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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Government Secrecy : International Relations : Labor : Media : Regime |
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World Press Freedom Day: Secrecy, Propaganda Seen Sweeping US |
Current rating: 0 |
by William Fisher
(No verified email address) |
03 May 2005
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Freedom of the press is in decline in the United States amid increased government secrecy and propaganda, say media veterans, analysts, and advocates. |
NEW YORK -- Freedom of the press is in decline in the United States amid increased government secrecy and propaganda, say media veterans, analysts, and advocates.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom here that U.S. media are the freest in the world, the United States has suffered ''notable setbacks'' in press freedom and has slipped among countries tracked by the New York-based rights group Freedom House.
The organization, in an annual survey released in advance of Tuesday's commemoration of World Press Freedom Day, said media in Finland, Iceland, and Sweden faced the fewest fetters in 2004 while the most restrictions were slapped on journalists in North Korea, Burma (also known as Myanmar), Cuba, and Turkmenistan.
The United States was tied with Barbados, Canada, Dominica, Estonia, and Latvia at 24th place out of 194 countries covered in the survey.
Countries were scored based on three broad categories: the legal environment in which media operate, political influences on reporting and access to information, and economic pressures on content and the dissemination of news.
Freedom House said the U.S. score declined in part because of ''a number of legal cases in which prosecutors sought to compel journalists to reveal sources or turn over notes or other material they had gathered in the course of investigations.''
Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine, for example, face prison sentences for refusing to reveal their sources in a case in which the name of a Central Intelligence Agency covert agent was publicly revealed.
Neither Miller nor Cooper wrote articles about the case. Chicago Sun Times syndicated columnist, Robert Novak, named the agent in print. But the government is demanding that Miller and Cooper turn over any information they have. The journalists have lost their appeals in lower courts and will now take their case to the Supreme Court.
Doubts about official influence over media were fanned by revelations that the administration of President George W. Bush was paying journalists to espouse administration positions without identifying their government sponsors.
In one case, the administration -- seeking to build support among black families for its education policies -- paid a prominent African-American pundit, Armstrong Williams, 240,000 dollars to promote the ''No Child Left Behind'' law on his nationally syndicated television show and through his newspaper column, and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
Other nationally known journalists have admitted accepting thousands of dollars to endorse government programs.
''Paying journalists to write positive stories is part of a pattern of secrecy and manipulating the public that undermines our safety and our democracy,'' Steven Aftergood, who runs a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, told IPS.
Government agencies also have produced video news releases, or pro-government propaganda made to resemble independent news, and distributed them to local television stations across the country. The stations frequently fail to identify the government as the source, thus encouraging viewers to believe they are watching genuine news, Freedom House said.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Congressional watchdog agency, has called the videos a form of ''covert propaganda.''
More than 20 federal agencies have used taxpayer funds to produce such television segments. Bush has defended the practice and has said he plans to continue it.
But Martin Kaplan of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication told IPS, ''The consequence of their injecting fake news into the media mainstream may be even worse than poisoning public debate on specific issues. It corrodes the ability of real journalism to do its job.''
Charles Davis, executive director of the University of Missouri School of Journalism's freedom of information center, added, ''Press freedom in the U.S. is experiencing some dark days as government at all levels seems content to turn its back on cherished freedoms in favor of administrative expediency, executive privilege and propaganda. Its embrace of secrecy to the point of caricature is but a symptom of the broader disease. This is a government with absolutely no respect for the role of the press in a democracy.''
US News and World Report magazine recently complained that the Bush administration has ''quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government -- cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters. The result has been a reversal of a decades-long trend of openness in government.''
White House spokespersons routinely counter such assertions by saying that the administration's policy toward the media is honest and transparent.
Even so, Jack Behrman, a former assistant secretary of commerce, accused the administration of hypocrisy.
''Our government avowedly promotes freedom abroad but has sought successfully to limit it in the U.S. through secrecy and manipulation of the media,'' Behrman told IPS.
Copyright © 2005 IPS-Inter Press Service
http://www.ips.org |
See also:
http://www.freedomhouse.org/
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Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Iraqi Press Under Attack from Authorities in Iraq |
by Mohammed al Dulaimy
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
04 May 2005
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BAGHDAD, IRAQ -- A photographer for a Baghdad newspaper says Iraqi police beat and detained him for snapping pictures of long lines at gas stations. A reporter for another local paper received an invitation from Iraqi police to cover their graduation ceremony and ended up receiving death threats from the recruits. A local TV reporter says she's lost count of how many times Iraqi authorities have confiscated her cameras and smashed her tapes.
All these cases are under investigation by the Iraqi Association to Defend Journalists, a union that formed amid a chilling new trend of alleged arrests, beatings and intimidation of Iraqi reporters at the hands of Iraqi security forces. Reporters Without Borders, an international watchdog group for press freedom, tracked the arrests of five Iraqi journalists within a two-week period and issued a statement on April 26 asking authorities "to be more discerning and restrained and not carry out hasty and arbitrary arrests."
While Iraq's newly elected government says it will look into complaints of press intimidation, local reporters said they've seen little progress since reporting the incidents. Some have quit their jobs after receiving threats - not from insurgents, but from police. Most Iraqi reporters are reluctant to even identify themselves as press when stopped at police checkpoints. Others say they won't report on events that involve Iraqi security forces, which creates a big gap in their local news coverage.
"Tell me to cover anything except the police," said Muth'hir al Zuhairy, the reporter from Sabah newspaper who was threatened at a police academy.
The fall of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship resulted in unprecedented freedom for Iraqi journalists, who'd suffered torture and prison terms for criticizing the former regime. More than 150 new newspapers and several local TV and radio stations sprang up immediately after the war began - one of the biggest success stories of the U.S.-led invasion. In recent months, however, Iraqi police have begun cracking down on local journalists, creating a wave of fear reminiscent of Saddam's era.
"If things carry on like this, we will have to carry weapons along with our cameras and recorders," said Israa Shakir, editor of Iraq Today, an independent Baghdad newspaper. "Under such circumstances, we should be worried about the future of democracy."
Although Baghdad is the main hub for Iraqi journalists, complaints have poured in from other provinces, said Ibrahim al Sarraj, director of the Iraqi Association to Defend Journalists. In southeastern Iraq, he said, a weekly newspaper was shut down in October for criticizing the governor of the Wasit province. A judge related to the governor sentenced two editors to several months in prison, Sarraj said. The court papers accused the men of "cursing and insulting" the politician.
In the northern town of Baqouba, a cameraman for a local TV station was filming a mosque when Iraqi troops detained him on April 9 for trespassing "in a prohibited place" and for shooting videos that could be used to help insurgents. He's still in custody, said Salah al Shakerchi, one of the man's colleagues at Al Diyar TV.
"There was no warrant. It was totally illegal, and he's being kept in poor conditions," Shakerchi said. "That's all we know. We have had no further contact with him."
Several Interior Ministry officials didn't return phone messages seeking comment on the journalists' complaints.
Unlike most Western journalists, who are bunkered in hotels because of security concerns, Iraqi reporters still cover bombing scenes and demonstrations, places swarming with authorities. The local journalists make easy targets for several reasons: Police aren't used to press coverage of their activities, authorities aren't well-versed in press freedoms and Iraqi politicians frequently gripe that negative news reports aid the insurgency.
"We've become hated because we say the truth, and the truth is that Iraqi police make a lot of mistakes," said Ahmed Abed Ali, the photographer arrested Jan. 13 for taking pictures of long lines at gasoline stations.
Even with the backing of a major company, journalists in Iraq are targeted by local authorities. The Middle East's two most popular satellite TV stations have suffered: Al-Jazeera's Baghdad bureau has been shuttered for months because of government criticism, and Iraqi forces held a reporter from Al-Arabiya for two weeks because he had footage of insurgent attacks.
Laith Kubba, a spokesman for Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim al Jaafari, said the newly elected government won't accept maltreatment of journalists and urged them to bring complaints through organizations such as the Iraqi Association to Defend Journalists.
The government's main objective, he said, remains fighting terrorism. Iraqi police are the frequent targets of insurgent attacks and are naturally suspicious of reporters who show up minutes after a car bombing. Authorities also have reported incidents in which insurgents used fake press ID cards to get closer to their targets.
"Our brothers in media organizations understand the sensitivity and the difficulties of the current conditions," Kubba said.
Al Dulaimy is a special correspondent. Knight Ridder correspondent Hannah Allam contributed to this report.
© 2005 KR Washington Bureau and wire service sources
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