Editorial
Threat to Press Freedom
IT is known to all that in a democracy freedom of press is as important as freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Democracy cannot function without these basic liberties. In the last twenty-eight years of our independent existence, press in Bangladesh has gone through various phases of freedom as well as repression during different governments - elected or otherwise. Since the toppling of the autocrat in 1990, the print medium in particular has had better operational freedom under the elected governments in spite of stray incidents of intimidation by party musclemen and law enforcing personnel.
So far so good. But the recent incident of shooting at a newspaper office at Tejgaon by unidentified gunmen and the threat delivered on the life of the Dhaka University correspondent of the Bangla daily concerned were a bit too much to go without protest. The daily reported Sunday that a group of students belonging to Bangladesh Chhatra League, the student wing of the ruling party, led by the DU unit president and general secretary of the party allegedly barged into the news room and threatened the DU correspondent of the paper with dire consequences for publishing a report relating to the 'manhandling' of the DU unit president of BCL by another group. The same news was purportedly published in some other newspapers and the DU correspondent of another leading Bangla daily was manhandled at the DU campus for the same reason.
We believe this is not the way to protest a news item. The aggrieved persons could send a rejoinder to the newspapers concerned in an attempt to redeem their position. We strongly condemn this belligerent attitude of ruling party student cadres and urge their mentors to teach them tolerance and rein them in. They are not supposed to take the law into their own hands and go about threatening newsmen in their offices. This is a dangerous trend being set by the ruling party which may backfire on them. We shall continue to protest and condemn such acts of indiscretion.
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