The Fight For Journalism

by Lucy Komisar

Next to me, attired in black tie for the glittery event, a reporter for a major broadcast network griped at his bosses' refusal to let him do investigative reporting.

"They just want junk, sex, the lowest," he said in frustration.

The censorship in this country is not by the government, it's by the media owners and their editors.

A group of activists broke through one wall of silence with a protest that included a street picket and an imprompu unfurled banner and brief speech from the balcony just after the official program got started.

They raised the issue of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black radio reporter who has been in prison for 17 years, most of it on death row, after a patently unfair trial, including testimony by a witness who later recanted and said she'd been threatened by police with jail unless she fingered Abu-Jamal. (Authorities not long ago had to free dozens of inmates after discovery that Philadelphia police had fabricated evidence against them.)

They wanted to know why the Committee hadn't taken up the case. Presider NBC-TV anchor Tom Brokaw promised that the CPJ board would consider it immediately. He didn't say why he and the other media leaders present, so genuinely concerned about repression abroad, have shown no interested in investigating this case and reporting it on their broadcasts and in their publications.

And when Brian Lamb, chairman and CEO of CSPAN, the recipient of an award for lifetime achievement in promoting press freedom, asked his own board members from around the country to stand, we were treated to one white face popping up after another. It prompted Brokaw to comment, half-jocularly, that Lamb ought to consider gender diversity for the board. He might have added racial equity as well.

Consider the cases of the people who were honored. These sketches are taken from CPJ materials:

Gremah Boucar, 38, of Niger's Anfani newspaper and magazine, and Radio Anfani, one of the country's only private radio stations has stoon firm against attempts by military ruler Gen. Ibrahim Ba'are Mainassara to force the station off the air.

In 1996, soldiers stormed, vandalized, and occupied the Radio Anfani studios in retaliation for the station's coverage of the political opposition. In 1997, five unidentified men wearing military uniforms ransacked the station's studios, destroying equipment valued at $80,000. Since then, Boucar and his staff have been repeatedly arrested, harassed, and threatened. CPJ has organized diplomats and international press freedom organizations to press the regime and win their release.

Gustavo Gorriti, 50, of La Prensa in Panama, left Peru after threats in that country, but found them again in Panama when he began to expose corruption. His articles documented how Colombian drug traffickers with close ties to the Panamanian government were using banks to launder money.

Gorriti found that a major trafficker with close ties to the Cali drug cartel had made a $51,000 contribution to the campaign of President Ernesto Perez Balladares. The government refused to renew his work visa, but he filed suits and, with iternational media support, got an extension.

He and fellow reporter Rolando Rodrguez reported that a company that had been accused of being a front for drug traffickers in Panama had made a $5,000 contribution to the 1994 congressional campaign of Jose Antonio Sossa, who is currently Panama's attorney general. Sossa is now prosecuting Gorriti and Rodrguez for criminal defamation.

Goenawan Mohamad, 57, who stayed in Indonesia because of the crisis there, is founder and editor of the news magazine, Tempo. In 1994, a cover story criticizing Indonesia's purchase of 39 used navy ships from the former East Germany drew attention to a dispute between B. J. Habibie, the author of the deal and then a powerful cabinet minister, and a number of senior generals. (Along with Monitor correspondent Andreas Harsono, he is a leader of the Alliance of Independent Journalists in Indonesia.)

Suharto was reportedly enraged with the airing of his regime's dirty linen in print. Tempo was banned and its publication license revoked in June 1994. It returned after Suharto was forced from power in May.

Pavel Sheremet, 27, who couldn't get a visa to from Belarus, is bureau chief of ORT (Russian television) and editor of the Belarusskaya Delovaya Gazeta. He has been imprisoned, stripped of his credentials, and barred from traveling to the West or working as a journalist until January 1999. His crime is standing up to President Aleksander Lukashenko's campaign to silence critics and harness independent and opposition news media. Sheremet has earned the regime's anger by covering opposition rallies and exposing Lukashenko's Soviet-style political tactics.

Sheremet, his cameraman, and their drivers, all Belarusian citizens, were detained by border guards on July 22 while filming a report on smuggling and border security at Belarus' frontier with Lithuania. Sheremet jumped a fence to film unguarded border areas, demonstrating how easily smugglers could cross the Belarusian frontier He and his colleagues were arrested and charged with illegally crossing the border. Sheremet received a two-year suspended sentence.

Ruth Simon, who's been imprisoned in Eritrea since April 1997, is a correspondent for Agence France-Presse. Simon, an Eritrean citizen, was arrested after reporting that President Isaias Afewerki told participants at a seminar in Asmara that Eritrean soldiers were fighting alongside rebels in neighboring Sudan. (Sudan's opposition military and political coalition, the National Democratic Alliance, is based in Asmara.)

Simon was responsible for the clandestine publications of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) during the war for independence from Ethiopia and was the editor in chief of BANA, the publication of the Association for the Reintegration of Eritrean Women Guerrilla Fighters. She is the first journalist to be arrested in Eritrea since it became a state in 1993. Afewerki personally ordered Simon's imprisonment for "publishing false information."