Panel 3: Freedom and Responsibility in Media

Josef Jařab
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to open this panel by making a short remark: The power of journalists and the power of media is great. Sometimes media can not only rewrite but even make history, as we know. We have an example from the Czechoslovak history: The Velvet Revolution in 1989 in Prague was not caused directly by the media, but by a not true item of news; it started when we heard that a student was killed. As it turned out no student was, fortunately, killed by the police, and yet the news about the student who was not killed, and, in fact, never existed, helped to kick off the Revolution.

I would like to introduce now our keynote speaker, Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent of CNN. The way she speaks comes through always very clearly despite any noisy humming and drumming that may be the in background... And many times we have seen her being a part of very dramatic scenes. It is my pleasure to invite Christiane Amanpour to speak, and then we shall have other interesting panelists. I hope we will have enough time to go deeply into our topic.

Christiane Amanpour
Thank you very much. It is really great to be here. I have such an affection of Czechoslovakia, which is now the Czech Republic. Some of the people I like most are Czechs—Václav Havel, Madeleine Albright, Milan Kundera, Martina Navrátilová, Miloš Forman, I could go on. One of the injuring images that I have is sans doubt the fall of Berlin Wall, the collapse of the communism and the Velvet Revolution. It was the victory of the Czech experience, when the leaders of the Revolution went on the Wenceslaw Square. I remember Alexandr Dubček—I had certainly heard of him dealing with the Prague Spring even I was a kid. I saw him there with leaders of that movement and he pointed to the crowd and then he extended his arms in a hugging motion. To me, that was so symbolic, so affectionate and it summed up for me the meaning of leadership and the relationship of leaders to their people. One of communication, one of fondness, one of caring about them. And I’ll always remember that.

But, what is freedom and what is responsibility when it comes to the media? For myself, I’ve always taken that remarkably seriously, because at a very early stage of my career, I realised that what we have is a massively powerful platform. It is incredibly potent to have a television camera and a microphone and a satellite and to be able to report around the world. Certainly in our free societies and our democratic societies, where there’s not or should not be control or censorship of the press. Each individual journalist has his or her own responsibility. And for a while, that responsibility fit within certain parameters, while we don’t have the same as let’s say the medical profession or the legal profession strict rules and boards that can expel us or now we do have a code of ethics. And therefore, it’s up to each one of us to live up to that code of ethics and live up to what it means to be a reporter, in other words, a wielder of a powerful tool, particularly in our technological age.

When I first started, I started 24 years ago exactly at CNN, I came out of university and I went straight to CNN right at the very bottom. I started as a desk assistant, but I always knew what I wanted to do and that was report the world. I come from Iran, where I was brought up, I’m half Iranian, I witnessed the revolution and while it was dramatic for many of us and while many of my family and friends were victims of it, for me it was an empowering moment. I realised I would like to tell those stories and to foster greater understanding of these massive and seismic issues. And I was lucky that I ended up at CNN and I worked my way up through the ranks. My first big story was the first Gulf War and then I went on to Bosnia. And while the Gulf War, with due respect deference to everybody who was involved in that, for me personally it was my first so-called adventure. I did not really think much about responsibility there, I knew that we had to report the truth and I knew we had to be objective and I knew our rules, but I didn’t know what it meant to have a voice, to be responsible and what it meant to use this tool.

That came when I moved to Bosnia and the Balkan wars, where there we were covering what was this cataclysmic explosion after the fall of communism, what was Yugoslavia suddenly exploding into many different parts. And we were covering that. It came into sharp focus in Bosnia, because there it was evident to all of us, who were reporting and who were in the city of Sarajevo with the civilian population and other besieged cities, it was quite clear what was going on. Our governments, the Western governments, United States, Europe did not want to intervene or take a position. So their public propaganda was that this is an ethnic conflict, this is just inevitable, these are years of ethnic hatred and we were faced with “How do we report that?” We knew that, actually, that was not the case, we knew that, actually, there was a group of people heavily armed, who decided to carve out their powerful, ethnically pure state and that others based on their religion and ethnicity were being slaughtered. Men, women, children. On our watch, in our backyard in the television and satellite age. So what to do about it? When people said that “Oh, Christiane has an agenda.” or “Oh, she’s taking a position.” I had to really examine what it meant to be responsible in issues of genocide and mass violations of human rights and humanitarian law. And I personally came up with re-evaluation of what objectivity means, our golden rule. And I found myself defining it as “Yes, we must cover all sides, but no, we must not assume or intimate that all sides are equally guilty or innocent, that there is a moral equivalent.”

When there is no moral equivalence, it is not up to us to create one in the name of some kind of forced notion of objectivity. This was a crucial lesson to me and this is for me and for CNN, where responsibility in our free media world came into play for the first time certainly in CNN generations, CNN is only 27 years old now. And we, I believe, by doing our job, by being responsible, not just CNN, but other news networks from the United States, from Europe, from all the different Islamic countries, European countries, even Far Eastern countries, we were there day in and day out, telling stories day in and day out and we told the truth. The truth was unpalatable and it was not lovely, but we told the truth. And I strongly believe that because we did that unflinchingly, we eventually contributed to a critical mass situation, whereby one atrocity was too much, the atrocity of Srebrenica, where thousands of young Muslim boys were slaughtered just because they were young Muslim boys and men. And we told that story and we kept telling the stories and the West finally decided to intervene. Now, it was late, it was three years into the war. Nonetheless, the West did the right thing. And its allies did the right thing. And not only did they intervened, they had a real plan for afterwards. This was our responsibility, to hold them accountable. And I believe that was what we contributed to, the whole press contributed in Bosnia to a much earlier intervention in Kosovo. Very important, because that meant that we did not see that kind of slaughter in Kosovo, that we could have seen if we did not do our jobs. And lest you think that I’m being too grand about our responsibility and our effectiveness. I’m not and I’m not saying this with any glee, because I know that when we’re not responsible and when we turn a blind eye and when we are not there, the consequences are purely unacceptable in today’s universe.

For instance, in Rwanda, in 1994, it’s been eluded to already here this morning. Within the space of three months, a group of people decided to kill another group of people based on their ethnicity with machetes and with clubs. The fastest genocide that we know about. Nearly a million people were killed in the space of three months, because nobody looked, nobody reported it and therefore, nobody intervened. And I strongly believe that this is a huge black mark and a shining example of what it means not to be responsible in the area of the free press. And this is something that will be a stain on our consciousness as a profession as well as it should be a permanent stain on the consciousness of world leaders, who did nothing. So, our job is not to enable or to disable. I believe our job is simply to tell the truth. It’s to tell the truth and to be there. Our job as practitioners of free press in the free world is not to shirk our duty as a profession, which is simply to tell the truth, which is to be the eyes and the ears of all our viewers, readers and listeners, who can’t get up and go to every place in the world and see for themselves what’s going on, and therefore have entrusted us with this duty that our profession demands that we enact. And that to me is exceptionally important.

When I say truth, I mean that more and more today, because we live, I believe, in a universe, where truth is becoming more blurred. Where is the line of truth? Is truth ideological? Is truth political? Is truth what somebody would it like to be? Is truth what we wish the world to be? What happened in the run-up to the Iraq war? We in the United States, the grand press, fraternity and sorority in the United States, in my view partly was responsible for enabling that war, because we failed. We failed to rigorously question the rational, the premise, the facts as we know it. We failed because we confused rigorous and demanding observation with dissent and disloyalty. We failed, because we were susceptible to those whose said that if you don’t go along, you are not patriotic and we failed, because we were afraid of them. We were afraid that if we didn’t go along, that somehow we would be run out of town or something. There was a very unpleasant atmosphere amongst the general public, amongst the leadership and as a consequence in the press during the run-up to the Iraq war. And I think it should be a very salutatory lesson to all of us when we talk about responsibility and the press. So that in terms of what I believe is our key duty to tell the truth, no matter whether it’s palatable, no matter whether it’s attractive, no matter if it gets us into trouble, no matter if it brings us risks, that is our basic duty.

Another duty, I think, of our organisations, is to allow us to tell the truth and allow us to go out and report the news and the important events that are going on around the world. And by that I mean, because of the increasing corporatisation of our news organisations. The money imperative has become very, very central to what we do. And my answer to that is our historical responsibility is not to enrich our shareholders, it is to provide information. I believe that those corporations who happen now to own news organisations need to understand that we are not accountable as commodities or as commercial commodities such as Coke, Nike, whatever it is.

We are not a commodity that should be held up to the extreme levels of corporate shareholder return and all the rest of it. We have a singular duty and in the United States and in parts of the Western world, the press is known as a fourth estate. It’s a very grand title, but with it comes the responsibility. Without a free and fair and independent press, I don’t believe you can have a free and vigorous democratic, civic and civil society. In countries like Iran and many other countries, which I’ve covered, and I’m from Iran, I also believe that one of the great methods of reform during the reform years were the press, who went out and were on the cutting edge of reform. And it certainly happened in parts of Eastern Europe, in Russia and elsewhere. We were talking earlier, or I’ve listened to certain commentaries in different panels about “What does democracy mean?” Well, I’ve just come back from Russia and they went through the chaotic years of the 90’s, which was the fall of communism and democracy,

I suppose, and now they’re all having a major hangover over what went on back then. And so, this so-called sovereign democracy, the so-called feasible democracy as one Russian politician explained to me, is what’s in place right now. But with that, and it is popular, I mean the majority of people there actually support President Putin, because they believe he’s brought back the strength and stability and, of course, the economic enrichment of the Russians, but with it has come a serious retreat in the freedom of the press. Yesterday was the first anniversary of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a wonderful woman, who was on the vanguard of truth and human rights and who paid for it with her life. This trend towards killing the messenger is increasing and not just in Russia, but also in the Philippines, in part of Latin America, obviously in Iraq and elsewhere, where we all have been bogged down for so long.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, of which I am a board member, notes that over the last several years the leading cause of death amongst journalists is deliberate, which, as you know, is not the case of the general population. The general population’s leading cause of death is illness and such. So for us it is entirely skewed and this has a chilling effect. This means that it is very difficult and frightening for journalists to go out and do this job. But, I believe that we need it now more than ever, because our world is not getting simpler, it is getting more complicated. Our leaders, some of whom are getting more democratic and free, other are not. They’re using democracy and freedom for their own ends. And I believe that we have a particular responsibility in our world today. I will say in closing that I hope for a free and independent and vigorous press, that we need somehow our governments and legal establishment, our police establishment to create a climate against impunity, a climate of accountability. So that when journalists are killed deliberately or injured or shut up and closed down, there is a proper investigation and there are proper penalties for those who do it deliberately and maybe that will have a knock-on effect and promote the issue of free speech rather than shut us down.

I also believe, and this might not be popular, but I also believe even in free societies that we need some regulation in terms of how we operate, particularly in broadcast television and on the radio. There used to be a time, when you had to have equal access for public affairs driven information as well as entertainment and commercial information. I think that it is dangerous that the vast amounts of media are being controlled by one or two or three very rich people, who are more concerned about enriching themselves than about a free and democratic and independent press. And I think that also we should be very, very careful about it, because it has an effect and I’ve outlined some of the effects it has. I’ve outlined the positive effect we as a proper profession can have and I’ve outlined the negative effect that we can have as well. And it’s up to us to make the choice of which way we are going to go.

Josef Jařab
Thank you, Christiane Amanpour. It’s lovely to have you here and we all feel, I think, even more intensely your energy when you are with us here in Prague, physically, than we do when we look at the TV screen. You have opened so many questions, you have daringly, as a journalist should, opened the question that is sometimes very dangerous for politicians to ask, namely: what is the role of media? The moment we asked this question, when I was in the Council of Europe, all the journalists jumped on us saying, “It is not you who will decide that”, and I agreed. As an average citizen, however, I may ask, because it is the citizen who has to ask, what are the roles and duties of the media. We have heard that it involves telling the truth, but telling the truth remains, of course, something easier said than done, as we all know. The details make the difference. Telling the truth relies on the responsibility that comes from the conscience, the integrity of the journalist, of the person who sees what he or she sees and reports and interprets. And that is very important. A responsible attitude of a journalist is more than just giving the same time and voice to two sides in debates and discussions.

So now I would ask my colleagues here on the panel take the floor for some seven to eight minutes each, so that we can still have an exchange of views. in the end. And here is the first panelist, one of my personal heroes, a hero also of the truth telling, and that is Adam Michnik, editor in chief of Gazeta Wyborcza from Poland. Adam?

Adam Michnik
Thank you. I will be speaking in Polish and I hope that the eight minutes that I have will be used effectively.

The problem, which all of us are concerned with at a time of the existence of a dictatorship, is the question of censorship. I remember when Vladimir Bukovskyi said that in Russia in the future it would be possible to mention things like liberalization, to speak about liberalization and that it would be possible to, for instance, acquire a photocopy of any kind of document in a shop on the street. In those days, we found it difficult to imagine something like this could be true. Today, the problem in our country when we have no dictatorship is cacophony. What we have today is too much information. In other words, there is such noise, such information noise, that an ordinary person is not capable of distinguishing the truth from manipulation. And that is why today the media defend their case in a very dangerous way. Media are like fire. They can help you heat your hands, but they can also burn you. And they’re like a knife. You can use a knife to cut a slice of bread, but a knife can also be used to murder a man. Some years ago, Heinrich Böll, a German writer, wrote a short story, which was called the Lost Reputation of Catherine Blum, and it is about how the media were capable of killing a human being. And today, when I reflect on the evolution of the media in my country and the direction the media are taking in my country, I am terrified by the process of tabloidization, as we call it. There is less and less space for serious news and more and more space for sensation, which helps to sell copies. If there is no sensation, what do we do? We invent a sensation. And in this regard, the media can be, and often are, a great destroyer of public debate. They deprave the public debate. Why?

Because they are a tool in the hands of public relations experts. And these experts are very skillful in manipulating public opinion. You probably are acquainted with the example that in the elections in the United States, one of the candidates, who was a war hero, was then presented as a deserter. And actually, what was white, was called black. That’s an American example, but in our own region, in the views of the people here, America is the most advanced democracy. But then we see what happens in post-communist countries in Europe today. A sort of a great surprise to me is the media, which are reduced to a kind of machine which makes money. Media are now reduced to becoming a way of acquiring capital. And production of newspapers is becoming something like producing shoelaces or some other similar kind of product.

On the other hand we see the media, which are permanently under constraint, media which are perceived by some groups as a threat to the government, which still has a certain appetite for authoritarian methods. To use an example: look at Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, which is a result of this sort of unfavourable evolution. Putin, over a small number of years, actually managed to abolish plurality in the media, in the electronic media, and he managed to actually abolish plurality in print. And he did it in a manner that nobody really noticed. George Bush looked deeply into the eyes of president Putin and what he saw there was a true democrat. Nobody else saw that. He did see that, that’s what he says. And this is a very characteristic sort of phenomenon, a large part of post-communist Europe is like a costume ball. Somebody dresses up as a leftist politician, another one as a conservative politician, all of them, it’s like a costume ball. And what we have is a kind of a pageant of something which has nothing in common with reality.

Look at my own country. In Poland, we have a prime minister who combines the conservative rhetoric of President Bush and the practical rhetoric of President Putin. So what he is? He is a Polish Molotov cocktail. But, looking very carefully at some cleansing tendencies that we’re seeing in other countries of Europe, both West and East, we will see that very similar operations of the media can be achieved also on the basis of left-inclined rhetoric. To give an example: Slovakia represented by Mečiar. To wind up, the media can suffer from an epidemic. I am the editor-in-chief of the largest paper in Poland. The media can become a poison. But it is the people who would like to shut up the media. That’s even more dangerous and also a poison of some sort. Some people are trying to destroy the media, while speaking about historical necessity, speaking about newly discovered truth. But these people would also destroy not only the media, they would destroy the national culture. We have heard the absolutely wonderful presentation by Christiane, who appealed to us and she said we should speak the truth. Of course, we as the democratic opposition understand the importance and the value of truth. But, we must always remember that the truth can also kill. The truth can be a lie. And when Goebbels, for example, spoke of Stalin, he was speaking the truth. And at the same time, he was telling enormous lies. Looking at how people can be destroyed these days, destroyed, for example, with the help of the documents that are being uncovered from the archives of communist-controlled secret services. For example, I have material which says that Mr. Michnik is a pedophile. It is “true” in that it is something that has been documented by our secret police. So, we have to be extremely careful about the truth, we have to be very, very careful, because there is no such truth that could justify killing, for example, because we have a commandment “You shall not kill”. And of course, this is true also for the people who are speaking the truth in the media and through the media.

Josef Jařab
Thank you. And as we can see from Adam’s short introduction, of course, responsibility, the content, the dimensions, the impact of this particular concept, is greater every moment a wise person adds something to it, which has just happened. Next, a philosopher from France, Andre Glucksmann.

Andre Glucksmann
Last year attending this conference, I spoke of Anna Politkovskaya. Because when we ask ourselves what is freedom and responsibility of the media, Anna Politkovskaya is a symbol of what we mean by this. She was as free as no other journalist in Russia. She went to Chechnya fifty times and in every case she risked her life. She always knew that she could be murdered. Until today, we do not know who committed this crime. She was not only free, she was also responsible, when asked why she goes to Chechnya so often, she said because the Chechen people is at stake. But it is not only the Chechen nation, it is also the Russian nation that is at stake. This is a disease, this is something that could spread also through Russia, so we need to speak the truth about Chechnya. So Anna Politkovskaya was responsible and she was free at the same time. But she was also alone. She was also on her own and speaking about mass media; this is something that I do mind.

For example, when we speak of Chekhov, you would know that Chekhov wrote a report about Sakhalin, which was a huge jail. And he travelled across Siberia and became ill, he caught TBC. Why did Chekhov go to Sakhalin? The answer is very similar to that of Anna Politkovskaya: Chechnya is like enormous closed prison. And it is the red line that combines these two situations. Christiane said at the beginning of her remarks that we should always respect reality, we should always discover facts. Then she gave an example of Bosnia. This, I believe, is the main role of journalists: to respect the principle of reality. I remember Anna Politkovskaya, my friend, who came with her tapes, tapes that were comparable to tapes showing the scandal in Abu Ghraib. She had material about what was going with Russian army repression, mass killings, tortures and so on. She had proof, she had evidence but nobody matters in Russia and Western Europa. Yet the perpetrators of these deeds are still with us, but she was murdered. This material has never been shown on Russian television of course, although Anna hoped that one day it would be possible. So, when we are speaking today about how lonely Anna Politkovskaya was, we are also speaking about her loneliness in the West.

The same with the loneliness of Khodorkovsky, who is now in prison in Siberia. We can also speak of loneliness and solitude of other people. Trepashkine, who used to be a member of the KGB, became a lawyer who defended victims of explosions in Moscow in 1999. It was not the Chechens who were responsible for these explosions, it must have been responsibility of some secret service. Those people who investigated the case ended up in prison or were killed like, for example, Litvinenko in London poisoned by polonium. Litvinenko was also a person who was investigating this explosion in Moscow. In other words, the solitude of some courageous people, not only journalists, is something that we are all responsible for. In the Russian case, like in other repressive states, the information work is not only a question of respect of reality, the courage of truth and thinking without taboos is necessary and precious.

This brings me to the end of my presentation. I would like to end by talking about freedom and responsibility. Freedom is something that we cannot take for granted and it’s something that is not always good. Freedom is not only freedom for good, freedom can be also for evil. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, we had Havel, but we also had Milosevic. In other words, freedom can also liberate the bad, the evil in us. So, we have to be careful and we have to stress the importance of responsibility. Responsibility is important, responsibility is extremely topical today. We are responsible for our freedom, but we are also responsible for making use of freedom for evil. Freedom must not die out facing those who wish to kill it. I would like to give you two quotes. The first is by Sartre, who wrote immediately after the Hiroshima event that “Humankind should now, facing the nuclear bomb, become responsible for its fate” and also for its consciousness, because humankind could either kill itself step by step or in one bang. And the second, by a christian philosopher, Jean Guitton, who said that “It is important to remember that Western civilization could commit suicide now that it has the means to do so”. This was written in 1968, and this is even more valid today than it was then. The psychological capacity to kill everybody, without any moral restriction, is perceptible everywhere (killing of hostages, human bombs, genocide of Tutsi and so). The technical capacity of indiscriminate mass murder is “democraticizing”, possible for everyone (September 11th, Atocha in Madrid, London subway and so on).This is the world as it is, a world with Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinedjab and others not so wellminded persons like Putin, Chavez, Castro, Kim Jong Il, Charles Taylor, the drugs barons, the Taliban, the columbian FARC is not a simple thing. We also have to be aware responsibly that there is a threat of the end of the world due to a nuclear explosion or some kind of totalitarian and terrorist extermination. Freedom and responsibility are now and for ever a question of humanity’s survival.

Josef Jařab
Thank you for this philosophic meditation on very real issues that take a lot of courage and conscience to address. Our next speaker is Bambang Harymurti, editor-in-chief of Tempo, from Indonesia. Bambang.

Bambang Harymurti
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for having me here. It’s an honour for me. It’s an honour to be sitting beside Christiane Amanpour and the hero from Poland and also a French philosopher, but it also creates a kind of burden on me as to how to follow such distinguished persons. But, to my friends from the Czech Republic, I must add a little story, because the other name for journalists is story- tellers. Many of you may not know Indonesia, although it’s one of the largest, most populous countries in the world with the largest Muslim community in the world, but most Indonesians know Czechs, for a very simple reason. In the sixties, we had a lot of young men, military officers and others training here and then somehow many of them found a beautiful wife, flew back and now most of them are beautiful film stars or we see them on television screens every day. So, in Indonesia, the Czech Republic is considered to be the land of beautiful people. My kid asked me years ago, “What do you do, Dad?” And I said “Well, I’m a journalist.” “What’s a journalist?” And you know, being a father you want to tell your small daughter about the glory of your job, so I said journalists are truth seekers. She was really impressed…truth seekers. But the other point of truth seeker is that after 25 years in journalism I know how hard it is to find the truth. On the other hand, I’m so happy we never find the real truth, because otherwise that would be the death of truth seekers, and there would be no need anymore for journalism. And being a journalist, I think I can share with Christiane that it reminds one of Greek mythology, Mr. Sisyphus, who pushes stone up to the mountain and then, just before reaching the top, the stone rolls back. So, you have to keep doing it every day. That’s also, I think, what we do every day. We think we found the truth and the next day we see that our truth has expired, so we have to find it again and work hard again. And of course, being a journalist and in terms of responsibility, society’s responsibility is to keep the truth-seeker alive and well, because nobody would like to do this Sisyphus job for you. I think it’s not a very attractive job being a Sisyphus. And so I want to tell this story of my personal experience. You know I am from Tempo magazine. When Suharto was forced to resign by reform movement, the Tempo was already four years banned. And it was a very traumatic experience for us, because when we were banned, people went to the streets for the first time in our history. And some of them had to be hospitalized and some even went to jail. So, when Suharto resigned, we had this dilemma: should we publish again, because according to some people, we should not republish, we had become a legend and it would be very difficult to republish because we could not live up to the legend. On the other hand, we thought we owed it to the people who had been hurt, who were really struggling for us to survive and now that we had democracy, we should serve the public again. And then, being from Tempo magazine, we are very collective-oriented, so we had a sort of referendum and the group of people who wanted to republish won by a small majority, because some of the people, who did not want to republish, already worked in other media and had a good position. So then, when we decided to republish, we thought ,why do we republish? And there was a lot of soul-searching and debate and in the end we thought well, Indonesians have a democracy now, so what is different about democracy than non-democracy? And then we started to think that because we have democracy as compared to an authoritarian regime, it’s a matter of oversimplifying it, the question is who actually decides about anything of public interest? And in a democracy, we think everyone should have the right to decide what’s good for the country and for the public as opposed to the Suharto time when Suharto and a few friends could decide what was right and what was wrong for us and we all would just follow. We were in a non-democratic regime for fifty years, so people were not used to deciding on their own, they were just used to following what the leaders decided. So, there is the decision mark, the inferiority complex in our society. We thought, are we up to it to decide on our own? We have no experience. And then we thought, you need the right information to make the right decisions, because no matter how smart you are, even if you are smart and have the wrong information, you do not make the correct decision, you will make wrong decisions. And it is very dangerous for our young democracy, because if people get wrong information, they make wrong decisions, things get worse and then they make another decision, wrong again and things get even worse. People will then slowly lose their confidence in their ability to decide for themselves and therefore look for someone very strong, another authoritarian regime. It happened in Germany, where they democratically elected Hitler, it happened in Italy where they, through democratic means, elected Mussolini. So, we did not want this to happen in Indonesia. We thought this was our mission. We have to be the best clearing house of information for Indonesian society and provide relevant, credible and timely information to the public so the public has enough information to decide what they want to decide and if we are wrong, to quickly make a correction, so people slowly make more good rather than bad decisions. And slowly they build their confidence and at one point they think they are the best decision makers in the world and nobody can make decisions better than they. And that’s how I think we will reach consolidation of our democracy. We are working toward that, it’s quite elusive, we are working hard, and let’s pray that we are successful in this. Thank you.

Josef Jařab
The next panelist is the most charming ambassador Czechoslovakia ever had, and one of the bravest. But now she comes from abroad, that means from Slovakia—Magdaléna Vášáryová.

Magdaléna Vášáryová
If we would like to equal us, here, at this moment, with the famous Descartes sentence: “Cogito, ergo sum”—“I think, therefore I am” we would rather have to say today: „We were seen on television, therefore we are.“ According to Danish sociologist, Henning Bech, „We are already for a longer time living in global tele-town, we are just afraid to admit it”.

We do not want to consider that perhaps: „Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?” as 20 years ago wrote Edward Lorenz. Hanna Arendt named 20th century to be the age of “inactive rubbernecks”, bystanders.

We do see what is going on, we watch TV, but it does not mean we do understand what is going on. We observe the world through a TV screen, but to see the image, scene or pictures does not mean that we do comprehend the relationship among them. We need someone to write a story about these relations, so to explain the rules of the game. The media Games have their own rules, short terms and each game always starts from the beginning, as in Casinos. Once, we do understand the rules and we are ready to live under them, then we have to ask the question: Who will do the story, who will interpret the story and who will do the next one. Because the story represents the power, the power influencing the public meaning.

So, we are captured in the row/cycle of three activities. First one is Fact, second Understanding and third is Action.

Another problem: We do not receive information just in written or verbal form anymore; we see them on the TV screens in colors and with sounds. Without any manipulation, they are more natural then a reality, they are more beautiful, closer even louder as we would see them with our own eyes and hear them with our own ears. So then media shown reality is starting to be more credible as what we can see behind the window, if we would of course, stand up and undrawn the curtain. If we resolve to do so, reality; the real world would surprise us with its grayness and non-attractiveness. In this sense, it makes no difference who is owner of „picture broadcasting“, whether private company or state propaganda or public institutions. Pictures fascinate us.

If we want to understand a relationship between cause and consequence, we are becoming a witness of flow of event all around the world. They are happening right in front of us. We can see them with our own eyes on the screen. At that moment we are “undergoing unceasingly moral questioning” as polish sociologist Zygmunt Baumann would say. Information provides us with proof of human suffering, poverty and injustice on the daily basis. They are pushing us to sympathy and bear the destiny of people either in our country or around the world. There is no better opportunity to manipulate with people then populist appropriate their sympathy.

How one, who does not want to be just passive „rubberneck“ and wants to understand; how one may be burden with information that makes one joint responsible for everything that is going on in the world?

After the experience with for example Somalia, we have to ask a question. Was it really like that or was it just that colorful, interesting and touching part of the reality? Here, we need to look for the author of the story, for the person to decide what and when shall be broadcasting and who will comment the context. Are media concentrated in one hand or is there a possibility for spectator to choose from wider offer of stories?

Who control media activities in the state? One of the media that wants to be important in the most of the European countries as well in Slovakia is a public channel.
After parliamentary elections periodically start a political fight who will be writing the „stories“ in public media. Today in Slovakia, this process is becoming very intensive.

According to independent organization MEMO 98 report from August 3, 2007, 74% information in news of Slovak Television (public TV) was about Government of Slovak Republic. 1/3 of news correspondents gave in notice and left.

After our experience from years 1994-98, we are skeptical. So, to answer a question if Slovakia can afford to have independent, professional and competitive public TV and Radio as f.e Council of Europe suggest is unclear. However, we will have to find an answer very soon, especially we in the political opposition. So freedom of broadcasting information is now more guaranteed by private companies, which are mainly in the hands of foreign media corporations. What a paradox.

In a few words, I have talked about possibility to overcome a gap between passively receiving facts so called fascination and world understanding. We still need to overcome a gap between understanding and action, so that we will not be witness.

Primary question for me is: „How will we be able to use an upcoming information and technological revolution and digitalization of TV broadcasting? Will we support sense of responsibility and solidarity of citizens or will it remain as a lovely romantic phantom of idealism?

There is always a possibility to say: „We can not do anything because it is not in our hands—we are just poor ones and in the end an action is not required anyway“. What is desired, is watching, because TV traceability is the most important fact. Then we find ourselves as Pierre Bourdieu said: “In the place of those who live day after in non-healing situation. Though, I hope there is one prescription for that—civic society involvements, an active one, that will require public media radical change and TV that offer channels for modern society. Without pressure of citizens/users this modification will not be possible. That is why we in Slovakia need to figure out whom and how to manage public media; who should be seated in TV and Radio Council and what should be broadcasted so that Public TV will survive. Although, the most important for me is answer a question: “Who will be active and who will have power to put ones ideas and thoughts through”. I can not find an answer to my question, yet.

Josef Jařab
And if fairy tales, then fairy tales with happy endings, of course. Already this morning we heard that media are something of an issue when Mr. Kubiš mentioned it, now we hear you, Magda, so we will be watching you across the Morava River and see what we can learn from you and from the way in which you will deal with democracy and freedom.

I feel that this is also a sort of ambassadorial panel. Besides Ms. Vášáryová, there is as well my old friend Michael Žantovský, at the moment Ambassador to Israel but before that Ambassador to the United States, and also former press secretary to President Václav Havel. Michael?

Michael Žantovský
Thank you, Jožka. Before I say a few words about the responsibility of the media, let me mention something the media is not responsible for, and that is the shape the world is in. We all are responsible for that. The media is the messenger. Responsibility of the media—this is a topic I tried to avoid to the best of my ability for a very long time, because of one very painful personal experience. Sixteen years ago I spoke in my then—capacity of the spokesman for President Václav Havel to a conference in Prague of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, a roomful of people I had admired for a long time from a distance, my heroes, people like David Halberstam, Ben Bradlee and others. And unfortunately, I chose a topic for my presentation—the responsibility of the media. And as I said my first few words about responsibility, the room went cold. And it went all downhill from then on, I realized I was digging myself a hole but I got more and more nervous and couldn’t stop digging. I said some outrageous things and in the end I offered my resignation to the President, because I really felt bad. And as I tried to understand what had happened, I exchanged notes with Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn and a few of the others and I realized that the problem was the context.

When I used the term responsibility, my reference, of course, was Václav Havel, who else. But when they listened to me, their reference was Richard Nixon and Watergate, who else. And we could never understand each other. So, my first point is that it is the responsibility of both the media and especially of the politicians to make clear the context beforehand. Otherwise, misunderstandings ensue. The second point, and that has already been mentioned here, is that media today are a mixture of news, entertainment and advertising. It is perhaps inevitable, but I think it is an essential responsibility of the media to make clear the distinction and make clear which is which. There is something very disturbing, to me at least, about the concepts of infotainment, infotizing and infolitics, if I may coin a couple of phrases. It is one thing to file a properly sourced, but erroneous story about a missing student such as I bylined for Reuters in November 1989, and such as Jožka mentioned, and quite another to print a series, an endless series of stories about a missing 12-year old girl, who had never existed to begin with, just to get through the summer. And last, but certainly not least, it is the responsibility of the media to protect the integrity of its most valuable tool, namely the language, be it the language of a print story, language of a photograph or language of a film.

The media must maintain and defend their ability to call a spade a spade, to call a murder a murder, an act of terror an act of terror and an act of corruption, corruption. We diplomats can be forgiven for euphemizing reality, because ambiguity is our tool of trade. The media cannot afford it, because clarity is their tool of trade. The emergence of an Orwellian newspeak in the language of the media anywhere is always a sign that the truth is getting distorted, is getting corrupted, be it masked by reasons of national security, diplomatic sensitivity or political correctness. The very idea of truth is directly dependent on the clarity of language. There is no truth without clarity. Thank you.

Josef Jařab
Michael is one of those rare people who can make brevity into quality. Thank you very, very much. The last speaker, and as they always say, last but not least, and indeed this is what I really mean. Here we have Jeffrey Gedmin, the president of the Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. And I am reminded of a little story I have to tell you. In this country, in my family, we were listening for years exactly to this source, and to the Voice of America, when we wanted to get true information. Every day, we were listening over breakfast with our two boys present, to the news, but they were not told that this was a different source from the official one. And our little boy, our eight-year-old David, went to school, and the teacher asked: “So, what’s the news, does anyone want to review the news of the day?” David stood up, reviewed the news of the day, and the teacher was horrified, because it was all what the boy heard on Radio Free Europe. The parents were called to school and had to explain. Anyway, here we have Jeffrey Gedmin.

Jeffrey Gedmin
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thought you were going to say I was the last, but briefest. I’m not a journalist, but I’m not short of opinions and I will share those with you over the next five minutes.

One of RFE/RL’s radio stations is called Radio Farda. It broadcasts to Iran, it does radio 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and has a full web service.

I went to Washington two weeks ago to Dulles Airport to meet one of our journalists. Her name is Nazi Azima and she had been detained inside Iran for eight months. She’d gone back home to visit her 94-year old mother, who was having surgery, and authorities blocked her from leaving. As you know, she was one of four Iranian Americans who had been blocked during this period. I spent two evenings with Nazi in Washington and I am flying back tomorrow to have dinner with her tomorrow night, to listen and to learn more. She was not held in prison, but she was under virtual house arrest, and the story of her ordeal is disturbing and, if I may say, riveting, because she spent hundreds of hours with Iranian interrogators. By the way, she is a journalist—actually, by training a literary translator—and her politics are not the politics of George W. Bush. What’s more, Nazi is a grandmother. She’s not someone that you’d think would greatly alarm Iranian authorities.

Her story is disturbing and riveting, because at the end of those dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of hours of interrogation one thing comes out crystal clear again and again. The fight that the Iranian authorities have is not with her, it’s not with Radio Farda or with Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, or for that matter Deutsche Welle or the BBC, which does four hours a day in Persian. The fight and the quarrel that the Iranian authorities and interrogators have is with their own people.

It’s really quite striking, because what people like us or my colleagues are doing is simply providing the news and information that the regime of Iran is so eager to deny their own people – accurate, objective information the authorities in Iran do not allow. It is the oxygen I think, of any free society, of civil society and they’re doing everything they can to cut it off.

We broadcast in 28 languages to a broad swath of the globe from Russia to Central Asia down to the Middle East. And it’s remarkable I think, in the year 2007, that so many member states of the United Nations have governments vehemently denying their people access to information. That’s the simplest way to state it.

I’d like to make three points—very briefly. Number one: seeking the truth. I sign on to everything in this context that Christiane Amanpour said. I believe that truth- seeking is fundamental to our business. However, to be honest, accurate and completely truthful, journalism cannot fall prey to false notions of objectivity. There was a terrific column in the Financial Times on Friday by Philip Stevens on the misguided impartiality that tolerates intolerance. Due to the painstaking efforts we go to get things rights and be objective and fair and neutral, we have become so open-minded that I think our brains will fall out. If you do an interview with the head of the World Jewish Congress and want to be neutral and balanced, some people say you would have to interview Adolf Hitler, too. That’s point one.

My second point is about values. That is a loaded term for some people, because it sounds unclear, ideological and nefarious. I don’t believe you can do good journalism if you are not rooted in values and if you don’t have some kind of reasonable moral compass. And I mention Russia in this regard. We have a debate in our company—you’ll find a similar one in Washington, you find it in London, you find it in Berlin—because there is confusion, about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, because he’s popular. Well, he is popular. But, I don’t think that means we have to be confused. Mussolini in his early years was wildly popular. And just like Vladimir Putin, he understood (a) control of mass media, (b) control of education, (c) control of history as a way to control the future and last, but not least, marginalization and suppression of dissent. Putin is popular So, does that mean journalists should love him too? As Michael said, journalists and the media have responsibility but I believe also governments have responsibility.

Andre Glucksman and others have noted the anniversary yesterday of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya—this great, courageous, independent journalist, just doing her work. She was murdered for simply doing her work. If you reflect on it, I think civil society, NGO’s, Forum 2000, Andre Glucksman, and others have done a marvellous job of remembering and pressing her case. I think Western governments generally have been remarkably weak. That’s what I think—with one notable exception. RFE/RL hosted a conference here in Prague five days ago. Czech Prime Minister Topolanek came and strongly urged that Russia properly investigate the murder of Anna Politkovskaya and hold those responsible accountable. I thought that he made an excellent statement.

And last, but not least, Mr. Chairman, I think when we do this, when we pursue journalism in a framework of values, with this kind of moral compass, I think we have to be ready to look at everything. Then we can be relaxed, confident and unapologetic about what we do. And I’ll mention two things by way of explanation. Two brief quotations. First: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.” Second: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.” Those aren’t American values and those aren’t Western values. What I quoted comes from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was drafted in 1947 and had as principle drafters a Chinese, a Lebanese and a Canadian. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Josef Jařab
Thank you, Mr. Gedmin. Being a moderator of a panel with so many wonderful panelists one feels a little bit like that Sisyphus, you know, pushing the boulder up against the timetable that one has to respect. We’re not yet up to the very top and we know what will follow—we will not make it to the top. This means we will not have the exchange as I promised and hoped for, but I trust that you allow me one thing, one little step in this direction and that is to ask Christiane Amanpour if she would like to share with us whether she has learned something from what we were hearing this afternoon, whether she’d like to comment on something that has been said.

Christiane Amanpour
Thank you very much. I’ve heard a lot, I’ve been really fascinated by different interpretations of truth. I think we’ve got very hung up on the word truth and I think, obviously, nobody thinks you can achieve absolute truth. My view is though, that in our current cacophony as Adam talked about, we can separate facts from opinion and fact from commentary. And I do believe than I currently redefine myself by fact-based journalism, because we are overwhelmed and swamped by other people’s ideas and opinions and as I said what they wish the world would look like. I think that’s something that we really need to keep separate. The other thing, just in the big picture I feel that we’re swamped as you, Magda, said by Paris Hilton and her likes. In other words, we are swamped as a civilisation by a lack of seriousness and a lack of what’s important. There’s always a place and a section to go and get that kind of information from. And everybody likes a good gossip and a good fashion magazine and a good look through Hello now and again.

But, it should not really be, I don’t think, on our news organisations, because it’s not going to help us in anything. There’s a big election coming up in the United States. Some say it might be the most important election in the United States of our time, in our generation. And you know, there’s barely a sensible, serious debate going on. Certainly not about anything foreign. And as you know, I think America, will elect and debate this election rather the people that will go to the election probably about Iraq war and other related instances. And yet there’s no real debate in the public sphere over what’s going on, it’s all the same old sound bytes, the same old positions. I was just talking to Václav Havel before, I had the great privilege of talking to him for a few minutes. And he said: “Look, what would the leaders of post-WWII Europe and post-WWII world have done if they had the media that we have today. Could they have rebuilt Europe, could they have made decisions that, perhaps, were unpopular, but desperately necessary, if they had today’s press, which only focuses on the immediate, which only holds people accountable to the most banal and often stupid, idiotic things? And which forces a level of leadership that quite frankly we as a civilisation cannot afford any longer.”

We need to understand our role in leadership, we need to understand that we’re journalists, that we need to go back to the basics and find out what our profession was about and to do the job properly, because otherwise we’re stuck with those leaders, who we have created and who we helped to perpetuate. I’m not relieving them of their responsibility and what they have to do as well, but I’ve just come from Russia and to see what’s going on with the television over there, for instance, as we’ve mentioned. It’s been rolled back and people are allowing it to happen. And I just think that we all just need to get up, stop being complacent, get a grip and figure out where our future lies. And it lies in a robust democracy, robust civil society, robust press and a robust political sphere.

Josef Jařab
Let me thank Christiane and thank everybody on the panel on behalf of you and let me thank you. You have been a very attentive and wonderful audience. And, of course, what remains to be done is to just join the truth-seekers among the journalists and become truth-seekers ourselves.