[vc_row full_width=”stretch_row_content_no_spaces” full_height=”yes” css_animation=”fadeIn” css=”.vc_custom_1531732086773{background: #ffffff url(https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/FinalBullshit-withBleed.jpg?id=101381) !important;}”][vc_column width=”1/6″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”Manipulating news and discrediting the media are techniques that have been used for more than a century. Originally published in the spring 2017 issue The Big Squeeze, Index’s global reporting team brief the public on how to watch out for tricks and spot inaccurate coverage. Below, Index on Censorship editor Rachael Jolley introduces the special feature” font_container=”tag:h2|text_align:left|color:%23000000″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/6″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
FICTIONAL ANGLES, SPIN, propaganda and attempts to discredit the media, there’s nothing new there. Scroll back to World War I and you’ll find propaganda cartoons satirising both sides who were facing each other in the trenches, and trying to pump up public support for the war effort. If US President Donald Trump is worried about the “unbalanced” satirical approach he is receiving from the comedy show Saturday Night Live, he should know he is following in the footsteps of Napoleon who worried about James Gillray’s caricatures of him as very short, while the vertically challenged French President Nicolas Sarkozy feared the pen of Le Monde’s cartoonist Plantu.
When Trump cries “fake news” at coverage he doesn’t like, he is adopting the tactics of Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa. Cor-rea repeatedly called the media “his greatest enemy” and attacked journalists personally, to secure the media coverage he wanted.
As Piers Robinson, professor of political journalism at Sheffield University, said: “What we have with fake news, distorted information, manipulation communication or propaganda, whatever you want to call it, is nothing new.”
Our approach to it, and the online tools we now have, are newer however, meaning we now have new ways to dig out angles that are spun, include lies or only half the story.
But sadly while the internet has brought us easy access to multitudes of sources, and the ability to watch news globally, it also appears to make us lazier as we glide past hundreds of stories on Twitter, Facebook and the digital world. We rarely stop to analyse why one might be better researched than another, whose journalism might stand up or has the whiff of reality about it.
As hungry consumers of the news we need to dial up our scepticism. Disappointingly, research from Stanford University across 12 US states found millennials were not sceptical about news, and less likely to be able to differentiate between a strong news source and a weak one. The report’s authors were shocked at how unprepared students were in questioning an article’s “facts” or the likely bias of a website.
And, according to Pew Research, 66% of US Facebook users say they use it as a news source, with only around a quarter clicking through on a link to read the whole story. Hardly a basis for making any decision.
At the same time, we are seeing the rise of techniques to target particular demographics with political advertising that looks like journalism. We need to arm ourselves with tools to unpick this new world of information.
Rachael Jolley is the editor of Index on Censorship magazine
KAYA GENÇ dissects the use of shocking images and asks why the Turkish media didn’t check them
Two days after last year’s failed coup attempt in Turkey, one of the leading newspapers in the country, Sozcu, published an article with two shocking images purportedly showing anti-coup protesters cutting the throat of a soldier involved in the coup. “In the early hours of this morning the situation at the Bosphorus Bridge, which had been at the hands of coup plotters until last night, came to an end,” the piece read. “The soldiers handed over their guns and surrendered. Meanwhile, images of one of the soldiers whose throat was cut spread over social media like an avalanche, and those who saw the image of the dead soldier suffered shock,” it said.
These powerful images of a murdered uniformed youth proved influential for both sides of the political divide in Turkey: the ultra-conservative Akit newspaper was positive in its reporting of the lynching, celebrating the killing. The secularist OdaTV, meanwhile, made it clear that it was an appalling event and it was publishing the pictures as a means of protest.
Neither publication credited the images they had published in their extremely popular articles, which is unusual for a respectable publication. A careful reader could easily spot the lack of sources in the pieces too; there was no eyewitness account of the purported killing, nor was anyone interviewed about the event. In fact, the piece was written anonymously.
These signs suggested to the sceptical reader that the news probably came from someone who did not leave their desk to write the story, choosing instead to disseminate images they came across on social media and to not do their due diligence in terms of verifying the facts.
On 17 July, Istanbul’s medical jurisprudence announced that, among the 99 dead bodies delivered to the morgue in Istanbul, there was no beheaded person. The office of Istanbul’s chief prosecutor also denied the news, and it was declared that the news was fake.
A day later, Sozcu ran a lengthy commentary about how it prepared the article. Editors accepted that their article was based on rumours and images spread on social media. Numerous other websites had run the same news, their defence ran, so the responsibility for the fake news rested with all Turkish media. This made sense. Most of the pictures purportedly showing lynched soldiers were said to come from the Syrian civil war, though this too is unverifiable. Major newspapers used them, for different political purposes, to celebrate or condemn the treatment of putschist soldiers.
More worryingly, the story showed how false images can be used by both sides of Turkey’s political divide to manipulate public opinion: sometimes lies can serve both progressives and conservatives.
JEMIMAH STEINFELD writes on the story of Jack Ma’s doppelganger that went too far
Jack Ma is China’s version of Mark Zuckerberg. The founder and executive chairman of successful e-commerce sites under the Alibaba Group, he’s one of the wealthiest men in China. Articles about him and Alibaba are frequent. It’s within this context that an incorrect story on Ma was taken as verbatim and spread widely.
The story, published in November 2016 across multiple sites at the same time, alleged that Ma would fund the education of eight-year-old Fan Xiaoquin, nicknamed “mini Ma” because of an uncanny resemblance to Ma when he was of a similar age. Fan gained notoriety earlier that year because of this. Then, as people remarked on the resemblance, they also remarked on the boy’s unfavourable circumstances – he was incredibly poor and had ill parents. The story took a twist in November, when media, including mainstream media, reported that Ma had pledged to fund Fan’s education.
Hints that the story was untrue were obvious from the outset. While superficially supporting his lookalike sounds like a nice gesture, it’s a small one for such a wealthy man. People asked why he wouldn’t support more children of a similar background (Fan has a brother, in fact). One person wrote on Weibo: “If the child does not look like Ma, then his tragic life will continue.”
Despite the story drawing criticism along these lines, no one actually questioned the authenticity of the story itself. It wouldn’t have taken long to realise it was baseless. The most obvious sign was the omission of any quote from Ma or from Alibaba Group. Most publications that ran the story listed no quotes at all. One of the few that did was news website New China – sponsored by state-run news agency Xinhua. Even then the quotes did not directly pertain to Ma funding Fan. New China also provided no link to where the comments came from.
Copying the comments into a search engine takes you to the source though – an article on major Chinese news site Sina, which contains a statement from Alibaba. In this statement, Alibaba remark on the poor condition of Fan and say they intend to address education amongst China’s poor. But nowhere do they pledge to directly fund Fan. In fact, the very thing Ma was criticised for – only funding one child instead of many – is what this article pledges not to do.
It was not just the absence of any comments from Ma or his team that was suspicious; it was also the absence of any comments from Fan and his family. Media that ran the story had not confirmed its veracity with Ma or with Fan. Given that few linked to the original statement, it appeared that not many had looked at that either.
In fact, once past the initial claims about Ma funding Fan, most articles on it either end there or rehash information that was published from the initial story about Ma’s doppelganger. As for the images, no new ones were used. These final points alone wouldn’t indicate that the story was fabricated, but they do further highlight the dearth of new information, before getting into the inaccuracy of the story’s lead.
Still, the story continued to spread, until someone from Ma’s press team went on the record and denied the news, or lack thereof.
DUNCAN TUCKER digs out the clues that a story about clown killings in Mexico didn’t stand up
Disinformation thrives in times of public anxiety. Soon after a series of reports on sinister clowns scaring the public in the USA in 2016, a story appeared in the Mexican press about clowns being beaten to death.
At the height of the clown hysteria, the little-known Mexican news site DenunciasMX reported that a group of youths in Ecatepec, a gritty suburb of Mexico City, had beaten two clowns to death in retaliation for intimidating passers-by. The article featured a low-resolution image of the slain clowns on a run-down street, with a crowd of onlookers gathered behind police tape.
To the trained eye, there were several telltale signs that the news was not genuine.
While many readers do not take the time to investigate the source of stories that appear on their Facebook newsfeeds, a quick glance at DenunciasMX’s “Who are we?” page reveals that the site is co-run by social activists who are tired of being “tricked by the big media mafia”. Serious news sources rarely use such language, and the admission that stories are partially authored by activists rather than by professionally-trained journalists immediately raises questions about their veracity.
The initial report was widely shared on social media and quickly reproduced by other minor news sites but, tellingly, it was not reported in any of Mexico’s major newspapers – publications that are likely to have stricter criteria with regard to fact-checking.
Another sign that something was amiss was that the reports all used the vague phrase “according to witnesses”, yet none had any direct quotes from bystanders or the authorities
Yet another red flag was the fact that every news site used the same photograph, but the initial report did not provide attribution for the image. When in doubt, Google’s reverse image search is a useful tool for checking the veracity of news stories that rely on photographic evidence. Rightclicking on the photograph and selecting “Search Google for Image” enables users to sift through every site where the picture is featured and filter the results by date to find out where and when it first appeared online.
In this case, the results showed that the image of the dead clowns first appeared online in May 2015, more than a year before the story appeared in the Mexican press. It was originally credited to José Rosales, a reporter for the Guatemalan news site Prensa Libre. The accompanying story, also written by Rosales, stated that the two clowns were shot dead in the Guatemalan town of Chimaltenango.
While most of the fake Mexican reports did not have bylines and contained very little detail, Rosales’s report was much more specific, revealing the names, ages and origins of the victims, as well as the number of shell casings found at the crime scene. Instead of rehashing rumours or speculating why the clowns were targeted, the report simply stated that police were searching for the killers and were working to determine the motive.
As this case demonstrates, with a degree of scrutiny and the use of freely available tools, it is often easy to differentiate between genuine news and irresponsible clickbait.
ABRAHAM T ZERE dissects the moment that Eritreans mistook saucy satire for real news
In recent years, the international media have dubbed Eritrea the “North Korea of Africa”, due to their striking similarities as closed, repressive states that are blocked to international media. But when a satirical website run by exiled Eritrean journalists cleverly manipulated the simile, the site stoked a social media buzz among the Eritrean diaspora.
Awaze Tribune launched last June with three news stories, including “North Korean ambassador to UN: ‘Stop calling Eritrea the North Korea of Africa’.”
The story reported that the North Korean ambassador, Sin Son-ho, had complained it was insulting for his advanced, prosperous, nuclear-armed nation to be compared to Eritrea, with its “senile idiot leader” who “hasn’t even been able to complete the Adi Halo dam”.
With apparent little concern over its authenticity, Eritreans in the diaspora began widely sharing the news story, sparking a flurry of discussion on social media and quickly accumulating 36,600 hits.
The opposition camp shared it widely to underline the dismal incompetence of the Eritrean government. The pro-government camp countered by alleging that Ethiopia must have been involved behind the scenes.
The satirical nature of the website should have seemed obvious. The name of the site begins with “Awaze”, a hot sauce common in Eritrean and Ethiopian cuisines. If readers were not alerted by the name, there were plenty of other pointers. For example, on the same day, two other “news” articles were posted: “Eritrea and South Sudan sign agreement to set an imaginary airline” and “Brexit vote signals Eritrea to go ahead with its long-planned referendum”.
Although the website used the correct name and picture of the North Korean ambassador to the UN, his use of “senile idiot” and other equally inappropriate phrases should have betrayed the gag.
Recently, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki has been spending time at Adi Halo, a dam construction site about an hour’s drive from the capital, and he has opened a temporary office there. While this is widely known among Eritreans, it has not been covered internationally, so the fact that the story mentioned Adi Halo should also have raised questions of its authenticity with Eritreans. Instead, some readers were impressed by how closely the North Korean ambassador appeared to be following the development.
The website launched with no news items attributed to anyone other than “Editor”, and even a cursory inspection should have revealed it was bogus. The About Us section is a clear joke, saying lines such as the site being founded in 32AD.
Satire is uncommon in Eritrea and most reports are taken seriously. So when a satirical story from Kenya claimed that Eritrea had declared polygamy mandatory, demanding that men have two wives, Eritrea’s minister of information felt compelled to reply.
In recent years, Eritrea’s tightly closed system has, not surprisingly, led people to be far less critical of news than they should be. This and the widely felt abhorrence of the regime makes Eritrean online platforms ready consumers of such satirical news.
Journalist NATASHA JOSEPH spots the signs of fiction in a story about circumcision
The smartest tall tales contain at least a grain of truth. If they’re too outlandish, all but the most gullible reader will see through the deceit. Celebrity death stories are a good example. In South Africa, dodgy “news” sites routinely kill off local luminaries like Desmond Tutu. The cleric is 85 years old and has battled ill health for years, so fake reports about his death are widely circulated.
This “grain of truth” rule lies at the heart of why the following headline was perhaps believed. The headline was “Men can now circumcise themselves at home, it is easy – says minister of health”. Circumcision is a common practice among a number of African cultural groups. Medical circumcision is also on the rise. So it makes sense that South Africa’s minister of health would be publicly discussing the issue of circumcision.
The country has also recently unveiled “DIY HIV testing kits” that allow people to check for HIV in their own homes. This is common knowledge, so casual or less canny readers might conflate the two procedures.
The reality is that most of us are casual readers, snacking quickly on short pieces and not having the time to engage fully with stories. New levels of engagement are required in a world heaving with information.
The most important step you can take in navigating this terrible new world is to adopt a healthy scepticism towards everything. Yes, it sounds exhausting, but the best journalists will tell you that it saves a lot of time to approach information with caution. My scepticism manifests as what I call my “bullshit detector”. So how did my detector react to the “DIY circumcision” story?
It started ringing instantly thanks to the poor grammar evident in the headline and the body of the text. Most proper news websites still employ sub editors, so lousy spelling and grammar are early warning signals that you’re dealing with a suspicious site.
The next thing to check is the sourcing: where did the minister make these comments? To whom? All this article tells us is that he was speaking “in Johannesburg”. The dearth of detail should signal to tread with caution. If you’ve got the time, you might also Google some key search terms and see if anyone else reported on these alleged statements. Also, is there a journalist’s name on the article? This one was credited to “author”, which suggests that no real journalist was involved in production.
The article is accompanied by some graphic illustrations of a “DIY circumcision”. If you can stomach it, study the pictures. They’ll confirm what I immediately suspected upon reading the headline: this is a rather grisly example of false “news”.
Finally, make sure you take a good look at the website that runs such an article. This one appeared on African News Updates.
That’s a solid name for a news website, but two warning bells rang for me: the first bell was clanged by other articles, which ranged from the truth (with a sensational bent) to the utterly ridiculous. The second bell rang out of control when I spotted a tab marked “satire” along the top. Click on it and there’s a rant ridiculing anyone who takes the site seriously. Like I needed any excuse to exit the site and go in search of real news.
Veteran journalist RAYMOND JOSEPH explains how a handy new tool from South Africa can teach you core journalism skills to help you get to the truth
It’s been more than 20 years since leading US journalist and journalism school teacher Melvin Mencher released his Reporter’s Checklist and Notebook, a brilliant and simple tool that for years helped journalists in training.
Taking cues from Mencher’s, there’s now a new kid on the block designed for the digital age. Pocket Reporter is a free app that leads people through the newsgathering process – and it’s making waves in South Africa, where it was launched in late 2016.
Mencher’s consisted of a standard spiral-bound reporter’s notebook, but also included tips and hints for young reporters and templates for a variety of stories, including a crime, a fire and a car crash. These listed the questions a journalist needed to ask.
Cape Town journalist Kanthan Pillay was introduced to Mencher’s notebook when he spent a few months at the Harvard Business School and the Nieman Foundation in the USA. Pillay, who was involved in training young reporters at his newspaper, was inspired by it. Back in South Africa, he developed a website called Virtual Reporter.
“Mencher’s notebook got me thinking about what we could do with it in South Africa,” said Pillay. “I believed then that the next generation of reporters would not carry notebooks but would work online.”
Picking up where Pillay left off, Pocket Reporter places the tips of Virtual Reporter into your mobile phone to help you uncover the information that the best journalists would dig out. Cape Town-based Code for South Africa re-engineered it in partnership with the Association of Independent Publishers, which represents independent community media.
It quickly gained traction among AIP’s members. Their editors don’t always have the time to brief reporters – who might be inexperienced journalists or untrained volunteers – before they go out on stories.
This latest iteration of the tool, in an age when any smartphone user can be a reporter, is aimed at more than just journalists. Ordinary people without journalism training often find themselves on the frontline of breaking news, not knowing what questions to ask or what to look out for.
Code4SA recently wrote code that makes it possible to translate the content into other languages besides English. Versions in Xhosa, one of South Africa’s 11 national languages, and Portuguese are about to go live. They are also currently working on Afrikaans and Zulu translations, while people elsewhere are working on French and Spanish translations.
“We made the initial investment in developing Pocket Reporter and it has shown real world value. It is really gratifying to see how the project is now becoming community-driven,” said Code4SA head Adi Eyal.
Editor Wara Fana, who publishes his Xhosa community paper Skawara News in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, said: “I am helping a collective in a remote area to launch their own publication, and Pocket Reporter has been invaluable in training them to report news accurately.” His own journalists were using the tool and he said it had helped improve the quality of their reporting.
Cape Peninsula University of Technology journalism department lecturer Charles King is planning to incorporate Pocket Reporter into his curriculum for the news writing and online-media courses he teaches.
“What’s also of interest to me is that there will soon be Afrikaans and Xhosa versions of the app, the first languages of many of our students,” he said.
Once it has been downloaded from the Google Play store, the app offers a variety of story templates, covering accidents, fires, crimes, disasters, obituaries and protests.
The tool takes you through a series of questions to ensure you gather the correct information you need in an interview.
The information is typed into a box below each question. Once you have everything you need, you have the option of emailing the information to yourself or sending it directly to your editor or anyone else who might want it.
Your stories remain private, unless you choose to share them. Once you have emailed the story, you can delete it from your phone, leaving no trace of it.
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This article originally appeared in the spring 2017 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
Kaya Genç is a contributing editor for Index on Censorship magazine based in Istanbul, Turkey
Jemimah Steinfeld is deputy editor of Index on Censorship magazine
Duncan Tucker is a regular correspondent for Index on Censorship magazine from Mexico
Journalist Abraham T Zere is originally from Eritrea and now lives in the USA. He is executive director of PEN Eritrea
Natasha Joseph is a contributing editor for Index on Censorship magazine and is based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is also Africa education, science and technology editor at The Conversation
Raymond Joseph is former editor of Big Issue South Africa and regional editor of South Africa’s Sunday Times. He is based in Cape Town and tweets @rayjoe
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”From the Archives”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”91220″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064228408533808″][vc_custom_heading text=”There’s nothing new about fake news” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1080%2F03064228408533808|||”][vc_column_text]June 2017
Andrei Aliaksandrau takes a look at fake news in Belarus[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”99282″ img_size=”213×289″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064227508532452″][vc_custom_heading text=”Fake news: The global silencer” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1080%2F03064227508532452|||”][vc_column_text]April 2018
Caroline Lees examines fake news being used to imprison journalists [/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”88803″ img_size=”213×289″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064229808536482″][vc_custom_heading text=”Taking the bait” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1080%2F03064229808536482|||”][vc_column_text]April 2017
Richard Sambrook discusses the pressures click-bait is putting on journalism[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row content_placement=”top”][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”The Big Squeeze” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2F2017%2F12%2Fwhat-price-protest%2F|||”][vc_column_text]The spring 2017 issue of Index on Censorship magazine looks at multi-directional squeezes on freedom of speech around the world.
Also in the issue: newly translated fiction from Karim Miské, columns from Spitting Image creator Roger Law and former UK attorney general Dominic Grieve, and a special focus on Poland.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”88802″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2017/12/what-price-protest/”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″ css=”.vc_custom_1481888488328{padding-bottom: 50px !important;}”][vc_custom_heading text=”Subscribe” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fsubscribe%2F|||”][vc_column_text]In print, online. In your mailbox, on your iPad.
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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
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.”
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Journalists at Black Lives Matter and similar demonstrations have been arrested by police, even though they clearly identified themselves as members of the press.
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 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 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.
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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.
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.
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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.”
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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.
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.
“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.
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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.”
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.
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.
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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.
“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”.
“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.
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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.
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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.
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”.
“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.
“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.
“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 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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
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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.
Volkskrant columnist Harriet Duurvoort had received threats before. She often questioned the racist elements of Black Pete (Zwarte Piet) in her columns. Black Pete, a black-faced children’s character, is part of the annual Dutch feast of Saint Nicolas (Sinterklaas) celebrated every 5 December.
The threats usually came through social media. But this time it was different.
It was early December 2015. Her phone rang. There was a male voice on the other end of the line. Before she could ask who he was and how he got her number, the man started shouting at her. He called her a “bitch” and told her to keep her hands off of “our Black Pete”. His rant lasted less than a minute, Duurvoort recalled. “It was terrifying,” she said. “This wasn’t just Facebook or Twitter. This man got hold of my personal phone number, and made an effort to phone me up.”
Duurvoort’s weekly column runs in one of the biggest Dutch dailies, De Volkskrant. That week she had published a commentary for the New York Times – titled Why I changed my mind about Black Pete – in which she described how she experienced Black Pete as a child of Suriname descent. Duurvoort knew her article would stir tension and it was shared widely on social media. “It defines the climate surrounding the Black Pete debate in which we find ourselves,” she said.
For years the character of Black Pete has been causing heated debates in The Netherlands. An activist group collectively using the slogan “Black Pete is racist” began campaigning in 2011. The group aims to change the Dutch perspective on the black-faced character with which Dutch kids had been growing up for decades. But the pledge to change the Black Pete tradition has met with much resistance. Many Dutch citizens consider Black Pete an essential part of their culture and childhood memories and they don’t want to see it changed.
The United Nations committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination urged The Netherlands in 2015 to get rid Black Pete because it has racist elements. “Black Pete is sometimes portrayed in a manner that reflects negative stereotypes of people of African descent and is experienced by many people of African descent as a vestige of slavery,” their report stated. The UN urged the Dutch authorities to work on the elimination of racial stereotyping.
A few Dutch cities, schools and TV broadcasters have already reinvented Black Pete by changing the character’s colour and removing it’s big red lips and golden earrings, calling it Pete instead of Black Pete. But the public debate remains fierce. Protest groups in favour of and against Black Pete have clashed on several occasions. People who speak out in the media about the racist elements of the character are increasingly facing threats from Black Pete supporters, mostly through social media.
The well known TV presenter and now politician Sylvana Simons has been subject to a storm of threats ever since she became publicly vocal about Black Pete and racism. A photo-montage of her face in a video showing lynched bodies was shared on social media earlier this year. A popular radio DJ played monkey sounds on his national radio show, saying that Simons should “be quiet,” which created a huge row in Dutch media.
In November this year, the Dutch special Children’s Ombudsman, Margrite Kalverboer, received dozens of death threats by email after she’d published a report on the matter, stating that the Dutch must change the Black Pete tradition because it contributes to bullying and discrimination of black children.
Journalists experience similar threats when writing or tweeting their opinions about Black Pete. Seada Nourhussen, a Dutch-Ethiopian journalist for daily Trouw, saw her Twitter timeline fill up with roughly a hundred hate tweets after she’d posted a photo of little black-faced marzipan pastries being sold at an Amsterdam bakery on 13 November 2016. “Adults who bake these, what kind of a life do they have?” she wrote below a picture she had received from a friend.
“I’m a columnist in a free country without censorship where tensions do sometimes rise high. It’s not easy sometimes”
“It was a nasty, violent, sexsist, racist and Islamophobic mayhem,” she told Mapping Media Freedom. “My whole timeline was filled with mostly angry white men who wished me dead and called me names.” Nourhussen spent hours on blocking and reporting accounts from people who’d threatened her to Twitter. “It lasted for about a week, every day, and then it stopped”, she said. She said she also reached out to Twitter and the police, but neither responded to her.
The hate storm against her started after right-wing politician Martin Bosma (PVV) had reposted a screenshot of her tweet to his thousands of followers. Nourhussen had by then already deleted the tweet. She didn’t want to derail the racism debate towards Dutch bakeries, she said. The popular right-wing weblog GeenStijl republished Bosman’s screenshot in a tendentious article about another bakery in Amsterdam which removed black-faced cakes after someone had sprayed ‘You are racist’ on it’s window, indirectly blaming Nourhussen for it.
Nourhussen is an Africa-editor at Trouw’s foreign news desk. She does not write about the Black Pete controversy for the newspaper and her tweets represent her personal opinion. But she does think being a journalist might make her an easier target for people who are intended to send out hate tweets. “When you have my profession, and also belong to a minority group in a western country, and on top of that being a woman and having an Arabic sounding name, you’re aware that you’re not entitled to express your opinion without consequences”, she said.
It didn’t change the way she writes or tweets, she added. “I’m not afraid,” she said. “Angry is a better description of how I feel”. Nourhussen is disappointed in her colleague journalists at other newspapers and broadcasters who ran the story about her tweet only from the perspective of victimising bakeries that are selling Black Pete pastries, like daily Telegraaf and regional Amsterdam broadcaster AT5. “I’m ashamed to call those reporters my colleagues because they did a terrible job”.
Nourhussen and Duurvoort are not the only ones. The African-American documentary filmmaker Roger Williams who produced the documentary Blackface: Dutch holiday tradition or racism? for CNN in November 2015, also received death threats from Dutch citizens. “I clearly touched a nerve here,” he said in the Dutch TV talkshow RTL Late Night. Among other things he was called “black ape” in emails he’d received. He said that he was astonished by the reactions to his documentary about Black Pete and racism in The Netherlands. “The Dutch are clearly not aware that the black community in The Netherlands is not happy with Black Pete,” he said.
Several incidents with journalists have taken place during Black Pete street protests this year. On 12 November 2016 a reporter for the broadcaster PowNed, Dennis Schouten, was assaulted during a demonstration against organised by activist group Kick Out Zwarte Piet (Kick out Black Pete). Schouten was interviewing protesters when one of them, an anti-Black Pete protester, pushed him onto a moving car. He wasn’t injured and the perpetrator was arrested.
On 26 November Dutch-American journalist Kevin P Roberson was assaulted while reporting on another demonstration against Black Pete in the city of Utrecht. Roberson, owner of the online news portal The Roberson Report, was hit on the head by a Black Pete supporter while he was filming the protest. Roberson had been threatened before, and he’s told Mapping Media Freedom that he fears for his safety. He said that his home address and car license plate number is circulating on right-wing social media groups. “I don’t feel safe anymore,” he added. “I don’t know if I’d risk covering another Black Pete protest to be honest.”
The Dutch Union for Journalists condemned both attacks.
The day that Volkskrant columnist Duurvoort received that threatening phone call, she felt unsafe in her own house. At the time, she contacted the police, but they had told her there was not enough information to start an investigation. A year later she’d rather not think about it too much anymore. And it did not stop her from writing about the controversy surrounding Black Pete.
“I’m a columnist in a free country without censorship where tensions do sometimes rise high. It’s not easy sometimes,” she said. “But it is also part of my job.”
[vc_row full_width=”stretch_row” full_height=”yes” css=”.vc_custom_1481647350516{background-image: url(https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/magazine-cover-subhead.jpg?id=82616) !important;background-position: center !important;background-repeat: no-repeat !important;background-size: contain !important;}”][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Governments that introduce bans on clothing and other forms of expression are sending a signal about their own lack of confidence” google_fonts=”font_family:Libre%20Baskerville%3Aregular%2Citalic%2C700|font_style:400%20italic%3A400%3Aitalic”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
IF YOU HAVE to introduce laws telling your citizens that they are banned from wearing purple, sporting red velvet, or showing their knees, then, frankly, you are in trouble.
But again and again, when times get tough or leaders think they should be, governments tell their people what to wear, or more often, what not to wear.
“Dare to wear this,” they say, “and we will be down on you like a ton of bricks.” Why any government thinks this is going to improve their power, the economy or put their country on a better footing is a mystery. History suggests you never strike up a more profitable relationship with your people by removing the freedom to wear specific types of clothing or, conversely, telling everyone that they have to wear the same thing. We are either consumed by rebellion, or by dullness.
The Romans tried it with purple (only allowed for the emperor and his special friends). The Puritans tried it with gold and silver (just for the magistrates and a few highfaluting types). Right now the governments of Saudi Arabia and Iran ban women from wearing anything but head-to-toe cover-ups along with a range of other limitations. In one frightening case in the past month there were calls via social media for a woman in Saudi Arabia to be killed because she went out shopping “uncovered” without a hijab or abaya. One tweet read: “Kill her and throw her corpse to the dogs.”
Banning any type of freedom of expression, often including free speech, or freedom of assembly, usually happens in times of national angst, economic downturn or crisis, when governments are not acting either in the interest of their people, or the national good. These are not healthy, confident nations, but nations that fear allowing their people to speak, act and think. And that fear can express itself in mandating or restricting types of expression. Generally, as with other restrictions on freedom found in the US First Amendment, enforcing such bans doesn’t sweep in a period of prosperity for countries that impose them.
At different points in world history governments have forced a small group of people to wear particular things, or tried to wipe out styles of clothing they did not approve of. In medieval Europe, for instance, non-Christians were, at certain periods, forced to wear badges such as stars or crescents as were Christians who refused to conform to a state religion, such as the Cathars. Forcing a particular badge or clothing to be worn sends a signal of exclusion. Those authorities are, by implication, saying to the majority that there is a difference in the status of the minority, and in doing so opening them up either to attack, or at least suspicion. Not much has changed between then and now. Historically groups that have been forced to wear some kind of badge or special outfit have then found themselves ostracised or physically attacked. The most obvious modern example is Jews being forced to wear yellow stars in Nazi Germany, but this is not the only time minorities have been legally forced to stand out from the crowd. In 2001 the Taliban ruled that Afghan Hindus had to wear a public label to signify they were non-Muslims. The intent of such actions are clear: to create tension.
The other side of this clothing coin is when clans, tribes or groups who choose to dress differently from the mainstream, for historical religious reasons, or even just because they follow a particular musical style, are persecuted because of that visual difference, because of what it stands for, or because they are seen as rebelling against authority. In some cases strict laws have been put in place to try and force change, in other cases certain people decide to take action. In 1746, for instance, the British government banned kilts and tartans (except for the military) under the Dress Act, a reaction said to be motivated by support for rebellions to return Catholic (Stuart) monarchs to the British throne. Those who ignored the order faced six months in prison for the first instance, and seven years deportation for the second. Those who wear distinctive, and traditional clothing, out of choice can face other disadvantages. For years, the Oromo people in Ethiopia, who wear distinctive clothing, have long faced discrimination, but in 2016 dozens of Oromo people were killed at a religious festival, after police fired bullets into the crowd. And in her article Eliza Vitri Handayani reports on how the punk movement in Indonesia has attracted animosity and in one case, Indonesian police seized 64 punks, shaved their heads and forced them to bathe in a river to “purify themselves”. Recently the Demak branch of Nadhlatul Ulama, Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation, has banned reggae and punk concerts because they make young people “dress weird”.
Another cover for restrictions or bans stems from religions. As soon as the word “modesty” is bandied around as a reason for somebody to be prohibited from wearing something then you know you have to worry. Strangely, it is never the person who proclaims that there needs to be a bit more modesty who needs to change their ways. Of course not. It is other people who need to get a lot more modest. The inclusion of modesty standards tends to be used to get women to cover up more than they have done.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_icon icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left” color=”custom” align=”right” custom_color=”#dd3333″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_custom_heading text=”When freedom of expression is quashed, it usually finds a way of squeezing out just to show that the spirit is not vanquished” google_fonts=”font_family:Libre%20Baskerville%3Aregular%2Citalic%2C700|font_style:400%20italic%3A400%3Aitalic”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Then you get officious types who decide that they have the measure of morality, and start hitting women wearing short skirts (as is happening right now in South Africa and Uganda). For some Ugandan women it feels like a return to the 1970s under dictator Idi Amin “morality” laws.
Trans people can find themselves confronting laws, sometimes centuries old, that lay out what people shouldn’t be allowed to wear. In Guyana a case continues to edge through the court of appeal this year, it argues that a cross-dressing law from 1893 allows the police to arrest or harass trans people. A new collection, the Museum of Transology, which opens in London in January, uses a crowdsourced collection of objects and clothing to chart modern trans life and its conflicts with the mainstream, from a first bra to binders.
When freedom of expression is quashed, it usually finds a way of squeezing out just to show that the spirit is not vanquished. So during the tartan ban in the 18th century, there are tales of highlanders hiding a piece of tartan under other clothes to have it blessed at a Sunday service. And certainly tartan and plaids are plentiful in Scotland today. In the 1930s and 40s when British women and girls were not “expected” to wear trousers or shorts, some bright spark designed a split skirt that could be worn for playing sport. It looked like a short dress (therefore conforming to the accepted code), but they were split like shorts allowing girls to run around with some freedom.
While in Iran, where rules about “modest” dress are enforced viciously with beatings, sales of glitzy high heels go through the roof. No one can stop those women showing the world their personal style in any way they can. Iranian model and designer Tala Raassi, who grew up in Iran, has written about how vital those signs of style are to Iranian women. In a recent article, commenting on the recent burkini ban in France, Raassi wrote of her disappointment that a democratic country would force an individual to put on or take of a piece of clothing. She added: “Freedom is not about the amount of clothing you put on or take off, but about having the choice to do so.”
And that freedom is the clearest sign of a healthy country. We must support the freedom for individuals to make choices, even if we do not agree with them personally. The freedom to be different, if one chooses to be, must not be punished by some kind of lower status or ostracism. National leaders have to learn that taking away freedom of expression from their people is a sign of their failure. Countries with the most freedom are the ones that will historically be seen as the most successful politically, economically and culturally.
Rachael Jolley is the editor of Index on Censorship magazine. She recently won the editor of the year (special interest) at British Society of Magazine Editors’ 2016 awards
Vicky Baker looks at why slogan shirts are more than a fashion statement and sometimes provoke fear within great state machines.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”89180″ img_size=”213×289″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064220600624127″][vc_custom_heading text=”Miniskirts” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1080%2F03064220600624127|||”][vc_column_text]February 2006
Salil Tripathi believes the press should not pick and choose what to publish based on who will get offended. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”90622″ img_size=”213×289″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064228908536934″][vc_custom_heading text=”List to the right ” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1080%2F03064228908536934|||”][vc_column_text]July 2001
UK’s Terrorism Act 2000 is further evidence of the government’s indifference to fundamental freedoms – clothing included.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”Fashion Rules” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2F2016%2F12%2Ffashion-rules%2F|||”][vc_column_text]The winter 2016 issue of Index on Censorship magazine looks at fashion and how people both express freedom through what they wear.
In the issue: interviews with Lily Cole, Paulo Scott and Daphne Selfe, articles by novelists Linda Grant and Maggie Alderson plus Eliza Vitri Handayani on why punks are persecuted in Indonesia.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”82377″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2016/12/fashion-rules/”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”Subscribe” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fsubscribe%2F|||”][vc_column_text]In print, online. In your mailbox, on your iPad.
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