Assault on press freedom (interesting article!)

[n2doc]

This may have been posted before, but it is worth reading if you did not see it....

ASSAULT ON PRESS FREEDOM
In a nation that preaches the virtues of democracy, the United States government has consistently eroded the media's ability to report and, by extension, undermines the ideals it professes to uphold
William Bennett Turner
Sunday, November 26, 2006


Vladimir Posner, the former Soviet journalist, used to claim the press was freer in the Soviet Union than it was in the United States. This was during Glasnost, as the Soviet empire was disintegrating. Posner explained that the government was dysfunctional, so journalists did not have to worry about the official censors, and the media had not been privatized, so journalists were not accountable to commercial sponsors and advertisers. The result was a kind of anarchic freedom. The press was free, but only for a brief window in time.

The window in America once was open wide and, I thought, permanently so. I used to tell my students on the first day of class that we had the freest speech and press in the world. I can't do that anymore.

In recent years American press freedom has eroded. Many other countries are now ranked freer than the United States -- all of the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand and many others. In the most recent survey by Freedom House, an independent American-based organization that assesses liberties around the world, the United States tied for 17th place, with the Bahamas, Estonia, Germany and others.

The international free-press advocates Reporters Without Borders ranked us 53rd, tied with Botswana, Croatia and Tonga. These rankings may not be scientifically valid, for a lot of subjective judgment is involved. But it is sobering to see the consensus that the United States is no longer anywhere near the top.


snip:
Unlike in Sweden, where the right of access to government documents is enshrined in the Constitution, our 1966 information act is solely a legislative creation. Unlike in South Korea, where the Supreme Court decided in 1989 that the right of access to government documents was an integral part of the constitutional freedom of the press, the U.S. Supreme Court held (in a case I lost, Houchins vs. KQED) that there is no such thing as a First Amendment right of access to government information or facilities. Consequently, Americans' right to know what their government is up to is not as well recognized as it is in some other countries.

much more:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/11/26/INGAKMHOCV1.DTL

[Kagemusha]

1. Some of this is a little unfair...

Sweden is a neutral country. S. Korea has a long-term, active espionage program against the United States. Neither was the command center for the Western side of the Cold War. As for the window in America being open wide, the American press never had free access to secret diplomatic cables, to the diagrams used in The Manhattan Project, or NORAD's air defense plans. There is no window there that closed - it wasn't open in the first place. In every such case, the expectation is that Congress will exert oversight on behalf of the American people, first and foremost. America has never had a system of government where the public has a right to the easy and liberal revelation of genuine national security secrets.

In contrast, the modern press dramatically fails to take advantage of its robustly protected right to political speech that offends the powers that be.