NPR has long been noted for the liberal bias in its news reporting. I am aware of it's bent but listen to it nevertheless because, with its anecdotal form of narrative, it is entertaining and it helps to keep my perspectives balanced.
However, this morning they ran a curious set of comments about journalistic conditions. The two pieces were Daniel Shorr's commentary and a piece about attacks on journalism in Zimabbwe and across the world run in sequence.
The Daniel Shorr piece was his typical ad-hominem attacks on the Bush administration. He was scolding the US position that Russia and Russian leader Putin are backsliding on democracy. Shorr stated that they were just different and doing democracy their own way. He pointed out that we use the Electoral College - what kind of democracy is that?
Apparently this report had nothing to do with journalism. We're both democracies, we're doing it our way; they're doing it their way. He made it look as if we both have democracy and we're making a fuss over nothing. This is, of course, the official Russian position and it's Putin's reply when Bush chides him about the recent slippage in the Russian march toward democracy.
What Mr. Shorr doesn't say, however, is that the recent criticisms of Russia's backsliding have not been about the voting methods employed, but about the curtailment of freedom of the press, especially the government crackdowns on the news media in that country. The free media have been shut down and replaced by government news outlets.
The second piece discussed the condition of journalists across the world, pointing out how they are often put in jail for what they write. It looked at Zimbabwe where journalists have to have a license to write and that the government has kicked out foreign journalists who would otherwise report on the coming elections.
But in NPR's attempt for balance, they close with the comment that the world looks to the United States for our freedom of the press and that we have a Vermont journalist who is under house arrest for failure to reveal his sources.
Of course, in this country, a journalist's protection of his sources is a tradition for which writers have gone to jail to defend many times over the years - it is almost a Red Badge of Courage in the journalistic wars to have been jailed to protect your source. It adds prestige and gravitas to one who has been there.
This is not to say, however, that it is something that is sought out - it is something that one must do when challenged to defend their right to write. It is an experience that is better to have had than to be having. But it is also something that is never required by our executive branch - government officials, police, military, etc - it can only be ordered by the courts and only then in the investigation of criminal matters. If a criminal commits a crime in front of a journalist, he can't simply write about it and have no more responsibility. He has the same responsibility as you and I - to report it, to witness it in court. The whole thing of when the court may impose jail time for failure to reveal a source has been vetted many times and continues to be every time a new case comes to court. The court usually understands that even when it must impose incarceration, there are higher ethical issues at hand and imposes house arrest or minimum security confinement to assuage the hardship.
Yet the NPR report seemed to equate the jailing a single journalist across the entire nation with the mass expulsion of all journalists to cover up a rigged election. It seemed pretty heavy, even for NPR.
But what have these two pieces have in common? Simply put, both overlook the great freedom of the press that they enjoy to put down our own country for doing and saying the right things.
We have no right to criticize Russian "democracy" where the free press has been muzzled, because we have a republican form of democracy that protects the rights of the preferences of the regional majorities, rather than the full democracy that Daniel Shorr would prefer. We don't have freedom of the press because one journalist has, after due process, refused to reveal his sources in a criminal case. This is similar to Zimbabwe where they also don't freedom of the press because all the journalists are being chased from the country.
Only in America would the press defend or equate the elimination of a free press with its full exercise.
-Murrel Rhodes