President Bush meets the press by Clarence Page
President Bush meets the press by Clarence Page
Copyright by The Chicago Tribune
Published May 10, 2006
WASHINGTON -- I enjoyed President Bush's good-natured comedy act at this year's White House Correspondents Association dinner as much as everyone else did, up to a point.
We laughed as Bush impersonator Steve Bridges joined the real president on stage to reveal what the inner Bush was supposedly thinking.
Sample: "How come I can't have dinner with the 36 percent of the people who like me?"
It was funny, yet I could not help but wince at the sharp contrast between his jovial rapport with the crowd of journalists and Hollywood stars and the war of words and legal actions that his administration has been waging against press freedoms.
News item: A week earlier the CIA announced it had dismissed senior official Mary McCarthy for allegedly having unauthorized media contacts, including with The Washington Post's Dana Priest, who won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing the CIA's secret prisons for terrorists in Eastern Europe. Yet it is significant that the CIA has not said McCarthy was the source of that story, and McCarthy's attorney says she was not the source. So what did she do wrong? So far, that's a secret.
News item: Several Bush administration officials, including Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales, have spoken of prosecuting The Washington Post over the secret American war prisons and The New York Times for its Pulitzer-winning scoop on the National Security Agency's secret surveillance of Americans. Conservative commentator William Bennett, a veteran of the first President Bush's administration, undoubtedly spoke for some members of the current Bush administration when he said the reporters should have received prison instead of Pulitzers.
News item: The FBI is seeking access to almost 200 boxes of papers bequeathed to George Washington University by the late investigative journalist Jack Anderson, who died in December at age 83. FBI agents have asked to comb through Anderson's papers first and remove any that they think should be classified, whether they are marked classified or not. Anderson's family has refused the request, citing the 1st Amendment and the many times that Anderson defied the FBI's late Director J. Edgar Hoover when many others would not.
Some people naively think that Hoover's now-notorious abuses of wiretapping and other powers against Martin Luther King Jr. and other targets can't happen again. In fact, as Lord Acton famously said, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The more power you grant to any single branch of government, the more opportunities you grant for that power to be abused.
It is with that in mind that the founding generation of this great country saw the need to protect freedoms of speech and the press to serve as a check on the potentially abusive powers of government.
Indeed, less than a decade after the ratification of the 1st Amendment, the party that controlled both houses of Congress at the time, the Federalists led by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, tried to repeal it with the Sedition Act of 1798. That law made it a crime for any person to criticize the president, Congress or the government of the U.S.
Passed in the name of national security, the Sedition Act proved to be nothing more than an excuse to arrest journalists and others who were sympathetic to the rival Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In spite of looming war fears, the backlash against the Sedition Act helped Republicans to elect Jefferson president in 1800, and he pardoned those convicted under the Sedition Act.
History has funny ways of repeating itself. Some scholars say the Bush administration is taking a more aggressive stance than just about any other since the days of the Sedition Act to tighten the vise on press freedoms, intimidate journalists and put a chokehold on the public's right to know, all in the name of national security.
To be sure, there are many secrets that should be kept secret, like troop movements and other critical information that could bring harm to our military forces. But the leaks various administrations of both parties have tried to plug up have had less to do with critical military tactics than with somebody's mistakes, embarrassments or potential abuses of power, such as the secret terrorist prisons and the NSA's domestic spying.
The 1st Amendment was written and strengthened over the years in order to protect the public's right to know about questionable practices, through whistleblowers, if necessary. When the public surrenders that right, we will have a hard time getting it back.
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Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail: cptime@aol.com
Copyright by The Chicago Tribune
Published May 10, 2006
WASHINGTON -- I enjoyed President Bush's good-natured comedy act at this year's White House Correspondents Association dinner as much as everyone else did, up to a point.
We laughed as Bush impersonator Steve Bridges joined the real president on stage to reveal what the inner Bush was supposedly thinking.
Sample: "How come I can't have dinner with the 36 percent of the people who like me?"
It was funny, yet I could not help but wince at the sharp contrast between his jovial rapport with the crowd of journalists and Hollywood stars and the war of words and legal actions that his administration has been waging against press freedoms.
News item: A week earlier the CIA announced it had dismissed senior official Mary McCarthy for allegedly having unauthorized media contacts, including with The Washington Post's Dana Priest, who won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing the CIA's secret prisons for terrorists in Eastern Europe. Yet it is significant that the CIA has not said McCarthy was the source of that story, and McCarthy's attorney says she was not the source. So what did she do wrong? So far, that's a secret.
News item: Several Bush administration officials, including Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales, have spoken of prosecuting The Washington Post over the secret American war prisons and The New York Times for its Pulitzer-winning scoop on the National Security Agency's secret surveillance of Americans. Conservative commentator William Bennett, a veteran of the first President Bush's administration, undoubtedly spoke for some members of the current Bush administration when he said the reporters should have received prison instead of Pulitzers.
News item: The FBI is seeking access to almost 200 boxes of papers bequeathed to George Washington University by the late investigative journalist Jack Anderson, who died in December at age 83. FBI agents have asked to comb through Anderson's papers first and remove any that they think should be classified, whether they are marked classified or not. Anderson's family has refused the request, citing the 1st Amendment and the many times that Anderson defied the FBI's late Director J. Edgar Hoover when many others would not.
Some people naively think that Hoover's now-notorious abuses of wiretapping and other powers against Martin Luther King Jr. and other targets can't happen again. In fact, as Lord Acton famously said, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The more power you grant to any single branch of government, the more opportunities you grant for that power to be abused.
It is with that in mind that the founding generation of this great country saw the need to protect freedoms of speech and the press to serve as a check on the potentially abusive powers of government.
Indeed, less than a decade after the ratification of the 1st Amendment, the party that controlled both houses of Congress at the time, the Federalists led by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, tried to repeal it with the Sedition Act of 1798. That law made it a crime for any person to criticize the president, Congress or the government of the U.S.
Passed in the name of national security, the Sedition Act proved to be nothing more than an excuse to arrest journalists and others who were sympathetic to the rival Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In spite of looming war fears, the backlash against the Sedition Act helped Republicans to elect Jefferson president in 1800, and he pardoned those convicted under the Sedition Act.
History has funny ways of repeating itself. Some scholars say the Bush administration is taking a more aggressive stance than just about any other since the days of the Sedition Act to tighten the vise on press freedoms, intimidate journalists and put a chokehold on the public's right to know, all in the name of national security.
To be sure, there are many secrets that should be kept secret, like troop movements and other critical information that could bring harm to our military forces. But the leaks various administrations of both parties have tried to plug up have had less to do with critical military tactics than with somebody's mistakes, embarrassments or potential abuses of power, such as the secret terrorist prisons and the NSA's domestic spying.
The 1st Amendment was written and strengthened over the years in order to protect the public's right to know about questionable practices, through whistleblowers, if necessary. When the public surrenders that right, we will have a hard time getting it back.
----------
Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail: cptime@aol.com
posted by Carlos T Mock at 9:06 AM
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