Eric Newton
World Press Freedom Day
Washington, D.C.
May 2

Congratulations to the organizers of these World Press Freedom Day events, here in the United States for the first time, and for their theme of: “21^st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers.”

Knight Foundation has invested $100 million this past decade to advance freedom of expression. Many of our partners are here. The World Press Freedom map is produced by one, Freedom House, and shown to millions by another, the Newseum.

Over time that map has come to reflect the mess of humanity at its messiest. After the Cold War ends, it shows press freedom growing. But after the terrorism wars begin, it shows press freedom shrinking.

War ends, freedom grows; war begins, freedom shrinks.

So which way is it headed now?

Looking at the past, you’d have to say it would be forward — and backward.

In many ways, we are still racing down parallel paths.

Some of the possible futures are horrible. Imagine, for example, World War 3.0. I call it 3.0 because it would start in cyberspace, where 120 countries are currently considering cyber armies. Once it branches out with modern firepower, we can easily wreck the planet and kill billions. Not a very “free” scenario.

Or imagine lots of small wars. A Return of the Tribes. Our cyberspace cloud like a giant virtual brain at war with itself. Digital cocoons focus us on what we already believe. Social media breaks the news. Flash mobs rule. Attention deficit disorder thrives. We are “sort of free” but going nowhere.

Or maybe it will be the Rise of Authoritarian Capitalism. China wins. The corporation is the state. Dictators run our lives. They sterilize us to manage things. And we entertain ourselves to forget a world that is only “partly free.”

Or, hopefully, we create a Crowd-Sourced Planet. Personal expression explodes. Education is universal. We throw out the crooks and innovate to solve our problems. And in a peaceful and sustainable world, we are free.

A lot of arguments are about variations of these futures. So what will happen? We can’t say. And that’s what I want to talk about today: our cloudy crystal ball.

I know some of these futures sound like science fiction. But science is pushing us there. Our radar is fuzzy because in a new digital age of communication we haven’t changed enough the ways we measure and describe concepts like world press freedom.

We see violence and instability driving our traditional press freedom indicators downward, and digital revolution and popular uprisings pushing our hopes upward. If we can’t tell where freedom really stands, how can we help it grow?

Let’s start with violence. The 20^th Century was a century of war, they said, and the 21^st Century will be one of peace. That isn’t happening. Dozens of national wars, civil wars, drug wars: The World Bank labels 1.5 billion as prisoners of poverty and violence. As uprisings spread, so do attacks on journalists. A violent world is not a free world.

For centuries, freedom has crept forward during the lulls in the stops and starts of a very long war between open and closed societies. The real war is not so much of nations as of ideas, increasingly happening on battlefields without boundaries, a fluid and confusing fight in which leaders attack their own people and in which people, corporations and nations can abruptly change sides.

Cyberspace was built for a fight like this. And there it sits. Our militaries defend against cyber attacks every day. We may already be in World War 3.0, and just don’t know it.

Open and closed societies don’t even agree on what cyber war is. We say a cyber attack could be shutting down an electrical grid. They say it could be bringing in any kind of disruptive information, like a news story that they don’t like.

We call Google a digital miracle. They call it a cyber attack. David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer, reports that in 2002 only four governments censored the internet but 40 do it today.

Voice and facial recognition software, global positioning systems, all these things can be used by tyrants to track you down. They once tortured you to get your friends; now they want your password.

During these violent times, can America be at its generous best when making the case for freedom? It’s not an easy test. But we have to try: we need the moral high ground to show how freedom of expression underpins all human rights. We need to operate in a framework of freedom, exceptions strictly limited.

Our record is not what it could be. Student journalists, for example, are not well legally protected, nor are the increasing number of freelance and volunteer journalists, nor even all the full-time professionals.

Our own Secretary of State speaks eloquently on the “freedom to connect.” But then our Pentagon says military employees should not look at the Wikileaks web site. Or Apple goes after the blogger who leaked the iPhone stuff. Or teachers won’t let students use cells. Or the Rev. Jerry Falwell blocks a local news web site from his students.

Can you hear Stalin out there somewhere, applauding? He said ideas were more powerful than guns. He would not allow his enemies to have guns. Why would he leave them free to know and share ideas?

Stalin would face difficulty today in a world in which we can instantly share ideas. Like the sun, water and air, news today flows where it flows. But that doesn’t stop threatened nations from fighting back. They fight and traditional press freedom indicators fall.

Yet freedom may be growing even if our world press freedom map says it isn’t. Why? Because we tend to track human rights tragedies — journalists killed in Pakistan, Mexico and Iraq; jailings in Eritria, Burma, China and Iran. We track institutions. We watch former Soviet Union states recreate repression.

We track negatives. What about positives? There are now 5 billion cell phones on a planet of 7 billion. Where is that on our maps? You can hold a printing press in your hand, say what you want to whomever you want, times five billion. That’s some free expression.

Look at Egypt: as many as 82 million cell phones, depending on the source, for a nation of 80 million people. Suddenly, the whole digital media ecosystem is different. (Remember, news does not care how it flows. Like water, it takes the easiest path.) Someone might post a note on Facebook about a rally in the square, or tweet it, or call a friend, or text it, or blog it. Or people in the square might talk to each other (yes, that can be news). And people might watch it on satellite TV and share that on the Internet.

Our usual indicators show little freedom in traditional Egyptian media. But those measurements didn’t matter. The story was digital. Facebook mattered. The journalism on Al Jazeera mattered. Even Twitter mattered. People communicated. Theirs was a Digital Revolution, born of the new capacities of the digital age.

So we need a new calculation. Track the exploding capacity of the digital media ecosystem. Subtract the censorship and see where we are.

To do this, we need a real-time picture of where digital media is on the planet. Regulators should require global companies to tell us generally where the technology sits. Internet providers should tell us right away when service is blocked. Governments must tell us far more about cyber attacks.