Jordan's press law

A key part of Jordan's potential reform agenda is now on the table - a new press and publications law.  Reuters reports:

Jordan's press syndicate and newspaper publishers have launched a campaign to lobby lawmakers to speed up ratification of a new press law scrapping provisions setting jail terms for journalists.Independent politicians, media figures and newspaper editors began lobbying lawmakers this week to give priority in the new parliamentary session to approving an amendment, proposed last year, to the current law governing so-called press offenses.

Tareq Moumani, head of the Jordanian Press Association, said he was "hopeful" for the amendment's prospects after meeting with senior lawmakers, who pledged to speed parliamentary ratification of the change.

Advocates of the draft amendment say it will represent a milestone for press freedom by repealing an article that currently permits the jailing of journalists for up to three months for writing articles deemed "offensive or harmful" to the state.

Current legislation allows journalists to be imprisoned for a number of loosely defined offences, which include offending the king and royal family, showing contempt for religion or damaging national unity. Critics say the authorities have used press and publications laws to imprison journalists for dissident political views.

The current press law is not a good one.  Its revision would be a positive step.  As I've often argued, media freedoms should be seen as a leading component of democratic reforms, not as a side issue or an afterthought.  Without a free media, you won't likely see accountability or transparency, or a mobilized and informed public.

The real question is not whether the law should be revised, it's what the new law looks like:  is it less restrictive?  Does it do a better job of protecting journalists and guaranteeing press freedoms?  Well, we don't really know.   The Jordanian regime has passed a series of increasingly repressive amendments to the press law over the last decade, the weekly press with its tales of official corruption and sensationalist exposes and more diverse political opinion has been gutted, and stories of escalating intimidation of journalists are easy to come by.   With that decade of history, and with a government expressly focused on security, what are the prospects that the new press law will be more liberal than the last one, or even that it will meet the minimal hopes of democratic reformers?  It might, and I certainly don't want to prejudge it -  I'd like to see the details first. 

The institutional politics of all this is also a bit murky.  As the Jordanian blogger Khalaf points out, the National Agenda was supposed to be the framework for all of the coming reforms, but the Agenda has still not been made public so we don't know what it recommended.  Further, the proposed revisions to the state-run media have been made by the Higher Council for the Media - which the National Agenda Committee proposed scrapping. Here's his recap of the last year:

Back in March, 2005, Marwan Muasher stated that the government will establish a communications directorate within six months, in order to "coordinate" the transmission of information (i.e. keeping their stories straight). Later, in October, the NAC leaked that it is recommending the abolishment of the higher council for media, in favor of a new commission created by the merging of the audiovisual media commission and the press and publications department in order to "regulate the media". For good measure, they created a stir by suggesting that mandatory membership to the journalists' syndicate be abolished. A couple of weeks later, the higher council for media struck back, criticizing the NAC for not seriously addressing the problems of the official media and for "rehashing existing legislation using imprecise and ambiguous language". It went on to criticize the NAC for not presenting any justification for wanting to change anything. Of course, the press syndicate made a fuss about the mandatory membership thing.

Khalaf today also reports on an unsigned al-Ghad editorial which appeared in the print edition but not the on-line edition (thanks, Khalaf):

The commentary points out, in essence, that the problem with free media in Jordan is not the legal framework, but the intangibles related to the application of the law. Specifically, the author points out that what is needed is the "abolition of the numerous authorities [presumably including the mukhabarat and the press and publications department] that call the newspapers morning noon and night, preventing publication of certain news, and thus building a dam between people and information".

This is quite a statement, and one that should not be viewed lightly. On the face of things, the limit of freedom of the press is the sky. In reality, intimidation continues. I am sure that everybody suspects that this is the case, but for the editors of Al Ghad to be bold enough to print it is a breath of fresh air, and hopefully the start of real reform of the media....More editors need to speak out for this hope to become a reality.

Meanwhile, Samih al-Mayateh in al-Ghad points out in an important essay that no reforms of the Jordanian official media will work without addressing the real problem:  the existence of a state media.   Jordanian state has an extraordinary number of agencies responsible for the official media, and yet year after year official statements declare the official media to be in horrible shape.   The problem, Mayateh argues, lies in the way the government deals with the official media, and if that isn't changed then none of the other changes will really matter.  According to Mayateh, the official Jordanian media wasn't able to report on the Amman hotel bombings until an hour after the satellite television stations - presumably because it was waiting to be told what to say.  Changing directors or shuffling the institutions won't help.   Mayateh wants the government to simply abandon the very idea of having a 'state media'. 

I like Mayateh's proposal - a genuinely radical reform which would set Jordan apart both from many of its Arab peers and from its own past. In conjunction with a much more liberal press and publications law protecting journalists and their access to information, this kind of reform would do as much as anything else to promote genuine democratic reform and pluralism in Jordan.   It's exactly the kind of trend which I think the United States should be encouraging (and which the American state-run stations like al-Hurra and Sawa contradict).   

I know that there were some genuinely liberal minded people on the National Agenda Committee working on the media and political reform files.  It's a pity that the Agenda still hasn't been published - it sure would be nice to know if Mayateh's idea had been considered, and the grounds on which it was supported or rejected.  It would be great to see a serious public debate about the need for a state media, and to see if those institutions could be defended on their merits in today's information environment. 

Comments

[khalaf]

Hi Abu: Of course, you realize that none of this talk about restructuring is a serious attempt at reforming public media. Moreover, elimination of public media will never happen no matter what the merit of the proposal is. The public media is a source of patronage for all sorts of qualified and unqualified people, at all levels. Everybody knows that few people watch JTV, especially the news. Nobody has taken action to rectify this because JTV new isn't about drawing audiences in the first place.

Keep up the good work!

[the aardvark]

K - what do you think of Mustafa Hamarneh's efforts at JTV lately? Think things are any better?

[khalaf]

Abu: He got into an ugly turf war with Mohammad Saraireh, who was the director of JTV (Hamarneh was the chairman of the board). In the end, they were both forced out. Of course, in the government's eagerness to create cushy jobs for their freinds, the multitude of positions end up with overlapping authority. So, things are designed so that nobody can get anything done, which is the whole point.