The right's efforts to undermine the freedom of the American press have been largely successful.
Judith Miller and Josh Wolf make for unlikely comrades.
Miller is a veteran journalist with a 28-year career at the New York Times behind her. Wolf is a 24-year-old freelancer and video blogger.
Miller is accused by her detractors - unfairly, in my view - of having carried the Bush administration's water through overly credulous reporting in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Wolf describes himself as an anarchist. His blog appears beneath the slogan "The Revolution Will Be Televised."
The incongruous duo have emerged in recent months as symbols of press freedom in the US - or, perhaps more accurately, as symbols of the degree to which that freedom is being circumscribed.
Miller served 85 days in jail last year because she would not reveal her source on a story she never wrote. The bizarre saga involved prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald hounding Miller to testify before a grand jury as part of an investigation into the leak of the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative. Miller's stint in jail came to an end when she finally received a strong assurance from her source - Vice-President Dick Cheney's then-chief-of-staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby - that she could testify.
Miller and Fitzgerald have been tangling again this year, in an unrelated case. Fitzgerald is this time investigating how journalists got to know that two Islamic charities were going to be targets of government investigation and asset freezes in 2001. A court has ruled that he has the right to inspect 11 days of phone records belonging to Miller and her erstwhile colleague Philip Shenon. Late last month, the Supreme Court refused to stay that decision.
Wolf languishes in jail in California. He filmed an anarchist protest in San Francisco last summer. As part of an investigation into whether certain crimes, including arson, were committed, Wolf was subpoenaed and asked to surrender his material. He refused. He was jailed for contempt of court on August 1. Save for a brief period during which he was granted bail, he has remained there ever since.
A third case is also vexing American journalists. Two reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada have been ordered jailed for contempt, pending appeal. The men's work helped uncover the extent of steroid abuse in baseball. In the course of that work, they received leaked grand jury testimony. They are now facing prison terms of up to 18 months because they will not reveal the identity of the leaker.
The public, of course, seems largely unconcerned by all of this. Polls consistently show plummeting regard for the mainstream media. To be fair, some of this is undoubtedly the media's fault - scandals like that involving New York Times fabricator Jayson Blair have undermined the quality press's credibility, while tabloid excesses on both sides of the Atlantic continue unabated.
Added to that, some sections of the American media have exhibited a strange, and ultimately self-defeating, double-standard, on the subject of leaks. Liberal columnists at the New York Times and elsewhere have gone out of their way to defend leaks critical of the White House but called for all sorts of sanctions against those who leak information that helps the administration's cause. This does little other than muddy the argument for press freedom.
None of this, however, should obscure the fact that the current administration has gone to unusual lengths to frustrate, intimidate and defame those sections of the American media that it considers troublesome. And it has been greatly helped in this effort by the broader conservative movement.
Earlier this year, the New York Times published a story regarding the administration's monitoring of international banking transactions in an effort to disrupt terrorist financing. Although few people were truly surprised by the news, the furore that followed was intense. The president himself branded disclosure of the project "disgraceful". Dick Cheney said that "Some in the press, in particular the New York Times, have made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult." Republican Congressman Peter King accused the Times of "treasonous" behaviour.
The labelling of disclosures that are inconvenient for those in power as unpatriotic, traitorous or subversive is one of the oldest tricks in the handbook of authoritarian leadership.
Predictably enough, the White House's proxies among the punditocracy made even more shrill attacks. Most memorably of all, Melanie Morgan, a radio chat show host, said she would have no problem with the Times' executive editor Bill Keller being executed for treason.
Last year, a Pew Research Poll found that 45% of Americans believed little or nothing of what they read in their daily newspapers. Twenty years before, that figure was only 16%. Another survey last year by the Annenberg Public Policy Centre indicated that while 92% of journalists believed that the government "never" or "rarely" had the right to limit press reporting of a story, only a minority of the public (46%) agreed.
The logical extension of that finding - that more than half the population would happily collude in denying their own right to know what their government is up to - is profoundly depressing. But it is not out of keeping with the times.
In an article defending his decision to publish the banking story, Bill Keller and his then-counterpart at the Los Angeles Times, Dean Baquet, noted the words of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black who, in the 1970s, allowed the publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers.
"The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government," Black wrote. "The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people."
Such a viewpoint finds little support among the judiciary - or, it seems, among the general population - today. The unpalatable truth is that a concerted attempt by the right to undermine the press has been largely successful. We will live with its dismal consequences for many years to come.
Niall Stanage was born in Belfast in 1974. He lives in New York, where he covers American politics and culture for an Irish national newspaper, The Sunday Business Post.
He writes regularly for The New York Observer and the print edition of The Guardian. He was previously editor-in-chief of Ireland's main current affairs magazine, Magill.
No comments:
Post a Comment