The Diplomat in Spain

Pedro González

Journalist

Not a single democracy in the world has been sustained without the counter-power of free and independent media. On the contrary, not a single totalitarian regime has ever respected freedom of expression, rather it has stifled it to the point of cutting off all hope of alternation in power, progressively increasing repression against the slightest hint of threat to tyranny or those who embody it.

These are bad times for press freedom, if they were ever good times. It has been thirty years since UNESCO established May 4th as World Press Freedom Day, and what can be seen is that this freedom is threatened by the very people who should have been its guarantors. The numerous reports being published these days, among which the most well-known is that of Reporters Without Borders, highlight “the worrying deterioration of support and respect for the media, while increasing the pressures exerted by States and other political actors on them.”

The journalist has always been a character seen with distrust and suspicion. Remember the interest of those who exercise this profession so that their own do not have to go through the trance of their social shame: “Don’t tell my mother that I am a journalist; tell her that I play the piano in a brothel…”

But, it turns out that he is an essential character, because without his direct testimony of the facts, or the relentless collection and investigation of them, his contextualization and his ability to unite seemingly unconnected clues, the citizenry would have no more information than the fodder supplied by power. Hence, the sober definition of news as everything that someone has an interest in that is not known.

This year, once again, the profession registers the highest number of murders, disappeared and imprisoned. More than a hundred of those who have lost their lives have done so in the Gaza war. All of them were Palestinian journalists, to whom UNESCO has awarded the World Press Freedom Prize “for their courage and commitment to freedom of expression”, an award thanked by the International Federation of Journalists as “the demonstration that the world has not forgotten them and thus pays tribute to their sacrifice for information”.

In addition to the sad statistics of journalists killed in the real act of service, it should be noted that 521 media professionals began 2024 in prison, with China always being the largest prison for journalists (23% of those imprisoned worldwide), followed by Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Iran and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. They are not statistically dead, but there are 84 missing journalists, one in three of whom is Mexican.

This year 2024 is the one that celebrates the most elections in history. More than half of humanity will go through the ballot box. Paradoxically, elections, which are usually described as a celebration of democracy, are usually accompanied by a lot of violence, especially in countries where democracy is not very consolidated. This phenomenon occurs particularly in Africa, in several of whose countries an alarming upsurge has been registered: Nigeria and Congo south of the Sahara, in addition to the Sahel countries now ruled by military juntas: Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, and with disturbing symptoms of the same happening in Chad.

Nor are journalists sheltered in countries considered full Western democracies. The RSF report highlights that “some political formations fuel hatred and distrust towards journalists, insulting, discrediting and threatening them, while others orchestrate maneuvers to control the media ecosystem, either by taking possession of journalistic media or by co-opting private ones through their partial or total acquisition.” Certain political parties also often play the role of a transmission belt for disinformation campaigns, and not infrequently they are even the instigators of such campaigns themselves.

Censorship has significantly intensified in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. There is an amazing mimicry of Russia’s repressive acts, whether in Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan or Azerbaijan. According to reports, Russian influence extends as far as Serbia, where pro-government media disseminate Russian propaganda and the authorities in Belgrade threaten Russian journalists living in exile there.

RSF establishes a world ranking every year, which this year are headed by Norway, Denmark and Sweden as the countries where they are most respectful of freedom of information. At the other extreme, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Syria are the countries where such freedom is most welcomed, besides, of course, the hermetic North Korea.

Although most of the statistics only collect the data of 2023, at the UNESCO Conference on Freedom of Expression held in Chile, very current threats have been denounced such as the new Law against Fascism in Venezuela, presented by Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, described as the paradigm of arbitrariness in repression, and the offensive unleashed in Spain against what he describes as “pseudo-media”, by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez.

Regarding the explicit remark of the director of El Debate, one such ”pseudo-media”, Bieto Rubido, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (18,000 media from 109 countries), warns that “the totalitarian temptation is common to every power. There is nothing easier, nor more abject than hiding inquisitorial intentions behind an initially honest idea, such as ensuring that the information we receive is truthful and reliable.”

What I have said: we will continue to report, even if we hear the whistle of the shooting closer and closer. As the explanatory statement of the non-law proposal that the PSOE presented a few months ago in Congress said, of course not with the intentions rescheduled now by Pedro Sánchez“ “without press freedom there is no democracy”. I couldn’t agree more.

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