We don’t need no education, we do need free press!
It is May 5th and I bounce upon an article by the New York Times through my Facebook feed. What really caught my eye was a small notification at the bottom of my mobile screen which said that NYTimes have taken down their pay wall so that I, a common man, can see the value of independent journalism. This was to mark the World Press Freedom Day, which is celebrated globally on 3rd May.
This took me back to a discussion I had with a group of friends on freedom of press. We discussed major countries and their press structure in detail. After a long, animated discussion there was not a single country we could name where the press was free, and not influenced by either the government, bureaucracy or private companies. And that is when I started to feel good about not following any newspaper or TV news channel religiously. It has been quite some time that I changed the way I read news. I moved on from short snippets to long form, as I have realized that short stories only present few facts, hide most and are generally designed to be clickbait. I now read the news that I want to and never believe a word of what the news says unless I have researched on the topic. There still is noise in what I read but at least it’s a start. Just a few days ago I came across an article on Wired and how it is now a part of One Free Press Coalition. (https://www.wired.com/story/wired-joins-the-one-free-press-coalition/). This is a community that, as their website says, is standing up for journalists under attack for pursuing the truth. Following is a snip from their website:
Your heart shrinks when you read this. There are people risking their lives in search for the truth. And for me they have the highest regard, to put your life at risk so that the world can know the reality. This is also the reason why I have started taking subscriptions for magazines and journals I read (like Wired, New Yorker etc.) because this is not the money I pay to read one article, this is the least I can do from the comfort of my home for real journalism to keep flourishing.
The Wikipedia page of World Press Freedom Day gives you the following image:
The image shows Press Freedom Index of countries which
intends to reflects the degree of freedom that journalists, news organizations, and netizens have in each country, and the efforts made by authorities to respect this freedom
The deeper the red more the blood authorities have on their hands for curtailing freedom of press. Most of the countries are either in very serious situation or in a difficult situation. India is no better than China and USA where the situation is satisfactory still lags behind countries like Norway and Sweden. What we need is not only authorities coming forward to support freedom of press but also multinationals and media houses fighting for nothing but the truth. While this is utopian future, we as citizens of the world have our duty to support true journalism by not forwarding fake news, digging deeper into the truth of what anchors tell us on television and reporting any crime against freedom of press, because as one ‘The Wire’ article puts it
