Targets

CARTAGENA – One consolation for Filipino journalists is that media workers are being targeted for murder and harassment not just in our country but also in many other parts of the world.

In this land notorious for narco traffickers, a Spanish journalist covering the drug conflict was kidnapped by Marxist rebels last month. Two Colombians who reported about her disappearance were also kidnapped. All three were freed about a week later.

Cartagena is home to El Universal, the newspaper where Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez began working as a journalist. The novelist, whose home is a tourist spot in this city, later worked for El Espectador in the capital Bogota, which sent him to Europe as a correspondent after he wrote a series of stories exposing smuggling by the navy.

Over the years, El Espectador’s offices have been burned and bombed by those unhappy with its critical reporting. In 1986 its editor Guillermo Cano was assassinated reportedly on orders of Medellin drug cartel boss Pablo Escobar, who also hit the newspaper office with a truck bomb in 1989. El Espectador is still being published, and its founder Luis Gabriel Cano was the recipient of the Golden Pen of Freedom awarded by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) in 1990.

Last year the Golden Pen, conferred since 1961, was awarded to all journalists killed in the line of duty.

This year Luis Gabriel Cano’s nephew Fidel Cano, now the editor-in-chief of El Espectador, was chosen to hand out the Golden Pen to Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, the Russian newspaper that has seen six of its journalists and one of its lawyers murdered in work-related attacks or under suspicious circumstances since it was founded in 1993. Among the victims was Anna Politkovskaya, a critic of President Vladimir Putin and his Chechnya policy, who was shot in the elevator of her apartment building in October 2006. Five men were convicted in 2014 for the contract killing; who ordered the hit remains unknown.

Since 1992, 56 Russian journalists have been murdered in the line of work. Ninety percent of the attacks are unsolved.

In the Philippines and elsewhere, hired guns have no gender issues; women journalists are fair game. In Mexico, women in media have banded together in Juarez, once rated as the world’s most violent city as a result of warring drug cartels and the government’s crackdown. Of some 12,300 fatalities in that war, 400 were women. Several were journalists, but many, according to a Juarez reporter, were just relatives of drug suspects.

Gabriela Minjares of El Diario de Juarez, founder of the Network of Journalists of Juarez, said here that some of those targeted turned to the media for help in finding missing relatives, and the journalists also got killed.

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Reporting to the 68th WAN Congress and 23rd World Editors’ Forum here last Monday on the state of press freedom, WAN-IFRA’s Swedish president Tomas Brunegard said that for the 12th straight year, fewer people worldwide had access to a free press in 2015, a year that saw 73 journalists killed in the line of duty in several countries.

The majority of those killed, according to WEF research, were investigating politicians and governance issues rather than covering armed conflict.

Where journalists were not being murdered, Brunegard reported, state surveillance and counterterrorism legislation were eroding civil liberties including in Europe. To snoop on media, governments are pushing laws for gaining content access to tech companies.

“There’s a widespread culture of impunity against journalists around the world,” Agence France Presse global editor Phil Chetwynd told us at the Press Freedom Roundtable here on Sunday. “It goes to the idea that a journalist is a target.”

And there are other threats. In post-apartheid South Africa, parliament members have hit back at the aggressive media by proposing a 20-year sentence for journalists who expose sensitive government information. I can see many of our politicians loving this proposal.

Governments in several Latin American countries in particular are not enamored with a free press. In Ecuador, El Universo director Carlos Perez Barriga told us about heavy censorship and a situation in which journalists are “treated almost like war targets.”

In Venezuela, photojournalists were attacked by unidentified men for covering food lines, and media workers are going into exile to avoid being jailed. Several media organizations have been forced to close shop because their business licenses were not renewed by the government.

Then there are the business problems arising from competition posed by social media and other platforms. Anyone can now become a reporter, and mainstream media has lost control of the narrative.

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What can journalists do? There is general agreement here that the best response is returning to the core values of good journalism, which social media cannot guarantee: credibility, fairness and objectivity. The quality of coverage must also keep improving, keeping in step with technology.

“Our basic journalistic values have never been more important,” Chetwynd said. Even in an “economically troubled environment,” he said mainstream media must remain objective and impartial, providing context in interpreting unfolding events.

The results have been encouraging. Data compiled annually by WAN-IFRA show that despite the popularity of social media and the growth of mobile news consumption, newspapers are enjoying a global resurgence.

Last year, data showed that global newspaper revenue amounted to $168 billion – more than the earnings of the music industry. In Latin America, Colombians are among the most avid consumers of printed news, spending an average of an hour a day reading newspapers.

Print circulation was slightly up globally last year, and grew by 21.7 percent from 2011 to 2015. Even in established media markets, according to WAN-IFRA research, print circulation and revenue are stable.

As for the bottom line, print revenue still accounted for 90 percent of global media advertising, with digital earnings far behind. People don’t like ads on digital platforms, and there are ad blockers to facilitate this.

French publication Le Monde puts out a print edition only on weekends; the rest of the week it’s purely digital. But its CEO Louis Dreyfus told us that the printed version accounted for 70 percent of their revenue, with circulation shooting up during the terrorist attacks and when they published the Panama Papers.

People want “physical contact” with news, Dreyfus observed, and “we strongly believe there is a future for print.”

Dmitry Muratov couldn’t make it here because of a recent medical procedure. On his behalf, the Golden Pen was accepted by his deputy editor Sergei Sokolov, who once went into hiding after being allegedly threatened with death by Russia’s top investigator. Sokolov said he and his colleagues would not stop working in newspapers.

“We like the profession,” Sokolov said. “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

Many Filipino journalists will say the same thing.