Today is World Press Freedom Day

From the World Values Survey Association.

Thanks to UNESCO for the information and for trying to protect journalists

The #CharlieHebdo attack highlights the urgency of to defending freedom of expression, and particularly, #pressfreedom today. Globally, 9 of 10 crimes against #socialmediaproducers & journalists go unpunished. What if your opinions on Facebook got you arrested?

Today is Press Freedom Day

“A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny. … Under dictatorship the press is bound to languish, and the loudspeaker and the film to become more important. But where free institutions are indigenous to the soil and men have the habit of liberty, the press will continue to be the Fourth Estate, the vigilant guardian of the rights of the ordinary citizen.”
Winston Churchill


From an Algerian former colleague, let me share:

"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them."
Thomas Jefferson

Thinking about political free speech for organizations

I just read "Money Unlimited: How Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the Citizens United decision" by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker. It got me to thinking:

Whose Political Opinions are Expressed by Corporations

Organizations don't speak. Sometimes a person is designated to speak for an organization, but organizations don't have the physical equipment to speak.

More importantly is the way organizations make decisions. The owners of an organization are in theory its stock holders, and if an organization were to express opinions they ought to be the opinions of its stock holders. While there are stock holder meetings, many of the stock holders of large corporations are themselves other organizations -- banks, pension funds, mutual funds, etc. There is no practical way to ascertain the political preferences of the people who own large corporations.

In fact, small groups of people make decisions as to the advertisements that corporations pay for. Thus a small group of people is using money belonging to the corporation's stock holders to pay for advertisements promoting political views of that small group rather than the documented opinion of the stock holders. I can not imagine that the corporate charters give that power to the management of corporations, nor that the ultimate people whose money forms the capital of the corporation are informed that their money will be used in that way.

The question is not whether the rights of corporations as "legal persons" have the right to political speech, but whether the management of a corporation has the right to determine the content of political speech of the corporation that they manage.

We generally agree that foreign nationals do not have the right to advertise to influence American elections. Thus foreign owned corporations should not have that right either. How about corporations chartered in the United States with foreign owners? What percentage of the capital in a corporation could come from foreign investors before the corporation should not be allowed to influence an American election?

Indeed, I have made the argument that decisions on political advertisements funded by corporations are actually made by small groups of people in the corporate management. What if some of all of those people are not American citizens?

Do we want the Federal Elections Committee to try to make such fine distinctions and to try to ascertain whether corporations meet the criteria to be allowed political advertisements? I think not.

Balance in the Media

The Supreme Court decided in the past that the government had the right to assure balanced coverage of controversial issues in the media, accepting a "Fairness Doctrine" from the FCC. While the FCC no longer enforces a fairness doctrine, the government might do so.

The fairness doctrine was imposed in part because the broadcast spectrum is owned by the people and managed by the people to serve the public interest. In the second half of the 20th century, most people got their information from from radio or television, and there was a potential danger that if those media presented a biased coverage of the issues before voters, then the voters would not have the information necessary to vote wisely.

Similarly, the FCC has enforced a newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule. The rule again establishes the principle that in order to assure that voters have balanced information on issues before them the government can regulate the media.

Today people have vastly more access to information via cable television and the Internet than they had when those principles were established. Faced with a virtual flood of information, the question is to what do viewers attend? It is possible that the government has a legitimate role in encouraging the public to attend to a balanced set of views on key issues. I would hold that such is at least worthy of consideration.

Money is now used to buy attention through advertisements in newspapers, radio, television, email, social media, search engines, etc. Indeed, money is used to buy "news channels" such as Fox News and MSNBC that present conservative and liberal views of issues respectively.

It would seem to me that the government has a potential role in assuring that the funding for political advertising is not so heavily directed towards one point of view that voters are unlikely to attend appropriately to other legitimate views on the issues. I would think limitations on the funding of political advertisement by Super PACs, corporations and non-profits be considered in this respect. 

A thought about the ethical limits of market

Michael Sandel, in his book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, argues that markets in which money transactions take place are extending beyond their ethically legitimate role in the distribution of goods and services (and provision of signals for producers and consumers) to other less acceptable transactions. Would you want people to sell their votes? Do you want to see organs auctioned on eBay (perhaps with reserves) so that the highest bidder could obtain an organ for transplant? How about children auctioned for adoption? There clearly should be limits to what you can buy if you have enough money.

While Sandel is right to worry, one can argue that the long term trend is towards more ethical institutions. The institution of slavery has been abolished, and there is increasing effort to reduce involuntary servitude. We read in history where marriages were arranged by parents to obtain control of dowries or increase the value of property holdings. Indeed, I suspect that votes are less likely to be bought and sold today than they once were.

Sandel suggests that we should have a public debate on the what money should and should not be allowed to buy. I would be more optimistic about that had the Supreme Court not decided that for the purposes of free speech, corporations are people; were we not seeing PACs using funding from people of great wealth to dominate the media with political messages.

Press Freedom Index 2010

Reporters without Borders has just published the 2010 edition of its press freedom index. The United States ranks 20th in the world! This ranking is unchanged from last year.

Freedom of Expression

The history of freedom of expression is quite long, and apparently early examples of societies providing such freedom include not only the classical Greek city states but also the Madrasahs and universities of classical Islamic society (where the university was invented). Of course, historically churches were not pleased by apostates nor heretics, and for most of history kings and sultans were not open to criticism. It would seem that censorship gained new urgency for religious and government leaders after the invention of printing, when opinions could be widely shared. Of course, with radio, television, and the Internet added to the print media, there is even more technological capacity to share opinions, and consequently considerable enthusiasm on the part of those who would coerce agreement to censor free speech.

In the West, it would seem that the resistance to censorship gained importance in the Reformation, with a concern for freedom of religious expression. It gained currency in political documents with the American Bill of Rights and French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.


I quote from Wikipedia:

Areopagitica, published in 1644, was John Milton's response to the Parliament of England's re-introduction of government licensing of printers, hencepublishers. Milton made an impassioned plea for freedom of expression and toleration of falsehood, stating:

"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

Today, freedom of expression is enthroned in a number of international agreements, Again, quoting from Wikipedia:

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, states that:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Today freedom of speech, or the freedom of expression, is recognized in international and regional human rights law. The right is enshrined in Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 13 of the American Convention on Human Rights and Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights.

It is hard to see how one can promote knowledge for development without also promoting freedom of expression!

What is good journalism

Good journalism, according to Carl Bernstein, is "a simple matter but difficult to achieve", namely "trying to obtain the best attainable version of the truth."

I wonder if, in that definition, it might be better to replace "version" with "approximation". I am not sure I like the idea that there are different versions of truth, other than the different versions that different people might hold of the same truth.

I also wonder if the function of the journalist is simply to "obtain" that approximation rather than to convey the information that would enable the public access to the best approximation of truth.

The truth about what? Bernstein is famous for his work with Bob Woodward in exposing the Watergate conspiracy. Using that as the example, consider several truths:

• The truth about the event of June 17, 1972 in which a group of men broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee.
• The truth about the effort of the Republican campaign officials to obtain information about the Democratic plans for the election campaign.
• The truth about the efforts of Republican campaign officials to use unfair and sometimes illegal steps to ensure a win in the election.
• The truth about the overall efforts of the Republican campaign in the election.
• The truth about the role of President Nixon and his inner circle of White House advisors to subvert election procedures and then to cover up what they had done.
• The truth about the weaknesses in our democracy that if corrected might prevent such abuses in the future.

Some of these "truths" would be instrumental in revealing others. Some of these truths seem more important than others. Perhaps good journalism is revealing the best available approximations of a series of truths to create an effective narrative to help the public understand an important issue of public policy.

How the press has changed

My history book club met last night and got me thinking about how much press coverage of scandal has changed in U.S. history. We were discussing The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington by Jennet Conant, which describes a fair number of sexual liaisons among its characters. It came to our attention that sexual misbehavior of political leaders in that time, and indeed in the time of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, were not covered in the press.

Today there seems to be little chance that a Clinton or an Edwards could get away with much of the kind without it being splashed across the news channels and other media.

However, it you look back a couple of hundred years, there were many published charges from attacks on the wives of President Jackson and a member of his cabinet, to charges that President Jefferson sired a child by his slave Sally Hemings, to the charges of infidelity implicated as a cause of the Hamilton-Burr dual.

What could cause the pendulum to swing so violently? I suppose that the Victorian age intervened between the free-swinging 18th century and the more prudish press of the mid 20th century. Since World War II, we have seen a sexual revolution (birth control pills, legalized abortion, Playboy and Penthouse, etc) which has made sex a much more acceptable topic for discussion, and the creation of a mass market for television news -- providing graphic depiction of peccadillos in living color.

Where do we go from here?

Facebook Changes Egypt

ESRAA RASHID (center) was jailed for helping to organize protests online.

Source: "Revolution, Facebook-Style," SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO, The New York Times Magazine, January 22, 2009.

Excerpts:

Facebook is now one of the 10 most-visited Web sites, and in Egypt it ranks third, after Google and Yahoo. About one in nine Egyptians has Internet access, and around 9 percent of that group are on Facebook — a total of almost 800,000 members. This month, hundreds of Egyptian Facebook members, in private homes and at Internet cafes, have set up Gaza-related “groups.” Most expressed hatred for Israel and the United States, but each one had its own focus. Some sought to coordinate humanitarian aid to Gaza, some criticized the Egyptian government, some criticized other Arab countries for blaming Egypt for the conflict and still others railed against Hamas.......

Freedom of speech and the right to assemble are limited in Egypt, which since 1981 has been ruled by Mubarak’s National Democratic Party under a permanent state-of-emergency law. An estimated 18,000 Egyptians are imprisoned under the law, which allows the police to arrest people without charges, allows the government to ban political organizations and makes it illegal for more than five people to gather without a license from the government. Newspapers are monitored by the Ministry of Information and generally refrain from directly criticizing Mubarak. And so for young people in Egypt, Facebook, which allows users to speak freely to one another and encourages them to form groups, is irresistible as a platform not only for social interaction but also for dissent.

The Article goes on to describe the April 6 movement in which thousands of Egyptians, primarily young and educated, use Facebook to arrange meetings.

ETHAN ZUCKERMAN, a research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, told me that the April 6 movement illustrates what he calls the “cute-cat theory of digital activism.” Web sites or proxy servers created specifically for activists are easy for a government to shut down, Zuckerman says, but around the world, dissidents thrive on sites, like Facebook, that are used primarily for more mundane purposes (like exchanging pictures of cute cats). Authoritarian regimes can’t block political Facebook groups without blocking all the “American Idol” fans and cat lovers as well. “The government can’t simply shut down Facebook, because doing so would alert a large group of people who they can’t afford to radicalize,” Zuckerman explained.

Comment: I have spent a few months in Egypt over the years and came to the conclusion that my viewpoint based in the culture of the United States, modified by years of living in Latin America, does not provide much insight into the way Egyptians think about politics and political participation. Still, I think it the effect of online social networking is likely to open Egyptian political processes.

I suspect that when social networking via cell phone networks becomes universal, coercive control of information will become all but impossible. JAD

Murrow on the Broadcast Media

“These instruments can teach, they can illuminate, and yes, they can even inspire; but they can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use them towards those ends. … Otherwise, they’re merely wires and lights in a box.” --Edward R. Murrow, October 15, 1958

Source: FreePress shop

Needed: Foundations for Public Internet News Broadcasting

I think we need to institutionalize mechanisms to finance the development and maintenance of strong, independent, professional (virtual) newsrooms for Internet journalism. The mechanism should support the supplementary services needed to make the products of these newsrooms available to the public.

Democracy depends on an informed electorate, and thus on the ability of the public to obtain complete and accurate information on issues of public policy in a timely fashion. Indeed, an informed public is the best protection against government and corporate corruption and incompetence. We have depended on newspapers and news broadcasters to send in the investigative reporters to dig out the news.

Newspapers are cutting back on their newsrooms and reducing the numbers of journalists that they hire; increasingly their reporting is biased to reflect the politics of their readers. The television networks play the same limited range of news repeatedly; they too increasingly bias their reporting to fit the politics of segmented audiences.

Source of figure: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

The Internet provides an alternative medium for journalism, but there is not an adequate institutional model for financing the services of an adequately large and strong cadre of investigative journalists working in that medium.

The traditional media use mixed financing obtained by providing complex bundle of services. Part of the reason that they are cutting back on the newsroom is that the Internet is cutting into some of their most lucrative services thereby cutting revenues. These media combine fees for service (e.g. newspapers), advertising fees, government funding (e.g. NPR), audience donations (e.g. public television), and funding from special taxes (e.g. the British television tax financing BBC), and philanthropic grants (e.g. NSF grants for science reporting, foundation grants). Some stations have stores providing broadcast related merchandise for sale (with tax exempt revenue); others sell educational content. Think too about the licensing requirements imposed in the spectrum allocation process that requires stations to broadcast news, and the non-profit status that allows donors to claim tax deductions for donations to public radio and television.

The Internet makes publishing and distribution inexpensive, but a newsroom with an adequate staff of reporters and editors is expensive, as is developing an online audience. There are examples of online news services that are supported by advertising, subscription, and fee-for-story mechanisms. I suggest, however, that a more comprehensive mechanism for financing a major, independent, Internet news service would be a great idea.

Perhaps some of the models of public broadcasting might be considered. A mixed financing model might be used, combining advertising and user donations with other sources of funding. I don't see any feasible way of bundling Internet news with other remunerative services (as for example newspapers have bundled news with classified adds, comics, games and information on films and theater).

How about adding to the mix for Internet news services:

• tax exempt status (tax exemptions for bequests and donations)
• operational foundation status that would allow non-profit operation and facilitate reception of grants and bequests and tax free income generation
  
• licensing requirements on Internet Service Providers that they contribute a portion of revenues to online news services
• special purpose taxes, such as a tax on personal computers that would fund a foundation for Internet news broadcasting.

Governments have directly financed news media, as in the case of the BBC or the Voice of America, but I find it hard to trust governments in most countries to deliver independent news services or to finance such services adequately.

There is a strong ratchet effect in public decisions of the kind I am requesting. It is hard to see how the United Kingdom could reverse the decisions that led to the BBC, or how the United States could referse those that led to the primacy of commercial broadcasting. So the decision on Internet news service support also might be difficult if not impossible to undo. So lets make the right decision up front.

'Tech giants in human rights deal'

Source: Maggie Shiels, BBC News, 28 October 2008

'Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have signed a global code of conduct promising to offer better protection for online free speech and against official intrusion.......The guidelines seek to limit what data should be shared with authorities, in cases where free speech is an issue.'

Avian Flu, a Pandemic & the Role of Journalists

Sylvia Renteria watches a big wave caused by
Hurricane Ike crash into a seawall in Galveston, Texas.
Photo from National Geographic

Nieman Reports has published excerpts from a conference in which public health experts and journalists discussed preparations to cover the news during the next flu pandemic. Since there have been 10 flu pandemics in the last 300 years, we ought to expect that another one will arrive sooner or later. If by some chance it is not a flu pandemic, we must expect some other pandemic of a communicable disease, following. After all, we are still dealing with HIV/AIDS and remember the threat of SARS.

It is a real issue, since the reporters too are likely to be affected by the disaster and the worse the disaster, the greater the need that it be covered, and the less the ability of the journalists to do so. There is also a question of how and how much to prepare for an eventuality that may not materialize.

In the case of the next flu pandemic, it should be realized that some pandemics are much worse than others. Some generate infections more rapidly than others, some infect a larger portion of the population than others, some are more lethal than others, and some target especially important members of society (as HIV/AIDS in some African nations has been more prevalent in the military, teachers and truck drivers). The worst flu epidemic in the last 300 years is estimated to have killed 50 times as many people as the least lethal. How then does a newsroom prepare to meet the emergency?

When a hurricane occurs, and a newspaper is struggling to put out a reduced edition in the most severe of conditions, surrounded by stories that need telling, how do the editors allocate their resources, and how do they set priorities for the content that they publish? Can they prepare for those decisions in advance?

St. Paul Police Arresting Journalists

Police in St. Paul arrested several journalists yesterday, including Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and an AP photographer as they were covering protests of the Republican National Convention. And earlier this weekend, police raided a meeting of the video journalists' group I-Witness with firearms drawn to arrest independent media, bloggers and videomakers.

Freepress is sponsoring a mail campaign to protest these actions.

How free is the American Press?

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
Robbie Burns

Reporters Without Borders ranks the United States 48th of 169 countries in its most recent Worldwide Press Freedom Index (2008). That ranking is better than Togo, but not as good as Nicaragua!

Check out the RWB Annual Report on the United States!

Check out the Freedom House report on the United States!

"Cuba Bars Blogger from Accepting Award in Spain"

Source: Tom Gjelten, Morning Edition, May 8, 2008, NPR

Yoani Sanchez, 32, has gained a worldwide following for the independent blog she writes from Havana. Wednesday evening she was supposed to be in Madrid receiving the Ortega y Gasset prize for digital journalism. But her request to travel to Spain to accept the award was not approved by the Cuban authorities; they are clearly annoyed by the attention her critical writing has received.

Here is the URL of Sanchez' blog.

Lets all support Yoani (which I suppose we Gringos should pronounce Joannie) and her right to freedom of expression.

Censorship

Semantha Power has resigned from the Obama campaign staff following a European newspaper publishing her offhand and off-the-record remark about Hillary Clinton. The Washington Post today has an article about an American university closing down the exhibition of an artists production which involved projection of a controversial video game on Iraq; the institute reportedly wanted time to review the show's "origin, content and intent.

Thinking about these, it seems to me that Semantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize winning author affiliated with Harvard University can speak our more forcefully for Obama as a private citizen than as a staffer. She clearly did the right thing in stepping down from the campaign rather than run the risk of embarrassing her candidate, especially since doing so is likely to make her more effective in his support.

The university certainly should have decided before starting its exhibition as to whether it chose to exhibit the work. Inviting an artist to exhibit and then closing after one showing is not fair to the artist. Universities, especially private universities, have not only the right but the duty to screen the exhibits that they provide. They have the right to define their own screening criteria. Fortunately we have to freedom to avoid or ignore those universities that choose not to exhibit high-quality, thought-provoking materials on the sole basis that they are deemed too controversial by university bureaucrats.

I am far more concerned with political appointees that try to keep public servants from providing the public with information from publicly funded research and analysis because the politicians don't like the information. Of course, the protection of freedom of speech in the United States is much greater than in many other countries, and of course we need to continue to fight for that freedom if we want to continue to have a strong democracy.

i am, however, worried more about the protection of other human rights in this country than for protection of freedom of speech. The social and economic rights of too many people are endangered, and the prison population suggests we need to spend more effort protecting freedom from unreasonable incarceration.

"Judge Shuts Down Web Site Specializing in Leaks"

Source: ADAM LIPTAK and BRAD STONE, The New York Times, February 20, 2008.

A federal judge has ordered Dynadot, its domain registrar, to shut down Wikileaks.Org. In support of freedom of speech let me report that if you want to read the documents that it posts that are generally leaked by wistleblowers, you can do so using its Internet Protocol address (http://88.80.13.160/) or mirror sites registered in Belgium (http://wikileaks.be/), Germany (http://wikileaks.de) and the Christmas Islands (http://wikileaks.cx).

Unfettered Free Speech Now???

The Washington Post has an op-ed piece today by Bradley A. Smith which appears to promote free speech in U.S. elections. It specifically calls for SpeechNow.org to be freed of federal election laws which would require it to be registered as a political action committee.

As far as I can figure, Smith is an expert on election law, but he was also a Republican member of the Federal Election Commission. So is his opinion real and simply something that would as a side effect empower Republicans, or is it a an disingenuous advocacy of a weakening of the election law.

The basic issue is not whether we all have the right to talk around the water cooler about politics. it is whether we will allow those with more financial resources to have a hugely disproportionate influence due to their ability to buy time on the media which form public opinion.