Today marks the 30th World Press Freedom Day With that in mind, I thought today was a good day to reflect on what a free press means, and how that freedom is currently under attack.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the number of journalists at the beginning of this year that are imprisoned worldwide is at a 30 year high. Since that stat was calculated, you can add one more person since Wall Street Journal’s own Evan Gershkovich was detained. He has been wrongfully detained for about five weeks by the Russian government.
Gershkovich was on assignment and was arrested by the Russian Federal Security Service; the new KGB. He became the first journalist since the Cold War to be arrested and charged with espionage. As I would expect, the Journal has done a great job of telling Evan’s story, the grief his family, friends and colleagues are feeling and the fight to get him out of prison. While President Biden has come out and demanded Gershkovich’s release, that demand has fallen on deaf ears in Russia. It is not surprising, but none the less disappointing.
Even more disappointing to me is the lack of outcry from media outlets and the general public. Have we grown too weary of American’s being wrongfully imprisoned by foreign countries, especially the Russians? Women’s professional basketball star Brittney Griner was released on December 8 last year in a prison swap for a notorious Russian arms dealer, rather than she serve the nine year sentence she received for possession of a controlled substance. As a reminder, she plead guilty of this crime, saying she had no intent to break the law.
But she did break the law, and yet the outpouring from our government, celebrities, media outlets and the general public was amazing. Which is completely fine in my opinion and I’m not criticizing that. I’m not saying that she didn’t deserve the attention, didn’t deserve to be released, etc. That is a different debate to me, though I sometimes wonder about the priorities we have as a country.
What I am saying, and what I am very disappointed in is the lack of support for Evan Gershkovich. To the best of my knowledge, he was doing nothing except his job. He was (and is) a fully credentialed journalist covering Russia. He was arrested, and is now facing the same conditions and a longer sentence as Griner yet hardly a whisper about him by our governing officials, celebrities and media outlets.
I’ve had several conversations with people that I feel are reasonably well read and up on current events, and they knew nothing about this story. I could scroll up and down my social media feed right now and see nothing about Gershkovich chronicled there. Go back in time to late November and you’d have to have been under a rock to not know about the plight of an athlete that made a mistake and got arrested, pleaded guilty and was convicted of a crime.
The news media has done an especially poor job of telling this story. My friends in the media, still the largest single segment of my friends on social media, are not posting anything on their feeds demanding action from Russia and from our government to find a solution. If you felt so passionate about Griner that you posted on social media, called a politician, or wrote a story about her circumstances, then I think you own it to Evan – to a fellow journalist just trying to do his job. Join the Wall Street Journal in telling this story – a real life story about freedom of the press.
What a great way to celebrate World Press Freedom Day.
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