Monday will mark World Press Freedom Day. It’s a moment to celebrate the work that journalism does in holding power to account. It’s also a moment to raise awareness of the dangers facing journalists in many countries. At least 1,400 journalists have been killed for doing their job in the three decades since the first World Freedom Day in 1991. Many of those were killed by their own governments, or by organised crime groups linked to political elites. This year’s coverage will focus on this violence, and on the culture of fear it is intended to promote. And this is right and proper. As long as people can’t go to work without fear of violent retribution there is a pressing need to bear witness.
But for those of us lucky to live in countries where journalists are not regularly subjected to official harassment, intimidation or worse, it is useful to reflect on the state of press freedom in what is hardly ever referred to in our major media as the imperial core. Here, the threats to journalism are much less cartoonishly obvious. Even state repression has an almost cryptic quality. No one can draw a straight line from the fact that Julian Assange has done more to embarrass Anglo-American power than anyone alive and the fact that he is now in the UK’s Belmarsh prison. And while in 2013 employees of UK’s intelligence agency GCHQ did turn up at The Guardian to make sure some sensitive hard drives were smashed with hammers, for the most part that paper is on cordial terms with that same state.
Repression in the West for the most part isn’t a matter of gangsters and uniformed goons. The media systems that regularly reach mass audiences operate as a collaboration between profit-seeking institutions and state and parastatal institutions. These collaborations, which feature in our media commentary about as often as talk about an imperial core, deliver accounts of the social that reflect the various interests and concerns of the participants. Facts that aren’t useful to those who wield power are sometimes suppressed outright but they are mostly just finessed away. ‘Everyone knows’ some things, that just don’t ‘cut through’ with the public, until it’s time for one actor or another to make their move.
