‘Journalists can serve democracy but they can’t save it’: Joel Simon

The press freedom advocate speaks about the need for journalists to focus on their essential role amid challenges posed by digital disruption and AI.

In times when governments and political actors worldwide are weaponising the law against journalists, it has become critical to put in place institutional safeguards in order to protect media freedoms. Joel Simon—American journalist, author, and a renowned advocate of press freedom—believes one way that both journalists and media institutions in democratic countries can prevent the erosion of those freedoms is by never losing sight of their essential role: empowering citizens with the information they need to participate in a democracy.

Joel Simon has written extensively on press freedom, journalists’ safety, and human rights for various publications. | Photo Credit: joelsimonwrites.com

Joel Simon is the Founding Director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. An alumnus of Amherst College and Stanford University, he has written extensively on subjects such as press freedom, journalists’ safety, human rights, and global policy for various publications over a career spanning more than three decades. He also served as Executive Director at the Committee to Protect Journalists between 2006 and 2021 and was a Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia University, New York.

Edited excerpts:

There have been reports in the recent past of the Indian government considering the possibility of bringing in a Bill “to regulate digital media”. This comes even as India has slipped to its lowest rank of 161 in RSF’s Press Freedom Index this year, and the government has already attempted to restrict media freedom through legislation such as the IT Amendment Rules 2023 (which facilitates the setting up of a fact-checking unit that can issue de facto takedown orders for information pertaining to the Central government) or even the proposed Digital India Bill (which will replace the Information Technology Act, 2000; it contains provisions pertaining to “discretionary moderation of fake news”). You have written extensively about the weaponisation of law by both governments and private actors against journalists. How do you view this turn of events in India?

Well, I definitely view it within that context of the weaponisation of law and also the weaponisation of the framework that is being employed by all sorts of political actors with different motivations to critique and criticise the media.

This notion of fake news, for example, has been weaponised by governments around the world. There are new fake news laws that have been used to criminalise critical expression and have actually led to the imprisonment of journalists in many places. Now we see the concept of disinformation being weaponised, new laws being proposed.

Let’s stipulate that all of these efforts, to a certain extent, are in response to legitimate concerns about disinformation, about malicious actors seeking to see their narratives within the information space. But governments are not reliable institutions to address these challenges. Usually, they are motivated by asserting their own interests and using the power of the state to marginalise or isolate critical voices, including within the media.

So, the notion that the platforms need to be regulated in some way—that’s a legitimate point of discussion. But I have to view this particular effort in that context, and so I view it with a certain amount of suspicion.

Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting Anurag Thakur at Parliament House, New Delhi on July 26. In November 2022, he said that “newspapers should bring the right news before the public at the right time”. | Photo Credit: SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR

In the past, Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting Anurag Thakur said things like “newspapers should bring the right news before the public at the right time” and that along with shortcomings of the government, they should also highlight the public welfare schemes and policies of the government. Given that the press or the news media is a pillar of democracy or, as we know it, the “fourth estate”, what do you think should be the government’s role ideally in a democracy as far as news media is concerned?

Well, in this particular instance, let’s first recognise that governments and people within the government have expressive rights, and that public criticism of the media as an institution is legitimate. It’s really up to the media itself to respond to that kind of give-and-take and it’s normal and healthy within democracies. The criticism itself is not the issue.

The issue in many instances is how that criticism can be weaponised, again, in the kind of information space. Many times, government criticism is a triggering mechanism for trolls and online attacks and other kinds of interventions, which amplify that criticism—again, the criticism may be legitimate—but when it’s amplified and weaponised online, it can turn into a form of harassment which is intended to actually suppress some of that criticism.

So again, it’s all contextual. Governments have the right to engage in criticism and engage in a give-and-take with the media that is normal and healthy. But within a democracy, there also have to be institutional protections and a culture of political tolerance for that kind of criticism.

We have seen a rise in the takeover of Indian news media by conglomerates and corporate groups. A recent example of this is NDTV, which was one of the few independent voices in a polarised TV news space and it was taken over by the Adani Group last year. Such moves, as we have witnessed in the recent past, have often led to the ruling government’s narratives coming to dominate the discourse. Do you see this trend across the world, including the US? And if so, can corporate interests be subservient to the larger public interest?

Well, I think you’ve hit on the exact right framework. It’s the one I continuously emphasise, which is public interest. You need media institutions and journalists to serve the public interest.

And what is the public interest? It is ensuring that people have the information they need to participate as citizens in a democracy. So that is the public interest. And that is the role of the media to serve that function.

So yes, I mean, there are certain advantages to having strong institutions that can resist government intervention in the information space—that can hire legal teams, that can have editors, that can have strong editorial culture, that can train journalists and bring them into media structures.

We want strong institutions in many ways. But strong institutions can also be corrupted. And that is always a risk. So, you need a culture within media structures that puts public interest first. You need a market for that kind of journalism, which is increasingly being concentrated. And you need a political culture within these media organisations that resist that kind of pressure.

I can point to so many examples, including in the US, where those kinds of structures are breaking down. And you see a media that is really not focused on its primary mission and is compromised politically in some form.

In a piece you wrote for NiemanReports earlier this year, you talked about a “rights-based approach” (focus on protecting rights of media outlets that report on corruption, advance accountability, and provide the public with perspectives on various issues) in advocating press freedom. In the same piece, you also acknowledged that in the current environment, public interest journalism might not or will not necessarily prevail in the “marketplace of ideas”. Given that we live in times of immense polarisation, can different segments of the media across the spectrum stand united on something as crucial as this? And what are the changes that media freedom advocates can attempt to bring about?

So, the rights-based approach to the defence of press freedom is really about the defending the rights of individual journalists to express themselves when those rights are restricted. And the argument behind that is if the rights of individual journalists are protected across the spectrum, regardless of their ideology and their ethical practices—that’s free expression—if we defend everybody, then citizens will have access to the full range of ideas and information. And then it’s on the citizens to sort through this information and make informed decisions about the information they need to participate in a democracy. That’s the right space to argument.

Now, the challenge with that in the current context is we still obviously need to defend everybody’s rights. But the problem we’re facing in the information space is that it’s become a very competitive environment, where all sorts of malicious actors are actually competing for attention, right? So, it’s not only about suppression of speech. It’s about flooding speech with counter-narratives, often promulgated by governments or political actors or others with a particular interest.

So, the antidote to that: you could sort of call it like a “fight disinformation” but there’s another way of thinking about it. Which is: how do we elevate journalism that serves democracy and that serves the needs of citizens? To me that is public interest journalism, which allows people to make informed decisions. And I think that as a matter of public policy—not just as a matter of rights—we need to make sure this kind of information is elevated within this information space and ensure that citizens have access to this information.

So that’s a new paradigm, a new way of thinking about some of these issues, which has been my work for the last quarter century.

Staying on the subject of polarisation, this idea that journalists should be “neutral” or that they should aspire to “neutrality” is bandied about quite a lot. Does the term have a place in the journalist’s vocabulary?

Everyone’s got their own term. I’ve definitely never liked neutral. Some people like “objective”, some people like “independent”. But I think the point is journalism is a diverse space. There’s all kinds of different journalism and there always has been. There’s a certain kind of journalism that certain media institutions practice, which is sometimes called “objective”. It’s one form of journalism, I think it has a place.

I understand objective not as “both sides-isms”—one side is saying nonsense and one side is saying something that is obviously accurate, then you don’t have to report both sides. To me, independence or objectivity is that journalists don’t make up their mind until they’ve done the reporting. You go in there with an open mind, you listen to all sides. But then, once you’ve done your reporting, you still have to treat everyone fairly. But it’s fine to make informed determinations that this is the more accurate perspective and to emphasise that. That is a form of journalism that has immense value, because it can create a consensus around facts. And it has sort of a broad audience.

But there’s also plenty of room for journalism that might have a more activist or advocacy bent, and publications that see the world through a more ideological perspective, or have a particular area of concern and emphasise that or certain perspective in the reporting. I really think we have room for both. So, I think this is a bit of a false dichotomy and something that we as a profession really need to get beyond and stop arguing about.

Some media commentators believe that the Indian news media, particularly television news, is slowly beginning to resemble Radio Rwanda, considering the amount of hatred and divisive debate on most primetime news shows. Do you agree with that assessment? Or do you think it’s an overstatement?

Well, I can’t possibly make a judgement about that because I am not watching and engaging with Indian media. And it’s obviously in multiple languages, so I wouldn’t deign to make a judgement.

But I’ll say a couple of things. Look, that’s an extreme analogy. I mean, Radio Rwanda was used as an instrument of incitement to genocide. And it was a coordinated government campaign that had the explicit purpose of inciting the population to take armed action against another segment of the population.

And it’s completely prohibited. It’s a violation of every international legal standard. So that’s a really extreme analogy. I can’t make a judgment about the quality of the broadcast media, but I would just note that any media that’s engaging in that kind of speech, there’s no legal protection for incitement to violence or especially incitement to genocide.

The Infodemic, co-authored by Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney, talks about how governments in China, Iran, Russia, Brazil, India, and even the US (under President Donald Trump) hijacked the flow of information and usurped power using different means during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In your recent book The Infodemic (co-authored with Robert Mahoney), you have written about how governments hijacked the flow of information and usurped power using different means during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among many countries, such as China, Iran, Russia, Brazil, and even the US under President Donald Trump, you also mentioned India as one of the countries where that happened. Would you like to elaborate on that?

The pandemic was born in censorship. You’ll recall when it emerged in Wuhan, the response of the Chinese government was to censor and suppress early indications that there was a new infectious disease circulating. They censored the medical community, they censored journalists who sought to report on it.

How the pandemic or how the disease might have played out differently had there been a more open information environment, we’ll never know. But censoring information about a threat to public health certainly has repercussions, and we saw that.

What happened with the disease is as it spread around the world, so did censorship. I was at the Committee to Protect Journalists at the time, and the wave of censorship around the world in nearly every country was something unprecedented.

And different governments had different motivations for censoring and managing speech. As the disease spread to more democratic countries, particularly those led by populist democrats, leaders were confronted with a dilemma. The dilemma was: do we follow public health guidance and take measures that might reduce the spread of the disease but which also might have economic and political consequences? And many governments, particularly populist governments, were loath to do this.

So, in the US, we saw Donald Trump systematically undermine public health advice and attempts to build a public health consensus, and also abrogate responsibilities and putting them all on the States. We saw a similar dynamic play out in Brazil.

In India it was a bit different, because the response of the (Narendra) Modi government was initially to recognise certainly the public health risk of this disease and to take very dramatic steps to kind of shut down the country.

The thing that Modi did that was quite alarming was the government suppressed much reporting about the terrible hardships it created for so many citizens who had to return suddenly to their villages, and their lives were disrupted. And there were journalists who sought to report this and countered the narrative that the government was trying to assert. And so, they faced consequences.

Then in the second wave of the disease, the Modi government felt that it had established a powerful narrative that through these measures, India had contained the disease. But then it started to re-emerge. And because of the narrative that the government had created in its own mind, it was slow to take action. So, by the time it began to take root and the media and experts began to talk about this, the government was resistant to this narrative.

And so it was sort of a situation in which the government began to believe its own propaganda, and to suppress and undermine information that contradicted it. And this was certainly not unique to India. This was a framework that we saw play out in so many different countries around the world.

Talking about fake news: when Donald Trump attacked The New York Times (one of many outlets) on multiple occasions by decrying its legitimate news coverage as fake news, it resulted in a significant rise in subscriptions for them. But one can attribute that to the institutional strength of the media in the US, which is rooted in constitutional safeguards such as the First Amendment. On the contrary, we have had not just digital outlets, but even media bigwigs such as the Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar (which did some impressive coverage during the COVID second wave) and the BBC (which broadcast the documentary The Modi Question), which have been at the receiving end of raids by government agencies following unfavourable coverage of the current dispensation. And all of this has become so normalised that when a newspaper decides to temper its critical coverage following such government action, it is considered par for the course—in fact, it’s even cheered upon by some quarters. Do you think that “media watch” as a subject, which is still nascent in the Indian context, could bring these issues to the forefront? And should more news outlets be doing something like a media watch?

Well, that’s a very specific question about a very diverse and complex media in multiple, different languages that I can’t possibly, really grasp in the limited amount of time that I’ve spent in India, even though I’ve had diverse and wonderful opportunities to talk to a range of journalists and media institutions.

But I do think that speaking more generally, the media, like every institution, needs to be accountable. And the way in which journalists hold strong institutions accountable is through their reporting. They don’t have any other mechanism to do so. You know, by bringing it to light, by applying scrutiny.

I think there are areas where journalists need to cooperate and work together and defend certain essential interests—for example, around press freedom and fundamental rights.

And there are areas where they need to compete, where it’s healthy for them to compete in the market. I think that often results in—not always—giving the readers more options and more diverse perspectives. And it can have a positive impact.

Another area where it’s healthy for them to engage in a more competitive practice is in covering other media institutions. There’s a certain reticence to do that, and it’s understandable. But in general, it’s a good practice and it’s healthy for media organisations to have a media reporter or for specialised media publications to scrutinise media performance and to report on it. I think that’s good for democracy.

A sculpture called “Anything To Say” featuring life-sized bronze figures of whistleblowers (L-R) Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning, at Parliament Square, London. The US government has been relentless in its attempts to extradite Julian Assange for his role as founder of WikiLeaks on charges under the Espionage Act. | Photo Credit: James Manning/AP

When one considers the fact that the US likes to think of itself as the leader of the free world and aspires to be a leading light when it comes to media freedoms or press freedoms, you also see something like the government persecuting someone such as Julian Assange, or imprisoning Chelsea Manning for a number of years. These are instances where the stakes of media freedom are really high. How do you reconcile these two things?

The notion even within the government, certainly within the media sector, in the US, is that there’s something exceptional about (the US) or that we’re somehow insulated or isolated from these global trends: I think we’re actually at the centre of them and all the issues we’re talking about in India are present in the US. We’ve had a President who, in terms of the line he chose, could not have been more direct, could not have been more antagonistic.

And yes, it’s great that media institutions were strong enough to resist that pressure. But it’s not good for democracy. It’s not good for the institutions and [for] building the kind of political consensus that’s necessary for the formulation of legislation or public policy. So, you know, there are a lot of there are a lot of very significant challenges in the US in the information space.

Regarding Julian Assange, he is a polarising individual. I know some people think that what he did in basically taking information and putting it into the public realm was wonderful. And other people think that it was destructive. And they have various opinions about him.

I don’t think what he did was fundamentally journalistic, but I do think that prosecuting him under the Espionage Act is terrible for press freedom. And the reason is that the legal argument that the US is asserting in prosecuting Julian Assange and seeking to extradite him is that the publication of classified information is a form of espionage, right? But this is what journalists do. I mean, they publish classified information when it’s in the public interest, right?

This is the difference between what Julian Assange did, and what journalists do. And then journalists don’t just say, “Oh, this is classified, I’m going to publish it”, which is essentially what he did. They would be like, “This may be classified, but I looked at it and I think the public needs to know this, so I’m going to publish it.” There is a difference.

But I don’t think that you can make a distinction legally, if you criminalise the publication of classified information. There’s really no legal argument that protects The New York Times, or for that matter, any journalist anywhere in the world, because the US is asserting this legal authority extraterritorially. You don’t have to be a US citizen, this doesn’t have to be published in the US. If you’ve published classified information and made it public anywhere in the world, you could be subject to prosecution.

So, this is not only legally dangerous, it really sets a very poor standard and undermines US credibility which we need. We need US credibility on this issue in order to defend the rights of journalists everywhere in the world, whether under threat, and also to have media policies in the US that elevate the kind of information that we need to have an informed democracy.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism comes out with a Digital News Report every year and this year’s report highlighted an interesting and somewhat worrying trend: that 45 per cent of the people surveyed in India tended to avoid news on negative subjects—for instance, the war in Ukraine, national politics, issues of crime and security, social justice issues. We now have a prominent Indian newspaper that claims to have no negative news on a particular day of the week. What is the major challenge for news media in this regard? And how do we make people care?

I’ve been a journalist for 30 years and my editors have been asking me: why should people care about this? It’s a perennial refrain that every journalist hears from their editors. And to a certain extent, it’s our job to make people care. And as I said, we as journalists, there’s a kind of emphasis because of the way the information structure works on maximising your audience. But it’s always a balance between reaching as many people as possible and informing them as citizens. That’s the public interest versus the kind of more commercial aspects of media.

And we have to do both, in a way. I think it’s legitimate for journalists to say, well look, if I’m writing articles that are really informative and nobody reads them, how am I contributing? Or if I’m writing articles that a lot of people are reading, but they don’t really elevate the public dialogue, then perhaps I’m not contributing either. So it’s really finding that right balance.

It’s also recognising that readers and consumers of information are changing in their habits and their outlook. And that to a certain extent, we as media institutions and journalists have to kind of figure out strategies that allow us to reach them where they are by using and embracing new communication tools when they become available.

I don’t have a problem with a specific media organisation, if it’s a tool to get people to engage and care and say like, we’re going to emphasise positive news in certain contexts. As long as that’s not their only role.

I really think the only way to evaluate whether the media is performing its function is to think about why we have media freedom. Why do we have journalism? Why do we need journalism in a democracy? And it’s because it’s through journalism that people get access to this essential information and whatever efforts we must undertake to achieve that goal are absolutely worth considering.

The Digital News Report 2023 said that in India, only 39 per cent of the respondents prefer to consume news by reading as opposed to the global trend of 57 per cent. | Photo Credit: Unsplash

Another trend which came across in the report was that of a platform shift. Speaking of India specifically, 61 per cent of the respondents prefer to consume news by either listening or watching it, as opposed to reading (39 per cent). Globally, the trend is that 57 per cent preferred to read. Do you feel that this kind of shift is permanent?

I don’t know. And I also think that some of the ways in which people consume information is driven by platform policy, and platforms change. Platforms were emphasising video: say, Facebook was emphasising news and now they pulled away from news, and then they pulled away from video. So there’s a kind of chicken-or-egg question about whether the platforms and their policies are shifting behaviour, or whether the platforms are responding to consumer demand. I don’t really know the answer.

But we have been operating in an incredibly volatile moment, both in terms of the platforms and the way they deliver information. And because of the emergence of AI, a lot of those sort of paradigms that we’ve been dealing with, about how the systems work, are going to change, and they’re going to change dramatically. We’re going to face the kind of disruption we faced at the beginning of the kind of the dawn of the internet, right? It’s going to be a disruption on that scale. And we have some ideas about what might happen and how AI might change journalism in the information space.

But there’s a huge kind of dark spot that we just can’t see. So the only thing we can be certain of is that change is coming. And we’re due for another wave of digital disruption.

As someone who has been at the forefront of press freedom advocacy for over two and a half decades—in fact, almost three decades—what would be your recommendations to improve the state of media freedom in India?

Well, the one thing that I’ve been talking about during my visit here is the challenges are enormous. And I think it’s understandable that people want simple, straightforward answers, and I just don’t have them.

I think that there are a couple of things to keep in mind. I mean I am, only to a certain extent, I’m talking to journalists. And I think there’s a kind of responsibility that journalists have taken on which goes well beyond the profession.

Journalists can serve democracy, but they can’t save it. There are so many incredibly powerful forces that are disrupting democratic institutions including the media. We, as individual journalists, I do think there are things we can do. But I don’t think we should be so grandiose to think that we can solve this kind of problem. That’s the kind of disruption of the information space and the impact it has on both democratic governments and accountability on a global scale.

So, I think that to a certain extent, journalists have lost their confidence in the essential work that we do and its value. And we really need to lean into that role. We need to recognise and work hard to meet that role.

And that role is its most basic element. It involves ensuring that the people who engage with the media, the media that we produce—whatever form it might take—that we see them as citizens, and that we seek to inform them and empower them and entertain them, and do other things as well.

But that is the heart of why the protections for free expression exist for journalists, it’s because of this essential role. And if we don’t fulfil it, then the protections that we enjoy will erode. We’re starting to see that happening. And the space, the political space that we operate, the institutional and normative structures that allow us to do our job will erode. And we’re seeing that happening.

So, I think that the most essential advice I can give to any journalist is not the big advice, like how do we save democracy. It’s really like, do your job, do it as well as you possibly can. Never lose track of your audience and the purpose of what you do. I would give the same advice to media houses and media institutions. I think that is an essential contribution and not at all an insignificant one. And that’s where we should put our emphasis.