-United States Constitution, First Amendment
I confess that I do not entertain that firm and complete attachment to the liberty of the press which is wont to be excited by things that are supremely good in their very nature. I approve of it from a consideration more of the evils it prevents than of the advantages it ensures.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Saturday, May 3rd, was World Press Freedom Day. Freedom House released its Freedom of the Press 2008 survey, which covers 2007. The United States ranks 24th.
Here's some perspective: there are 64 countries listed as "free" in Freedom House's report. We don't even break the top third.
In 2005, the year of jailed journalists, revelations that Bush had "paid several political commentators who supported certain domestic policy initiatives through grants from agencies of the federal government," and the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting stepping down in disgrace after attempts to politicize the agency, the United States ranked 17th.
We are slipping.
Our vaunted free press is no longer first in the world. It's not even in the first third. We've been slip-sliding down ever since Bush got his grubby hands on our government and started telling us that we had to trade freedom for security. William Bennett Turner took on this "Assault on Press Freedom" in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006:
But U.S. press freedom has been slipping away since Sept. 11, 2001. Now that we are in a seemingly permanent "war" on terrorism, the government claims wartime powers that result in restricting press freedom.
The Bush administration has multiplied exponentially the number of documents it classifies as secret, shielding them from public view. It has classified literally millions of documents "top secret," according to reports filed with the National Archives; and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney claims to be exempt from reporting even the numbers of records it brands with the "classified" stamp. (The administration has also tried to retrieve antique classified documents from columnist Jack Anderson's estate, contending that only the government may possess such documents, however old.) Within weeks after 9/11, President Bush issued Executive Order 13233, allowing him to veto public release not only of his own presidential papers but those of former President Ronald Reagan, Bush's father and former President Bill Clinton.
Things haven't gotten much better since then. Bush signed a new Freedom of Information Act on December 31st, 2007 - after the CIA safely destroyed videotapes of its interrogations of terror suspects. But a bill to shield reporters from being forced to reveal confidential sources is stalled in the Senate. The covert propaganda campaign continues apace. Most recently, we discovered that the Bush Administration had bought off retired generals to act as "message force multipliers." That's Pentagon-speak for "government propaganda footsoldiers."
The freedom of our press isn't overtly threatened so often - the Constitution still holds there - but its health is continually undermined by covert propaganda techniques, appeals to patriotism, and attacks from the right-wing noise machine. Our press has gone from robust to moribund. Glenn Greenwald has relentlessly documented the decline, here:
Last night was a perfect microcosm of how our political process works. The Right creates stupid, petty personality-based attacks to ensure that our elections aren't decided on issues (where they have a decisive disadvantage). Media stars -- some due to sloth, some due to ideology, some due to an eagerness to please the Right and convince them how Good and Fair they are -- eat up the shallow trash they're fed and then spew it out relentlessly, ensuring that our political discourse is overwhelmed by it, our elections dictated by it. That happens over and over. It's how our media and our elections function.
And here:
In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.
Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:
"Yoo and torture" - 102
"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16
"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043
"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607
"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079
And just about everywhere.
Our press dies by degrees, by the day. And I really, really wish I could put the entire blame on Bush, but I can't.
We let this happen.
We didn't demand substantive coverage of issues rather than inanity. We didn't hit back as the right wing gradually insinuated itself into every aspect of our mainstream media. We didn't insist on investigative journalism and vigilant criticism of the government. We let the Administration tell us these things would compromise the War on Terror. We let fear get the better of us in the months and years just after September 11th. We let self-censorship take over because we were afraid. We let vapid gossip stand in for actual news because reality was too tough to face. We let the Administration use our press for propaganda because we didn't want to look unpatriotic by raising hell, and we sure as fuck couldn't believe our government could be that evil.
We're paying for it now.
But there are signs that the watchdogs of democracy are starting to wake up and sniff the air. There's been some major revelations made by real, live investigative journalists: ABC broke the Torture Memos story. The New York Times broke the Pentagon Pundits case. Journalism is being committed with increasing frequency. It's starting to look as if it might start performing the function de Tocqueville lauded and start preventing some evil rather than aiding and abetting it.
If we encourge this good behavior and demand more, we may just have a free, robust press come next World Press Freedom Day.
Wouldn't that be lovely?
5 comments:
Ownership of the media is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few large corporations. I think that significantly contributes to the problems you mention in your article.
By the way, Dana, you have an outstanding blog here. I'm taking the liberty of adding you to my blogroll.
Paul, you're the sweetest! And you're absolutely right - I didn't highlight it, but the reports I read did note that concern. I think they minimized the issue. I'll have much more as I delve deeper.
Sweetest??? Obviously, you have not been talking with my ex wife.
I wonder to what extent the internet can counter-balance the betrayal of the public by so much of the traditional media?
I wish I knew. The report was cynical about that, to a degree: while bloggers led to greater freedoms, we're - ahem - "partisian."
To which I can only respond, No shit, Sherlock!
But they did note that blogs have done a good job breaking some stories, if I remember rightly, so I guess there's hope that we partisian buggers could save the free world after all. ;-)
Is Glenn Greenwald all that partisan? I know he's harsh on neocons, but does that make him partisan in his approach to liberals? I find him a little hard to classify.
Whatever the case, he seems highly accurate.
Post a Comment