Nothing is too firm in the arsenal of measures deployed against Russian aggression against Ukraine. Almost nothing. By going after the Russian-controlled media, Europe and indirectly Canada don’t seem to realize that they are shooting one of the main ideas that people are dying for in Kiev. A reckless fratricidal fire against a pillar of democracy, the one against which – precisely for this reason – the Russian power, its Belarusian and Chechen vassals or its Chinese friends tirelessly rage: the right to publicly disseminate its ideas.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
This is not to condone what Sputnik or RT News can do to the news. But if “we don’t like you here” and “you’re biased” were legitimate grounds for banning, Fox News might have cause for concern. Especially since in terms of toxicity, it is boxing in a different category than the Russian media, whose power of influence in the West seems derisory. It is true that Fox News does not depend on a state. Unlike Radio-Canada or, in the news export market, France 24 or BBC World News…
The freedom to inform is not only a founding idea, it is also a complicated idea. Reasons why it should only be touched with the delicacy of a watchmaker. In this area, there is nothing good to expect from an instinctive hammer blow, even if it relieves at the time.
Neither repugnance nor the conviction, in this case justified, of being on the right side seem to be sufficient reasons.
“No freedom for the enemies of freedom”, would have launched during the French Revolution the virtuous Saint-Just, relentlessly sending the “enemies” in question to the guillotine. Two centuries later, the same country turned the fetid fabrications of Holocaust deniers into criminal offences. It wasn’t the same thing at all, and yet it was: two hammer blows delivered with all the force of unshakeable certainty.
During the bloody conflict that tore the former Yugoslavia apart, bombing Serbian radio and television also seemed like a good idea to Western countries. When the dust settled, Amnesty International assessed things differently. According to its experts, the appropriate label was “war crime”: you don’t make a civilian media a military target because you don’t like what it says.
Could it be that it is forbidden to prohibit, as was claimed in the 1960s? It’s definitely not that simple. In Rwanda, the star presenters of Radio Télévision des Mille Collines freely called for the massacre of the Tutsi, providing on air the names and addresses of the “cockroaches” to be eradicated. The international punishment of the instigators came later. Much too late.
However extreme these examples are, they remind us that the path of democracies between censorship and impunity is delicate.
But unless they deny themselves, they have little more than a fragile point of reference: what is not prohibited in the interest of all by a circumspect law is authorized, other errors falling of civil proceedings.
The addition of the adjective “cautious” here could no doubt be debated (as was, conversely, the legitimacy of the law against Holocaust denial). But with or without this addendum, the call for the murder of a Tutsi or anyone else clearly cannot come under the freedom to inform. It is much less certain in the case of articles celebrating the views of Vladimir Putin.
It is difficult to assess the dangers that a democracy believes to escape by banning media whose sites do not mask their allegiance. But it’s easy to see what such a hammer blow can inflict on one of the principles that defines and protects it: the freedom to speak…even for “enemies of freedom”.