In the United States, the press is lobbying with apparent success for the right to accompany its country’s frontline troops into battle in Iraq. In Zimbabwe, those journalists not licking their leader’s jackboot are languishing under its weight. On the surface, a perfect illustration of the age-old contrast between press autonomy and censorship, between democracy and autocracy. America: land of the free and, if its reporters are anything to go by, home of the brave. Zimbabwe: land for free and home of whoever does the government’s bidding.
But on closer inspection one discerns the same forces at work in both instances. That no leader likes a hostile press is a truism as applicable to George W. Bush as Robert Mugabe. Both are equally anxious that their antics, be they carpet-bombing Baghdad or dispossessing farmers, be presented to the world in a favourable light. Where they differ radically is in the approaches they take to achieve this end.
The Zanu-PF approach is simple: if you don’t like what the press is saying, shut it up. There are many ways of shutting people up in an autocracy, and Mugabe has explored most of them: evicting the international media, terrorising and imprisoning local journalists, and, most recently, refusing accreditation to any editor, journalist or publication that strays from the party line.
Resorting to strong-arm tactics is hardly a subtle technique, but recent history has shown it to be a chillingly effective one. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, for example, Hutu militia were careful to target journalists fourteen killed in the first three weeks to ensure that the world would hear little of the atrocities to follow. In Bosnia, massacres of Muslims were often prefaced by attacks on journalists, either killing them or driving them out of the area. And why is it that few outside Algeria know that a civil war in that country has claimed over 100 000 lives in the past ten years? Because at least sixty of those lives belonged to journalists.
Before the nineties, such naked aggression against the media, though not unheard of, was considered politically unwise; journalists were still regarded as detached observers, through whom one could communicate one’s story to the world. But the days when the word “press” guaranteed immunity are long gone. Indeed, in too many of today’s conflicts the same word signifies “fair game”.
An increasingly common tactic used by those wishing to vilify journalists even local journalists is that the press represents foreign interests or foreign governments. Zimbabwe is a case in point. After the ousting of several outspoken Zimbabwean journalists by newspapers eager to survive Mugabe’s draconian media laws, The Herald, a government mouthpiece, ran a self-satisfied editorial claiming that “[the journalists’] downfall was like a man devoured by his own pets. The Western style of journalism of peddling lies dealt a death nail on their professionalism (sic).”
In Zimbabwe’s case, such claims, along with regular rants accusing the BBC and CNN of deliberately furthering British and American imperialist ambitions, are, of course, manufactured solely to justify state censorship. But the fact remains that in much of the developing world, respect for the integrity of journalists, particularly western journalists, is at a low ebb. Journalists have become easy targets.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the Muslim world, where American reporters are frequently suspected to be agents of the US government a presumption made by the men who tortured and murdered the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl in Pakistan last year.
Persecution of the press is one of the more frightening consequences of fundamentalist, undemocratic ideologies, but influence-peddling by Western politicians and media owners particularly those in the United States has also contributed to perceptions of a comfy relationship between the free press and government.
The past few years have seen a dramatic rightward shift in the outlook of the US press. No doubt the siege mentality brought about by September 11 was a contributing factor external threats have always been helpful in galvanizing domestic support for the state. But the shift is also believed to be the result of a concerted effort on the part of the Republican Party, whose members have invested millions over the past decade in Republican-friendly foundations and research groups that do everything from developing conservative TV talent to disseminating print-ready spin for right-thinking newsmen.
The result has been a surge in the popularity of conservatively minded media, as attested to by the meteoric rise of the right-wing Fox News Channel to the top of the cable news ratings. One can also point to personalities like Rush Limbaugh, whose dogmatic conservatism secured his position as America’s number one radio talk-show host.
The Republican approach is a far cry from anything resembling the strong-arm tactics of Mugabe and his ilk. Nevertheless, it has certainly succeeded in quieting the influence of dissenting voices on such issues as America’s ambitions in Iraq, or anything, for that matter, perceived to have a bearing on national security. Today, the majority of American news, or at least broadcast news, is unashamedly patriotic and rarely critical of Bush’s foreign policy.
It is thus hardly surprising that the Pentagon is training up US journalists to join the vanguard in the event of a war in Iraq. Should the press be allowed to put this training into practice, it would not be because of Bush’s commitment to press freedom, but rather for more calculated reasons. Stories from the front will get out regardless, and the US government would far rather they were reported by loyal American journalists than by Qatar’s Al-Jazeera network, or worse, Saddam’s propaganda corps.
Regardless of the rationale, however, should a war take place in Iraq, the public will be far better served by reports from combat zones than they were during the last Gulf War. Back then, in the days before Al-Jazeera, journalists were herded into holding pens miles from the frontlines and forced to subsist on a diet of Pentagon press briefings. And despite the swing of many broadcasters and newspapers towards a pro-government line, there are still numerous high quality publications here that remain fiercely independent the New York Times being a noteworthy example. Still, it is easy to get the impression that the US media have earned their new pride of place largely through a demonstrated allegiance to the US government and its actions.
The new amity between the press and the Pentagon holds dangers not only for the public, who are likely to view the war through rose-tinted televisions, but also for the journalists themselves. Writing recently in the New York Times Magazine, veteran war reporter Scott Anderson insisted that part of the escalating hostility towards journalists comes from a lack of understanding in undemocratic countries about how a free press works. However, he added, “when militants observe a cozy relationship between American journalists and the American military in the field, when television reports from Kuwait or Afghanistan carry border graphics of red, white and blue bunting and taglines like ‘America Strikes Back,’ what is there left to understand? The whole world, remember, now gets CNN.”