Who Your Friends Are

by digby

I have not been able to post much about this latest rightwing fatwah against the news media, but I can’t help but wonder how those who have been so agitated by the angry leftist blog readers who write nasty emails calling for reporters to be fired for incompetence feel now that they are being subject to public accusations of treason and calls for their executions? I don’t think that even in the depths of the Judith Miller WMD scandal that anyone on the left suggested that the press were literally traitors to America — we directed our fire at the White House that consciously lied to the media and strong-armed it into supporting the Iraq war despite obvious holes in its arguments. At worst, I believe that most lefties saw the press as being passive purveyors of government propaganda — not exactly a profile in courage, but hardly the stuff of treason.

Neither do I recall such hysteria in all the years the media pummeled the Clintons mercilessly with the vilest innuendo and gossip. It never occurred to me, or anyone else I can think of, to suggest that the press should be held criminally liable. Even the Plame affair, which was also a national security issue, did not engender a wholesale attack on the freedom of the press. The criticism generally was focused on the cozy relationship between extremely powerful government actors and certain reporters. I don’t recall any calls to try the Chicago Sun-Times for treason because they allowed Robert Novak to print Valerie Plame’s name. (There may have been some on blogs or among some blog commenters — but certainly there was no calls among nationally known liberal voices for such a thing.)

Atrios linked to this great Tom Tomorrow strip that perfectly illustrates my confusion about the media’s ongoing passivity toward these rightwing attacks even as they screech madly about the emerging “angry left.” Just last week there was a huge hue and cry among the New Republic crew about “blogofascism” —- directed at leftwing bloggers who angrily criticize media coverage and correspond with one another on an email list. Meanwhile, you had rightwing bloggers, talk show hosts, mainstream pundits and powerful elected leaders in coordinated fashion openly calling for the editors of major newspapers to be tried for treason — and in some cases calling for their execution.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better example of the mainstreaming of rightwing eliminationist rhetoric. And yet, oddly, we see lefty bloggers being called fascists and used as the poster boys and girls for rhetorical violence by mainstream media — not because we are calling the press treasonous, but because we are criticizing their professionalism. How can this be?

It seems like only yesterday that the right was having a full on bill-of-rights moment when those Danish cartoons were published. No matter how many riots they might incite or how many people died because of them, the right of the press to publish was inviolable. As Michelle Malkin, staunch defender of the First Amendment so pithily put it:

First, they came for the cartoonists. Then, they came for the filmmakers and talk show hosts and namers of evil. Next, who knows?

Next, the New York Times, obviously.

As a civil libertarian and free speech absolutist, I was sympathetic to the argument that the press had every right to publish those cartoons, although I wondered why printing them was considered important for any reason other than the principle which allowed the media to do it. Unlike the recent stories revealing that the US government has been operating secret programs that fail to comply with the constitution and which represent an unprecedented executive power grab, the cartoons seemed a rather peurile test of freedom of the press. But even if I believed that it was terribly irresponsible and wrong on every level, I would never argue that because the cartoons inflamed the Muslim population that those who printed them should be tried for treason, despite the fact that a decent argument can be made that such inflammatory provocation was far more detrimental to our side in the alleged War On Terror than the recent revelations that the American government was doing illegally what everyone already assumed it was doing legally.

Freedom of the press is freedom of the press and with the exception of certain narrow categories, it is not illegal to publish classified information. The reason is that history shows that prior constraint leads to tyranny. Period.

When the framers were hashing out all this stuff during the conventions, it’s important to note that the arguments that existed about the necessity for a free press centered around whether the constitution needed to explicitly provide for it (which it eventually did) or whether it was so self-evident that the government had no power to regulate it, that it shouldn’t even be addressed. Nobody ever argued that the government could constrain the press’s right to publish (although President John Adams certainly gave it a good old fashioned try not long after.) In fact, it was considered the single most important check on the awesome power of government — which is why civil libertarians like me have been so critical of the press’s behavior in recent years.

It is worth remembering that this nation’s security was a lot more fragile in those early days than it is now. How much braver the defenders of liberty were then when these principles were so important and so meaningful that they were actually willing to die rather than allow themselves to live under tyranny. Today, those who style themselves as uber-patriots cavalierly throw these principles aside in favor of cheap, short term partisan politics.

Considering what has been happening I think it might be important for the media to evaluate who their friends really are — the liberal “blogofascists” who complain bitterly when the press reflexively accepts the conservative narratives that portray us as knaves ands fools, or the well financed rightwing operatives and powerful government officials who call for their imprisonment and deaths? It pays to remember that while this assault on the press is clearly a ginned up base rattling psuedo-issue, it is deadly serious in other ways. It’s designed to intimidate and the political press has a very dicey recent history in that regard. Aren’t they getting tired of being strong-armed?

If they behave as they did this week-end when dealing with that hypocritical blowhard William Bennet, then they will have a supporter in me, and I suspect most of the left, no matter who is running the government. We supported Daniel Elsberg, after all, when the Pentagon Papers indicted the Democrats. I have never seen a similar example on the right. We actually believe in the liberal values that undergird the press’s rights and responsibilities. If anyone is slouching toward fascism it’s those who betray those liberal values in favor of Republican authoritarianism.

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