The past few days have seen a catastrophe unfolding in the UK concerning unethical and I have to add, unlawful, practices by journalists especially surrounding the use of “phone hacking”.
Centring on the News of the World newspaper, it has transpired that as well as “snooping” on the lives of so called “celebrities”, the newspaper has also hacked into voice-mail and landlines of victims of tragic, serious crimes.
There is now a growing groundswell of public opinion that this type of journalism is both obnoxious and disgusting and that such behaviour should be stopped by law.
What has transpired so far is obnoxious and disgusting, without a shadow of a doubt.
BUT there is an even greater danger looming.
That danger is a total over-reaction by government to current events and laws being passed that will seriously curtail future investigative journalism.
Challenging and investigative journalism is almost the bedrock of policing democratic systems by exposing wrongdoing and thereby holding politicians and senior public servants to account.
Here in the western Balkans (and especially in Bosnia and Hercegovina) the media landscape is controlled by “elitist groups” masquerading as “political parties”. Anyone who even considers BiH as a country with free, independent media, is certainly drinking the “Kool Aid”.
Balkan politicians and media controllers, are masters at using western European examples of behaviour as they see fit and they will certainly be watching how this story unfolds in the UK.
Their argument, I suspect, will be to tell their constituents (the Bosnian people) that free media is not needed (“just look at what’s happening in the UK”) and that having a muzzled or gagged media landscape is good for everyone.
“AND you see, the UK want to have what we have always had, so how cool are we?”
Whatever the outcome of the phone hacking saga in the UK, what’s needed is an ongoing, robust, media landscape that can continue to expose wrong doing.
A spin off of this will be, that truly independent media practitioners in the western Balkans, will still have role models and procedures to base further developments on, in this still insecure, part of south east Europe.
Just a thought.
