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Pressing freedom
A media freedom crusader takes an academic turn.
Peter Greste interviewed by Loren Smith
From a young age, Peter Greste dreamt of becoming a foreign correspondent. It actualised. He worked in countries like Afghanistan and Kenya before being assigned to Egypt by Al Jazeera. There, in late 2013, he was used as a scapegoat in an ideological war between Egypt and the West, and jailed for 400 days. That experience transformed him.
Now, he spends most of his time advocating for press freedom. For his ordeal, subsequent efforts and resultant international standing, he has been appointed UNESCO chair of journalism and communications at the University of Queensland.
Campus Review spoke with him about his harrowing experience, the critical issues facing journalists today, and his new role, including how budding journalists can enter the brave new, and challenging, media world.
CR: If you ' re okay talking about it again, what was it like being jailed in Egypt? PG: It ' s a fairly straightforward question with a very big answer to it. It was a complex experience. I don ' t know quite know where to begin. The thing is, it was completely unexpected. I ' ve done a lot of difficult reporting from difficult places, and I ' ve done a lot of work over the years where I expected there to be some kind of blowback. I ' ve done work that ' s upset governments, made warlords cranky, got noses out of joint, but what we were doing in Egypt was pretty bland. I ' m almost embarrassed by that. I wish they had picked us up for something a little more spectacular as a journalist. It was completely unexpected, and that ' s why it was, for us and our supporters, a difficult thing to deal with.
Having said that, in the course of my career on front lines, with the refugees in some of the world ' s more difficult places, I ' ve also seen quite a lot and picked up a few tricks around resilience which also helped.
When we were first arrested, we thought it ' d be over swiftly – a case of mistaken identity. Then, when it became clear they had the right guy, I thought, well, there ' s been a mistake. Someone ' s misunderstood some of our reporting. There ' ll be a few phone calls. We ' ll be allowed to go. At most I thought we ' d spend a night or two in the cells and it ' d be over. So when we ended up not just spending a long time in prison, but with a conviction and a sentence of seven years, it was pretty devastating.
The thing that kept me going was the understanding of just how much support we had internationally, both among our professional colleagues and ordinary people.
Also, the fact that we came to represent something quite significant – the much broader struggle of defending press freedom, and that meant it wasn ' t personal.
We were picked up, I think, not because of anything we did, but because of what we came to represent. In trying to fight that, we pushed back in favour of the cause. It was something we had to fight for on principle, and I think that made it easier to deal with.
Media freedom is becoming increasingly curtailed. Why is this happening? It ' s one of the things I thought about a lot in prison. It occurred to me that what had happened to us was a pretty egregious example of the kinds of things that we ' re seeing taking place all around the world, especially since 9 / 11, where governments are using the ' war on terror ' and national security more generally as an excuse to tighten up on the press, and if not explicitly to clamp down on press freedom, then imposing all sorts of draconian laws which have a negative effect on the work journalists can do.
The underlying thesis that I realised was that, in a war over physical stuff, which
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