By William Diem
So far this year, 50 journalists have been killed and 488 are in jails around the world, according to the Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF), an association of journalists. In response, news organizations like Agence France Press (AFP) mandate safety training for reporters, even if they aren’t covering a war or a dictator.
And beyond physical safety, journalists are today subject to economic pressures that show no sign of slowing.
I thought about the Newberry News the whole time that spokespersons from those RSF and AFP participated in a panel discussion organized by the Anglo-American Press Association of Paris.
When Carol or Sterling or Dan ask someone to explain something for a newspaper article, or when they attend a meeting or a game, they risk bugging someone who doesn’t want to be in the paper for voting no or being sent to jail or missing a tackle.
What gives them the strength to write the news anyway? The people who subscribe. The public as a whole. Readers, citizens, you and I.
We all want to know what’s going on, yet we don’t have the time to attend every school board meeting or Lady Indians volleyball game. So, we trust Carol and Sterling and Dan and many volunteers to listen and learn for us. And because they do a good job, because we believe they are fair and see that they work hard at being fair, we give them the strength to keep reporting the news.
I am proud of the Newberry News winning awards for being the best smalltown weekly in Michigan, but behind that is the pride the community has for us. In Newberry and Curtis and Engadine and McMillan, we have a newspaper. Lots of country towns don’t.
At the panel discussion in Paris, we talked about social media and fake news and chaos on the internet. We asked: How can old-fashioned news reporting withstand the pressure of powerful politicians or wealthy enemies or armed terrorists?
Guns and lawsuits and new laws are fighting our ability to know what is happening.
The AFP transferred a reporter from Israel to Lebanon, where armed anti-Israel groups control much of the country. Some soldiers took her telephone to see if she was their enemy, but the only photos on her phone were pictures of her cats. The AFP urges their reporters to separate the professional from the personal.
Wealthy people can sue journalists they don’t like, and even if the journalists win in the end because the reporting was honest and correct, they lose time and energy and resources defending themselves.
Autocrats like Vladimir Putin in Russia made a new law a few years ago that caused hundreds of journalists to leave the country. Some set up Medusa, a website outside Russia that manages to reach 15 million readers with news that Putin forbids. That happens because whenever Russian hackers block its website, technology from Reporters Sans Frontiers broadcasts the Medusa news from a new site.
Now RSF is working a project to give media sites more attention on the internet so search engines and artificial intelligence can’t just steal the work that reporters did.
Says a blurb from The Dakota Scout, a newspaper in Sioux Falls. “Quality reporting isn’t conjured from thin air – it’s sustained by readers who value it.”
Amen.
