Manna from the sky for foreign pseudo sympathizers of ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom of speech’ were recent events in Azerbaijan; brawl over a post in social media left a journalist battered, who eventually died in the hospital and ordinary court proceedings based on lawsuit, involving violations of several articles of the criminal code, against a correspondent of Radio Liberty.
They used this opportunity and launched black PR campaign against Azerbaijan, as if this was some sort of a competition. For them, Twitter and Facebook became convenient platforms where they could exercise their ‘skills’. They were so carried away, trying to display commitment to their ‘mission’ that all moral-ethical and legal boundaries were defied.
In light of the aforementioned, two incidents that happened in one week in two of the world’s most developed nations drew no attention whatsoever. Murder of two American journalists during live broadcast in the U.S. and arrest of two French journalists based on charges of blackmailing the King of Morocco went seemingly unnoticed.
This begs the question. Why do those who ‘bend over backwards’ trying to put to shame Azerbaijan over ordinary brawl that resulted in journalist’s death remain silent about gunning down of two journalists in front of live TV audience in U.S.? These incidents fall into the same category, do not they? Perhaps even greater responsibility belongs to law enforcement agencies in U.S. with that murder case. Far greater if compared to the gravity of the crime committed in Azerbaijan.
Similarly, a case of blackmail is classified as punishable crime by the very institutions that decry a case of a journalist, held accountable over libel charges, as something that violates freedom of speech. Is there fundamental difference between blackmail and libel? Is not blackmail a publicized form of libel? Blackmail is a threat to publish libelous materials, isn’t it? Isn’t there a chance that some of that information deemed libelous could be accurate? Then, why the beacon of freedom of expression – the West – prevented those materials from being published? Why not let those media representatives release materials available to them…
These two events shed light on the attacks against media in Europe. Investigations reveal that such cases are quite frequent. There were 931 journalist-related incidents in different categories registered in European Union and candidate nations in eight months of 2015 alone – 23 in UK, 55 in France, 60 in Germany, 28 in Spain, 6 in Portugal, 7 in Austria, 99 in Hungary and 73 in Italy.
As for the gravity of cases, seven of those were death-related, 126 involved physical violence, 80 resulted in imprisonment and 181 in censorship.[i]
Did anybody ever here champions for media freedom even mention these countries? What is the point of looking for speck in others’ eyes while ignoring the log in own eyes? Is not this manifestation of double standards at its finest?
Kaynak: Newtimes.az
