Greste symbol of journalism’s dangers

Peter Greste may be languishing in an Egyptian jail, but he has managed to do journalism a service by focusing Australians’ minds on the problems faced by the profession in reporting the news overseas.

The fact he was back in court with his Al Jazeera colleagues on World Press Freedom Day (May 3) gave a welcome boost to the event, which usually rates just passing references in newspapers and television bulletins. Journalists are generally uncomfortable about making rather than reporting the news, and as a result a great deal of the difficulties and dangers in what they do are undocumented.

While I was in the Middle East a number of journalists were defying a Syrian Government ban on reporting the country’s civil war by slipping over the border via rebel-controlled crossings. It meant they had to rely on the protection of the various insurgent groups; falling into the clutches of government forces would have meant jail or worse.

And yet, without their reports and the contacts they made, the world would have had to rely on propaganda, unconfirmed claims, grainy images from the cell-phones of combatants and the statements of interested parties often far removed from the battlefront.

It is a desperately risky business. My colleague Martin Bell had to be airlifted home from the Bosnian Civil War after being hit by shrapnel; Robert Fisk’s account of the horrors of reporting the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s can be found in his book The Great War for Civilisation – and they are the survivors.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has listed 70 deaths in 2013 involving reporters and camera people, caught in the crossfire, beaten by mobs or murdered. The total so far this year is 14.   

Freedom House claims that Eurasia is now the most difficult place from which to report – worse even than the Middle East. The organisation’s Vice President, Arch Puddington, says 97 per cent of the people living in the region (mostly the countries of the old Soviet Union) have no access to a domestic free press.

“The cumulative impact of 10 or 15 years of pressure on journalism in that region has created a really unique situation by post-Cold War global standards where there’s not a free press in the whole region. There are only partly-free presses in Georgia and Moldova,” Puddington says.

Which makes it all the more difficult to report from those regions to the free presses that do exist, as the recent detention and beating of reporters in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine testifies.   

Freedom of the press does not simply mean freedom to report on wars and unsavoury governments. It means freedom to resist pressure from overbearing officialdom, freedom from laws, possibly well intentioned, which can be manipulated by those who have something to hide.

Even freedom from media barons themselves who pressure their journalists to report in ways that do damage to the truth in order to promote their interests.

The campaign to free Greste and his colleagues must be pressed to its fullest extent, both for their sakes and the sake of the profession to which they belong.