Over drinks and good food, journalists in countries with a captive press talk freely about what they know but which they don't write because regimes don't allow. Journalists everywhere have a universal bond-they are all the same. They talk freely among themselves. They know a lot and they also know what to keep and are keenly aware of what's possible. So, when conditions permit, they break loose from their shackles, they write what they know and they plunge into the engagement in the struggle for open politics and press freedom.
Press freedom is a language journalists know by instinct.
It is not a Western construct. Thus, when the Soviet system broke down, Pravda overnight blossomed into a free newspaper in which journalists who dared now write the unprintable were no less rambunctious than their Western counterparts. Indonesian editors I had met just before the fall of Suharto were critical of the regime when talking to fellow journalists. They however say they could not write what they know. But as soon as the windows are open to the new wind of change, journalists jump into the stream of press freedom like fish swimming in water.