Media censorship a ‘global phenomenon’ obstructing efforts to tackle pandemic

On Sunday, we celebrated World Press Freedom Day, yet when it comes to reporting Covid-19, journalists across the world are far from free.  

They have been risking their lives to provide reliable and trustworthy information during the pandemic, but all over the world, governments’ crackdown and media censorship are hampering efforts to tackle the virus. Censorship of vital information related to the pandemic has become a ‘global phenomenon’, according to Amnesty International.

“There is no hope of containing this virus if people can’t access accurate information. It is truly alarming to see how many governments are more interested in protecting their own reputations than in saving lives,” says Amnesty International’s Director of Law and Policy, Ashfaq Khalfan.

A core feature of the right to health is the right to access timely and accurate information. In the case of COVID-19, this means everybody has a right to access all available information about the nature and spread of the virus, as well as the measures they can take to protect themselves. But governments around the world have arrested and detained journalists and other media workers for sharing exactly this kind of essential information.

Here are just a few examples of dangerous censorship and serious attacks on free speech across the globe collected by Amnesty International:

• Russia: On 12 April, the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta published an article by journalist Elena Milashina, in which she criticised the Chechen authorities' response to the pandemic. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov posted and Instagram video in which he threatened Milashina, appealing to the Russian government and Federal Security Service (FSB) to "stop those non-humans who are writing and provoking our people."

Urge the Russian authorities to ensure her safety. 

• Niger: Journalist Mamane Kaka Touda was arrested on 5 March after posting on social media about a suspected case of COVID-19 infection in Niamey Reference Hospital. He was charged with "disseminating data tending to disturb public order". 

• Egypt: Editor-in-chief of AlkararPress newspaper, Atef Hasballah, was arrested by security forces on 18 March, and forcibly disappeared for nearly a month, following a post on his Facebook page in which he challenged the official statistics on COVID-19 cases. 

• India: Journalists reporting on the COVID-19 situation have been summoned to police stations and forced to explain their stories, including Peerzada Ashiq, a senior journalist with The Hindu in Kashmir, and Siddharth Varadarajan, editor of The Wire in Uttar Pradesh. Many others have been arrested. Internet restrictions in the Jammu & Kashmir region continue despite the rising number of COVID-19 cases. 

Journalists have been prosecuted for reporting on COVID-19 in many other countries including Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Uganda, Rwanda, Somalia, Venezuela, Tunisia and Palestine.

Meanwhile journalists who report on human rights abuses related to the pandemic, such as police abuses or poor prison conditions, have also been harassed, intimidated, attacked and prosecuted.

Many countries, including Azerbaijan, Hungary, Russia, Uzbekistan, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tanzania and several Gulf states, have used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to introduce new laws against disseminating “fake news”. In most cases, it is at the authorities’ discretion to define what constitutes false news or misinformation, and these laws act as a stark warning against free discussion of the situation. For example: 

• Hungary: Viktor Orban’s government has amended the country’s Criminal Code, introducing new provisions that threaten journalists with prison sentences for “spreading false information” or communicating facts in a way that impede ‘successful protection’ against the virus. Journalists have reported being harassed, threatened and smeared for scrutinising the government’s response to the outbreak. 

• Myanmar: Authorities have warned that anyone who spreads “fake news” about COVID-19 could be prosecuted, while a Ministry of Health official said they would file criminal charges against anyone who speaks out about the lack of Personal Protective Equipment at hospitals.

• Tanzania: On 20 April, Tanzanian authorities suspended the licence of the Mwananchi online newspaper after it posted a photo of President John Pombe Magufuli out shopping surrounded by a crowd of people, eliciting debate about the need for implementing physical distancing.

 

"It's Just Good Journalism" - Constructive Journalism at Thessaloniki International Summer Media Academy

Students at Thessaloniki International Summer Media Academy looking for constructive angles/credit: Veronique Mistiaen

“Do we need to call this ‘Constructive Journalism’?  It’s just good journalism,” one student at the back said.  All over the room, heads nodded in approval.

Most of the 46 students at the International Journalism Media Summer Academy in Thessaloniki had never heard of the term “Constructive Journalism” before, yet it just made sense to them that when journalists expose a problem, they should try to explore solutions as well. And that reporting on progress and possibility has its place, alongside covering crisis, crimes and tragedy.

I had been invited to the beautiful city of Thessaloniki this summer, along with colleagues from Croatia, Germany, Russia and Ireland, to present lectures and workshops on ‘New Trends in Media and Journalism: Disinformation, Verification of News and Constructive Journalism in a Changing World’.

It was wonderful to see students from Greece, Russia, Croatia Ukraine, Germany, Brazil, Bosnia, The Netherlands, Slovenia, the US, China and other countries, debate and build connections - and listen to their various perspectives.

When we discussed the coverage of the refugee crisis in their respective countries, most students said that the media mostly stressed the problems posed by migration and the burden it imposes on social services, but others had another take.  Greek students, for example, said that while the coverage was alarmist and negative at first, over the years, there were also stories of solidarity and on the contribution made by migrants. This was unexpected as Greece is one of the countries most affected by the influx of migrants and in the midst of a serious economic crisis.

We found examples of constructive stories from a rapidly growing media pool - from the New York Times and the Guardian Upside to the BBC World Hacks, Positive News and De Correspondent.

We explored how to interview the so-called “victims” in a way that doesn’t reduce them to their situation, but shows their resilience and preserves their dignity.  And we looked at how we can ask different questions to those in power, the experts and those who hold different views.

The idea that journalists can facilitate engagement between people from different religious and ethnic groups, political views or age, rather than fuelling polarisation and conflict, led to heated discussions.   We concluded that it’s not the journalists’ role to advocate a solution or campaign for integration, but to show how communities can come together across these lines to engage with one another, and how problems that they are facing are being tackled elsewhere.

At the end of the day, the students decided to call this type of journalism “Responsible Journalism.” I kind of like that!

 

#LivingIsWinning – Olympics inspire refugee awareness campaign

 

No matter the distance, the height or the fight

For them, living is already winning

#LivingIsWinning

Athletes perform amazing physical feats to win; men, women and children fleeing war, poverty and violence also surpass themselves. But they do it simply to survive.

This parallel struck two young French creatives, who wanted to counter the negative portraits of refugees in the media. They took the opportunity of the official announcement of Paris 2024 Olympics to talk about the dangerous journey many refugees have to take – crossing lands, deserts and seas and facing countless obstacles - in order to win their right to live.

The result is  “Living is Winning”, a refugee awareness campaign launched on September 14, the day after Paris was officially set to host the 2024 Olympics.

The campaign, which features a series of posters, three films and a campaign website, was created and directed by Valentin Guiod (Josiane Paris) and Min-Hyung Choi (AdamandeveDDB London), with the support of Josiane and OTSO Paris, and led by La Cimade, an independent humanitarian organisation protecting refugees’ rights.

“In France, some people started to see migrants as hobos whereas they are just humans who are forced to leave everything, surpassing themselves to flee conflict and persecution,” explains Min-Hyung Choi. “This idea of surpassing yourself rang a bell.  They are doing it not to win golds, but just their right to live with dignity. Then there was this debate on Paris 2024 in the French media, which we saw as the perfect opportunity to bring back another debate on the table.”

Their initiative has received lots of support, including from the award-winning photographer Espen Rasmussen, who lent his images to the campaign - and was extensively covered in the French media and on social media with more than 140k views and 2900 shares on Facebook.  

Now, they want to spread their message to an international audience. So please, do share it.

#LivingIsWinning

How to tell the refugee story?

Khalid's story/PositiveNegatives

Migration and the refugee story are one of the most important issues of our age and will be there for a long time. Migration, the movement of people, has always existed. “The current crisis isn’t about people being refugees and migrants, the crisis is that we think of such movement of people as a crisis,” said Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist in this issue (June 2017) of New Internationalist. He is right.

  

The way the media reports on migration and the refugee story has a huge impact on how people react to them and on public policies. So, as a journalist, I keep asking myself how to best report migration. How to produce fair and balanced pieces that counter the stereotypes and misinformation, but also how to keep telling these stories in ways that are engaging and innovative.

These are so many stories about refugees and migrants out there that people become numb and turn away from them.  Yet, it is our job as journalists to keep telling those stories again and again, and to keep telling them in ways that cut through the compassion fatigue and reach our readers.

Over the past months, I’ve been looking at examples of various creative ways  to do that - some are journalism, others not.

Here are just a few, illustrating or responding to three different issues in reporting migration:

• Most refugee stories have been told in Europe in two ways: one that instills fear with unfactual or biased reporting; the other that shakes the public awake through sorrow and shock. But there is a middle ground: stories that put a face on the numbers, that humanize the immigration statistics, that show that refugees are just people like us, thrown into exceptional circumstances. And the best stories are those told by refugees themselves.

- My favourite is “A Perilous Journey: Stories of Migration” an exhibition of literary comics based on testimonies from refugees. They were created by PositiveNegatives, a wonderful non-profit, which produces literary comics, animations and podcasts about contemporary social and human rights issues, including conflict, racism, migration, trafficking and asylum.  Concentrating on contemporary real-life stories from Syria and Iraq, we follow two men and two women on their long difficult journeys fleeing conflict and persecution.  Nadia’s Story, for example, tells of a pregnant Yazidi mother, fleeing ISIS controlled Iraq with her two young children. The last panel of each story is a real photograph of the refugee, reminding us that these are real people and real stories. It is very effective and moving.  The exhibition is at SOAS’ Brunei Gallery Room: 1st Floor Gallery until June 24. Really worth a visit!

Hasko'story/PositiveNegatives

- Then there is the series of short radio episodes produced by BBC Radio 4’s The World at One, following a Syrian family from the Jordan refugee camp where they had lived for two years to Greece, then across Europe to Germany. Reporter Manveen Rana documented the twists and turns of their journey in a series of short reports – showing the good and the bad, the hopes and the challenges.  Her reports are honest, fascinating, moving, though provoking and surprising.

- Last summer, short hand-written messages were left in public places - inside coffee shops, in between the pages of books in libraries, on benches in parks and tied to lampposts and railings - or written on white boards in tube stations. They were messages of hope for a better life, written by refugees from Nigeria, South Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries - part of a campaign by humanitarian aid agency Mercy Corps, aimed at changing the attitudes and perspectives of people around Syrian refugees and the migrant crisis in general. The campaign was particularly effective with young people, who shared the messages on Instagram and Twitter. 

 

“Sometimes it is really hard to put yourselves in the shoes of these people because it seems so distant but when I read the note it really made it sink in that this girl was not any different from me,” said Rebecca Alexander, a 21-year-old student, who saw the note of a 15-year-old Syrian refugee, hanging from a tree in London's Regent’s Park.

• People are tired of refugee stories because stories of suffering are exhausting. Stories of empathy are empowering. As are those who show refugees not just as “victims”.

- For example, millions of people shared the image of Syrian refugee Alex Assali feeding homeless people on the streets of Berlin, but very few might have read his story in a newspaper.  

When Assali, 38, woke up in his small Berlin flat one autumn morning two years ago, and checked his email, 1,000 messages waiting for him. The day before, a friend had uploaded a photograph to Facebook of Assali feeding homeless people on the streets of Berlin. The caption below read: “Acts of kindness: A Syrian refugee mans a food stand for the homeless, to ‘give something back to the German people’.”   The image went viral - it was shared more than 3,000 times on Facebook and nearly three million times on Imgur. Al Jazeera produced this interactive story, giving Assali’s backstory, and that story got no trolls, according to Yasir Khan, senior editor of digital video at Al Jazeera English.

- Then there was the “Iam a refugee" campaign, launched last summer to celebrate the contribution refugees have made, and continue to make, to life in the UK. Plaques, inspired by the English Heritage blue plaques, were placed on buildings across the UK, where selected refugees have worked or studied. The idea was to show the diversity of the refugee population and the experiences they have had, as well as the creativity, skills and knowledge that they bring to the UK.

• Stories on refugees should try to portray a range of backgrounds and experiences, even contradictory, to help the audience get a fuller picture. And it's a good idea to let refugees tell their own stories.

For this year’s Refugee Week 2017, the Higgins Bedford Art Gallery and Museum is launching ‘Voices - Different Pasts, Shared Future’, an exhibition featuring oral histories from refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants from Syria, Iraq, Rwanda and Palestine. Some of the stories are from women who are detained at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre. The exhibition also includes a wonderful tapestry of objects which people have brought from their countries of origin. The objects are printed, then partly stitched by volunteers from the community and women from Yarl’s Wood. “These Voices transform personal memories into collective memories impossible to ignore,” says Josepa Munoz, the artist behind the project. 

There are too many interesting and innovative projects and ways to report on the refugee story to feature here, but feel free to add those you like…

Bosnia to America - how lies can kill

More than half of Donald Trump' supporters think a made-up massacre actually happened, even after the fabricated story was widely debunked.

According to a recent poll, 51% of Trump' supporters say the Bowling Green Massacre – an event fabricated by Kellyanne Conway – justifies Trump's Executive Order of 27 January suspending refugee admission to the US and barring entry to citizens from seven majority Muslim countries.

Please watch and share this short video by my friend Kemal Pervanic, a Bosnian concentration camp survivor, who explains how such lies about violence can kill – creating the conditions for neighbours and even friends to turn on one another.  

Constructive Journalism Comes to North Africa

Journalists from Libya, Tunisia and Egypt analyzing the balance of news in their respective media at the MiCT Tunis Constructive Journalism Workshop/credit:Veronique Mistiaen

“Wouldn’t constructive stories belittle the problems we are facing?” asked the tall Libyan journalist.   “If we write stories with a constructive angle, how can we make sure that they won’t be used as propaganda by the regime?” the thoughtful Egyptian journalist wanted to know.

These were some of the stimulating questions journalists from Libya, Egypt and Tunisia asked during the very first Constructive Journalism Project’s workshop in the region.

The political and media landscapes in post-revolutionary North Africa are not only very different from those in the UK and EU, where we have been running most of our workshops – but they are also different in each of these three countries.   This led to very interesting, challenging and passionate discussions.

Nineteen journalists participated in a three-day Constructive Journalism workshop in Tunis on November 25-28 arranged by Media in Cooperation in Transition, MICT, a German non-profit organization that runs media development projects in crisis regions. In addition to working for various  media outlets, many participant journalists also contribute  to Correspondents.org, a bilingual digital magazine (Arabic/English) designed by MiCT to cover three countries.

We began the workshop by analyzing the various newspapers/media they work for, discussing the balance or imbalance in the news and its impact on the readers/audiences, on major issues such as migration and climate change and on democracy.

Constructive Journalism was a new and rather unfamiliar concept to all participants, but they could see the need for a journalism that moves from the crisis rhetoric, trying instead to capture the complexity of social and political life, reconnecting with communities and reinvigorating our profession.

We then explored practical tools journalists could use in their own reporting in order to produce stories that are more balanced, explore new angles and possibilities and ask different questions to those in power, the experts and the so-called victims.

During our last session, the journalists pitched constructive-angled story ideas for Correpsondents.com. These included stories on a Libyan port city, where the community and police worked together to drive traffickers out; transitional justice in Tunisia; projects to get young people off drugs in deprived areas in Libya and a profile of a young female hero from Cairo’s Tahrir Square.  

“In our country, more than 90% of the news is on war and conflicts – who wins and who loses. Everything else is ignored,” a Libyan journalist said. “Now we have the tools to change that.”

2016 World Press Freedom Index: Deep Decline in Media Freedom

This is great for censorship. Putin, Erdogan and other authoritarian leaders are celebrating.  We need to fight back the “deep and disturbing” decline in media freedom across every continent, at both the global and regional levels. 

The 2016 World Press Freedom Index, recently published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), shows that every continent has seen its press freedom score decline. The Americas have plunged 20.5%, mostly as a result of the impact of physical attacks and murders targeting journalists in Mexico and Central America. Europe and the Balkans declined 6.5%, mostly because of the growing influence of extremist movements and ultraconservative governments.  The Central Asia/Eastern Europe region’s already bad score deteriorated by 5% as a result of the increasingly glacial environment for media freedom and free speech in countries with authoritarian regimes.

This matters enormously because if journalists are not free to report the facts, denounce abuses and alert the public, how would we resist the problem of children-soldiers, defend women’s rights, oppose injustice or preserve our environment? In some countries, torturers stop their atrocious deeds as soon as they are mentioned in the media. In others, corrupt politicians abandon their illegal habits when investigative journalists publish compromising details about their activities. Still elsewhere, massacres are prevented when the international media focuses its attention and cameras on events.

The reasons for the decline in freedom of information documented by RSF include the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of governments in countries such as Turkey and Egypt, tighter government control of state-owned media, even in some European countries such as Poland, and security situations that have become more and more fraught, in Libya and Burundi, for example, or that are completely disastrous, as in Yemen. 

The survival of independent news coverage is becoming increasingly precarious in both the state and privately-owned media because of the threat from ideologies, especially religious ideologies, that are hostile to media freedom, and from large-scale propaganda machines. Throughout the world, “oligarchs” are buying up media outlets and are exercising pressure that compounds the pressure already coming from governments. 

Published every year since 2002, the World Press Freedom Index ranks 180 countries according to the level of freedom available to journalists. It offers a snapshot of the media freedom situation based on an evaluation of pluralism, independence of the media, quality of legislative framework and safety of journalists in each country. It does not rank public policies even if governments obviously have a major impact on their country’s ranking. Nor is it an indicator of the quality of journalism in each country.

You can find more about the report here. 

2015 - another deadly year for journalists

The passing year has been another deadly one for journalists, with at least 109 journalists and media staff killed in targeted killings, bomb attacks and cross-fire incidents, according to the annual report by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).   Reporters Without Borders (RSF)’ annual round-up puts the figure at 110 – in addition to 27 citizen-journalists also killed in 2015.  In total, 787 journalists have been killed since 2005, according to RSF.

The very high number of journalists killed in 2015 (although there was a slight drop from 2014) reflects the increasingly deliberate use of violence against journalists. It is also indicative of the failure of initiatives designed to protect journalists and of the near absolute impunity for such crimes.

2015 was marked, in particular, by an increase in targeted terrorist attacks against journalists. French journalists paid a disproportionately high price when terrorists gunned down media workers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. In the United States, the killing by a disgruntled ex-employee of two former colleagues at US TV WDBJ in Virginia took place in front of a global TV audience during a live transmission.

The IFJ 2015 list names the 109 journalists and media staff killed across 30 countries, together with 3 who died of accidental deaths.

This year, the killing of journalists in the Americas topped the toll, at 27 dead. For the second year in a row, the Middle East comes second, with 25 deaths. Asia Pacific comes third, with 21– a drop on last year due to the big fall in violence in Pakistan. Africa is in fourth place with 19 dead, followed by Europe with 16.

In response to the increasing violence against journalists, Jim Boumelha, IFJ President, is calling for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the heads of UN agencies to enforce international laws protecting journalists. “The attacks in Paris shocked the world and put on the world stage the tragedy of the drip-drip slaughter of journalists worldwide, which are today the only professional group that pays so dearly for just doing the job… Journalism is put daily to the sword in many regions of the world, where extremists, drug lords and reckless warring factions continue murdering journalists with impunity.”

The Federation is urging the UN to take concrete measures through its Action Plan for the Safety of Journalists and take a strong stand against impunity for crimes targeting journalists. The IFJ ran a three-week campaign this year to hold governments accountable for the lack of investigation of crimes against journalists, which leads to the erosion of freedom of expression across the world. 

#OwnTheMedia: Positive News Becomes Global Media Cooperative

Positive News Editor-in-Chief Sean Dagan Wood and Journalist Danielle Batist

Positive News started on a kitchen table in a farm tucked away in rural Shropshire some 22 years ago.  It is the world’s leading and longest-established publication dedicated to positive and solution-focused journalism. A magazine writing about kindness, cooperation, creativity and innovation - a breath of fresh air in a media where news too often means problems, conflicts, wars, crimes, tragedy: the old  “if it bleeds, it leads” approach.

The publication is now based in London, has a circulation of 60,000, a strong social media presence, and its construtive approach is increasingly attracting interest from other media.

The idea that news has to be something that’s broken is slowly being questioned by media outlets all over the world – and not just by alternative media.  Mainstream media like the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera and many more are experimenting with solution-focused sections and a more balanced news agenda.

Studies have shown that news with a negative bias tend to leave audiences feeling powerless, bored, frustrated, disengaged and less likely to get involved or contribute financially. The opposite is true for news with a more positive slant.   This does matter: journalists say they need to report on what’s happening in the world - and too bad if it makes people feel bad, and I tend to agree. But journalists are not doing their job if they produce switched-off, disengaged citizens.

As Positive News has pioneered a more positive form of journalism, it is now pioneering a new way to finance and run a media business. It needs to innovate to become sustainable and to meet the growing demand for its journalism, so it is becoming the first crowdfunded global media cooperative, owned by their readers and journalists. 

Positive News editor-in-chief, Seán Dagan Wood, said: “We’re seeing a growing public demand for our journalism, as well as increasing interest in our approach from other media. Cooperative ownership is the perfect way forward to raise investment while protecting our ethos.”

They launched their #OwnTheMedia crowdfunding campaign at Nesta yesterday to reach the £200,000 they need to secure and grow the organisation. Amazingly, the campaign has already reached £68,800, last time I looked, and new investments are coming in all the time.

 The funding will help Positive News expand their core team, develop their new website, relaunch their print publication into a magazine and build the audience and the income streams that will help sustain them in the long-term.

I’ve written for Positive News for a few years and love what they do and stand for.

If you want to join a community of people with shared values and be part of the first crowdfunded global media co-operative, please join the #OwnTheMediacampaign