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Reporters Without Borders has
posted its annual look at the state of press freedom around the world. As always, there are problems galore. As RWB points out, press freedom is non-existent in many countries, and people brave enough to
be reporters there risk their liberty or lives even in absence of war. China, Sudan and Saudi Arabia are among them. On the other end of the study are Canada and the Scandinavian countries, where the press is outstandingly free. As for the United States:
Countries that pride themselves on being democracies and respecting the rule of law have not set an example, far from it. Freedom of information is too often sacrificed to an overly broad and abusive interpretation of national security needs, marking a disturbing retreat from democratic practices. Investigative journalism often suffers as a result.
This has been the case in the United States (46th), which fell 13 places, one of the most significant declines, amid increased efforts to track down whistleblowers and the sources of leaks. The trial and conviction of Private Bradley Manning and the pursuit of NSA analyst Edward Snowden were warnings to all those thinking of assisting in the disclosure of sensitive information that would clearly be in the public interest.
US journalists were stunned by the Department of Justice’s seizure of Associated Press phone records without warning in order to identify the source of a CIA leak. It served as a reminder of the urgent need for a “shield law” to protect the confidentiality of journalists’ sources at the federal level. The revival of the legislative process is little consolation for James Risen of The New York Times, who is subject to a court order to testify against a former CIA employee accused of leaking classified information. And less still for Barrett Brown, a young freelance journalist facing 105 years in prison in connection with the posting of information that hackers obtained from Statfor, a private intelligence company with close ties to the federal government.
Freedom of the press is one of the key bulwarks of a free people. Without access to factual information and a spectrum of opinions, it's impossible to make reasonably informed assessments and decisions about a whole range of matters. America has long been one of the freer nations in this regard. But despite this, we know, as A.J. Liebling repeatedly said, that "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
And while the owners and, to a considerable extent, the journalists who work for the owners, are generally protected in the United States from direct interference with that freedom—those worrisome situations RWB catalogues aside—those who read and listen to or watch the news the those owners and journalists choose to present are not protected from the distortions, twisted interpretations and false propaganda that this free press invents or acts as a conduit for.
As Liebling also said, "People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news." He could have said that about radio, television and, of course, those internet outlets that most closely imitate the traditional, pre-online press.
There's more below the fold.
While the American press made a transition from partisan, highly opinionated publications to one in which a journalism school-mediated adherence to objectivity and ethical standards held sway, that change contained three flaws.
First there was the pernicious idea that stories have two sides. The original meaning behind that was a good one for reporters and their editors: Don't take one version of an event or a study as gospel, get "the other side." But it soon became an ironclad rule: There are two sides to every story. As in, only two sides. In fact, most stories, especially the big ones, have more than two sides. Telling only two of them can be just as bad as telling only one.
The press also began succumbing nearly four decades ago to what Ben Bagdakian in his 1983 book of the same name called The Media Monopoly, a concentration of ownership that was moving toward what we have today in America: huge chains of mostly mediocre and frequently godawful newspapers and local broadcast outlets. The mission statement of most of these could be summed up in one phrase: Bottom Line!
And finally there is the press' penchant for infotainment, with most of the emphasis on the second half of that portmanteau. About that no more need be said except I should admit that I am guilty of opening clickbait as the next person.
The confluence of these three makes another statement of Liebling just as true as the one already cited: "People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news."
All this doesn't mean that there aren't still reasonably good newspapers being published or that there aren't good reporters at some of the bad papers. But even at what once were America's most trustworthy news outlets, print or broadcast, have given us plenty of reason to read, listen and watch with deep skepticism.
The internet, as we know, has put a small kink in this modern press. It's done a lot to present more than two sides, and a lot to rip apart the sloppy, lazy, conventional and official-line reporting that has become ever-more common. A couple of the many examples from the Daily Kos files: the exposing of fake reporter Jeff Gannon by a crowd-sourced team led by Susan Gardner in 2004-2005 and the reality of ACA sign-ups thanks to the long hours put in by Brainwrap in 2014.
Without net neutrality, however, such efforts by Daily Kos and a large array of broadly and narrowly focused internet sites—whether or not they view themselves as part of the 21st century press—will be hampered in getting at the truth, at telling the third and fourth sides of stories, of continuing to dig when the traditional media have moved on to superficially cover something else.
Compared with the plight of reporters—amateurs and professionals—in many places around the world, Americans have it pretty good. And that will still be true if net neutrality succumbs to those greedy or censorship-minded. But the trend, as this year's RWB report makes clear is not so good.