Napa Valley Register
Posted: Thursday, August 4, 2011
Last spring we returned from Cambodia, where the idea of a free press is severely restricted by a regime that regularly intimidates reporters, editors, authors and critics. And I really mean “intimidate.”
Newspaper reporters are daily forced to file their stories — stories that simply report the facts of illegal activities by the government — under pseudonyms. Why? Because in a country that purports to have a free press, these newspapers are regularly sued for defamation by the government, editors are jailed for years by corrupt judges, and journalists who publish these reports are targeted for assassination.
It’s one of the reasons why Cambodia is still — 30 years after the Khmer Rouge — identified as the most corrupt government in Southeast Asia.
So it saddens me that I learned last week that a petition is now circulating to boycott the St. Helena Star. Why? Because recent articles and columns have pointed to the possible violation of the Brown Act by the City Council. The petition saddens me, but unfortunately does not surprise me.
Maybe people are upset by the reporting of these allegations. Or maybe the petition is a ploy to distract us from the real issues and to pressure the St. Helena Star from further reporting. It’s a very familiar — though truly paranoid — scenario for those of us who return from places like Cambodia. Intimidation. We don’t expect it, but is that what is going on here?
The issue should not be about the Star’s role in revealing the facts, or even opining that perhaps certain actions were ill-advised. That’s the purpose of a free press. The real issue should be, “How can the city leaders prevent this from recurring in the future?”
St. Helena is blessed to have a pretty good little newspaper with a staff of dedicated professional journalists. It’s a newspaper that really attempts to address what’s important to the community, and not merely entertain us with snippets of daily life.
It’s not that the Star was “looking for a fight”; instead, it was “looking out” for its readers and the citizens of St. Helena.
I applaud the role that the St. Helena Star has played in keeping tabs on the city’s actions — particularly those actions that have been performed behind closed doors. The law was designed to protect the citizenry from corruption. It’s a testament to how a newspaper — even a little newspaper like the Star — can monitor the workings of government for everyone’s benefit.
No one is saying that the City Council members are “bad guys.” They just made a mistake. Let’s not let it happen again.
So let the petitions fly. But if you want the reporting on this issue to stop, why not talk to a City Council member? Why blame the reporter or the editor? They’re just journalists doing their jobs.
And keep in mind that there’s a whole country where 80 percent of the people never have a chance to read a weekly newspaper because the government won’t fund an education policy that teaches people how to read; and where 98 percent of the newspapers are so intimidated that their journalists must cower before the “powers that be.”
Then let’s pause for a moment and say, “Thank you, St. Helena Star, for trying to keep us informed.”
That is, after all, the job of our little newspaper.
(Thomas M. Stockwell is a former editor-in-chief of five information technology magazines. He lives in St. Helena.)
No comments:
Post a Comment