The Fall of the American Media

Twenty-seventh – thanks to Ann Coulter it isn’t lower!

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

5/14/05

http://zeppscommentaries.com/VRWC/mediafall.htm

Bartcop had a link to an article at Arab News  which stated that an outfit calling itself "Freedom House" had rated the world’s media, and that in terms of having a free press, America ranked only 27^th in the world.

That the free press in America has taken a catastrophic plunge over the past 15 years is pretty much beyond dispute. One can spend a few days reading the Washington Post and realize that the glory days of Woodward and Bernstein are long passed. One can read its crosstown rival, the Washington Times, and realize that some segments of the American press are no better than the once-ridiculed Pravda of the Soviet era.

The Arab News story on the survey began with the acid remark, "Recent polling data shows that most Americans think their press is the freest in the world — indeed, some believe it is too free." Obviously, an attitude like that left a lot of room for encroachment that an at best passive and at worst timid populace would tolerate quite willingly.

But I got around to wondering what the criteria of the survey was, exactly. On one end of the American journalistic spectrum, you had outfits like Moon’s rag or Faux News, which are often only one step above newspapers in some countries where the daily headline better sing the praises of the Glorious Leader, or a certain managing editor would be taken out and shot. At the same time Bartcop could level his daily blasts against Putsch and manage to avoid falling into the American Gulag. Did Freedom House factor in such wide variation?

So I went to Freedomhouse.org and examined their methodology. I was wondering if they considered the influence of private ownership on the media. They do, along with a host of other factors. Their methodology statement includes:

Our examination of the level of press freedom in each country is divided into three broad categories: the legal environment, the political environment, and the economic environment.

institutions in order to restrict the media’s ability to operate. We assess the positive impact of legal and constitutional guarantees for freedom of expression; the potentially negative aspects of security legislation, the penal code and other criminal statutes; penalties for libel and defamation; the existence of and ability to use Freedom of Information legislation; the independence of the judiciary and of official media regulatory bodies; registration requirements for both media outlets and journalists; and the ability of journalists’ groups to operate freely.

Under the category of political environment, we evaluate the degree of political control over the content of news media. Issues examined in this category include the editorial independence of both the state-owned and privately-owned media; access to information and sources; official censorship and self-censorship; the vibrancy of the media; the ability of both foreign and local reporters to cover the news freely and without harassment; and the intimidation of journalists by the state or other actors, including arbitrary detention and imprisonment, violent assaults, and other threats.

That is pretty hard to fault. One of the biggest threats to American freedom is the strange notion that tyranny and repression are all right if inflicted by the private sector. Thus Americans are watched by more cameras, are accustomed to having every move they make at their jobs closely scrutinized. Americans are convinced that employers have a "right" to tell employees how they must dress, how they must act, even how they must behave when off duty. People cheerfully become wage slaves while inveighing that government must always be watched because it might encroach upon one’s personal sovereignty. "Recent polling data shows that most Americans think their press is the freest in the world — indeed, some believe it is too free."

Freedom House took that into account, along with the effects of collusion between government and reporters (Armstrong Williams, Robert Novak, Jeff Gannon, etc.) and self-censorship as a result of social, political, or economic factors. The US, which ranked 15^th in the 2004 survey, still had a ranking of "free."* Pretty bad for a country the inhabitants like to brag is "the freest on earth," but compared to everyone else, pretty good.

In just one year, it slid to 27^th, putting it on a par with Canada, the Barbados, Estonia, and Latvia.

It would have been much worse, but for two things. First, there is the fact that the government and the corporate interests haven’t figured out how to squelch the independent media that remains. They are trying, of course: the most recent story reported in the remaining free press was efforts by the new chairman of CPB, the parent corporation of public broadcasters NPR and PBS, to introduce "more conservative" coverage to the already decidedly right-leaning networks. Later it was revealed that the chairman was in fact a toady to the White House who, despite frequent meetings with Karl Rove and other admin officials, actually tried denying any links to the White House.

So there is still an independent media, and of course, there are tens of thousands of people like myself and Bartcop who are willing to talk about this kind of stuff.

So that pushes the freedom rating up a few notches.

The second is that the study isn’t really designed to distinguish between sloppy journalism and deliberate lying. Diana Griego Erwin, the renowned Sacramento Bee columnist, resigned the other day when a in-house investigation revealed that some of the sources in her recent stories could not be properly attributed. [Note: I wrote an essay on her back in 2001. If we assume that the newspaper has justification, was it sloppy journalism, or deliberate lying? And how do you tell? Either way, though, the study would consider Griego Erwin – if guilty – an example of repressed press.

At the same time, the Lord Haw-Haws of the right, such people as Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Weiner sometimes speak out against the government (usually pretending that the people who are out of power, be they liberals, Jews or gays, are actually secretly running everything) and of course aren’t being suspended by their editors for breaches of journalistic ethics. (Just try to imagine EIB or Newsmax demanding journalists submit to fact-checking!)

I won’t insult the intelligence of my readers by pretending we can’t know if they are lying or not. Of course they are lying. They are paid liars for the GOP. But the study would have to classify them, with their outspoken "anti-government" stances, as examples of a free press.

There you have it: Griego Erwin may have invented sources, and that’s a less free media. Ann Coulter simply lies, but she claims to lie about the powers that be, so that’s evidence of a free media. Amazing, isn’t it?

So if the ranking of 27^th for "the freest nation on earth" (something Americans used to refer to themselves as) strikes you as appalling, remember: it’s actually even worse.