Legal Constraints on International Journalists
Due to our technological world today, spreading information and reaching a greater audience has become much easier. The technology we have access to today is making it easier for individuals to access information by for example the use of Google. While searching for something on Google, we can get a lot of information about what we searched for. Spreading information to a big audience is also possible due to the technology we have today. There is also a large number of different news sites accessible to us on the internet.
For us, getting the information we want might seem like a given thing, but the truth is that depending on where you are in the world, the amount of information able to get is different in different places. There are countries that are very open with their press like Sweden, which is the world's first country to have adopted a press freedom law. And according to Reporters Without Borders, Sweden traditionally holds media independence in great respect. Nevertheless, journalists continue to be targeted by threats, online hate campaigns, and abusive lawsuits.
It was in 1766 that Sweden became the world's first country to adopt a press freedom law. Today, in 2022, the media are independent of political power and hold politicians accountable to the public interest. Media ownership is separated from politicians in executive and legislative functions and no active politician can sit on the board of directors of public media outlets or media regulators. There is a consensus on the need for public media, even though there is an ongoing debate on their content and funding. In the past, politicians have verbally attacked public newspapers or openly proposed ideas to influence their editorial content.
Online threats and harassment are common things for journalists in Sweden. According to Reporters Without Borders, almost one in five reporters say they have been a victim of such attacks in the past three years, 40% of journalists who have received threats claim these have deterred them from covering certain topics. The risk of physical attacks against journalists in Sweden is low, although some media outlets have received bomb threats and reporters have suffered physical attacks hampering their work. However, exiled journalists in Sweden face threats from the regimes of their home countries.
One Swedish journalist, Dawit Isaak, has been jailed in Eritrea for more than 20 years. Isaak has been held in prison in Eritrea since 2001 without trial and is considered a traitor by the Eritrean government. Isaak got arrested due to his challenging president Isaias to give the Eritrean people the freedoms they have been promised. On November 2005, Dawit was released from jail, but two days later he was taken back to prison. On 26 May 2009, during an interview with the Swedish TV4 (channel 4) the President of Eritrea dismissed Dawit's case altogether with these words: "We will not have any trial and we will not free him. We know how to handle his kind" and "To me, Sweden is irrelevant. The Swedish government has nothing to do with us". There is rumors that Dawit had died, when a government official from Eritrea was asked about the rumors during an interview in Sweden, he avoided the question, refusing to give an answer.
A country with less freedom for the press is Cuba, and it is named the worst country for press freedom in Latin America. Cuba's government is having control over and media that its citizens have access to. The television, radio, and newspapers are all monitored by the government. The government is also controlling the internet access. Bloggers and citizen-journalists see a space for freedom on the web, they navigate at their own risk, and are frequently imprisoned or forced to exile. In 2021, new regulations that flatly violate the rights of free expression, information, and association in the cyber-sphere, made the principle of an open, free and inclusive internet an even more distant dream.
Archipelago is an online discussion forum with 35,000 members in Cuba and abroad. In this forum the members can call for protests, ask for support from others and provide information to the rest of the world. The Cuban members of this group are using this forum as a way to educate people from other parts of the world, what the Cuban population are going through in their country. The way the Cuban government are punishing their citizens for organizing protests etc. is by cutting of their internet which means they can not communicate with their technology.
I believe that it is hard for these restrictions to continue since a lot of the press is using the internet today. It is harder to control what is being said online because a lot of it can be posted anonymously and be hard to track who posted it, and it would not be fair in my opinion to punish a whole group of people just because of what someone did alone. . The only way I see it able to work is to do what the Cuban government is doing to its citizens as a punishment, cutting off their internet.
Social Media is a very powerful tool of communication in today's society. It allows everyone from all parts of the platform to express themselves. In other words, this is a good way to make freedom of speech and information accessible to all. It is also possible for individuals to have an anonymous image on their social media platforms which would mean that journalists could be able to post articles without anyone really knowing who was the person posting the article. Social Media is also a good way of reaching a large amount of audience which means that it is also a good way of educating people on how the situation is in some countries, which could maybe help with the help from other countries in our world.
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