House and National Security Council, it’s now occupying the White House itself.”

Some of the most virulent harassment cases have been against conservatives like Kelly who did not support Trump. On October 26, 2016, David French, who writes for the conservative publication National Review, told National Public Radio program Fresh Air how he was targeted. He wrote an article about the alt-right movement being white nationalist in its tone and tenor and found himself and his wife bombarded with hateful tweets and messages, including an image of his seven-year-old child, who was adopted from Ethiopia, in a gas chamber. He said it was his linking of Trump and the alt-right that specifically led to his family being subjected to anti-Semitic, racist and pornographic abuse.

French received anti-Semitic abuse despite not being Jewish. The abuse against Jewish journalists has been more systematic.

CASE STUDY: ANTI-SEMITISM

In October 2016, the Anti-Defamation League published a report entitled The Anti-Semitic Targeting of Journalists During the 2016 Presidential Campaign. One of its key findings was that 800 journalists received anti-Semitic tweets with an estimated reach of 45 million. The top 10 most targeted journalists (all of whom were Jewish) received 83% of those anti-Semitic tweets. The report found the abuse got worse as the presidential campaign intensified in the period between January and July 2016. The words most frequently used in anti-Semitic tweets directed at journalists included “kike”, “Israel” and “Zionist”. A majority of tweets (60%) were in reply to tweets by journalists. Writer and former Breitbart reporter Ben Shapiro, who was on the receiving end of vast amounts of abuse for launching the #NeverTrump campaign, told ADL: “It’s amazing what’s been unleashed. I honestly didn’t realize they were out there. It’s every day, every single day.” Despite Shapiro’s efforts to shield his family from the abuse, his wife and child were targeted as well. “When my child was born there were lots of anti-Semitic responses talking about cockroaches.”

Though our review of incidents represents just a short period of time, it points to areas that journalists and law enforcement, as well as the country’s political establishment, need to improve

  • Frontline police services – as well as journalists – should be clear on the rights of protesters and those covering demonstrations, rallies and other public events and receive regular training in this area. It is also vital that journalists are aware of these rights when covering such events.
  • Police forces must adhere to Freedom of Information laws. All levels of government should work to minimize fees associated with FOI requests.
  • Customs and Border Protection officials should respect the rights of journalists to protect confidential information and cease immediately the invasive examination of people’s online activity at the border.
  • States need to enact strong shield laws to protect journalists from having to reveal sources. This is vital especially in cases involving whistleblowing in the public interest.
  • State lawmakers need to ensure that that new or revised legislation does not encroach on the First Amendment rights of journalists. Where necessary, laws should have a public interest clause that could be used by journalists.
  • Harassment and crimes against journalists that go beyond protections offered by the First Amendment – whether online or off – must be investigated and prosecuted vigorously to prevent the establishment of a culture of impunity.

 

#IndexAwards2010: Mahsa Vahdat, Freemuse Award for Music

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Since winning the Freemuse Award for Music in 2010, Mahsa Vahdat has continued to use her music to fight for freedom of expression for the women of Iran.  Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, female solo vocalists are permitted to perform only for female audiences; they cannot perform for men except when part of a chorus as conservative clerics say women’s voices have the power to trigger immorality and arousal.

But Vahdat learned music as a child and went on to study it at university in Tehran.  She was encouraged to perform there despite the strict new rules of the Islamic Revolution.  Not only does she sing but she also plays the piano and the setar, a Persian string instrument that’s a member of the lute family.  Now she has taken that freedom to the Iranian diaspora and world music circles across the globe, performing at international venues where her voice is not discriminated against on the basis of her gender.  She refers back to the classical Iranian poets – Rumi, Khayyam and Hafez – as well as using contemporary poetry.

Vahdat’s commitment to fight for her right to sing often meets obstacles; in 2011 she gave a concert at the residence of the Italian embassy in Tehran despite the attempts of the government security forces to stop guests from entering the building.  But she has built a following around the world, especially in Norway after touring schools there and presenting a positive, musical image of Iran.  In 2011 she released the album Twinklings of Hope with her sister to critical acclaim and has gone on to collaborate with other performers such as Mighty Sam McClain.

Despite the conservatism of her homeland she still teaches Persian singing in Tehran, ensuring that the tradition of both folk music and that of the female artist stays alive. She continues to be an ambassador for the Freemuse Organization which advocates freedom of expression for musicians and composers across the world.

Sophia Smith-Galer is a member of Index on Censorship’s Youth Advisory Board. She is an MA student studying Broadcast Journalism at City University in London.  She studied Spanish and Arabic previously at Durham University.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”85476″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2016/11/awards-2017/”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]

Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards

Seventeen years of celebrating the courage and creativity of some of the world’s greatest journalists, artists, campaigners and digital activists

2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1492506354793-87f74769-0713-9″ taxonomies=”2562, 7359″][/vc_column][/vc_row]

#IndexAwards2017: Here’s what you need to know

Freedom of Expression Awards

Each year, the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards gala honours courageous champions who fight for free speech around the world.

Drawn from more than 400 crowdsourced nominations, this year’s nominees include artists, journalists, campaigners and digital activists tackling censorship and fighting for freedom of expression. Many of the 16 shortlisted are regularly targeted by authorities or by criminal and extremist groups for their work: some face regular death threats, others criminal prosecution.

The gala takes place Wednesday 19 April at the Unicorn Theatre in London and will be hosted by comedian, actor and writer Katy Brand. If you aren’t lucky enough to be attending, you can catch the night’s events by tuning into coverage and a live Periscope stream @IndexCensorship beginning at 7:30PM BST.

We will be live tweeting throughout the evening on @IndexCensorship. Get involved in the conversation using the hashtag #IndexAwards2017.

Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards nominees 2017

Arts

 

Luaty Beirão, Angola

Rapper Luaty Beirão, also known as Ikonoklasta, has been instrumental in showing the world the hidden face of Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos’s rule. For his activism Beirão has been beaten up, had drugs planted on him and, in June 2015, was arrested alongside 14 other people planning to attend a meeting to discuss a book on non-violent resistance. Since being released in 2016, Beirão has been undeterred attempting to stage concerts that the authorities have refused to license and publishing a book about his captivity entitled “I Was Freer Then”, claiming “I would rather be in jail than in a state of fake freedom where I have to self-censor”.

Rebel Pepper, China

Wang Liming, better known under the pseudonym Rebel Pepper, is one of China’s most notorious political cartoonists. For satirising Chinese Premier Xi Jinping and lampooning the ruling Communist Party, Rebel Pepper has been repeatedly persecuted. In 2014, he was forced to remain in Japan, where he was on holiday, after serious threats against him were posted on government-sanctioned forums. The Chinese state has since disconnected him from his fan base by repeatedly deleting his social media accounts, he alleges his conversations with friends and family are under state surveillance, and self-imposed exile has made him isolated, bringing significant financial struggles. Nonetheless, Rebel Pepper keeps drawing, ferociously criticising the Chinese regime.

Fahmi Reza, Malaysia

On 30 January 2016, Malaysian graphic designer Fahmi Reza posted an image online of Prime Minister Najib Razak in evil clown make-up. From T-shirts to protest placards, and graffiti on streets to a sizeable public sticker campaign, the image and its accompanying anti-sedition law slogan #KitaSemuaPenghasut (“we are all seditious”) rapidly evolved into a powerful symbol of resistance against a government seen as increasingly corrupt and authoritarian. Despite the authorities’ attempts to silence Reza, who was banned from travel and has since been detained and charged on two separate counts under Malaysia’s Communications and Multimedia Act, he has refused to back down.

Two-tailed Dog Party, Hungary

A group of satirists and pranksters who parody political discourse in Hungary with artistic stunts and creative campaigns, the Two-tailed Dog Party have become a vital alternative voice following the rise of the national conservative government led by Viktor Orban. When Orban introduced a national consultation on immigration and terrorism in 2015, and plastered cities with anti-immigrant billboards, the party launched their own mock questionnaires and a popular satirical billboard campaign denouncing the government’s fear-mongering tactics. Relentlessly attempting to reinvigorate public debate and draw attention to under-covered or taboo topics, the party’s efforts include recently painting broken pavement to draw attention to a lack of public funding.

Campaigning

Arcoiris, Honduras

Established in 2003, LGBT organisation Arcoiris, meaning ‘rainbow’, works on all levels of Honduran society to advance LGBT rights. Honduras has seen an explosion in levels of homophobic violence since a military coup in 2009. Working against this tide, Arcoiris provide support to LGBT victims of violence, run awareness initiatives, promote HIV prevention programmes and directly lobby the Honduran government and police force. From public marches to alternative awards ceremonies, their tactics are diverse and often inventive. Between June 2015 and March 2016, six members of Arcoiris were killed for this work. Many others have faced intimidation, harassment and physical attacks. Some have had to leave the country because of threats they were receiving.

Breaking the Silence, Israel

Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organisation consisting of ex-Israeli military conscripts, aims to collect and share testimonies about the realities of military operations in the Occupied Territories. Since 2004, the group has collected over 1,000 (mainly anonymous) statements from Israelis who have served their military duty in the West Bank and Gaza. For publishing these frank accounts the organisation has repeatedly come under fire from the Israeli government. In 2016 the pressure on the organisation became particularly pointed and personal, with state-sponsored legal challenges, denunciations from the Israeli cabinet, physical attacks on staff members and damages to property. Led by Israeli politicians including the prime minister, and defence minister, there have been persistent attempts to force the organisation to identify a soldier whose anonymous testimony was part of a publication raising suspicions of war crimes in Gaza. Losing the case would set a precedent that would make it almost impossible for Breaking the Silence to operate in the future. The government has also recently  enacted a law that would bar the organisation’s widely acclaimed high school education programme.

Ildar Dadin, Russia

A Russian opposition and LGBT rights activist, Ildar Dadin was the first, and remains the only, person to be convicted under a notorious 2014 public assembly law. Aimed at punishing anyone who breaks strict rules on protest, the law was enacted to silence dissent after a wave of demonstrations following Putin’s last election victory. Dadin’s crime was to stage a series of one-man pickets, often standing silently with a billboard, attempting to duck the cynical law and push for free expression. For his solo enterprise, Dadin was arrested and sentenced to three years imprisonment in December 2015. In November 2016, website Meduza published a letter smuggled from Dadin to his wife, exposing torture he claimed he was suffering alongside fellow prisoners.  The letter, a brave move for a serving prisoner, was widely reported. A government investigation was prompted, and Dadin was transferred – against his will – to an undisclosed new location. A wave of public protest led to Dadin’s new location in a Siberian prison colony being revealed in January 2017. In February 2017, Russia’s constitutional and Supreme Courts suddenly quashed Dadin’s conviction, ruling he should be released and afforded opportunity for rehabilitation.

Maati Monjib, Morocco

A well-known academic who teaches African studies and political history at the University of Rabat since returning from exile, Maati Monjib co-founded Freedom Now, a coalition of Moroccan human rights defenders who seek to promote the rights of Moroccan activists and journalists in a country ranked 131 out of 180 on the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. His work campaigning for press freedom – including teaching investigative journalism workshops and using of a smartphone app called Story Maker designed to support citizen journalism – has made him a target for the authorities who insist that this work is the exclusive domain of state police. For his persistent efforts, Monjib is currently on trial for “undermining state security” and “receiving foreign funds.”

Digital Activism

Jensiat, Iran

Despite growing public knowledge of global digital surveillance capabilities and practices, it has often proved hard to attract mainstream public interest in the issue. This continues to be the case in Iran where even with widespread VPN usage, there is little real awareness of digital security threats. With public sexual health awareness equally low, the three people behind Jensiat, an online graphic novel, saw an an opportunity to marry these challenges. Dealing with issues linked to sexuality and cyber security in a way that any Iranian can easily relate to, the webcomic also offers direct access to verified digital security resources. Launched in March 2016, Jensiat has had around 1.2 million unique readers and was rapidly censored by the Iranian government.

Bill Marczak, United States

A schoolboy resident of Bahrain and PhD candidate in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, Bill Marczak co-founded Bahrain Watch in 2013. Seeking to promote effective, accountable and transparent governance, Bahrain Watch works by launching investigations and running campaigns in direct response to social media posts coming from activists on the front line. In this context, Marczak’s personal research has proved highly effective, often identifying new surveillance technologies and targeting new types of information controls that governments are employing to exert control online, both in Bahrain and across the region. In 2016 Marczak investigated several government attempts to track dissidents and journalists, notably identifying a previously unknown weakness in iPhones that had global ramifications.

#ThisFlag and Evan Mawarire, Zimbabwe

In May 2016, Baptist pastor Evan Mawarire unwittingly began the most important protest movement in Zimbabwe’s recent history when he posted a video of himself draped in the Zimbabwean flag, expressing his frustration at the state of the nation. A subsequent series of YouTube videos and the hashtag Mawarire used, #ThisFlag, went viral, sparking protests and a boycott called by Mawarire, which he estimates was attended by over eight million people. A scale of public protest previously inconceivable, the impact was so strong that private possession of Zimbabwe’s national flag has since been banned. The pastor temporarily left the country following death threats and was arrested in early February as he returned to his homeland.

Turkey Blocks, Turkey

In a country marked by increasing authoritarianism, a strident crackdown on press and social media as well as numerous human rights violations, Turkish-British technologist Alp Toker brought together a small team to investigate internet restrictions. Using Raspberry Pi technology they built an open source tool able to reliably monitor and report both internet shut downs and power blackouts in real time. Using their tool, Turkey Blocks have since broken news of 14 mass-censorship incidents during several politically significant events in 2016. The tool has proved so successful that it has begun to be implemented elsewhere globally.

Journalism

Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea/Australia

Iranian Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani fled the city of Ilam in Iran in May 2013 after the police raided the Kurdish cultural heritage magazine he had co-founded, arresting 11 of his colleagues. He travelled to Australia by boat, intending to claim asylum, but less than a month after arriving he was forcibly relocated to a “refugee processing centre” in Papua New Guinea that had been newly opened. Imprisoned alongside nearly 1000 men who have been ordered to claim asylum in Papua New Guinea or return home, Boochani has been passionately documenting their life in detention ever since. Publicly advertised by the Australian Government as a refugee deterrent, life in the detention centre is harsh. For the first 2 years, Boochani wrote under a pseudonym. Until 2016 he circumvented a ban on mobile phones by trading personal items including his shoes with local residents. And while outside journalists are barred, Boochani has refused to be silent, writing numerous stories via Whatsapp and even shooting a feature film with his phone.

Daptar, Dagestan, Russia

In a Russian republic marked by a clash between the rule of law, the weight of traditions, and the growing influence of Islamic fundamentalism, Daptar, a website run by journalists Zakir Magomedov and Svetlana Anokhina, writes about issues affecting women, which are little reported on by other local media.  Meaning “diary”, Daptar seeks to promote debate and in 2016 they ran a landmark story about female genital mutilation in Dagestan, which broke the silence surrounding that practice and began a regional and national conversation about FGM. The small team of journalists, working alongside a volunteer lawyer and psychologist, also tries to provide help to the women they are in touch with.

KRIK, Serbia

Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (KRIK) is a new independent investigative website which was founded by a team of young Serbian journalists intent on exposing organised crime and extortion in their country which is ranked as having widespread corruption by Transparency International. In their first year they have published several high-impact investigations, including forcing Serbia’s prime minister to admit that senior officials had been behind nocturnal demolitions in a Belgrade neighbourhood and revealing meetings between drug barons, the ministry of police and the minister of foreign affairs. KRIK have repeatedly come under attack online and offline for their work –threatened and allegedly under surveillance by state officials, defamed in the pages of local tabloids, and suffering abuse including numerous death threats on social media.

Maldives Independent, Maldives

Website Maldives Independent, which provides news in English, is one of the few remaining independent media outlets in a country that ranks 112 out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. In August 2016 the Maldives passed a law criminalising defamation and empowering the state to impose heavy fines and shut down media outlets for “defamatory” content. In September, Maldives Independent’s office was violently attacked and later raided by the police, after the release of an Al Jazeera documentary exposing government corruption that contained interviews with editor Zaheena Rasheed, who had to flee for her safety. Despite the pressure, the outlet continues to hold the government to account.

Flemming Rose: Censorship and self-censorship in the 21st century

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I want to begin with a story that took place not long before the fall of the Soviet Union. It illustrates what happens when an oppressive regime, and its institutions, loses its monopoly and control of information.

A deputy chairman and general of the KGB had invited a private citizen and acquaintance to his office on Lubyanka Square in central Moscow. The private citizen was working in the newly created private sector as an communications officer.

In the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union a deputy chairman of KGB, the secret police, was one of the best informed people in the country.

The KGB controlled what information should be made available to the public, they were in charge of surveillance of the population and reported back to the party leadership about conversations in lines for vodka, about dissidents, about foreigners, about anything. The KGB had special access to information that no one else was allowed to read, listen to or watch.

The KGB controlled the so called special archives, Spetskhrany, where forbidden books were hidden out of the public’s sight and Soviet citizens needed special permission to access them.

KGB-generals and high ranking party officials read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other banned works of literature. They studied Russian emigre writers and the emigrant press that ordinary citizens were not allowed to read or put on their book shelves. If they did, they risked ending up in a labor camp in Siberia.

All that started to change with Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policy during the second half of the 1980s. The regime’s loosening grip on society, the opening up of the country to alternative ideas and people from other parts of the world, the challenging of Soviet taboos and official ideology played a crucial role in the demise of the USSR.

In this process the KGB and other repressive institutions lost their status as the ultimate gatekeepers of information and in the end they, therefore, lost power.

As I mentioned, the conversation between the KGB general and a private citizen who was an outsider to the regime but no dissident took place at the time of the unravelling of Soviet power. The private citizen, let’s call him Yura, was of course curious to find out why the KGB general wanted to talk to him. It turned out that the KGB general had just one question to this guest: “Yura, he said, could you please tell me what is going on in the country? I just don’t have a clue.”

For anyone with experience of the Soviet Union that was an astonishing question. A KGB general asking a private citizen about what was going on in the country was highly unusual. It revealed the changed relationship between power and information. It indicated that Soviet censorship had come to an end.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row equal_height=”yes” content_placement=”middle” el_class=”text_white” css=”.vc_custom_1489569355941{background-color: #6b6b6b !important;}”][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_custom_heading text=”Protect Media Freedom” use_theme_fonts=”yes” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fdefend-media-freedom-donate-index%2F|||”][vc_column_text]

Support Index on Censorship

We monitor threats to press freedom, produce an award-winning magazine and publish work by censored writers.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″ css=”.vc_custom_1489569293052{background-image: url(https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/newspapers.jpg?id=50885) !important;}”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]This is being said as a preface to a few observations about dictatorships, power and censorship.

Every dictatorship is based on the control and manipulation of information. That’s why censorship is crucial to any oppressive regime. It cannot survive without it. Censorship is by definition closely connected with power and the exercising of it.

To be more specific: Censorship is an instrument to assist in the attainment, preservation or continuance of somebody’s power, whether exercised by an individual, an institution or a state. It is – as Michael Scammell, one of the founders of Index on Censorship has put it – “the extension of physical power into the realm of the mind and the spirit”. (1)

With the redistribution of power from state to non-state actors – from Google and Facebook to ISIS and thousands of NGOs and social movements around the world and with new ways and discourses to silence unwelcome expression not always associated with state power it makes sense to introduce a broader definition of censorship – a definition that doesn’t focus exclusively on the state and the use of hard power to silence speech.

I think this is of importance in the context of Censorship Awareness Week and our attempt to understand and deconstruct the more subtle mechanisms of what Tom Cushman called “prevention of the mind”. This goes for states, institutions and individuals.

We live in a world of cognitive biases that from time to time operates as censors. They close our mind and prevent us from seeing complexities and different sides of a problem. Be it confirmation bias, blind spot bias, courtesy bias, hindsight bias, outcome bias, social biases, ingroup bias, stereotyping and so on and so forth or the bias of a public opinion – remember John Stuart Mill’s warning against the Tyranny of public opinion?

A definition of censorship may go like this:

“Censorship describes a variety of processes… formal and informal, overt and covert, conscious and unconscious, by which restrictions are imposed on the collection, display, dissemination, and exchange of information, opinions, ideas and imaginative expression.” (2)

In the following I will focus on the history of censorship in Europe in order to understand one of its fundamental premises. Then I’ll take a look at the internet and the way governments try to control it with increasing success. I will pay special attention to China, because it is the most powerful country trying to undermine the internet’s libertarian and transnational core. Finally, I will return to Europe and the US and ask what can be done to counter censorship and self-censorship in our part of the world.

Censorship is a loaded word. It triggers negative associations in most people in spite of the fact that everybody, people and governments, support it and practise from time to time and in one form or another.

It’s a bit like the debate about freedom of speech and its limits. People say I am in favor of free speech, but… until nothing is left of free speech.

When it comes to censorship they say: I am against censorship, but… –  and then it goes: We need to shut down offensive speech, we need to protect the country, we need to fight terrorism, we need to protect the truth or the public order or religious and national symbols or certain feelings or public morals and social cohesion.

The list goes on and on depending on time and place.

Censorship in Europe was first and foremost connected to the church. The church exercised strict control over the dissemination and interpretation of the holy scriptures. The church and the state were for centuries so close that what was seen as injurious to the church was automatically regarded as injurious to the state.

The church’s authority to act as censor started to erode as a result of the Reformation when the heresy of choice was introduced. It became impossible to maintain that there were no possible alternatives to the Roman way.

The impact of the Reformation in the aftermath of the invention of the printing press proved to be decisive in determining a changing attitude to censorship. It lead to a conceptual separation of words and deeds, of expression and action as Michael Scammell says in his seminal essay on censorship and its history. I quote:

“Up to the 17th century, action and expression, had been held to be virtually one where religious heresy and political crimes were concerned. To advocate on orthodox or dissenting religious views was tantamount to a physical attack on church members or property, while to advocate political change or express hostility to the prevailing order was ‘sedition’ and equivalent to treason.

“The consequence of this breakthrough was that a ruling power or government might be expected to take measures against actions hostile to its existence, but it should tolerate the expression of hostile opinions.” (3)

In other words the distinction between words and deeds is fundamental to upholding freedom of speech. It paved the way for a doctrine of religious tolerance and religious freedom and later for freedom of expression. The distinction serves as a line separating democracy from dictatorship, a free society from an unfree society.  The former does not treat words as if they were actions, the latter does. That’s why dissidents end up in jail for word crimes in a dictatorship while they sit in parliament or become presidents in democracies. Think of Vaclav Havel or Andrei Sakharov.

I believe that it is of the utmost importance to keep this fundamental distinction in mind in today’s world, where so many people are eager to equalise words with deeds insisting that words can be as harmful as actual physical violence and therefore we have to criminalise them. We don’t want to return to the Middle Ages.

Today censorship is regarded as abnormal and as an emergency measure and therefore it tends to hide when it becomes the norm and institutionalised. If censorship is being exercised openly governments may give it another name in order to provide it with a cover of decency or to present it as a necessary measure to counter a domestic or foreign threat.

The dream of any free speech activist would be to see the end of censorship. With the introduction of the internet it was a widespread assumption that it would be impossible to exercise censorship as before. US President Bill Clinton in 2000 laughed at the possibility that the internet could be controlled.

In 1996, internet pioneer John Parry Barlow, wrote a Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. It said:

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.” (4)

Governments, Barlow claimed, did not “possess any methods of enforcement that people living in cyberspace had to have to fear.”

As late as 2011 one of the leaders of the uprising against the Mubarak government in Egypt said: “It you want to liberate a people, give it the internet.”

Today things look different and you may as well say:

“If you want to empower the government and provide it with tools to put you under surveillance and limit your freedom, give it the internet and digital technology.”

The internet is seen by governments as both a threat and a means of control.

Today John Parry Barlow’s declaration from 20 years ago sounds utopian. Back then a lot of people hoped that the internet once and for all would do away with censorship.

It didn’t happen. Around the world new systems of control are taking hold. They are stifling the global conversation and repression and violence against journalists are at record levels. Today governments are increasingly exercising their sovereignty on the internet, fencing it in through the establishment of national borders and enforcing their own laws and limitations.

Just to give you one example showing how the internet and the digital technology has been transformed from a tool of liberation into to a tool of repression:

At the time of demonstrations in Iran in 2009 security agents tortured journalists and activists in order to get passwords to their social media and e-mail accounts, and then combed through their networks and arrested their sources and colleagues. (5)

In this way the internet is repeating developments that took place after the invention of other new technologies from the printing press in the 15th century to radio and television in the 20th century. Sooner or later governments find ways to control the new technology to their own advantage.

The Democrators (6)

We don’t have that many hard core dictatorship in the world today. The director of the New York based Committee to Protect Journalists Joel Simon labels the new autocrats “democrators”.

They prefer to rule by manipulation, not by force. Dictators impose their will. Democrators govern with the support of the majority. Dictators control information, democrators manage it. Democrators win elections, dictators denounce elections as a key to legitimate government.

Democrators span the globe and the ideological spectrum.

The two most successful democrators are Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

They tolerate private media but manage critical expression through diverse measures such as national security prosecutions, punitive tax audits, manipulation of government advertising, and seemingly reasonable content restrictions like prohibitions on hate speech, extremism or support of terrorism – restrictions that liberal democracies also have though they apply them with more restraint and checks. When democrators like Erdogan and Putin do crackdown on media, they cast their efforts as consistent with international law.

China is a league of itself (7). It represents the most formidable attempt to show that a powerful determined state can still control the flow of information, ideas and images across and within its frontiers.

The Chinese Party-state claims the right to control all expression within its frontiers on three grounds.

First, it refers to the idea of information sovereignty, second, it insists that is has a civilisational difference that justifies control of the internet so that it doesn’t come under the influence of non-Chinese values and finally the communist party claims that it knows best what is good for the people.

China is the country with the most internet-users in the world, 642 million people or 22 percent of all users in the world and the fastest-growing connected population is also the world’s most ambitious censor. An estimated 2 million censors police the internet and the activities of users, among them 300,000 party members who are paid to push the party line online.

Nevertheless, 76 percent of Chinese questioned in a poll in 2014 said they felt free from government surveillance. Thanks to the internet the Chinese government has been able to deploy censorship strategies that are subtle and harder for the public to see. They have combined traditional oppression with more sophisticated way of exercising censorship. It’s been called “networked authoritarianism”.

The Great Firewall of China – a complex system of internet filtering and blocking and directing that allows the government to block hundreds of thousands of websites. The system works because all internet traffic in or out of China passes through only eight gateways. In cases of regional unrest the government can simply unplug the internet.

Censorship is being delegated to private companies.

China has created its own tech companies – Baidu instead of Google, RenRen instead of Facebook, Sina Weibo instead of Twitter – that makes it easier to control, filter and block the digital technology.

And China is building a global coalition to counter US dominance on the internet. This group of countries than involves Russia, Iran, Turkey and countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia are fighting on 2 fronts.

  •  They seek to internationalise internet governance by putting it under UN control.
  •  They seek to challenge international legal standards which define freedom of expression as a transnational right that is guaranteed regardless of frontiers as it says in the UN declaration of human rights.

To the Chinese leadership mass media is not a forum through which individuals can realise their right to freedom of expression; rather it is the means through which societies can advance their collective interest as defined by the country’s leadership. This is an understanding of the media that China shares with a lot of governments.

After having visited China I want to bring you back closer to our life and reality and say a few words about self-censorship.

Self-censorship is driven by fear. It is closely connected to censorship and intimidation of the public space. When people stop fearing for the consequences of what they say dictatorships fall. Fear is often a very legitimate feeling, but it comes at a price. A fear society doesn’t have to apply repressive laws because people themselves will internalise the limits of freedom that have been drawn by intimidators of one kind or another. Citizens will practice self-censorship so that there will no need to silence them. They will silence themselves.

Self-censorship is invisible. You will only learn about it if people are honest about their motivations for not saying one thing or the other out of fear. You cannot pass a law that protects people against fear. It’s extremely destructive for a society.

Writers and artists in repressive societies have to struggle with self-censorship but self-censorship is also a fact of life in democracies, though for other reasons. In the words of the Serbian writer Danilo Kis self-censorship is a process that involves an external pressure, political or social, that forces you to give up sovereignty over your work and let others decide what to say and not to say. This definition reveals the existential core of self-censorship.

Exercising self-censorship you abandon part of yourself to the censors. In an essay from 1986 on censorship and self-censorship Kis wrote:

“The fight against self-censorship is anonymous, lonely and without witnesses. It makes its subject feel humiliated and shameful for cooperating. It means that you read your own text with another person’s eyes. It’s a situation where you become your own judge, more suspicious and tougher than anybody else. (…) The self-appointed censor is the author’s alter ego, an alter ego that leans over the author’s shoulder and sticks his nose in the text. (…) It’s impossible to defeat this censor because he is like God – he knows everything and sees everything. He is the product of one’s own mind, of one’s own nightmares. This alter ego succeeds in undermining and corrupting even the strongest individuals that the external censorship hasn’t been able to destroy. Self-censorship allies itself with lying and spiritual corruption when we deny that it exists.” (8)

Censorship and self-censorship have become the preferred way to manage diversities of culture, religion and opinion in a world where more and more people are living in cities and having a life on line and therefore are becoming physical and virtual neighbors.

A lot of it is being done out of the most noble and honorable intentions – to protect minorities, to avoid offending religious sensibilities, to keep the social peace and so on and so forth.

Nevertheless I believe this is the wrong way because it makes it more difficult to understand one another. Silence rarely promotes a deeper understanding between human beings.

It also undermines what Jonathan Rauch has called the Liberal Science model (9), that is, that in a knowledge producing society there can be no final say and no personal authority when it comes to determining who has a right to say what, ask questions and challenge what is being said. No matter, whether the insistence on a final say or personal authority comes from fundamentalists or humanitarians or egalitarians.

Fundamentalists want to protect what they see as the indisputable truth, political or religious, while the humanitarians want to stop what they see as verbal violence and the egalitarians insist that some perspectives should have preferable treatment.

There is no way to advance knowledge peacefully and productively by adhering to principles advocated by humanitarians or egalitarians. Their principles undermine liberal science and ultimately peace and freedom. Knowledge cannot be had except where criticism is unfettered and doubt is never rebuked. The only way to decide who is right is through open-ended public checking of each by each, through criticism and questioning. This is the epistemological constitution of a liberal society.

I want to end by quoting the British historian Timothy Garton Ash who last year published a fine book on the principles of free and better speech in a globalised world. Garton Ash explains why free speech is so important to understand others and ourselves.

Timothy Garton Ash writes: “Over the last half century, human enterprise and innovation, from the jet plane to the smartphone, have created a world in which we all are becoming neighbours, but nowhere is it written, that we will be good neighbours.

“Central to this endeavour is free speech. Only with freedom of expression can I understand what it is to be you. Only with freedom of information can we control both public and private powers. Only by articulating our differences can we clearly see what they are, and why they are what they are.

“Openness about all kinds of human difference is as vital as civility. I cannot fully express myself – that is, my self – unless I identify my differences with others. We all notice differences and respond to them both consciously and unconsciously. Unless we explore these responses and feelings, we have no chance of digging down to the hidden biases of which we are not aware.

“If we ‘speak as we feel/not what we ought to say’, as Shakespeare puts it at the end of King Lear, we can learn from experience what is hurtful to others, and hence discover for ourselves what it takes to live together as neighbors.

“Rather than brushing our perceptions of human difference under the carpet, where they fester like rotten banana skins, we speak about them openly but civilly – as well as in such registers as art and humor.”

Flemming Rose is a Danish journalist, author and since 2010 foreign affairs editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Notes:

  1.  Michael Scammell, Censorship and its History: A Personal View; in Article 19’s Information, Freedom and Censorship – World Report 1988, edited by Kevin Boyle; London 1988.
  2.  Julian Petley, Censorship: A Beginner’s Guide, Oxford 2009.
  3.  Scammell.
  4.  Quoted in: Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World; London 2016.
  5.  Joel Simon, The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom; New York 2015
  6.  Simon.
  7.  On censorship in China see Garton Ash and Simon and Philip Bennett and Moises Naim, 21st-Century Censorship; in Columbia Review of Journalism; January/February 2015.
  8.  Danilo Kis, Censorship/Self-censorship; in Index on Censorship vol. 15/1, January 1986.
  9.  Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (expanded edition); Chicago 2013 (First edition, 1993).
  10. Garton Ash.

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