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Asian Center for Democratic Governance >> Freedom of Information for Good Governance
A Report by the Asian Center for Democratic Governance 6 - 8 August 2001 New Delhi, India |
Session V - The Impact of New Technologies on Freedom of InformationOPENING REMARKSBambang Harymurti Chair This last session is very dear to me, personally-the impact of new technology on the freedom of information. Because in 1994, when President Suharto banned the magazine I work for-Tempo, we were able to survive by having what we called the "Tempo Interactive"-an online magazine, which the government could not find any legal ground to ban. So, we were able to keep informing the public. It is a very strange outfit because until today, it is probably the only online news organization that has not lost money-we have a little bit of profit. But, because had a very small operation and it had a very big hit, because until Suharto fell from the government, it was the only outfit that dared to publish on the Internet, news that was impossible for the other media to publish, and using the nature of the Internet technology, these have been downloaded and printed all over Indonesia, especially by students, and used as a way to get information unavailable in other media. The same thing seems to be happening in Malaysia, although there is no banning in Malaysia, Malaysiakini is now a source of information that people would not get in the Malaysian media, and, so far, the Government of Malaysia has not found a way to close it down, which Steve Gan will talk about. We have another celebrity journalist, Tarun Tejpal, who has become famous a long time ago, rejuvenated his celebrity status, when his outfit Tehelka.com, broke the story on corruption on procurements in the Indian defense establishment. Malaysiakini and the impact of new technology in the freedom of information in Malaysia. ADDRESS Steven Gan Southeast Asia when I was a student activist was very different. Then there were Suharto, Marcos, and Thanom. Now they are all gone. Indeed, we have seen much changes in the region. Dictators and autocrats are on the way out. Democracy is slowly taking roots. In Philippines, the democracy baby is learning to walk, and getting better each time. In Thailand, the democracy baby is still crawling. I saw a political cartoon some 20 years ago. It depicted a baby attempting to walk, but kept falling back to crawling after a few hesitant steps. Again it tried. And again it fell back to crawling. It appears that the Thai democracy baby is at last going to break that vicious circle. In Indonesia, the democracy baby is just born. It is crying and getting all the attention it richly deserved. In Malaysia, the democracy baby is conceived but yet to be born. We are undergoing birth pangs. And it looks like a very difficult birth. Dr. Mahathir Mohamad is thinking about recommending a caesarean, but unfortunately not many trust the doctor. Moreover, the father of the child has been put away, of all things, for sodomy. Meanwhile, in Singapore, the democracy baby is not conceived yet and Lee Kuan Yew is working overtime to make sure that everyone is taking protection. Video cameras are installed in bedrooms and everywhere else as an added precaution to ensure citizens do not do the unthinkable. And if all fail, there is always abortion. Still, democracy does not emerge all by itself. Dictators and autocrats don't give up power easily. Democracy needs help, especially from the civil society. Over the past few years, the Internet has been increasingly seen as a weapon which the civil society can utilize to promote democracy. However, Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas, two Carnegie information revolution experts, showed in a recent study on China and Cuba that authoritarian regimes can actually maintain control over the Internet's political impact and benefit from the technology. Cuba and China represent two extremes of authoritarian Internet control: Cuba has sought to limit the medium's political effects by carefully restrict access to the Internet, while China has promoted widespread access and relied on content filtering, monitoring, deterrence, and self-censorship. According to the researchers, these choices of strategy reflect a more fundamental difference between the two regimes' levels of economic liberalization. China has promoted widespread Internet access to capitalize on the economic potential of a booming information sector and technologically savvy workforce, while Cuba, less committed to a market economy, has been willing to forgo some of the Internet's potential economic benefits. The Internet experiment in Malaysia, another authoritarian regime, however is slightly different. In Malaysia, we have freedom of speech. But not freedom after speech. True, Malaysia has a constitution which guarantees freedom of speech. But the constitution also allows the government to impose restrictions, as it deems necessary, to protect national security. This has led to a litany of laws that severely curb freedom of expression. Examples abound. Under the Official Secret Act (OSA), almost all government documents can be labeled secret and thus cannot be released to the public. The OSA effectively inhibits civil servants from giving information, including those strictly not categorized as secret, for fear of retribution or demotion, or worse still, punished with a mandatory jail sentence. In addition, there is the Internal Security Act which allows detention without trial. A number of journalists have been arrested under this draconian law and its threat cast an ominous shadow on Malaysian journalists. But the mother of all laws, as far as the journalists are concerned, is the Printing Presses and Publications Act (PPPA). It provides the government the right to suspend or revoke printing and publishing permits. And its decision is not subject to review or be challenged in court. The Act also requires the annual applications of all printing and publishing permits, thus keeping the press on a short leash. In 1987, the licenses of three newspapers were revoked under this law in a sweeping crackdown on political dissent. The law also allows the government to fine or jail writers, editors, printers and publishers for spreading "false news." More recently, a number of anti government publications ran foul of the law. Independent weekly Esklusif, pro-reform monthly magazines Detik and Al-Wasilah were banned while the organ of opposition Islamic Party, Harakah, was punished with a reduction in its frequency from eight to two issues a month. On top of all these restrictive laws, a number of politically well connected business tycoons are beginning to take a leaf out of the Singaporeans by suing journalists who write unfavorable news reports about them. A few years ago, media tycoon and a personal friend of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, Vincent Tan, sued freelance journalist MGG Pillai, the editor, printer and publisher of the magazine which ran his article for defamation. In a controversial court decision, Pillai was ordered to pay Tan RM$2 million. Tan has since been followed by a string of others. Indeed, journalists can hardly write without fear or favor when such swords of Damocles hang ominously over their heads. There is, however, little protest from journalists to such insidious curbs on freedom of expression in Malaysia. Most, if not all, journalists have opted the easy way out by kowtowing to the authorities and their editors. Repression in Malaysia has reached to a level akin to "1984." All media organizations are obsessed with self censorship. In such an Orwellian environment, there is little room for those who are committed to upholding their responsibilities as journalists. An example is my own personal experience when I was editor of special issues in The Sun, a mainstream English language daily. In 1995, working with two colleagues, I helped unearth the deaths of 59 detainees mostly Bangladeshis in an illegal immigration detention camp. They died of beri beri, a symptom of malnutrition and typhoid-diseases which are easily preventable. We pointed out that this was a case of criminal neglect on the part of the police who ran the camp. The story was spiked hours before it went to print. When it appeared that the paper was not going to run the story, the team decided to hand the information over to Tenaganita, an NGO which supports migrant workers. It wasn't until Tenaganita exposed the deaths at a press conference and these deaths confirmed by the government that the newspaper had the courage to run the story, but not without four revisions. But that was not the end of the story. The whistle blower, Tenaganita Director Irene Fernandez, was however subsequently arrested for spreading "false news" under the Printing Presses and Publications Act a law originally used to muzzle the press. Those who wrote the story were interrogated by the police for over three days. Which is why the only democratic space left in Malaysia is cyberspace. Indeed, with the Internet, the government can no longer have complete monopoly on truth. While the government holds true to its dark reputation of keeping the media on a short leash with a coterie of repressive laws, it has nevertheless decided not to do the same with the Internet. That, if we were to believe Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. He has said time and again that he would leave the Internet alone, a guarantee he gave to investors to his Multimedia Super Corridor a Silicon Valley type project in the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur to help leapfrog Malaysia into the Information Age. Such no Net censorship stance should be applauded. True, this is not because the government has suddenly become more open to political dissent. On the contrary, it has no choice but to leave the Net alone. The reason is simple. Censoring the Net would mean cutting off our lifeline to the future. After all, the Internet will soon shape the way we do business, learn, work and play. Working in the government's favor, however, is that the penetration rate of the Internet is still low. While Malaysia is one of the first to embrace the Net in the region, its adoption has been lukewarm. The total number of Internet users hovers around 1.45 million with 600,000 Internet subscribers. Indeed, only 11 percent of Malaysians have personal computers and only six percent surf the Net. Simply put, the government has nothing to worry about. Until now, that is. Over the past few months, there has been an intense attack on Malaysiakini.com, the country's first and only independent Internet news website. Aspersions were cast over our purported link to international financier George Soros, whom Mahathir and other Asian leaders blamed for the 1997 financial crisis. The attack came after the Far Eastern Economic Review wrongly reported that Malaysiakini was one of the websites funded by Soros' Open Society foundation. It later provided a clarification saying that Soros "funds the Bangkok-based Southeast Asian Press Alliance (Seapa), one source of funding for Malaysiakini." True, Soros did give some money to Seapa but that went to pay the stipend of an advisor. None of the seed capital which Malaysiakini received from Seapa came from Soros. The Review now said that while they were wrong for claiming that we received money from Soros, but it implied that we are getting the money indirectly. I find such action dishonest and deceitful. The campaign against Malaysiakini unleashed by the Review was unrelenting and lasted for some two months. It reached to the point that Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad accused Malaysiakini journalists as "traitors." Interestingly, the Review has a taste of Dr. Mahathir's bitter medicine when the distribution of a number of issues were held back for up to three weeks by the Home Ministry. There were also crude attempts by the mainstream media to discredit me by "exposing" that I fabricated a story which I did in 1995. That was the one which I wrote on the deaths in the detention camps. The reports pointed out that only eight, including a police officer, had died, not the 59 which I mentioned. And like the Review, they failed to get the facts right. Indeed, they were referring to another event, that of a riot by Acehnese detainees in 1998. Also they took the trouble to dig up a nine-year old footage of a demonstration I participated in Brazil during the Earth Summit, with the intention of showing that I was a radical activist. The phenomenon success of Malaysiakini.com, an independent journalism project, should serve as a warning. Since it was launched five months ago, it now one of the top three news websites in Malaysia, registering an average of 150,000 visitors a day. All this, without spending a single cent on publicity and marketing, and with a team of a handful of overworked and underpaid journalists. Its success indicates that the mainstream media have lost so much credibility that a growing number of Malaysians are seeking alternative news on the Net. It has also spurred mainstream journalists to, for the first time in recent years, call for an end to restrictive press laws. They have handed a petition to the government expressing concern of "accusations that local journalists are merely a part of the government's propaganda machine and not professionals performing their duties to the best of their ability." "We further note that this perception, rightly or wrongly, has resulted in more and more people turning to alternative sources of information, namely, the Internet, foreign news reports as well as opposition party publications such as Harakah," said the petition. In May, to follow up on their petition, mainstream journalists have proposed a press council to self regulate the media. Apparently, the government said it would look into the idea. However, it is unclear how the council can operate in an environment where restrictive press laws remain, and key media is owned by either political parties or government cronies. At the prestigious Journalism Awards 1996, Mahathir told the 700 journalists who attended the gala event to behave themselves. He said Malaysians should not be unduly ashamed of laws which curtail their freedom of expression. "Are we ashamed that there is no freedom of the press in this country?" he asked. "Do we, forever, have to apologize to the rest of the world for our laws. Could it be, perhaps, that we are right and they are wrong?" Later that night, he presented a number of awards to journalists picked by a panel of veteran journalists for their outstanding news reports. One of the winners was "Shattered Dreams" the report about the deaths of immigrants in the detention camps, a story originally considered unfit for publication. But despite the irony of the award, Malaysian journalists have yet to prove Mahathir wrong. Tarun Tejpal The most extraordinary part of the extraordinary three months all of us have lived through, in Tehelka, was this strong sense that, even if briefly, there seemed to have been a shattering of the apathy that we have been living in, for too many years now. It had very little to do with us. The first thing I have to stand up and say, every time I am invited to speak somewhere, is that we are not crusaders, we are not Mother Teresa. Our best case scenario is to practice straight, clean, journalism. We all become different over the years, but most of us start off just wanting to be good, clean journalists. Since 1983, there has been these incredible changes in technology. I remember, we used to work with hot type, and read in reverse. There were times when the guy who fixed the headline, or caught a bad story, was the typesetter, because he was the only one who could read in reverse. I remember my first curious introduction to the fax machine, in Punjab, during the Punjab agitation days, when it was difficult to get a story through to the headquarters, which replaced all that sitting at a tele-printer machine, because the operator would get half the story wrong. My first introduction to computers was in India Today, which I joined in 1988, and we got the first sense that stories could be transmitted, written and edited quickly. I think the big impacts that technology has had, has been in the sense of functional efficiency through the kinds of machines that we have, at our disposal, including what we did to the Tehelka exposé and before that, to the cricket exposé, where we unearthed match fixing in cricket. This was just the use of technology to record audio or video and make it possible to nail down corruption or at least to nail down the guilty parties. Yet today I see the impact of the Tehelka story has had and, despite its impact, there have not been any serious convictions or admissions of guilt. So, I really worry for just plain newspaper stories, where you cannot nail down evidence in graphic audio or video terms. I think a lot of why the Tehelka story caught the imagination of the people, had a lot to do with the fact that there was visual footage available. Those images went across the world; they completely electrified Indians, from villages to towns to cities. The visual impact was great, and it was only because of technology that it was possible to do that at all. The paradigm shift is really the Internet, it is giving a platform to the individual voice, or has the potential to do so. Then of course, there is the low cost of entry that makes a huge difference. I will come to our own story. We can only draw lessons from what has happened to us. I have been a print journalist all my life. I have worked with most of the major Indian newspapers and magazines. I came to the net, not because I was in love with the net, but because it was the only medium, where I could raise funds to start an independent media portal or platform with a group of journalists. We went to a venture capitalist with this idea of starting a magazine on the net. Much had to do with a certain amount of distress with the way Indian journalism has evolved over the last ten years. It is truly in the hands of business people: it is still an extraordinarily free press and extremely high quality people are manning most of these places, but there is a problem, there are boundaries, there are things you can do and things you cannot do, there are doors you can push through and doors you cannot push through. The excitement was merely of an attempt at running a journalistic organization where you could make all the calls, right from which story to follow, for how long to follow it, how much money to put behind it and when and how to break it-and if somebody had funded me to start a magazine, I would have started a print magazine. But the marvel and the lure of the net is that it is possible, to raise funds and to start a magazine on the net and even today. Even though we are under severe financial stress, in trying to keep it going, it will probably be easier to keep up an Internet, than a print magazine going, or a TV channel station. The other big question that is always posed is, could we have done this story on traditional media? I will summarize the story very quickly. Two correspondents from Tehelka.com, Anirudh Behl and Samuel Mathew, started chasing a story in the August 2000 on graft in defense purchases. They created a dummy company, called Western International and a dummy product-a hand-held camera. They did some basic enquiries and found out that in the Army, there was an indent for something called hand-held thermal camera. We downloaded all the information from the net and formed a brochure in the design department of the office. They decided to start from right at the bottom of the food chain, at the Sections Officer level and tried to see how far they could go with a dummy product and a dummy company, by just offering graft. As it turned out, the greed was so staggering that they went all the way to the top. We know where the story ended up. The story actually went logically from one step to the next, to the next. It took six months of field work. We paid a bribe of RS 10 lakhs 15,000, (which is about US$25,000) and we spent a couple of lakhs, another US$5,000) on actually doing the story. It took us two months to transcribe and edit, from 90 hours of tapes, 15 staff locked themselves in two rooms. It was a tedious job, edited down to a 4 and a half hour film. We broke the film in the Imperial Hotel. Then, of course, all hell broke loose, and we are still coping with the fall out. I think, yes, it could have been done in traditional media, but the chances were far, far more stern. In traditional media after a point, it begins to lack the energy of the new. The net is pushing the limit because it is a new medium and it needs to announce itself, and it could have had the same impact in traditional media. I don't think journalism is about medium, after a point. It is really about being good or bad journalism. I think good journalism travels everywhere, to TV, print, on the net, it really does not matter. In the case of the net, what it did do for us, is that within hours of breaking our story, we were getting responses from all over the world. Now that is something no other medium can match, immediately access, hundreds and thousands of people, millions theoretically, across the globe. That is staggering, and the Indian diaspora, is such an affluent, powerful and widespread diaspora, something like Tehelka.com can elicit such a reaction. Within 24 hours, the website was being bombarded by hits from all over the world. That, I think, is really the triumph of the net. But more importantly, the triumph is also in the deployment of resources. What happens is the slice of the pie that you can direct straight towards news gathering, investigations and stories, is far greater than in any other medium's and this actually, if you get down to it, is the heart and souls of the business, not the building or the quality of the newsprint or just the equipment you have. The other question that confronts all of us, is the credibility of the net. Our experience has been a bit 50-50. Somehow, when the traditional media picks up your story, credibility does get enhanced a great deal, you have to kowtow to gray hair. But at the same time, when the traditional media does not it is down to us. There is still a large envy factor at work here, and there is an assumption that there is a new brat on the block and he is messing around. I am not too happy about it. (In fact, just now, over lunch, someone from Andhra Pradesh was speaking with me. He was talking to me about a very major investigative story we had done on N.T. Ramarao, the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh,. but the truth is that the story never got picked up by any of the mainline presses, and the Chief Minister called me up at least six times on my mobile phone. He was very polite in denying the story). When this issue came up in the Assembly for discussion, Chandrababu Naidu dismissed it, by saying, "What is this Tehelka? Who are these guys? They are a bunch of faltoos," (street journalists). So there is a credibility problem and I think it will take time to work itself out, like television, when it first came to India. I think that the net will have to go through that process. Stories like the one Malaysiakini has done and the kind of story Tehelka is doing, will help us. There have been many smaller ones too that we have done, which nobody has picked up. There will come a time, when governments' and other vested interests, will be forced to take cognizance of the things that are being said about them on the net and react to it, simply because the net and its influence will be so widespread, and people reading it will be creating public opinion. We are still a wonderfully free regime. It is true that we have had to face a lot of draconian steps taken by the government, and we find ourselves in a kind of a ludicrous situation, where our funding avenues are being totally blocked. Anybody who has anything to do with us, is leaned upon. Our first-round investors, have been made examples, and their business has been shut down completely. I have any number of friends in this country, who say, we love you, but if we give you money, we are in trouble. Everybody loves the work we do, everybody thinks we are great guys, we are heroes, but nobody wants to put a rupee into us. That is not a cause for any complaint, that is something that we will have to get around and we will. At the same time, it builds a lot of steel into the company and you think on your feet. We have an extremely dedicated group of journalists now. At Tehelka, we find ourselves doing many things to bring in money. We have a television arm, so that the revenue can be driven through the television channel and the work on the website can carry on, and maybe down the line, if the resources allow, we will try to "offline" our content into other medium, print or television. So, I think why the Internet becomes critical is because information is really the tool that authoritarian or autocratic regimes use to perpetuate themselves. This has historically always been true, whether it is the colonial government, or an autocratic government or it is a military dictatorship, it is always about control. The net begins to subvert that control of information and subverts it better than any other medium. In China they have actually increased the access to information that people have, thanks to the Internet. It begins to create a kind of a public opinion, which the Chinese authorities are being forced to respond to now. They are being forced to loosen up. The flow of information does not have to be directly incendiary. Information builds, I think what we are witnessing is just the very seminal stages of the evolution of the net. Give it three years and the economics will fall into place, the net will mature. Exactly like Steven, I foresee a subscription model for a site like ours. These will be the websites of real value on the net, or they will close down. If you deliver value, there will be people willing to pay a few dollars a year to access that value. Bambang Harymurti Chair I will also say something of my experiences online… with our online website Tempo Interactive. One of the things that the new technology offers is interaction, between us and our readers has created a lot of good things. Especially as an Editorial writer, I am pleased to see the next day after my editorial is on-line, there would be quite a few people who would have commented on it and I learn from all this input. All the writers also learn a lot from the readers, who send emails and comment. The other thing is that it is open to all the other kinds of possibilities with the Internet, Tempo is even being translated in one day or two days, all over the world. In New York, Oslo, Sidney. The other thing that I find amazing, apart from the interactivity, is an ability to create new business. For instance, in the case of my company, we have about 20-30,000 people, who regularly read the content. We give it partly free, but for the database they have to pay subscription rates in Jakarta, and we give them free hard copy in Jakarta, which they can send to anybody that they want. It created a tremendous boost for our circulation, because suddenly people in America will say that I will give this free copy to my niece, or whatever, and since we have a circulation boost, all are happy. That is why now I think that you should integrate everything and become multi-media, better access at what can be called the agency cost to the reader. At Tempo Interactive, journalists make the report right away, and can react to demand because of interactivity. We printed a 4 page newspaper and there was a scramble from advertisers, because they knew that the people would buy those newspapers like peanuts. So, it creates a lot of possibilities for economies of scale and efficiencies, and I think that is the trend in the industry. There is a worry also, that this kind of a thing is not without a price to press freedom, because it also gives to existing media, a much higher efficiency than to newcomers, and this would increase the barriers to newcomer. KEY DISCUSSION POINTS
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