Spin-free Spiral

The U.S. press becomes less free. No one told you?
by Marc B. Haefele

Recently The Wall Street Journal’s editorialists called three of this year’s Pulitzer winners traitors. The treacherous three were the Washington Post’s Dana Priest—who uncovered the CIA’s secret torture prisons—and The New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who ratted out the policy whereby the NSA gets to listen to your phone calls without warrants.

It’s not all that surprising that a Journal editorial went bonkers over such courageous investigation. After all, their editorial page still has a hard time accepting 100-year-old progressive notions like the Federal Reserve Bank and clean food and drug acts. But as Tim Rutten quoted NY Times exec editor Bill Keller as saying, the president’s authority doesn’t extend to telling newspapers what they can or can’t print. Perhaps a Spring Street house rule about L.A. Times writers taking exception to other Times writers prevented Rutten from mentioning that resident op-ed bonehead Max Boots preached the same accusation as the Journal.

Did the press really shaft the War on Terror by telling terrorists that Uncle Sam might be listening in on their phone calls with the proper warrants? It’s about 50 years since mob bosses started saying, “I hope your ears drop off,” to their FBI eavesdroppers. Don’t you think that by now most of us, lawbreakers included, know that telephones (cellular or otherwise) are not a secure means of communication? Did Al Quaeda really need the NY Times to tell them this? No: of course the real Pulitzer story is not that officials listen in on phone calls, but that the NSA could now tap anyone, suspected terrorists or not. Similarly, it was no real news that the US is torturing terror suspects. But the well-paid stooges of the Bush Disinformation Machine have to pretend otherwise. Hence, the age-old game of Let’s Kill the Messenger, so the bad news goes away.

“People have got to be put to the torch for this sort of thing,” as another U.S. president—Nixon—once put it. Funny thing is, all this fuss about the alleged Pulitzer secret-spilling comes on very nearly the 35th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers’ publication in 1971. That was when Daniel Ellsberg leaked most of the Defense Department’s studies on the history of the Vietnam War to the Post and the Times. The contents of these studies were already known by the North Vietnamese who had been fighting that war, but they were news to the U.S. public, who had no idea, for instance, how much this country had done to provoke the conflict. But administration stooges of that time argued that it was treason even to tell the public what the enemy already knew, on the grounds that such disclosure would undermine enthusiasm for a war that was being fought under false pretenses.

So here we go again. Liars are loyalists; truth tellers traitors. So far no indictments against Risen, Priest, Lichtblau et al. Maybe that has to do with the fact that the public’s trust for the despised media is inching up in the polls as President Bush’s approval ratings sink to 31 percent. Maybe it’s because we have a Congressional race in the offing. On the other hand, even in 1971—back when our Supreme Court could truly be said to have a liberal majority—that court only went 6-3 to protect the press from prior restraint by the government in the “Papers” case. If it came to that point today, any guesses? Are perhaps many in the U.S. media—these Pulitzer winners excluded—being influenced, perhaps intimidated, by the possibility of such a decision and holding back on other disclosures? Is the American press hence becoming less free?

Here’s an interesting sign that it is. The Paris-based international media NGO known as Reporters Without Borders just published its “2005 Press Freedom Index:” its rated rankings of press freedom in 167 nations. And guess what? This country has slipped 20 places. It used to be up there with Great Britain in press freedom—around 23rd place. Now it’s dropped to 44th place, above Bolivia but behind the tiny, 15-year-old former Yugoslavian nation of Macedonia.

According to the Reporters Without Borders report, “The United States fell more than 20 places, mainly because of the imprisonment of New York Times reporter Judith Miller and legal moves undermining the privacy of journalistic sources.” Just in case you might suppose this lowered rating is due to a France-based organization’s inherent antipathy to the US, France also dropped a few notches to 30th place, ”because of searches of media offices; interrogations of journalists and the introduction of new press offenses.” But that is still 14 places ahead of the United States. Which is in turn, if this makes you feel better, 145 places ahead of China (where there are more journalists in jail than in any other nation) and 153 places ahead of last-place North Korea.

The world’s top 10 countries in press freedom remained European nations like Denmark, Finland and Ireland—but they also included the newer nations of Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. One of the most impressive things this list shows is how many youthful and poor-to-poorish nations with bad-to-hideous recent histories of repression show better free-press scores than either the US or France: Number 12 is Hungary, for instance, and Number 28 is El Salvador (!); Namibia shares 21st place with Canada. The former Soviet republic of Latvia, 16th Place with Austria. So much for the weary idea that democracy and freedom are restricted to rich, old, powerful nations. On the other hand, wherever these brave new lands are getting their notions of the importance of a free press from, right now it probably isn’t the United States of George W. Bush.

Mike Qualls R.I.P.

Mike Qualls’ sudden death at 63 this week took from our scene a guy who’d been very important to local journalism, and to me personally. I mean no disservice to the subsequent news management of Los Angeles City News Service to say that as its editor, Mike, in the early 1980s, turned CNS from a loopy local tip wire into a respected regional news organization—one that’s since thrived and grown as equivalent newswires in Chicago and New York withered and died. Mike encouraged those of us who worked for him at CNS to take our miserably underpaid jobs seriously, to do good and important work, to break stories and stay ahead of the rest of the media. It was a great loss to L.A. journalism when he left to do PR for the City Attorney’s Office in 1985.

He was the best editor I ever worked for and now he’s gone.   LAA