As major publications called for the release of reporters believed to be arrested while covering the political crisis in Iran, and two American journalists sentenced to hard labor in a North Korean prison awaited diplomatic rescue efforts, the House of Representatives passed a bill aimed at providing some level of protection to reporters facing similar trouble and named in honor of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter slain abroad while covering the first days of the War on Terror.
nfortunately, putting nations that sometimes not only condone but also orchestrate deadly violence against journalists on a State Department watch list and providing some grant funding for international media projects will not to do much good for either Euna Lee or Laura Ling, the two American TV journalists arrested by North Korean soldiers near that country’s border with China and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for committing what officials call only “grave crimes” against the government. Nor will it help the hundreds of journalists around the world slain each year while doing their jobs — quite often by people belonging to or affiliated with government forces.
In the latest hotspot, Iran, newspapers are being closed, the government is clamping down on coverage of the violent political turmoil occurring in the streets of Tehran and reporters are being targeted for detention. Mohammad Atryanfar, for instance, the publisher of a number of opposition newspapers, was detained on June 15 and remains in custody.
Two journalists reported missing since the weekend are Maziar Bahari, a Canadian correspondent for Newsweek, and an Iranian photographer for LIFE magazine. Bahari is also a filmmaker who’s been living and working in Iran for the past decade, CNN reported. There’s been no word on whether the Iranian government heeded calls by the magazines for their immediate release.
Among early signs of the media crackdown are the cases of journalists Roxana Saberi, who was arrested in Iran in February for working with revoked press credentials, and Esha Momeni, a Cal State Northridge graduate student arrested in October while working on a research project on women’s rights in Iran. Saberi was released on May 11. Momeni remains in custody.
The nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists has compiled an Impunity Index tracking countries where journalists are killed and government fails to solve the crimes, finding more than 500 journalists have been murdered in the last 15 years in direct relation to their work.
The index, said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon, is designed “to measure a country’s progress or lack of progress in combating impunity around the world.” Justice is served in less than 15 percent of these cases, according to CPJ research.
According to the latest available figures, 17 journalists have been killed this year in direct relation to their work, 22 remain in Cuban prisons serving 24-year sentences for dissent against the government, and the Iraqi government has failed to solve even one of the 91 journalist murders that have occurred since 2003.
Nevertheless, “Our government must promote freedom of the press by putting on center stage those countries in which journalists are killed, imprisoned, kidnapped, threatened or censored,” Pasadena’s Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, who co-chairs the Congressional Caucus for Freedom of the Press and is a co-author of the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act, said in a prepared statement.
Schiff also recently introduced a House resolution urging North Korea to release Ling and Lee, held since March 17, on humanitarian grounds.
The Pearl Act was originally drafted as a stand-alone bill but later incorporated into the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, HR 2410, which passed 235 to 187 on June 10.
The act, which will now go before the Senate and, if approved, on to President Barack Obama for his signature, would implement a broader examination of freedom of the press worldwide by the State Department in its annual country reports.
Simon said “the United States has an enormous influence around the world for setting the example for press freedom.”
When the Miami-based Inter American Press Association (IAPA), launched a 1993 campaign against impunity in journalist murders in Latin America, investigations and prosecutions there improved markedly, according to CPJ’s independent analysis.
So the new act requiring action from the State Department “is really going to be very helpful, because journalists all over the world now are expecting the United States to take an active role in their profession and safety,” said Judea Pearl, father of Daniel Pearl and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation. “It’s important that the monitoring of journalist’s safety and freedom to move, report, write and interview occur at the highest level.”
Simon said that while CPJ already compiles statistics on deaths of journalists, “there will be a completely different impact when it is done by the United States government. We seek to influence the government by bringing to their attention press freedom violations.” He believes the act will better ensure that human rights, and more specifically press freedoms, are part of United States’ foreign policy agenda.
“It’s important that the State Department at that level will be overseeing that initiative,” Pearl said.
The State Department’s report, which will include initiatives supporting freedom of the press and efforts to improve media independence, together with an assessment of progress made as a result of those efforts, will be more inclusive than reports offered by independent organizations such as CPJ, Schiff said.
“They will be composed by two different agencies. They may very well have access to different information about different countries,” Schiff said last week. This information, he said, will then be used to “develop a game plan to further promote freedom of the press in countries where it is unresolved.”
Also included in the act is funding for a series of grants to provide training to journalists and establish international reporting standards, which “can run over a longer period of time and will assist in setting stronger foundations for press institutions in other countries,” Schiff said.
While independent agencies have offered grant programs such as the International News Safety Institute, which has provided free two-day safety training to 1,223 journalists and media staff in 20 countries since 2004, the government-sponsored grants will have enough funding to last up to five years. Schiff said he expects to see “definite benefits from a longer-term approach.”
Pearl sees the passage of this act as a constructive step toward protecting journalists, an example for other countries to follow. “When push comes to shove, your tweak can make a difference. I hope our tweak can make a difference,” he said.
Schiff said he was honored to name the act after an icon of press freedom. Pearl’s father was also pleased.
“I am glad that they chose the legacy of Daniel to emphasize the plight of journalists and also to present to the world America as the culture that supports journalists wholeheartedly,” Pearl said. “The reason I think they chose it is because what he stood for is uncontroversial.”
Editor Kevin Uhrich contributed to this report.
