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International Forum >> The Democracy Forum for East Asia>> "The Role of the Media in Fighting Corruption: Perspectives from Asia and Beyond"
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Introduction
Session I: The Current State of Media Reporting on Corruption in Asia Session II: The Institutional and Legal Environment Session III: Forging Partnerships in the Fight Against Corruption Session IV: Promoting More Effective Media Coverage Agenda Participants |
Session IV: Promoting More Effective Media Coverage Kie-Duck Park (Sejong Institute, Korea) The concluding session of the conference focused on identifying the most effective techniques that journalists use to fight corruption and on considering how these might be adapted to the particular conditions of countries in East Asia. Stephen Magagnini said that although he would focus in his remarks on the strengths of American journalism, he did not want to give the impression that it-or the democracy in which it operated-was perfect. Mr. Magagnini had spent much of his career reporting on race relations, for example, which had given him insight into some of the less positive chapters in U.S. history. And he characterized press coverage of U.S. businesses as "weak," noting that executives from competing firms were aware of the coming collapse and bankruptcy of Enron, the huge international energy firm, months before U.S. business reporters began breaking the story. Nonetheless, Mr. Magagnini believes that journalists investigating corruption in East Asia could learn much from their American counterparts. He does not think that bribery of journalists is a major problem in the United States, for example, primarily because of the sense of professionalism that reporters acquired in their schooling and apprentice years. "In the United States," he said, "many journalists learn ethics by doing." Mr. Magagnini described how when he reported for his first newspaper job, the mayor of the Florida city in which he worked offered him the free use of an automobile. The offer was tempting to a young, underpaid reporter, he said, but even then he knew that accepting such a favor would compromise his objectivity, so he declined. The essence of investigative reporting, Mr. Magagnini stressed, was the constant searching for facts, especially those that lay beneath the surface of a story. He encouraged reporters to investigate and publish the salaries of public officials. This would allow citizens, government agencies, and even other journalists to identify individuals who appeared to be living beyond their means. He recommended that reporters investigate and publish property-ownership and business-ownership records to expose corruption in public contracting and procurement. He urged journalists to publish consumer tips and to invite the public to send in its own suggestions and recommendations. He even suggested a technique that he had used once when he was having trouble obtaining an interview with a particular individual: "I called the person's mother and asked why her son was avoiding the press, and within fifteen minutes I had him on the phone doing the interview." While urging his fellow reporters to be tenacious in pursuing their stories, Mr. Magagnini also stressed that "journalists need to be fair." For him, this meant that journalists needed to present both sides of a story and that they must give the subjects of their investigations a chance to respond to allegations against them. He also believed that it was not enough to describe problems or to criticize others; positive journalism also meant trying to present individuals who could offer solutions to problems or could make recommendations on how to improve a given situation. Mr. Magagnini said that he understands the fear that isolated reporters feel when covering corruption allegations involving high-level political and business figures. "But there is strength in numbers," he added. When Don Bolles, an investigative reporter who focused on organized crime in Arizona, was murdered by a car bomb in 1976, for example, scores of U.S. journalists flocked to Arizona to continue his research. "I would like to see this kind of solidarity in Asia," Mr. Magagnini said. Conditions in Romania were quite different from those in the United States, Mircea Toma noted. In his estimation, the media in Romania were characterized by "a lack of independence and a lack of professionalism" that were only gradually being redressed as younger journalists educated since the collapse of communism rose to higher ranks within the profession. Nonetheless, in light of what he had heard from his East Asian counterparts, Mr. Toma believed that at least some of the press-oversight activities conducted by an organization he belongs to-Media Monitoring Agency-were needed in their countries as well. Among these, he said, were ongoing monitoring of the press for political bias and periodic quantitative studies that documented the amount of television airtime given to leaders of the governing and opposition parties. The Media Monitoring Agency also calculates newspaper advertising revenues to see if the government disproportionately places paid advertising in progovernment publications. Because the placement of advertising is meant to block publication of certain articles, reformers had created an alternative electronic publication that contained a database of articles rejected by other publications. One such article, he said, reported on a new mobile telephone company that had entered the Romanian market without going through the normal bidding process. "No Romanian publishers will touch this story because of the advertising censorship," Mr. Toma lamented. Finally, the Media Monitoring Agency planned to launch what he called a "media Interpol project," an international network of journalists trained in investigating crossborder crimes and using a common database. Mr. Moreno was particularly pleased to hear Mr. Toma's final point. "Corruption is international… I am also trying to create international networks of prosecutors." But he also believed that journalists needed specialized training to improve their ability to follow the international trail of money. James Tu and Rick Chu strongly agreed with Mr. Magagnini that journalists should not accept financial favors from the individuals or companies they cover, and both said that they had established policies at their newspapers to discourage the practice. Mr. Tu, for example, generally would not allow reporters to accept offers of free travel while on assignment, although he said he had made exceptions in cases where reporters were invited on international trips to report on major arms sales. And Mr. Chu said that when he became editor, he established a rule requiring that his employees declare any gift whose value was $10 or greater. While he did not believe that the news media would ever be able to outbid business firms or corrupt politicians, Mr. Chu was convinced that reporters who were paid good wages were less likely to be tempted by bribes. But Geo-Sung Kim said that there were numerous ways to entice journalists in addition to giving them envelopes full of cash. Public officials offer reporters free food, drink, and entertainment. Business executives offer them stock tips. Bankers offer special mortgage rates. There are simply too many avenues of potential corruption for editors to control, Mr. Kim warned. Mr. Wu had also seen the effects of the low wages of journalists when he investigated an international prostitution ring in the early 1990s. Among the principals of this criminal enterprise were two news reporters who told Mr. Wu that they engaged in the business to supplement their small salaries, with the tacit approval of their editors. And he knew of numerous cases where local legislators with criminal ties used public funds to feed and entertain reporters or to lend them money. In China, Tang Wan Jun replied, the line between businesses and the media is not as distinct as it appears to be in other countries. Many journalists run businesses on the side, and many of those who do not are nonetheless too close to the businessmen they cover. "Every time I saw the fancy cars of my colleagues whose salaries are almost the same as mine, I doubted their willingness to fight corruption," Mr. Tang noted. "For the media to fight corruption, they must first clean up the media themselves." But Mr. Toma disagreed, "there is not enough time to wait to clean up the media; we need to do both simultaneously." And for Xilong Chen, cleaning up the media in China will also require political reforms. Because most media still belong to the government, it is political officials and not the nominal editors and publishers who make the real decisions on what appears in newspapers or on the air. While there is slightly more freedom to report sports, entertainment, and even business news, political news remains fully under political control. Journalists know, for example, that they are expected to give full and favorable coverage to the official acts and statements of political leaders. Hon-dong Lee, an editor with the Hankyoreh Shinmun newspaper, said that he had been involved in the effort to reform the Korean media since 1987, when the newspaper was founded by a large number of journalists who had earlier been dismissed from other companies. From the start of his company, all of the journalists, including Mr. Lee, were inspired by a new professional ethos and pledged to refuse all gifts and bribes called 'Chon-ji.' Since then, Mr. Lee said, other media had also created watchdog organizations like the trade union of journalists that monitor wages, job issues, and journalism ethics and work to eliminate corrupt practices in the profession. All in all, "I believe our newspaper has started a new culture in Korean journalism," Mr. Lee concluded. Rick Chu declared that despite all the self-criticisms made by the Korean journalists at this conference, "We are shamed by the energy of our Korean colleagues…The Korean media are simply the best in Asia in fighting corruption." Karaniya Dharmasaputra asked other participants to discuss how they would proceed in corruption investigations that produced damaging but not conclusive evidence. Mr. Dharmasaputra was one of the reporters who had uncovered the Buloggate financial scandal in Indonesia that led to the ouster of former president Wahid. In his case he had obtained photocopies of checks linking the then-ruling Golkar party to some of the funds illegally obtained from the state food agency. He wanted to hear from other journalists how they dealt with the problem of incomplete documentation of official wrongdoing. Mr. Toma replied that a Romanian journalist who alleged that someone had stolen $20 million could only provide firm evidence that the person had stolen $18,000. Nonetheless, the journalist pursued the case as far as he could with the documents available to him, and then appealed for help from journalists in those countries where the larger sum allegedly had gone. Mr. Magagnini urged caution in situations where the facts were not clear. He believed that while reporters should not make factual assertions that they could not prove, they could report on investigations and allegations made by others-while also giving the subjects of these allegations the opportunity to reply. And he also recommended sharing information with foreign journalists whose larger news organizations might be able to provide more complete documentation of crimes. For James Tu the pursuit of corruption allegations was not simply a question of professional courage but of personal and financial resources. "How many of us can work for an entire month on one story?" he asked. He knew of cases where newspapers had devoted significant staff resources to long corruption investigations that, in the end, never produced anything worth publishing. In addition, complex corruption stories require lots of space, often more space than publishers believe they can dedicate to them. One possible solution to this latter problem, Mr. Tu suggested, was to publish a shorter version in the print edition of the newspaper and to post the longer version-perhaps with backup documentation-on the Internet. Luz Rimban had also had to deal with the issue of staff resources. For her organization the solution was to assign reporters to a mix of stories, including daily news reporting and long-term investigations, and to appoint teams that worked part-time on complex investigations, often in partnership with foreign reporters. One of the most important things he had learned in his career as a journalist, Mr. Tang said, was how potentially dangerous the media can be. In the 1990s, for example, Chinese television began broadcasting a program called "The Focus Interview" that led to numerous corruption prosecutions. And since a conviction for corruption in China can lead to severe penalties, including the death penalty, journalists needed to realize the awesome seriousness of their work. "If the press does not have proper ethics, it can be more dangerous than the government," Mr. Tang concluded. Yongzheng Wei provided what he called a concrete example of Mr. Tang's point: the case of a local police official in China who had killed someone in a car accident. After being tried and sentenced to death, the official complained that he had been convicted "not by the judge but by the media." Mr. Wei said that he was aware of other cases of what he called "media lynchings" and he asked, "How do we strike a balance between media reporting and a fair trial?" For Luz Rimban, the solution to the dilemma posed by Mr. Wei was for reporters to "seek the truth and report it as fully as possible." She realized that reporters needed to cooperate with other organizations and agencies, but in the end journalists needed to be responsible to themselves and to their readers. Part of that responsibility included developing sufficient expertise in the subjects on which they wrote: "Reporters need to know the laws; they need to understand the issues; they need to understand history," she said. The most important thing, she repeated, was that reporters "be guided by the quest for truth and that their work always be grounded in the truth." |
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