Indian policemen escort political cartoonist Aseem Trivedi, as they leave a court in Mumbai.Rafiq Maqbool/The Associated Press
It is not something Western journalism schools teach.
How to run from bullets. How to endure being locked up for months (and sometimes years) in jail. How to face being accused of terrorism or sedition for doing your job.
In India, a cartoonist is in jail on sedition charges for drawing Parliament as a fly-infested bathroom – a way of pointing to political corruption. (Curiously, a precedent-setting libel case in Canada involved a cartoon of a premier pulling the wings off a fly. It was ruled fair comment.) Cartoonists "cannot make national symbols the object of their cartoon," the government's Information and Broadcasting Minister said.
Why on Earth not? Is India's Parliament beyond critique, like the Prophet Mohammed in some Islamic societies? Governments that create no-go zones for journalists are not protecting their country. They're protecting themselves. They're perpetuating the corrupting effects of power by making those effects difficult to talk about. A democracy that does such a thing discredits itself. (No journalism school could teach students how to utter such quotes. Only being tossed in jail can do that.)
In Turkey – another democracy – as many as 100 journalists are in jail on charges of supporting Kurdish terrorism. But reporters who are apparently just doing their job are at risk under terrorism laws. A journalist who reported on sexual harassment at Turkish Airlines was charged with "denigrating the state." Forty-six journalists went on trial last week, of whom all but eight have been in jail since last December. There is "no difference between the bullets fired [by terrorists in southeast Turkey] and the articles written in Ankara," the Interior Minister said. Not only is the pen now officially mightier than the sword, it is in some cases an illegal weapon.
In Eritrea – definitely not a democracy – the government shut down all independent newspapers 11 years ago, and jailed 10 journalists without charge, of whom seven have reportedly died in custody. One Eritrean-Canadian journalist, Aaron Berhane, visited this newspaper's editorial board, and described running "faster than an antelope" and ducking behind fig trees as state agents shot at him as he fled the country.
A truly global journalism program would include a course in obstacles unimaginable in the West, a reminder of how necessary freedom of speech is, and how important it remains to keep fighting for it.