Juno News - July 20, 2019


Reporters Without Borders skeptical but hopeful about media freedom commitment

Topics
media freedom commitments
Mentioned
Without Borders Tommy Robinson Rebecca Vincent Barry McCaffrey Julian Assange Trevor Burner Donald Trump Lyra McKee Bolsonaro Trumps
Canadian media needs to get over its Trump fixation Does this sound like ＂media freedom＂ to you？

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

200.34

Word count

1,985

Sentence count

120

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I'm joined by Rebecca Vincent, the UK Bureau Director for Reporters Without Borders, to discuss the importance of press freedom in countries like the UK, Canada, and the US. We discuss the growing threat to freedom of the press, the role of climate change, and how governments around the world have a role to play in protecting journalists.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'm joined right now by Rebecca Vincent, the UK Bureau Director for Reporters Without Borders.
00:00:05.020 Rebecca, thanks so much for your time.
00:00:06.500 Absolutely.
00:00:07.540 One of the things that we have heard a lot about at this conference, and I think will continue to,
00:00:12.200 is the idea of what journalists in developing or completely undeveloped nations experience.
00:00:18.200 And I don't like this idea of, in many respects, comparing it to democratic countries,
00:00:23.940 because I think the issues are very different.
00:00:25.760 But I do want to look at some of those distinct issues,
00:00:28.960 because one point that you've done in your organization's rankings is revealed that
00:00:33.980 the countries that everyone would assume, and rightfully so, are far better than dictatorships,
00:00:39.380 still aren't completely able to rest on their laurels with this.
00:00:43.040 And I'm hoping you could explain a little bit about why that is with countries like the UK, Canada,
00:00:47.480 the United States, for example, countries that we would all view as free nations
00:00:51.160 that in many cases have very poor rankings compared to where people might think they are.
00:00:56.700 Absolutely. And where citizens actually think their own country should be.
00:01:00.720 We should all be doing better.
00:01:02.220 So here in the UK, we're currently ranked 33rd out of 180 countries.
00:01:05.920 We improved a bit.
00:01:06.800 It was at 40th for the past couple of years before this.
00:01:09.460 But actually, most of the reason for the improved ranking was because other countries deteriorated further.
00:01:14.840 And here it's been often legislative issues, things related to national security, data protection,
00:01:19.980 that may trample press freedom in the meantime.
00:01:22.880 And we do have cases here, such as in Northern Ireland last year,
00:01:26.100 the case of Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey.
00:01:28.320 They had police turn up at their homes at dawn, detained them, questioned them,
00:01:33.220 seized their journalistic materials in relation to a documentary they had made
00:01:37.160 alleging police cover-up of a massacre in Loughin Island there.
00:01:41.520 So we get cases like that even in countries like the UK.
00:01:44.800 I want to break up the US a bit there because it's deteriorated sharper than the others that have been mentioned.
00:01:49.520 So this year, the United States slipped to 48th on our index out of 180 countries.
00:01:55.200 But this is also the first year that the US slipped into the orange category.
00:01:58.260 There's a color code that goes with our index.
00:01:59.880 There's a map that you can see on our website there that has various color coding for, you know,
00:02:04.980 the scale of good to kind of bad performers on the index.
00:02:07.880 So the US for the first year is now in the orange problematic category.
00:02:11.680 And for the first time, the United States was actually on the short list of deadliest countries for journalists in 2018.
00:02:17.700 That's really alarming. That's due to the Capital Gazette newsroom shooting.
00:02:21.580 But you have to look at the climate that allowed for that sort of shooting.
00:02:24.380 When you've got the White House, when you've got Donald Trump actually using such inflammatory media bashing language,
00:02:30.100 Stalinist rhetoric, enemies of the people talking about the corrupt fake news media all the time,
00:02:34.740 that actually does feed into the climate. 0.55
00:02:37.380 And in that way, there is some responsibility for what's happened in the United States.
00:02:42.160 And as well, the model that that sets for other countries around the world.
00:02:45.080 So we're seeing an increase in that strongman model, the sort of heavy handed approach to the press being used as like a way of achieving political popularity.
00:02:55.580 So countries like the Philippines, we have Duterte, Brazil, we have Bolsonaro.
00:03:00.040 These sort of mini Trumps are popping up around the world.
00:03:03.240 And that's really worrying.
00:03:05.100 When you look at that idea of the climate, I guess that's an important point to drill down into,
00:03:09.860 because a lot of people view resistance to press freedom as coming in the form of censorship.
00:03:14.660 Whereas what you're describing certainly involves governments, but it's something that exists more culturally.
00:03:20.060 And many would argue, look, I mean, Trump may say whatever he says.
00:03:23.260 People may say they don't like what the fake news media are saying, whatever the case may be.
00:03:27.120 But journalists have the legal freedom to report.
00:03:30.240 So how does the culture impact that overarching freedom of the press, in your view?
00:03:35.460 Well, it's not strictly the law.
00:03:37.040 It's sort of what happens around it.
00:03:38.660 And in some countries, you kind of see this attitude of there is freedom of expression, but not freedom after expression.
00:03:44.360 There can sometimes be very serious consequences, not necessarily just coming from states.
00:03:48.960 But in countries where we see, for example, serious violence against journalists, it becomes very known what the red lines are.
00:03:55.360 These acts of violence are particularly done to make examples of people who have crossed certain lines.
00:04:01.840 And when those attacks go unprosecuted, which they almost always do in most cases of violence against journalists,
00:04:07.900 we don't actually see justice or not full justice in any case.
00:04:11.940 That really leaves the door open for others.
00:04:14.200 But there's other ways of making examples of people, too.
00:04:16.780 And, you know, it can be sometimes more subtle, especially in democracies.
00:04:20.740 There's many reasons for actually you mentioned censorship, but self-censorship is also a huge problem.
00:04:25.720 In fact, I think it's one of the biggest single challenges to global freedom of expression because it can be influenced by many things.
00:04:32.620 It can be advertising.
00:04:34.760 It can be sort of who owns what media outlet, that sort of thing.
00:04:38.200 Or it can be very overt things like the implicit understanding that you might actually be physically attacked or imprisoned for that.
00:04:44.360 So this exists everywhere.
00:04:45.840 It's really difficult to pinpoint, to measure and to counter, but that's there.
00:04:50.120 So both overt forms of censorship and sort of the self-censorship that results from all of these other pressures and sort of in particular when these acts are committed with impunity.
00:05:01.480 So in developed democratic countries, is it enough for government to step back and simply regulate nothing to allow there to be free press?
00:05:10.120 Or do you need an affirmative regulation or legislative approach to protect it?
00:05:15.060 Well, not regulation, so to speak, because I think that's a specific issue and there's different models.
00:05:19.640 I think self-regulation models tend to be best.
00:05:22.260 But of course, there's countries that have some degree of self of state regulation that actually perform very well on our World Press Freedom Index.
00:05:29.180 But in terms of states abiding by their commitments, there's a bit of both there.
00:05:34.480 So in some places, it's a question of just states doing more to to protect those at risk.
00:05:41.040 But in other places, it's actually states themselves that are the source of threats to journalists.
00:05:46.200 And so that is really alarming.
00:05:48.600 And we don't do well enough as democracies sometimes and actually calling that out.
00:05:52.740 Honestly, I think diplomats tend to dance around this a bit because countries don't really accuse other countries in that way.
00:05:58.680 But there are places where it is very obvious that the threats are coming from the state itself.
00:06:02.560 So I think there's different degrees here.
00:06:04.760 But states, you know, every state here in this room, maybe they're here this week to talk about media freedom, to reaffirm in some way.
00:06:10.540 Maybe there's a declaration coming out of this that will reaffirm this commitment to media freedom.
00:06:13.780 But they all have existing commitments to these things already.
00:06:16.620 And far too often, they're not being implemented.
00:06:20.020 With that being said, do you think this conference is, and I know we don't want to put the cart before the horse on it,
00:06:24.860 but do you think in many respects it is more about putting on a facade if, as you say,
00:06:29.920 these commitments already exist from countries and are not being adhered to?
00:06:33.420 I hope it's not a facade.
00:06:34.660 I hope this doesn't end up just being another, you know, possibly talking shop for these issues.
00:06:39.460 What we will really be looking at is what comes next, what states do in the aftermath of this.
00:06:44.320 I think it is valuable to gather, to discuss these things, for states to encourage each other to do better.
00:06:51.320 But what are they going to do at home?
00:06:52.980 And that includes the UK as well.
00:06:54.360 This campaign goes beyond just this conference.
00:06:56.180 It's supposed to be all year.
00:06:57.620 But then what happens next as well?
00:06:59.380 We need to all do better within our own countries, looking inwardly and addressing the shortcomings that actually every country has some shortcomings when it comes to media freedom,
00:07:07.940 even those at the top of our index.
00:07:09.420 But also doing more to hold each other to account, not just talking about it at a conference.
00:07:15.080 And I guess the last issue I ask you about then in the UK is that this week, Tommy Robinson, who I know rubs a lot of people the wrong way,
00:07:21.940 is going to be sentenced.
00:07:23.400 And that's being presented by a lot of people as a threat to the free press in Britain.
00:07:27.080 And I'm wondering where either you or your organization stands on that.
00:07:31.560 Because the one thing I would say that's always been important is consistency on these issues, even if you don't like it.
00:07:37.040 But I wanted to give you an opportunity to speak out on that issue, that case.
00:07:40.540 Well, certainly.
00:07:41.020 Well, I think the answer is actually pretty straightforward in that he is not a journalist in our professional regard.
00:07:47.900 And so, therefore, it's not a case that we work on here.
00:07:50.280 There are other cases in the UK that are problematic.
00:07:52.200 We talk about Julian Assange, for example.
00:07:56.160 We're watching with concern what may happen to him, particularly with regard to the extradition requests by the United States on 18 different charges now,
00:08:05.660 because there's a serious history of whistleblower persecution in the United States.
00:08:09.960 But in Tommy Robinson's case, we don't view that as journalism.
00:08:13.780 We don't view him as a journalist.
00:08:15.060 And, in fact, he has actually admitted to the crimes of which he has been accused, which was not journalism.
00:08:22.200 Running around a courthouse and essentially obstructing justice is not journalism.
00:08:27.400 And so I think we need to be very careful to not let kind of cases that aren't really getting at the core of this distract from the others,
00:08:36.460 because there are serious cases.
00:08:37.700 I mentioned those in Northern Ireland.
00:08:39.060 That case is not fully resolved.
00:08:40.280 We've had serious things here, too, like a journalist killed in the line of duty within the United Kingdom this year,
00:08:46.780 Lyra McKee, in Northern Ireland just two months ago.
00:08:49.780 So there are very serious cases that are clearly linked to journalism that we should be looking at.
00:08:55.220 There's a role for broader free expression organizations to work on some of these others.
00:08:59.060 But for RSF, our mandate is quite clearly focused on journalism, citizen journalism, journalistic sources.
00:09:05.380 So I guess that would be the one question to end on, if I could.
00:09:08.100 How do you, in the age of new media and independent journalism, and in some cases, independent journalists that are doing absolutely incredible work and with journalistic rigor,
00:09:17.940 how do we define that line between a citizen free speech and a journalist free speech when it seems that journalism itself is going through a huge shift right now?
00:09:27.960 Well, yeah, journalism is changing.
00:09:29.380 Citizen journalism is changing.
00:09:30.900 I think as Reporters Without Borders, we do have strict professional criteria.
00:09:34.340 We look at each case on its own merit and determine if an individual we believe is being targeted for their journalism, even if that is citizen journalism.
00:09:43.360 Just because one might have a blog does not necessarily make one a citizen journalist, in our opinion, either.
00:09:48.340 We have to really look at the merits of each case individually and assess.
00:09:52.820 Thank you so much for your time.
00:09:54.000 Thank you.