Abstract
Measuring the spaces left empty by fear of publication or worry about speaking is difficult, but is part of building up a picture of just what is lost, argues
Eritrea is the most censored country in the world, according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists. Here, refugees from the country hold placards during a protest against their government outside the Eritrean embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel, May 2015
Credit: Reuters/ Baz Ratner
It is complicated, but not impossible, to measure how far this silencing of voices goes. A variety of organisations, including Index, monitor or record explicit acts of censorship in their various forms: from deaths and arrests of journalists (23 deaths in the first four months of 2015 reports the Committee to Protect Journalists) to works banned or altered; to laws outlawing certain forms of speech. Index on Censorship’s own monitoring project Mapping Media Freedom, which records threats to media freedom in the European Union and candidate countries, documented 760 instances considered a threat to a free media between May 2014 and April 2015. These included a journalist burned in effigy in Croatia, journalists depicted as animals on billboards in Kosovo and a funeral wreath sent to a veteran TV reporter in Macedonia. Many of these small, local incidents do not get considered in measures of a nation’s censorship.
And as Javier Garza, former newspaper editor and Knight International Journalism Fellow, remarked at a meeting organised by the Danish government and global press forum WAN-IFRA in May, such information is vital in formulating an effective response to censorship. “A precise diagnosis, specific to each country, is needed to understand challenges facing journalists,” he said. Garza’s mapping project Journalists at Risk,documents the sources of various threats to media in Mexico, allowing journalists and media organisations to develop appropriate mechanisms to protect themselves and fight back. “Security manuals … are an invaluable tool for journalists, but do not take into account the regional differences around the world and within each country that produce different risks for journalists,” Garza said in a recent blog post. “A reporter in Syria faces very different risks [to] a reporter in Mexico. And even within Mexico, a reporter in one region has a different risk than colleagues in another. [The analysis provided from the map] allows journalists anywhere in the country to have a better sense of the most immediate dangers they face, by knowing the nature and characteristics of the aggressions in their regions. This way, they can develop protection plans and protocols that are closer to their own realities.”
But the other side of the equation, the self-censorship that results from fear, is harder to measure. PEN America reported earlier this year that 31 per cent of authors polled in “free” countries had deliberately steered clear of certain topics in personal phone conversations or email messages, or have seriously considered it, due to fear of government surveillance. That rises to 68 per cent in countries deemed “not free” and the picture may in fact be much worse since it evidently excludes all those are too fearful even to respond to a questionnaire.
Other organisations attempt to assess the unseen effects of censorship by examining a country’s laws and actions: the Committee for the Protection of Journalists concludes that, according to a variety of measures, including the use of tactics ranging from imprisonment and repressive laws to harassment of journalists and restrictions on internet access, that Eritrea is the most censored country in the world.
Of course, what such maps, tables and indices can never satisfactorily measure is the silence, the blank space that such environments produce: the books never written, pictures painted, or plays performed through fear, or the media reports that cannot be penned or broadcast. But they do help to build a picture of the level of difficulty a society faces in expressing itself freely, and the potential losses that censorship – and, crucially, fear – produce. As American author Judy Blume, herself no stranger to book bans, once wrote: “It’s not just the books under fire … that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship.” Identifying the causes of that fear, and helping find ways to face it, is one way to write a new future.
What such maps, tables and indices can never satisfactorily measure is the silence
©Jodie Ginsberg