Freedom of the Press?

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Quote of the Day

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” ― George Orwell, 1984

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With all the bad examples of journalism and news reporting we've had in the past decade or so (think about the march into the Iraq War), it is disheartening to hear of the attempts to intimidate and muzzle The Guardian for its courageous reporting on the NSA spying scandal. I'm speaking, of course, of this weekend's nine-hour airport detention of David Miranda, partner of The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald who, working with information provided by Edward Snowden, broke the story.  "The detention of David Miranda is a disgrace and reinforces the undoubted complicity of the UK in U.S. indiscriminate surveillance of law-abiding citizens," Michael Mansfield, one of Britain's leading human rights lawyers, told Reuters. [Huffington Post/Reuters]

If that wasn't bad enough, we learned Monday of the raid by British security experts" from the U.K.'s GCHQ intelligence agency on the offices of The Guardian. The agents seized and destroyed hard drives in the basement of offices of the British newspaper.   As reported in the Huffington Post yesterday:

Despite this apparent attempt at intimidation, as well as the previously reported nine-hour detention of Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda at London's Heathrow airport, [Guardian editor] Rusbridger explained that The Guardian "will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won't do it in London."

Greenwald has been similarly undeterred by recent events. Following the detention of Miranda under the controversial schedule 7 portion of Britain's Terrorism Act, Greenwald stated, "I will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now. I am going to publish many more documents. I am going to publish things on England too. I have many documents on England's spy system. I think they will be sorry for what they did."

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger wrote on Monday regarding these incidents and the growing threat to journalism:

The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood the absolute threat to journalism implicit in the idea of total surveillance, when or if it comes – and, increasingly, it looks like "when".

We are not there yet, but it may not be long before it will be impossible for journalists to have confidential sources. Most reporting – indeed, most human life in 2013 – leaves too much of a digital fingerprint. Those colleagues who denigrate Snowden or say reporters should trust the state to know best (many of them in the UK, oddly, on the right) may one day have a cruel awakening. One day it will be their reporting, their cause, under attack. But at least reporters now know to stay away from Heathrow transit lounges.

Well said. An informed citizenry is a hallmark of and a necessity for a democracy. When exercising its rights responsibly, the press, the "Fourth Estate", can help inform citizens with that necessary knowledge. It can be a guardian (no pun intended) of that democracy.