Journalism is under attack

Saturday was World Press Freedom Day. Who cares? Every year, we hear it: some 124 journalists killed in the past year, most recently the 27-year-old Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, captured in 2023, disappeared into Russia and finally returned in a body bag last week, her corpse marked with torture. An old tale. Tragic, but not unexpected.

But there’s something else going on: increasingly, journalism itself is under attack. Nowadays, most people feel about journalists much the same as they do about ambulance-chasing lawyers and insurance salesmen. Pushy. Untrustworthy. Preying on the weak. Never met one I much cared for. Only good one is a dead one, ha ha ha.

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This in itself says a lot about how the world has changed. Journalism has become a byword for corrupt, for dodgy, for detestable, for everything journalism is generally not. I know this first-hand. I’ve worked in the field for 30 years.

Yet the press are an easy target for anyone with things to hide. If you don’t like what they’re saying, call into question those who say it. Why bother to refute, to defend, or to prove them wrong when you can simply say they’re lying puppets for your enemies? Or cut them off entirely.

It’s a playbook used most effectively by autocrats and wannabes, Donald Trump, naturally, but also everyone from Vladimir Putin to Viktor Orban, the Chinese Communist Party to Narendra Modi, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni to our own Jacob Zuma.

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They point fingers, cry foul and “fake news”, block, undermine, threaten and sue. At best, they control the flow of information so that they control the narrative.

But journalists will tell other stories. Herding journalists is like herding cats. Don’t get me wrong. Doing what they do – or should do – journalists will never be universally loved. They ask challenging questions, dig where they’re not wanted, demand accountability, expose ineptitude, and rip bandages off open wounds.

Truth-telling is not a route to popularity, even more so when you’re doing it for a living. And yes, the press will sometimes get it wrong.

But the only thing they are universally guilty of is perhaps a hard-won measure of cynicism, coupled with a passion that has been there since the beginning, when we were cub reporters working for a pittance and maybe a byline, dreaming our words might help build a fairer world.

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