This week I was reminded of how teaching can challenge assumptions I never realized I had. In a seminar with masters’ students we briefly discussed an earlier blog on blurring the boundaries between spies and journalists. Some of the students were deeply skeptical. I could understand where they were coming from having lived and worked as a journalist in Britain for a number of years and seen first-hand how assumptions about a media free from state interference are deeply embedded within political culture and public consciousness. Here, where basic freedoms are taken for granted, talk of spies posing as journalists or vice versa sounds more James Bond and Hollywood than real life. However, this skepticism was challenged by the author of the blog who pointed out that in her country journalists have spent years in jail after being convicted of spying. The discussion prompted me to dig a little deeper.
It reminded me of an episode when I was an undergraduate in apartheid South Africa. Civil unrest was on the increase, the government had declared a state of emergency and it emerged that another student – a friend of mine – had been planted on campus by the security forces to spy on fellow students.Overnight, the coffee shop chats about politics stopped. The freedom to discuss ideas and different viewpoints ended. Fear and silence replaced open debate among friends. Trust was broken and there was a deep sense of betrayal. If one of us was a spy, how did we know others weren’t?
This is an experience common to thousands around the world but it is far removed from western campuses, news rooms and general understandings of some of the forms the media-state relationship can take. So, I did a quick search of English-language newspapers around the world on “journalists and spies”. In the past 12 months, there have been over 3000 newspaper articles written on it. A cursory glance suggests most of these are about reporters writing about spying activities or about security services spying on journalists. But roughly one in ten were about journalists being co-opted as spies or spies posing as journalists in countries as diverse as Uganda, Zimbabwe, Yemen, Bulgaria, Yemen, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and Hong Kong.
I then did a basic search on the academic literature on the topic written in English and found only three journal articles and half-a-dozen books none of which had dealt with the topic systematically. Friends tell me there is this literature but it is written in Russian, Malay, Thai, etc but it has yet to be translated into English so I cannot access it.
This academic silence – at least within the medium of English - may be because people have not yet seen the need to translate these other texts. It could be because academic publishers mainly based in the west are skeptical, perceiving the topic to be too much like James Bond to be academically credible. It could also be that the topic is fiendishly difficult to research given that so much of the material is likely to be in official documents which even in liberal countries with a freedom of information act would be sealed under national security laws for 50 years.
But the sheer volume of newspaper articles on the topic suggest that it could still be possible to focus on those aspects that emerge into the public sphere through court cases, internet chat rooms and blogs. It would also be invaluable if those proficient in other languages could think about translating this material into the more globally-spoken English.
Why does this matter? On one hand, knowledge from diverse contexts is crucial to how we understand the multiple forms the media-state relationship may take. Too much of the literature on media and politics written in English is western-centric and the danger with this is that we then assume that what happens in the USA, UK and Western Europe is universal when it is not.
On the other hand, as Aleksandra noted in her blog, the blurring of boundaries between spies and journalists raise big questions about the public sphere. The ideal public sphere where people debate issues of common concern openly and then convey these views to government may not work in practice anywhere. But as Habermas pointed out, the principle still stands that information needs to be circulated freely for people to make informed political decisions.
The use of journalists to spy or the posing of spies as journalists threatens this in a number of ways. First, as my undergraduate experience highlighted, the infiltration of studying, working and social spaces by spies closes down the informal discussions of political issues among friends and colleagues. Second, the abuse of the media devalues the public sphere. If the public believe journalists are spies or spies are journalists they will believe the state has infiltrated the media in obscure and sinister ways. A key relationship of trust between public/readers and media will be broken. Third, it potentially puts the lives particularly of foreign correspondents at risk and so compromises the ability to get information out on countries such as Tibet, Burma and Thailand. Fourth, what about those journalists who have been jailed for spying on their own governments? In some case, they may have been spies; in others – especially where governments control the courts – they may not have got a fair trial and so could have been innocent of spying. It seems to me that where the state has the ability to fix the outcome of court proceedings and put journalists in jail under trumped up charges of spying, the state has a very powerful weapon to intimidate journalists and prevent them probing into issues that government does not want reported on.
So, in a multitude of ways the blurring of the boundaries between journalism and spying damages the circulation of information and so potentially weakens the public sphere. It is long-overdue that these experiences and debates be translated, researched and circulated more widely. The relevance of these issues is not limited to authoritarian regimes and police-states. As Aleksandra pointed out in her blog, the US senate and congress have debated it and allowed for a limited blurring of the boundaries.
