A Free Press: Pillar of Liberty

     In the very first Amendment to our Constitution, the third basic right
essential to the preservation of ordered liberty mentioned (after freedom
of religion and speech) is freedom of the press. But in the more than two
hundred years since the adoption of that document, it is not at all clear
that a free press has been an asset to our nation rather than a recurrent
cancer eating away at its innards. 
     Those of us who were once actually taught American history remember
well the story of John Peter Zenger, the pre-Revolutionary War colonial
newspaperman tried for seditious libel in 1734 because of his attacks on
the colonial Governor of New York. Zenger was acquitted by the jury in spite
of pressure from the judge and this was said to stand for the proposition, 
in the words of his attorney, that "exposing ... public wickedness... can never
be a libel ...". This case and the pamphleteers such as Thomas Paine who
supported our Revolution were in large part responsible for the high regard
in which our Founding Fathers held a free press. 
     But was this regard rightly placed and is such esteem justified today?
Now no one can deny that in domestic affairs newspapers are often responsible
for exposing "public wickedness", whether one is talking of Thomas Nast's 
cartoons helping to bring down Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall over a hundred
years ago, Jacob Riis and the "muckrakers" revealing the appalling living conditions
of slum dwellers in the early 1900's, or other exposes throughout our history. It
is when we get to national security and military and international affairs that
newspapermen, with their biases and lack of background knowledge, become more
problematic in their disregard for public safety.
     In conducting combat operations, General William Sherman, a man known for
his pithy statements, probably had the definitive word. "I hate newspapermen. 
They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I
regard them as spies, which in fact they are. If I killed them all there would be 
news from Hell before breakfast." And before dismissing this as a gross
exaggeration, think of the Mainstream Media (MSM) today blithely revealing
the very secrets necessary to protect us against international terrorists.
     From at least the Civil War on our "free press" has been an unjustified
millstone around the necks of both foreign policy makers and military planners.
Both Generals Sherman and Grant during the Civil War were bedeviled by 
newspapers revealing military secrets. At the end of the nineteenth century
William Randolph Hearst, the leading newspaperman of that day, boasted of
getting the United States to go to war with Spain with his manipulated and
erroneous news reports, and his boast was probably true. To a lesser extent
American entry into World War I was partly the responsibility of the press.
And press manipulation for the remainder of the twentieth century colored
our view of the world. The MSM concealed Soviet crimes, hid the extent of the
Holocaust, denied Castro was a Communist and promoted him as an advocate
of democracy, and manipulated coverage of the VietNam War to ensure our
defeat, while finding time to undo an election and overthrow a President. 
      One of the most monstrous examples of the abuse of our "free press"
occurred during World War II when a right wing Chicago newspaper owned
by an enemy of our wartime President (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) revealed
that the United States had broken the Japanese Naval Code, thus putting in 
jeopardy the lives of thousands of servicemen and risking the failure of
future military operations. (Doesn't this sound all too familiar to us today!)
The Japanese, fortunately, either didn't become aware or didn't believe this
information and continued to use this same code and, rather than risk calling
attention to this security leak, the Government decided not to prosecute the
newspaper or the leakers. After the War ended, a statute was enacted in 1950
to cover this situation. The statute (18 USC 798 (a)(3) ) states that "whoever
knowingly and willfully ... publishes... any classified information ... concerning the
communication intelligence activities of the United States ... is subject to up
to 10 years imprisonment". This statute is literally violated by the recent
exposure by the MSM of international telephone transmission intercepts by
our Government. Does anyone for a moment think that any newspaper or
reporter will be prosecuted under this statute?
      The situation today is much worse than ever before. Television news
presents a totally distorted picture of the world. Visual images openly
obtainable in a free nation (United States or Israel) can only be obtained
in a non-free nation with the acquiescence and cooperation of their
government. Thus, Iraq under Sadaam, Iran, the Palestinian Authority,
and Hezbollah can control the flow of news and manipulate it. American
news entities such as CNN have openly admitted that they have submitted
to control by tyrants and terrorists in order to maintain access. A film
(Pallywood) is devoted to showing staged events in which the Palestinians
purported to prove Israeli atrocities and convince the world, with the
assistance of their journalistic dupes, that they were innocent victims.
Hezbollah has recently adopted similar tactics with obviously staged
events. In addition, fully realizing the naivete and bias of Western journalists,
the Islamists have deliberately set the stage for the deaths of their own
civilians by engaging in military operations in the midst of these civilians (using
them as human shields, a violation of international law) so that military
countermeasures would necessarily harm their own civilians and raise an
international outcry. 
     Newspapers have persistently engaged in a monstrous form of moral
equivalence where the actions of those killing innocents inadvertently in
spite of strenuous efforts to avoid doing so (e.g., prior warnings of impending
attacks) are equated with the actions of those deliberately killing innocents
whom they have targeted. The final straw in creating the distortions presented
by our journalists is that Islamo-Fascists and, to a lesser degree, totalitarians in 
general threaten the very lives of journalists who fail to toe the line while
Western democracies do not. Thus, it is both easier and safer to condemn
those fighting evil than the evil-doers themselves.
     In the past the MSM ignored the domestic threat of Communist subversion 
and the foreign threat posed by international Communism, with its tens of
millions of victims. Today it actively interferes with attempts to protect our
homeland from Islamo-Fascist terrorism and our attempts to reform Islamic
states abroad. The clear intent of the MSM is not warning of unwarranted
excesses but sabotage of necessary protective measures. 
     We tend to think that today we are protected from the MSM insanity by
the alternative media, talk radio and the Internet, which was somewhat
effective in exposing the forgeries behind Dan Rather and CBS' attempt
to destroy President Bush during the last election campaign. But the
majority of the public (and the electorate), because of general disinterest
and poor education, still gets its news from television, photographic
images, headlines, and abbreviated stories disseminated by the MSM. 
Think of the misinformation about Hurricane Katrina, with the distortions
about the number of deaths, the accusations of racism, the exaggerations
about the violence and the chaos at refugee centers, that were spread by
the media with the resultant interference with rescue efforts. Thus, the MSM
endangers rather than informs. Corrections and clarifications by the alternative
media usually come too late and do not penetrate the consciousness of most of
the voting public. And the distorted and manipulated view becomes part of the
accepted general wisdom about any issue.
     It is presently unclear what, if anything, can be done about all this. The
guarantee of a free press may be the death of us yet, especially if that
freedom includes the ability to freely engage in espionage. There is probably
no better way to conclude then with the words of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the
foremost public intellectual of eighteenth century England. He observed that
even in his day for a newspaperman "is required neither genius nor knowledge, 
neither industry nor sprightliness; but contempt of shame and indifference to
truth are absolutely necessary". 

                            R.B.