Technocrat

The Risk of Journalism

zogger
Sat Sep 29 18:40:38 -0700 2007
Politics
manage

Burma is under lock down now, internet cut off from the rest of the world,while the military junta "cracks down" on protesters. Until recently there was some chance to get the word out on actions inside that nation, but it is mostly gone now, with best access being from satellite imagery. And even when regime fighters are jailed and tortured, they still thank journalists who once helped them with this mission of simple communications.

.."The second man was shaking as he described how he was tortured. "First, they put the handcuff backward and put on the canvas bag, it is very hard to breathe. And they beat with the pipe on my body and put some electric shocks at my calf and thighs. This went on for five or six days. All political prisoners are tortured.""....more disgusting fascists there

The Risk of Journalism
deek
Sat Sep 29 20:23:02 -0700 2007
 manage

So the risk of journalism in this case is ... that information is made publicly available. That seems a worthy risk to me. The fact that Burma has been locked down, internet access cut off, seems to be a success story for journalism, not a failure. Burma was always going to cut off information to the world, once the world was aware of what it was doing.

Journalists cannot stop reporting on a situation, for fear that the information will dry up, because then the general public would never be aware of it in the first place. Protecting the information source, by not reporting on it, would make the information source useless. It's a classic case of protectionism destroying any value in what is protected.

 

Do you have questions about the site? Write to bruce at perens.com . List of all articles we've ever published. Source Code Developer's Documentation RSS XML Sitemap XML News Sitemap Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict Valid CSS! [Valid RSS]