What the Editors Council has not done

It is agreed that it ought not to be the job of a government to do anything that will militate against the freedom of the press. In a democracy, even a fledgling one, a free press is a reassurance to citizens that they are part of a society that cares or will care for them.

It is further agreed that those who wield political power in the state should not do or say anything that will look like harassment or intimidation of the press, or a part of it. It ought not to be the business of lawmakers to spend time castigating a newspaper on the floor of parliament. If there are grievances against a newspaper or any other medium, there are the proper legal or moral ways of going about expressing such grievances.

It is also agreed, since ours is not a totalitarian or latter-day Stalinist state, that it is beyond the jurisdiction of the police or other security agencies to raid newspaper offices and look for incriminating material that might or could be used to harass the management of the newspaper organizations. Belief in democracy and police searches of media establishments do not go together.

We are therefore in broad agreement with the opinions which have of late emerged from a meeting of the Editors Council. The members of the council feel they have complaints to air in public and they have gone ahead with an expression of those complaints.

But then comes the question of the degree, if at all, to which freedom of the media is actually under threat in Bangladesh at this point in time. The Editors Council has spoken of such threats, ostensibly in light of the government's ire in relation to a particular newspaper. The council has also made note of what it considers to be government interference in the choice of individuals who should or will be brought on television talk shows.

Let one go into the talk show issue first, briefly. Any citizen who has any interest in the direction in which the country is or appears to be headed will agree that those who have grave complaints about the manner in which the ruling party has been functioning in recent times are ubiquitous by their presence on the myriad talk shows beamed to the country all week. And these individuals, despite the absence of logic or truth in their statements on television, do not appear to have been forbidden from appearance on the talk shows. There could be exceptions, surely. Why must exceptions mesh in with the rule?

Let us leave it at that and move on. We as citizens are surely encouraged by the Editors Council taking a stand on the question of media freedom. But should the Editors Council not have been equally forthright about dealing with certain other issues of grave public concern? In the run-up to the general election of 5 January 2014, the Editors Council saw little reason to ask the opposition to engage with the ruling party on the ways and means by which a credible, and therefore, good election could be organized in the country. Its loud silence on the issue did not go unnoticed. But of course, there were newspaper editors and other journalists who did spend days and weeks asking the government to put off the election only because a significant opposition party was staying out of it. Perhaps these individuals did not realise – or did they? – that by calling for a deferment of the voting they were in truth pushing the country to a new phase of unconstitutional rule?

The Editors Council has never been worried about the provocation, the personal insults, the blatant disregard for truth peddled by the editor and management of the daily Amar Desh over a long stretch of time. Any respect for press freedom or for socially acceptable norms of behaviour should have pushed the Editors Council into issuing a public reprimand of the newspaper in question and, of course, its editor. The council stayed silent. But it did speak up sometime later, to ask that the editor of the newspaper, by then in detention, be freed. The Editors Council was perfectly within its rights to make that demand. But, look again, only when one of its own was in trouble did it rouse itself to action. The fact that all those earlier reports and commentaries in the newspaper were promoting political turmoil and wreaking communal frenzy was ignored. The Editors Council did not feel it necessary to meet and condemn the havoc let loose by the Hefazat-e-Islam in late 2013. It did not warn the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Jatiyo Party that their support for bigotry would set a dangerous precedent for the country.

In the nearly two months which have elapsed since Begum Khaleda Zia and her allies imposed a blockade and a series of hartals on the country, all of which have led to casualties and other disfigurements of democratic politics, the Editors Council has stayed quiet. It is worried about what it sees as government infringement of media freedom. It does not seem to be worried about the criminality which has arisen from the blockade and which has kept the nation hostage to political petulance. It has seen no reason at all to take the agitating opposition to task over its disturbing brand of politics.

When the Editors Council calls for a guarantee of all those rights which underpin the pluralistic political process, we as citizens cannot but be happy and, yes, grateful. Yet there is the clear and present need to remind ourselves that there are newspapers, and also newspaper editors whose tolerance of dissenting opinion is not much above that of the forces they now seek to upbraid for delinquent behavior. Opinion pieces critical of such areas as Grameen or its founder, civil society, or anti-corruption watchdogs have never found space in some of the newspapers whose editors happen to be on the Editors Council. Freedom of expression, did you say?

Life must be lived on a decidedly high plane of individual, professional or moral behavior. Any deviation – through pettiness, through hypocrisy, through selective modes of action and thought – can only undermine our attempt to reach for the skies. Certainly the government, any government, must not do anything that upsets our sensibilities. Equally certainly, the Editors Council must be sure that its cupboards are empty of skeletons before it takes upon itself the role of the oracle on Olympus.

For coverage on the 24 Feb, 2015 statement made by the Editors Council: English, Bangla.

For coverage on earlier statement made by the Editors Council on national broadcast policy.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist, current affairs commentator, and columnist.