The Committee to Protect Journalists has a sobering new report titled "Internet Fuels Rise in Number of Jailed Journalists." The headline might be construed as blaming the Internet for the rise in journalist jailings, although that clearly isn't the report's intent, nor would that be a reasonable claim. What the report does do is provoke some important questions about how the Internet is impacting the relationship between governments and journalists - especially now that the Internet makes it easy for just about anybody with an Internet connection to commit acts of journalism.
Who would have predicted ten years ago, when John Perry Barlow wrote his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, that even in cyberspace governments have many ways to stop professional journalists and concerned citizens from doing truly free journalism?
(Click to enlarge the chart, which comes from the CPJ press release.)
More print journalists are in jail around the world today than any other kind of journalist. However CPJ says: "Internet journalists are a growing segment of the census and now constitute the second largest category, with 49 cases." Of course there wasn't much Internet journalism happening around the world in 1997 when the CPJ recorded the first net-journo jailing, so the rise in that curve also tracks the growing scope and impact of online journalism. With unfortunate human casualties.
What is the root cause of these casualties? The CPJ's executive director Joel Simon is then quoted as saying: “We’re at a crucial juncture in the fight for press freedom because authoritarian states have made the Internet a major front in their effort to control information.”
Why? Because Internet journalism is harder to control than traditional journalism. It's much easier to create dissident news organizations online with a hope of reaching wide audiences across fast distances, and it's easy for anybody to blog what they eyewitness around them. An individual blogger can report a police crackdown he witnessed in his hometown, despite the fact that official media organizations have all been forbidden from reporting it. With traditional media, the main mechanisms used by governments to control journalists tend to be pre-publication or pre-broadcast: the issuing and withdrawal of media licenses without which a news organization cannot operate legally; political and economic pressures by authorities on editors and publishers to avoid or emphasize certain topics; and hiring processes that try to weed out journalists whose reporting would cause too much trouble. Imprisonment is the last resort when all else fails, or when people persist in setting up unlicensed or dissident publications.
Some countries, like China, have worked hard to expand traditional registration and licensing requirements online as a way to control at least online journalism being done by people living in China. For commercial Chinese Internet media, the chilling effects on speech have managed to mirror those in the Chinese offline media world. Efforts in China to regulate non-commercial or personal Internet media (blogs, etc.) have not been quite as successful given how difficult it is to control individual bloggers. But as some colleagues of mine at the Open Net Initiative pointed out in a report early this year, these efforts have still resulted in more caution and self-censorship by people talking online: "the state creates some deterrence and leads Web site owners and bloggers to self-censor what they post."
(Click to enlarge this graphic which comes from the CPJ website.)
According to the CPJ, China once again is the world's #1 jailer of journalists, with 31 in prison as of December 1st 2006.
CPJ's Joel Simon says: “China is challenging the notion that the Internet is impossible to control or censor, and if it succeeds there will be far-ranging implications, not only for the medium but for press freedom all over the world.” I agree with this. But it's important to note that physical jailings - despite China's position as #1 journalist jailer in the world - are really only used as a last resort by Chinese authorities when all else fails. The simple fear of trouble, plus a range of legal, administrative, commercial, and technical means, plus apathy and nationalism discussed in my last post, have all succeeded in preventing the Internet from bringing a truly free flow of information to China. And this is the case even though it is simultaneously true that a much greater volume and variety of information is flowing in China in contrast to the pre-Internet age.
China has somewhere between 15-30 million bloggers depending on whose count you believe. But bloggers are not filling up Chinese jails despite the fact that many get their content deleted, shut down or blocked on a regular basis. In fact, if you look at the CPJ list of Chinese journalists currently in jail, or the Reporters Wthout Borders list of jailed Chinese "cyber-dissidents", from what I can tell none of the people listed are in jail as a result of postings on individual blogs or uploads to video-sharing sites and the like. (Blogger Hao Wu was detained for several months earlier this year, but while nobody including he himself is clear about the full reasons for his detention, the circumstances have led most people to conclude that his detention was mainly due to a documentary he was making, not what he wrote on his blog.) The people on the CPJ list who were jailed for online writing were mainly contributing in some way or another to well-known overseas-based dissident websites like Boxun and Minzhu Luntan, or to the Epoch Times - a news organization affiliated with certain banned religious organization often referred to in shorthand as FLG but which if I name it in full this page will be blocked to readers in China.
Please correct me in the comments section below if I'm horribly wrong, but it appears that when it comes to online journalism in China, the jails are mainly reserved for people who not only speak critically of the government online, but who also are doing so in concert with overseas dissident groups that have some organization and resources behind them and which are linked in some way to an interest in political action - or at least what the Chinese government perceives as an intent to organized political overthrow of its power. This is the difference between a lone blogger posting video of a protest onto YouTube - who is not hunted down and taken away in the middle of the night - while somebody with a track record of contributing to overseas dissident news sites is arrested, tried, and jailed. Not that Chinese authorities aren't nervous about bloggers getting out of control - they are. Which is why some Chinese officials have called (controversially) for the abolition of anonymity on domestic Chinese blogging platforms. This fear is also why more and more overseas citizen media websites are being blocked to Chinese Internet users. But it seems that the focus for controlling Chinese blogger speech is placed on Internet service providers and network administrators on the one hand, plus blog-hosting services and other Chinese citizen-generated media platforms including multinational Internet companies on the other, plus other administrative means, plus a culture that people have grown up in where everybody knows that certain kinds of public speech are best avoided if you want to avoid trouble.
This all provokes a further question: In a smaller or more subtle country, can a government in the Internet age successfully exercise significant amounts of control over journalists - professionals as well as citizen media-creators - while actually sending few or none to jail? I think the answer is "yes." Ironically and counter-intuitively, while China is the world's biggest jailer of journalists, China is also writing the manual on how to control your press and citizen media - and hence your national discourse - while jailing a minimum number of people.
"it appears that when it comes to online journalism in China, the jails are mainly reserved for people who not only speak critically of the government online, but who also are doing so in concert with overseas dissident groups that have some organization and resources behind them and which are linked in some way to an interest in political action"
I agree with you. Their biggest worry is people who organize politically, and activists funded by overseas groups.
Posted by: Jeremy Goldkorn | December 08, 2006 at 12:13 PM
I think your observations are quite accurate. It isn't opinions that get people jailed, but rather concerted action to challenge the government. The religious group that shall not be named faced only governmental criticism until they protested, and actually shut down Zhongnanhai. From that point on, it was banned.
Posted by: rkluver | December 09, 2006 at 03:43 AM