That’s the year that the now defunct publication’s editor, with a name nearly as long as his prison term, will be released from jail. His crime? Publishing articles deemed to have insulted the King of Thailand.
Adding to his misery, Somyot Pruksakasemsuk didn’t even write the stories for which he was sent to jail after serving 20 months of pre-trial detention. The author was Jakrapob Penkair, a former government official. That wise man now lives in self-imposed exile in Cambodia.
In former times, when it was universally assumed that ignorance was more dangerous than knowledge, the Western reaction would have been the superior smirk accompanied by the token denunciation. The things these undemocratic fellows, these potentates and Grand Pooh-bahs, get up to.
In Somalia, journalists have also been thrown in jail recently for insulting the government. In Russia, the government blocks access to ‘unfriendly’ blogs — in China the leadership can kill the Internet at the flick of a switch. In Vietnam, journalists have been imprisoned for grotesque sentences after rigged trials. In Syria, journalists are routinely murdered for the high crime of laying bare the regime’s monstrous crimes.
But now that knowledge is widely viewed in official circles as being more dangerous than ignorance, there is far less to feel superior about. Exotic geography and arrested social development offer little comfort. In fact, the King of Thailand is remarkably in-step with the times. Free speech has become a royal pain in the ass to governments and organizations everywhere — it is under attack, and the shells are falling dangerously close to home.
One would have hoped, for example, for a more enlightened approach to press freedom from the Edinburgh University Student’s Association in Scotland, (EUSA). That group recently got an injunction to stop the university newspaper from publishing anything that might suggest that “EUSA is poorly governed, and whose management is inexperienced and unaccountable.”
That’s right — anything.
The King of Thailand might give a nice lunch to EUSA members for their impeccable smothering instinct. But he surely would lay on a lavish banquet for Lord Justice Leveson after reading what the eminent jurist has recommended the U.K. government do about the infamous phone-hacking scandal in Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire.
Lord Leveson has recommended state regulation of the British press, which up until now has not operated under license the way that television and radio do. His justification for unprecedented government oversight is the gross abuse exposed through the phone-hacking scandal at the former News of the World. The facts of that case are drop-dead awful, but Lord Leveson’s cure is worse.
The Leveson Report, nearly 2,000 pages long, not only recommends government regulation of the press, it suggests creating new powers for the police. If the Cameron government accepts these recommendations, police would have greater powers to compel the production of a journalist’s sources.
True, the police still would have to seek a warrant from a judge before leaning on a journalist for sources. But they no longer would have to prove that they had sought the information in other venues and were unable to get it. Leveson also recommended — and the Cameron government has agreed — that senior police officers must now document their “contacts” with the press.
There are two gaping holes in Lord Leveson’s approach. First, without the right to protect sources, journalists would never hear from a whistleblower again, or a policeman with a troubled conscience. Such leaks would be construed as “unauthorized” and therefore not deserving of protection. The chill over the free press would be an ice-cap that would never melt.
But the greater darkness in what Lord Leveson has suggested is that a particular scandal is being used by the establishment to justify a power grab. Just as 9/11 was used as an excuse for draconian new powers for supposedly democratic governments, and a loss of civil liberties for the average citizen, the Murdoch scandal is now the whip for lashing an entire industry that was not involved in his rancid practices.
There already are well-established laws to deal with the individuals behind the journalistic atrocities produced by Murdoch editors and reporters. And those laws have been put to good use in the phone-hacking case. People like Rebekah Brooks and Andrew Coulson have been charged with crimes, huge settlements have been paid, and a newspaper has been closed. The paper’s royals reporter, Clive Goodman, went to jail for phone-hacking and more may follow. Corseting the entire free press is unnecessary, undesirable and indefensible.
But that’s not to say the idea isn’t popular in certain circles. The people who would like to regulate the colour of their citizens’ underwear were deeply impressed with Lord Leveson’s advice for reining in the press. Bureaucrats in the European Union quickly endorsed the Leveson Report and denounced Prime Minister David Cameron for not fully embracing it. They like the idea of a media that is “much more closely watched” by “media councils” that would have the power to fine, order retractions, or sack journalists.
And they like even better the notion that these national media councils ultimately would be under the control of Brussels — if they get their way. Not censorship, of course, just guaranteeing that good old “European values” permeate the news. It is a matter of pure coincidence that the the howl from an EU panel comes at the expense of the British press, which has offered the sharpest criticism of the World According to Brussels.
We have a version of this kind of thinking about information control in Canada. The Harper government doesn’t respond to leaks — not because they are not true or without a public interest, but because they are unauthorized. It is an insurance policy against the Julian Assanges of the world — tribunes of the people with their ear to the Senate door.
Stephen Harper has already killed the general press conference, made the location of cabinet meetings a state secret, and imposed restraints on how the free press works in Canada. The PM gets to choose the subject of his press conference, limits the number of questions that will be taken, and has a hand in who will ask the questions. He also clamped a muzzle over government bureaucrats, including federal government scientists.
The point is readily admitted that none of the 232 journalists who found themselves behind bars in 2012 were in Canadian prisons. Nor were any of the approximately 139 reporters murdered in the same year killed in Canada.
But the same things can be said of the United Kingdom, the cradle of Canada’s parliamentary democracy. Now that some members of the Cameron government are in favour of regulating the press by Royal Warrant, no one should forget what Harper cabinet minister Vic Toews tried to do to control the Internet. First instincts are more revealing than strategic retreats.
As Robert Mahoney, the top dog at the Committee to Protect Journalists, recently put it, “the battle to control information is an assault on public accountability.”
And everyone knows how Stephen Harper feels about accountability.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Michael Harris
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