JERUSALEM–The past few days in Jerusalem have been uneasy ones. In a city that teeters on the verge of violence on a fairly regular basis, the height of the week long Jewish  holiday season of Sukkot added an element of unrest. The holiday draws a large number of Jewish visitors from around the world and has been called the backdrop for violence and fears of violence in the last week.

On Sunday, there was brief rioting. On Monday, an Israeli security officer was stabbed and wounded. On Tuesday, stones were hurled at Israeli Defense Forces, police, and security personnel who were brought into the city to quell potential violence. The dynamite at the end of the fuse is what the Muslims call Haram as-Sharif and the Jews call Temple Mount. It’s a religious place of worship that has been under the control of the Muslims and the Jews alternatively for thousands of years. Today it is a Muslim mosque.

During the past few days in Jerusalem, I had the chance to experience–as an American and an outsider–the scene on the ground. On Tuesday afternoon, I sat outside of Damascus Gate to observe (this is one of the ways to enter the Old City and get to Temple Mount). Large numbers of security personnel, police, and Israeli Defence Force soliders had been called in to secure the city. On the surface, not much was happening, but there was an underlying tension crackling like a live exposed electrical wire.

A group of young Arab boys, riled up by the atmosphere of tension, hurled insults at an Israeli soldier guarding a blockade. The soldier was non-plussed, but an elderly Arab man with a wooden cane refused to let the bad behavior slide. He proceeded to scold the young boys and chase them with his cane until he succeeeded at striking a few blows with the end of it on one of their backs. It was hard to decide whether to be amused or not with such an archetype of social hierarchy playing out against the backdrop of potential rioting and violence. There men with the guns and the old man with the cane each tried to keep the peace in their own way.

Then there was a group of school children, again boys and about 8 years old, who seemed to be playing nearby on their way home from school. But they weren’t playing. Some of the boys were Arab, some were Jewish. There was taunting and bullying and soon the Arab boys picked up stones and threw them at the Jewish boys (who quickly ran off).

It made me wonder how children can learn violence at such a young age. While the potential for truly dangerous rioting boiled around them, they made a dangerous game of it. It looked as though they thought they were part of the ethnic and religious tensions, even though they were only children on their way home from school–school bags, textbooks and all.

On the way back from Ramallah in the West Bank later that day, my taxi driver refused to drive into the parking lot of the checkpoint, called the Kalandia Gate. He seemed afraid and I didn’t understand why. Hiding behind the wall encircling the checkpoint’s parking lot on the Ramallah side, I spotted two Arab men with professional cameras and several young teenage boys standing near them. I approached to ask if they were journalists, and they said yes.

One of the journalists warned me to cross the checkpoint “before it got worse”, so I did. All day people had been talking about the violence reaching a boiling point, and I wasn’t equipped or prepared to switch into reporter mode. 25 feet inside the wall of the checkpoint parking lot, something large and granite landed within arm’s-length of my head. It was a stone, and it was coming from behind me, from the spot I had just been standing. I’ll never know if the stone was meant for me and the person throwing it just had bad aim. The parking lot was littered with stones of all sizes, and an armored security vehicle barked rebukes at the boys.

Later that day, after getting back to the relative calm of Jerusalem away from the Old City, I found AP photographs on a news website of a young boy throwing stones at the Kalandia Gate toward the security vehicle. I recognized his t-shirt and realized the photographer who took the shot must have been one of the two who I had encountered earlier that day.

In that moment, it all seemed staged. Everything from the old man at Damascus Gate to the boys hurling stones toward me to the police and military personnel. But what seemed most staged was those two photographers I had come across–the two “journalists”. In my brief encounter with them, it seemed like they were there for one story and one story only–violence. The very presence of professional news photographers likely emboldened the young boys to act more extremely. But that’s not the most disturbing part. The most disturbing part is the slant that the media coverage has taken overall. Jerusalem during Sukkot is a charming place full of festive cheer.

The plaza next to Jaffa Gate by the Old City that same evening, for example, was full of Jews singing and dancing and celebrating with calls of “Happy Holiday”! Even as helicopters hovered above, they still danced and sang. Even as police cars and ambulances sped by on the street far below, they still danced and sang. Throngs of people crowded the sidewalks and streets following a large parade held that afternoon for Sukkot. There were no explosions, but still the news the next day was of police reinforcements and tensions among city residents. The scene on the ground is always different, though. All I saw were police and soldiers standing around, and young boys who have been taught no better than to hurl stones.

Last week I got a surprising email from a close friend and fellow journalist–someone by the name of Christian Poveda had been murdered in El Salvador. My friend knew Mr. Poveda years back while reporting on the conflicts in the 80’s in El Salvador and Nicaragua. In more recent years, Poveda had been doing controversial and dangerous reporting on notorious gangs in El Salvador for a documentary called “La Vida Loca” . I also vaguely knew Poveda, having followed his progress with the documentary, as his friend on Facebook, and had sent him a Facebook message or two in the past year. The news about Poveda was shocking, especially because I had admired him so much for his bravery in tackling such dangerous work and living to tell about it.

My first thought was to tell, in some small way, about Poveda’s work and what he had given his life for. So I wrote about him in my blog. But I had to create a new category: Journalists Killed. It was a sickening sight to see the new category in black and white, but it made me think about things more deeply.

It isn’t that Poveda’s murder was the first time I had heard of a journalist being murdered while working. It just happened to be the first time it hit so close to home. One day someone is posting updates on Facebook about their documentary, the next they are a victim of a silent war against journalists who dare to tread in dangerous territory to tell important stories.

During an interview with Carlos Lauría, senior program coordinator for the Americas for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), about Poveda’s murder, he reminded me that most murdered journalists also suffer the fate of their killer not being brought to justice.

“Impunity is the norm in most cases of journalist assassinations around the world according to our research,” said Mr. Lauría of the CPJ during my interview with him for a  story I wrote about Poveda’s death that was published in The Epoch Times. “There are many factors—overburdened justice systems, widespread corruption, no resources for investigations.”

Almost two weeks later, thoughts of Poveda and his unjust death still linger in my mind. He was shot in the head. Will his murder ever be solved? What about the journalists who were left behind in El Salvador? As CPJ’s Lauría told me, Poveda’s murder “sends a chilling message to Salvadoran journalists.”

It begs the question–what about the stories still to be told? The murder of the journalists going after the truly dangerous stories brings two kinds of death. One is their lives, the second is the eerie warning to all those who might come after to report.

In some countries, there has literally been a string of journalists murdered. Russia is a chilling example. The CPJ’s recent special report on Russia is called Anatomy of Injustice: The Unsolved Killings of Journalists in Russia. A video report of the background of these murders–17 murders in the past 9 years, only 1 of which has been solved–includes an interview with CPJ’s Nina Ognianova and Muzaffar Suleymanov as they discuss impunity in the murders of Russian journalists.

Anatomy of Injustice: Video Report

There should be protection for journalists who go about their jobs reporting the news and getting the stories for the public. There should be harsh punishment awaiting those who dare to murder journalists. And there should be no category on a blog or a website discussing the phenomena of journalists being murdered and their murders not being solved.

There is little in this world that I find more confounding than when Rupert Murdoch is portrayed as the last great hope for journalism. First of all, no single person should be allowed to own as many media as he does. There are a plethora of rationale for a statement like this, not the least of which is that being a good businessman with an international media empire doesn’t equate to being a champion of the free press. In fact, some could argue that it is quite the opposite.

Not satisfied with simply owning almost all of the print media in Australia, and  newspapers and broadcasting companies in the U.S. and the U.K., Murdoch is now toying with the idea of charging for online media content.

During an investor relations meeting on Aug. 5, Murdoch mentioned that good journalism costs money. This rationale might be feasible if coming from the mouth of a seasoned news editor trying to save their struggling city newspaper. But out of the mouth of the man who owns FOX, whose news reports and programming have been widely criticized for being horribly biased on the right, it seems flippant.

Yes, good journalism can cost time and money, but a great deal of outstanding work is done by intrepid reporters all over the world, under widely varying circumstances. For many of these reporters, the defining factors that ensure their quality of work fall under a few categories: 1) They are a hard-working, honest reporter 2)  They are backed and supported by a solid editor 3) They work for a media that believes in telling the truth. To say nothing of the many, many journalists out there who do excellent work for independent media or as freelancers and are making little to no money.

Money is necessary fuel to keep the engine of a news company running. But it certainly is not, never has been, and never will be the foundation of what makes good journalism.

The fact that the media itself, as in the case of the Examiner, are taking Murdoch’s little “dream” to save journalism and saying he is on some kind of a mission makes matters even more complicated. The Examiner and others might be right by saying Murdoch would be gambling to start charging for online content. There’s no guarantee that news consumers wouldn’t just go somewhere else that’s free. But that’s just business.

Murdoch’s motivation as a businessman and his interest in “saving journalism” should not be distorted to look like one and the same thing. Business is business. And journalism is journalism. It will survive and go on for as long as people are in the world and need information. No single person, not even the fabulously wealthy Rupert Murdoch, can control the ebb and flow of journalism. It is a force to be reckoned with, all on its own.

The past couple of days, there has been a frenzy of media coverage about the two jailed American journalists who were freed from North Korea. And rightly so. Rarely has such a dramatic set of circumstances come into play at the same time, then ended in a moral, political, and humanitarian coup. Yet the biggest victory of all could be what was won in the name of the free press.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s swift rescue of the jailed journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, carried the same hallmark style he’s always been known for. A smooth, cool statesman, who’s able to talk irrational dictators into releasing two American prisoners. According to a report from CNN, Clinton had a meeting with North Korean President Kim Jong Il, followed by a dinner that was twice as long. An interesting connection is that Clinton’s former vice president, Al Gore, is the founder of Current.TV, the media that Lee and Ling work for. They were doing a story about the trafficking of women along the Chinese-North Korean border early this year when they were arrested. In June, they were sentenced to 12 years in prison for crossing the border into North Korea.

Lee and Ling being set free goes far beyond a coup for American foreign policy. It goes right to the core of what is best about the American institute of the free press. It’s a demonstrable example of why in the past the press was called the “Fourth Estate”—a group other than the usual powers. American democracy thrives on the press being allowed to operate openly and freely and disseminate information. But support from high-profile individuals and the government are key in keeping the press secure for present and future generations.

What Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and all those who worked hard behind the scenes to secure Lee and Ling’s release did was more than rescue two Americans who were basically being held captive. They made a stand for the right of journalists to do their jobs. Sometimes that means going to dangerous locales. Sometimes it means getting so close to the story that personal safety is risked. But that is why there are journalists. That is whey they are called “truth tellers”. Not everyone can be on the scene themselves, and journalists are needed to go there–wherever that might be–and bring the story back.

One can only hope that now that Euna Lee and Laura Ling are back on U.S. soil, they will use their skills as journalists to tell the story of what really happened to them in North Korea.

The recent flurry of media coverage on a town in the West Bank called Nablus has a definite positive ring to it. Things are changing for the better there, in an area that has been described by the media as a “former ghost town.” It is also described as a “former militant strong hold”.

Most heavily emphasized among positive changes are the economic advances made in Nablus. They have their first movie theater in 20 years, just set a new Guiness record for the world’s largest pastry, the choking of Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints is easing, and law and order after years of trauma and chaos. It seems all is well in the world of Nablus.

But look a bit more closely, and there’s a problem with all the adulation about the dawn of a new economic era in the West Bank. An article that ran on the front page of The New York Times, “Signs of Hope Emerge in the West Bank” is laced with subtle suggestion that the West Bank is easily understood by outsiders. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just the lead photo on the article alone shows a deliberate attempt to paint a picture that is easy for Americans to relate to: young women with short sleeves, tight jeans, and uncovered hair at the movie box office. About 1 percent of the women in Nablus would dare to walk around dressed in such a way and with their hair uncovered. They are stylish, but extremely demure and are typically covered from head to foot. Is The New York Times and the media in general trying to say that becoming like the west is equal to recovering from war and economic trauma?

Although economic recovery in Nablus–albeit slow–has become somewhat of a bright spot in the West Bank, it’s curious that so much media coverage that is so positive is coinciding with the recent calls from the U.S. for Israel to halt Jewish settlements in the area. In fact, there have been two days of violence against Palestinians near Nablus after Israeli authorities evacuated some illegal Jewish settlements. The Jewish settlers burned and cut down scores of Palestinian olive trees in retaliation, a practice known as a “price tag.”

Coverage of the West Bank is a case in point of why any reader of the news should be cautious discerning about what they read and believe. Readers rely on reporters to be discerning and honest in what they write. And they rely on the media to not distort the final article with misleading photos and information.

To find the real story on the West Bank and Nablus, don’t rely on any one media source, even if it is one you consider highly reliable. There’s no telling when a story could be wrong, even if its printed in a newspaper.

North Korea officials sentenced American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling to 12 years of hard labor on Monday. The women were working for Current TV along the China-North Korea border when they were taken by North Korean government officials. They have been in jail since March.

Numerous journalist advocacy organizations have called for their release, including Reporters Without Borders and the International Women’s Media Foundation and Amnesty International.

According to a statement from Reporters Without Borders:

“These 12-year sentences are a terrible shock for all those who have repeatedly insisted on their innocence,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The sentences are much more severe than anything we had imagined. The authorities in Pyongyang must urgently reverse this decision and allow Ling and Lee to rejoin their families.”

The sentences were clearly designed to scare journalists trying to do investigative reporting in the border area between China and North Korea, which is ranked as Asia’s worst country in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.”

Last week, award-winning journalist Amira Hass was arrested after returning from four months of reporting in the Palestinian Authority. Hass, who reports for Ha’aretz newspaper, was not held long after being arrested, but her case highlights a major problem for journalists in the region: access. Or lack of. It’s illegal for Israeli journalists to go to the Palestinian Authority areas to do their jobs.

According to a release from Reporters Without Borders on Hass’s case:

Reporters Without Borders condemns Israeli newspaper reporter Amira Hass’s arrest at the Erez border crossing yesterday as she returned to Israel after spending four months in the Gaza Strip reporting for the Tel Aviv-based daily Haaretz in violation of a military ban on Israeli citizens visiting the Palestinian Territories.

“Her arrest is disturbing,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Hass clearly violated Israeli law by residing in the Gaza Strip for four months, but Israel’s blanket ban on Israeli citizens entering the occupied Palestinian Territories obstructs the work of its journalists and violates press freedom.”

Hass told Reporters Without Borders that the Israeli police arrested her at about 4 p.m. yesterday as she was leaving the Gaza Strip on a charge of “illegally entering enemy state.” With her lawyer and the newspaper’s deputy editor present, she was questioned for three hours but limited her answers to confirming her identity.

She said she was finally released on condition that she would not try to reenter the Gaza Strip by any means or route. But she added that “the ban is only valid for 30 days.”

Hass entered the Gaza Strip by the southern Rafah border crossing at her newspaper’s request four months ago and wrote many stories about the impact of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead (from 27 December to 18 January) on the territory’s population.

The question remains of how the people of Israel can gain access to news about their neighbors—their lives are intertwined on some level. Hass’s case is only the most recent chapter in an ongoing struggle for press access in the region.

U.S. President Barack Obama reversed a significant decision this past week. He decided to go back on his promise to release photographs of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan that were taken a few years ago. The popular sentiment among the more conservative-minded might be that Obama is well within his right as Commander-in-Chief to do what he considers in the interest of national security. On the surface this does appear to be a sound argument for the reversed decision.

But dig a little deeper, and the logic that national security and our troops are being protected by thwarting the publication of said photos is actually a hairline crack in the foundation of free speech. And it’s the type of decision that can weaken a democracy.

In 1798, Thomas Jefferson said:

“One of the amendments to the Constitution… expressly declares that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,’ thereby guarding in the same sentence and under the same words, the freedom of religion, of speech, and of the press; insomuch that whatever violates either throws down the sanctuary which covers the others.”

The freedom to think, speak, and believe freely is a great source of strength for Americans. But it can also be a great challenge. We are given explicit protection to be free, but no explicit instructions how to use that freedom. Therein lies the genius of the founding fathers’ conclusion in the Declaration of Independence that government must draw it’s “just powers from the consent of the governed”. A consenting citizenry must be an informed citizenry, otherwise it will always be at odds over what exactly it is consenting to.

Photos of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, for this very reason, should be released. The world, not just Americans, learned in the worst way that what goes on overseas in dark prison cells in the name of the United States makes the citizens of the United States linked to those events by association. Abu Grahib. Guantanamo. Black sites in Europe. The world will never know the extent of suffering that has been inflicted, only the imagined possibilities based on pieces of the story.

During a press briefing in Washington on May 13, President Obama’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs made the basic point in the President’s argument to a fiesty press corps confounded by Obama’s decision.

Gibbs’s response, in part:

“The President believes that the existence of the photos themselves doesn’t actually add to the understanding that detainee abuse happened, was investigated, that actions were taken by those that did indeed or might have undertaken potential abuse of detainees, and that those cases were all dating back to finishing in 2004. The President doesn’t believe the release of photos surrounding that investigation does anything to illuminate the existence of that investigation, only to provide some portion of sensationalism.”

One reporter responded with the essential rebuttal:

“But, Robert, is that really his role to decide whether or not it illuminates?”

Beyond the borders of the United States, there is an entire world that might also be interested in seeing these photographs. Whether they would try to use them for harm is impossible to know. Whether people within the borders of the U.S. might use them as political ammunition is also impossible to know.The media doesn’t always get it right, but fear of “sensationalism” is no excuse for the federal government to reach for a muzzle.

That reporter in the White House press briefing had it right–it is not President Obama’s role to decide whether or not the photographs illuminate the story. In fact, woe to the politician who treads on the public’s access to information. In a story like this, where the interests of how human beings were treated in the name of the United States is at stake, the photos will likely surface one way or another. The wise choice for politicians, president or otherwise, is to not stand in the way of that certainty and the public’s right to know.

The crisis in western Pakistan has heavily dominated the news in the past week, and rightly so. But there’s a huge hole in the story–the media is not allowed to go to the wild Swat Valley region where much of this story is happening.

So, the media and people paying attention to this important story have been forced to rely on two major sources of information: the United Nations and the Pakistani government.

It’s hard to decide what the worst part of this scenario is–either that it’s  close to impossible for journalists to independently verify the facts, or that the international media is becoming the defacto mouthpieces for the Pakistani government and the UN.

The UN’s slant is heavy-handed on refugee numbers, death, and the situation of civilians who have escaped the violence in Swat but are living on the edge of survival. The Pakistani government’s verbage (repeated by the media) is swaggering, kitchy, and sometimes downright bizarre, and there’s a heavy slant on military successes and the toll of militants killed.

Case in point is a story yesterday by the French newswire AFP:

“Ground forces shelled strongholds in the Swat valley, where around 4,000 Taliban are believed to be battling for control of the former ski resort in the northwest, once popular with Westerners but now devastated by violence.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said more than 700 militants had been killed in the northwest region as the military announced Monday that 52 “miscreants” died in exchanges of fire over the last 24 hours in Swat.”

Journalists, particularly foreign correspondents, are used to being in the middle of dangerous situations. That’s their job–to be on the scene and report back what they are seeing firsthand. The situation in the Swat Valley is extraordinarly dangerous, and the region is often called “lawless” under normal circumstances. Swat, and the rather porous border region it shares with Afghanistan, is considered by some to be a haven for the Taliban. But that’ shouldn’t be accepted as a reason to bar journalists from going there to report the news.

Part of the story here could be that the Pakistani government is basically controlling the spin on the action side, and the UN is controlling the spin on the humanitarian crisis side. All we can know for certain is that until journalists are given more access, the public will be only getting a small piece of the picture.

A recent analysis of China’s media censorship practices deftly analyzes and explains the country’s system of repression and control of the media by using the threat of economically punishment.

The piece, published on May 2 in the Far Eastern Economic Review, is aptly titled “China’s Commercialization of Censorship“. The piece not only explains how China is perfecting the dark art of controlling what can and cannot be said in the public trust of the media. It also demonstrates how the country’s controlling force–the Chinese Communist Party–is setting an example of repression for export:

“More ominously, Beijing’s controlling approach to media, particularly of the internet, appears to be gaining traction beyond China’s borders. In December 2008, Vietnam’s government issued regulations holding ISPs responsible for ensuring that blogs they host do not include content deemed “undesirable.” Cambodia’s Ministry of Information is reportedly preparing a law that would extend traditional media controls to audio-visual online content, a regulatory path similar to that of its counterpart further up the Mekong. China is already believed to share censorship technology and know-how with a number of governments in the region.”

According to the authors of the article, the illusion of a free press inside China is a relative house of cards, especially for those few domestic journalists and media organizations willing to take the risk of publishing reports that expose corruption. A case in point is the severe punishment the business publication Caigong Shibao suffered after going public with an investigative report that exposed suspicious cash-transfers at a branch of the state-run Agricultural Bank of China. The publication, and dozens of its staff members, paid dearly for simply doing their jobs:

“The report was quickly deemed by officials to have violated several media regulations and eventually led to the publication being temporarily shut down for “internal reorganization” [for 3 months]. The suspension of Caijing’s operations led to the dismissal of 70 staff and sent a clear message to other would-be, independent-minded news enterprises: push editorial limits at your economic peril.”

It’s alarming that a country as precipitously on the forefront of international affairs as China would even have “media regulations” to impose upon members of the press. And it’s doubly-alarming that China’s communist party has the power to eliminate the jobs of 70 members of the media. The FEER piece is absolutely spot-on in it’s assessment that suspending Caijing’s operations and firing so many of its staff was intended as a “clear message” to the surviving journalists who might hope to publish other stories about the widespread corruption in China. According to the FEER’s take on the situation:

“In this pseudo-commercial environment a news company’s success or failure rests on its ability to meet government censorship demands, rather than on the quality of its products or services. In the current economic climate, the vulnerability of private enterprises is likely to grow. As their profit margins shrink, so too does their ability to withstand political pressure.”

A threat like this is more than a dark cloud over the journalism community. It’s a sad state of affairs for those who consume the news produced in such a tightly-controlled environment. If they cannot consume news about the truth of the situation, what are they being left with? Information filtered, controlled and crafted by the communist party? How are they to know the difference, then, about what is true and what is not?

The final nail in the coffin of free speech has been the tight grip the Chinese Communist Party keeps on the Internet. At highest risk? News and information of “political consequence”. According to the article:

“In addition to employing “low-tech” means of repression, such as some of the world’s longest prison terms for “cyberdissidents,” the Chinese authorities have been at the forefront of a growing trend toward “outsourcing” censorship and monitoring tasks to private companies. As scholar Rebecca MacKinnon notes, “the process of web site censorship by which domestically hosted content [in China] is deleted completely or prevented from being published in the first place … is carried out almost entirely by Internet company employees, not by ‘Internet police’ or other government officials.”"

World Press Freedom Day was just celebrated–or mourned–by journsalists, non-profits, and governments around the world. The passing of the day, and events that drew attention to freedom of the press violations and suppression globally, highlights the fact that China is not the only country seriously threatening freedom of speech within its borders and beyond. But considering the high importance politicians, businessmen, scholars and others have placed on China’s place in the world (particularly in the future), it should occupy a special place of concern.