142 - The Fight for Transparency and Freedom of Expression

An essential key check on creeping authoritarianism and even on established autocracy is a vigilant free media.  Only when rulers and all manner of political operators know that they are (potentially at least) being observed by servants of the people – ombudspersons, auditors-general, and vigilant members of the media – is the public interest fully served. There can be no sustained democratic life without the ability of representatives (and potential investigators) loyal to the commonweal asking hard questions, insisting on transparency and accountability, and doggedly pursuing possible offenders.  Freedom everywhere globally, and within individual states, depends critically on increased awareness of, and implacable support for, the reducing of interference with media reporting.

            Criminal, corrupt, kleptocratic, repressive, and dictatorial-tending regimes all seek to avoid being held accountable. Transparency is the enemy of governmental injustice, discrimination against ethnic groups or population segments, and all kinds of illicit favoritism – as well as the petty cruelties that a cabal of ruling thugs can inflict on its people.

            For trying in a variety of straightforward and sometimes clever ways to crack the walls of silence and to ferret out self-dealing, administrative malfeasance, illicit undertakings, and all manner of operations that are harmful to the public interest, 67 journalists were killed in 2022.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, based in Paris, says that the large number of scribes lost last year for doing their jobs was 50 percent larger than in 2021.  Also telling, and threats to freedom everywhere, were the particularly large losses in three very disturbed countries: Ukraine (15), Mexico (13), and Haiti (7).  The first is at war, the second is rife with drug gang violence, and the third has descended from gang-dominated total lawlessness to anarchy. I have written about Haiti in the past (#s 56 & 57, “ Haiti: Mayhem Close to our Shores, I & II, May 27, and May 39, 2022) and will write about Haiti again shortly.

            Russia, never a friend of free media under the czars, under the Stalinist communists, and under Putin’s post-communist charade, has intensified its attempt to control all information and accountability since even before the invasion of Ukraine a year ago.  Putin’s Russia also engages in massive propaganda at home and innumerable false flag operations beyond its borders -- even at times managing to penetrate the United States and parts of the rest of the world. Leaked internal emails show that Russia’s main security service, the FSB, told television stations what to say about the invasion of Ukraine.   The erroneous “denazification” of Ukraine is still parroted as the motive for assaulting Ukraine and killing thousands.

            Putin attacked free expression again this week, attempting to control how Russians see, hear, or learn about the war of attrition in Ukraine.  He cut all direct access to broadcasts by the BBC, information on Facebook, and many other international sources of clarity. Russia also declared Meduza, an independent news site run by Russian exiles in Latvia, “undesirable.” That means that anyone inside Russia who tunes in to the site, “likes” it, shares its articles, or even talks to Meduza journalists, risks prosecution as a criminal.

            Meduza was defiant.  “We will find ways to operate,” it said.  “Our readers” are still in Russia, it continued.

            Adding to the Putin-inspired attack on free information flows within the Russian Federation, Moscow terminated its rental agreement with the Sakharov Center, a museum showcasing Soviet abuses and crimes against the Russian people.  A Moscow court also shut down the operations of the Helsinki Group, a human rights advocacy organization that began after the famous Helsinki summit of 1975 (and later such summits) when the Soviet Union and Western governments promised, among other matters, to respect human rights internally and across borders.

            Russia’s Internet regulator has also cut access to the websites of the CIA and the FBI.

            Finally, but there may be more inflictions coming, the publisher of Mediazona, an independent news site still based in Russia, was accused of “spreading falsehoods” about the Russian army. Those “falsehoods” included accurate descriptions of atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in Bucha and other towns near Kyiv.

            China is even more systematic in banning unfavorable-seeming comment of almost any kind about its rulers, especially President Xi Jinping.  Jimmy Lai, the founder and publisher of Hong Kong’s once outspoken Apple Daily and a 75-year old citizen of the United Kingdom, was arrested in 2020, charged with harming national security and sedition, and is now on trial for a second time after being sentenced in December to more than five years in prison for fraud. He is expected to receive another long prison sentence, probably for life. And Lai is among the many internationally and locally prominent critics of Chinese communism who have been jailed, especially now that the freedoms of Hong Kong and Hong Kongers have been eliminated.

            Below the global radar, at least to some extent, are similar regime crackdowns on free expression of any kind in Western Hemispheric outposts such as El Salvador, Honduras, and Venezuela; African autocracies such as Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini  (where a leading critic of the monarchy was killed recently), and Zimbabwe; European despotisms like Belarus and Hungary; and Asian outposts of ideological tightness like Laos, Myanmar, Pakistan, Thailand, and Vietnam.  Even India, the world’s largest notional democracy, has banned the showing of, or listening to, of a BBC documentary detailing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s culpability in the virulent massacre of Muslims when he was Chief Minister in Gujerat in 2002.

            The tension between transparency and denial and coverups has always been present in the affairs of nations. Even in the third decade of the twenty-first century, after two world wars and many revolutions and rebellions around the globe, efforts by tyrants and their governments to avoid accountability and transparency are constant, even routine.  That is why we must salute those courageous truth-tellers who act, through the media, as tribunes of the people. Accurate information undermines the actions of the most avaricious and mendacious potentates. We as citizens and consumers of truth need constantly to enshrine and support the actions (often under duress) of those who seek to tell it as it is.