How is the state of health of the media in Bangladesh today? How free are we? Or are we in a straitjacket? With journalists regularly coming under onslaught from those who have wielded power and who use power to assert their dominance, can we be happy? These are serious questions. Nothing is flippant about them. Because it is on the state of the press that one judges the nature of a state, of a nation, of a society. The media, we have been reminded at every turn of the work we do as journalists, speak truth to power. Do they? Or do they falter at some point? Or are there those elements who hold power and arrogantly decide that it is their authority over the state that is all?

These are the queries which assume relevance as we observe yet one more anniversary of the arrival of Daily Sun in Bangladesh’s media landscape. We might begin by stating what to many might be obvious: the media in Bangladesh are today a free tribe of people, unencumbered by constraints of any sort. But you will then ask: is that true? Is journalism today operating at a stage where no one and nothing can touch it? If those are the queries you need to answer, then that earlier premise of the media being free gets a little frayed at the edges, indeed makes you wonder about the way the media have been conducting themselves, if at all, in recent years.

Let us take a step back in history. Let us begin with something that has more in relation to the past than to the present. Go back to the days of Pakistan, of its ubiquity of dictators and illegitimate rule. Back in 1968, as an embattled Ayub Khan regime went around carting leading politicians like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Khan Abdul Wali Khan off to prison (Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was already struggling against the illegitimate power of the state in the so-called Agartala conspiracy case), retired air marshal Asghar Khan in West Pakistan and Justice Syed Mahbub Murshed in East Pakistan decided to enter politics, albeit in opposition to the regime. News of their act was printed in near obscure manner, on the back pages of the newspapers. It was one of those times when the press was in fetters, fully and unambiguously.

The fetters of course took on an even more sinister colour when the Pakistan army went into action against Bengalis in March 1971. Correspondents of newspapers published abroad were barred from working in occupied Bangladesh; and the local media were of course in no position to speak of the killings and the arson the state of Pakistan had let loose on an unarmed population. Newsmen like MB Naqvi and Anthony Mascarenhas, along with others, were taken on supervised tours of a desolate Bangladesh and asked to report on the normalcy that was coming to ‘East Pakistan’. Naqvi complied. Mascarenhas made his way out of Pakistan and revealed the truth in London’s Sunday Times.

But, of course, we have come a long way from those terrible days of suffocation. On the lighter side, we can take comfort from the fact that in these days of journalism there are no media people making a beeline to be part of the government, that journalists are quite content to be men and women of dignity than be individuals ready and willing to serve the powers that be. In the Ayub era, the editor of Pakistan’s leading English language newspaper cheerfully joined the government as a minister. In similar fashion, the editor of the pre-eminent Bengali language daily in Bangladesh saw hardly anything that was wrong when he agreed to be one of the ministers serving the general. Those are images you will not see today. And you will likely heave a sigh of relief.

But, then, there are all the other complexities that have in our times undermined and indeed demeaned the media here in Bangladesh. Extremists in the south-west of the country have felt little compunction in murdering newsmen. Politicians in the two major political parties have happily had their goons pounce on journalists, who have ended up badly bruised or have gone on the run with their families. Some years ago, a deputy commissioner ordered the officer in charge of a police station to take a local journalist into police custody because the journalist had committed the perfidy of reporting on the bureaucrat’s bizarre behaviour during a school inspection.

An unexpected blow to media freedom came in early 1975 when, against a background of the passage of the Fourth Amendment to the constitution, only four newspapers, two each in English and Bengali, were decreed for the country. In subsequent times, matters were not helped much. The Zia period remains notorious for the severe, Pakistan-like censorship under which the press was compelled to operate in Bangladesh in the six years between 1975 and 1981. And under the Ershad dispensation, it was not so much censorship as it was the euphemistically defined ‘advice’ that forced newspapers to tread the lines set for them by the government.

In the end, though, ‘advice’ did not help the regime to survive. It fell flat on its face. And beginning in December 1990, the media, all said and done, all taken into consideration, relished their new-found liberty. But, here is a caveat: in recent times, the frenzy with which certain outlets have gone into disseminating falsehood (one propaganda sheet masquerading as a newspaper came forth with a sinister presentation of the change of the gilaaf at Kaaba as a demonstration in favour of a convicted war criminal in Bangladesh) have quite undermined the integrity of the journalist community. Such so-called newspapers have committed the sin of tarring the nation’s respected individuals with its brush of venom and vilification.

In an era where people have a ubiquity of newspapers and a surfeit of private television channels, one wonders about the quality of media performance. There are two ways of stepping into this minefield. The first is a reminder of the old assumption that whoever was unable to land a decent, well-paying, respectable job either in government or in the private sector turned to journalism as a means to a livelihood. The second, which is truer of the times we inhabit, relates to those young men and women, like those we see here today, specifically acquiring an education in journalism and media communication before graduating to careers in diverse regions of the media. If the first was an instance of journalism taking shape as the journalist goes along, the second has become a question of the degree to which the young are equipped, through knowledge of history and politics, to tackle the many issues that arise from day to day.

And then there is that vexing question of political partisanship that assails journalists in Bangladesh today. In a country where factions define politics, it is but natural that tribalism will come to encompass larger regions of life. And that, tragically, is true of journalism. Media people, to be sure, will have their points of view on politics. But when they carry the baggage of personal political convictions or party propaganda into the workplace, it is journalism that becomes the casualty.

Journalism takes a mauling elsewhere as well. With newspapers gaining in numbers if not in circulation, the trend in the past many years has been the rise of a new species in the field of editorial responsibilities. The owner becomes the editor. He then quickly declines into being neither a good owner nor an informed editor. There are owner-editors who sometimes make their way into politics.

And then consider the plight of the media people trudging along, for years on end, in the shadow of owners who will not clear their dues at the end of the month. Look around. Chances are you will stumble upon newspapers (and they are quite a few) where the interests of working journalists are flung to the winds, where journalist unions have progressively become anaemic. The loss of blood has been extreme. Enervation is all.

And yet journalism must survive in a society that means to transform itself, on to a higher plane of existence. That journalism, for all its limitations as also its self-inflicted wounds, matters comes through the impetus it has given to investigative reporting. Those in authority, or have been in it and hope to be there again, are offended, send rejoinders without responding to the points raised in the news reports about them and with much that is below the belt.

Through the mist, in the enveloping dark of the woods, journalism keeps us going. For Daily Sun, the time is here and now to disseminate the idea that the media will not be silenced, that journalists who suffer in prison on charges that are as hollow as they are outrageous, must be freed, to inform the nation of the state of the country. For those who occupy the citadels of power, the lessons of history must not be forgotten, that attempts to muzzle the media have always backfired. All power is fleeting. But all ideas of beauty are eternal.

Let Daily Sun be a powerful, purposeful voice of the people. Let it be that instrument which will reassert and reinforce the principle that freedom of speech matters. And freedom of speech for a nation is truly ensured when the concept of freedom of the media is asserted resolutely by its practitioners, despite the roadblocks put up before them.

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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history