Recently I listened to the philosophy professor and member of the Swedish Academy, Åsa Wikforss, who is worried about the future of democracy. Her fear is based on the fact that more and more countries get regimes that want to restrict human rights. Totalitarian political leaders do not accept any opposition but try to silence it by any means.
Some days later I read an interview with Eliot Higgins, the founder of the journalist network Bellingcat, which has made fighting fake news and disinformation its main task. He believes that disinformation, without exaggeration, is a fundamental threat to democratic society.
Social media and smartphones in almost anybody’s hands has meant a shift. Previously, the information flow came from a newspaper or other media which was controlled by certain rules and ethics. Giving everyone access to widespread communication channels could be a democratic reform. But it is also a massive difference and not regulated in the same ways as communication in mass media used to be.
We are already in the middle of an information war. Troll factories in totalitarian states send out fake news and disinformation to give us a false worldview and discredit people and other states. We have to be very careful and critical of sources when we consume media. Who is the sender and why? It places high demands on both journalists and media consumers.
Free elections, freedom of speech and free press are the cornerstones of a democracy. And when they are threatened the democratic values are at stake. That’s one of the reasons why our Freedom of the Press Committee and its work are so important to IFAJ.
I once met a journalist who said that politics had nothing to do with her work since she was ”just” an agricultural journalist. I found that very strange. Even if IFAJ is a non-political organization and a reporter shall be objective in their work, agriculture and food production will never be non-political. On the contrary, it’s used as a means of power in many conflicts and even as a weapon to win wars.
This makes our work as agricultural journalists so important, but also hard. We have an essential mission to do. But we also have to be careful not to become messengers of false information and lies.
2024 has been called the Super Election Year. More than 50 countries will have elections this year, among them big democracies such as the USA, EU, India, Great Britain, Brazil and Mexico. But also countries where the election means very few, if any, choices, as in Russia.
This will be a test of how strong the democracy and democratic values are in the world. To me free journalism is one of the most important ways to maintain democracy and a free world. It puts a huge responsibilities on journalists’ shoulders. Even ours, though we are ”just” agricultural journalists.