Media freedom: journalism has crucial protective role as civic spaces threatened
Joanne HarrisFriday 28 April 2023
A report published in March by global civil society alliance CIVICUS, which monitors civic space freedoms, has downgraded 15 countries – including several nations widely seen as democracies, such as the UK. The UK’s rating fell from ‘narrowed’ to ‘repressed’ after a year in which its government published a series of legislative proposals that threaten to restrict areas such as the right to protest.
CIVICUS defines ‘civic space’ as ‘the respect in policy and practice for the freedoms of peaceful assembly, association and expression which are underpinned by the state’s duty to protect civil society’. The organisation’s civic space monitor, which tracks developments in citizens’ freedoms and rights around the world, assesses and scores 197 countries and territories based on how well they protect civic freedoms such as the right to protest, how restrictive laws are, the level of intimidation by authorities and how free the press is to report on these areas – the latter being crucial for holding authority to account and helping to protect civic space.
A total of ten countries were upgraded last year, with positive signs seen in jurisdictions including the US, which moved from repressed to narrowed. CIVICUS said that 28.5 per cent of the world’s population live in closed countries, 42.2 per cent in repressed countries, 14.9 per cent in obstructed regimes, 11.3 per cent in narrowed countries and just 3.2 per cent in countries with open civic space. More people than ever are now living in countries where state and non-state actors are routinely allowed to imprison, injure and kill people for exercising their fundamental freedoms.
I would like to see more of that robust assertion that the act of journalism is vital to a free society
Dana Green
Chair, IBA Media Law Committee
Given the war in Ukraine, Russia was unsurprisingly among the five countries to be downgraded from repressed to closed. Likewise, Hong Kong SAR was downgraded in this way, given the increasing restrictions being imposed by China. Journalists are at risk of arrest in both jurisdictions, with a recent example being that of reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been detained in Russia on charges of espionage, allegations that are denied by both Gershkovich and his employers.
CIVICUS assesses the frequency of harassment and attacks on journalists, and whether they’re detained in the process of doing their jobs. It has documented attacks – both verbal and physical – on journalists by the police, politicians and protestors in countries around the world. The Americas were identified as the most dangerous region to be a journalist, with deaths of reporters recorded in at least nine countries.
CIVICUS upgraded the US in part due to efforts by President Joe Biden’s administration to improve the government’s relationship with the media. However, Dana Green, Chair of the IBA Media Law Committee and Senior Counsel at the New York Times, says she remains pessimistic about the press freedom situation in the country. The US Press Freedom Tracker documented 145 arrest or criminal charges involving journalists in 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests. Numbers dropped to 59 in 2021 and just 15 in 2022, but Green says these numbers are likely significantly undercounted. ‘In my personal experience […] often these things don’t make the news, often the journalists are released without charge due to lawyers’, she says. ‘The framing around the Biden administration is not the right way to look at this, in the sense that almost all of these repressive actions are happening at the local or state level which is not influenced by national changes in political parties.’
She suggests that attacks on journalists, especially those covering protests or civil unrest, could be attributed to a desire by authorities to deter protestors more generally, by making the arrests more prominent. It has also become more common for authorities to attack the media verbally, leading to a social discourse suggesting that the ‘mainstream media’ is biased or unreliable.
Elizabeth Morley, Diversity and Inclusion Officer of the IBA Media Law Committee and a partner at Howard Kennedy in London, says the growth of social media and other forms of reporting have made it tougher to be a journalist. ‘It’s harder to easily categorise what constitutes a journalist or a reporter because it’s so diverse now. You’ve got citizen journalists, you’ve got freelancers, you’ve got those employed by long-standing media organisations and they all play a role in reporting and holding authority to account’, Morley says.
Last year journalist Charlotte Lynch of LBC was arrested while covering an environmental protest and held for hours in a cell – an arrest later found by a police report to be unjustified. As a direct result of this, the Public Order Bill currently progressing through the UK legislative process has been amended to prevent a police officer from exercising a police power ‘for the sole purpose of preventing a person from observing or reporting on a protest’.
Despite this, Morley says that press freedom and freedom of expression are generally not a priority in UK legislation. But the challenge now is that the anti-media discourse makes it hard for the press and authorities to speak up in support of the importance of protecting journalism from attacks. Instead, she and Green suggest the legal profession could play a role as part of the ultimate aim of safeguarding the rule of law.
‘All lawyers, regardless of whatever field they happen to practise in, should view attacks on the media as an industry or profession as undermining the rule of law that we are all committed to uphold. I would like to see more of that robust assertion that the act of journalism is vital to a free society and these are not legitimate attacks’, Green says. Morley agrees and says that ‘the legal profession are independent of the government so from that perspective it puts them in a really good position to be able to highlight the importance of freedom of expression’.
Moving forward, the picture is not rosy. Green says it’s now harder to be an investigative journalist, and the pool of applicants is becoming even less diverse. She adds that some news organisations are now giving their reporters covering domestic protests ‘pre-deployment’ support – previously reserved for covering overseas conflict zones – such as safety equipment, contingency planning and psychological assistance.
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