May 3rd was World Press Freedom Day. In recent years, the internet has increasingly become the new battleground for press freedom. Repressive governments around the world are cracking down on bloggers and other online journalists who are breaking the bonds of censorship.
China for example continues to filter foreign and domestic content on the internet, it has 150 million internet users and despite government restrictions of online content, both domestic and international stories that censors prefer to control, manage to slip through government information firewalls. Northern Asia media expert Ashley W. Esarey conforms that it is indeed most likely that the internet will play a role in Chinese media reform, because its “absolute control has proven difficult if not impossible.” The primary space for freedom of speech in China is the blogsphere, where journalists use humour and political satire to criticise the Chinese government. In mainstream media, editors find ways to test the rules as readers in country’s flourishing economy demand hard news. However, journalists covering social issues which their editors won’t publish will simply post their stories online, such stories tend to be more edgy and critical of the social status quo in the country.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says that more online journalists are now in jail around the world than traditional journalists. This is because in the past journalists could count on news organisations for legal protection. However, with the advent of internet media the playing field has changed. According to Deputy Director of the Committee, Robert Mahoney, “Now more and more of these bloggers are independent, freelancers, who have no backing, they are on their own when their up against these huge oppressive government bureaucracies.”
African journalists too are no strangers to online censorship by government. In Tunisia, which was the first African country to ban websites, journalist Muhammad Abou was arrested and subsequently imprisoned for publishing an article on a banned website where he compared the president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
African dictators and paranoid readers are beginning to discover cyberland where, unlike traditional media, freedom of expression is much more difficult to control. Nigeria has a huge online presence not only from bloggers but from news portals, forums and discussions groups, most of them highly critical of the government. Many dissidents and activists from the Nigerian Delta and the Igboland , both very politically unstable regions, use the internet to publish their writing which would be banned in Nigeria. Such journalists however often find themselves in the government’s radar.
After online elections observers are currently reporting larger regularise in Sudan’s first multi-party polls in 24 years. Civil society groups are also being blocked away from their internet tool monitoring the elections and their results. Access to the Sudan Vote Monitor website, a collaborative platform created by Sudanese civil society with the aim of facilitating independent monitoring and reporting of the elections and their results has been partially or totally blocked over the last week . This comes after president Omar al Bashir has supposedly ordered the end to state censorship of the media in 2008.
Although the Sudanese government is indeed cracking down hard on online journalists at such an key point in the country’s history, their feeble attempts to control online media are not enough to completely control domestic and foreign content.
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