Why reporters are in the firing line

The unspoken rule that gave journalists immunity is gone. Autocrats know that intimidating reporters consolidates power

Naomi Wolf
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 July 2012 08.30 EDT

It has been a bad year for journalists. We lost the Sunday Times' legendary war correspondent Marie Colvin – her injured colleague, in a recent Vanity Fair piece, believes they may have been targeted after she appeared reporting from Syria on the BBC. William Dobson's new book, The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy, explains that autocrats and anti-democracy forces around the world are learning how to be nimbler and more efficient in suppressing populations, and one way to do this is control of news reporting in spots where abuses are taking place.

If you scan the reporting of Reporters Without Borders (and the examples they investigate of harassment, imprisonment and other assaults on journalists worldwide are extensive), you see subtle new patterns developing: in Jordan, for instance, a new law criminalizes with penalties as severe as hard labor such vaguely defined crimes as offending public decency, or any reporting that threatens "national security" or "public order". Reporters Without Borders concludes that this type of soft coercion chills investigative reporting. On the other side of the autocrats' toolbox of repression, there are regimes that don't bother with new laws because they just keep foreign journalists out or mow domestic reporters down: Bahrain's massacres, like Syria's, RWB asserts, are proceeding without check because they are out of range of cameras.