Author: hankkalet

Here is the latest weekly “Inside the First Amendment” column from the First Amendment Center in Arlington, VA.. It is provided free to newspapers around the country.

Does it matter that the press is under siege?

By Paul K. McMasters
First Amendment Center

Many of us view the increasingly intense struggle between the press and the government with a strange mix of fascination and detachment. We are tempted to believe this distant clash of titans has little impact on our daily lives and that we can’t do anything about it anyway.

Well, it does, and we can. In fact, it is one of those rare situations where merely paying attention is doing something about it. Yet for the most part we stand aloof.

For example, how much attention did we pay earlier this month when five of our largest news organizations contributed to the government’s settlement of a lawsuit filed by nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee? In his suit, Lee claimed that the federal departments of Energy and Justice and the FBI had violated the Privacy Act and falsely branded him as a spy by leaking information from his files to the press.

Lee’s lawyers subpoenaed five journalists to reveal who their government sources were. The journalists refused and eventually were ordered by the courts to divulge their sources or pay fines of $500 a day and possibly face jail.

After more than four years of litigation, the government agreed to pay $895,000 to settle the lawsuit. The five news organizations, ABC, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post, agreed to pay a total of $750,000.

The journalists’ employers paid up even though they were not parties to the lawsuit. Their reporting was not challenged. They were not accused of libel or of publishing classified information. They appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, to no avail.

The journalists and their lawyers said that every professional fiber in their beings was against making such a deal, but they had reached the end of the road. So they agreed to the least unappealing of a very ugly set of options. The settlement did allow them to protect their sources, to escape the threat of jail and to halt the financial hemorrhaging from the legal battles – as well as to return full-time to what
they do best: gathering and reporting the news.

What does this unsettling and unprecedented action have to do with the rest of us?

First and foremost, it marks yet another loss of ground in journalists’ efforts to report thoroughly and fairly on an increasingly secretive federal government. Sources are getting more and more skittish as new policies crack down on whistleblowers. The courts defer more and more to access restrictions and fail to balance government claims with the press’s need to inform the public.

When news organizations break major stories about questionable government actions, members of Congress call for laws targeting the press more often than for investigation of the questionable actions. The Department of Justice warns darkly that it has the power to prosecute journalists for receiving or publishing classified information. A judge sends a reporter to federal prison for 85 days for refusing to reveal a source.

Now, the Wen Ho Lee settlement encourages private litigants to view the press as a cheap source of information or a lucrative source of settlement funds.

When the press is under a siege of this magnitude, the flow of vital information reaching the public is constricted and public policy is distorted. The major news organizations particularly are intimidated, distracted or drained of resources to pursue the news aggressively and fight the legal battles that the public depends on.

It is little wonder that the USA has slipped to 43rd place in the press-freedom
rankings among other nations. And if this losing battle with government, in the courts, and with an uncaring public continues, press freedom will no doubt move closer to the 138th ranking of Russia, which has experienced a nasty descent into state control and censorship.

What can be done?

We should resist the idea that the press deserves all this simply because at times it can be irritating, superficial, sensational and invasive.

We should understand the necessity for the press on occasion to rely on sources that may not have the best of motives, as the police, the FBI and the CIA do.

We should hope that to protect those sources Congress will pass a federal shield law and that the president will sign it. The Free Flow of Information Act, with bipartisan sponsorship, is moving toward a Senate vote. It is burdened by lots of caveats, of course: It wouldn’t help reporters much in criminal cases or when national security was involved. But in cases like the Wen Ho Lee settlement, it would require courts
to at least consider the public interest that news coverage serves.

Finally, we can remind government officials and the courts that there is interest by the public – by paying more attention.

Paul K. McMasters is First Amendment ombudsman at the First Amendment Center, 1101 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, Va. 22209. Web: firstamendmentcenter.org. E-mail: pmcmasters@fac.org.

The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

The New Republic offers an excellent primer on why the current telecom proposal to charge content providers based on service is a bad idea for democracy. (Thanks to Talking Points Memo for this.)

Under current rules, the magazine writes,

Content providers from Google and Amazon to Daily Kos and TNR Online currently pay Web-hosting companies to put their content on the Internet. Consumers then access that content via Internet service providers, such as Comcast and Verizon. Under the new FCC guidelines, those companies will be able to charge content providers a fee to deliver their content to consumers and, in particular, an additional surcharge to deliver their content to consumers more quickly–that is, they will be able to create a faster toll lane on the information superhighway. If they want, the telecoms can favor their own services and penalize competitors–for instance, voice over Internet protocol companies like Vonage–by denying them faster service. They can even charge lucrative fees to companies for exclusive access to the fast lane at the expense of their competitors, giving, for example, L.L. Bean an advantage over Lands’ End. And, by making the fast lane prohibitively expensive, they can force start-up ventures and noncommercial providers (like blogs) onto the bumpy dirt roads of the Internet.

Net neutrality would prohibit all of this. Telecoms could make money the way they always have–by charging homes and businesses for an Internet connection–but they couldn’t make money from the content providers themselves. That is a perfectly reasonable proposition, and it has won support from Amazon and eBay, as well as the Christian Coalition and MoveOn.org.

The telecoms and their lobbyists argue that they need the extra cash to upgrade lines and say that consumers and content providers would still be free to shop around. The reality is more complicated:

[W]ith the industry dominated by a handful of companies, the typical American
has a choice of only two providers. And changing services often means losing an
e-mail address and facing new connection charges.

Ultimately, though, this issue should be about democracy:

Most important, as Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig has argued, the Internet is not only a tool for economic growth, it is also a public commons for the exchange of ideas. It is where Americans can not only search for the best deal on a new digital camera, but also debate the country’s future. Unlike the telephone, it is a medium in which thousands, even millions, of people can participate in the same discussion at the same time. Unlike television, it is interactive. But it can’t function optimally if content is prioritized or filtered by telecom companies. Allowing companies to levy a toll on information providers is not just a blow to consumer choice–it’s a blow to democracy.

The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

Tom Moran of The Star-Ledger on the cool reception that state Sen. Stephen Sweeney — himself a labor leader — received at the state AFL-CIO convention this week.

One thing about this, Moran makes it clear why the Sweeney proposal — that state unions give a little back to help balance the budget — is not the kind of fight that unions should use to stand as a symbol of the labor movement in 2006.

Conven tions like this are supposed to give them a chance to champion the common man against the rich CEO.

But what if there is no rich CEO? In the case of public workers, the cost comes out of the hide of the average middle-class taxpayer.

Essentially, the fight in question comes down to worker versus taxpayer — or, if you prefer, worker v. worker.

The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

The GOP in Congress wants to limit the freedom of expression enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution by passing an amendment to allow the federal government and the states to make desecration of the flag a crime.

Motivation aside, the amendment is flawed in far too many ways to count. Suffice to say that, in their zeal to prevent flag desecration, the GOP will be desecrating the Constitution.

Here is a good piece from today’s Washington Post.

The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

This is from Joshua Marshall and his indispensible blog, Talking Points Memo. I offer it in its entirety because it offers a necessary rejoinder to the usual thinking on the conservative movement.

Zooming down the northeast corridor I was just reading Greg Anrig’s delightful post at TPMCafe on conservatives’ attempt to get their way out of under the Bush presidency. Greg’s is actually a riff on Jon Chait’s piece at TNR, which I’m just starting.

With all the efforts now to disassociate President Bush from conservatism, I am starting to believe that conservatism itself — not the political machine, mind you, but the ideology — is heading toward that misty land-over-the-ocean where ideologies go after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. Sort of like the way post-Stalinist lefties used to say, “You can’t say Communism’s failed. It’s just never really been tried.”

But as it was with Communism, so with conservatism. When all the people who call themselves conservatives get together and run the government, they’re on the line for it. Conservative president. Conservative House. Conservative Senate.

What we appear to be in for now is the emergence of this phantom conservatism existing out in the ether, wholly cut loose from any connection to the actual people who are universally identified as the conservatives and who claim the label for themselves.

We can even go a bit beyond this though. The big claim now is that President Bush isn’t a conservative because he hasn’t shrunk the size of government and he’s a reckless deficit spender.

But let’s be honest: Balanced budgets and shrinking the size of government hasn’t been part of conservatism — or to be more precise, Movement Conservatism — for going on thirty years. The conservative movement and the Republican party are the movement and party of deficit spending. And neither has any claim to any real association with limited or small government. Just isn’t borne out by any factual record or political agenda. Not in the Reagan presidency, the Bush presidency or the second Bush presidency. The intervening period of fiscal restraint comes under Clinton.

Take the movement on its own terms and even be generous about it. What’s it about? And has it delivered?

Aggressive defense policy? Check.

Privatization of government services? Check.

Regulatory regimes favoring big business? Check.

Government support for traditional mores and values on sex and marriage? Check.

That about covers it. And Bush has delivered. The results just aren’t good.

The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press