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Saturday, March 1, 2008

[mukto-mona] Relation between government and press

Dear Editor,
 
Hope you are doing well and thanks for publishing my previous write-ups
 
This is an article about "Relation between government and press" on the occasion of the World Press Freedom Day May 3. I will be highly honoured if you publish this article. I apprecite your time to read this article.
 
Thanks
 
Have a nice time
 
With Best Regards
 
Ripan Kumar Biswas
New York, U.S.A
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Relation between government and press
 
Ripan Kumar Biswas
 
"The basis of the government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether a country should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter," said Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States (1801-1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (17776) and one of the most influential founding fathers for his promotion of the ideals of Republicanism in the United States. 
 
On the necessity of a free press, Jefferson was satisfied to believe why a government succeeds and why it fails as because the press is much more of a channel between citizens and the acts of government. When the relationship works well, both the press and the government gain, when it doesn't, both have something to lose. Press is independent and fearless, and not indebted to anyone except public interest.
 
Freedom of Press is the guarantee by the government of free public press for its citizens and their associations, extended to members of news gathering organizations, and their published reporting. It also extends to news gathering, and processes involved in obtaining information for public distribution. Until now, not all countries are protected by a bill of rights or the constitutional provision pertaining of freedom of the press.
 
Every year, May 3rd is a date which celebrates the fundamental principles of press freedom; to evaluate press freedom around the world, to defend the media from attacks on their independence and to pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the exercise of their profession. In 2008, World Press Freedom Day will focus on the freedom of the press and the "Access to information and the empowerment of people."
 
Modern democratic government subsists in representation of millions by hundreds. For the representatives to be accountable and for the process of government to be transparent, effective communication paths must exist to the constituents. No doubt, these paths consists primarily of the mass media, to the extent that if press freedom disappeared, so would most political accountability. In democratic countries, a special relationship exists between media and government. Although the freedom of press may be constitutionally enshrined and have precise legal definition and enforcement, the exercise of that freedom by individual journalists is a matter of personal choice and ethics.
 
According to Timothy Balding, chief executive officer of the World Association of Newspapers, balancing the sometimes conflicting interests of security and freedom might indeed be difficult, but democracies have an absolute responsibility to use a rigorous set of standards to judge whether curbs on freedom can be justified by security concerns and should set them against the rights protected in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which guarantees freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
 
Anti-terrorism and official secrets laws, criminalization of speech judged to justify terrorism, criminal prosecution of journalists for disclosing classified information, surveillance of communications without judicial authorization, restrictions on access to government data and stricter security classifications, all these measures can severely erode the capacity of journalists to investigate and report accurately and critically, and thus the ability of the press to inform.

Press freedom and safety is not only an issue in conflict and post-conflict areas; there is also a worrying tendency of increased political pressure in many other countries. In the past decade, more than 1000 media professionals have been killed in the exercise of their profession, most of them victims of targeted killing. Only very few cases are investigated. In even fewer cases the perpetrators are brought to justice. Indeed, impunity stands in the way of justice in more than ninety percent of these cases, and as long as this pervasive culture of impunity persists, journalists will remain easy targets.
 
According to the New York based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), sixty-five journalists were killed in direct relation to their work in 2007 since 1994, the highest death toll in more than a decade. For the fifth straight year, Iraq was the world's deadliest country for the press. Its 32 victims accounted for nearly half of the 2007 toll. Somalia was the second-deadliest country, with seven journalist deaths.
 
Taking note of the many problems of media and media-persons in South Asia face in the pursuit of truth and in fulfilling the demands of the professional tasks, in particular as a result of legal, social and political constraints on, and a growing pattern of governments' intolerance of criticism, the freedom of press and the right to know continue their well-deserved reputation as one of most unsafe places in the world for journalists to work. Governments continue the crack down on democratic rights and press freedom in the name of tackling situation. And corrupt officials, insurgents, fundamentalists of all religions and gangsters with their own violent methods of silencing truth tellers, continue with impunity.
 
It becomes a significant symbol of the curb on the freedom of expression that the state of emergency is forcing on public views and opinions when the government asked private television channels to follow a set of guidelines in airing talk shows while the chief adviser of the present interim government of Bangladesh Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed claimed to the BBC in an interview that the media is operating freely in Bangladesh without any government intervention. Print media has been also advised several times to be cautious about their editorials, features or columns related to politics and government.
 
Media freedom shrinks and grows in Pakistan, as it does in Sri Lanka and other South Asian nations. The changes can be rapid, depending on leaders' ambitions, the state of the economy, or a worsening security situation. But the media's persistence, resourcefulness, and cohesion have often formed a bulwark against attacks.

Journalists in countries under duress realize that a free and open society is something grander than journalism. They also know that without journalism—even when it is flawed, or biased, or self-censored—a free society cannot truly exist. Power-obsessed politicians know that, too, and that is why in Pakistan and Sri Lanka they have tried to suppress the media. That these politicians have not fully succeeded should give us hope. Failed governments have come and gone. Their executives, legislatures, and judiciaries are easily and regularly corrupted, but South Asian journalists have persevered to uphold a higher ideal.
 
Although a cherished right of the people, freedom of the press is different from other liberties of the people in that it is both individual and institutional. It applies not just to a single person's right to publish ideas, but also to the right of print and broadcast media to express political views and to cover and publish news. A free press is, therefore, one of the foundations of a democratic society, and as Walter Lippmann, the 20th-century American columnist "A free press is not a privilege, but an organic necessity in a great society."
 
Freedom of press is not an event; it's a continuous process that should be remaining as it is as because it is widely related with the general people to re-install confidence whenever they need. Government must not restrict unnecessarily the freedom of movement of journalists or compromise the right of news media to gather, produce and disseminate information in secure and safe conditions.


March 02, 2007, New York
Ripan Kumar Biswas is a freelance writer based in New York
 

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