Accurately determining a country’s press freedom status has
always been a difficult task. International human rights groups sometimes
quibble over the precise metrics and there have been known to be interesting
anomalies, particularly with respect to traditionally under-reported countries
such as those of the Caribbean.
The Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM) has, since
its inception, attempted to present a consistent, albeit nuanced picture of the
press freedom environment through our biennial country reports prepared by
national associations and focal points. These are often over-shadowed in the
public space by the better known assessments of international organisations
such as Reporters without Borders (RWB), the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
and Freedom House which publish annual press freedom indices.
In times past, such reports were often prepared in the
absence of meaningful consultations with practitioners on the ground and
against the backdrop of a generally moribund trans-Caribbean human rights
movement. Apart from a small number of special interest groups that do fine
work in the areas of LGBT advocacy, gender equity, workers’ rights and
environmental rights, there are few that appear to have the faintest interest
in one of the fundamental pillars of the democratic process – freedom of
expression.
This unpardonable vacuum has created conditions under which
advocates in one category of rights – whether civil and political or economic,
social and cultural – do not feel inclined to draw the connection between their
individual causes and the need to foster an environment of free expression. As
a consequence, free expression and press freedom advocates in the Caribbean
often embark upon the lonely task of bringing to light the value of such
freedoms to the polity as a whole.
It is by no means a politically neutral engagement. Press
freedom is subject to fickle support. Opposition politicians focus on the
inalienability of the right, but quickly remind us all of the need to be
“responsible” whenever the political tables turn.
The fact of the matter, of course, is that freedom does
carry with it a requirement to be responsible. But it is equally difficult to
be responsible if one is not free.
If you have a situation in which accountability and
transparency are not the norm, access to information laws are defective and
whistle-blowers are punished instead of being protected, then journalists are
drawn to the “leak” and the unofficial release of information often attached to
less than honourable motives. Yet, our societies crave the truth and there is
usually an outcry for more and more “investigative journalism.”
It is a campaign riddled with no shortage of duplicity. Many
politicians, captains of industry, opinion-leaders and others in responsible
positions may not survive properly conducted investigative journalism. In a
sense, in our small authoritarian geographic spaces, nobody really wants this.
It is sheer hypocrisy.
So this, to me, would be one of the important metrics to
measure the degree of press freedom that prevails – a predisposition to
speaking the truth not only to rulers, but also to the ruled.
The other variable, of course, would be the legislative and
constitutional framework under which the society functions. It is clearly not
enough for there to be a constitutional provision for freedom of the press, if
social and cultural antecedents militate against the freedom to offend, to
blaspheme, to defy sacred edict, to stand up against the powerful and,
sometimes, to get it wrong without the guillotine of silence being gratuitously
imposed.
For this reason, the first signs of a country serious about
free expression and freedom of the press would include a commitment to
decriminalise breaches of laws related to expression, protect those who blow
the whistle on official wrong-doing and the opening of the doors and windows to
officially-held information through real access to information laws.
In this regard, nothing heard across the political divide in
most of our countries in the Caribbean is particularly encouraging.
All of this does not mean there is no freedom of the press
in the region, but that in defining the processes we need to take us there, the
legislative and cultural defaults have to increasingly focus on freedom and
not, as is currently the case, on restriction and ultimate silence.
