As CPJ marks its 25th anniversary, our early board members and former directors look ahead to the emerging challenges facing the international press. Moderator John Carroll, Knight visiting lecturer at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, leads the panel in a two-week discussion about Iraq, national security, Internet censorship, and the new threats to press freedom.
| Other Topics Iraq Stringers and Fixers Israel-Lebanon Conflict Reporting from Censored Countries China and the Internet Emerging Threats |
The Panel  |
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Your comments and reactions are welcome. Write to cpj@cpj.org |
Posted July 21, 2006
From John Carroll: We tend to regard the First Amendment as a standard that other countries should emulate. Few do. Some restrict hate speech (as in Canada), official secrets (Britain), blasphemy (many Muslim countries), or criticism of the king (Thailand). Hence, two questions: In the post-9/11 climate, are we becoming more like them? Is pressure from the Bush administration and other Americans seriously eroding our press freedom? Are the administration’s attacks on The New York Times causing real harm? And, if it’s true that press freedom is eroding in the U.S., is the erosion likely to weaken press freedom in other countries?
Bush administration in a class by itself
From Michael Massing: Two years ago, after an event at the Berkeley school of journalism, I joined a group of guests at Chez Panisse, the mecca of American nouvelle cuisine. At one point, a liberal activist looked up from his dinner of linguine al funghi to lament loudly how George Bush was turning America into a police state. I’ve always regarded such talk as laughable. Compared to even many of our western allies, freedom of speech in general and press freedom in particular remain alive and well in this country. Earlier this year, a British journalist, trying to impress on me just how severe the Official Secrets Act is, told me that David Kelly, the government scientist who was responsible for the famous leak about the Blair government’s misrepresentations on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (and who later took his own life), was the only official in the entire British government willing to talk to the press about the subject off the record. In this country, such officials were not exactly plentiful, but they were there for those determined to find them.
Yet it’s hard to be very optimistic about developments here. Until recently, it was possible to argue that the Bush administration’s various efforts to crack down on the press differed only in kind, not degree, from those undertaken by some of its predecessors, most notably the Nixon administration. But the White House’s actions in recent months have clearly put it in a class by itself. In particular, the threat to use the Espionage Act to prosecute journalists at The Washington Post and New York Times for their articles about the secret detention centers in Europe and the national eavesdropping program represents a major step-up in executive branch efforts to deter journalists from prying into national security matters. Even more disturbing, in some respects, has been the campaign of venom and vitriol directed at The New York Times for its recent story about the secret monitoring of financial transactions.
Whatever one thinks about the appropriateness of the Times’ decision to publish the story, the ferocity of the attacks on the paper shows the lengths to which the White House and its political allies in think tanks, the blogosphere, talk radio, and Fox News will go to try to cow the press into silence. Some of the comments about Bill Keller have made Ann Coulter look like a moderate. These attacks have taken on added strength from the inhibiting effect that September 11 continues to have on political discussion in this country. That effect, I believe, is visible in the current coverage of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, especially on TV, where events have overwhelmingly been presented as a case of America and the civilized West being attacked by terrorists. It is not just hostile government actions that the U.S. press must battle, but a more insidious mindset that often operates on journalists (as on others) without their even being aware of it.
A political strategy to silence critical press
From Anthony Lewis: For at least the last 70 years, since the Supreme Court began giving broadly protective interpretations to the speech and press clauses of the First Amendment, this country has had greater freedom of expression than any other. That is still true in legal doctrine. No one else protects hate speech as we do, or defamatory publications.
What is different today is political pressure to silence or punish probing, critical journalism about the national administration. There’s nothing new in presidential resentment of press criticism. Franklin Roosevelt said a right-wing columnist should put on a dunce cap and sit in the corner. Nixon had an enemies’ list, etc. But Bush has made attacks on the press a major, overt part of his political strategy.
Karl Rove & Co. have evidently decided that attacking newspapers that are (supposedly) liberal, in particular The New York Times, will play well to the base: conservative Republicans, the Christian right, blue-collar whites. Thus we heard for a long time that America was really winning in Iraq, only the liberal, lily-livered press was giving a false picture—a claim that looks increasingly absurd as the statistics of death in Iraq mount. Another example has been the attacks on papers that published the story of Bush’s wiretapping in violation of law, especially the Times. Or again the Times story about efforts to track terrorist money flows—efforts that were actually boasted about by the Administration in the past.
Rove & Co. have been able to summon up choruses of right-wing denunciators like Sen. Jim Bunning and Rep. Peter King to call the press stories "treason." How effective is such talk? At a minimum it has caused editors to adopt a somewhat defensive posture, explaining and defending the role of the press as they did not use to do.
The real question, I think, is one not of law but of courage. Will the press stand firm on not just its right but its duty to report wrongdoing by the government? The omens are mixed on that. The Times and The Washington Post apologized for excessive timidity in covering the run-up to the Iraq war. Since then the established press has done better. But I still wonder whether it is prepared to take the measure of official lawlessness. Think about the torture and mistreatment of detainees. The people who made that possible—John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, Dick Cheney, David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz—all still enjoy respectable lives.
The threats and pressure by the administration are noticed elsewhere in the world, particularly in Britain. But I doubt that directly influences press freedom there. Each country has its own tensions. In Britain, for example, Prime Minister Tony Blair is as antagonistic to press freedom as George W. Bush—and is doing his best to prosecute leakers and bring in harsh new legislation.