Media freedom in Asia: challenges from below

ABSTRACT

The scholarship on media freedom has tended to focus on threats from state and corporate power, avoiding the awkward reality that ‘people power’ can also be a source of constraints. These ground forces can work in tandem with political and economic power, or independently. They contradict the common assumption that the public is the natural ally of independent media, against the tyranny of states and markets. While Asian publics are more able than ever before to make themselves heard, it is naive to believe that they will always use their rising voices in support of democratic values. Apathetic silence is common, especially when people do not identify with the victims of human rights abuses, or when they do not feel directly harmed by official corruption. Today, there is ample evidence that the glare of publicity does not guarantee justice. In highly polarised societies, public opinion can even turn against journalists and other critics who malign leaders, parties and movements that are seen to represent the masses. Such dynamics require closer attention to what it means for the media to be free from power, and whom exactly the media should use their freedom for.

KEYWORDS:

• Media freedom
• Asia
• polarisation
• intolerance
• democracy

If terms such as media freedom and press freedom have any meaning beyond the larger category of freedom of expression, it is because they gesture toward the media’s role in the collective life of society. Media are not just essential vehicles for atomised individuals ‘to seek, receive and impart information and ideas,’ in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948). They are also indispensable as convenors of conversations, where we become ‘us’ and where publics constitute themselves.

In line with this perspective, the social responsibility tradition – which most media institutions and professionals claim allegiance to – regards media freedom as requiring freedom from power, for a public purpose (Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1947). This special issue of the Asian Journal of Communication interrogates both sides of that equation. It asks what it means to be free from power, in these populist times when ‘the people’ sometimes manifest as a mob, exercising significant constraints on truth-seeking and truth-telling. It also asks whom the media use their freedom for, a question posed by critics as far back as Marx, and that has grown unavoidable in twenty-first-century societies riven by systemic inequalities.

Our emphasis on challenges ‘from below’ does not deny the ever-present dangers posed by the state and by economic power – the traditional focuses of liberal and critical scholarship, respectively. But the threat analysis would be incomplete if we did not also gaze at the grassroots. Of course, ground energies, even when seemingly authentic and autonomous, are not completely independent of the centres of political and economic power. We would be missing something, however, if we simply subsumed society within the categories of the state or the economic sphere, as if people are always completely brainwashed by political elites or subject to the false consciousness of the capitalist order.

Two to three decades ago, accounts of media freedom generally assumed that society and independent media were allies, against the tyranny of states and markets: when journalists spoke truth to power, the people would cheer them on. Countless Hollywood movies were – and still are – built around that reassuring narrative. The intrepid investigative reporter or whistleblower gathers damning evidence of high crimes and gross injustices; taps the send key, or presses the fax button, or drops the manila envelopes into the mail (depending on the era); and triggers a chain reaction from media exposé to public outrage to a righting of wrongs.

Today, it is clear that the glare of publicity does not guarantee justice. While Asian publics are more able than ever before to make themselves heard, it is naive to believe that they will always use their rising voices in support of democratic values. Apathetic silence is common, especially when people do not identify with the victims of human rights abuses, when they do not feel directly harmed by official corruption, or when present-day injustices against women or sexual and gender minorities align with deep-rooted tradition. In highly polarised societies, public opinion can turn against journalists and other critics who malign leaders, parties and movements that are seen to represent the masses.

Such dynamics are not just found in more closed societies. Indeed, although not our original intention – we were open to submissions from across the region – the four articles selected for this collection focus on three of Asia’s more democratic republics: India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. All three have competitive elections and a lively media. All three have regressed. India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its allied organisations have undertaken a hateful majoritarian overhaul of the country’s secular democratic order. Once priding itself as the world’s largest democracy, India was relegated in 2021 to the status of ‘electoral autocracy’ by the Varieties of Democracy project based at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden (Boese et al., 2022). Indonesia, hailed as a consolidating democracy a decade after the overthrow of Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998, has backslid as well, though not as dramatically as India. In Indonesian politics, there used to be a clearer distinction in between the inclusive pluralists who have tended to win national elections and Muslim hardliners. As in other countries, however, discriminatory discourses have been mainstreamed, and President Joko Widodo has become more autocratic. As for the Philippines, the original People Power revolution that ousted the military dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos is long forgotten. If not prevented by term limits, the Philippine electorate would have probably re-elected Rodrigo Duterte, a president flamboyantly opposed to media freedom and human rights.

The four studies in this issue engage with these troubling trends, focusing on different aspects of ground-level dynamics in the three countries. First, Subin Paul and Ruth Palmer delve into India’s Hindi-language press, part of a public sphere quite distinct from the elite discourses that dominate India’s English-language media. Inequalities associated with the ancient caste system – the world’s most intricate and entrenched system of discrimination – as well as gender continue to make a mockery of India’s democratic pretentions. Paul and Palmer show how the Hindi press fails to address these injustices because, after all, the press is itself not immune from casteism and patriarchy. The authors embark on a case study of the rape of a lower-caste woman in the hinterland and how it was reported by two leading Hindi newspapers with opposing party loyalties.

Dainik Jagran, which the authors identify as Hindu nationalist in orientation, seemed more incensed by the ensuing protests than what was being protested. The narrative of ‘troublemakers inciting caste-based violence’ diverted attention from the rape itself. Hindustan, critical of the ruling party, criticised official inaction and the persistent rape culture gripping Indian political life, overlooking the fact that it, too, had considered the crime newsworthy only after the victim’s move to a hospital in the national capital and her subsequent death, when the news began circulating on the social media of the urban middle class.

The second article, by Masduki, takes stock of Indonesia’s toxic environment for journalists. Vicious online trolls used to be associated with rightwing religious groups. But Masduki notes that the country’s 175 million social media users, spending an average of 4.5 hours online a day, have become a potential weapon that no major party, even erstwhile moderates, feels it can forswear. One Detik.com journalist was attacked online after critically covering the president’s planned visit to open a shopping centre in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cyberwarriors circulated the journalist’s contact details, after which he was inundated with death threats and flooded with fake food orders. Tempo, the country’s leading investigative news organisation, has even had to arrange safe houses for journalists threatened in the course of their work.

In our third article, Jefferson Lyndon D. Ragragio studies how media have contributed to authoritarian populism in the Philippines. Examining 83 pro-Duterte Facebook pages, Ragragio found that more than half were heavily involved in attacking opponents. Duterte was promoted as a powerful leader – in command of the police and military – and at the same time a simple man. Networked disinformation is not a straightforward matter of indoctrination from above, Ragragio notes. If it works it is partly because it resonates with sentiments on the ground: propagandists use ‘carefully crafted texts, photos, and memes that touch on the Filipino shared values on religion, family, satire, and nationhood’.

The set of articles closes with an article on Indonesia and the Philippines by Jonathan Corpus Ong and Ross Tapsell. It describes how a ‘shadow economy’ of digital professionals and entrepreneurs, drawn from a large creative workforce, has been helping political incumbents consolidate their power, including by undermining trust in journalists. There is a ‘politics-profit spectrum’ from disinformation producers that are mainly state-driven to those that are mainly commercial. At the latter extreme, producers are politically agnostic and simply follow the money. Ong and Tapsell find that this production model appeals to people’s entrepreneurial aspirations and tap into distrust of legacy media. Ironically, they point out, ‘cynicism about mainstream media is used as a moral justification to dispose of institutionalized practice by replacing it with another version equally lacking in scruples yet ultimately benefiting themselves’.

Collectively, these four articles make a strong case for paying more attention to the questions set out at the start of this essay. What does it mean to be free from power, and whom exactly do and should the media use their freedom for? To answer these questions, the authors show that the familiar, and probably unavoidable, categories of state, business and society – or political, economic and civil spheres – need to be applied with a keen sense that they interpenetrate. The political economy tradition is accustomed to treating political and corporate power in this manner. In contrast, people power tends to be placed on a pedestal. Whether looking at local language media of the rural hinterland, or young talents contributing to a tech boom in Asia’s urban centres, there’s a tendency to romanticise the grassroots.

In addition, media freedom advocacy is prone to diminish the media’s faults, as if the harm some do by marginalising vulnerable groups below them is always less of a problem than the media’s suppression by forces above them. Our authors suggest that reality is more complex and does not really fit into ‘heroes-and-villains narratives,’ as Ong and Tapsell put it. We may need uncomfortable conversations about ‘complicity and collusion’ and how the production of disinformation and discriminatory discourses is ‘organic to media practice.' Our special issue joins a still-small body of scholarship concerned about developments within Asian media and online publics that are deeply damaging to democratic life (Banaji & Bhat, 2021; Brooten & Verbruggen, 2017; George, 2021; McCargo, 2017; Ong & Lin, 2017). Since media freedom is not for media but for the public they serve, such works remind us that we should be thinking about not only protecting media as they currently exist, but also how to create a more democracy-enhancing media ecosystem, even if it is costly to incumbents.

Scholars of Asian media who engage with such complexities would be contributing to knowledge creation and theory building at a global level, since the issues we have been talking about are not confined to the Asian region. Authoritarian populism, toxic polarisation, and ethno-nationalism are global phenomena; it is not just Asian societies that seem to have lost sight of democratic fundamentals. In particular, people have tended to relish their own freedom to speak while resenting others’. They embrace democracy as a way to have one’s say, without necessarily accepting the quid pro quo of listening to others. This lack of reciprocity in popular demands for recognition, rights, respect translates into a media space that, in most countries, is more plural, participatory, and protest-friendly than ever before – but that fails to provide a common space for democratic deliberation and the constitution of tolerant, diverse publics able to act for the collective good.

Internet platforms and news media are not solely responsible for polarisation, but they have certainly not helped. Social media platforms are programmed to isolate people for efficient commercial microtargeting, rather than gathering diverse citizens for broader deliberation. Favouring virality over verifiability, they have boosted the disinformation industry. Journalists working in the public interest cannot compete. All this is a far cry from the visions of 20–30 years ago, of an internet that would foster conversations that cut across social and ideological divides, thus serving as a ‘digital public sphere’ more inclusive than pre-digital society. Instead, the global trend is towards greater political polarisation (Boese et al., 2022; McCoy, Rahman, & Somer, 2018).

One reason the field has under-theorised the position of publics in relation to media and democracy is the unstated assumption that democratisation is a virtuous circle: give the people competitive elections and the tools for self-expression (including the radically liberating internet) and you’ll get a spontaneous chain reaction propelling societies towards a more liberal and just social order. Over the last decade, that myth has shattered. In all regions of the world – irrespective of regime type, economic level, and culture – large numbers of people have freely favoured authoritarian leaders, and supported or even instigated and perpetrated atrocities against minorities. Significant segments of the media have, likewise, championed anti-democratic movements even when they possess the constitutional freedom to do otherwise. These trends cry out for internet platforms and media organisations with a public service orientation, committed to strengthening democracy’s twin pillars of freedom and equality. Market forces alone cannot generate the required institutions and practices; nor, certainly, can unchecked governments (Fuchs, 2019; Murschetz, 2020). In industry forums, discussions about the future of media have tended to skirt around these questions, focusing instead on how to develop sustainable business models for private media organisations in the wake of digital disruptions, and on traditional censorship by state actors. The scholarly agenda needs to be broader, covering media regulation and reform, and journalism norms and ethics. Scholars of Asian media can contribute to the development of media ecosystems that are free from coercion from above and below, independent enough to serve the public interest, and supportive of tolerant and plural democracies.

Disclosure statement

Cherian George was the PhD dissertation supervisor of contributor Jefferson Lyndon D. Ragragio, whose article draws on his PhD research. George was not involved in handling Ragragio’s manuscript at any stage, from initial screening and reviewer selection to the final publication decision.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cherian George

Cherian George is Professor and Associate Dean (Research and Development), School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University.

Kyu Ho Youm

Kyu Ho Youm is the Jonathan Marshall First Amendment Chair at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.