Media is now less impartial, conflict conference is told

MANY REPORTERS have moved from being “detached chroniclers of events to active combatants on the information front line”, according to the EU’s Middle East envoy Marc Otte.

At a conference in Dublin yesterday on the media and conflict, Mr Otte said the mass media had become less impartial.

“Commercialisation is a big reason,” he said, “so that most media pamper to the biggest audiences, airing their ideological views and disregarding old-fashioned” journalistic values.

He wondered if it was a choice for journalists of “being embedded being targeted or being excluded”.

Mr Otte said journalists had become targets during the Iraq war and insurgencies.

In other regions, governments accuse reporters of bias about the “impact of their military security operations so sometimes accidents happen. Missiles misfire, visas are refused, prison sentences are imposed and blackmail” is used, Mr Otte added.

According to the press freedom barometer Reporters without Borders, so far in 2010, 26 journalists have been killed, 155 journalists have been imprisoned and 113 bloggers and “net citizens” have been jailed.

In an address to the conference, organised through the European Commission, Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin said attacks on journalists “are an intolerable affront to the rule of law”.

He said he would place the freedom of the media at the centre of Ireland’s chairmanship of the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) in 2012.

Referring to the Middle East conflict, the Minster said it “has demanded the attention of ministers and editors around the world for over half a century now. In a way, this longevity has become part of the problem. The conflict is both too familiar and too little understood, urgent and yet too often forgotten”.

Ireland continued to have a strong commitment to assist in the resolution of the conflict and Mr Martin said he agreed with the US’s Middle East envoy George Mitchell that “all conflicts made by man can be resolved by man”.

During a question-and-answer session, an Israeli journalist said that Mr Martin, when referring to victims of the conflict, had failed to mention the Israeli schoolchild sitting in the rubble of his school.

“This to my mind portrays the problem Ireland has in the Israeli imagination,” the journalist said. “I’m not sure Ireland would be considered an honest broker in the Middle East.”

Mr Martin replied: “I would not accept in that we are not honest brokers. We are. Perhaps we come at it from a different perspective because of our experience in Northern Ireland.”

He said the Government had “consistently condemned atrocities on all sides” in the Middle East conflict.

During discussion on the impact of the media in a conflict, journalist, author and Basque specialist Paddy Woodworth said that on balance in the Basque conflict, the media had hindered rather than helped.

Mr Woodworth described the Spanish media as highly polarised, highly opinionated and said it “does not engage with opposing opinions”.