The text below is a transcript of the author’s remarks to the M20 Media Freedom Summit held online in Delhi on September 6, 2023 by the M20 Organising Committee, which comprises eleven editors from India and a former judge of the Supreme Court.Hello and a very warm welcome to all of you who are joining today’s historic M20 meeting – gathering vital discussions on the issue of press freedom and journalists who are holding a line.I’m David Walmsley. I’m the editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail in Canada based here in Toronto. It would have been great to be there in person but I know some of the challenges with visas and such like has not made that possible.Press freedom, it goes without saying, is an essential element of any democratic force – of any operation that believes naturally or indeed instinctively with respect to how the country works. And the information the journalists provide ensures that the citizens of those countries are fully informed – or at least more informed than they would be without journalism.So, I want to start my remarks with a consideration about countries that don’t have that, they don’t have journalism, they don’t have the freedom of the press, they don’t have a natural understanding of the decisions being made that affect them, and what it means.Imagine a blank screen, imagine that all the newsrooms and all the news industry officials who are taking part in M20 – this historic first gathering – turned off the news.Nothing to read.Nothing to discuss.Nothing to distribute.Nothing to show.And that exists far too often in patches of the world where a free press is simply non-existent.So what can be done about it?In Canada, many people on the surface would say you don’t have a lot wrong, you’re a very wealthy country, and we are. That nature has been kind to Canada with its natural resources which include fossil fuels, water, just land itself, are enormous gifts. And while we think regionally across the six time zones of this very wide country, the ability for us to discern what matters is something that is underpinned by the reality that we have a free press, as we do.Also read: Why M20? To Remind G20 Leaders That the World’s Problems Can’t Be Solved Without Media FreedomBut even here, there are challenges. Challenges are on distribution, we do have news deserts – towns and villages where there are no existing news outlets, where the reporting from local decision makers or the local court system has all but been lost. It doesn’t exist in print and it doesn’t exist digitally. What can be done about that?We face in Canada very real challenges with legislation, where the US platforms of both Meta and Google are being told that they are going to have to pay a still-unknown hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars bill in order to continue to distribute the news that is produced by journalists across the country.Platforms don’t believe the legislation is correctly written. The news industry is split in terms of whether or not that is money that is properly apportioned. The debate about who gets that money remains very open, but in the end if the platforms were to withdraw their distribution services from Canada, the news deserts would only grow.One of the things we understand as we look across the world is that journalism cannot go it alone. We need partnerships, be that active members of the public, be that clear rules of engagement where – not in the government but also platforms – understand the priorities and the needs of journalism. What can be done to instill that without giving all of the power to the legislatures of the country?One of our challenges is explaining ourselves as an industry. The gathering of the G20 leaders gives us a chance – a chance to build on in the years to come, where we can offer up some solutions, where we can explain not only what is lost when journalism is no longer in the marketplace but also the threats that are maybe a little less obvious, that are less than.We know that the Nobel Peace Prize went to two journalists this past year, journalists who for the first time since 1936 were awarded that prize because of the work they had done in their homelands of the Philippines and in Russia, to say that they were still determined to get the news to the public.That bravery in the singular moment where journalism was put on the world stage is something, I believe, that should be central at the G20, a gathering of these large economies and those who are developing still.The opportunity to say we act as one with humanity through an exchange of ideas, through the intellectual capital that we put into the marketplace, and to the very notion that the citizenry of the world is enriched through the knowledge that they are afforded.Brave independent investigative journalism has never had greater currency and yet never been under greater threat.Also read: M20: The Digital Age Has Brought a New Kind of Censorship for the Media in IndonesiaThe near pogroms that have been created in too many countries against journalists, the extraordinary phenomenon of the last 30 years where the messenger becomes the targeted, both in open conflict and in the more insidious fights on the street levels of society, have to end.The G20 can take a leading hand in ensuring that the countries of the world can unite around the belief that their citizens and those in charge should have nothing to fear about transparency and accuracy, and about the belief that journalism is an essential ingredient of life.I often speak to my own newsroom and I say, ‘Do the stories that matter in your gut and in your head, but never leave the audience with an excuse that they didn’t know, that someone didn’t tell them.’Journalism is about telling people information they didn’t know. It is a daily discovery. It is a privilege and it is also something I believe is a fundamental right.So I congratulate all of you at the M20 and at the G20 in India in this next week and I wish you the best of luck as you launch this vital annual initiative.
