Reporters worldwide battle for freedom
Furrah Qureshi
Issue date: 5/16/08 Section: Ed-Op
Politkovskaya was a true journalist, marked by her ability to preserve the truth despite the burden of fear and death threats. Her life, unfairly short, and her death, painfully gruesome, serve as a testament to the necessity of the freedom of speech. The very injustices that Politkovskaya exposed in her articles were the same ones that led to her death.
In her book, "Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy," Politkovskaya predicted that, "We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance." She was so insightful because she realized that governments, across the globe, use "public safety" and censorship as a guise to curtail basic human rights.
Every writer has the right to write, but exercising it appears to be fatal. In April of this year, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that between 1998 and 2007, 13 countries accounted for at least 199 unsolved murders of journalists.
The world becomes eminently more macabre as countries realize traditional censorship can no longer function successfully because many alternative media sources can be found openly and for free via the internet. Countries are finding new ways to shut up their journalists, and unfortunately, they're shutting them up for good.
This is not a "Russian" issue, or a "third-world" issue. This is a global issue. While countries like Algeria, Russia and Pakistan flagrantly murder journalists, more "sophisticated" countries find more "sophisticated" ways to silence their journalists, the U.S. using mechanisms like "libel."
Very recently, journalists, activists and politicians in the U.S. were all afraid to oppose the Iraq war at the time of its inception for fear of being dubbed as "anti-patriotic." And at the beginning of the war, disagreement with its organization was vilified as "not supporting the troops."
History will examine those early years of our new millennium as a time in American journalism that was not far from the days of the Red Scare and Joseph McCarthy. Would the Iraq War have been so long, expensive or unpopular if people had spoken up? Furthermore, if people had spoken up, would the war have been at all? So you see, people only fear their government for so long; eventually, so many people disagree that you can no longer silence them. But these masses can only see the truth if someone shows it to them.
So I write here, a young, American, female, future-journalist, paying tribute to a woman that took on the colossal task of never shutting up. Thank you, Anna Politkovskaya.
Furrah Qureshi is a freshman majoring in English. She can be reached at ed-op@thetriangle.org.
In her book, "Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy," Politkovskaya predicted that, "We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance." She was so insightful because she realized that governments, across the globe, use "public safety" and censorship as a guise to curtail basic human rights.
Every writer has the right to write, but exercising it appears to be fatal. In April of this year, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that between 1998 and 2007, 13 countries accounted for at least 199 unsolved murders of journalists.
The world becomes eminently more macabre as countries realize traditional censorship can no longer function successfully because many alternative media sources can be found openly and for free via the internet. Countries are finding new ways to shut up their journalists, and unfortunately, they're shutting them up for good.
This is not a "Russian" issue, or a "third-world" issue. This is a global issue. While countries like Algeria, Russia and Pakistan flagrantly murder journalists, more "sophisticated" countries find more "sophisticated" ways to silence their journalists, the U.S. using mechanisms like "libel."
Very recently, journalists, activists and politicians in the U.S. were all afraid to oppose the Iraq war at the time of its inception for fear of being dubbed as "anti-patriotic." And at the beginning of the war, disagreement with its organization was vilified as "not supporting the troops."
History will examine those early years of our new millennium as a time in American journalism that was not far from the days of the Red Scare and Joseph McCarthy. Would the Iraq War have been so long, expensive or unpopular if people had spoken up? Furthermore, if people had spoken up, would the war have been at all? So you see, people only fear their government for so long; eventually, so many people disagree that you can no longer silence them. But these masses can only see the truth if someone shows it to them.
So I write here, a young, American, female, future-journalist, paying tribute to a woman that took on the colossal task of never shutting up. Thank you, Anna Politkovskaya.
Furrah Qureshi is a freshman majoring in English. She can be reached at ed-op@thetriangle.org.
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