Clarence Page
Washington Times
November 30, 2005

New York City: After this year’s International Press Freedom Awards dinner, a former reporter remarked to me the honorees’ inspiring stories made her “think about getting back into real journalism again,” with her accent on “real.” “Me, too,” I responded spontaneously, feeling unusually humbled by the realities of many of our overseas
colleagues. It’s been a rough year for American journalists. But things could be worse; we could be trying to work in China, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan or rural Brazil. In those  countries, death, jail, beatings, exile or intimidation color daily working conditions of this year’s recipients of the Press Freedom Awards, given by the Committee to Protect Journalists, of which I am a board member. This year, the tributes seemed to have a new edge. Journalists’ hardship and sacrifices in less-free societies remind us not only how much we take for granted in the United States but also how often our own press
freedoms seem under siege. We’ve seen one American reporter, Judith Miller, jailed this year ile working for the New York Times, and Rhode Island TV reporter Jim Taricani put under house arrest with an ankle bracelet in 2004. Dozens of others have been similarly threatened with subpoenas and jail while Congress drags its heels on a federal shield
law. As our own government fights for increasing secrecy in the name of the war on terrorism, more tyrannical regimes increasingly borrow such homeland-security rhetoric to cover up their own abuses. And as our international trade grows, American companies increasingly ignore human-rights abuses to win favors from tyrannical regimes. One of this year’s CPJ honorees, for example, was jailed in China, a perennial international leader for jailing journalists. Shi Tao, 37, a Chinese journalist, is serving a 10-year sentence for “leaking state secrets abroad.” Translation: He posted on the Internet a Propaganda Department memo that instructed Chinese journalists in the government-approved way to cover the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. If you
follow the news, you also may know his arrest resulted from a troubling cooperation between China’s repressive police and the American company Yahoo, which has refused to discuss the affair, except for brief press statements about cooperating with host countries’ laws. Another honoree, Brazilian editor Lucio Flavio Pinto, 56, was too tangled up in harassing lawsuits to leave his Amazonian hometown to receive his award in person. Investigating corruption and deforestation has made him the enemy of powerfully well-connected big business people, one of whom punched him in a restaurant – on camera. Missing even one of his almost daily court appearances could land him in jail, said his daughter, Juliana da Chuna Pinto, who accepted the award on her father’s behalf. One of the other two honorees could not return to her home country and the other was about to do so only with great courage. Galima Bukharbaeva, 31, cannot return to Uzbekistan for fear of imprisonment or other reprisal stemming from her reporting of police torture, repression of Islamic activists and other state-sponsored abuses in the former Soviet republic. While reporting a May 13 massacre of civilians
in the city of Andijan, a bullet tore through her backpack, piercing her notebook and press pass, when troops opened fire on demonstrators. And Zimbabwean lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa, 47, is the first nonjournalist honored by CPJ after she was followed and arrested and beaten for her work on behalf of journalists, foreign and domestic, who have dared to
operate independently of dictator-President Robert Mugabe. With almost all independent journalists and correspondents driven out of the country, there is little press freedom left in Zimbabwe to protect. The result, as Mrs. Mtetwa pointed out, is a growing freedom for Mr. Mugabe and his cronies to do whatever they want, unexposed by journalists. We
take press freedom for granted in the United States.