Press freedom can also deliver horror, which makes it all the more precious | World news | The GuardianPress freedom can also deliver horror, which makes it all the more precious | World news | The Guardian










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Charlie Hebdo attack


Peter Preston on press and broadcasting



Press freedom can also deliver horror, which makes it all the more precious


Peter Preston








Charlie Hebdo is part of a very French tradition of biting satire, but the massacre in Paris has seen countries across the world embrace anew the importance of a free press














Demonstration in Place de la Republique, Paris, the evening after the Charlie Hebdo attack. Photograph: Nigel Dickinson/Polaris/Eyevine





Sunday 11 January 2015 04.05 EST







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The standard mantra begins: “Of course I’m in favour of press freedom, BUT… ” And you always mind the “but”. You watch for the qualifications and thus for some separate, limiting agenda. Yet the fascinating thing, this Charlie Hebdo time around, is that there are no “buts”, no caveats, no excuses, no ritual citing of codes and reservations. It is deemed absolutely right to hold the prophet (or anyone else) up for ridicule. It is absolutely wrong to threaten journalists with violence in return. As for killing a dozen cartoonists, writers, visitors and police at their editorial offices, who can possibly excuse such berserk vileness? Press freedom is under manifest threat. Crowds around the world demonstrate their grief and resolve. Politicians, priests and editors march together down Charlie’s freedom road.
Count the absence of “buts”, then, as affirmation, as a question of principle. And if there’s principle here, there’s also the clear Gallic logic of right and wrong. It is wrong to kill journalists because of what they write or draw. It was therefore wrong for a local group that calls itself al-Qaida to kill Khalid Mohammed al Washali, a Yemeni TV reporter, on a road outside Sana’a just one week ago. It was wrong to see cameraman Zubair Hatami assassinated by bomb blast in Kabul a few days before.
It was wrong, wrong, wrong a hundred times over through a hundred murders in 2014. At least 38 journalists died in the Middle East last year: 18 of them in Syria. Six Palestinians perished in Gaza. Range further east – to six dead Pakistani correspondents, six dead Afghans, four dead Bangladeshis – and something else is absolutely evident. This is not some inchoate “war” of Muslims against those who clutch the pen of truth. Here are Muslims dying, in chilling numbers, to hold that pen, to expose brutality, crime, corruption and the rest.
Press freedom knows no bounds and has no religion. Press freedom is your right to be informed, educated, entertained, stirred to laughter or action. Press freedom is every society’s safety valve. The context of the Charlie Hebdo massacre makes that point in the most desolate way possible.
This does not mean, naturally, that journalism in every society is the same, rattling identical cages. Take the most obvious difference. France is an insistently secular state. “If we say to religion ‘You are untouchable’ then we’re fucked,” according to Gérard Briard, Charlie’s surviving editor-in-chief. Cartoons of the prophet naked or the pope holding a condom and proclaiming “This is my body” are prime targets for Charlie artists week after week. It is serious, acrid stuff – images that do far more than spit in the whimsical, Oxbridge British tradition (which mostly wouldn’t bother with religion much anyway, because C of E-ness doesn’t shift many copies on newsstands).
There’s even a specific French name for it – gouaille. Arthur Goldhammer, the brilliant Harvard-based translator explained to al-Jazeera and Vox: “It’s an anarchic, populist form of obscenity that aims to cut down anything that would erect itself as venerable, sacred or powerful.”
So does this, on examination, represent the absolutism of press freedom the crowds muster to defend? Yes, as a concept and a creed. Freedom in a defined cultural context; freedom that makes sense within traditional borders and traditional terms of reference. It doesn’t travel naturally to bookstalls in Manchester or Miami, but that’s not the point.
Charlie Hebdo and a whole tradition of scabrous satire are part of France, part of the French definition of freedom – and part of the bill of goods foreigners who settle there sign up for. In short, it isn’t the cartoons themselves, taken one by one, that count; nor is it their differing capacity to shock as you travel from nation to nation. It is what they mean for France; and for what this whole desperate episode means for press freedom every time a politician hastens to hymn it.
There is no absolute conformity here, but there is the sudden appearance of absolute solidarity, positioning free media at the heart of a free society. That’s why journalists across the globe have been so moved and so shaken by the tragedy in Rue Nicolas-Appert. Its scale seems to stun all of us. And the message we register and pass on in turn has the force of momentum at last.
We’re used in Great Britain to a press and a broadcasting apparatus bound by a thousand knots. Read the BBC Trust’s report on fairness and balance in religious/immigration reporting to see a society trying to be all things to all licence-fee payers. Watch for the first announcements from the Royal College of Second Thoughts. Wait for the claim that better regulation might make our world of ideas safer for all. Listen, inevitably, to the new boss of MI5 seeking fresh powers to bug, hack and intercept communications in order to protect his definition of a free society.
Of course there are tangles of ways, means and outcomes here. Of course the political agenda may soon flake as usual. Of course those journalists who die next week and next month – in Syria, Yemen, Pakistan – will find no justice as familiar impunity cloaks their killers. Of course attacks on newspaper offices – as the Belfast Herald plaintively remembered last week – don’t all have the same impact, or result. And of course attempts to conflate the fate of Stéphane Charbonnier and his staff into some new version of a holy war (against ragtag, deluded losers) is hugely overblown. But the fate and resilience of Charlie tells us something vital we were in danger of forgetting. Freedom isn’t always comforting. Freedom delivers horror as well as hope. But freedom – including press freedom – is something precious we instinctively hug close on one dire day, a day to remember. No buts. It matters.
■ Picture the scene in broadcast newsrooms last Wednesday morning. There’s been a horrible shooting in Paris. We need a volunteer – Huw, Mark, Emily, Jim? – to head over fast… Oh! They’ve all gone.



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