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Alumni Association Home > Past Issues > 2005 > March-April 2005	Print View

Democracy at Stake

By Rich Broderick
Tim Rutten, a media reporter with the Los Angeles Times, says her work is driven by a belief in the importance of a free press as “a bedrock value of a free society.” New York Times reporter Adam Liptak praises her “authentic commitment to First Amendment values,” as well as her knowledge of media law. She is sought out weekly by the national media to comment on the day’s most urgent media and legal issues, such as reporters pressured to reveal sources in the leak of a C.I.A. agent’s name or on free expression in wartime.

She’s Jane Kirtley, professor in the University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication and director of its Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and the Law. The author of “First Amendment Watch,” an influential column in the American Journalism Review, Kirtley has practiced law in New York and Washington, D.C., and reported for newspapers in Indiana and Tennessee. During the time she headed the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit in Arlington, Virginia, that provides free legal assistance to journalists, she emerged as one of the nation’s leading advocates of freedom of the press and of the public’s right to know.

In the wake of 9/11, the lead-up to the war in Iraq, and now the 60 Minutes scandal that led to the ouster of four top-level employees at CBS and the early retirement of anchor Dan Rather, questions about the role of the media in American society and the proper limits on government secrecy are more significant than at any time in recent memory. Kirtley recently met with a writer for Minnesota in her Murphy Hall office to discuss these and related issues.

Q: Most people can understand why journalists care about whether the press in the United States is able to operate freely, without prior restraint from the government, but why should ordinary Americans care about freedom of the press?

A: It’s simple. Because our democracy is at stake. Without trying to sound too sanctimonious, some of my work in past 10 years has taken place in so-called emerging democracies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. You don’t have to sell those people on freedom of the press because they already know what its absence means. Because we have had it for 200 years, the public takes it for granted. People here don’t recognize that, at its core, freedom of the press means the government can’t tell us what to think or believe. A free press is essential to provide us with the information we need to shape our destinies.

Q: In your opinion, just how well is the American press performing that job now?

A: The functioning of the press is a cyclical thing. We go through periods of great capability and periods of embarrassment. I think we are coming back from the big shock wave of 9/11. That event dealt a blow to media credibility for a variety of reasons.

After 9/11, the press was to a great extent cowed into silence. It did a great job of covering the crisis, but not of the larger stories surrounding 9/11, specifically the Bush administration’s exploitation of the 9/11 mentality to justify secrecy and stifle criticism. The White House and other political figures were suggesting not at all subtly that to criticize the government was to give aid and comfort to the enemy. All of that had a tremendous impact, from [then–National Security Adviser] Condoleezza Rice calling up TV executives and saying, “Do you really want to show those bin Laden tapes?” to the response to secret government proceedings in the jailing and deportation of aliens.

Journalists knew about this and didn’t do anything. They dropped the ball. Journalists are not going to be popular but have to operate from principles and one of those is to hold government to account.

Q: So why did the self-styled freest press in the world allow itself to be cowed?

A: If we focus on broadcast and cable media for a second, one inescapable conclusion has to be that it is because they are regulated. The Janet Jackson incident reminds us of the power of the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to go after broadcasters. Rice’s calls to networks in the fall of 2001 about the first bin Laden tapes had a lot more effect with TV networks than newspapers. Though no direct threats were made by her, we can’t get away from the fact that the FCC does have the power to grant or take away broadcast licenses. And as long as that threat is there, you are not going to have a totally free press.

As far as the print side of the media is concerned, a lot of the restraint was not from worries about government reaction but reader reaction. There was a strong perception that people were thinking that this country was in a state of war and under attack and any criticism of the government would be seen as unpatriotic. In the post-9/11 world, Americans were desperately looking for something to trust in and they didn’t want anything to interfere with it.

Q: How do you assess various threats facing freedom of the press in the United States today?

A: Government secrecy is where I would start. Again, in my work in developing democracies like Poland, which had a strong underground press in Communist days, there was an explosion of papers after the downfall of Communism, most of which didn’t survive in part because of economics but also in part because they were full of opinion pieces but little substantive information because there was no Freedom of Information Act or other guarantees of access to official information. People wanted substantive information but couldn’t get it.

The Bush administration has brought secrecy to an art form. In general, Republican administrations have tended to be more secretive than Democratic administrations because their members have closer ties to the intelligence community. But 9/11 gave this White House a license to be secretive in ways that I think far exceeded their wildest dreams. In turn, I think this helped them pursue an agenda they already had in mind—not just in terms of secrecy about national security, but even for things like changing the rules about withholding presidential records [per executive order signed by President Bush in November 2001].

If you inherently trust the government—which I don’t, and that means any government, no matter what party is in control—then maybe you are comfortable with these assertions of privilege and government secrecy. But I would assert, as did the founders, that you shouldn’t, and you can’t, trust the government.

The next big threat is the perception that for the press, the bottom line—and not the public’s need to know—is the most important consideration. For this, we in the media have only ourselves to blame. I don’t necessarily think that this perception is fair, but it is the perception many people have.

The irony here is that, in my opinion, a commercial press is the closest to a free press that you can have. The only press models that I know of in the world are state-owned or church-owned, media owned by political entities, or a commercial press. We do have hybrids here in United States—what we call public media—but if you scratch the surface you find ultimately that those involve government funding and control.

This perception, then, is a threat because it undermines credibility and support of the commercial press. Back in the last glory days of the media—in the years after Watergate—even supporters of Nixon felt the press was primarily interested in informing the public, not to make money or bring down government.

I also have to say that since I am a big supporter of commercial media, I used to think that for a news organization to be owned by a powerful conglomerate was not such a bad thing because it would provide the resources necessary to take on bad guys and not worry about whether they sue for libel. But that’s not the way it has worked out, which makes me very sad.

Q: Can you comment on blogging in the mix of press coverage?

A: I think on the whole it is positive because new media are good things. Anything that gives more people an opportunity to have a voice, I support. The problem is it means anybody with a computer and a modem can participate—so its greatest strength is its greatest weakness. But blogs do represent democratization of media. At the same time, there is merit in trying to teach media literacy, to train people to be able to pick and choose credible sources. The other danger posed by blogs or openly partisan news sites is that we are becoming much more self-selective of what we pay attention to. Instead of everybody watching CBS News, we’re now surfing the Net and reading only things I want to read. That’s the potential downside. We lose the big marketplace of ideas.

Q: Is there some relationship between the advent of 24/7 news coverage and the fact that Americans are not only less well-informed, but are actually inclined to believe things that are demonstrably untrue?

A: Just because news and information is available 24/7 doesn’t mean people are tapping into it. What we see in the media, especially broadcast media, is an explosion of choices, some of them news, most not, and when faced with that choice Americans tend to choose entertainment. By the way, I don’t think Americans are unique in that.

Statistics show that people in this country don’t read newspapers the way they once did. In 2001, I led a course for American students in England called Press Freedom and the United Kingdom. One of the assignments was to read a daily newspaper—either one from London or from Glasgow. Some of the students were journalism majors, most were not, and most were not regular readers of daily newspapers back home. By the end of course they were hooked; they loved reading these papers. Most said they couldn’t wait to get back to the U.S. and read their local daily newspaper. I thought, How disappointed you will be!

I sometimes wonder if the American news media has not made a mistake in elevating “objectivity” to some gold standard. In fact, ideals like “fair and accurate” or “balanced coverage,” which I think should be the aim of news organizations, don’t necessarily equate to what is meant by “objectivity.” Our notion of objectivity can be really problematic when it means giving both sides of an issue equal voice without providing context or analysis. Such a practice gives a real advantage to liars over truth-tellers. I think we fail the public when we fail to give context.

Q: In the past couple of decades there have been a number of scandals that have eroded public confidence in the press—the most recent being 60 Minutes and the possibly forged documents used in a report on George Bush’s National Guard service. If the underlying truth of the story—regarding how the president came to join the Texas Air National Guard and whether he fulfilled his service—has been amply verified, though the authenticity of one document has been questioned, why would CBS come out and state that the entire story was inaccurate?

A: My own sense was that the question of the documents became so important because CBS made such a big deal about their authenticity in the first place. But the fact is they could have done a report that was substantively the same without those documents—and frequently do stories like that.

I’m hesitant to go down the road that the ends justify the means, that it doesn’t matter how you got the story, it’s the truth of the story that matters. However, as [fired 60 Minutes producer] Mary Mapes said, journalists use photocopies all the time to do stories. So the claim that they needed original copies to do the story is false.

[CBS’s September 2004 statement] does not say the story was inaccurate. What it says is, “Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report. We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret.”

Similarly, the Boccardi-Thornburgh report [on the process by which 60 Minutes prepared the broadcast] does not say the documents are forgeries; rather, it says that they can’t be proven to be genuine. That’s not just semantics. It’s an important distinction. In short, unless there’s a statement out there I’m not familiar with, CBS has not said that the story is false.

The point is that CBS says that it failed to comply with a basic journalistic rule, which is to verify your sources, as well as the authenticity of documents you use, and provide your readers and viewers with as much information about both as possible, so that [they] can decide for [themselves] what the truth of the matter might be.

I think it is not surprising that there was so much attention paid to the documents themselves, because, as I said, CBS emphasized the documents themselves in its early stories. But . . . journalists simply can’t report on government without relying on primary and secondary sources who have access to information that the public and press do not.

So, I would hope that the lesson of the CBS incident wouldn’t be that reporters shouldn’t look at and consider using documents like this as the basis for a story, but rather that they should be skeptical, question their sources closely, and do their best to corroborate information with on-the-record sources, especially if initial tips are received from sources who might appear to have an ax to grind. The old admonition for journalists is still a good one: “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”

I do think the media remain the most open and accountable institution in our society. Everything they do is published or broadcast for public consumption and is subject to review and criticism by competitors as well as the general public. When they make mistakes, they run corrections. I can’t help but contrast this with Enron, for example, or even the federal government. Everybody criticizes the media, which is fine, but I think it is important to keep it in perspective.

Q: How is the CBS case similar to earlier instances of conscious journalistic fraud, such as those involving Jayson Blair at the New York Times, Jack Kelley at USA Today, and others?

A: What I find interesting about this is that it suggests the same kind of problems that occurred [at these publications] also occurred at CBS: an upper-level management that didn’t press lower-level employees on sources or the agendas of sources. There were not mechanisms in place that allowed people in the newsrooms to come forward and speak up about problems—either they wouldn’t be listened to or might even get into trouble. That seems to be a motif that occurred in all these scandals. This tells us something about a culture in these major media corporations that is not conducive to accuracy and truth.

Q: Is there a relationship between this phenomenon of brazen fakery and the relative affluence of journalists working for top newspapers or TV networks that is part of the problem?

A: I think it’s great in an abstract way that we have a better educated group of journalists than 100 years ago. But the fact is that because we have better educated journalists making more money than many of the people they serve, there is a disconnect that didn’t exist 100 years ago either. The old maxim about afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted—well, journalists are pretty comfortable now. If you have reporters wondering how much money I can make, how much celebrity I can achieve, you are losing your core mission. I think a Jayson Blair or a Jack Kelley may be pathological [liars] and would be liars in any profession, but without the allure of money and fame and perhaps even celebrity that comes from appearing on TV, would they have been attracted to journalism? Probably not.

The biggest issue of media credibility is not whether a Jayson Blair or a Jack Kelley gets hired but how they get away with things for so long. This tells me there is a problem in management, whether it’s a star system or because people move up into upper echelons of management without the kind of experience old-time journalists had. An advanced degree from Columbia might be a great thing, but I’m not sure it’s the best qualification for a night editor at a daily newspaper.

Q: What do you try to impart to your journalism students?

A: I teach law, of course, so my focus is on the First Amendment and the common law protections that the courts have recognized. But beyond that: a sense of history—the history of the United States, and the history of civilization, and journalism’s place in it. A recognition that the United States is unique in the world and that journalists operating here have greater freedom than their counterparts anywhere else (this is a freedom that must be used to keep the government accountable and the public informed). The necessity of thinking critically and being independent. Healthy disrespect for authority. A default position that questions the conventional wisdom—people for whom alarm bells go off when they are told “everyone says it is so.”

And obviously, I guess, a reverence—even awe—for the First Amendment and for the founding fathers whose genius created it.

Rich Broderick is a St. Paul–based freelance writer.

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