Part 2 of 2 on the attack on the First Amendment by the Bush Administration and the lackey Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Armando's Part 1 can be found here.
"In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly."
-- Justice Hugo Black, New York Times v United States
Until yesterday, watching the traditional media interact with the Bush administration for more than five years has been like watching a tennis match at a high-end country club. Sure, there's been a whiff here and there of an adversarial rivalry, but for the most part it's been limited to "tsk tsk" under-breath rebukes by the media of a competitor who increasingly steps over the line. Sharing membership in the DC cocktail crowd has limited journalists' criticism to polite, water-downed appeals to the small crowd of elite spectators. "This just isn't done," one can imagine reporters saying in undertones to each other in the bar after the sets are completed. "Bringing down the tone of the game," another agrees.
And then the attorney general leapt the net Sunday morning, knocked the press flat on its back and presented a bayonet to the throat: You publish leaks, we can prosecute you as spies. This is more than game, set, match. This is the media assuming it was playing a game while its adversary - an entrenched and secretive administration - was arming for war.
How the press reacts to this blatant strong-arming of First Amendment rights could be the most important test of civil courage and independence since major newspapers cooperated in publishing the Pentagon Papers in the face of injunctions 35 years ago.
(More on the flip)
Given the paucity of official commentary from the big media players today, we can only hope they're locked in ten-hour meetings with the best attorneys in the country and not suffering some sort of disbelieving paralysis that the "civilized" way of doing things has been discarded. To most observers, it's been apparent for quite some time that extreme free speech suppression measures were in the works. When you're embedded deep in the game, I guess you just don't see it coming.
The simple fact is, the special privileges of the press were extended by the Founders with the understanding that journalists would act as mediating truth-tellers for the citizens of this nation. When government or corporations got up to no good, some blessed brave insider soul would hand off proof of skullduggery to the New York Times so that the hearings, investigations, trials and citizen ire could ensue. Of course, that's just what happened with the December NSA leak to the Times, and it's this process that the Bush administration once and for all wants to subvert with Gonzales' declaration yesterday.
The truth is, sources have always borne the greater risk in this symbiotic leaking game. They lose jobs, clearances, income, reputation, friends, sometimes family and often the classification of being sane, while reporters get to appeal to the public as martyrs, rarely do jail time - and when they do, come out of it with multi-million dollar book contracts (see Miller, Judith). Woodward and Bernstein hit a trifecta: Pulitzers, book and a movie. The whistleblowers themselves seem only able to dream of such rewards for their humbler, more dangerous role.
It is a precious right, this historical protection of the press, and one eminently worth fighting for to keep our democracy as transparent as possible. Now is the time to see if the current generation of media mavens are themselves up to the task of preserving their own constitutional privileges. If they are not, I predict the sources will continue to leak. Their risk, after all, is no greater after Gonzales' pronouncement yesterday than it was two weeks ago. If the big press players don't fight for this one, alternative media will surely rise to make their bones and publish like mad. Indeed, in the age of the Internet, the argument could be made that the role of mediator in getting information out there is anachronistic anyway. What's to prevent a modern-day Daniel Ellsberg from setting up a web site, getting it mirrored, making PDF's and posting away with glee (Craig Murray, in fact, did just that - and this in the face of Britain's harsh Official Secrets Act).
I would argue that some version of a gatekeeping/verifying body is desirable; otherwise, it would become frustratingly cumbersome to sort out the false claims from true. And I'm old-fashioned. I think the press, when it's living up to its ideological potential as it did during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate era, is the closest this country can probably come to having an objective, skeptical, researching agent to separate the kook with a grudge against a boss from the serious whistleblower.
But notice I said "desirable," not "necessary." If worse comes to worst, citizens will step up to do the chaff/wheat separation. It's not how we want to spend our time, but it will get done. What all of us who care about free flow of information should root for after Gonzales' statement yesterday are two things: first (and hopefully soon), a firm and defiant official response from the heads of news organizations declaring a firm "screw you" to the Bush administration, and second, that reporters get a clue and get off the tapped phone lines. Getting creative and wearing down some shoe leather to meet willing whistleblowers would do the whole profession a world of good.
Traditional media needs to understand that the largest part of blogospheric frustration is most certainly not that their representatives are overzealous in their pursuit of truth. We want them not only to have their constitutional privileges, we want them to use them far, far more. We don't in any way begrudge them this precious right, and we urge them to exercise it to the full. We've got their backs on this one, if they're willing to take a stand.
If they're not willing ... well, there are people at the gate, not just of the political system, but at the media barrier as well. And if the traditional press doesn't feel strongly enough about this to step up to the plate and fight for its rights, there are a lot of willing gatecrashers waiting in the wings, and patriotic sources will surely find them. Ignoring this salient fact could either be the death knell of traditional media or the spur that gets them back to their roots. Their choice.