Assaults on Journalists, Assaults on Journalism had all of the elements that CEU students have come to expect from an event organized by the CEU School of Public Policy and its Center for Media, Data and Society – opening remarks by the CEU President and Rector, a diverse panel of accomplished experts, a meet-and-greet reception, followed by a short film and discussion.
The CEU President and Rector, Michael Ignatieff, opened the event by sharing a story of how bullets came his way, on two separate occasions, during his professional stint as a journalist. Threats against journalists are real. Ignatieff lamented that tacit idea of a journalistic space, a protected space for journalists to work and report, is at risk of collapsing.
During the discussion moderated by Valerie Hopkins, South-East Europe Correspondent for the Financial Times, Carlos Lauría, a panelist from the Free and Safe Journalism portfolio of the Open Society Foundations Program on Independent Journalism, reinforced our sense of urgency by reminding us that on average two journalists a week have been killed between 2010 and 2018. According to Sejal Parmar, Assistant Professor of Law at the Department of Legal Studies and a Core Faculty Member at CMDS, the manifestation of populism can be connected to the dramatic increase of attacks.
Peter Bárdy, Editor-in-chief of Aktuality.sk in Slovakia, mourns the death of a murdered colleague, Ján Kuciak, and Marius Dragomir, the Director of the Center for Media, Data, and Society at CEU, warns us of the danger posed by the state capture of a free media, a process whereby the state begins to limit the freedom of the media.
Jodie DeJonge, a panelist from the Organized Crime and Corruption Project, gives us reasons for hope and strategies for moving forward. She urged her fellow journalists to finish the investigative work of colleagues who have fallen victim to violence to demonstrate that journalists will not be intimidated by threats and assaults. She encourages the younger generation of aspiring journalists and policy makers to have the courage to stand up and report on critical issues.
After the meet-and-greet reception, the conversation shifted towards assaults on female journalists in countries across the world. A screening of A Dark Place, a documentary on the stories of women journalists as well as experts on gender and media, was followed by a Q&A with Jennifer Adams, the Media Freedom Project Officer at OSCE.
The event concluded with a collective sense by everyone in the audience that journalism is worth urgently standing up for.