19 Jul 2024 | China, Hong Kong, News, Newsletters, Russia
Has China entered a “garbage time of history”? Some netizens think so. According to a Guardian article from yesterday, the term is trending, coined to reflect a generation who feel squeezed by rising costs and other social burdens. Those behind the term even created a “2024 misery ranking grand slam”, which tallies up the number of misery points that a person might have earned this year (one star for unemployment, two stars for a mortgage, another for hoarding the expensive liquor Moutai and so on). I always felt bonded to many of my Chinese friends by what I’d say was a shared sense of humour – the dry, acerbic sort that Brits are famed for, the one that is still able to chortle no matter how bad the news. It’s very much on display in this story.
The censors though aren’t laughing. They’re scrubbing. Pity these people who take away the lemonade from those with lemons.
Two other stories emerged from the region this week that, while not necessarily “garbage”, were bad. The first concerned a rumour that Xi Jinping had a stroke (side note: Xi is 71, his mother is 97, and his father died aged 88). The rumour spread across Chinese social media and was picked up on X by the activist Jennifer Zeng, who has a huge following. It was later debunked, including by the Reuters Fact Check team here. In the interim, China’s censors blocked posts about it.
The story was troubling, and not just the censorship angle. There are perils to getting things wrong when you are meant to be on the side fighting for freedoms, a central one being that it’s an own goal, a way to feed into the autocrats’ line that it is others, not themselves, who can’t be trusted.
Another troubling story this week came out of Hong Kong. On Wednesday Wall Street Journal reporter Selina Cheng was laid off. The Post said it was part of a restructuring. Cheng believes it was linked to her taking up the position of chair at the Hong Kong Journalists Association, a union that campaigns for media freedom. She said she was pressed by her employer not to stand for election for chair, being told the role would be “incompatible with my employment at the Wall Street Journal”. The WSJ have not commented on her firing. But a pattern appears to be emerging of major international outlets being spooked by association with the HKJA. According to an article from the China Media Project, three recently elected members of the HKJA board, alongside an outgoing leader of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, said they faced similar pressures.
“All asked to remain anonymous, fearing reprisals from their employers, but confirmed that the Journal is not alone: the biggest names in Hong Kong and China’s foreign press have been pressuring their employees to stand back and stay quiet, or face the repercussions. For the territory’s embattled journalists, defending the free press has become a fight on two fronts: against both an increasingly authoritarian government and their own employers, based in the West and nominally committed to liberal principles,” the article said.
Meanwhile Tom Grundy from Hong Kong Free Press, one of the few independent media to still operate from Hong Kong, told Index that the news added to the sense of vulnerability felt by journalists there. He said:
“When a giant international news organisation fails to support the city’s only independent media union and its officers, they further erode press freedom by closing precious space. It sends a terrible signal, and makes their own remaining staff more vulnerable in the long run. Especially locals.”
The Beijing supporting media of course is loving it. The Global Times tabloid was calling the press union “a malignant tumour that harms the city’s safety and security”.
Finally on the note of the WSJ, we have just heard news that the reporter Evan Gershkovich has been sentenced to 16 years in a Russian prison on espionage charges after he was arrested last March while on a reporting trip in the city of Yekaterinburg 1,600 km east of Moscow. That this news was predicable doesn’t make it any less disturbing. We will continue to fight for his release.
11 Jun 2024 | Israel, Moldova, News, Russia, Ukraine
Israel’s High Court of Justice this week heard a petition challenging new legislation allowing a ban on foreign broadcasters deemed a threat to national security.
Known as the Al Jazeera law, in honour of its inaugural target, this allows the communications minister, with the consent of the prime minister and the committee of national security, to impose far-reaching sanctions.
“There is no doubt that there is a violation of freedom of expression here,” the High Court panel’s head, Justice Yitzhak Amit, told the hearing.
Yet Israel’s May shuttering of Al Jazeera – described as a “terror channel” by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – passed without much domestic concern.
Any outrage was limited to Israel’s small liberal left wing, even though in banning Al Jazeera, Israel joins the august ranks of countries including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain.
The issue is, of course, rife with politicisation. Al Jazeera is headquartered in Qatar, as is part of the Hamas leadership, and is hardly free from bias. Nonetheless, this law can be used in the future to ban other foreign broadcasters that are deemed to pose an amorphous “threat to national security”.
And crucially, it includes an “override clause” that even Israel’s high court cannot overturn.
It’s important to note that countries often introduce special legislation affecting media in times of war and crisis, amid legitimate national security considerations.
Ukraine is an obvious case in point, not least because it faces such a particularly sharp threat from Russian disinformation.
A year before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, President Volodymyr Zelensky moved to shut down three pro-Russian TV channels judged to effectively be weapons in Russia’s information war.
Immediately after the full-scale invasion, all national news channels were united into a 24-hour broadcast, and a subsequent newly revised media law was intended to be muscular enough to withstand Russian malign influence.
Yet while criticism of the government in times of war – especially one being fought with a citizen’s army – is not easy, Ukrainian journalists have quite effectively held their leaders to account.
Reporting on corruption in the defence ministry, for instance, heralded the minister’s resignation of defence minister Oleskiy Reznikov and government pledges for greater transparency.
And critically, the Government’s moves in the information sphere have not gone unchallenged. Ukraine, with its history of authoritarian government and a media scene under the sway of oligarchs and political interests, knows all too well how fragile free expression can be.
While officials made clear that the telethon would be completely free of government intervention, not all outlets were included, and critics note that some of those excluded such as Espresso, Channel 5, and Priamyi, had often criticised Zelensky and to varying degrees were associated with his predecessor Petro Poroshenko.
And there was widespread criticism of the March 2023 media law for handing too much power to government intervention, with the same measures to counter Russian disinformation all too easily abused to limit critical voices.
In neighbouring Moldova, scores of pro-Russian outlets were banned under the state of emergency declared immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. More than two years later, the TV channels and websites remain blocked despite the end of the state of emergency, and many critics would argue that the country remains as vulnerable as ever to Russian propaganda.
What is needed to ensure that national security considerations do not become a tool to control free expression is a robust civil society push back and an ongoing debate on the boundary between freedom of speech and the fight against fake news.
In Israel, where the national narrative has become an inextricable part of the conflict itself, the public appears increasingly supine in the face of the official version of events.
Israel has long championed its diverse and outspoken media sector as a sign of a vibrant democracy, alongside robust laws that purport to protect free expression. But civil society and media are now experiencing repression from both official and non-state sources, with Palestinian citizens of Israel bearing the brunt.
Anti-war protests have been curtailed and violently repressed; Jewish and Arab teachers fired over left-wing posts on social media, while students have faced disciplinary actions for simply supporting a ceasefire.
Dissenting voices and journalists are being directly targeted and doxxed. Just after 7 October, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi suggested police be empowered to arrest those accused of spreading information that could harm morale or fuel enemy propaganda.
Haaretz journalist Rogel Alpher this week noted a column in Yisrael Hayom which called for articles in the penal law that mandate execution or life imprisonment enforced on those disseminating “defeatist propaganda” or “abetting the enemy”.
Of course, Israel is not about to start executing journalists. The vast majority of extreme proposals do not make it into law, just as most anti-war arrests do not lead to indictments. Even bans on specific outlets are not total; Al Jazeera can still be accessed with absolute ease online.
But this all helps create a chilling atmosphere, serving to normalise such actions and increasing self-censorship.
Israel’s Hebrew-language media has chosen to self-censor to such a large extent that Jewish Israelis experience what Esther Solomon, editor-in-chief of Haaretz English, describes as a “cognitive gap” between the content they consume and what the rest of the world sees.
This means that anything confronting the profoundly uncomfortable reality of war and contradicting the accepted IDF narrative is seen as traitorous and a threat to national security.
The public acceptance of vaguely worded censorious media laws seems to fit all too well with the ongoing slow and creeping deterioration of Israel’s democracy.
3 Jun 2024 | Israel, News, Palestine
Israel’s decision to seize video equipment from AP journalists last week may have been swiftly reversed but the overall direction of travel for media freedom in Israel is negative.
Journalists inside Gaza are of course paying the highest price (yesterday preliminary investigations by CPJ showed at least 107 journalists and media workers were among the more than 37,000 killed since the Israel-Gaza war began) and it feels odd to speak of equipment seizures when so many of those covering the war in the Strip have paid with their lives. But this is not to compare, merely to illuminate.
The past few days have provided ample evidence of what many within Israel have long feared – that the offensive in Gaza is not being reported on fully in Israel itself. On Tuesday a video went viral of an Israeli woman responding with outrage at the wide gulf between news on Sunday’s bombing of a refugee camp in Rafah within Israeli media compared to major international news outlets. Yesterday, in an interview with Canadian broadcaster CBC, press freedom director for the Union of Journalists in Israel, Anat Saragusti, spoke more broadly of the reporting discrepancies since 7 October:
“The world sees a completely different war from the Israeli audience. This is very disturbing.”
Saragusti added that part of this is because the population is still processing the horrors of 7 October and with that comes a degree of self-censorship from those within the media. The other reason, she said, is that the IDF provides much of the material that appears in Israeli media and this is subject to review by military censors. While the military has always exerted control (Israeli law requires journalists to submit any article dealing with “security issues” to the military censor for review prior to publication), this pressure has intensified since the war, as the magazine +972 showed. Since 2011 +972 have released an annual report looking at the scale of bans by the military censor. In their latest report, released last week and published on our site with permission, they highlighted how in 2023 more than 600 articles by Israeli media outlets were barred, which was the most since their tracking began.
In a visually arresting move, Israeli paper Haaretz published an article on Wednesday with blacked out words and sentences. Highlighting such redactions is incidentally against the law and will no doubt add to the government’s wrath at Haaretz (late last year they threatened the left-leaning outlet with sanctions over their Gaza war coverage).
The government’s attempts to control the media landscape was already a problem prior to 7 October. Benjamin Netanyahu is known for his fractious relationship with the press and has made some very personal attacks throughout his career, such as this one from 2016, while Shlomo Kahri, the current communications minister, last year expressed a desire to shut down the country’s public broadcaster Kan. This week it was also revealed by Haaretz that two years ago investigative reporter Gur Megiddo was blocked from reporting on how then chief of Mossad had allegedly threatened then ICC prosecutor (the story finally saw daylight on Tuesday). Megiddo said he’d been summoned to meet two officials and threatened. It was “explained that if I published the story I would suffer the consequences and get to know the interrogation rooms of the Israeli security authorities from the inside,” said Megiddo.
Switching to the present, it feels unconscionable that Israelis, for whom the war is a lived reality not just a news story, are being served a light version of its conduct.
In the case of AP, their equipment was confiscated on the premise that it violated a new media law, passed by Israeli parliament in April, which allows the state to shut down foreign media outlets it deems a security threat. It was under this law that Israel also raided and closed Al Jazeera’s offices earlier this month and banned the company’s websites and broadcasts in the country.
Countries have a habit of passing censorious legislation in wartime, the justification being that some media control is important to protect the military. The issue is that such legislation is typically vague, open to abuse by those in power, and doesn’t always come with an expiry date to protect peacetime rights.
“A country like Israel, used to living through intense periods of crisis, is particularly vulnerable to calls for legislation that claims to protect national security by limiting free expression. Populist politicians are often happy to exploit the “rally around the flag” effect,” Daniella Peled, managing editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, told Index.
We voiced our concerns here in terms of Ukraine, which passed a media law within the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion with very broad implications, and we have concerns with Israel too. But as these examples show, our concerns are far wider than just one law and one incidence of confiscated equipment.
13 Oct 2023 | Israel, News, Palestine
The events of the last week have been horrific. We won’t rehash them here — the videos, photos and details coming out of the Middle East are everywhere you look. For an organisation that campaigns for free speech, we have struggled to find words to respond to the mounting loss of life and the horrendous accounts that emerge every day. But at Index our job is not to report on all of this. Instead our job is to uphold free expression, and to alert the world to the instances where this has been curtailed. So that’s what we’ll do. Here are the free speech issues we are most concerned about:
Killed and missing journalists
Amid the deaths of civilians, journalists are losing their lives. While there’s nothing to suggest that the journalists are being specifically targeted, their lack of protection is of huge concern, both for them and for the knock-on effect for media freedom more broadly. The Committee to Protect Journalists has reported that at least 10 journalists have been killed so far. The first was Yaniv Zohar, an Israeli photographer working for the Israeli Hebrew-language daily newspaper Israel Hayom, who was killed alongside his wife and two daughters during the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz in southern Israel on 7 October. Israel Hayom’s editor-in-chief has said that Yaniv was working that day. Nine Palestinian journalists have also been confirmed dead as of yesterday and one Israeli journalist is reported missing.
Protest bans
Across the world, buildings are being lit up with blue and white, while green, white, black and red flags are being held aloft in protest. While these vigils and protests are being enacted, so too are calls to shut them down. In the UK, home secretary Suella Braverman suggested waving Palestinian flags might be a criminal act (depending on the context) and told police chiefs to be on “alert and ready to respond to any potential offences”. In France, the interior minister yesterday announced a systematic ban on pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Police have also warned against pro-Palestine rallies in Sydney, after some people chanted antisemitic slogans at a previous demonstration. The Sydney event organisers have distanced themselves from those people and said: “This behaviour has no place at these rallies.” Meanwhile, police in Sydney placed restrictions on Jewish people by warning them to stay at home while that first rally went ahead, and even arrested a man who was carrying an Israeli flag for “breach of the peace”.
There are certain areas that fall into “grey free speech” areas. Protest is usually not one of them. Only sometimes it is. The office was divided, for example, on whether there should be restrictions on protest outside abortion clinics. Today we are similarly divided. The Times argues here that some protests are making the leap from a peaceful right to expression to hate crimes. The Daily Beast argues the opposite and that these bans would erode our free speech rights.
Internet interruptions
This week we’ve heard reports of social media accounts being suspended or blocked. NetBlocks, a former Index award-winner which maps media freedom, has also reported on declining internet connectivity in areas of both Israel and Palestine, after attacks and counter-attacks. In Gaza, a total blackout is anticipated if further internet infrastructure is damaged, making access to social media all but impossible before the apps are even opened. As we reported when Erdogan cut off access to social media following the Turkey earthquakes, access to the internet and these platforms is crucial during times of disaster and war. It can be a lifeline, connecting people to aid as well as to their loved ones.
Misinformation multiplied
On Wednesday, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins called out a video seemingly from the BBC being circulated by Russian social media users, which claimed Ukraine was smuggling weapons to Hamas. The video was entirely fake. Others have highlighted video after video claiming to be footage of Israel bombing Gaza or Hamas airstrikes on Israel, which are in fact a combination of Assad airstrikes in Syria, fireworks in Algeria and even video game footage. Both faked and reappropriated content are running rampant on X (formerly Twitter), which is not necessarily anything new. But a Wired report suggests that the scale of the problem is new. Boosted posts from premium subscribers take precedence over once-verified news providers and hordes of fired misinformation researchers now spend their time updating their CVs rather than fighting fake news on the platform. And in an added twist fake news to smear both Muslims and Jews is also running rampant behind China’s Great Firewall on Sina Weibo.
Fair journalism
Getting news from on the ground is a huge challenge in this conflict, and it’s in that vacuum that the kind of misinformation we just outlined takes hold. So it’s all the more concerning that Israel’s public broadcaster Kan News reported that the Israeli cabinet is planning emergency legislation to ban Al Jazeera, which does have a presence on the ground in Gaza. This is not the first time Israel has announced a ban on the network. Back in 2017 Israel looked set to join a boycott by Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which all accused the network of sponsoring terrorism. Relationships between Al Jazeera and Israel have also been very strained since the May 2022 killing of Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh. But if Al Jazeera is banned, one of the few media outlets reporting from within Gaza will go silent.
We know that conflicts can deal a blow to free expression. At Index we are here to ensure that doesn’t happen, or at least if it does happen that it doesn’t go unnoticed. We will continue to monitor the situation closely.
