Slashdot Mirror

Americans aren't exactly all behind the free speech wagon either.

In the wake of 9/11, over half of Americans surveyed said free speech should be restricted, especially on the press (in the context of criticizing the new war on terror).

That's not even recent; a 1987 survey said the same thing (assuming the post-date is correct for a digitized article).

A survey of American youth in 2005 isn't encouraging either.

So while by law America has free speech and China does not, a large percentage of citizens from both countries believe free speech should be restricted in some way.

Troll
Ahhh, the mods are more cowardly than a drone pilot... Bombs away from a nice safe distance so as to not get any of their own blood on their nice suit..

This is just one more instance of the new American business model of making more and more people criminals.

Sure is refreshing to see some logic in all this stupidity.. Where too many people think the first amendment 'goes too far' in protecting one's rights, and these same people will tell you torture is ok... Dark times ahead...

There was a case before the Mass Supreme Judicial Court about 10 years ago where a motorist was stopped by the police. The motorist felt he was being singled-out unfairly so he secretly audio recorded the encounters. A few days later he went to the police station to file a formal complaint against the officers and submitted his recording as evidence. He wound up being arrested, charged and found responsible for violating the wiretap statute. The defendant appealed the decision up to the SJC and lost there.

I've always been torn up a little about the wiretap statute. I think it's not totally unreasonable to have some measure of protection in citizen-to-citizen interactions, especially in this age of Youtube. However I've always felt there should be an exception to this rule for recording municipal and state employees (including police) acting in their official capacity.

FWIW, there was an attempt to change the law to make an exception for recording police officers but (as one might expect) opposition from police unions killed it.

DO you have some links to back that up? I did a google search for Bush removes reporter critical of him and got no hits stating that. I did however, find a lot of hits for Clinton and Obama. One reporter was even kicked off his tour bus during campaign coverage.

I'm not doubting what you say, I just want to see some creditable evidence of it. I think someone told you a lie or something.

Thanks for asking for a source, that's always a fair question. This one's actually been a real bitch for me to find - I remember it being more commonplace, and I distinctly remember hearing about specific instances when it was happening, but I've been having a hell of a time finding specifics.

American Journalism Review has a great article on the Bush administration's "press management". It seems they primarily denied access rather than revoking access, because revoking access would've caused more outrage.

A few key quotes:

The administration's news management has taken many forms, including banning New York Times reporters from Vice President Dick Cheney's campaign plane, cutting short press conferences held jointly with more loquacious foreign leaders, and holding a mere 17 solo press conferences as of December 20, far fewer than the 44 or 84 that Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, respectively, held at a comparable point during their administrations. One-on-one interviews are doled out selectively: Chen says the Los Angeles Times is one of the last major newspapers in the world that has not had an interview with President Bush. It's not personal; it's strategic. "This White House doesn't need California, has no use for California politically," says Chen, "so we carry no clout."

Another good example:

When Cheney went to a Washington, D.C., hospital in November complaining of shortness of breath, Hutcheson called the White House press office and was told he would have to talk to Mary Matalin, a former top aide to the vice president. He called her twice and had to leave messages. Hutcheson later saw a Fox News report that cited Matalin as a source, and as his deadline neared, he called the White House and Cheney's office again. "Sorry, can't help you," was the response.

If you're interested, I can probably dig up a lot more examples. I was probably wrong about how often access was revoked, but the evidence is most certainly there for intentionally limiting access.

As journalists you are expected to seek reliable sources

Yes.

and to accompany reports of controversial facts with attribution.

No.

Sometimes the only way for a journalist to obtain the information they need from reliable sources is to promise to keep their sources anonymous. It's particularly funny that you are picking on the WSJ because they are the paper that brought down Nixon with information from anonymous sources.

This article from American Journalism Review will show you that the practice is perhaps controversial, but common.

Eight years of legal wrangling in the ABC/Food Lion case did not arrive at a thoroughly satisfying conclusion on these matters. You may want to look into it: http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3132

Video news releases
Armstrong Williams
Judith Miller

Look for yourself, you'll find more.

FOX did not dispute that it tried to force Akre to broadcast a false story, but argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports.

Not quite.

Try this and this for a somewhat better description of what happened.

Why should we believe the "New York Crimes?" They have a habit of hiring reports who fabricate stories.

American Journalism Review had a great article last month about the assault on shield laws.

I realize that shield laws and ThinkSecret's NDA smackdown aren't quite the same thing, but the AJR article is great.

Figured I'd plug it.

Hell, yeah. Whenever I see the alternative I realise just how good the BBC is. Sky is dire by comparison, and US TV is just unwatchable.

One thing people tend not to realise is that because the BBC has its own guaranteed source of income, they can't be put under pressure by their sponsors. There's an old story of a car company whose latest product had just been slammed by Top Gear, the BBC's excellent motoring programme (although less excellent than it was. Sigh). And when Top Gear doesn't like something, they're not subtle about it... the story goes is that the CEO watched the review, said, "I'll teach them to talk like that about us. Pull all our advertising from that channel. Now." And his secretary said, "Um..."

You would not believe what a difference this makes. During the last Gulf War I watched some CNN and MSNBC. It was embarrassing. A lot of it was cultural differences, but the blatant jingoism and emotionalism made, to me, a complete mockery of the whole concept of independent journalism ---I found it hard to accept what I was watching as being anything but outright propaganda.

(Incidentally, the BBC is not government funded, and their charter clearly makes them independent from government interference. If the government tries to pressure them, most BBC journalists shout 'Hurrah!' and it tends to make the news.)

I don't like the heavy-handed way the license fee is collected --- they use scare tactics a lot. "This man didn't pay his license fee. Now he's bankrupt, his wife has left him, his kids are drug addicted hookers, and we shot his dog. Don't let this happen to you." They also have a lot of trouble believing that some people don't have TVs. If they'd be nicer about it, I'd be much happier paying for it.

There's quite a good writeup on the BBC's journalism here.

Absolutely. The big journalists have accepted incredibly large "speaking fees" from the very same corporations that have been the subjects of their news stories (or not the subjects if they have been up to no good in some cases). Cokie Roberts has been paid $35,000 to speak for an hour to the Junior League. It was paid for by a Toyota distributor. Do you think Cokie will report on anything bad that distributor does after that?

According to a recent article by American Journalism Review, several different polls have revealed a notable cross section of Americans subscribe to various misconceptions or believe outright falsehoods about the war on terror and the war on Iraq; while it's not uncommon for Americans to be ill-informed about a given issue of the day, it is historically unusual for so many people who claim to "pay close attention to" a given specific issue to still harbor such misconceptions about it (usually, Americans are far more likely to believe various falsehoods about an issue when they aren't particularly interested in it and don't follow it much). Digging deeper, AJR found the likelihood of people believing something that wasn't true tended to hinge on what source they got their news from (article quoted below):

"Among Republicans in the poll, says PIPA's Steven Kull, those who said they were closely following the news about Iraq were more apt to have these perceptions than those who weren't following the news closely. This "suggests that there's some kind of distorting process going on," he says. It's a distortion on two fronts: one being a personal bias that leads someone to reach conclusions that conform to that person's beliefs, and two, "some skewing in the way the information is being presented," he says.

PIPA further analyzed its data from this summer to see if there were relationships between people's beliefs and their main news sources. And it found some: Those who said they watched the Fox News Channel "very closely" were more likely to say evidence of WMD had been found or that people in the world favor the U.S. having gone to war with Iraq than those who watched Fox "not very closely" or "not closely at all." For CNN, the opposite was true--those watching the network very closely were less apt to have these misperceptions. There was little difference among the attention levels of NBC, ABC or CBS viewers.

When PIPA compared Republicans who supported the war, would vote for Bush in 2004 and listed Fox as their primary news source with Republicans who met the first two criteria but listed other news sources, it still found differences in beliefs. Loyal Fox viewers were more likely to have some misperceptions about Iraq.

It's debatable whether that means there's something in the way news is presented or in the way Fox fans choose to hear it."

Yeah, I'd say Fox certainly doesn't put a liberal spin on topics. Note how that's not the same thing as putting no spin on topics. Given a greater likelihood of attentive Fox viewers to believe outright falsehoods than attentive consumers of other news sources exhibit (among other things), Fox looks to be the biggest spinner of news among the leading, mainstream media outlets in the US.