A Far More Serious Threat 2

Posted on October 18, 2005 in Crosstalk Journalists & Pundits

When freedom of the press was first incorporated into the Constitution, it was a small matter for any middle class person to buy a press, the type, the ink, and the paper then to start publishing. The relative cheapness of publishing evaporated over the course of 200 years until the idea of “independent publishing” became synonymous with “vanity press”: only the wealthy could afford to own a newspaper of any decent circulation.

It was the small press that the Founding Fathers sought to protect. After being pushed out of the publishing mainstream by the sheer expense, ordinary people found their way back via their home computers. It became possible for me to go to former Yugoslavia in 1992 and for Lindsay Beyerstein to go to New Orleans in 2005 and tell of what we saw firsthand. There was no waiting for reporters “to do the right thing”. Freed by technology, we did it ourselves.

In her response to my previous critique of her advocacy of shield laws for journalists, Lindsay says:

Shield laws exist to further the free flow of information in society at large, not to grant special powers to a group of people on the basis of their allegedly superior qualifications. Legitimate shield laws exist in order to create overall conditions under which the press can function optimally. Therefore, shield laws should use functional criteria to determine whether someone is a journalist–i.e., is this person reporting and disseminating information on matters of public concern?

A little document called the Constitution already covers this. When testing the arrest of a reporter, a court should already be considering whether the individual was “reporting on and disseminating information on matters of public concern”. The existence of this constitutional test is enough for me. It worked before.

Child of the sixties and seventies that I am, I remember the golden age of reporting that culminated in bringing down Richard Nixon in 1974. Did Woodward and Bernstein require a shield law? Hardly, because the matters they reported upon were in the public interest: the president and his staff abused their power for their own ends. This was also the time (1971) when The New York Times published The Pentagon Papers which were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. Though classified, the documents exposed the crooked and insane history that led up to the war. The Nixon Administration stopped publication for fifteen days, at the end of which time the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the injunction against The Times. Ellsberg had been doling out copies of the secret history to other newspapers which would have forced the government to seek out injunction after injunction in the event of The Times being permanently muzzled.

Though Ellsberg was charged with “theft, conspiracy, and espionage”, the charges were ultimately dropped thanks to Nixonian shenanigans. One should note that unlike Judy Miller, Ellsberg’s goal was to expose the inner workings of a corrupt government: Miller, on the other hand, sought to aid it.

Woodward and Bernstein did not need a shield law. Because he was not a journalist, Ellsberg would not have been protected under one. Yet despite this, the free flow of information occurred. What has been preventing newspapers from speaking freely since then? The consolidation of media power in the hands of a few corporations. Reporters are gagged, it is true, but not by the government. They fear for their jobs, so they just go by what corporate and Executive Branch press releases say. Freedom of the press has been undermined by the Press itself. Are we to protect these?

Lindsay concludes her article with these words:

If we have shield laws that explicitly exclude bloggers and other non-traditional media workers, then we’re faced with the worst of all possible worlds. In that case, the government would be making substantive decisions about who is a journalist based on the medium they publish in, their employment status, or the willingness of a media corporation to vouch for them.

That’s my point: we don’t need shield laws because what motivates the free flow of information is the determination of some of us to root it out and present it. We are the Press. The Founding Fathers would recognize us as such. We take the time to compose thoughts, put them to the screen, and distribute them for others to see. The Internet Superhighway is not “untraditional media” but an extension of the original idea of the free press when pampleteers roved the streets either giving away or selling tracts. No court in the land would attempt to deny us our right to research, to know, and to write about these things.

The people who need protection are the Daniel Ellsbergs of our future, the whistle-blowers who uncover government and corporate corruption. Journalists only want shield laws to license themselves. As Lindsay herself points out, there is no “journalist profession”: nevertheless she wants to be counted as one of the protected. Whistle-blowers, on the other hand, may abandon their jobs, their lives, and more to reveal breaches of environmental destruction, worker protection, political giving, and insider trading. The only instances where reporters and editors should be protected is in the publication of articles or the dissemination of news stories that are expressly censored by their corporate masters. But even this law may not be necessary in this day of blogging.

If bloggers want to be the equals or superiors of journalists, they need only do these things:

• Organize in news blogging associations that give out credentials
• Support those who go to the scene to get the story first hand
• Go after the untold stories (cf. FAIR)
• Tell the truth
• Keep telling the truth