{"id":234275,"date":"2023-05-01T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2023-05-01T11:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=234275"},"modified":"2023-04-28T07:54:00","modified_gmt":"2023-04-28T06:54:00","slug":"the-lifeblood-of-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/05\/the-lifeblood-of-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lifeblood of Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Journalists are on the front lines of battles to defend the right to freedom of expression.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

20 Apr 2023 – <\/em>Two cornerstones of democracy\u2014freedom of expression and freedom of information\u2014are under concerted attack, in the United States and around the world.<\/p>\n

In the US,\u00a0\u00a0for example, reactionary elected officials seek to\u00a0ban books in schools<\/a>, often in the name of protecting children; and government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, seek to\u00a0curb online speech<\/a>\u00a0that they deem dangerous.<\/p>\n

Here and globally, tech companies and social media platforms engage in\u00a0algorithmic gatekeeping<\/a>, throttling online traffic to\u00a0progressive news outlets<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0vital LGBTQ+ content<\/a>, while embattled leaders in nations such as\u00a0Benin<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Malaysia<\/a>\u00a0use \u201cfake news\u201d laws\u2014enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic, ostensibly to restrict misinformation about it\u2014to harass, jail, or silence journalists whose reporting challenges those regimes. Anonymous individuals serve the fossil fuel industry by\u00a0filing bogus copyright complaints<\/a>\u00a0to stifle investigative journalists and news outlets whose work is critical of the industry.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Threats to freedom of expression and freedom of information, such as these, undermine the possibility of a well-informed public, which, in turn, erode the effectiveness of democratic institutions. Freedom of expression and access to information are foundational rights, meaning they are essential to the protection and exercise of other basic rights: They insure, for example, that each person, community, and society can express their fundamental needs\u2014for clean water, healthy food, adequate shelter, and fresh air, not to mention healthcare, education, and fair wages. One international human rights organization, Article 19,\u00a0describes<\/a>\u00a0freedom of expression as the \u201clifeblood of democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is one fundamental reason that numerous organizations\u2014including Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Press Institute, and Article 19\u2014promote press freedom and defend the rights of journalists. Journalists serving the public interest protect fundamental human rights. They are \u201con the front line,\u201d defending and promoting<\/a>\u00a0all<\/em>\u00a0people\u2019s rights to freedom of expression and information.<\/p>\n

Those rights were formally articulated in Paris, seventy-five years ago, when the General Assembly of the United Nations affirmed freedom of information and expression as inalienable human rights. Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)\u00a0declared<\/a>\u00a0that \u201ceveryone\u201d has the right \u201cto seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, just because an organization such as the United Nations asserts that freedom of expression and information are universal and inalienable does not mean this is automatically true for everyone everywhere. Far from it. The broad and widening gap between the ideals expressed in Article 19 and the reality of the world in which we live inspires my work with Project Censored, a news watch organization that champions independent journalism and critical media literacy education.<\/p>\n

Since 1976, Project Censored has\u00a0vetted and highlighted<\/a>\u00a0independent news reporting on important social issues that corporate news outlets have failed to cover. Often those failures are due to the corporate media\u2019s narrow definitions of who and what count as \u201cnewsworthy.\u201d<\/p>\n

By privileging official, elite perspectives and interests, corporate news subtly but significantly undermines the ideals of free expression declared in Article 19. This systemic bias in corporate media treats most of the world\u2019s population as passive bystanders, whose rights to expression are irrelevant or undesirable. As Arundhati Roy wrote in\u00a0An Ordinary Person\u2019s Guide to Empire<\/em>\u00a0(2006), \u201cThere\u2019s really no such thing as the \u2018voiceless.\u2019 There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Critical media literacy, the second component of Project Censored\u2019s mission, provides people with practical\u00a0tools to engage media proactively<\/a>. Critical media literacy education raises questions about power, focusing especially on connections between concentrated ownership of media and the production, distribution, and interpretation of media messages. The ability to determine the trustworthiness of specific news reports, for example, hinges on understanding how news \u201cframes\u201d our view of the world\u2014including how that framing often reflects (and reinforces) deep-rooted power dynamics and enduring social inequalities.<\/p>\n

Many people in the US might scoff at the UN\u2019s Declaration of Human Rights as either an anachronism from a bygone era in international politics or, in US context, a redundancy, given this nation\u2019s Bill of Rights. But not even journalists working in the United States\u2014ostensibly protected under the First Amendment\u2014can take for granted the right to freedom of expression articulated in Article 19 of the UDHR.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker\u00a0carefully documents<\/a>\u00a0press freedom violations in the United States, including arrests, equipment seizures, assaults, and interrogations, which occur on a shockingly regular basis. In the most extreme cases, journalists face grave threats for doing their jobs. In February 2023, Dylan Lyons, a reporter for Spectrum News 13 was\u00a0killed while working<\/a>\u00a0at the scene of a homicide in Pine Hills, Florida; his colleague, photojournalist Jesse Walden, was critically wounded. And, in September 2022, Jeff German, an investigative reporter for the\u00a0Las Vegas Review-Journal<\/em>, was\u00a0stabbed to death<\/a>\u00a0outside his home. The suspect charged with premeditated murder is a former county official who was the subject of past and pending reporting by German.<\/p>\n

Seventy-five years since ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the chasm between these grim realities and Article 19\u2019s lofty ideals might be interpreted as cause for pessimism. But we cannot fall into despair; the stakes are too high. Instead, I interpret the UDHR\u2019s bold affirmation of freedom of expression as a compass arrow that can reliably orient us, especially when our target destination is not directly visible.<\/p>\n

If Article 19 points us in the desired direction, then critical media literacy education and independent journalism provide guidance along the way. They signal where pitfalls threaten to ensnare us, and they alert us to how the power of media can be harnessed to remake our world in closer alignment with the values articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Andy Lee Roth is the associate director of<\/em> Project Censored. He coordinates the Project\u2019s Campus Affiliates Program, a news media research network of several hundred students and faculty at two dozen colleges and universities across North America. His research and writing have been published in a variety of outlets, including<\/em> Index on Censorship, In These Times, YES! Magazine, Media, Culture & Society, and the<\/em> International Journal of Press\/Politics. He earned a PhD in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BA in sociology and anthropology at Haverford College.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – projectcensored.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

20 Apr 2023 – Two cornerstones of democracy\u2014freedom of expression and freedom of information\u2014are under concerted attack, in the United States and around the world. Journalists are on the front lines of battles to defend the right to freedom of expression.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":234277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[1785,276,2305,1138,1748,328,1017,2376,125,2881,234,2571,1006,1008,3016,1365],"class_list":["post-234275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-censorship","tag-democracy","tag-elon-musk","tag-fake-news","tag-fake-report","tag-freedom","tag-freedom-of-information","tag-freedom-of-speech","tag-freedom-of-the-press","tag-journalistic-ethics","tag-media","tag-official-lies-and-narratives","tag-social-media","tag-twitter","tag-twitter-files","tag-war-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":234279,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234275\/revisions\/234279"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}