Freedom of Press is Good for Readers. Not for Journalists.

While going for the last round of email check before finally disconnecting from the world for a good sleep, yesterday I lost myself on a small surprise that I decided to share with Estonian Free Press readers today – hoping that it will somehow help us all to start a dialectic that the Estonia media world is chronically missing.

The email, sent by Anna Maria Galojan – feel free to think anything you want about her, it does not matter because today she acts as a medium,  a good one – brought straight to my inbox her latest column published by the Baltic Times, a column all dedicated to the importance of a free, independent press as support for well functioning democracies.

Criticizing some actions from the Estonian government that Anna Maria -  as many other colleagues – considers unfortunate for the establishment of a real free press in Estonia, her column touches some important issues that it would be shameful not examine more into detail.

Sources, Estonia, Europe

“One cannot legislate for a free press, only against it” says Galojan and I disagree if I try to see a picture that goes beyond the national borders.

I will not get into any verbal fight with Estonian authorities for the way they recently discussed the work of journalists considering imprisonment to be a legitimate measure to protect various kind of interests for two very simple reasons: I learned to be a journalist in a country where freedom and journalism are not well seen together and, even more important, I am a journalist myself.
Hence, I am not objective when I write about my own interests. I am not even supposed to be.

Still, moving from some specific decisions to something more general, something that cannot be identified with the name of Minister Lang nor with the symbol of a political party, then I think that “one should legislate for a free press” being its destiny deeply linked to a support only the elìte of a country can guarantee.

Legislating for a free press means guaranteeing this one with the right of existence, the right of being able to reach its public, the right of competing with the non-free one even if the disparity of means these two will have is destined to be immense.

Not legislating to save a free press, instead, is the greatest way to kill it- believe me. Only looking at the monster the lack of legislation created in Italy should be sufficient to understand it: if legislation does not save the free press, then free press is condemned to die. Or to sell itself to someone – which is almost like dyeing, just not in a very honorable way.

Is it all about money?

It could be, yes. And who feels like blaming anyone for that?

I quote Anna Maria once more because, in my opinion, she touches the point leaving it too rapidly  -as if after all it was not as important as it might seem: “It is also true that journalists fear for their jobs and are willing do what their editor wants (…)Journalists have families to protect and bills to pay and some agonize about selling their souls.”

I might be too young to teach anyone over this point but – considering the employers I had the chance to have and the amount of countries I had the chance to write from, I do not feel too ashamed trying having my say on what I consider being the key point of the whole discussion: money.

And I do it as I know mine is the point of whom tried to live the dream of journalism as a mission based on the freedom and independence Anna Maria talks about, colleagues whom then gave up on most of their ideal because – at the end of the month – it is always complicated to pay the heating and the water with bags of freedom.

I remember working in Greece with a f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c French photographer married with a reporter (what a couple!) and I still keep memories of our wine talks frustrated by the idea of not making it by the end of the month while the world around us seemed to go in a completely different direction.

As I remember the cuts on a solo reportage from Minsk with some clear statements as “or you change it or we don’t pay you” – something that many wine talks with many colleagues from BBC to less important media confirmed being if not usual, at least expectable.

Who puts the money?

You cannot ask everything to journalists, you cannot ask us to put the money or to give up on the idea of having an apartment and a life to enjoy also after work just because we have to be free. Just because YOU want to benefit of OUR freedom.
That is just not fair, believe me.

After being miserably free and fighting some of my idealistic battles against editors that, now I know, were not as bad as I thought at the time, I gave up. And, as once I said to a conference, I gave up also because of superficial readers expecting to have some 30pages magazines filled with interesting content every day. Every single f*****g day.
As if good stories grew on trees and took some 30 minutes to be written.

I gave up because I have seen a fantastic free press dyeing in a mud of debts the day someone decided not to renew grants vital to pay even just for electricity.

For how good he can be, even Soros cannot put the whole world on his shoulders and pay for everyone betting on something that – if you really want it to be free – is not even supposed to work thinking too much about generating those profits that, believe me, are the only real interest of investors.

And Estonian Free Press?

When I opened this magazine, I did it a bit because I believed in it and a lot because I needed to have and give the possibility to be free. But I also do not expect it to last much longer than many marriages in this country.

Because if we are free and independent – as we will be till the last article we will ever publish – we work in a way that is not even able to give us the money needed to pay our phone bill. Not mentioning computers, IT expenses, electricity and, why not, sometimes even a coffee.

Estonian Free Press is an experiment, a laboratory to make Estonia accessible to people out of Estonian and Russian language that also to get some young wannabe journalists and train them to understand (enjoy) what being independent means before some older and more serious editor will make them lose faith in journalism itself.

Funny, and here I conclude my reply hoping that someone else will choose to participate to the discussion, that this project is self financed with money coming with a kind of non-independent journalism that gives us the chance to even have an office in an exclusive place as Roosikrantsi 2.

A journalism that, until independent journalists won’t have something more concrete than glory and respect, will keep eating any kind of free press with its money.