When the press is silenced, the corrupt smile

‘Nothing to see here’ is not just an innocent phrase´-or-a cold joke. It is an administrative order. It is said to people to make them look away. It is said to the press to make them keep quiet.
This week’s cover of the venerable Economist magazine does not scream. It extends a hand. An open palm. It carries nothing, yet it obscures everything. It is reminiscent of a police officer’s signal´-or-a corrupt politician’s palm saying: “Move on, don’t ask questions.”
The cover alone makes it clear that this is serious. Usually, the magazine puts economic maps, leaders’ faces´-or-stock market symbols on its cover, but this time it has decided to put a hand that obscures rather than an eye that sees. Against a black background, the hand is close to the reader’s eye, bordering on rudeness. But everything here is worth pausing over: the image, the phrase and the implicit acknowledgement that the world is entering a new era in which obscuring the truth is becoming the norm.
The British magazine neither discusses the mistakes of the press nor defends the angelic nature of journalists. It does something more dangerous: it links media suppression with rampant corruption. The more the press remains silent, the greater the spoils, and the greater the need to silence those who ask questions.
Rather than describing a passing scene in the world of news, the magazine declares the moral bankruptcy of an era that has long prided itself on transparency. Here, the hand is not just a visual detail, but a complete political statement. This is the moment when the press transforms from a window into a wall and from an eye to a raised hand that obstructs the view.
The Economist report behind this cover does not speak of a passing whim in the relationship between power and the press, but of a long period of deterioration. Since 2014, as the report reminds us, press freedom has been in decline globally, with independent journalism being crushed from a level resembling the remains of a free press to one closer to the Arab model, where the press is stifled before it can even begin. This decline is not just an indicator of human rights-;- as data from the V-Dem Institute for the Study of Democracy reveals, it is also a gateway to corruption. The more the press is stifled, the more corruption spreads and the more -dir-ty secrets politicians accumulate, and the greater their appetite to stifle any voice that might expose them.
The report’s equation is both harsh and simple. If press freedom moves from ‘good like Canada’ to ‘bad like Indonesia’, then corruption moves from ‘clean like Ireland’ to ‘-dir-ty like Latvia’. Any Arab reader can replace the names of the countries in these examples with their own, and the meaning will remain unchanged.
This is not a journalistic metaphor, but the result of calculations covering 180 countries. In this context, the press is not a democratic luxury, but an early warning system. When it is disabled, society only notices when it is engulfed by flames.
However, the most worrying aspect of reading The Economist is that repression is no longer confined to regimes that openly proclaim their tyranny-;- it has also become the favoured tool of “flawed democracies” and populist governments that hold elections while employing the tactics of closed, sectarian regimes. These governments do not need to shut down newspapers´-or-imprison journalists en masse-;- it is enough to create a media environment in which voters are bombarded with praise for the militia and the ruling party, while faint, intermittent and distorted whispers of opposition reach them only sporadically. If we want a vivid example that does not require lengthy research, Iraq is the perfect model.
How is this whisper created? With tools that Arab readers are familiar with. This is achieved by appointing loyal individuals to head editorial boards and public broadcasting, -dir-ecting state advertising to compliant newspapers and pressuring businessmen with state contracts to acquire independent platforms and remove their content. In contrast, institutions that insist on investigative journalism are besieged by malicious lawsuits and advertising boycotts until they become loss-making projects, gasping for oxygen.
The report also reminds us that individual journalists no longer face authority alone, but hordes of harassers and smearers. When smear campaigns are not enough, national security and ‘fake news’ laws are invoked to criminalise anything the government disapproves of. If these tools fail, other charges are fabricated, such as ‘financing terrorism,’ ‘money-laundering,’´-or-any other convenient label in the authorities’ dictionary.
Technology, which we were promised would be the saviour of freedom, is presented in the report as a double-edged sword. While it is true that anyone with a phone can film a police officer beating a protester and post the video online, the authorities can, in turn, cut off the internet, spy on journalists’ phones ‘as happens in Iran’,´-or-use privacy laws to protect politicians from accountability rather than to protect citizens from abuse. This is how digital platforms are transformed from open spaces into vast surveillance rooms where every move is monitored.
All of this is happening in a world that still has institutions, a judiciary and public opinion that can exert pressure and hold people to account. So what do this coverage and this report mean when viewed through an Arab lens?
In the Arab world, we do not need the V-Dem Institute data cited by the magazine to know that the relationship between press repression and the flourishing of corruption is not theoretical. Here, the story often begins where the West ends. The press is muzzled in advance, economically besieged´-or-turned into a propaganda appendage of the authorities. The hand raised on the cover of The Economist to say ‘Nothing worth seeing here’ is not a symbolic gesture to us-;- it is a familiar sight. It is the hand of the censor, the sectarian leader and the security officer-;- the hand of the complicit businessman-;- and the hand of a society that has learned to look the other way in order to survive.
In many of our countries, corrupt politicians do not require sophisticated techniques to control the media. It is enough to allow the market to operate under a ceiling of fear. A journalist who gets close to a real corruption case is not only prevented from publishing, but also from working, and their livelihood is threatened. They are also presented to public opinion as a ‘troublemaker’, ‘agent’´-or-‘subversive’. Thus, journalism is transformed from the fourth estate into a profession fraught with punishment and from a watchdog -function- into an activity perceived as a threat to security.
The difference between what The Economist describes and our own experience is not in the type of tools used, but in the degree of openness. In the West, the battle is still fought under the umbrella of institutions that can be held accountable, even if only after some time, and in the name of the law. Here in the Arab world, the battle is often fought outside of any such umbrella and without any illusion of independent institutions. There, a raised hand in the face of the reader is still considered a warning cry. Here, it is part of the daily scene and does not require a magazine cover to be seen.
Nevertheless, this report’s importance for the Arab reader does not lie in its providing a new de-script-ion of his suffering, but in its placing this suffering in a global context. The suppression of the press is not a ‘cultural peculiarity’, but part of a universal trajectory linking blindness and corruption, the stifling of questions and the accumulation of illicit wealth, and the raised hand on the cover and the hand reaching for public money in the dark.
Ultimately, readers may disagree with journalists and be angered by exaggerations´-or-errors, as The Economist itself acknowledges. They can cancel their sub-script-ion, file a defamation suit´-or-demand the resignation of a media executive. All of this is legitimate. However, it is neither legitimate nor innocent to prevent journalists from doing their job in the first place and convince society that ‘there is nothing worth seeing here.’ As the report concludes, a world with less press freedom will be more polluted and poorly managed. If the Arab world continues to build walls of blindness around itself, it will lose not only its press, but also its last mirror.

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