Do You Think Journalists Are Free In The Usa?

[leonidas]

Do you think journalists are free in the usa?


With all the stuff they've shown in france,it seems not.

[Rat Faced]

Journalists are free.

However if the want promotion etc...they have to toe the editorial line i think.

[3RA1N1AC]

this "embedded journalists" (insert "in bed with the military" pun here) business during the invasion of iraq was a bad sign. it seemed like a serious compromise of objective journalism, to have reporters riding along with troops and having their sympathies/vocabulary/p.o.v. influenced by their intimacy with the grunts and officers. whenever i listened to reports from the journalists, they always seemed to be speaking as if they were part of the military team rather than outside observers.

on the plus side, we got a lot more close-up detail and up-to-the-minute reporting than ever before, but it lacked perspective-- as if all of it were happening in a moral/social/political vacuum. "there's some smoke over there, there's some dirt, there are some dead bodies, hooray we didn't get shot by the iraqis," but how did any of that fit into a larger picture? all of these things were presented with no attempts to address the cause or the effects of the things they reported on, as if it were just a grand adventure rather than a serious political and historical event.

i don't really blame the u.s. government for this, though it is prolly partially at fault, but it struck me as terribly lazy and compromising on the part of the media who chose not to set out on their own and capture a more clear, balanced story.

[clocker]

Originally posted by Rat Faced@7 July 2003 - 14:41
Journalists are free.

However if the want promotion etc...they have to toe the editorial line i think.

True.

Fortunately for us in the US, the editorial line gets drawn anywhere from the extreme right all the way to the extreme left.
It's up to the citizen to decide which source to patronize.


As a somewhat off-topic aside I present the following (feel free to google for more thorough coverage)...

Tattered Cover Decision an
ACLU Victory Too!

ACLU of Colorado was thrilled to be a part of the recent Colorado Supreme Court decision upholding the right of the general public to purchase books anonymously and without governmental interference. Civil libertarians across the nation are applauding Joyce Meskis, owner of the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, for her courage and tenacity in standing up for the rights of readers.

The case involved an attempt by law enforcement officials to use a search warrant to gain access to the book-buying records of a suspected criminal. The Court held that law enforcement officials must show a compelling need for access to customer purchase records - a need sufficiently compelling to outweigh the harm likely caused to constitutional interests by execution of the search.

ACLU of Colorado submitted an amicus brief urging the Court to protect the rights of readers. Bruce Jones of Holland and Hart, ACLU's cooperating attorney who filed the brief, said the ruling "was written with a breadth of analysis that will extend beyond Colorado just because of how thorough and careful and persuasively the court presented its analysis."

We are grateful to Mr. Jones for the work he did in preparing the brief and to all the attorneys and friends who helped in defending and supporting this case.

After the case against the bookstore had been decided, and the criminal case was also over, the woman who owns the Tattered Cover ( surely one of the top 10 bookstores in the entire country- I'm very fortunate that it's here in Denver&#33 revealed the information the government had been trying to pry out of her.

The Government had been dead nuts sure that the accused had purchased books about bombmaking and urban terrorist tactics from this store. Turns out he had actually bought books on calligraphy.

[kAb]

sure. u can figure out whatever you want if you put your mind to it, interrogating enough top officials. its whether they'll talk or not.


whats the stuff they've shown in France?

[j2k4]

Any reasonable observer of the media in the U.S. could not fail to conclude that they are "free", although to find that they are also unbiased (as clocker has pointed out) would indicate the observer has taken leave of his/her senses.

Embedded reporters are quite a different case; they must be protected by the soldiers they accompany; the quality of which protection could conceivably suffer should the reportage be somehow objectionable to his/her escort.

I see no cure for this, ah....failing.

[MagicNakor]

Although one could argue it's the first time reporters have been so "close" to the front lines since Vietnam.

And we all know how that turned out.

[j2k4]

Originally posted by MagicNakor@8 July 2003 - 01:10
Although one could argue it's the first time reporters have been so "close" to the front lines since Vietnam.

And we all know how that turned out.

Just so-

Thank you, MN.

[3RA1N1AC]

i'm not sure i follow what you're saying. we all know how the viet nam war turned out or how the reporting turned out? are you suggesting a correlation between how detailed the reporting is and how the war turns out?

just curious.

[MagicNakor]

Popular support for the Vietnam war plummeted when everyone stateside began to see what was really going on. The reporters then had a larger measure of "freedom" when bringing images back home. Surely the military has learnt from that experience, and, in an effort to not fight Vietnam II, has brought the media closer to heel.