Journalists' Safety and Multifaceted Censorship in Colombia

Introduction

Why does researching Colombian local war journalist’s mater? The research question guiding this investigation is to determine what local practices and rationales conflict journalists apply during an armed conflict regarding their safety and professionalism. By studying the world of local conflict journalists in Colombia, this chapter will examine how conflict journalists reflect on and comprehend their professional performance and their ethos, and how this might shed light on their professional experiences when reporting on war in their own country. In answer to this question, the hypothesis posited is that Colombian local conflict journalists may have a critical reflection on their praxis and professional logic to cover war in its particular violent context of a fifty-year old multifaceted war. In turn, this could illuminate journalistic praxis and ethos when covering other contemporaneous wars. The research presented in this chapter is part of a larger study Revamping journalism in the midst of conflict: Mapping the world or local journalists (Zárate, 2016).

As this chapter will expose, self-censorship is the result of the impunity in the country and new threats appear with online harassment to journalists. If the assassinations of journalists are not solved (FLIP, 2011, 2018) this might help to explain or validate – to a certain degree – their silence on a regional level. Given that there are inadequacies in government security policies to protect effectively journalists in conflict and post-conflict. Yet this situation does not explain the self-censorship in bigger national media (e.g. El Tiempo, Caracol, RCN). The chapter will conclude with recommendations to address censorship in Colombia and journalists’ safety in conflict.

In the following, we will analyze threats to journalists in Colombia that shed light on a triple menace: the decrease in journalistic quality, a citizen’s right to information and, the influence on journalists’ professional behaviour. There are three kinds of censorship: political interests, economic interests, and fear. Censorship can work in different forms linked to power, repression and discipline. Foucault (1984, p.60) explains that power does not weigh on society as a repressive form, but instead ‘traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse’ [italics added]. In Colombia, during Álvaro Uribe’s government the official discourse permeated several media institutions, as the power underneath the social body, reproducing the endorsed discourse of the war on terror. As Philip Knightley asserts:

George Orwell argued that “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban” (1972, n.p.). He pointed out subtle forms of censorship that can be immersed in media culture and journalists’ professional practices. There are many academic studies focused on censorship (Curry Jansen, 1991; Green & Karolides, 2005; Jones, 2002; Warburton, 2009), given that the history of journalism has always been linked with censorship, not only under authoritarian regimes but also in democratic states. Colombian journalism has different levels of censorship interlaced with government, armed groups, and media. As a result, it is easy to observe evidence of Restrepo’s argument that journalist’s greatest and vilest professional behaviour is clearly exposed when they are under attack by violent actors.

Curry Jansen (1991) elucidates that censorship is a form of surveillance and a mechanism that gathers intelligence that the powerful can use to increase control over ideas or individuals that threaten to disrupt the established sense or order. Self-censorship manifests as the silence that journalists might impose on themselves in defence of their lives or interests. Journalists and media are targets of the wielding of power, and Colombia is not the exception. Most interviewees lived under the pressure of armed groups but also —and sometimes disregarded— are the influences exerted by politicians, public servants and advertizement revenues, all of which might silence the press.