Abdulhamit Bilici

Abdulhamit Bilici, Former Editor-in-Chief, Zaman News, Journalist | USA

Abdulhamit Bilici is the Former Editor-in-Chief of the now-closed Zaman Newspaper. He was also the Chief Executive Officer of its English-language version, Today`s Zaman. Mr. Bilici was the General Director of Cihan News Agency and the Editor of Aksiyon Weekly Magazine. He has a Master`s Degree from Department of Economics at Istanbul University and has an MBA degree from Faculty of Management at Fatih University. Abdulhamit Bilici has been living in exile as a journalist in the USA after the failed-coup attempt in Turkey. Mr. Bilici is an expert on Turkish politics and continues his journalism career by writing freelance articles for various media outlets.

 

Video Link:

Event Title: SDGs Conference 2023 Date: Sept 20, 2023
 

SPEECH

The role of a free and independent media for electoral democracies

To present my case will be very easy because if I introduce myself, it will be sufficient to tell how awful the situation is when there is no press freedom. I used to be Editor-in-Chief of the largest Turkish newspaper, which does not exist anymore, so it is not even a yellow journal. It is not a mouthpiece newspaper and even our archives are deleted. I used to write in that newspaper column twice per week and now I can not find those articles. Still, this is the smallest part of it because some of my colleagues are still in jail. I am lucky; although I have been in exile for seven years and of course, even that does not describe the situation because it is not just my newspaper but 200 media outlets that have been shut down in the last seven years, especially after the 2016 coup attempt. 

Turkey became the biggest jailer of journalists in the world. I would like to underline that the relationship between human rights in any country and press freedom is very significant. Those who follow international relations will remember Turkey was a rising star just 10 years ago, not a long distance. It was a model of a rising democracy. It was an economic success story in a very volatile, very chaotic world; it is not the case now. I will share two statistics to help you in making a conclusion for yourself. 

What is the relationship between press freedom and the rule of law, human rights, or justice? Turkey now ranks 165 out of 180 countries in terms of press freedom according to the World Press Freedom Index. Turkey was 59th out of 126 countries on the Rule of Law Index, a global index telling us about the quality of justice in any country. Turkey was in the mid-level but now after seven years of the destruction of the press freedom, where is it now in that index? It is now 117th out of 139, almost 50 to 40 countries down in terms of quality of justice, rule of law, and human rights. 

When I listen to my colleagues’ observations about the United States, Greece, and New Zealand, I am learning that there are always some problems to focus on and to talk about and work on in regard to progress. There is a very important quote from George Orwell: “Journalism is printing what someone else doesn’t want to be printed. Any other thing is public relations.” 

If journalism is to print something that some people do not like to be printed, it is a default fact that you will be targeted. So, this is kind of given for a real journalist if we do our job but the scale of being targeted, being attacked, being not liked, may be different. In my case, my newspaper was shut down and I went into exile. In some French cases, they are being killed just because of writing facts that some sources of power do not like. It may be a government, a political leader, a mafia boss, a leader of a company, or a tribe. The nature of journalism has that intrinsic in it. 

You may not think that is disturbing some people. There are different levels of threat, damage, and problems but as I said, there is a strong relationship between press freedom, human rights, and the rule of law but of course, it is not a one-way street. If there is press freedom, journalists must respect the rule of law and human rights; however, this is not the case. There was relative freedom of media in Turkey but it did not support human rights but eventually destroyed it.

An Armenian colleague of mine who was a journalist was assassinated by an ultranationalist group but they have been targeted first by a very mainstream newspaper. As a result of a silly story, they put him on target. This was the starting point of him being killed and at the end of the process. There was a very popular singer, the Turkish audience will know very well, Ahmet Kaya, whose exile process and his death in Paris, happened after him being targeted by the media. So, there have been some other prominent journalists and intellectuals who have been targeted in cooperation with the security agencies of the Turkish state. 

These stories were published by mainstream media. Even when there is freedom of the press, it does not mean that all journalists and media will use it to support human rights. In my former newspaper, we had special policies. There are different groups and minorities that are oppressed by the state`s ideology. So what we did was, we had some intentional policies to contribute to human rights, not to eliminate it. One of those attempts was to invite columnists, and reporters from different backgrounds to be present in our newsrooms and to write their views in the newspaper. 

In Turkey, we have an Armenian minority, a Greek minority, of course, a very big majority of Kurds, but still a minority. We had intellectuals from these groups representing their views freely in the newspaper which was a training and education for us, for all our staff. We need to empathize and understand their situation as they were raising awareness of the violations that they were subjected to. Other than the established media in Turkey, 90 to 95 percent of it was controlled by two families. 

That was a big problem. Whenever we see a story that looks fabricated or fake, we could send a reporter to investigate the truth about it. The first book that we published in the newspaper was a collection of those fake stories and their correct versions as a book. My newspaper was established in the 1980s or mid-1980s but we have newspapers with 80 years of history. We had our reporters trained in human rights awareness. Journalists are not angels, so we may have some biases as well. Thus, we need to have all this education and training to not make mistakes or to make mistakes. 

It is not possible in journalism to be mistake-free. Sometimes we make mistakes without being aware of what we are doing. It is very important to be able to reach out to different people who are living in the same society. So that was a very big problem and for the founders of my newspapers, one of the priorities was to change perspective in the media and to reach out to other people that were neglected before, not to be populist, but just to give them a chance to express themselves. 

My newspaper’s history goes back to before Erdogan and AKP but first, when it was established, it was attacked by the seculars because it was an outsider and new player in the game. It was a tiny newspaper when it started but it became the largest newspaper in 10 to 15 years. We had strong relations, and this was appreciated by the community. In the case of Zaman, the newspaper shows that it is possible, even if you are not happy with the existing media’s establishment, you can start something from scratch but you need to have good principles. When AKP was founded and Erdogaan was the leader of that party, we thought their approach and their perspective were very close to ours. 

They had some pious backgrounds but they were open to the world. They were pushing for Turkey to be a European Union member. They were progressive; and had a conservative background but progressive policies. We gave full support to this party and to this leader until 2013, the year that an extensive state corruption scandal was discovered. We had to cover and write about that and that was the beginning of the decline of Turkish democracy including my victimhood.

Turkey in 2013 and in 2023 is like day and night. My conclusion is that Turkey was becoming a good example of Muslim democracy rising in a very troubled area but now it is also another example of how press freedom, democracy, and human rights are very interdependent on one another. A state can not have a democracy without upholding human rights for all first.

Paula Penfold

Paula Penfold, Stuff Circuit, Investigative Journalist | New Zealand

Paula Penfold is an investigative journalist based in Auckland, New Zealand. Penfold reports for the video-led team Stuff Circuit at the country’s largest media organization, Stuff. Her work consistently returns to human rights themes across a wide range of issues. A five-year investigation into the miscarriage of justice Auckland man Teina Pora for rape and murder contributed to the quashing of his convictions; two landmark projects exposed hidden aspects of New Zealand’s role in the war in Afghanistan; and a major 2022 investigation, Fire and Fury, analysed the motives of the key players in New Zealand’s “freedom movement”, whose occupation of the country’s Parliament grounds ended in a violent riot. Stuff Circuit’s work is frequently awarded both nationally and globally, and Paula Penfold was named New Zealand’s broadcast reporter of the year in 2022 and 2019.

 

Video Link:

Event Title: SDGs Conference 2023 Date: Sept 20, 2023
 

SPEECH

Gender-based violence and violations against women journalists

Tēnā koutou katoa, a greeting in te reo Māori to acknowledge you all. 

People probably think nothing bad happens in New Zealand. The World Press Freedom Index for 2023 ranks New Zealand 13th. We are described as a model for public interest journalism. We apparently benefit from a high degree of press freedom. It is true, relatively speaking. No journalist has died in New Zealand because of our profession. There are no state-sponsored invasions of reporters’ homes or extrajudicial imprisonments.

Unfortunately, the World Press Freedom Index is wrong when it says journalists in New Zealand work in an environment free from violence and intimidation. Increasingly, there is an insidious threat, but it is not the state that is the problem. It is our fractured society, and a growing distrust, and more than that, a growing hatred towards journalists, a hatred borne disproportionately by women journalists. 

Given my brief is gendered violence, I want to step back, briefly, to 2013, when my colleagues and I began investigating a man’s wrongful conviction for rape and murder. I work in a small team and I was the only woman. So when an email arrived saying I was “infatuated with the convict” I took note. My male producer did not receive the same email. I found it distasteful but I put it to one side. 10 years on, if only things were that quaint. 

Last year we investigated the worst spreaders of mis- and disinformation in New Zealand for a documentary we called Fire and Fury. It came about because of a protest inspired by the trucker’s convoy in Canada. So-called “freedom movement” protestors converged on the capital, Wellington, and set up camp in the Parliament grounds. We were familiar with some of the key players and we knew it was not, as they maintained, a protest of “peace and love”. It was a recruitment drive and it radicalised ordinary New Zealanders. 

When we started to see some of the leaders use the term “ungovernable” — and others call for a military coup — we decided we needed to start filming, on a day which, coincidentally, was the day the police made their final move. It turned into a riot the likes of which our country had never seen before, in the very seat of our democracy. When we have reported in countries like Afghanistan we receive security training, of course, in order to try to keep ourselves safe. We used that training more in Wellington that day than we ever did reporting in Afghanistan, the Philippines or Mexico; countries where just being a journalist can put a target on your back.

We were abused and threatened. We were made to leave the protest by an angry, threatening group, who physically escorted us out, in spite of the fact that we were clearly entitled to be there to report. We went back in, and once the fires started and the gas canisters were exploding, we found ourselves in a no man’s land between advancing riot police and enraged protestors, it was time to go. Our security training had drilled into us to always have an exit route.

The violence and intimidation that day was directed at all journalists. But what came in the wake of the documentary was plainly gendered, most of it was directed at me. It is also obvious from the language. Most of it is too offensive to repeat here. But I thought it might be instructive for you to get a largely sanitised sense of it. I apologise for the tone of what remains, but it is authentic. 

From Joseph: “You are a complete piece of s…. You are lucky we do not meet. F you, [insert offensive term for prostitute]! The sooner you die the better.” 

Peter agreed. “Even more citizens are aware of how much of a [c-word] you actually are. Eventually, your kids will despise you. What a lying piece of shit you are.” 

And Sean simply said: “Wake up Paula. We are growing. We are GROWING. And you will all burn.” That’s a very small sample. But you get the idea. 

When I was informed by a source that one of the subjects of Fire and Fury had my home address, my company put my family and me into hiding while we beefed up the already improved security at home. This happens in Aotearoa New Zealand, where we pride ourselves on press freedom, the 13th best in the world. 

We do report some of these threats to the police, and sometimes a constable from the local station will ring and say “Do you feel safe at the moment” and you will say: Yes, I guess. That is the end of it. No proper inquiry is ever made. Those of us who are frequently updating our police 10-5 file, as it is known, with the latest threats all the file will be useful for is to help police with their investigations in the event of our premature deaths. 

New Zealand, like many other jurisdictions, is not legislatively equipped to deal with this new violent, threatening world order. On the rare occasions people are charged, it does not necessarily play out how it should. One person we investigated for that documentary was arrested in March last year on charges of threatening to kill then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. He also has me and other journalists on his Nuremberg list of those he says should be brought before a military tribunal for crimes against humanity. He was released on bail but failed to turn up for his next court appearance, and he has been on the run ever since. Police will not tell us what they are doing to try to catch him.

Male journalists are abused, too, of course, and put on Nuremberg lists. But the research shows they do not suffer the same degree of abuse and harassment as women do, nor the sexually violent abuse. It is worse, as usual, for women of color.

It becomes even more concerning in light of research commissioned by New Zealand’s Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet into COVID misinformation. It surveyed 2000 people and found, disturbingly, that 8 percent believed threatening to hurt someone is an acceptable way to achieve change. The same survey revealed that 54 percent of respondents who strongly believe in misinformation have avoided or stopped watching or reading mainstream media. 

The tentacles of the “fake news” narrative have reached all the way to the South Pacific and they are strangling us too. I have come to realise this is not happening in spite of New Zealand being a liberal Western democracy. It is happening because we are a liberal Western democracy. It is all part of the same continuum and the same mechanisms through which we are seeing a rise in authoritarianism throughout the world. 

What’s the result? A chilling effect, obviously. This is where so many of us as journalists struggle because of course, we do not want to be silenced. And yet every time we put our heads above the parapet, particularly on social media, and no matter how strong your blocking game, the attacks begin. So consciously or not, you reduce your presence. You think — and think again — about telling some stories. It is driving some journalists from the industry. 

When you consider that misogyny is not only or necessarily hatred of or towards women, it’s the control of women, this is a victory for those who wish to silence us and the stories we wish to tell. 

Senior media figures are worried about it, of course. My former boss, a 30-year veteran, wrote in a piece last year that when the ballistic grading of the windows at one of our newsrooms was discussed at a senior management meeting he realized things had changed. They see the online threats against us and the stress that engenders. They too worry about whether or when those threats transfer to real life. 

What do we do about it? Rebuilding trust in the media is key, not just for our financial survival but potentially our literal survival. Being transparent about our processes. Advocating in each of our jurisdictions for better legislation to protect us in the face of increasing violence. Encouraging media literacy through a whole-of-society approach. This problem does not just affect us as individual journalists, it undermines the very foundation of our role in democracies, and we can not fix it alone. I do feel encouraged that while hate and distrust, gendered, and all forms of violence towards journalists, are at unprecedented levels, the craft remains and continues to be pursued with excellence. I stay — in spite of it all — because I believe what we do matters.

Batya Ungar-Sargon

Batya Ungar-Sargon, Opinion Editor, Newsweek | USA

Batya Ungar-Sargon is the Opinion Editor of Newsweek. She is the author of “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy” and the forthcoming “Promised Land: The Working Class Struggle for the American Dream.” Formerly, she was the Opinion Editor of the Forward and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, the New York Review of Books Daily, and many other publications. Batya Ungar-Sargon has appeared numerous times on MSNBC, NBC, the Brian Lehrer Show, NPR, and at other media outlets. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Video Link:

Event Title: SDGs Conference 2023 Date: Sept 20, 2023
 

SPEECH

State of Press Freedom under Autocratic Regimes: State`s control of media as a venue of propaganda

There are many autocratic regimes across the globe that you will hear about but they do not recognize freedom of the press or even the sanctity of human life, where speaking the truth can cost a journalist his or her freedom. I think a lot of us must have heard about Evan Gershkovich, an American Wall Street Journal Reporter who is imprisoned by Russia. These countries routinely inflict human and civil rights abuses against journalists and its unspeakable. 

12 journalists were reportedly killed last year for reporting on the war in Ukraine and Russia. 13 journalists were killed in Mexico in 2022. Nothing that I am about to underline should be seen as in any way making an equivalence between what happens in those countries and what happens in Western democracies. Human rights abuses against journalists, murder, culture of violence, and impunity are atrocities that cannot be compared to anything else. Unfortunately, many democratic regimes have begun to engage in a culture of oppression and incrimination, often ironically in the name of fighting misinformation and disinformation. I would like to be extremely clear this is in no way comparable to killing and jailing journalists or allowing cartels to get away with killing and torturing journalists. 

Yet, when a government engages in efforts to suppress the truth about those in power and is met by a willing journalistic cast that has decided to assist in this suppression in the name of fighting misinformation, one can end up with a similar effect when it comes to the electorate. In other words, if the point of a free press is a free electorate whose freedom is in part predicated upon some level of being informed, then the sad truth is that journalism can be stifled by journalists if they are unwilling to stand up to government overreach, even when that overreach does not come in the form of imprisonment or physical threats. What we have learned in the US of late is that social threats, social status, and class solidarity can have a similar chilling effect on free speech and a commitment to diversity of thought. 

Autocrats are very adept at suffocating free speech and a free press with state-sponsored violence. However, in democracies, class interests can also suppress free speech while perhaps not as evil, terrifying, or violent as physical violence, it can result in a similarly conformist and unfree civic society, one that should horrify people committed to a free press, especially, we Americans, with our First Amendment in the US State Agencies, have routinely intervened to spread or silence journalistic stories of late most famously. 

I will present one example of how this happened in the name of fighting misinformation. In the run-up to the 2020 Presidential Election, President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden left his laptop in a computer repair shop, we now know by his own admission that it was his laptop that contained compromising information. The laptop was full of images of Hunter where he could be seen in compromising positions, as well as emails that showed a vast enterprise of influence peddling with representatives of foreign governments. 

Some of them are adversaries that may have implicated Joe Biden, we do not know yet. Yet when this story first came out, it was vigorously ignored, voluntarily by the mainstream legacy press so much so that as a candidate, President Biden was never even asked to deny that this was his son’s laptop, which it turned out it was. Instead of robust coverage, the media ran cover for the Biden campaign, which also colluded with a former acting director of the CIA, again, this is all reported. This is his own admission that got 50 intelligence officials to spread the lie. We now know that the laptop was Russian disinformation. Twitter then locked the account of the newspaper that had published the story to keep that vital information from spreading. 

Emails have subsequently revealed how often the Biden administration reached out to social media companies like Twitter and Facebook successfully petitioning them to ban the accounts of established journalists for the sin of publishing stories unfavorable to the administration, the White House successfully petitioned Facebook to remove post discouraging people from getting the COVID vaccine or discussing what turned out to be the almost certain actual origin of COVID-19 and others were booted from Twitter at the White House behest. Autocrats also are very good at protecting the free speech of people who agree with them. The US government participated in this regime of censorship so aggressively that recently a Federal Appeals Court said that the Biden Administration had violated the First Amendment. 

Again, I want to make it very clear that none of this comes close to jailing or killing journalists, but again, we are not here to discuss the evils of murder but rather the evils of suppressing the freedom of the press and silencing speech against our constitution. It is all the more egregious when that speech turns out to be true and yet with silence because of political purposes. Of course, the test of free speech is always when it comes to speech you disagree with, every autocrat can protect the speech of people they agree with. The worst part is that the media in America has been completely complicit in all of this. 

None of this would’ve been possible if the media had simply stood up to what we all were after, the benign requests from a Democratic government or even no requests at all. As in the case of the Hunter Biden laptop story, in repressive regimes, the media is forced to report things that they know are lies but here the tragedy is that members of the media cast have come to believe whatever the administration wants them to and the reason for that is very simple, capture. The American media has become deeply captured by a socio-economic elite that is almost uniformly ultra-progressive and no longer believes that free speech is an absolute value and that political debate is the sacred bedrock of a democracy. Some 96% of American journalists who gave political donations gave them to the Democratic Party, even though they only got 25% of the electorates’ votes. 

96% of journalists speak from the same position as a quarter of Americans, the majority of them have graduate degrees. They make at least twice the median income, although most of them make much more, and vanishingly a few of them believe that those they disagree with deserve to make their case unimpeded to the American people. A lot of that is being done again and they use the terms misinformation and disinformation and push a political and economic agenda. American journalists routinely end up protecting the very people they’re meant to be holding to account while smearing and silencing the working class who tend to be more socially conservative. American journalists are now on the side of those in power. They go to the same elite universities as the tech billionaires and politicians they are supposed to cover and their children end up in the same elite schools and they end up in the same neighborhoods at the same time. 

97% of political donations that came out of Silicon Valley, surprisingly went to the Democratic Party. So, there are two ways to stop the truth from emerging in a free press. One is to kill journalists in jail and the other is to wait for them to become part of the same elites that benefit from the status quo and then they have a vested interest in protecting the lies of those in power to whom their own status is bound, making them reactionary; conservatives who will defend the Biden Administration or the Obama Administration before them. 

This panel is about the UN General Assembly’s Sustainable Development Goals, which are noble goals including reducing all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere. However, the American press would not report the skyrocketing levels of violent crime plaguing low-income Americans, especially black Americans, and here is the worst part about it. They did not need to be told by a democratic administration not to report on the crime wave, which is highly localized in democratic cities. They did not have to be threatened with prison to not report on it. It came naturally to them. 

It is how they protect their elite status with ideas like defunding the police, which proliferated in 2020 and 2021. If you are a working journalist who knew people whose lives had been destroyed by crime and dared to speak up against it, you were ostracized, humiliated, and shamed into silence by your fellow journalists. Stories about crime are rife with misinformation and racism. They declared at the federally funded NPR a sentiment that was echoed over and over by the Legacy media. Now, imagine being the victim of rape or carjacking or the family member of a person who was murdered and having to read that headline. 

I am sure everybody thinks education is a vital goal. Yet, thanks to the censorship of the Biden Administration, a compliant press, and complicit social media companies, the disastrous impact of learning loss due to school lockdowns on low-income children was hidden from view, as was how little children were in danger of negative outcomes from COVID-19. It will take a generation for black children to make up the impact of losing two years of school while rich white kids were back in school within six months. During these lockdowns, which got no pushback from the mainstream media, physical abuse of children skyrocketed and so did suicide attempts. What about Target 5.2, eliminating all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public in private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation? One fact you will not read about in the American media is the fact that one-third of all women crossing our southern border illegally admit to being raped. 

Imagine what the actual number is as a third of these women admit that they were raped on the way here, including children as young as eight years old. Under President Biden, the US is seeing more human trafficking and more sex trafficking than we have certainly in my lifetime, probably in our entire history. Why don’t you hear about it in the press class? Solidarity American journalists are in the class that consumes cheap illegal migrant labor, not the class who are competing for those jobs. The point I am trying to make is that there are many ways for a regime to control the media for purposes of propaganda and not all of them are violent. Not all of them occur under autocracies and even functioning democracies can have a dysfunctional press. 

All it takes is for the people tasked with holding power to account, to get a taste of power, to cultivate deep contempt for the citizens they’re meant to be informing. All it takes is for journalists to think it is their job to tell people how to think or what to value instead of supplying them with facts so they can make up their own minds, the way you do with somebody you respect. Autocrats have contempt for human life and human rights but nothing compares to the atrocity that represents and the atrocities it results in. However, if you have contempt for the values of your fellow man because they do not agree with you, you can end up robbing them of the truth too, and using journalism to spread misinformation in the name of defending the truth. I hope this goes without saying to me, but for an American, the government should never ever be involved in the business of fighting misinformation.

Tania Bozaninou

Tania Bozaninou, Journalist, To Vima Newspaper | Greece

JeniTania Bozaninou is a journalist from Greece working since 1997 for To Vima on Sunday, as its Editor-in-Chief. Ms. Bozaninou covers a variety of topics, from diplomacy, foreign affairs to human rights and migration. She has reported from several countries in the Middle East, including Afghanistan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and Europe. After completing her studies of Economics at the University of Athens, Tania Bozaninou received an MA in Journalism and Communications Policy from City University in London.

 

Video Link:

Event Title: SDGs Conference 2023 Date: Sept 20, 2023
 

SPEECH

In the 25 years I have been working for To Vima, in Greece, the last six as an editor-in-chief, I have been in a position to witness the developments in journalism, some good and some bad, but also the undeniable decline in press freedom. 

I will begin my speech by giving you two definitions of press freedom, not because I think you do not know what press freedom is, but because I want to show you the evolution of the definition of freedom of the press through the decades. The first one is by George Orwell, who lived in the first half of the 20th century: “Freedom of the press means the freedom to criticize and oppose” – as simple as that. 

Definitions of the 21st century, such as the latest one from Reporters Without Borders, describe press freedom as “the ability of journalists to select, produce, and disseminate news independent of political, economic, legal, and social interference and in the absence of threats to their physical and mental safety”.  The definition of press freedom had to be broadened in this century in order to encompass the more complex threats that journalists face today. 

I come from Greece which ranks in the worst position of all European Union countries concerning press freedom. According to this year’s World Press Freedom Index, which evaluates 180 countries, Greece is in position 107. Unfortunately, my country is not an exception but it is the norm: the environment for journalism is bad in seven out of ten countries in the world today, and satisfactory in only three out of ten.

According to an analysis by UNESCO of data on freedom of expression, around 85% of people live in countries where press freedom has declined over the past five years. Several of the most populous countries have declined from very bad to atrocious, such as China, Egypt, Turkey, and Russia. 

The entire American continent, including the United States, no longer has any country where press freedom is deemed good. In the Asia-Pacific, there are some of the worst countries regarding press freedom. In Africa, nearly half of the countries are problematic. Last in the regional ranking is the Middle East and North Africa, which continue to be the world’s most dangerous region for journalists. 

Europe continues to be the best continent to work as a journalist, but even there the situation is problematic in some cases. I suppose you have heard of Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta, Jan Kuciak in Slovakia, and Giorgos Karaivaz in Greece, who were all murdered in the last six years because they were doing their job. They were investigating corruption and they were murdered because their investigation displeased the corrupt networks. 

Even in Germany, which has a good ranking in the Press Freedom Index, number 21 out of 180, a record number of cases of violence against journalists were recorded last year. In Greece, just in the last five weeks, two journalists were beaten up in public places, one in a restaurant where he was eating with his family and one in a sports stadium. The second one is a colleague of mine. He was physically attacked by a businessman and his bodyguards, who were displeased by one of my colleague’s articles. In both cases, the journalists sustained non-life-threatening injuries. But the point was not to kill them. The point was to threaten all journalists in Greece not to mess with these particular people. 

Everything I have mentioned so far concerns the “traditional” threats that curtail press freedom: murder and attacks. Unfortunately, there are many more modern threats that might not harm journalists physically but they do harm press freedom. 

For example, in 118 out of the 180 countries in the Press Freedom Index, politicians are involved in massive disinformation or propaganda campaigns, which results in blurring the difference between true and false. This is made possible thanks to new technology. But apart from new technology, those who want to mess with press freedom have many other tools at their disposal. I would like to introduce just two of them. 

One is media capture, which describes the way politicians and businessmen collaborate in order to control the media. Instead of a government directly controlling or closing down a newspaper or a TV station because they are too critical of its policies, it colludes with friendly businessmen who buy the newspaper, the website, or the TV station. Under the new owner, the news medium stops being critical of the government, and the journalists who do not comply are simply fired. 

Media capture is one of the gravest and most intractable new threats to press freedom around the world. In country after country, collusion between governments and wealthy media owners has become the preferred method of control over the media. In countries such as Turkey, Hungary, and Russia it is already the dominant form of media ownership. 

The second new tool used to curtail press freedom I would like to mention to you is SLAPPs, which stands for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation or, more simply, intimidation lawsuits. These are lawsuits against journalists with the purpose of censoring, intimidating, and silencing them by burdening them with legal costs. 

In a typical SLAPP, the plaintiff does not even care to win the lawsuit, because the goal is to exhaust the journalists financially and psychologically with mounting legal costs so that the journalists themselves decide to stop being critical. SLAPPs are a very real threat to press freedom even in places where journalists are generally respected, such as in Western Europe. 

The people who want to control an “annoying” journalist are mostly politicians or public servants. They use strategic lawsuits often based on overstrict libel laws or vaguely drafted privacy rules, and more often than not they succeed in silencing their target. This form of harassment is used mainly against reporters and human rights defenders.

I would like to end on a positive note. In an effort to stop such misuse of the legal system, the European Commission drafted an anti-SLAPP directive which will hopefully be adopted next year – things go slowly in the European Union. Canada, Australia, and more than 30 American states, including New York, have anti-SLAPP laws in place. 

Jenifer Vaughan Fenton

Jenifer Vaughan Fenton, Spokesperson/Senior Media Adviser, UN Special Envoy for Syria | Switzerland

Jenifer Vaughan (Fenton) has been the spokesperson at the United Nations Office of the Special Envoy for Syria since May 2019. Ms. Vaughan attends the SDGs Conference in her personal capacity. Previously, she worked for Al Jazeera in Doha and New York, and CNN in Atlanta, Jerusalem, London, and Abu Dhabi, holding senior positions, including an Executive Producer. Ms. Vaughan also worked for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Palestine, and the UN Refugee Agency in New York. Vaughan held the Yale Poynter Fellow-in-Residence for the 2017–18 academic year. She has won several major industry news awards, including multiple Peabody Awards.

 

Video Link:

Event Title: SDGs Conference 2023 Date: Sept 20, 2023
 

SPEECH

Strengthening media institutions and political commitments for sustainable peace and security

The Secretary-General noted in his annual report that peace and security are threatened by the evolving nature of conflict, shrinking civic space, misinformation, hate speech, unregulated cyberspace, the climate emergency, and the rollback of women’s rights. The political will has been lacking. Clearly, journalism plays a pivotal role in conflict resolution, safeguarding human rights, and fostering sustainable development. Sadly, journalism is a risky and far too deadly endeavor. Media is consistently attacked and undermined in many contexts. Numerous studies have noted that across the world, female journalists and media professionals encounter escalating online and offline assaults. Gender-based acts of violence encompass stigma, stigmatization, misogynistic hate speech, cyberbullying, physical aggression, sexual assault, and tragically even murder. 

Strengthening media institutions and media freedoms is essential for the promotion of democracy to enable the free flow of information and to protect the interests of society. The United Nations has among its primary objectives, preventing conflict and promoting international cooperation and since its founding, it has evolved to take on a wide range of global issues, including the vital role of media. The UN also recognizes the critical role that media plays in conflict resolution, conflict prevention, and peacebuilding. The news media dictates what conflict and its aspects get covered and how much airtime or front-page news coverage a conflict receives. Who speaks about the conflict in the media? Do we use the main or auxiliary players in the conflict aid agencies, terrorists, or the civilians who are impacted? The media can frame a matter in a way that makes it more intractable. Media can act as a weapon of violence, spreading hate and false information. It can also assign and employ stereotypes and give people labels that are dehumanizing. News media can also provide accurate information in conflict zones, which is critical to help civilians stay safe and to access other necessities. 

It can also reduce conflict and help aid with resolution by providing accurate information in a timely manner. Also, it sheds light on the root causes of conflict and provides a path for meaningful dialogue. It can also hold parties to account, expose abuses of power, violations of human rights, and crimes of war, and act as a watchdog. The Secretary-General noted in his annual report on the organization that the UN has created mechanisms in an effort to bolster media development in places of conflict and countries. The report also highlights the work being done to fight back against the miss and disinformation, as well as hate speech and efforts, of course, including monitoring and training. Partnerships play an important role and include media, social media companies, and civil society organizations. 

Obviously, the media variables are very complex. News media environments are varied. For example, there are government or quasi-government media monopolies, and large media conglomerates. The news values differ at different outlets as well as to the extent to which governments control communication through mechanisms such as strict penal codes, and legal frameworks that restrict or enable the freedoms of the press. There is also communication infrastructure that may be limited or advanced and may suffer from more related or other damage. The interests and motivations of media outlets and journalists, of course, are wide-ranging, and communication methods also differ depending on the country and the region. Communication Technology continues to change the media landscape, and it is challenging to manage the volume of information that we are receiving. There is, of course, a lack of political will to achieve these goals.

There are not only legal protections for the freedom of the press but also constitutional guarantees. Journalists and media workers have the right to be protected from harassment, violence, and censorship. There needs to be a political will to establish conditions where journalists can carry out their work without retribution. Alongside these information laws, political commitments are needed to strengthen the freedom of information to help ensure government transparency and accountability for journalists, citizens, and affected persons to request and access public documents. Regulatory bodies need to have clear mandates that can help ensure fairness, as well as accountability in the media industry and international organizations.  

Other countries and bodies also should encourage and share best practices and resources. Media organizations also need to self-regulate adhering to ethical codes of conduct and also diverse funding and independence. To the degree possible, funding should be diverse and media outlets should try to reduce their dependence on single revenue streams as this runs the risk of making them vulnerable to external pressures. So, a combination of philanthropies, subscriptions, memberships, grants, and other funding to investigative journalism projects is critical, especially ones that aim to uncover corruption and hold powerful entities accountable. Media pluralism is also critical. We need to promote a diverse media landscape and have independent and community-led efforts. Education and media literacy are becoming increasingly essential programs, including at schools, teaching members of the public, engaging civil society, and combating disinformation and fake news. 

Along with holding the social media platforms accountable, it needs to be fostered and media outlets need to prioritize. Public interest reporting, and strengthening media institutions must be a process that is ongoing, combining a number of things that I underlined, including legal affairs as well as regulatory framework. A trustworthy and vibrant media ecosystem is one in which there is both freedom of the press and responsible journalism. Governments, international organizations, and civil society must work together to create an environment where media can operate freely and responsibly. Media must be strengthened and protected.