Courage in difficult times

From the Spring 2006 issue of The News Media & The Law, page 1.

As far as I'm concerned, the gloves are off.

For the past five years, the Reporters Committee has tried to serve as the media's voice of reason. When the government raised a national security or privacy reason for refusing to tell citizens what it was up to, we listened before we spoke. We carefully considered arguments that classified information in the wrong hands could do major damage to our national security and our citizens.

In interviews and television appearances, I tried to present the executive director of the Reporters Committee as a reasonable, thoughtful advocate for the media, who didn't pop off with attention-seeking quotes. I wanted reporters to be taken seriously when they advocated the public's right to know what government is up to.

But I've reached my threshold. After hearing that the phone records for reporters for ABC News and other news organizations were systematically being scarfed up by intelligence agencies; after hearing Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters called traitors; and after watching two respected West Coast reporters handed subpoenas after uncovering fraud and deception in major league baseball; after hearing from the family of the late Jack Anderson that the FBI wants to poke around in his files — I've had it.

The behavior of government investigators and prosecutors toward American journalists in recent months has been shameful. As our cover package this month demonstrates, the attacks on the First Amendment have been continuous. Two lobbyists for a special interest group have been charged with espionage for doing essentially what reporters do every day — sharing information given to them by a government employee. The National Archives announced last month that more than 25,000 declassified documents secretly had been "reclassified" over the past several years — more than a third of them inappropriately.

The federal officials involved on this assault on civil liberties don't seem to have a clue as to the role information — provided by the media and others — plays in a democracy. Better information means better decisions at the ballot box. It's that simple.

When news broke of the monitoring of journalists' telephone records, several reporters publicly said they won't be intimidated. But the bigger question is, "Will their sources be intimidated?"

I took heart in comments about the telephone tracing of reporters phones from Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. "If indeed it is being done — which would be totally consistent with the draconian and disingenuous policies of this presidency in regard to press and the war in Iraq – it is one more offense against the truth by President Bush and his administration," Bernstein told Editor & Publisher. "There are always going to be decent people in institutions like the CIA, when they see indecent or untruthful actions, who will respond with decent actions, who are interested in truthfulness as being an essential element of real national security. There will always be courageous reporters who won't be intimidated, and courageous public servants who see the press as a last resort to call attention to official lies and disinformation." The times call for courage from reporters and their sources.

On a positive note, credit is due to the judges of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. In the last issue of The News Media & The Law, we reported that nearly 500 criminal cases over the last five years had been conducted to some degree in secret, a situation that poses serious questions of unconstitutional conduct by the courts. Journalism fellow Kirsten Mitchell reports in this issue that Chief Justice Thomas Hogan and his colleagues have begun to make changes to this troublesome system.

A number of cases have been returned to the public docket, and the electronic docketing system no longer tells users that the cases don't exist. Now, the docket typically says "SEALED v. SEALED." Not a big improvement, but it's progress. We're told that more substantive changes require major changes to the software that manages the nation's federal court cases. Let's hope the federal judiciary doesn't drop the ball on these secret cases.