Free Society at the Brink: Investigative Journalism in Danger

The arrest and torture of investigative journalist Ivan Golunov at the hands of Russian law enforcement, coming as it does, on the heels of the U.S.’s attempt to extradite Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and sentence him to 170+ years in prison, adds new concern about the dystopian direction in which our civilization seems to be headed.  What happens when government can operate in the absence of any power that holds it accountable for its criminality?  When a country’s leader has absolute authority that cannot be challenged?

To answer that question, one might go to a place like North Korea and somehow get a few random citizens to tell you honestly what life is like there. If you were were looking for hell and found Earth, it’s doubtful you could tell the difference.

Trump’s visceral hatred of the media and his bromance with Putin speak to what’s happening in the U.S. and Russia along these lines.

China makes Trump and Putin look like free press advocates in comparison.  Reporters Without Borders ranks China’s press situation as “very serious”, the worst ranking on their five-point scale. Freedom House, a US backed NGO, ranks the press there as “not free”, the worst ranking, saying that “state control over the news media in China is achieved through a complex combination of party monitoring of news content, legal restrictions on journalists, and financial incentives for self-censorship.”

Of course, many dozens of countries around the globe are far more oppressive than these three.

The United States, if it stands for anything on this planet, must remain steadfast in its defense of the free dissemination of truth and the open expression of opinion.  Losing this is equivalent to welcoming in the Orwellian nightmare, and once it’s here, it’s hard to imagine how it can be eradicated.

Let’s hope that the 2020 U.S. election, if it is about nothing else, re-establishes a free and independent media, at least here at home.