Panel Note

Rodney Pinder

  More than 1,000 journalists and other news media workers have died trying to cover the news over the past 10 years. Most were not international war correspondents but local professionals trying to shine the light of truth into the darkest recesses of their own societies—murdered to silence them and intimidate their friends and colleagues. Shamefully, in 8 out of 10 cases of murder, no one is brought to justice. This issue of impunity for the killers of journalists is of deep concern not only to the news community but to international bodies such as the UN Security Council, expressed in Resolution 1738 on the deaths of journalists in conflict, UNESCO, in many resolutions over the years, and the Council of Europe. The safety of journalists is key to development programmes worldwide—the end to corruption, the war on poverty and proper sustained development cannot succeed where there is no freedom of the press or of expression. And neither of these can happen where journalists work in fear of their lives. Yet safety is largely ignored in media development programmes. They train journalists to be fearless reporters of truth, yet when the trainees exercise this new-found skill too often they blunder unprepared into great danger and risk their lives. More than 90 per cent of the 250 news men and women killed in Iraq since 2003 have been Iraqis, exercising their “press freedom” for the very first time. Out of $250 million spent worldwide on media development programmes last year a pittance was devoted to the key issue of journalist safety. INSI, a unique coalition of news organisations, journalist support groups and individuals, is the only organisation in the world solely focused on safety. And it struggles to raise the money for safety training courses for news media workers in the South who are unable to afford their own protection. We seek EUR 15 million over the next five years from the international donor community to run sustained training and other safety programmes—a drop in the ocean of media development aid and a tiny amount even compared with the $20 million spent on safety in 2007 by just four of the largest industry organisations. These organisations are a mere handful of news companies worldwide—the vast majority of companies around the world do little or nothing. So thousands of endangered journalists rely on INSI for life-saving support and we struggle with pathetic resources to meet the demand.

Santiago Lyon

How to minimize the risks inherent in covering the news around the world, especially in conflict and war zones.
Risks to the physical and mental health of the journalists involved.
Some of the factors that have increased risk
- Global spread of news; meaning the subject of your story is more likely to learn about it on the internet. Risks involved with that.
- Communications technology; satellite comms equipment can put the journalist in harm’s way for longer than used to be the case.
- Risk assessment training programs and the use, on occasion of armed security teams to protect journalists.
- Local journalists; increasingly media companies are relying on local journalists for their expertise and knowledge of the stories they cover. Moving “like a fish in water” can be safer, but it can also be easier to target and intimidate local journalists who do not always have the luxury of being able to leave their countries.
- Mental health; what do companies do when journalists need assistance processing the experiences they have lived through. Do regular Employee Assistance Programs have the expertise needed in dealing with trauma as it relates to journalism?

Alan Johnston

Our focus of concern will be the dangers faced by journalists operating in war zones around the world. I have some experience of that kind of work, having reported on conflicts in Tajikistan, Chechnya and Afghanistan. I also spent three years covering the tensions in the Gaza Strip, before being kidnapped there and held hostage by militants for about four months last year. My aim will be to draw on the things that I have seen and been through to illustrate some of the day-to-say realities of working in zones of conflict. I will try to spell out the nature of the various pressures on a journalist in a place like Gaza – the difficulties involved in trying to gauge the dangers and take action to counter them. I intend to talk about ways in which the BBC tries to keep its staff safe, and I hope to highlight the particular need to work to protect locally hired members of any reporting team.

Guy Berger

Citizen journalism via cellphones can articulate two significant constituencies: youth and the readers of a community newspaper. Instead of stand-alone citizen journalism, or intra-generational communication, this articulation provides a platform in the common public sphere for seldom-heard youth news, views and creative journalism. This phenomenon alerts adult readers to much information that would otherwise have passed them by. For young people, it also begins to signify that a newspaper is a medium that is not simply for older people, and that they can also develop their understanding of citizenship by contributing to it. These remarks are based on early experience in the ?Iindaba Ziyafika ? the news is coming? project being implemented in Grahamstown, South Africa. In the process, the conversion of cellphones from being devices for inter-personal communication, into interactive mass media devices, is hastened. Based on open-source software, this scenario is one way in which media convergence, and ultimately online media interfacing, can unfold in developing country environments.

 

Lakshmi Nair & A S Panneerselvan 
                                 
Spheres of Influence: Media as Public Sphere

Having a vibrant media scene is a necessary prerequisite to human development and good governance. But, the time has come for us, media practitioners and support organisations, to accept and recognise that this is too complex to bring about on our own. It would be prudent to recognise the limitations of our sector, and create appropriate evaluation and impact assessment tools. The existing tools and methodologies are devised to give a macro picture of the overall environments but fail to clearly demarcate the roles played by various actors: state, judiciary, executive, civil society and media. Media is just one contributing factor, albeit an important one at that. Hence, it is imperative to track the spheres of influence wielded by the sector so that support organisations are not misled into tracking and measuring overall environments while attempting to quantify the impact that media support organisations have in the process of change.