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2 MEDIA
MACHINATIONS Under the gun in
Afghanistan By Philip Smucker
KABUL - Thomas Jefferson, an early
advocate of the First Amendment [1] to the US
constitution, famously stated, "If it were left to
me to decide whether we should have a government
without a free press or a free press without a
government, I would prefer the latter."
In
today's Afghanistan, a harassed government and a
struggling free press face off against each other.
Both are under attack and
both
lack strong advocates.
There are troubling
signs amid deteriorating security that the Afghan
government and some of its Western allies are
attempting to restrict the press. In what is
already one of the most hostile working
environments in the world for journalists,
American soldiers and Afghan officials have used
threats of physical force against journalists to
suppress potentially embarrassing information.
Then there are the omnipresent Taliban, who have
no interest at all in a free press and remain
prepared to execute the messengers of truth.
Advisers to the government of President
Hamid Karzai admit they are disturbed by what they
consider to be the inordinate amount of print and
air time devoted to coverage of the Taliban's
ongoing war against foreign and Afghan forces. But
most Afghan journalists argue that, after all, the
war is "the news".
"When we cover news, we
try to use three sources on every story and we try
to be accurate and impartial," said Najibi Ayoubi,
the director of Radio Killid, a major private
station that serves Herat and Kabul. "We're also
aware that the Taliban [are] evil and that the
actions they embrace are un-Islamic."
Ayoubi doesn't sound like an enemy of the
state, but sometimes, she said, she feels as
though she is treated as one. She said the public
is served well by enterprising reporters.
Afghan journalists often get to a breaking
story before the government knows about it,
particularly in cases where the Taliban are
burning girls' schools in remote areas, said
Ayoubi.
Nevertheless, Afghan government
arm-twisters consider it their responsibility to
keep the pressure up. In Kabul this year, seven
men from the Information Ministry paid a visit to
Radio Television Afghanistan TV reporter Besoodi
Forgh, pinning his arms back and punching him in
the face. Among other things, the government thugs
accused him of spying for Iran, a charge he was
not allowed to dispute in a court of law.
As worrisome as the Afghan government's
autocratic actions, however, are those of its main
sponsor. Along the Afghan border, leading
pro-government radio stations have been offered
working space, funding and boosted broadcasting
power behind the blast walls of US military bases,
said Ayoubi, who contends that these stations have
"lost their objectivity".
"This is not the
way to go about promoting a free press," she said.
"In these areas along the border, the Americans
and the Afghan government are only forfeiting
public trust." Other radio journalists along
Afghanistan's embattled border with Pakistan
contend that the Afghan stations inside US bases
only report "good news" and do not question
mistakes made in the field by coalition and Afghan
peacekeepers.
On another level, the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its member
states run a system of "embedding" foreign and
national reporters to provide a presumably
uncensored look at the Western alliance's
humanitarian and military operations. But
reporters working in Afghanistan said in
interviews that US military officials have skewed
a once-egalitarian system by offering preferred
news outlets the best access, while limiting or
excluding those reporters who cannot be trusted to
report stories that shed a positive light on the
mission. The result, they say, is
government-imposed censorship of the news.
Apart from micro-managing access, by far
the most serious incident involving US military
forces occurred on March 4. Angry
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