Media Freedom Is Under Attack

On the 4th of June 1989, the Chinese authorities killed several hundred peaceful protesters at Tiananmen Square. These protestors had gathered to protect the students who were camped out in the square demanding democratic rights and institutions. The event was a watershed and went down in history as a moment when freedom of expression was literally gunned down in the streets by state tanks. 

It was in this atmosphere of fury and repression that a young, bright-eyed Barbara Trionfi arrived in China for her studies in sinology and first realised why freedom of expression and freedom of the media are a fundamental safeguard for human rights. Surrounded by the very students who had been part of the Tiananmen Movement campaigning for democracy, Ms Trionfi directly encountered what transpires when citizens are given no platform to vent their frustrations and articulate their needs. One fundamental right had been violently cauterised; the freedom of expression. She understood that this right, above all others, was a necessary prerequisite for a stable and secure society. The right of the people to express their ideas and call for change, freely, and without fear of repercussion or persecution.

Throughout history, people have been attacked by political regimes for expressing themselves. From Martin Luther’s ‘95 Theses’ hammered to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, to Sophie Scholl’s anti-fascist leaflets fluttering through a university campus, speaking out has often been met with the ultimate punishment. 

Speaking up is an act of courage, as much as it is a necessity for functional democracy. And the same remains true today. Media freedom is as much of a priority now as ever. As Barbara Trionfi, now the principal advisor to the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media explains, freedom of expression is what is known as an ‘enabling right’– a right that catalyses, facilitates and permits the defence of  other rights. Without it, the house of cards comes tumbling down. 

The following article draws on reflections of an interview with Barbara Trionfi that was conducted as part of a podcast series with Polemics Rec. 

Security is Contingent on Media Freedom

According to an OSCE report on the Freedom of the Media: ‘Freedom of expression has always been and still is a cornerstone of democracy as it enables the free exchange of ideas, opinions and information. The whole edifice of democracy functions on the assumption of an informed citizenry, with shared values and a common sense of truth. Facts nurture trust, and trust builds truth. Without facts, trust, or truth we cannot share a common reality. This is necessary for the possibility to scrutinise any potential threat to it.’

Media freedom is a fundamental mechanism to nurture trust and build truth. An ‘informed citizenry’ depends on the existence of a media ecosystem which is independent, pluralistic, ethical and professional and which, above all, is given the space and permission to comment, critique and call out – even if it is not what those in power want to hear. Censorship, surveillance, economic pressure, harassment through strategic lawsuits (known as SLAPPs) and violence against journalists are the most prevalent and effective ways of destroying media freedom. 

In our interview, Barbara Trionfi outlined that ‘you cannot have media freedom without democracy but you also cannot have security without media freedom’. Media freedom is contingent on a democratic environment which safeguards pluralistic and critical opinion, regarding the media as one of the core checks-and-balances. However, the media, in turn, enables other fundamental rights, such as the right to security. Namely, the right and ability to express diverse opinions freely prevents citizens from having to resort to violence in order to express dissent. Media, in many ways, is de-escalatory. It is a pressure valve that allows the steam to vent before it explodes. 

Trust in the media, trust that wrongdoings will and can be made public, and trust that facts will be aired all enable stability. This trust is inalienable. ‘Trust in the institutions, trust that your rights, in fact, will be protected, that the justice system will work to protect the public interest. All this is what keeps a country stable, safe, and at peace’ [Trionfi] 

Nonetheless, Trionfi noted that there is a rapidly ‘growing distrust and anti-media sentiment, sparked… by populist politicians and authorities who want to sow doubt in order to cover up their anti-democratic tendencies and deeds’. When democratic resilience depends on the media’s ability to amplify it, independent journalism will inevitably be the first victim of democracy’s erosion. 

Consider the state of media freedom in the United States under Trump’s second administration. Trump’s crackdown on the press, on students criticising his regime, on university professors who do not align with his agenda are all symptomatic of an anti-fact, anti-truth campaign. 

Heather Cox Richardson in her Substack Letters from an American, emphasised a particularly alarming instance of Trumpian media suppression. On the 11th July, the Department of Justice of the United States subpoenaed four reporters from the New York Times (Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt) over a story the newspaper published on the fact that the ‘US Secret Service had security concerns about the new Air Force One Boeing 747-8 given to the U.S. by Qatar’. 

The new Air Force One had become the prized possession of the president meaning that when the New York Times article came out, Trump and the White House immediately denied any possibility of the plane’s security being compromised. They were likely especially conscious of the hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money that had gone into the renovation of the plane. The Department of Justice then issued a statement claiming that the reporters were not being subpoenaed to threaten them, rather to find out the sources of the leaked information. However the fact that U.S. journalists, who are shielded from governmental interference by the First Amendment, are being targeted through the law, ‘is a huge red flag’ [Cox Richardson]. 

Journalists being called before the courts for simply doing their job–and doing it in line with highest standards of journalistic ethics–represents a worrying blurring of the lines of power. Free, investigative journalism is a necessary check-and-balance to ensure that political powers are held to account for their actions, or else democracy and internal security become irrevocably compromised. 

And yet, again and again, Trump has leveraged his power to harangue the press. His threatening of a $10 billion legal lawsuit against the BBC after it spliced together two sections of a speech given by Trump before the Capitol riots in 2021 is a ‘mega-SLAPP’ (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) which he is using to intimidate media outlets both in the U.S. and abroad. Lawsuits like these, rather than having any genuine legal foothold (though it must be acknowledged that the BBC did make a clear mistake), seek to abuse, exhaust, and drain the financial resources of media outlets, while also undermining and discrediting the critical news source in the process. It is a blatant weaponisation of money to muzzle free speech.

It must of course be acknowledged that though the attacks against media freedom and journalists that we are observing in the United States are concerning, they pale in comparison to what journalists are facing in, for example, Russia. The quintessential case of the imprisonment of the Wall Street Journal writer Evan Gershkovich in Russia on the grounds of espionage in 2023 exemplifies this, and he is just one example in a series of journalists who have faced oppression, arrest, aggression and threats during Putin’s War of Aggression on Ukraine. Or if we consider Steve Rosenberg, ‘Our Man in Moscow’, the only BBC journalist left in Russia, he is the victim of constant libel, intimidation, stalking and social isolation– simply because he is a Brit who reports on the reality of what he sees. 

What is alarming about media oppression emerging in the United States, however, is that it reveals how fast even the strongest democratic frameworks can be compromised. The U.S. for so long, has pioneered some of the very best journalism and reporting. It was a beacon and bastion of free speech, and there is hope it can return to being so. Otherwise, the anti-media rhetoric of the President of the U.S. may legitimise even harsher clamp-downs on the media by various autocratic leaders around the world.

Without access to the true facts provided by a free media, a citizen is at the mercy of fiction. And if we live within a fiction, then we are no better than George Orwell’s Winston Smith huddled in the corner scribbling frantically in his notebook, Big Brother’s eyes bearing down upon us and our language reduced to antonyms. 

The Media is Faced with a Barrage of Threats 

Though the media has served for centuries as the fourth estate (in 1841 Thomas Carlyle wrote in his On Heroes and Hero Worship that, ‘there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all’) its economic instability is not a new phenomenon.. To a great extent, media’s original business model has stopped working. Advertisers (a fundamental means of media sponsorship) have moved from legacy media (whether in print, broadcast or online form) to Big Tech Platforms – to search engines and social media. Digital transformation emaciated the news industry, thus weakening its ability to serve as the fourth estate and as a counterbalance for the powers of the political system. 

As Barbara Trionfi emphasised, where ‘there is an economic weakness,… political pressure becomes much easier’. Journalism has little to no means of economic resistance and when forced under insurmountable political and economic pressure, journalism is beleaguered, helpless, defenceless… It is a monetary minnow in the face of the digital Leviathan. 

But the vulnerability of the media is tangled not only in its purse strings. It also faces the age-old issue of disinformation – foreign information, manipulation and interference (FIMI) originating in Russia, China, and Iran. Fake news, from all over the world, compounds the maelstrom of threats that the media faces.

A landmark example was the forgery of the front page of the UK newspaper, the Hull Daily Mail, by Russian foreign actors.  Whilst the Russian state had already consistently been using ‘information warfare to attempt to undermine Ukraine and its supporters, sow divisions and bolster support for the Kremlin’s war aims’, it took a step further and resorted to manipulating a British news outlet to sway British public opinion on the Russia-Ukraine war. The headline of the phony front-page read ‘70,000 Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region died in vain’. The subtitle read ‘The UK poured hundreds of millions of pounds into Zelensky’s crushing failure’. A blatant example of how Foreign Intervention can not only perpetuate a foreign anti-truth campaign abroad, but also discredit a news platform that is otherwise attempting to accurately inform its readership.

In our interview, Barbara Trionfi further explained how ‘a core element of disinformation campaigns, and FIMI (foreign information, manipulation and interference) campaigns, is attacking fact-based information. If you challenge the credibility of fact-based information—be that journalism or academic research—then the disinformation gains in power. Or, people start thinking that everything is the same, that every piece of information—true or false—has equal value, that the opinion of some random person spurting random information, a conspiracy theory, is as credible as an amazing piece of investigative journalism. It is a terrible situation for the media to find itself in.’ This is what allows media freedom to be eroded so effectively by anyone who wants to silence the media. 

Beyond the economic fragility and looming FIMI invaders, media freedom has fallen prey to the vulturous Big Tech Platforms. The Big Tech platforms go one step further than other threats. They change the very structure of the information ecosystem. 

Big Tech’s algorithms determine the content we see. Such algorithmic decisions are based on business interests, and certainly not democratic ones. These interests and algorithms interfere with the proper functioning of a media ecosystem which should allow for discovery, for an open ‘public space’, a marketplace where ideas can be freely exchanged. Instead, the information space is an echo-chamber whose content is preordained by private companies with private agendas in mind – and which, all too often, promulgate polarisation, hate, and anger. 

New York Times publisher Sulzberger emphasised precisely this phenomenon in his speech this June, where he claimed that the ‘hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products – a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale. Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organisations that created this work. And this happens not just once during the training process, but countless times every single day’.

Through all the doom and gloom however, media and journalism have shown an incredible level of resilience, and the ability to continue serving the public interest in spite of immense economic and financial pressures. We can turn to the Hungarian example here as a case of how throughout the repression and media capture of the Orbán era, brave, solitary independent media outlets managed to survive. These are the outlets that today, with a new government in Hungary, will contribute to rebuilding the democratic framework that had been eroded.

Female Journalists are being Disproportionately Targeted

For the media to function as it should, journalists must be able to do their job. And what’s more, they must be able to do their job without receiving death threats. And yet, in a 2022 UNESCO study called The Chilling it was revealed that 73% of women journalists had faced online threats, with one in four experiencing offline attacks as a result.  Female journalists are, ever-increasingly, the victim of ‘gendered attacks’ both online and in person. Male journalists are attacked also, but the attack usually revolves around their profession – their work, the content of their stories. Threats towards female journalists, however, are personal.

Barbara Trionfi explained it as follows: ‘Women are viciously attacked. They are called corrupt, prostitutes, their children are threatened. It is a completely different phenomenon to what male journalists are facing. Attacks against male journalists tend to focus on their journalistic work, rather than on their person, their gender, their bodies, their families. This is compounded by the fact that algorithms amplify and push misogynistic content, which makes online violence against women go viral.’  

The OSCE SOFJO (Safety of Female Journalists Online) project has been investigating this phenomenon and tackling the core issues at the heart of gendered violence for over 10 years. However, now, more than ever before, these attacks are rising in regularity. 

In Czechia for example, a country within the OSCE region, there are heightened concerns relating to journalist safety in the country: according to an OSCE report, ‘a recent poll found that a total of 70% of journalists have encountered death threats or physical violence, 40% of people in the media have experience with online campaigns against them, and 10% of them have experienced some form of physical attack’. 

On paper, Czechia is a functional democracy with its estates intact and a strong civic society. And yet, its journalists are not safe. The strong public service media the country had nurtured is progressively being eroded by a government intent on silencing voices it does not agree with. The current Czech government is a coalition between the populist ANO party, the SPD (Freedom and Direct Democracy party) and the Motoristé Sobe party. Motoristé Sobe, the Motorists for Themselves (AUTO), is the most alarming component of the trio: the party is far-right, pro-Trump and riddled with politicians whose democratic values are flakey at best, and whose attitude towards the press is downright abominable.

Political harassment of the media is ever growing in Czechia. The Czech investigative journalist Zdislava Pokorná exemplifies this. Pokorná has been investigating a politician and ex-racecar driver named Filip Turek. Turek co-hosts a podcast with the Foreign Minister of Czechia Petr Macinka, a member of the Motoristé Sobe party. Turek is a neo-Nazi who was in line for a cabinet role as Environment Minister (despite being resolutely against the EU’s green deal) but because of his extreme fascist beliefs, Nazi memorabilia collection, and heiling in public he has (so far) been kept out of government. 

Zdislava Pokorná’s deep diving into the life of and publications about Filip Turek have helped expose his fascist and neo-Nazi tendencies, but she is now being hounded and persecuted as a result. The Czech Foreign Ministry has barred Pokorná from attending Petr Macinka’s press conferences on several occasions and Pokorná has ‘faced an avalanche of threats, insults and hate speech’ according to Balkan Insight.

This is not an environment in which the freedom of the media can endure. And there is no existing way for female journalists, or any journalist for that matter, to protect themselves. 

Barbara Trionfi pointed to one particular paradigm that is arising. Whenever the perpetrator of online attacks can be identified, meaning that attacks don’t originate from bots or online accounts, ‘we are seeing court cases against people who are attacking journalists. A journalist being attacked might sue their attackers. However, in some cases the courts have ruled in favour of the ‘free speech’ of the attacker!’ What is a journalist supposed to understand from rulings that give such an interpretation of the notion of ‘free speech’ as amounting to speech aimed at suppressing journalists’ right to carry out their job safely in the online and social media environment? What message does this send? And what incentive is there to continue writing?

When your life is threatened, when your family is threatened, when your children are directly implicated, what do you do? Do you relentlessly pursue a story in spite of it all? In spite of the risks that might arise? 

Freedom of the media cannot function when its journalists are the victims of death threats. It cannot function when female journalists are the victims of gendered assaults. 

The Future of the Media

Media, the fourth estate, has been weakened. Its freedom is threatened by autocratic leaders. It faces ‘death by a thousand cuts’, financial precarity, and crippling lawsuits. FIMI actors menace it from behind firewalls. Big Tech Giants disrupt its very architecture. Journalists themselves are  persecuted, harassed, and killed, simply for doing their job and practicing free speech. 

But weakness does not imply redundance. If anything, the media is more important than ever. Barbara Trionfi put it in a way I had never thought of before: ‘we must sponsor our media almost like we sponsor museums’. They are a public asset. They are an enabling right. They are essential for the functioning of a democratic society. In many ways, they are far more important than museums. 

The media is the space where ideas converge and collide, voices intermingle, frustrations are vented, and falsehoods are exposed. The media is integral to our security because it serves as a pressure valve for social and political discontent. 

That being said, the media must also be ready to evolve. Legacy media alone is not sufficient to meet the demands of our digital world. Social media, for all its ills, is also a rousing force, a space of communication and speech. Social media has been the place of inception for many movements; the Arab Spring, the Cockroach movement, the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement… to name but a few. It is through the media, in all its forms, that change comes from below. It is through the media that ‘power to the people’ is enabled and facilitated. 

The media must evolve to survive, but we must also protect it.
C. P. Scott, the great Manchester Guardian editor, wrote in his 1921 Centenary Essay on the publication of the Guardian the following words, which still ring true today:

A newspaper has two sides to it. It is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live. But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies. It is, in its way, an instrument of government. It plays on the minds and consciences of men. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces. It may make profit or power its first object, or it may conceive itself as fulfilling a higher and more exacting function.
One of the virtues, perhaps almost the chief virtue, of a newspaper is its independence. Whatever its position or character, at least it should have a soul of its own.

It is the soul of the media that we, as engaged citizens, must safeguard. 

And so, let this be an appeal to continue reading good, independent journalism. To subscribe and support. In a flagrant bit of self advertising – to sign up to the Cutting Takes newsletter. And above all, to remember that without the right to free speech, we have no rights at all. 

The interview with Barbara Trionfi was recorded as part of Polemics Rec. podcast. Polemics Rec. is a student-led podcast at the Diplomatische Akademie Wien, run by executive Producer Hannah Huber, and building on the voices, creative contributions, and editorial input of its diverse student body. Benefitting from the vibrant international community in Vienna, it produces two monthly formats. In Conversation is an expert interview series covering contemporary issues in international affairs by sitting down with global leaders, diplomats, and experts in their field. In the other format, The Roundtable, students take the lead in exploring the same issues through open and diverse debate.
Contact: polemics.rec@da-vienna.at
If you are interested in the podcast, you can find past episodes here:
Polemics Rec. Podcast
And to listen to the interview with Barbara Trionfi here:
In Conversation with Barbara Trionfi

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