Journalists under threat

Journalists seeking to provide their readers, viewers and listeners with up to the minute information on what has been going on in Iraq, rather than act as propaganda arms of the coalition military, are once again under threat. 

In turn, the arrest of four journalists in Panama for alleged trespass at the President’s vacation home, has presented yet another challenge to freedom of the Press. The hobbling of journalists, whether in Iraq, Panama or wherever is, as always, a deliberate attempt to deny the public the right to know what is going on, the right to the truth. In the end it is the public that suffers by the authorities’ intrusion on the freedom of the Press.

Journalists covering the war in Iraq have been shot at and some killed. The Palestine hotel in Baghdad, the unofficial headquarters of journalists covering the Iraqi conflict, was shelled by a United States tank as a result of a claim, disputed by several of the journalists, who were in the hotel at the time, that snipers had fired from the building. Two journalists in the hotel were killed, while three others were wounded.

Last Tuesday, properly accredited journalists using the hotel were once more under siege, when United States Marines claiming they were looking for Feyadeen paramilitary fighters, either opened doors, for which they had keys, or in cases in which journalists had bolted their doors for safety, kicked them down. M-16s were shoved in the faces of journalists, and in one case a female journalist said she was ordered to get down, as Marines searched her room. This time, the Marines did not bother to claim that there had been sniper fire, but instead advanced that the hotel was not seen as 100 per- cent safe, and they were making sure that it was.

What is puzzling is why did the Marines, having stormed the hotel rooms of the journalists, seek to intimidate them by pointing weapons menacingly at them and/or ordering them to get down?  Presumably, the journalists were not the enemy. Had there been Iraqi paramilitary fighters holed up at the Palestine Hotel, did the Marines not see the safety and well being of the journalists as part of their jobs?  How could placing them under threat be seen as necessary to their well being? In Panama, journalists investigating the secretive remodelling of a Presidential beach home, were arrested for allegedly trespassing on the property, although they have stoutly insisted that they were actually on the nearby beach, when held.

Is it not instructive that the cameras, tape recorders, notebooks, computer disks and cell phones of the journalists were seized by the Panamanian Police?  If, as Panama’s Interior Minister claimed, the authorities respected the freedom of the Press, will the Police be prepared to return, among other things, the photographer’s camera with the film intact; the reporters’ tape recorders and relevant tapes, and their notebooks untampered with? All too many Governments, public officials and security forces, with the proverbial cocoa in the sun, and uncomfortable at not being able to manage the news, tend to see the Media as a threat, fearful of the Media’s function and determination to present unvarnished news to their readers, viewers and listeners, regardless.