Members of the press hold images of colleagues during a protest against the murder or disappearance of more than 140 journalists and photojournalists in Mexico since 2000, in front of the National Palace in Mexico City, on June 1, 2018.YURI CORTEZ/Getty Images
Katherine Corcoran is the former Associated Press bureau chief, Mexico and Central America, and author of In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, a Cover-Up and the True Cost of Silencing the Press.
When I tell people that I worked as a journalist in Mexico, they almost always ask, “Were you afraid?” Mexico has consistently been one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists since I first went to work there as the Associated Press bureau chief in 2010.
The number of killings were astonishing then – six, seven, 10 a year – in a democratic country not at war. And they have only grown worse. This year is on track to set a record, with at least 13 so far.
This scares me, but not for the reasons you might think. What I saw and lived as a journalist in Mexico made me fear not for myself, but for the free press in the rest of North America, where physical attacks, detentions and vitriol toward journalists are growing by the day.
The same sowing of fear and intimidation by the leaders, criminals and special interests in Mexico, an emerging democracy with weak rule of law, is now happening in Canada and the United States.
The press is corrupt. The press lies. The press is the enemy of the people.
We are a target at home in a way I have not seen in my many decades in the profession. The press has always been criticized, sometimes with good reason, and we need those critiques as an institution that exists to support democracy. We can always do better. But this new message is one of annihilation and control, a tactic designed to throw confusion on the truth.
We are nowhere near the situation found in Mexico. But we are on the same road, and must ask ourselves if that’s where we want to end up.
It’s not where Mexico wanted to end up. Mexicans worked hard to oust the one-party, authoritarian rule they lived under for the much of the 20th century, where the government controlled the press. Going along with the official message meant lucrative payoffs. Governments gave media big advertising contracts, and presidents were known to donate land and build homes for reporters in their favour. Journalists who dared to be independent were threatened, harassed and labelled “the enemy of the people” long before anyone had ever heard of Donald Trump. Journalist assassinations were rare, but so was truth.
As single-party rule gave way to democracy, the press too became more independent and critical. Not coincidentally, that’s when the attacks and killings started to climb. And when journalists got killed, the government was quick to label them as corrupt, liars colluding with drug cartels or other dark interests.
It was a successful tactic there, and it is working here as well.
With the rhetoric against the press come the attacks. In Canada, reporters have been harassed by protesters at marches against COVID-19 restrictions. Others have been barred or arrested for covering controversial police actions or protests against logging and pipelines.
In the United States, the Committee to Protect Journalists has started tracking attacks against the press at home for the first time after decades of advocacy for them around the world. They have recorded more that 1,600 attacks since 2017, including bomb scares, a mass shooting in the Annapolis Capital Gazette newsroom, and the fatal stabbing of investigative reporter Jeff German in Las Vegas. The disgruntled subject of Mr. German’s reporting is charged in the killing.
Journalists can become targets simply by identifying themselves and doing their jobs. Reporters in Canada and the U.S. are now given training on how to operate safely in their own countries.
We’re an easy target. But we are not the ultimate target. An attempt to control the press, to spread disinformation and sow doubt in the public is an attempt to control the message.
Whoever controls the message controls you.
That’s what I saw in Mexico that was so scary. When a journalist is killed, others often flee or practise self-censorship for their own protection. Some areas become zones of silence, where no one really knows what’s going on.
But it is not the journalists who ultimately suffer. In one state with a particularly high rate of journalist killings, Veracruz, the state government itself was running criminal enterprises and was allowed to do so with impunity. It terrorized the press, but ultimately its own people. Billions were stolen from the state treasury and thousands of people disappeared. Any journalist who tried to report on these phenomena found themselves in grave danger.
Citizens who tried calling police were threatened and harassed. People had to rely on rumours to know what was going on. There was no reputable voice that could tell them the truth.
A society without truth is a scary place to live.