Authoritarian regimes have traditionally managed news media through direct censorship, assuming control over media outlets or by intimidating and arresting journalists and outlet owners. But “a more insidious form of censorship has emerged, according to Soft Censorship: How Governments Around the Globe Use Money to Manipulate the Media, a new report from the Center for International Media Assistance.
Soft censorship entails influencing news coverage by applying financial pressure, often through selective advertising, punishing media outlets and individual journalists considered critical while rewarding those deemed friendly, the report’s author, Don Podesta, told a meeting at the National Endowment for Democracy today.
In much of the former Soviet Union, check-book journalism is rife, said Podesta, a former correspondent and editor with The Washington Post. Official sources routinely pay journalists to write favorable stories about government policies, programs or personalities, not least during election campaigns. In Ukraine, the report notes, this practice is known as “jeansa,” after the denim jeans that country’s journalists tend to wear.
Many journalists willingly collude in such practices in what one observer called “two-way blackmail”, threatening to expose or attack politicians who fail to bestow government largesse. But the issue is less about personal ethics than the “perverse relationship between governments and media groups”, Silvio Waisbord of George Washington University told the meeting. The use of public funds for private or partisan political purposes is disturbingly common in many states.
Nor is it a particularly new phenomenon, said Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Soft censorship is having a “devastating impact on the free flow of information”, but it is at least preferable to traditionally harsh forms of censorship in the likes of communist Cuba and China. He highlighted the more subtle forms of censorship practiced by such ‘democratators’ as Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin. Simon cited the case of the Kremlin-controlled agency that acts as a politically-filtering intermediary between government and media outlets, denying both government and private advertising revenue to critical media voices like Novaya Gazeta.
“New communication technologies have led to a global proliferation of censorship agents, methods, and rationales,” notes Harry Lewis of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “Governments love and fear the Internet,” he writes. “It’s a cheap agent of economic growth, but it also delivers disturbing and subversive ideas at very low cost.”
Lewis calls for new approaches to safeguard the Internet as a forum for free expression, noting that information is already routinely filtered and monitored as it crosses national borders:
In China, if you want to visit www.freetibet.org (the Web site of a Tibetan independence group) or falundafa.org (the site of the banned spiritual group Falun Gong), you will temporarily lose your Internet connection. The OpenNet Initiative, a partnership of Internet research centers at Harvard University and the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Toronto, documents technology-enabled, fine-tuned censorship all over the world: no sex in Saudi Arabia, no Holocaust denials in Australia, no shocking images of war dead in Germany, no insults to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey. Some of those bans mimic pre-Internet censorship laws, but authorities install harsh new ones in response to internationally significant events, such as the monks’ protests in Myanmar in 2007.
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