Giving Journalists the Silent TreatmentWhy ignoring the media is a serious threat to press freedom.
Posted Tuesday, June 30, 2009, at 9:25 AM ET
Journalists working in repressive countries are routinely jailed, attacked, and killed. So what's the big deal if reporters are ignored?
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StumbleUponIn fact, the "silent treatment" is an emerging threat to press freedom, one that is insidious and dangerous.
I saw this firsthand in April when I visited Nicaragua as part of a delegation from the Committee To Protect Journalists. While President Daniel Ortega is everywhere in Nicaragua—his smiling visage adorns pink billboards, and he appears nightly on television delivering long speeches—he is invisible in the private media. He has yet to hold an official press conference or give an extended interview to a Nicaraguan journalist.
Why isn't Ortega talking to the media? Because he doesn't need to.
Nicaragua's private media outlets are owned and run by the country's traditional elites and have a center-right orientation. In normal circumstances, Ortega and his Sandinistas would need to reach out to some voters from this segment of the electorate to win a majority and would therefore have a vested interest in engaging with critics in the press. But Ortega engineered changes to Nicaragua's electoral law that allowed him to claim the presidency in 2006 with only 38 percent of the vote. This means he can safely dismiss the segment of public opinion represented by the private media.
Ortega's political strategy is to rally the Sandinista base, which he achieves by using heated rhetoric to provoke conflict with his political opponents, including those in the private media. He relies on outlets run by the Sandinista Party and his own family to communicate directly with his supporters. These outlets never talk to Ortega directly. As Dennis Schwartz, the director of a Sandinista radio station Nueva Radio Ya explained to us: "We broadcast his public events. We don't feel a need to interview Ortega."
Nicaragua is perhaps the clearest example of this global trend. Leaders around the world are ignoring critical media outlets that once held them to account. This is possible partly because the media themselves are weakened politically and economically. Traditional outlets, particularly newspapers, often reach a smaller percentage of the population and, because of the rise of the Internet, no longer shape public opinion in the way they once did. Often they are economically diminished—and not as able to push back effectively against government pressure.
Ignoring the press is a tactic that spans the ideological spectrum and is employed in countries both repressive and democratic. During a discussion on war and propaganda I attended recently, two panelists spoke about the media management strategies during the recent military conflicts in Sri Lanka and Gaza. Both the Sri Lankan and Israeli governments simply blocked media access to the war zones, accepting the inevitable criticism they received in international circles. While the media in Israel are vigorous and often critical, they broadly supported the Gaza military incursion in January. In Sri Lanka, the Sinhala-language radio network that reaches most of the population lined up behind the military operation against Tamil separatists. Assured of favorable domestic media, both countries simply refused to engage their critics outside the country.
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I don't see why it's such an offense to 'freedom' that democratically elected socialist presidents don't offer themselves up to media outlets controlled by corporate elites who propose not only different policies and candidates but a very different society. While the current political settlements in Nicaragua and Venezuela have come from elections, let's not forget that these media outlets represent political factions which fought civil wars and attempted coup d'etats, in both instances. Obama tried to shun Fox News to his right, and Fox News's constituency has never forcibly deposed him.
As an alternative, consider the audacity of a socialist or Islamist media outlet thinking it could get an interview with Obama? Of course they couldn't. The segments of American society socialist or Islamist media represent are both too far from Obama's politics for him to have anything to gain from trying, and failing, to persuade them, and because they are marginal, he doesn't have to. And so he doesn't.
To expect that socialist leaders would engage with corporate media outlets who they know they can't persuade and whom they don't have to because they are in the majority. And that's what it comes down to, there were elections, they won, part of being in the majority in a democracy is getting to set the agenda. Corporate media outlets can try to influence the agenda against the democratic majority, but why should it be integral to freedom to demand that politicians who enjoy majority support try to help them do so?
If the idea that Ortega and Chavez refusal to talk to the corporate press impinges on 'press freedom' seems credible, while the idea that Obama's refusal to talk to the socialist press impinges on 'press freedom' would seem absurd, this is only because we privilege our own local political norms and expectations based on who has influence and who doesn't in America.
-- suchgreatheights
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