Trial-and-error is a painful but necessary process for a truly free press GlobeDebate
Contributed to The Globe and MailJosh Friedman, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, was the chair of the Committee to Protect Journalists and director of International Programs at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He now chairs the Logan Nonfiction Program advisory board, sits on the advisory board of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and serves as vice-chair at the Carey Institute for Global Good.
Now, just one year into the term of new reformist Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia has made so much progress in freeing jailed journalists and lifting press controls that it is hostingBut don’t celebrate yet. Some in the newly freed press are publishing sometimes inaccurate stories – whipping up ethnic and tribal enmity and attacking Mr. Ahmed. With the first free elections in 15 years taking place next year, he is in the same spot Mr.
When I met with him, Mr. Zenawi offered a simple explanation for his government’s actions. “Our journalists are not professional like those in the United States and Western Europe,” he told me. “They do not know how to report the news accurately. We must set guidelines for them until they learn how to do their jobs.”Over more than three decades of fighting for a worldwide free press, and as an early chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, I have heard arguments such as this many times.
Arguing that an unrestrained press threatened America’s future, Adams succeeded in stifling journalists temporarily in 1798, when he signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which authorized imprisoning and fining journalists who “write, print, utter, or publish any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government. Twenty newspaper editors were subsequently jailed.But Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans pushed back against the Federalists, both in Congress and the courts.
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