I think the media is learning a lesson in that.
I’m not really sure why the media decided to hook themselves to the Bush wagon in the run up to the 2000 election – maybe they were bored with Gore (or figured he wouldn’t provide nearly as much material as Bush); maybe they were leaning over backwards to show that they really weren’t the “Liberal media”. Whatever the reason, many seem to have decided to take a pass on real reporting, even before they entered into their post-9/11 prostration. After 9/11… gah! unspeakable.
Still, even then there were some reporters who were going to do their jobs and hold power accountable, even if their corporate bosses weren’t too happy about it. Some, such as the New York Times, were perfectly willing to not only acquiesce to publishing total spin, through Judy Miller, but acceded to White House requests that they withhold stories that detailed this administrations illegal operations. (An exception to supine corporate bosses would be the Knight-Ridder corp – one of the few media organizations that pretty consistently did real investigative reporting and asked questions in the run-up to the war – but gosh, darn, for some reason it all of a sudden became imperative to the stockholders that this media organization be sold and broken up. And so it was.)
I have a feeling that some of this was in the form of an attempted inoculation… no doubt the press corps, more than most, knew the type of people who are inhabiting the White House. The stories that have made it through – on Abu Ghraib tortures, “renditions”, illegal wiretapping, excessive secrecy, corruption and more, are appalling. One can’t help but wonder what things are going on that we don’t yet know about. What ever it is… the Bush admin really, really doesn’t want us to find out.
So what, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, do you do when the press that you thought you had cowed and compliant, that knew their place, decides to start digging and keep digging?
Why, you threaten to prosecute them as spies, of course, under the Espionage Law.
Adam Liptak reports, in The New York Times:
(more on the other side)
Earlier administrations have fired and prosecuted government officials who provided classified information to the press. They have also tried to force reporters to identify their sources.
But the Bush administration is exploring a more radical measure to protect information it says is vital to national security: the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws.
Such an approach would signal a thorough revision of the informal rules of engagement that have governed the relationship between the press and the government for many decades. Leaking in Washington is commonplace and typically entails tolerable risks for government officials and, at worst, the possibility of subpoenas to journalists seeking the identities of sources.
But the Bush administration is putting pressure on the press as never before, and it is operating in a judicial climate that seems increasingly receptive to constraints on journalists.
[…]
Because such prosecutions of reporters are unknown, they are widely thought inconceivable. But legal experts say that existing laws may well allow holding the press to account criminally. Should the administration pursue the matter, these experts say, it could gain a tool that would thoroughly alter the balance of power between the government and the press.
[…]
In February, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales whether the government’s investigation into The Times’s disclosure of a National Security Agency eavesdropping program included “any potential violation for publishing that information.”
Mr. Gonzales responded: “Obviously, our prosecutors are going to look to see all the laws that have been violated. And if the evidence is there, they’re going to prosecute those violations.”
Recent articles in conservative opinion magazines have been even more forceful.
“The press can and should be held to account for publishing military secrets in wartime,” Gabriel Schoenfeld wrote in Commentary magazine last month.
There is much more, including discussion of the 1917 and 1950 laws that might be manipulated for this purpose (remember, Ashcroft had Greenpeace activists – I think it was – charged under some ancient, obscure “sailormongering” law), as well as the link between the recent arrests of the AIPAC lobbyists and the possible prosecution of journalists under that same law.
Much as I deplore what some in the media have become, (and would like to thumb my nose at them and sneer “suckers!”), this would be an unbelievably dangerous development, akin to places we usually regard as being “third world” countries, or totalitarian regimes. Even before this, Reporters Without Borders put US press freedom at #44 (on US territory… in Iraq it is #137)… below Italy (where the recently booted out Prime Minister owned much of the press), Bosnia, Mali and El Salvador.
I have a friend who was a member of one of the anti-Milosevec youth groups, and who watched as that country sank into totalitarianism. He no longer is shocked or surprised at some of the parallels here in the US… he just shakes his head and worries.
What’s that again about “It can’t happen here”?
crossposted from Stalking Sunlight, HB mag’s blog