Medium-Specific Threats for Journalists: Examples from Philippines, Afghanistan and Venezuela

ABSTRACT

Between 2012 and 2016, UNESCO registered 530 deaths of journalists. They also published a statistic showing that television journalists were the most killed, followed by print media, radio and online journalists. Hinted in this statistics is the need to understand the relationship between the medium through which and in which the journalists produce news and the threats and dangers posed to them. In this article, we discuss this interlinkage and call it medium-specific threats. As examples of this interlinkage, we describe the cases of community radio journalists in the Philippines, photojournalists in Afghanistan and online journalists in Venezuela. Based on these examples from independently conducted studies from very different parts of the world, we make the broader case that while recognizing the prevailing political-economic and socio-cultural factors and forces at work in these media systems-in-flux, investigations of medium-specific threats to journalists are needed for more nuanced understanding of and thus mitigation of journalists’ insecurities.

KEYWORDS:

• Safety of journalists
• anti-press violence
• freedom of expression
• UN sustainable development goals
• Afghanistan
• Philippines
• Venezuela

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The three media systems, we focus on in this article are very much in transition and so defy neat categorization (Roudakova 2012). Problems with categorizing the Phillipino media system has been noted before. Shifting power nexuses make for a media sector which is “fickle, transitory and ambiguous” in its orientation(s) (McCargo, 2012, 203). Consequently, voices “authorized and unauthorized” by powers-that-be can both make themselves heard depending on situation and context, making for a media landscape marked by “partisan polyvalence” McCargo described (2012, 223). Partisan polyvalence – a descriptive term rather than a category as McCargo argued (2012) – could also describe Afghanistan. The post-2001 Afghan media landscape has been called a patrons-based media system (Brown 2013) where media organizations show parallelisms with the Afghan government, western or regional donors (cf. Relly and Zanger 2017), political leaders or warlords, based on whose patronage the organization relies on. While the western donors have supported creating a pluralistic media system in Afghanistan (Barker 2008) and to some extent, the Afghan government has created laws and policies to institute the same, the steady and strong influences of the other actors, not to mention the ebbs and flows of an ongoing conflict, keep the media system-in-flux. Venezuela has been described as one of the several “captured liberal” media systems in Latin America (Guerrero 2014) though this category does not do justice to the shifting political and economic sands Venezuela has been experiencing. Showing how Venezuela under the Bolivarian regime became a mixed authoritarian system, Cañizález (2014) documented how the Venezuelan state pursued an agenda of increasing hegemony over the national media system. But this growing authoritarian control of the traditional media formats was limited at first when it came to digital news formats (Correa 2009) and an ongoing process when the study was conducted. This transitional process is described within the example discussed above.

In sum, each of these three countries’ media systems are hard to place under traditional categories (Hallin and Mancini 2004) which were orginally based on analysis of more politically stable countries and contexts. Thus, following Roudakova (2012), we have focused on describing and analyzing journalists’ medium-specific insecurities in relation to the political-economic and socio-cultural “processes” at work in the three countries, rather than on an unified, stable understanding of the media “systems” (247) in these countries.

2 While describing this particular threat, the photographers mostly spoke about photographing women in public spaces where it was implied that explicit consent should not be needed.

3 International Security Assistance Force: the official name of the NATO forces which was present in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014.

4 Article 57 expressly states: “ … Anonymity, war propaganda, discriminatory messages or those promoting religious intolerance are not permitted” (Emphases added).

5 We are grateful to reviewer 2 who served for the fourth round of peer review of this article, for suggesting the potential design of future studies investigating medium-specific threats.