« Start wearing purple! | Main | Gone, daddy » Online journalists in jailRebecca MacKinnon blogs a new report from The Committee to Protect Journalists. She says the report provokes "some important questions about how the Internet is impacting the relationship between governments and journalists - especially now that the Internet makes it easy for just about anybody with an Internet connection to commit acts of journalism." Though more print journalists are in jail, "... internet journalists are a growing segment of the census and now constitute the second largest category, with 49 cases." The report goes on to say "We’re at a crucial juncture in the fight for press freedom because authoritarian states have made the Internet a major front in their effort to control information." Rebecca suggests this is because Internet journalism is harder to control than print journalism. Why? Because Internet journalism is harder to control than traditional journalism. It's much easier to create dissident news organizations online with a hope of reaching wide audiences across fast distances, and it's easy for anybody to blog what they eyewitness around them. An individual blogger can report a police crackdown he witnessed in his hometown, despite the fact that official media organizations have all been forbidden from reporting it. With traditional media, the main mechanisms used by governments to control journalists tend to be pre-publication or pre-broadcast: the issuing and withdrawal of media licenses without which a news organization cannot operate legally; political and economic pressures by authorities on editors and publishers to avoid or emphasize certain topics; and hiring processes that try to weed out journalists whose reporting would cause too much trouble. Imprisonment is the last resort when all else fails, or when people persist in setting up unlicensed or dissident publications. More at RConversation, Rebecca's blog. jon posted this at 10:03 AM |
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