The hijacking of press freedom

THANKS TO technology, press freedom is looking less and less like anything it’s been intended.

Indeed, press freedom has been hijacked, to the extent that it now belongs more to non-journalists than to the professionals in whose suitably trained hands it is meant to rest, so that its responsible exercise may be ensured somehow, and in whose recognition precisely (World) Press Freedom Day is observed today.

The specific technological culprit is one that allows anyone to string words together, set them on a non-paper medium, and foist them on the rest of the world without having to own them. In the extreme, the arrangement, by analogy, allows a sniper to go about his business with impunity,sure that, there being no way he can be traced, he will get away with his murders.

The medium is the Internet, and it operates in an other world called cyberspace. It is outdating the newspapers, magazines, and other print media, which make up the “press” in its strict, original sense – radio and television don’t seem as quickly or widely affected, but they also get the scare. In fact many from these traditional media have begun to embrace the Net, straddling between their old real world and this new virtual other, positioning themselves for the prophesied doom.

Consequently the prospect for press freedom is made even worse; the operative equation is skewed: the press goes, leaving freedom up for indiscriminate appropriation.

Even now the journalist seems another person in cyberspace, half of a sort of split personality, and I can only imagine that as the new medium takes over so does the new half of that personality. And once it happens the tragedy becomes complete: journalism becomes history, and it is replaced by a freewheeling and free-for-all something or other – something definitely not journalism, for that makes it patently oxymoronic.

Visit cyberspace and see for yourself how little of what it offers actually passes for journalism.The product of a mostly individualistic, unorganized, and un-vetted practice, it just can’t be.

Journalism is a serious undertaking: deliberate, organized,ruled by standards, subject to layer upon layer of checks – it’s a profession after all. Its first rule, which itself constitutes the first standard of fairness and responsible exercise of freedom, is that all sides to an issue be aired at the first telling; it also happens to be the first rule ignored in cyber-practice, where prevails a simplistic and twisted sense of competition for, in the lingo of the trade, “scoop”: whoever gets the news out first wins, regardless of the quality of the information supplied.

As for opinion making, it is a department put in the hands of journalists who have been there and done that, but who, for all the breadth of view they have acquired through years and years of practice, still cannot be expected to say what they think unless it is founded on a robust body of facts. Not cyber-columnists – they just go ahead and say it.

For journalists feeling cramped by the strictly hierarchical order in their profession and looking to escape editors – whom they consider by their self-centric, resentful, shortsighted view to be judge, jury, and executioner–the cyberspace allure of untouchable solo practice is naturally tremendously appealing.

Meanwhile, the natural enemy of press freedom feels inspired and emboldened. In the licentious practice of information- and opinion-mongers in cyberspace, he finds reinforcement of his own ends – basically, to emasculate the press.

The president and his congress, for instance, continue to refuse to pass a law that would merely formalize the all too ridiculously obvious idea that public information should be made public because it is in the public interest to make it so (Freedom of Information Law).

On the other hand, a good number in congress are only too eager to pass a law commanding the media to publish, broadcast, or cybercast the reply of any news subject who feels aggrieved by them, no matter if it’s precisely the sort of law that does what the Constitution explicitly prohibits – abridging press freedom, which is what telling the press what to do precisely does.

Not that, in our tradition, law or noble sense is anything known to stop people in power like them.

Well, in keeping with the ridiculous tradition, Happy Press Freedom Day!

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Also appearing today in BusinessWorld, of which the writer is the publisher.