The seductive idea of steady human progress toward democracy has presented itself, at least to Americans, repeatedly in the Middle East during the past decade, almost always to be dashed. Three years ago, in Egypt, it was possible to believe that the fall of Hosni Mubarak was a step along the democratic path. What democracy looks like now in Egypt was last month’s Presidential election, in which Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who took power in a military coup, got ninety-seven per cent of the vote.
Freedom of the press has even more of the air of inevitability about it—how can anyone stand in the way of the Internet, of information? But, absent democracy and the basic suite of liberties and legal protections that goes along with it, press freedom is impossible to maintain. In Egypt this week, three Al Jazeera journalists, Baher Mohammad, Peter Greste, and Mohamad Fadel Fahmy, along with twenty other people whom the government deemed too sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, were sentenced to long prison terms—seven years for Fahmy, a Canadian citizen, and for Greste, an Australian, and ten for Mohammad. (Three other foreign journalists were in a group that was tried and convicted in absentia; they are unlikely to report back to Egypt to serve their terms.) Press-freedom advocates and news organizations have been eloquent in protesting the Al Jazeera journalists’ prosecution, but it’s important to keep their co-defendants in mind: their presence in the dock demonstrates how deeply press freedom is nested inside political freedom.
Even though political freedom is a necessary precondition of press freedom, it isn’t sufficient. Journalism costs money. Broadcast journalism is especially expensive, and it almost necessarily lives in some relationship with government, because broadcasters need access to public goods like the airwaves and transmission lines. The idea that a free press can live in a libertarian microclimate is a fantasy, appealing to journalists but not very realistic. The press needs more from government than just to be left alone. It needs a government that affirmatively protects a list of freedoms on which press freedom is only one item; it is inevitably enmeshed in other government systems that can operate well or badly.
Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar. It’s hard for most American journalists to make themselves completely comfortable with this. It feels as if the protests against the events in Egypt this week came more loudly from Britain, which has a long tradition of government-owned broadcasting, than from the United States, and perhaps that’s why. It’s also the case that the current governments of Qatar and Egypt are at odds, and that the now suppressed Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar are friends. But the way to think about Al Jazeera is in comparison to the realistic alternatives. You may not see tough, independent investigative reporting about Qatar on Al Jazeera. You may see a general political perspective that, in representing the view from the Arab world, seems biased to many Americans. Still, in its nearly two decades on the air, Al Jazeera has established itself as far more than a crude state-media outlet. Spend a few minutes comparing it to Vladimir Putin’s RT and you will see the difference. Al Jazeera is now one of the largest news organizations in the world. It hires real journalists and does real reporting, and, when that happens, what viewers see cannot be entirely assonant with the wishes of its owners. Practically, although individual bloggers are more courageous, the better state-owned broadcasters represent the most powerful and pervasive movement toward press freedom in the Arab world. They ought to be encouraged, and encouraged to embody journalism as much as possible and political constraint as little as possible.
And the Egyptian government’s willingness to put Al Jazeera employees on trial, on such flimsy charges as being in possession of a spent bullet, is a brassy gesture of contempt for respectable opinion and regional media power, which the government surely feels toward all news organizations.
Everyone who cares about freedom should protest the verdicts in Egypt. Sisi has already turned down a request from President Obama, delivered in person by John Kerry, that he consider pardoning the journalists. Obloquy now seems to be a stronger weapon than negotiation. In the longer run, with years of American efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East in a shambles, press freedom in the region isn’t likely to move forward simply on the strength of its moral claim. And perhaps the press can help enable democracy, even if its supporting institutions aren’t democracies themselves. We can only hope that creating a mass audience for information and opinion will eventually loosen the grip of autocracy.
Photograph: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty.