Reporter bucks Army to defend craft

Capital Times ^ | Jan. 25, 2007 | John Nichols

[SJackson]

American journalism is under assault. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, with its encouragement of media consolidation and homogenization, has provoked a marked decline in the diversity and quality of broadcast news.

The latest round of print media mergers and acquisitions is putting newspaper writers out of work at an unprecedented rate.

The people who own the nation's communications combines are, for the most part, so risk-averse and so obsessed with their bottom lines that they are making it impossible for serious reporters to do their jobs. These are fundamental, structural and rapidly expanding threats.

Equally serious is the threat posed by a government that overtly threatens reporters who actually seek to practice the craft of journalism.

But the greatest of all threats comes when journalists fail to defend fellow reporters and editors who have come under direct attack.

When the Bush administration decided to ignore questions from veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas with presidential press secretaries and their aides going out of their way to try to isolate and discredit her for failing to practice stenography to power the remainder of the press corps was for the most part silent. And the power of the press was diminished.

Now comes another test.

Sarah Olson, a 31-year-old independent writer and radio producer from Oakland, Calif., finds herself in the targets of Army prosecutors. Those prosecutors are demanding that Olson help them build the case against 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, an officer who faces a court-martial trial for refusing to deploy to Iraq.

Along with a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Olson was in December sent a subpoena seeking testimony that would confirm the accuracy of anti-war statements attributed to Watada.

The quotes are not seriously in question; in fact, Watada has made similar statements in a number of public settings. The first commissioned officer in the U.S. armed forces to formally refuse deployment in George Bush's war, Watada has made it absolutely clear that he has lost confidence in the president as his commander in chief, that he believes the war lacks legal legitimacy, and that he feels his participation could make him a party to war crimes.

So why subpoena Sarah Olson? Watada's case is difficult for the Army prosecutors, and by extension for the commander in chief.

An Eagle Scout who joined the Army after finishing a degree at Hawaii Pacific University, Lt. Watada served so ably during a tour of duty in Korea that he was rated by his superior officers as "among the best" and recommended for an early promotion. Watada has volunteered to serve in Afghanistan, where he believes that U.S. troops are participating in "an unambiguous war linked to the Sept. 11 attacks."

But he refuses to deploy to Iraq because, he explains, he believes that the U.S. presence there violates the Constitution, which requires that wars be declared by Congress, and the War Powers Act, which places limits on presidential war-making. Watada also argues that the U.S. actions in Iraq are in clear conflict with the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions.

It appears that the prosecutors do not want to provide Watada with an open forum in which to explain his arguments against the war. They are frightened by the prospect that an obviously courageous and patriotic soldier might make a convincing case against the legitimacy of an unpopular war.

That's publicity that the Bush administration does not want at a time when its war of whim has gone terribly awry. And it certainly won't help military recruitment.

So the military prosecutors are trying to get journalists to build the case against Watada.

Olson is balking.

"It's not a reporter's job to participate in the prosecution of her own sources," she explains. "When you force a journalist to participate, you run the risk of turning the journalist into an investigative tool of the state."

There is no question that Olson is right. The question is whether journalists will stand with her as she defends our craft. Olson is asking reporters and editors to sign a letter objecting to the Army's decision to subpoena journalists to testify in the court-martial of Lt. Watada.

The letter, addressed to prosecutors, states in part: "It's a journalist's job to report the news, not to participate in government prosecutions. The press cannot function if it is used by the government to prosecute political speech, and hauling a journalist into a military court erodes the separation between government and press. Turning reporters into the investigative arm of the government subverts press freedoms and chills dissenting speech in the United States."

I am proud to add my name to the list of signers of a statement that is not merely a defense of Sarah Olson but a reassertion of the founding principle that a free press is the essential underpinning of democracy.

[endthematrix]

Send him to the front lines in that UN quagmire called Darfur!

[7thson]

How about d) All of the above.

[Milhous]

The News does not spring full-grown from Athena's brow

Indeed. Big media's mythology shtick takes a hit. LOL.

[Larry Lucido]

Another bad sentence"

"finds herself in the targets of Army prosecutors"

You can be a "target," or you can be "in the sights," but you can't be "in the targets." And if you are, well, then, get out of the targets!