22 October 2008
Reporters Overcome Obstacles to Report on Human Rights Issues
Press coverage of human rights can help inspire improvement, assistance
Washington — Reporters covering human rights issues worldwide can help stimulate beneficial reforms in a country even though they sometimes have to navigate attempts to block their coverage, several journalists tell America.gov.
Aaron Goodman, a Bangkok-based Canadian video journalist who for the last 10 years has covered news and humanitarian issues in Asia, says he is fortunate in never having been attacked or censored by state authorities or other groups.
However, Goodman said, local journalists in Asia encounter “a lot more immediate threats than I do as a foreign reporter.”
“Governments that are launching attacks on their own people or committing serious rights abuses may be reluctant to target a foreign reporter because that could potentially create a lot of bad press for them,” Goodman said. “This hasn't outright prevented a lot of attacks on [local] journalists.”
Goodman said the risks for journalists are increasing, but, “hopefully, some international efforts to afford journalists greater protections and rights through international frameworks will help add to the safety of reporters in the field.” (See “Independent News Media Important for Democracy Worldwide.”)
The most difficult problem he sometimes faces involves access, Goodman said.
“There are some important human rights stories that I would like to cover, such as Sri Lanka and the ongoing civil war there,” Goodman said. “I am sure there are ways into the stories, but governments can make it very difficult for reporters to reach affected areas.”
Goodman said he cannot assess whether his work helps improve a country’s human rights situation.
“The best I can hope for as a reporter and filmmaker is that the work I produce helps create awareness about the situation that I focus on,” Goodman said. “Media and storytelling has the power to inform and move people, and hopefully inspire others to create positive change.”
REPORTERS FACE OBSTACLES IN RUSSIA, POST-SOVIET REPUBLICS
Former foreign correspondent Stephen Handelman spoke of his experience reporting from Moscow. “I, like many others, covered dissidents” in the former Soviet Union, he said.
But after the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, Russia’s human rights situation was “a lot harder to cover, because there were so many ambiguous issues: a lot of freedom for dissent on paper, but tougher for human rights advocates to make their points heard,” said Handelman, now director of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former columnist and senior writer for Time magazine and the Toronto Star.
As he worked to bring the attention of overseas audiences to criminal justice issues and economic crimes occurring in Russia, Handelman said, the “pressures rarely let up for people in the grassroots, including local journalists.”
Handelman said he found it difficult “to command attention from an overseas audience” about human rights issues in Russia. That audience, he said, was “largely convinced that the collapse of the Soviet Union had brought about the promised free-market democracy. Internally, reporting on crime issues was very difficult because so few sources felt safe enough to talk.”
Handelman, whose books include Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafia, an analysis of post-Soviet corruption and organized crime, said the “saddest trajectory” in Russia is the “tenuous and risky position” of Russian journalists. “It's been downward since the late 1990s.”
He added that “things are considerably worse in many of the post-Soviet republics, particularly Central Asia, which has experienced, if anything, a further constriction of human rights since the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
BARRIERS TO HUMAN RIGHTS COVERAGE IN LATIN AMERICA
Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group who has covered Latin America extensively, said he faced three types of obstacles as a journalist: governments denying access to people “who can give testimony” to a human rights situation, victims of human rights abuses who are too scared to speak out, and lack of definitive and credible information.
Vargas Llosa, a Washington-based senior fellow and director of the Independent Institute’s Center on Global Prosperity, said a big problem with human rights in Latin America is that the nongovernmental organizations and news organizations that care the most about this issue “tend to lean to the left [politically] and therefore look the other way when the violations are committed by leftist governments. There are not enough organizations willing to look at human rights based on the merits of each case regardless of the political implications.”
Vargas Llosa said a documentary series on Latin American politics with a heavy emphasis on human rights that he completed for the National Geographic Channel has begun airing across the region. However, a portion of that documentary did not air in Caracas, Venezuela, he said, because cable television operators in that country had been threatened with losing their licenses.
Cuba, he said, is the only nation of 15 countries where he has worked that has denied him permission to shoot documentary footage.
Additional information about Goodman’s work is on his Web site. More information about the Center on Global Prosperity is on the group’s Web site.
See also “World Press Freedom Day Supports Journalists Facing Threats.”
