From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/24/obama-ap-real-press-freedom-issue-journalist-indifference
The greatest threat to US freedom of the press isn’t incarceration or even a White House investigation, it’s indifference
Ana Marie Cox
guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 May 2013
It’s difficult to say who’s happier about the recent spate of troubles in the Obama White House, specifically the revelations about administration investigations into the activities of news organizations and individual journalists. Is it the Republicans, whose glee has finally found a source that doesn’t coincide with the misery of every day Americans? (That’s the problem with pegging your campaigns to Obama’s inability to get the economy going – you have to actively block his attempts to get the economy going). Or is it the press that’s the truly delighted party here, as they have finally found a narrative that is as critical of the Obama administration as it is laudatory of their own role in the great pageant of democracy?
President Obama and his team may overstep its bounds in attempts to squash individual stories, but it’s the cozy culture of Washington favor-trading that makes the protections of the First Amendment irrelevant.
Most of the time, being a reporter means taking crap from people. I’ve never held to the truism that pissing off “both sides” means you’re somehow doing the job correctly. For one thing, it suggests that there’s just two sides to any story, and while I do think the world can be divided into just two groups if you want, it’s not the “left and right” that matter so much as the “haves and have-nots”.
But it is true that doing the job correctly does not directly translate into praise. A reporter that’s regularly doing a really great job reporting is mostly tolerated by the powers that be and largely unnoticed by the public at large. The kinds of information that are the greatest threat to those in power don’t have to do with secrets so much as process; they detail the crimes against democracy that take place daily, not in the cover of night. They are not blockbuster stories; they are largely sleepers.
Indeed, Project Censored’s annual list of “most censored” stories is, invariably, a collection of articles that were censored so much as to be passed over: the role of slave-wage labor in the US economy (and how the military abets it), the widening gap in wealth between our elected representatives and those that elected them, the way that private philanthropy has usurped parents in shaping public education.
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/24/obama-ap-real-press-freedom-issue-journalist-indifference
