On World Press Freedom Day 03 May 2004
Tony Jenkins
President, United Nations Correspondents Association

Thank you Shashi for that introduction, thank you for organizing this day, and thank you for your support of the UN press corps. Mr. Secretary General, with your presence as always you honor the press freedoms enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and I thank you for that. Ambassador Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury you too have a well deserved reputation as a friend of the press, and I thank you too - I just wish all your compatriots felt quite as warmly towards us. And Ms Viviane Launay, thank you for being here. It is UNESCO's role in the UN system to press for a free press as a tool of development, and we welcome your support.

Your excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen.

I want to tell you about Ricardo Ortega. Ricardo was a journalist's journalist. A star foreign correspondent for Antena 3 TV, he was one of the brightest lights of his generation in Spain. He was young and handsome yet modest: he did not showboat in front of the camera and he was unassuming around his colleagues here at the UN press club. In the field he was fearless and determined. He proved it time and again in such places as Afghanistan and Chechnya, Georgia and Yugoslavia.

To the great sadness of all who knew him Ricardo was shot and killed 8 weeks ago while covering the deployment in Haiti of the Multinational Interim Force authorized by the Security Council. The circumstances of his death have not been fully clarified. What we do know is that despite his fatal wounds Ricardo carried on filming until he could no longer hold the camera.

It is with sacrifices such as these that journalists all over the world exercise press freedom every day. In so doing they protect all the other civil rights which would be meaningless without the right to freedom of expression. At the same time they deliver the information which is the life blood of democracy, commerce, education and the arts.

Unfortunately what happened to Ricardo is all too common. Last year, as many of you will recall, the UN press corps lost another of its finest, the irreplaceable Elizabeth Neuffer, of The Boston Globe. She too was one of the best foreign correspondents of her generation. In fact 2003 was an especially bad year to be a journalist. 42 were killed, 766 were arrested, 1460 were beaten up or subjected to death threats, according to figures from Reporters without Borders. And the first four months of this year show the trend accelerating: already 13 journalists and 6 media assistants have been killed, 431 have been arrested and 366 attacked or threatened.

Like some of his colleagues Ricardo was a victim in more than one category. Before his death he felt the lash of censorship. He believed that he lost his assignment in New York as the result of political pressure from the previous Spanish government which did not like his coverage of Iraq.

In other words, even in an advanced democracy with a flourishing press such as Spain's, journalists must be on constant guard to protect our freedoms.

As you might imagine Spain was a long way from being the worst offender in 2003 That dubious honor goes to Cuba where kangaroo courts sentenced more than two dozen journalists to jail terms ranging from 6 to 28 years, for their modest efforts to establish a beachhead of press freedom on that island. 30 journalists now languish in Mr Castro's dungeons. Such heinous abuses mock the name of progress in which they are made.

But the pattern does not look pretty almost anywhere you turn.

In Africa, a swathe of countries from Cameroon to Zimbabwe treat the press abysmally.

In Asia at least 200 journalists languish in jail, in hell-holes in Burma and Nepal, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. North Korea does not bear mentioning. Iran is brutal. The Chinese have relaxed coverage of some topics such as corruption, but by and large the dictatorship in Beijing only permits propaganda.

China, like Cuba, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and others, has also used the war on terrorism as an excuse to clamp down on criticism, shutting down thousands of internet cafes and jailing students and "cyberdissidents" for such fearsome offences as accessing Google. At the risk of embarrassing my co-panelist and friend Iftekar Chowdhury, I cannot leave Asia without noting that in Bangladesh last year more than 200 journalists were attacked or threatened, often with the connivance of elements of the governing party.

In the Middle East there has been an alarming rise in the number of acts of vandalism against the media and physical attacks against journalists in the Palestinian territories in the last six months.

In Russia the neo-authoritarian regime of President Putin has effectively silenced all negative coverage of the government in the broadcast media. At the same time reporting on Chechnya, independent of the authorities, is virtually impossible. In terms of freedom of the press, the course Russia is embarked on does not look like a happy one.

And what of the United States? What can one say about the country that gave the world the glorious First Amendment? I suppose Mark Twain said it best: "In this country we have three benefits- freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either."

But I must confess that I don't get it.

American journalists in my experience are the smartest, hardest working, most ethically conscious members of the pack. I know of few other professions in this country and of no other country where the media flagellate themselves so effectively in public for such lapses such as The New York Times and the Jayson Blair affair, or The New Republic with the Stephen Glass scandal, or the latest lapses at USA Today.

Needless to say, with tens of thousands of newspapers, magazines, radio stations and TV networks, not to mention the internet, America has the richest and freest press market in the world.

So the American people must be the best informed nation on earth, right? I mean one could be forgiven for thinking so.

Unfortunately that is apparently not so. According to a recent PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll, 57% of Americans continue to believe that before the war Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, including 20% who believe that Iraq was directly involved in the September 11 attacks. Forty-five percent believe that evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda has been found. And sixty percent still believe that just before the war Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction or a major program for developing them.

Of course, none of these things is true. None of them. There was no link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda or the events of 9-11. There were no weapons of mass destruction. We were all badly misled.

The cherry atop this bitter pie of misinformation is that only 41% of Americans are aware that the majority of world public opinion is opposed to the war in Iraq. One in every five Americans actually thinks that the majority of world opinion favored the war.

Something has gone wrong somewhere. And that is very bad news.

Let me make clear that there is a vast and qualitative distinction between the crude repression of some of the regimes I have just mentioned and the problems faced by the media in the USA. Journalists are not kidnapped and murdered, news outlets are not shut down. Censorship, such as it is, is usually self imposed.

But we are living through historic times when events have momentous consequences. The fact is that the most powerful nation on earth went to war in defiance of the U.N. The Secretary General described the Iraq invasion as illegal. It was an act with vast and long-lasting potential consequences which impact on the security of us all. This is a time when American voters, perhaps more than anyone else on earth, need to be well informed. The American press has a very serious duty to perform and clearly they have not done as well as they should have.

Those who risk their lives every day in Baghdad have earned the right to criticize. John Burns of The New York Times, is one who has most definitely earned that right. He recently told the University of California journalism school in Berkeley that and I quote: "We failed the American public by being insufficiently critical about elements of the administration's plan to go to war."

Only recently have the Times, the Washington Post and other major American media started to ask about the quality of prewar intelligence on Iraq and about how the administration may have used it to promote the war to Americans and the rest of the world.

Writing in The Free Lance-Star, Rick Mercier recently published an article titled, "Why the Media Owe You an Apology on Iraq."

He starts like this, "Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims drive our coverage. Sorry we were dismissive of experts who disputed White House charges against Iraq. Sorry we let a band of self-serving Iraqi defectors make fools of us. Sorry we fell for Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations. Sorry we couldn't bring ourselves to hold the administration's feet to the fire before the war, when it really mattered."

Mercier notes a recent study by the University of Maryland's Center for International Security Studies which concluded that much of the prewar coverage about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and again I quote, "stenographically reported the incumbent administration's perspective" and provided "too little critical examination of the way officials framed the events, issues, threats, and policy options." Too few stories, the study said, included perspectives that challenged the official line.

A study published last month in The New York Review of Books reached a similar conclusion. I quote: "In the period before the war, U.S. journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the administration. Those with dissenting views-and there were more than a few-were shut out." A recent report by the Knight Ridder group found that unsubstantiated claims by Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress were picked up in more than 100 stories in the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press and so on.

Why did this happen?

First, these are very difficult times to be a journalist. You know these are hard times to be a journalist when even someone like Ted Koppel is censored from American TV screens for allegedly engaging in politically biased reporting by reading out the names of the young men and women who died for their country.

You know these are hard times to be a journalist when a government-produced infomercial -in which two actors play journalists reporting on the latest medical news- gets picked up and broadcast as hard news by more than 50 TV stations in 40 states around the country. You know these are hard times to be a journalist when the most popular journalist in the country, Jon Stewart, is a comedian.

As Rob Corddry -a fake journalist at the pretend news program called The Daily Show on which Jon Stewart acts at anchorman- recently complained, "They created a whole new category of fake news - infoganda. We'll never be able to keep up!"

And you know these are hard times to be a journalist when the start of the Shiite intifada in Najaf, led by a mullah whom one suspects is n o democrat, is sparked when an American envoy with instructions to impart democracy in Iraq decides to suppress an Iraqi newspaper.

You know these are hard times to be a journalist when the president of the most powerful nation on earth states approvingly that he doesn't read the press and in the words of Frank Rich of the New York Times, "shuts out journalists and demonizes them as elites out of touch with Joe Public."

Is it the journalists' fault that the policy debate in the major American media has been so narrow? I don't think so. But it is a fact that we never saw a serious debate on the options to invasion.

You know, ladies and gentlemen, estimates for the cost of waging the war and peace in Iraq, including all the coalition partners, now start at a quarter of a trillion dollars. Some predict $400 billion before it is all over. If we had known in advance that the invasion of Iraq would cost that much, and we should have, why did we not have a debate about the most effective way to spend the money? Could that money have been spent more efficiently, to greater effect in the war on terrorism?

What would have happened if say we had taken just 100 thousand million dollars of that amount and spent it turning Gaza into the Manhattan of the Mediterranean? What if we had taken another 100 billion and invested it into transforming Afghanistan into a stable, functioning, developing democracy? And what if we had done it before the cameras of the world? Is there anyone in this room who believes the world would not be a more stable place today? Does anyone here doubt that such a tactic would have produced fewer new adherents to extremism and terrorism than the situation in Iraq today?

Why did we not have such a debate in advance? American journalism has some soul searching to do. Some questions may be easier to address than others. For example on embedded journalism. Modern armed forces seek to dominate the information battlefield. If the Pentagon is as happy with the way embedded journalism has been working as it claims to be, then American editors needs to rethink the arrangement.

Another question is about the antiseptic nature of the war that is reported by the American media. Why do Americans not see on their screens the same bloody images as Europeans and Arabs? Is it right that this material is censored? Should Americans not see what is really happening on the ground?

Another question might be: Why is the coverage of the Middle East so uneven? And so narrow? What is everyone afraid of? You find a broader debate about the policies of the Sharon government in Israel than you do here. It's as if all of American Jewry, in its multifaceted glory, had been hijacked by the Likud.

Why are so few in the American media explaining that this policy of unilaterally annexing parts of the occupied territories won't work? That we don't live by 19th century rules anymore. That you can't go marching into someone else's land, wipe out all the indians, build a wall around it and say 'this is mine,' with impunity. That, it was precisely to stop such actions that the United Nations was founded…

Why the narrowness of the debate? I have heard several explanations. One persuasive one is the growing concentration of the media, the growing focus on profits and the consequent descent to bottom line values such as jingoism and parochialism.

Freedom of the press is not an abstract concept, freedom of the press has a purpose: to deliver the truth. Not many journalists I know think they have a monopoly on the truth. Most of us understand that if we each tell our piece of the story a composite will emerge that is close to the truth. The fewer media, the greater the chance that we might miss an important piece of the puzzle.

The more media, the more voters know the truth and, we journalists believe, the more perfect a society we will have.

Thank you.