Media foes get away with murder
IT was so good to see, a couple of weeks back, that old colleague and friend Ken Dawson was honoured by his peers for a lifetime of first-rate work behind the lens of a movie camera. Ken was born, you could say, with hypo in his veins (hypo is the fluid used by denizens of the darkroom to fix the image on a photographic print) and has pixels in his genes.
His father was the legendary Eric Dawson, who once ruled over the darkroom at the Gleaner and then ran his own photo studio. An older brother, Winston, also a superb lensman, was one of a team who did stellar work for the then-fledgling Tourist Board, travelling all across the island to capture the images of the famous, infamous and not-so-famous visitors.
For a time Winston boarded at the same home where I lived with relatives while attending high school. Unfortunately, he died far too young and left a young family, whose members were the recipients of Ken’s special brand of compassion.
Ken was one of the first people hired by the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation when it expanded into television in 1963. Compared to the gear in use today, our equipment was quite rudimentary but worked just as well, especially in the gifted hands of a master like Ken.
Those were the days of black and white film, and unlike the standard practice in the industry, we did not make positive prints from the negatives. Instead, to save money, we edited the negatives and put them directly on the air, using a reversal setting on the equipment to transform the images into positives as they went out. This required extreme discipline on the part of the photographers, who had to maintain their exposures in a critical narrow range so that the pictures would not appear too bright or too dark. This presented no problem for our Mr Dawson.
Those Dawson boys also had something else in their genes — I never saw either Winston or Ken blow up at anyone. Their response, even to undue provocation or downright rudeness, was soft-spoken and moderate. It also was an attitude which stood him well in dealing with trying situations. When a reporter is covering a riot or similar explosive situation, he or she can easily spot likely trouble and duck to safety. The videographer, however, seeing the world only through the narrow confines of the viewfinder, is often at the mercy of miscreants or those with hostility towards the news media.
The JBC no longer exists, but Ken is still out there, shouldering his camera, recording for the rest of us whatever appears before his lens. Congratulations, Sir, and long may you continue!
While the dangers I have just mentioned are real, there are some things Jamaican journalists don’t have to worry about. True, there are always pressures from this party and that not to publish potentially embarrassing material or to broadcast stuff which is favourable to their cause. But those pressures come with the territory, and the young journalist learns very quickly how to handle them. But in many countries, being a journalist can be extremely hazardous to your health.
That is why I became a member of an organisation called Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, based in Toronto. By inclination and by choice I am not a joiner of organisations, and the only outfits for which I have carried cards have been trade unions and press clubs in addition to CJFE. As you can gather from the name, it exists to champion the rights of free expression everywhere in the world.
CJFE operates a bureau called IFEX – a clearing-house of information about the dangers journalists face every day. It raises money to help reporters and editors in trouble and offers fellowships to a lucky few to leave their country and for a short while enjoy the privilege of studying and reflecting in the relative safety of Canada.
But even there, journalists are targets for violence and even murder. Take the case of Tara Singh Hayer, who published the weekly Punjabi-language Indo-Canadian News on Canada’s west coast. One evening 11 years ago as he emerged from his car in his garage in the city of Surrey, British Columbia, one man, and possibly two, slipped into the garage and shot him in the head. They also stabbed him before escaping. To this day the police have not solved the murder, and his daughter continues his work at the newspaper’s helm.
His sin was to publish reports and commentary about the brutal activities of a Sikh separatist group in his homeland and in British Columbia. They are alleged to have organised the bombing of an Air India jet on its way from Canada to India in 1985. Shortly after that disaster, a teenage assailant shot Hayer in his newspaper’s lobby, and the bullet lodged in his spine, forcing him to use a wheelchair. But it didn’t shut him up.
Two years after his fatal shooting, another Canadian journalist was shot for his work. Michel Auger, a crime reporter with the paper Le Journal de Montréal, had covered a long and bloody conflict between two rival motorcycle gangs in Quebec. In late 2000, an assailant approached him in the paper’s parking lot and squeezed off six shots into his back. Remarkably, he recovered even though the surgeons had to leave three bullets in him. The crime remains unsolved, and Auger was honoured by the CJFE with the first of its awards named after Tara Singh Hayer.
Last week I attended the organisation’s annual dinner, when several hundred leading print and broadcast journalists, people in associated fields and headline-makers celebrated its efforts. This year’s Hayer award went to a reporter who wrote a book about journalists from Iraq, the Philippines, Russia, Colombia and Bangladesh who were killed for their reporting. Terry Gould’s book is called Murder Without Borders: Dying for the Story in the World’s Most Dangerous Places. In his address, he told the gathering that the greatest danger was to local journalists reporting to their own people about matters of concern to them.
All the people he wrote about had campaigned for changes in government and business and had written about corruption in high places. Many had received death threats and they all had predicted their own deaths. Yet they soldiered on.
The dinner also heard about Jila Baniyaghoub, a brave woman in Iran who had been locked up and beaten. She began writing at the tender age of 11 with a story in a Tehran newspaper about children living in poverty. She worked with paper after paper, each closed by the government because it disliked what they said. She sent an email which was read by a former colleague now working in Toronto. He accepted the International Press Freedom Award on her behalf. She declined the invitation to the dinner because her husband was still in the same prison where she had been held.
Another press freedom award went to a fearless Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, where four journalists have been murdered since 2001. The latest murder happened in January of this year, and the most celebrated was that of Anna Politskaya, who had written articles about abuse and torture of civilians in Chechnya at the hands of Russian soldiers. The award was accepted by the paper’s founding editor, Dmitry Moratov, who explained through an interpreter why he and his colleagues continue their efforts even with that sword of Damocles hanging over their heads: “We serve our public and we inspire each other. We give each other hope.”
More than 500 reporters and photographers have been killed in the past decade. Sadly, only one-tenth of the murderers have been punished. This has been a rough year — so far, 96 journalists have been killed, 31 in the Philippines last month alone. That is the worst case of concentrated venom against people who report for a living.
One of the evening’s co-hosts, Lloyd Robertson, a newscaster on Canada’s most popular television network, aptly summed up the situation: “Only a small fraction of those who kill journalists are ever brought to justice. They do it with impunity. Nobody ever tries to solve these cases… they are literally getting away with murder.”
keeble.mack@sympatico.ca