The end of Freedom of the Press
aPeople seem to forget how important the press is to our freedom. "The Liberal Media" is pretty much the only protection we have from our government operating in secret. Without the free press, there is no doubt in my mind that we'd be living in an authoritarian dictatorship. Since Bush took office, there has been an assault on the free press and the "USA PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 ) ACT" (see how they used an acronym to make it seem like voting for it would be anti-American?) was used as a tool for curbing our rights to the free press and other rights to speech, privacy and freedom that most people take for granted. Using fear to tighten control over the people is a key component of fascism and we're definitely going down that road.
Every empire in history has fallen. What makes Americans so arrogant to think that the American experiment will last forever? The secrecy of this administration is unconstitutional and incredibly dangerous. Not only are they taking rights away (as well as RE-classifying documents that had once been DE-classified), but they are beginning to treat journalists in a way that smacks of totalitarian regimes. The Valerie Plame affair showed that the government is in an adversarial relationship with the press, and the BALCO scandal is even more of an indication. The authors of "Game of Shadows", the book that broke the BALCO (the steroid lab that supplied Jason Giambi among others) scandal aren't being praised for their role in bringing this information to the public. They are actually being targeted by the government for leaking the information to the American public.
So why is bringing down Barry Bonds so much worse than Richard Nixon? Woodward and Bernstein didn't face jail time for revealing the Watergate scandal to the public, and they were certainly not forced (by threatening jail time) to reveal their source (Mark Felt). One of the authors of Game of Shadows, Lance Williams said it best: "As far as the government coming after us, the world has changed since this story was published. In the days of Woodward and Bernstein, the government was not going around the country subpoenaing reporters. This is a very new development. It's really an innovation of the current Attorney General, as far as I can tell. But the number of reporters subpoenaed in the past decade is not very great. And the number subpoenaed recently is a large proportion of the number subpoenaed in the past 20 to 25 years. We didn't know we were risking jail, we thought the government would try to find out the sources, but we really did not anticipate that it would get to this point. Because as a matter of practice, that wasn't what they were doing in those days." Obviously we'd be better off had Ashcroft and Gonzales never been attorney general.
So what can we do? The more the government attacks reporters, the less bold they're going to be. Nixon wouldn't have gotten exposed had it not been for aggressive reporters and a brave man willing to risk everything to release important information to the people. Not only will the prosecution of reporters hurt our free press, but the forced revealing of sources will dry up leaks. The anti-whistle-blowing sentiment can only hurt us. After all, Enron would have been able to fraud people out of billions more had Sherron Watkins not leaked the fraud to the public. People always cover their ass if they are purposefully doing something wrong, so it is the duty of the press to reveal those wrongdoings to the people.
The simple fact that Americans get their news from TV means they are already missing most of the news. CNN, MSNBC and (god help us) Fox News prefer to take the easy way out, only reporting on the headlines that are everywhere else. They don't want to be the only station not talking about JonBenet Ramsay, even though it's completely meaningless news, just simply because they worry that they'll lose out on the ratings battle. If our government actually cared about being free of corruption and hidden agendas, they'd support the members of the press, not attack them. I believe that the people should employ public reporters in a similar to how a public defender is employed. The press is basically a public defender, they work tirelessly to expose problems and to inform the public and that keeps us safe. So why not have a "public exposer" program where we pay taxes to employ reporters who have the sole purpose of investigating our government and its practices. If the government supported this program, then we could be sure that they're working in our best interests and not their own.
Every empire in history has fallen. What makes Americans so arrogant to think that the American experiment will last forever? The secrecy of this administration is unconstitutional and incredibly dangerous. Not only are they taking rights away (as well as RE-classifying documents that had once been DE-classified), but they are beginning to treat journalists in a way that smacks of totalitarian regimes. The Valerie Plame affair showed that the government is in an adversarial relationship with the press, and the BALCO scandal is even more of an indication. The authors of "Game of Shadows", the book that broke the BALCO (the steroid lab that supplied Jason Giambi among others) scandal aren't being praised for their role in bringing this information to the public. They are actually being targeted by the government for leaking the information to the American public.
So why is bringing down Barry Bonds so much worse than Richard Nixon? Woodward and Bernstein didn't face jail time for revealing the Watergate scandal to the public, and they were certainly not forced (by threatening jail time) to reveal their source (Mark Felt). One of the authors of Game of Shadows, Lance Williams said it best: "As far as the government coming after us, the world has changed since this story was published. In the days of Woodward and Bernstein, the government was not going around the country subpoenaing reporters. This is a very new development. It's really an innovation of the current Attorney General, as far as I can tell. But the number of reporters subpoenaed in the past decade is not very great. And the number subpoenaed recently is a large proportion of the number subpoenaed in the past 20 to 25 years. We didn't know we were risking jail, we thought the government would try to find out the sources, but we really did not anticipate that it would get to this point. Because as a matter of practice, that wasn't what they were doing in those days." Obviously we'd be better off had Ashcroft and Gonzales never been attorney general.
So what can we do? The more the government attacks reporters, the less bold they're going to be. Nixon wouldn't have gotten exposed had it not been for aggressive reporters and a brave man willing to risk everything to release important information to the people. Not only will the prosecution of reporters hurt our free press, but the forced revealing of sources will dry up leaks. The anti-whistle-blowing sentiment can only hurt us. After all, Enron would have been able to fraud people out of billions more had Sherron Watkins not leaked the fraud to the public. People always cover their ass if they are purposefully doing something wrong, so it is the duty of the press to reveal those wrongdoings to the people.
The simple fact that Americans get their news from TV means they are already missing most of the news. CNN, MSNBC and (god help us) Fox News prefer to take the easy way out, only reporting on the headlines that are everywhere else. They don't want to be the only station not talking about JonBenet Ramsay, even though it's completely meaningless news, just simply because they worry that they'll lose out on the ratings battle. If our government actually cared about being free of corruption and hidden agendas, they'd support the members of the press, not attack them. I believe that the people should employ public reporters in a similar to how a public defender is employed. The press is basically a public defender, they work tirelessly to expose problems and to inform the public and that keeps us safe. So why not have a "public exposer" program where we pay taxes to employ reporters who have the sole purpose of investigating our government and its practices. If the government supported this program, then we could be sure that they're working in our best interests and not their own.
posted by Dan Pasternack at 2:22 PM
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