Johannesburg | Friday
CENSORSHIP in South Africa has increased so dramatically that the Johannesburg-based Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) has advertised for an anti-censorshiFp programme co-ordinator.
”Previously we used to get about one to two requests for assistance per week. We now get them virtually every day,” FXI director Jane Duncan said this week.
The reported cases were not confined to government censorship of individuals and institutions such as the media, but also in the private sector and democratic organisations, the FXI noted.
The assault on press freedom and the free-flow of information echoes world trends.
The annual report of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), released in New York this week, reported ”a global press freedom crisis” precipitated by the September 11 attacks and the subsequent ”war on terrorism”.
Thirty-seven journalists were killed last year, up from 24 killed in 2000, and 118 jailed, an increase of 50% from the previous year.
China, with 35 journalists behind bars, was the globe’s leading jailer of journalists for the third year.
More than two-thirds of last year’s increase was in Eritrea and Nepal, carried out after September 11.
The annual survey of press freedom conditions around the world said the dramatic rise in the number of journalists’ deaths ”is mainly due to the war in Afghanistan, where eight journalists were killed in the line of duty covering the US-led military campaign”.
”Most of the journalists killed, however, were not covering conflicts but were murdered in reprisal for their reporting on sensitive topics including official crime and corruption in countries such as Bangladesh, China, Thailand, and Yugoslavia.”
It documented over 500 cases of media repression in 140 countries, including assassination, assault, imprisonment, censorship, and legal harassment and noted several alarming trends.
One was that governments around the world invoked ”national security” concerns after September 11, while seeking new restrictions on the press or unleashing new intimidations in countries like Zimbabwe, where journalists were denounced as ”terrorists”.
In South Africa, Duncan said journalists were experiencing censorship within newsrooms, ”either internally generated or as a result of external pressure”.
”We often deal with these confidentially (if so requested), or we may also deal with them together with the journalists’ organisations, if they involve working conditions.”
Duncan said it was not unusual for journalists to be threatened with ”disciplinary action for doing reports that offend people in high places”.
”We also get approached by actual or potential whistleblowers in the public and private sectors, seeking advice on how to handle particular situations, or if action has been taken against them, what to do.”
The FXI also received requests ”about how to access information that public or private institutions do not want to release”.
”Recently, we received a request from the Natal Society for the Arts to intervene in a situation where the Chinese Embassy attempted to shut down a photographic exhibition on Tibet’s struggle for self-determination.
”We also received a request to assist with a student newspaper whose Zimbabwean sources and writers were being threatened over their participation in a story on the MDC/Zanu-PF split among Zimbabwean students on campus.
”Then there was Benny Gool and the subpoenas, Robert Kirby and his book (Songs of the Cockroach, which Jonathan Ball refused to publish fearing a defamation case) and many, many others.”
Duncan said the FXI supported the establishment of the Media Development and Diversity Agency Bill because ”it is necessary to increase media access and broaden media ownership to the most marginalised sectors of South African society”.
”However, from a preliminary analysis of the Bill, the FXI does not believe that as presently proposed the MDDA will be independent from government, allowing it to ‘…exercise its powers and perform its duties without fear, favour or prejudice, and without any political or commercial interference’.
Another potential blot on the face of press freedom, according to political commentator Anthony Johnson, was the Presidential Press Corps (PPC) ostensibly to improve communication between the presidency and the media.
”The way that government and its agencies have set about handling these twin initiatives (the MDDA and the PPC) has unfortunately created suspicion that there are other, less laudable, agendas and objectives at play here.
”Indeed, some of the signals that government is sending out are the antithesis of greater openness and diversity of information and suggest a greater desire to centralise and control,” he wrote. – Sapa