Journalists under siege

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 2005 by Joe Saltzman

IT IS NOT MUCH FUN being a journalist anymore. Special interest groups have spent decades trying to convince the public that the media are not to be trusted. Government and Big Business leaders have echoed the same refrain. Top news media themselves have created a series of highly publicized scandals, including the fabrication of stories in The New York Times and at CBS News, as well as the falsifying of circulation numbers at Newsday. Warring factions around the world seem more eager than ever to kill the journalists covering conflicts rather than to talk to them. Now the courts are threatening more than a handful of journalists with sanctions, home detention, or prison terms for not naming sources in investigative news stories.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press, believes that punishing journalists for acting as watchdogs on those who wield power is dangerous. "If journalists are not able to protect their sources, the public will ultimately suffer because fewer people will be willing to come forward with information about public affairs out of tear of retaliation," she says.

One TV journalist, Jim Taricani, a veteran reporter at WJAR-TV in Rhode Island, refused to name the tipster who gave him an FBI videotape showing the mayor of Providence receiving a bribe. A Federal judge sentenced him to a six-month sentence of house arrest when he would not identify his confidential source. Moreover, the judge was not satisfied with just house arrest. Taricani's confinement for criminal contempt includes several punitive conditions: no Internet access, interviews, or reporting.

There are nearly a dozen different journalists across the country facing subpoenas from prosecutors who want to see their work product. It is not just U.S. courts, either. Now the military is getting in on the action. A Denver Post reporter resisted a military court subpoena for notes about an alleged gang rape of an 18-year-old woman at an Air Force base. The reporter was protecting the woman who was raped and attorneys for the newspaper called the request "a blatant fishing expedition" by the defense. As Society of Professional Journalists President Irwin Gratz puts it, "It's really beginning to look like open season on reporters."

Only the journalists seem to care about this infringement on First Amendment rights. The public, buried under an avalanche of special interest groups' condemnation of the news media, bombarded by one image after another of rude and offensive journalists hounding celebrities, couldn't care less. The strong connection between press freedom and citizen rights has been lost in the current talk show debates on overzealous journalists who look out only for themselves, not the public.

There was a time when fictional TV journalists such as Mary Richards, Lou Grant, and Murphy Brown were thrown into jail for protecting sources and made the point that the journalist was working for the public good, writing or broadcasting stories that expose corruption in business and government; when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame were lionized in film and TV. When people saw stories of real journalists headed for jail because they were protecting sources, they remembered Mary and Lou and Murphy and showed concern. However, those heroes of journalism are decades old and few seem to remember them or care about what they stood for.

Today's image of the journalist usually is the tabloid reporter or photographer chasing someone's favorite actor, or congregating in packs to badger some person accused of murder or rape. So, when the free press faces its toughest challenge in a generation from the courts and other segments of society, there is no positive collective memory from which to draw. The public is uninterested at best and antagonistic at worst. This means trouble for journalists facing jurists who are under no public scrutiny to emphasize free press over legal expediency.

Happily, journalists still care and will go to jail to protect what is left of freedom of the press to investigate stories that are of import to the public. Yet, as more and more judges feel no pressure not to harass reporters trying to shield sources, the problem will become more severe as a number of reporters end up in home detention or prison.

There also is the question of support from the reporter's employer, the newspaper. Too often in the past, newspaper management has pressured the reporter to do what the courts ask and not cause any trouble. The smaller the newspaper, the less economic and political clout it has, and when such an incident hurts the bottom line, the support becomes more tenuous and, sometimes, nonexistent. There are too many stories of reporters willing to resist judicial mandates only to be left out in the cold when the newspaper refuses moral and financial aid. Give up the fight or lose your job is always a possibility in this kind of a situation.

All of this sends a mangled message about freedom of the press to the world around us. As Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, notes, "The very big concern for us is if journalists are imprisoned in these cases, it sends a terrible message around the world." Only dictatorships are supposed to do that.