Opinion: The tug-of-war over press freedom

Authoritarian regimes are united in tactics to suppress freedom of the press — but journalists banding together to circumvent these efforts offer hope, writes exiled journalist Can Dündar.

May 3 marks Press Freedom Day

The Berlin office where I now work resembles a political thermometer for the world. When I came here six years ago, fellow journalists heard a wealth of censorship stories from Turkey.

The young political cartoonist who had escaped from Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's regime in Egypt drew our attention to the military oppression in Cairo. In the fallout from the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis, our colleagues from Baku knocked on the door. Once the biggest newspaper in Hungary was closed down, we welcomed its editor-in-chief and compared notes.

As you might imagine, my neighbor these days is a pacifist Russian journalist. 

Can Dündar is an exiled Turkish journalist living in Germany

We had all been forced to leave our homelands because of our ideas and the reports we had filed. We were all determined to carry on working in exile. Us 'old hands,' those of us who had been here longer, told the newcomers what we learned about establishing media in exile.

Our dialogues revealed the woeful state of the freedom of the press: "Which report got you arrested?" "How long were you inside for?" "How did you manage to get out?" and "Do you think you'll ever go back?"

Next, we debated how to scale those towering walls of censorship so we could be heard back home; which alternative ways would help us reach our readers with our banned articles; and how to shake off the intelligence agents dogging our footsteps. 

Even the sight of an office filled with journalists from different countries is enough to flag up where freedoms are wounded. Just as we teach one another how to fight against censorship, autocrats across the world appear to copy from one another, too. They resort to similar methods to tighten their grip on power: First, slash the means of communication to silence the spoken and the written word. It is much easier to rule masses rendered deaf and mute, after all. 

A further change that happened in this period is a less welcome kind of communication: attacks on the press — hitherto assumed to be "a totalitarian habit specific to the darker corners of the world" — spread to the West, that bastion of freedom of expression, which had been a natural right until then.

In Washington, then-US President Donald Trump hurled abuse at the press and banned critical journalists from White House briefings. In London, whistleblower Julian Assange was arrested. And, in Paris, journalists taking photos or videos of yellow-vest protests were dragged to the ground.

Just like COVID-19, censorship was spreading like wildfire over borders, regions and regimes. Our Western colleagues used to ask us, "What can we do for you?" Suddenly, we were all asking one another, "What can we do together?"

And we realized that there was an awful lot we could do together. Escalating repression triggered not only a massive displacement of journalists, but also an opportunity: media in exile operating from Western capitals had exposed to European eyes those oppressive regimes —  and paved the way for international cooperation within media.

Given the global nature of the attack on freedom of thought, the response also needed to be global. Thus spread news reporting beyond borders.

Dictators may gang up so they can develop tactics to suppress opposition and freedom of the press; but now, we all collaborate in order to reveal their secret bank accounts, dirty war tricks, and nasty tactics such as tapping opponents' telephones or poisoning rivals. 

A global network of journalists grows by the day. The struggle to defend the freedom of the press and the freedom of information expands across the globe in defiance of growing repression and censorship. 

It may well be this tug-of-war that will determine the future of the world.

Can Dündar is a Turkish journalist and writer. He stepped down from his post in Turkey as the editor-in-chief of the daily Cumhuriyet in 2016, after he was jailed for three months and survived an assassination attempt. He was sentenced to 27 years' imprisonment in absentia due to his report on the Turkish Intelligence Service's involvement in Syria. Now living in Germany, he writes for Die Zeit and The Washington Post. He founded Özgürüz ("WeAreFree") Radio and #Özgürüz Publishing House while in exile. He has written 40 books.