Melissa Mahtani, Journalist, Senior Producer | USA
Melissa Mahtani is an Emmy-nominated Senior Producer and Reporter for CNN’s award-winning digital team where she produces, writes and creates content across all platforms since 2012. Mahtani has interviewed change-makers across the globe such as Vladimir Kara-Murza from Russia, Masih Alinejad from Iran, Afghanistan’s youngest Mayor Zarifa Ghafari and the first lady of Namibia as well as celebrities like Naomi Campbell, Kristin Davis, Adwoa Aboah and Lin-Manuel Miranda. In addition to writing breaking news stories and feature articles, Mahtani currently reports for CNN’s award-winning gender focused “As Equals” team, hosting and moderating events for wider impact and engagement. She also plays a key role in designing the social strategy around special events including bespoke CNN Town Halls, CNN Heroes and coverage from the United Nations General Assembly.
Video Link:
Event Title: SDGs Conference 2023
Date: Sept 20, 2023
SPEECH
Freedom cannot be taken for granted.
The idea of democracy quite literally means rule by the people, where a population gets to decide what decisions are made through an elected, represented government. Democracy can only exist when there are free and fair, transparent elections, accountability, a pluralistic system of political parties, freedom of expression, an independent judiciary, and respect for human rights. These democratic values do not vanish in an instant; but as the Israeli Supreme Court justice indicated: democracy dies in a series of small steps.
Steps such as stifling opposition candidates, silencing the media, laws making it harder for certain types of people to vote, or rigging voting machines. Those things sound like they would be easy to see.
But when a population can not distinguish between what is true or false due to disinformation campaigns, technology that is manipulated, or a justice system that is slowly weaponized, how can one even see the line where democracy ends and autocracy begins?
This is what we are witnessing in many countries around the world. A slow eradication of democratic values, in countries once cherished as stalwarts of freedom like here in America, and others from South Africa to India and Israel. Even in countries that are known as autocracies, like China, Venezuela, and Russia, we are seeing their leaders take more ruthless actions and more worryingly, work more closely together to build and strengthen global undemocratic factions that make it harder to break through.
Thinking about solutions is not an abstract thought or discussion that relates to a planet in outer space. This is our world. For those of us who do live and work in democracies, what can we do to strengthen them? How can we shine a light on the injustices we see in other countries? Every one of us has power. Power to shape the communities and world that we want to live in, and more importantly, the kind of world we want to leave to future generations.
As Nelson Mandela famously said in 1999, “Freedom can never be taken for granted. Every generation must safeguard it and extend it”. It is up to each and every one of us to do our part to make sure freedom and democracy are rights that we enjoy, strengthen, and sustain.
Ivy Murugi, Global Youth Representative, World Organization of the Scout Movement | Kenya
Ivy Murugi is the Global Youth Representative of the World Organization of the Scout Movement. She is experienced in Mental Health and Sexual Reproductive Health Advocacy working with Youth-Led and Youth-Serving organizations. Over the last 3 years, Ivy Murugi has served as the Team Lead for a Mental Health initiative dubbed Healing Invisible Wounds. Involved in resource mobilization & fundraising , program design and delivery as well as overall team coordination to meet set objectives in providing innovative solutions that promote the overall wellbeing and resilience of young people and communities. I am committed to ensuring individuals have access to advanced mental health care services, transforming the stigma narrative surrounding mental health and supporting integration of MHPSS into thematic areas such as Peacebuilding and Climate Action.
Video Link:
Event Title: SDGs Conference 2023
Date: Sept 20, 2023
SPEECH
I wanted to be a journalist when I was growing up and I do not know whether to be relieved that I did not become one but I love the resilience that individuals have. I represent a movement of 56 million young people from across the globe in the world’s largest youth contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals. As a young person from Generation Z, I see endless opportunities in digital transformation that is happening around the globe. I recognize the importance of both social and mainstream media as a tool to connect people to foster dialogues, ignite change, and hold people accountable. The current media landscape is more diverse and the industry is attracting high levels of investment in capital in both mainstream and digital media platforms.
I pay tribute to the vocal and fearless men and women in the media who have had to lose their lives in the spirit of uncovering ills and telling stories of change. I also celebrate a million others, some of them in this panel who have the willingness to continue informing the world and telling personal stories of abusing people from across the globe. I believe that press freedom is an essential pillar of any democracy as it provides the platform for a multiplicity of voices to be heard at the national, regional, and local levels. Individuals working as public watchdogs, activists, and guardians are also educators, entertainers, and contemporary chroniclers. I have seen the media thrive and do their best in the context of both liberal and authoritarian regimes. I come from Kenya, we had our general elections very recently and the media did an amazing job in its reporting. Their coverage gave people the confidence to believe in the final tallies that were given, especially for the very tightly contested presidential seat.
However sadly, a few months down, one of the cabinet appointees of the current president made a full appearance on one of the media houses in Kenya who have been very brave in uncovering truths and telling stories without fear in two case scenarios. I’ll speak about one in one of them, he said, “XX Media Group, you must now decide where, whether you are a newspaper, a broadcasting house, a media house, or a political party. I have said from tomorrow, from today, even the government, any government department that is found placing an advertisement with the XX Media Group, should consider itself out of the government.” These are some of the media-captured intimidation lawsuits but I am more than sure that this is just one of the many existing situations in so many contexts with some having it more often than others from the statistics that we had.
The fundamental right to seek and disseminate information through an independent press is under attack, not just in Kenya but also in many other contexts. The threats have now taken new dimensions as they are publicly defended and even boldly justified by some of these perpetrators’ elected leaders who should be press freedoms. Despite the robust legislation, media freedoms have been constantly curtailed. Freedom of the press is a right that every entity in society must care about and commit to. Protecting press freedom can rebound from even lengthening the states of depression when given the opportunity. In this regard, there is a need for sustained conversations and multi-sectoral approaches to achieve a free press in all contexts.
I hope that the discussions today will help us spark actionable ways to be able to do this. Governments should not interfere with this freedom or censor media that are critical of state power. We need to safeguard press freedom and promote freedom of expression to ensure and facilitate global democracy and uphold the rule of law and human rights for all journalists. Please remember that people are more often than not going to take opinions as facts, but you are the remedy to set this right. Keep on fighting for the truth and holding those in power accountable. Be the watchdog that sheds light on wrongdoing, even in the wake of a shrinking media space. Keep giving accurate, fair, and unbiased information.
Christina Piaia, ProJourn Legal Manager, Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press | USA
Christina Piaia is the legal manager for the Protecting Journalists Pro Bono Program at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She oversees legal intakes for pro bono matters concerning prepublication review and access to public records and develops relationships with law firms and corporate partners to provide journalists with pro bono legal assistance. Prior to ProJourn, Ms. Piaia served as a trial attorney with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and supervised the Gender-Based Harassment Unit at the NYC Commission on Human Rights, working extensively on gender discrimination claims with a focus on community outreach and education. Before the Commission, Christina Piaia spent three years as an international human rights attorney, working on the ground with local grassroots organizations. As a passionate public interest attorney, she serves as pro bono counsel for several nonprofits and on the board of the Chris Hondros Fund.
Video Link:
Event Title: SDGs Conference 2023
Date: Sept 20, 2023
SPEECH
Upholding the rule of law for the protection of journalists: Increasing legal harassment towards media members
As a former journalist, now a lawyer, I have incredible respect for reporting the most pressing news. I think sometimes we see legal harassment that journalists are facing on a global scale as something that is an attack against the press. However, some of these attacks are not being housed in terms of press freedom but using different areas of law to target journalists and make it more difficult to do their work.
At the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, we have a US Press Freedom Tracker that takes a look at what is happening here on the ground, for journalists both from illegal perspective as well as attacks, assaults, and imprisonment against journalists. Since 2017, in the US, there have been thousands of assaults, mostly at the hands of law enforcement, against journalists in the United States. 2020 and 2021, not surprisingly, were exceptionally bad. 630 journalists in 2020 were assaulted, 145 in 2021 and although the numbers are lower this year, we continue to remain troubled about the state of press freedom here in the US, which of course boasts to have the First Amendment and some incredible legal protections for press. However, as you can tell from those numbers, not by any means free from issues.
At the top of my mind are the recent deaths of two journalists here in the US. Jeff Kerman, a veteran investigative reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was killed last September, allegedly by the subject of one of his investigations. A few months after that, Dylan Lyons, a reporter for Spectrum News in Florida was fatally shot while reporting on the scene. We know that journalists should not have to fear reporting information. They should not have to fear challenging public officials, who have been accused of misusing their office or betraying the public trust. It remains crucial to know that these journalists are out there covering these communities and how we have to make sure that communities are informed and that we hold those in power accountable for their actions.
We have an inability to make sure that we are protecting journalists’ access to local records. Journalists are often forwarded by government officials to obtain requests for certain government records. Legal protections can help kind of make sure that critical information is in the hands of journalists as they need it. Turning to more of the legal elements, again, we have a lot of protections here on the ground. In the US, journalists have been confronted with a wide range of legal threats, including subpoenas and prior restraints.
For those who might not be familiar with prior restraint, those are court orders that prevent news organizations or journalists from publishing newsworthy information. So, they essentially barred journalists from reporting on matters of public interest. In 2022, we saw several prior restraint cases here in the US and thankfully some of the judicial systems are working and most of those were reversed or dissolved. However these orders have a significant chilling effect and unless they are ultimately blocked, they can stop reporters from reporting on crucial stories. I think it is a bright spot in journalism here in the US and also across the globe, that has always existed but it might be coming more into the public eye, which is local journalism, community reporting where individuals from their community go to open meetings, making sure that they are covering whether it be a school board hearing or how election funds are being spent in their district or community.
I have spent most of this past year working on the ground in several states here in the US looking at smaller news organizations, sometimes two or three journalists reporting on police accountability, local government officials, and abuse. These individuals are doing such crucial work, that they really are sometimes in the eyes and ears of the community. So, I do see a bright spot of local journalism happening across the country. Whether or not you can find this local journalism, I think there is still a lot of crucial work that we have to do to make sure that we are looking at all aspects of reporting. However, what I am seeing from a legal perspective becoming a threat is the actual status of the organization itself.
So, as you can imagine, many newspapers have shuttered news organizations or have been dissolved and individuals are starting to find creative models to encourage news and reporting. One of the ways is by creating nonprofit institutions that still have the journalistic ethics of a news organization but they are built in to be able to receive grants and individual donations to cover their reporting. Part of this is to support what is happening on the ground and what we are seeing from a legal perspective. Unfortunately, when reporting, these smaller news organizations are generally a handful of people and they are almost always from the community, born, raised, and living in the communities where they are reporting and they are often working potentially in a language that is not English. Individuals are threatening their nonprofit status. So, essentially without their nonprofit status, they would not be able to report the news because they would have no funding. So, we have seen threats against that type of status, kind of a new way to threaten reporting.
Then, when we turn global and think about press freedom, governments have become very clever about talking more about press freedom, perhaps even enacting laws across different countries to help show if they are on the press’s side. However, I think what is happening is that the legal rhetoric and ways in which the press is being threatened have changed. Governments and leaders have learned to talk very expressively about press freedom and the protection of journalists but oftentimes, other areas of law often complex and difficult-to-navigate areas of law are happening. We have seen this in the case of Maria Russa who faced a barrage of charges from the Filipino government. These charges were a series of criminal and civil cases, including tax evasion violations of foreign ownership rules. These areas of law are so complex and so difficult to navigate without expert legal counsel.
They know that it is difficult to be able to have the funding to do this work. It is difficult to be able, when an individual gets a complaint like this, to be able to even navigate the area of law or how they respond to this request. Thankfully there is pro bono support for some journalists but a lot of times these threats are not related to press freedom laws themselves. Still, they are criminal cases that involve significant legal action, also, legal action that takes years to evaluate and change. So, as an eternal optimist, I would like to close by ending with a few potential solutions.
We have to make sure that individual journalist newsrooms across the country and the globe understand how critical legal support is and how legal support needs to be an infrastructure that is funded, whether by civil society, individuals, or community groups. We need to make sure that journalists who are doing this difficult work are supported from a legal perspective. We need to make sure that they have access to legal assistance at every stage of reporting investigation. We have to increase training on how they can be helped. Potential law enforcement officials do not even know what to do or they do not have the bandwidth or they just do not bother. In that vein, we need to make sure that we are growing attorneys who are serving journalists, making sure that legal counsel is available to mitigate risks and address these non-press freedom areas of law that often include these criminal and complex areas of law.
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, 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 documentarywas 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.
Melissa Mahtani, Journalist, Senior Producer | USA
