by
N1: Lucie Mori-YON is from Reporters Without Borders, an international organization defending people's right to be informed. She sees a worrying trend: two-thirds of the world's population does not have access to a real independent media. She says in many countries that endure conflict or oppressive government, privately-owned media is not allowed and freedom of speech does not exist.
A1 (MORILLION): Freedom of the press is totally under attack and the situation is not getting better, even though Iraq is the most dangerous country for journalists, you can get killed very easily in the Philippines, you can go to jail at any time in North Korea just for misspelling the name of an official, you can spend 10 years in a re-education camp for that. (18s)
N2: Last fall, Reporters Without Borders published a Worldwide Index that ranks the level of press freedom in nearly 200 countries. Coming in dead last was North Korea, labeled a "black hole" for news.
Morillion says nothing is able to get in or out of North Korea without the approval of the government. The country's sole news agency is owned by the state, and only publishes party agenda news to keep Kim Jong Il's regime in power and deter North Koreans from calling for democracy.
A2 (MORILLION): If you are a journalist over there, you are either bought by the government to write what he wants you to write, or you leave, or you don't exist, or you go to jail - there are no other options. (12s)
N3: John Feffer is a foreign policy expert and journalist in Korea. He says journalists who want to maintain a working relationship with North Korea have to do a certain amount of self-censorship in order to survive.
N3 (FEFFER): A journalist who goes to North Korea has to make a decision, they have to decide whether they're going to write one story about North Korea, i.e. what they see and what they feel, or they're going to write more than one story, i.e. they want to go back to North Korea (15s)
N4: Feffer maintains that even sources within a country like North Korea will give varnished comments out of fear of government reprimand. This makes it difficult for journalists to write a full-disclosure type of article - even if they wanted to. Those that try are kicked out of the country and not allowed to return. Feffer says that, although this setup is far from ideal, there is little that oursiders can do about it.
N4 (FEFFER): Of course we know they probably aren't happy about their situation, they can't say anything about it. But fundamentally, we can't do anything about it, either. We can't identify one guy and say, "well, we wish this guy had more press freedom," and then we find he was sent to a prison camp. It's just not an option. (15s)
N5: Of course, this is what an organization like Reporters Without Borders is all about. Morillion says a simple act of solidarity between western journalists and those working in more difficult countries can bring awareness to press repression and nudge governments towards change.
A5 (MORILLION): Western democracies takes freedom of the press for granted, we are used to it. We criticize our media but still, we have access to a wide range of information and we sometimes underestimate the risk that local journalists take in countries where freedom of the press does not exist or is threatened. (20s)
N6: According to Morillion, issues like internet censorship and access to online information are going to be the biggest challenges of the coming decade. More and more repressive regimes are cracking down on "cyber-dissidents" to make sure that what people cannot find in the independent media is not going to be on the internet, either.
In China, searches for terms like "religious freedom" and "human rights" turn up zero results, and a search for "Tiananmen Square" brings up images of smiling tourists instead of tanks and dead bodies. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft recently negotiated multi-billion dollar contracts to set up shop in China - with the understanding that much information must remain hidden from the Chinese people. For the seventh year in a row, China leads the world in the number of imprisoned journalists - today 32 remain behind bars.
Megan Hauser, Columbia Radio News.