Foreword

Right now as the second wave of the Covid pandemic threatens to engulf South Asia, journalists remain in the thick of a viral storm that has enveloped their working and personal lives for more than a year now.

As they’ve tried to survive professionally amid the chaos of society, lives and careers disrupted, media workers in South Asia have also had to mount stiff resistance to hyper-reactive states hellbent on controlling the narrative in an out-of-control and unprecedented situation.

They’ve been sacked, silenced, hounded, arrested, sickened from the virus and penalised.

During this time, we witnessed a significant increase in the numbers of journalists jailed or detained for simply doing their job in most countries in the region and a massive spike in arrests, particularly in both India and Bangladesh.

This year’s South Asia Press Freedom Report, Truth in a Time of Contagion: The Viral Frontline, outlines the precarity of journalism in a time when good journalism and strong reporting is needed the most. 

This report goes inside the media reporting that has dominated the media industry’s existence and threatened its survival. 

It tells the story of journalists reporting from the frontlines without adequate protective equipment. It hears from journalists who exposed themselves to infection to tell stories of the suffering as frontline workers. It sheds light on how journalism as a craft has been impacted – by massive job losses, wage cuts and a massive migration of more news to digital platforms. 

It was a year when journalists were routinely targeted as being “anti-national” and “against national security” for their reporting, with government wielding laws of sedition and colonial era laws of epidemic control to curb dissent – and by default journalism that was critical of state approaches. 

As well as confronting pandemic, journalists in South Asia endured the economic fall-out of the societal clampdowns combined with digital disruption. This amounted to thousands of jobs lost, some temporarily but many permanently, non-payment of salaries, cuts to wages and deteriorating working conditions.

Despite all of this, journalists bravely stood together to denounce overzealous governments trying to put curbs on their profession and curtail their rights.

Unions organised support and critical personal protective equipment for members who had been failed by their employers and advocated for important labour rights and the safety of journalists.

Together, many journalist representative groups monitored, assessed and researched the impacts on the industry and the fallout. It was a year when women journalists were particularly targeted, in being pushed from the profession or silenced online through abuse. 

Sadly, in this period, too many in our network lost their lives – the IFJ tally of the figures from its affiliates put this at over 190 Covid-related deaths of media workers. But that is just the cases reported. We suspect the actual number to be even greater.

Outside Covid-19, were the other violations against the media which showed no sign of abating even under lockdowns. This included 27 lives extinguished in targeted attacks, one death in custody and more than 180 violations on journalists at work.

This year’s report features the views of our affiliates’ leaders to hear how they responded to this time of contagion, and we hear from individual journalists about their experiences and of journalism’s evolution as a result.

A year on from the “great confinement”, truth has never been so important. And neither has the media which continues to bravely fight for it.

Jane Worthington
Director
IFJ Asia-Pacific