Does the press believe in freedom of the press?

[marmar]

Published on Tuesday, July 11, 2006 by the Providence Journal (Rhode Island)
Does America's Press Believe in Freedom of the Press?
by John R. MacArthur

NEW YORK -- Last month, when the White House attacked The New York Times for revealing a secret Treasury Department surveillance program, it was tempting to conclude that the thieves were falling out among themselves. The Times, according to Bush and his congressional stooges, had placed Americans in grave danger by alerting "terrorists" that U.S. authorities were trying to track their international money transfers.

What ingratitude on the part of Bush toward his former partners in propaganda! After all, the collaborative scare stories transmitted from Dick Cheney's office and Times headquarters on Saddam Hussein's atomic-bomb project have arguably made the Bush presidency what it is today.

Indeed, one could say that Bush owes his continued occupancy of the White House to the Gray Lady of American journalism. Above and beyond Judith Miller's and Howell Raines's front-page amplifications of administration lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, The Times's timely self-censorship proved essential to Bush's re-election campaign. Had the "paper of record" recorded the existence of the National Security Agency's warrantless (and unconstitutional) wiretapping program before the 2004 election -- instead of sitting on the story for more than a year -- we could very well be debating President John Kerry's equivocations on Iraq, rather than President Bush's incessant blather about staying the course.

But there are worse things than a pseudo-liberal newspaper's cooperating with malevolent power in Washington. For example, there is The Wall Street Journal's alarmingly mendacious suck-up response to the Bushwhacking of The Times.

The Journal, you may recall, published substantially the same story, the same day, as The Times, about the Treasury Department's and the CIA's monitoring of Swift, a Belgian cooperative that moves vast amounts of money around the world for big financial institutions. (Its stated goal is to nail "al-Qaida financiers," though I'm mystified about how this would prevent low-budget fanatics from blowing up either U.S. soldiers or themselves in Iraq.) Nevertheless, The Journal's editorial page announced last month that it wanted nothing to do with its supposedly radical Uptown Manhattan neighbors.

We know, of course, that The Journal's opinion page is crackpot right-wing, but even crackpots (especially crackpots like Col. Robert McCormick, of The Chicago Tribune) were once known as defenders of the First Amendment and the public's right to know about government secrets.

The rest of the article is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0711-29.htm

[MadMaddie]

1. They don't now..but when they are stripped of every possibility

of independent thinking and reporting....they will....of course it will be too little too late...

[Doctor_J]

2. After 20 years of fascist control, they seldom hire anyone who

doesn't conform to the right-wing slant that the editors and publishers require. The new hires don't require any particular freedom, since they seldom stray too far from the company line (ULTRA right-wing). Once you have populated the newsroom with believers, you can pretty much let them roam free since they'll stay in formation anyway.