Rooster "Crowing"
"Okeydoke"
History
1305 Scottish nationalist William Wallace is executed in London as a traitor against King Edward I of England. He is tried in Westminster Hall, London, and promptly hanged and quartered.
1821 Following a decade-long rebellion against Spanish colonists, Mexico receives its independence in the Treaty of Córdoba.
1826 Edward A. Jones receives his B.A. degree from Amherst College
John Brown Russwurm is considered to be the first African
American in America to graduate from college. Two years after
entering Bowdoin College, he receives his baccalaureate degree
on September 6, 1826. Edward A. Jones, the lesser known of the
two, graduates just two weeks prior on this date in 1826 from
Amherst College. Both men will receive their Masters Degrees,
John in 1829 and Edward in 1830.
1833 Great Britain frees 700,000 slaves in its colonies.
1892 O.E. Brown, inventor, receives a patent for a horseshoe.
1900 The National Negro Business League is formed in Boston,
Massachusetts. Sponsored by Booker T. Washington, the
organization is established to stimulate the development of
African American businesses.
1902 American cooking authority Fannie Farmer opens her School of Cookery in Boston, Massachusetts. The school is designed to train housewives rather than professional chefs.
1908 Fifty-two nurses, led by Martha M. Franklin, form the National
Association of Colored Graduate Nurses.
1917 A riot occurs in Houston, Texas, when the 24th Infantry seeks
revenge on the city's white police after the brutal beating
of two of the regiment's soldiers. After two hours of
violence, 15 whites, including four policemen, will be killed
and 12 more are injured. Four soldiers will die as a result
of the violence. One hundred and eighteen soldiers will be
charged in connection with the riots and 19 executed, most in
almost total secrecy, in one of the most infamous court-
martials ever involving African Americans.
1919 "Gasoline Alley" cartoon strip premiers in Chicago Tribune
1924 Mars' closest approach to Earth since the 10th century
1927 Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants and anarchists, are executed for murder in a case that aroused international protests of their innocence.
1939 Foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov of the Soviet Union sign a nonaggression pact between the two countries, opening the door to their partition of Poland.
1966 Lunar Orbiter 1 takes 1st photograph of Earth from Moon
1972, the Republican National Convention, meeting in Miami Beach, Fla., nominated President Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew for a second term.
In 1979, Soviet dancer Alexander Godunov defected while the Bolshoi Ballet was on tour in New York.
1989 An African American teenager named Yusef Hawkins is chased and
beaten to death by a mob of 30 white youths from the neighborhood
of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, New York. The only provocation is that
he is African American in an all-white neighborhood.
1989, in a case that inflamed racial tensions in New York City, Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old black youth, was shot dead after he and his friends were confronted by white youths in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.
2003 Bobby Bonds joins the ancestors at the age of 57 after succumbing to
lung cancer. He was a former San Francisco Giants outfielder and
father of Giants slugger Barry Bonds.
Missing in Action
August 23
1967 BAKER ELMO C. KENNETT MO 03/14/73 RELEASED BY DRV ALIVE AND WELL 98
1967 BRASWELL DONALD R. 08/24/67 ESCAPED
1967 CARRIGAN LARRY E. PHOENIX AZ 03/14/73 RELEASED BY DRV ALIVE IN 99
1967 GERNDT GERALD L. OCONTO FALLS WI 03/14/73 RELEASED BY DRV ALIVE AND WELL 98
1967 HOLT DEWEY T. 08/24/67 ESCAPED
1967 LANE CHARLES YANKTON SD
1967 MIDNIGHT FRANCIS B. GARY IN
1967 NESS PATRICK L. MINNEAPOLIS MN REMAINS RETURNED 04/10/86
1967 SITTNER RONALD NICHALIS SOUTH EUCLID OH REMAINS RETURNED 12/30/97
1967 SAWHILL ROBERT R. CARNEGIE PA 03/14/73 RELEASED BY DRV ALIVE IN 98
1967 SITEK THOMAS W. NIAGARA FALLS NY
1967 TYLER CHARLES R. GLOBE AZ 03/14/73 RELEASED BY DRV ALIVE AND WELL 98
1968 BERGEVIN CHARLES L. TORRINGTON CT RADIO CONTACT LOST
1968 FERGUSON WALTER JR. NEW YORK NY 05/70 DIC - ON PRG DIC LIST
1968 SETTERQUIST FRANCIS L. CLOQUET MN
August 22
1967 KERR JOHN C. MIAMI FL
1967 MORGAN BURKE H. MANITOU SPRINGS CO
1968 ACOSTA-ROSARIO HUMBERTO MAYAQUEZ PR
1972 CROCKETT WILLIAM J. COTTAGE CROVE NM
1972 TIGNER LEE M. WASHINGTON DC
August 21
1966 JOHNSON JAMES R. INDIANAPOLIS IN
1967 BUDD LEONARD R. JR. ROWLEY MA 03/05/73 RELEASED BY DRV ALIVE IN 98
1967 BUCKLEY JIMMY L. SAC CITY IA 12/16/75 PRG RETURNED ASHES
1967 EBY ROBERT G.
1967 FLYNN ROBERT J. HOUSTON MN 03/15/73 RELEASED BY CHINA ALIVE AND WELL 98
1967 GUENTHER HARRY GERMANY
1967 HARDMAN WILLIAM M. ST ALBANS WV 03/15/73 RELEASED BY DRV ALIVE IN 98
1967 MORRILL MERWIN L. SAN CARLOS CA POSS DEAD REMAINS RECOVERED 06/03/83
1967 PROFILET LEO T. CAIRO IL 03/15/73 RELEASED BY DRV ALIVE AND WELL 98
1967 POWELL LYNN K. PROVO UT REMAINS RECOVERED 06/03/83
1967 SCOTT DAIN V. GIBSONIA PA
1967 TREMBLEY JAY F. SPOKANE WA
August 20
1966 MILIKIN RICHARD M.III MIAMI FL
1968 LINDBLOOM CHARLES DAVID ATLANTA GA
1968 RISNER RICHARD F. 08/22/68 ESCAPED ALIVE IN 99
1972 MOSSMAN HARRY S. MANHASSET NY
NEW !! POW-MIA Search Engine (Search by Name, DOB, Loss-Date, or Country-State )
August 19
1968 COLLINS THEOTHIS ASBURY PARK NJ
1968 HOFFMAN TERRY ALAN DANVILLE IN REMAINS RETURNED BURIED 1994
1969 BOHLIG JAMES RICHARD CROCKETT CA
1969 FLANIGAN JOHN N. WINTER HAVEN FL REMAINS RETURNED 1989 ID'D 06/26/97
1969 MORRISSEY RICHARD THOMAS UNIONDALE NY CACCF/CRASH/AIRCREW/10 YRS USMC/QUANG TIN VMFA 115 MAG 13 WITH RICHARD BOHLIG REFNO 1483
1969 SMITH ROBERT N. TRUCKSVILLE PA
1972 BEHNFELDT ROGER ERNEST DEFIANCE OH REMAINS RETURNED 09/24/87
1972 SHINGAKI TAMOTSU MAUI HI 03/29/73 RELEASED BY DRV ALIVE IN 98
August 17
1966 BRAND JOSEPH WILLIAM CHICAGO IL 09/77 REMAINS RETURNED BY SRV
1966 KEMP FREDDIE NEW YORK NY
1966 SINGER DONALD MAURICE PHILADELPHIA PA 09/30/77 REMAINS RETURNED BY SRV
1967 DION LAURENT N. PROVIDENCE RI
1967 HOM CHARLES DAVID HUNTINGTON PARK CA
1968 GARTLEY MARKHAM L. GREENVILLE ME 09/25/72 RELEASED HANOI
1968 HOFFSON ARTHUR T. CAMERON TX 03/14/73 RELEASED BY DRV ALIVE AND WELL 98
1968 MAYHEW WILLIAM J. PUGHTOWN WV 07/72REMAINS RECOVERED- 3/14/73 RETURNEE HOMECOMING ALTHOUGH USG RECORDS SHOW REMAINS RETURNED
1968 POWELL WILLIAM E. GATESVILLE TX REMAINS RETURNED 12/04/85
1969 LOEPKE "MALCOLM ""BUCK""" CAPTURED WITH 3 OTHERS NORTH KOREA - HELD 180 DAYS NOT NOTED PMSEA /KOREA WAR/VIETNAM WAR VETERAN
1970 WELLONS PHILLIP ROGERSON RALEIGH NC
1972 PITZEN JOHN R. STACYVILLE IA REMAINS RECOVERED NOVEMBER 1994 ID MARCH 1996
1972 PENDER ORLAND J. WARWICK RI REMAINS RECOVERED NOVEMBER 1994 ID MARCH 1996
1972 RAEBEL DALE V. MILBANK SD 03/29/73 RELEASED BY DRV ALIVE AND WELL 98
Jailed Journalists
Writers Group Won't Give Judith Miller 'Conscience in Media' Award After All
The New York Times Company
Judith Miller
By E&P Staff
Published: August 03, 2005 11:08 AM ET updated Thursday
NEW YORK The board of The American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) has voted unanimously to not endorse an earlier decision to give a Conscience in Media award to jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller, E&P has learned.
The group's First Amendment committee had narrowly voted to give Miller the prize for her dedication to protecting sources, but the full board has now voted to not accept that decision, based on its opinion that her entire career, and even her current actions in the Plame/CIA leak case, cast doubt on her credentials for this award.
The group's president, Jack El-Hai, posted an explanation on an internal list-serve yesterday, noting the opposition from the rank and file, and also mentioning two other reasons for the unanimous vote:
* “A feeling that Miller's career, taken as a whole, did not make her the best candidate for the award”
* “Divided opinions on the board over whether her recent actions merit the award.”
The American Society of Journalists and Authors is a 50-year-old group of some 1,100 non-fiction independent writers. The earlier vote by its First Amendment committee had already prompted at least one member of that panel to quit her position.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001008093
Want to Cow the Press? Here
The Monitor (Kampala)
OPINION
August 20, 2005
Posted to the web August 19, 2005
Charles Mwanguhya Mpagi
Kampala
On Thursday August 11, the state electronic media regulatory body raided the headquarters of Monitor Publications, which also houses 93.3 Kfm radio and the Daily Monitor newspaper and promptly shut down the radio.
This was the second raid on the Monitor premises in exactly 34 months since the last raid on October 10th 2002 when the newspaper was shut for 10 days.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200508190886.html
CHAD: A fourth journalist is jailed for "inciting hatred"
New York, August 15, 2005—A Chadian journalist was sentenced to one year in prison today for "inciting hatred", the fourth reporter jailed in a month in what local journalists called a growing crackdown on the independent press.
A court in the capital N'Djamena convicted Sy Koumbo Singa Gali, publication director of the privately-owned weekly L'Observateur, after she published an interview with freelance journalist and government critic Garondé Djarma, her lawyer told CPJ.
Djarma was sentenced on July 18 to three years in jail for defamation and "inciting hatred".
Djarma criticized a July constitutional referendum allowing President Idriss Déby to run for a third term next year. In the interview with Sy he accused Arab "janjaweed" members of the Chadian government of conspiring to silence him because of his coverage of the conflict between Arabs and black Africans in the neighboring Darfur province of Sudan.
http://www.cpj.org/news/2005/Chad15aug05na.html
Group in D.C. to Support Jailed Reporter
By George Gedda, Associated Press Writer. August 10, 2005.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Press freedom advocates normally direct their wrath toward countries where harassment or abuse of journalists is the norm. Lately they have come up with a new target: the United States.
On Wednesday, a delegation from the Inter-American Press Association, a Western Hemisphere watchdog group, was making a pilgrimage to Washington to show solidarity with Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who has been jailed since July 6.
An evening meeting with Miller was planned at the Alexandria (Va.) Detention Center, where she was being held for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating the leak of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.
http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y05/ago05/15e8.htm
Jailed journo apologises for remark - state
By Daniel Wallis
Kampala - A jailed Ugandan journalist charged with sedition has apologised for remarks about the death of Sudan's former Vice-President John Garang, Information Minister Nsaba Buturo said on Sunday.
KFM radio reporter Andrew Mwenda had accused authorities of causing Garang's death in a Ugandan presidential helicopter crash on July 30 by putting him on a defective aircraft. Ugandan authorities say the helicopter was in excellent condition.
"Mwenda has written to the chairman of the Broadcasting Council agreeing that he used inappropriate and intemperate language during his talk show," Buturo said.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=136&art_id=qw1124027461877B225
Free speech a casualty as Mexican journalists killed
Stifled: Nuevo Laredo newspapers have stopped investigating drug connections after deaths
By Susana Hayward
Knight Ridder News Service
A newspaper vendor with El Manana daily walks empty streets in Nuevo Laredo, carrying mostly official news about the latest execution-style murders.
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - A drug war is ripping apart northern Mexico, but you won't find many details about who's behind it in the local newspapers. Journalists - after their colleagues have been killed, kidnapped and threatened with death - have stopped investigating organized crime.
''It's the new trend of drug gangs: Journalists are warned, paid off or killed,'' said Daniel Rosas, the managing editor of the daily El Ma ana, the oldest newspaper in this border city south of Laredo, Texas. ''Drug battles have become bloodier, and gangs have no code of ethics. They don't respect human life; why should they respect reporters?''
http://www.sltrib.com/nationworld/ci_2941830
Cracks in the fortress?
New York Times execs say the paper and its staff stand firmly behind jailed Judy Miller. But off the record, some are telling reporters a different story.
Aug. 17, 2005 When George Freeman, assistant general counsel for the New York Times, makes his way to his office at the Times' Manhattan headquarters, his colleagues usually raise the same topic of conversation: Judy Miller. As one of the attorneys working on Miller's behalf, Freeman says his co-workers are never-ending in their curiosity about the case. "People ask me about it every day, on the elevator, everywhere," Freeman told Salon. "How's Judy? How's she doing? Not a day goes by that I am not asked by someone."
With Miller now incarcerated for 43 days and counting, interviews with nearly a dozen Times staffers reveal widespread concern for Miller's welfare and support for the principle for which she is being jailed. "It is extremely upsetting to see a colleague in jail," says Adam Nagourney, a Washington correspondent. Adds Eric Schmitt, another D.C. colleague, "Everyone remains quite concerned about what happened to her." "I think most people have nothing but sympathy for Judy's situation," noted Craig Whitney, an assistant managing editor and 40-year Times veteran. "And outrage that she has to go to jail for a principle that we all believe in." Indeed, both inside the Times and elsewhere in journalism, the paper is being praised for standing by its reporter as she defends a journalistic tenet most in the industry find sacred.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/08/17/times_miller/index_np.html?x
Big-Name Journalists Spar Over Sources at NYC Gathering
By Jennifer Saba
Published: August 16, 2005 1:55 PM ET
NEW YORK This morning, Court TV gathered a group of columnists, editors, attorneys, and academics to discuss “the rule of the law vs. the rule of journalism” at the popular media haunt Michael's in mid-town New York.
With panelists Norman Pearlstine, Floyd Abrams, Nicholas Lemann, Richard Cohen, Michael Goodwin, Michael Wolff, Paul Holmes, and moderator Catherine Crier, the allotted hour was barely enough time to kick around complicated issues -- like the unfolding of the Plame story and other related concerns about confidentially and anonymous sources.
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001015561
Abducted French journalist freed
By KHALED ABU TOAMEH
A French journalist abducted by Palestinian gunmen in Gaza City last week was freed unharmed on Monday.
Palestinian Authority security officials told The Jerusalem Post that Mohammad Ouathi, a soundman for France 3 television, had been kidnapped by members of the Popular Resistance Committees, an alliance of various armed militias.
Earlier this week, the group held a press conference in Gaza City in which its leaders announced that they had nothing to do with the abduction of Ouathi, a Frenchman of Algerian origin. The group even claimed that Israel was behind the kidnapping.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1124677190967
Jailed journalist improves after ending hunger strike
MARGARET NEIGHBOUR
THE dissident Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji has broken a two-month-long hunger strike and his condition, which had been life-threatening, is improving, his wife said yesterday.
The outspoken journalist, who was jailed in 2000 after writing a string of articles linking top officials to political murders, had been refusing food in an effort to gain unconditional release from prison.
"He is now following the diet and medicine prescribed by doctors," his wife, Massoumeh Shafii, said.
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1826792005
Journalists Stop Investigating Organized Crime
Submitted by editor on August 22, 2005 - 1:58pm.
By Susana Hayward
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - A drug war is ripping apart northern Mexico, but you won't find many details about who's behind it in the local newspapers. Journalists - after their colleagues have been killed, kidnapped, and threatened with death - have stopped investigating organized crime.
"It's the new trend of drug gangs: Journalists are warned, paid off or killed," said Daniel Rosas, the managing editor of the daily El Mañana, the oldest newspaper in this border city south of Laredo, Texas. "Drug battles have become bloodier, and gangs have no code of ethics. They don't respect human life; why should they respect reporters?"
El Mañana, founded in 1932 after the Mexican revolution with a motto to promote freedom of expression, has been self-censoring itself since its editor, Roberto Javier Mora García, was stabbed to death on March 19, 2004.
http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/717
An Open Letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
(Aug. 22, 2005)The Honorable Louise Arbour
The High Commissioner for Human Rights
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
Tens of thousands of cyberpolice patrol cybercaf's, wiretap phones, intercept cellular phone conversation, and interfere with text-messaging devices. They use the same high-tech methods to monitor and obstruct the speech and expression on the Internet of independent journalists, writers and rights activists, and to gather evidence surreptitiously to use against these people in court. The Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party, which should not have any role in legislation, nevertheless wields tremendous arbitrary power in operating, controlling, and penalizing the mass media, threatening journalists and those in the media profession, And coercing them into practicing self-censorship. All these practices violate Chinese citizens' rights to information, free speech, and free press.
http://www.peacehall.com/news/gb/english/2005/08/200508221310.shtml
US website names MI6 officers
Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday August 22, 2005
The Guardian
An American website posted what it purported to be the names of 74 members of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, yesterday.
It was not clear last night what action British intelligence officials or lawyers will take to try to get the names taken off the website and prevent further dissemination of them. However, they are likely to conduct a damage limitation exercise and warn those individuals who have been identified. Eighteen of those named on the website have held the rank of ambassador.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,11026,1553993,00.html
UN Annan calls for release of Iranian jailed journalist
Tehran, Aug 20, IRNA
Iran-UN-Letter
The United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in a letter to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called for the release of the Iranian journalist, Akbar Ganji, it was reported here Saturday.
According to the dispatches "Annan's letter has not been made public because it has not yet been received by the Iranian authorities."
In his letter, Annan called for the immediate release on humanitarian grounds of Ganji.
Ganji was sentenced to six years in prison in 2001 after he wrote a series of articles linking senior officials to the murder of political dissidents.
Ganji, was admitted to a Tehran hospital on July 18 for knee surgery.
Masoumeh Shafiei, Ganji's wife, told reporters on Friday "he is cooperating with the doctors after arrangements prepared and negotiations held by the Judiciary officials."
http://www.irna.ir/en/news/view/menu-234/0508201764135759.htm
A dimming beacon
A Times Editorial
Published August 21, 2005
In the years it has defended the rights of journalists across Latin America, the Inter-American Press Agency has sent delegations to support media workers in such countries as Mexico, Panama, Chile and Venezuela. It seemed unimaginable they might one day send a support team to this country.
Yet an international delegation from the 1,300-member press freedom group recently visited New York Times reporter Judith Miller in an Alexandria, Va., jail, just after meeting with lawmakers in Washington to discuss her case. Their message was disturbing: Miller's plight is resonating abroad, where countries are following America's example to violate press freedoms.
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/08/21/Opinion/A_dimming_beacon.shtml
Imperfect martyr
Many -- including many Salon readers -- refuse to rally behind jailed, controversial New York Times reporter Judy Miller. But anyone who truly supports freedom of speech needs to.
By Andrew O'Hehir
July 13, 2005 "New York Times reporter Judith Miller is sent to jail for contempt of court, but not for writing months of front-page fiction about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," a reader in California recently wrote to Salon. "Al Capone did time in prison for tax evasion, but not for murder. I guess you have to take what you can get."
That letter, which I quote in its entirety, pretty much sums up the response so far from Salon's readers (and much of the lefty blogosphere) to our two recent news stories about Miller, who is now serving a prison sentence for refusing to identify to federal prosecutors the confidential White House source who leaked information about CIA agent Valerie Plame, wife of a former U.S. diplomat highly critical of the Bush administration.
At least on the leftward half of the political spectrum, there is a wide gulf between the way the media is telling the Miller story and the way the public understands it. "I suppose the journalistic breast-beating over Miller going to jail was to be expected," wrote Elizabeth Bass, in a letter we published a few days ago. "No profession loves to trumpet its own importance more. But am I alone in just not giving a shit?"
Bass is by no means alone in her cynicism, nor completely unjustified. We can learn things by gazing into this abyss between the press and the public, but the sense of vertigo is not especially comforting.
Many readers have been less temperate than the author of the Capone letter, not to mention less amusing and less succinct. Salon also received at least two letters suggesting, with apparent seriousness, that Miller deserves not just prison time but the death penalty for her journalistic sins. (Salon published one of those, which I think might have been a failure in judgment.) A more lenient correspondent suggested a life sentence, while many others seemed to share one reader's pithy but less specific sentiment: "I hope she rots." (Most of the letters I am quoting in this article have not been published, and in those cases I am not identifying the authors by name.)
To describe the whole Miller-Plame affair as murky, or profoundly ironic, doesn't even halfway do it justice. As Salon reporter Farhad Manjoo wrote after the June 27 Supreme Court decision that all but ensured Miller would go to jail, the tangled narrative "is like something out of Kafka." One of the things that enraged readers, it seems, is the fact that the first wave of stories about Miller's legal peril (Manjoo's included) judiciously avoided confronting what another of our letter-writers called "the elephant in the middle of the room."
That elephant, of course, was Miller herself, and the notorious role she played during the Bush administration's buildup to the war in Iraq. I myself wrote an article last December suggesting that Miller and her newspaper, having been thoroughly hustled by Ahmed Chalabi (possibly at taxpayer expense), bore more responsibility for the Iraq misadventure than anyone this side of George W. Bush. I'd be lying if I said I'd never felt any childish moments of schadenfreude, or any feeling that karmic justice was being dispensed, as she got closer and closer to prison. Miller is also spectacularly ill-suited for the role of poster child for the use of confidential sources or First Amendment freedoms in general because, as numerous commentators have noted, the source she's now protecting wasn't some selfless, embattled whistle-blower, but rather "a high government operative determined to stab a whistle-blower in the back," as a Salon reader from Washington put it. (At this point, we'd all be shocked if her informant wasn't Karl Rove, or someone right next to him.)
So it was reasonable to expect at least some anti-Miller letters in the wake of Manjoo's and freelance reporter Michael Scherer's Salon stories about the Miller case. Like virtually everyone else in every branch of the media, Manjoo and Scherer reported Miller's impending and then actual imprisonment as a dark day for press freedom. Also like almost everyone else in the media, both stories sought to put the bizarre details of Miller's dilemma in context, while dancing around its most uncomfortable elements: Miller's tarnished record and the presumed involvement of Rove, dark prince of the George W. Bush White House.
But it's safe to say that everyone here was surprised by the consistently enraged tone of the letters -- furious might be a better word -- and by the insistence of many writers that Salon's coverage had fundamentally missed the story. Of the dozens of letters we have received on this issue over the last few weeks, no more than a half-dozen have supported the general tenor of Manjoo and Scherer's reporting, or indeed have seen the Miller case as in any way a matter of fundamental freedoms.
"What a steaming load of treacle and crap," the Washington reader wrote about the latter story, describing it as "laying on the sentimental details with a trowel" in an attempt to evoke reader sympathy for Miller as she was led off to jail. "I've had my objections to Salon articles before but this is unquestionably the worst piece you've ever run on any subject."
I think that criticism is fundamentally unfair, and probably based more on ideology than on the facts of the story. Scherer's piece in particular straightforwardly addressed the ironies of Miller's current role, and her past as a mouthpiece for Chalabi and, in effect, for the Bush administration's WMD disinformation. If the reporter going to prison had been freelancer Greg Palast, who has argued that Bush stole the 2004 election, or former Salon reporter Eric Boehlert, who has written extensively about the mainstream media's weak-kneed response to the White House, those same "sentimental details" might have brought our Washington reader to tears.
But I do think that the tide of powerful reader emotion we've seen at Salon, even though it's impelled by the Manichaean political climate of the moment, stems from a legitimate source. Journalism as a profession -- if, that is, it can even be described as a profession -- is facing a crisis of public confidence, and the wounds are partly self-inflicted. Scherer referred to the recent opinion poll that discovered "as many Americans consider Rush Limbaugh a journalist as Bob Woodward." Manjoo quoted Burton Glass, of the Center for Investigative Reporting, who explained that reporters "who in the past were seen as stewards of the public interest now are seen as the enemy or as part of the problem. If the public doesn't see the connection between protecting anonymous sources ... and their own public interest, I think our democracy is weakened."
On one hand, many members of the public -- especially liberals who ought to be staunch defenders of the Bill of Rights -- seem unable or unwilling to grasp the idea that a matter of fundamental principle might be at stake, even in the murky and seemingly bottomless waters of the Miller-Plame-Rove affair. Compelling a reporter to reveal his or her sources to the police turns that reporter into a police agent, and that's not acceptable, even in unsavory circumstances like these. No reporter can be expected to check out the legality or ethics or motivations of all sources in advance. All sorts of surprising people talk to reporters when they probably shouldn't, for all sorts of personal and political and psychological reasons. If journalists can only receive confidential information from the saintly and the pure of heart, the entire enterprise might as well become "The View."
It's worth suggesting that Judy Miller might be the Skokie case of press-freedom issues. It was back in 1977 when a small band of neo-Nazis from the South Side of Chicago launched a year-long legal battle by applying for a permit to march in Skokie, Ill., a suburban community with a majority Jewish population and a large number of Holocaust survivors. The neo-Nazis were a pack of losers with no coherent political ideology and little message beyond hate speech; their proposal to march in Skokie was pure provocation. But the various ordinances Skokie officials passed to try to stop the march were transparently unconstitutional, and the ACLU took the Nazis' case all the way to the Supreme Court, winning at every stage. Jewish members of the civil liberties group resigned by the thousands -- nationally, the ACLU lost 15 percent of its membership -- and some tension between Jewish organizations and the ACLU lingers to this day.
It should go without saying that for civil-liberties advocates and constitutional scholars, the issue was never whether the Nazis were repugnant (they were) or had anything to say (they didn't). Instead, it was a question of what legal precedent was being set. "If we had lost, a brand new set of First Amendment law would have been created," David Hamlin, then the executive director of the Illinois ACLU, said a few years later. "Any community in the country would have had the legal power to pass laws like Skokie's that would stifle not just Nazis but anyone they didn't like."
There's no need to draw the parallel out further, except to observe that the principle here is not approximately the same, but exactly the same. Even if you believe that Judith Miller is nothing more than "a shill for the Bush administration" (a Florida reader) or "a co-conspirator in a government coverup" (a Missouri reader), she's still entitled to the same constitutional protections as Greg Palast and Amy Goodman. Even, God help us, as Robert Novak, who seems to have peed his drawers and spilled the beans the moment the independent prosecutor rattled his cage. The First Amendment covers all members of the press, without regard to truthfulness, integrity or their perceived similarity to sub-reptilian life forms.
But the public's baleful view of the press is not totally without merit. Media insiders have become so obsessed by their own internal debates and so mesmerized by their own pseudo-professional codes of conduct that they've failed to notice how badly they've lost the public trust. The Times' near-sanctification of Miller upon her imprisonment is a perfect case in point. While the paper's profile of Miller finally, in backhanded fashion, connected her name to reporting on "supposed weapons of mass destruction" -- something that never happened in the Times' wobbly May 2004 apology for its Iraq coverage -- it also seemed like a transparent attempt to rehabilitate her image with the paper's moderate-to-liberal base.
The problem is that the journalistic establishment has no way of dealing with someone like Miller, who screwed up massively, but did so within the rules the profession has set for itself. Unlike the far less significant case of Jayson Blair, who became the subject of an enormous ritual purification exercise, Miller reported what she thought was the truth. She was led astray, one presumes, by some combination of ideological bias and journalistic hubris. The scary part about that -- the part the Times has never even tried to confront -- is that if a skilled veteran reporter like Miller can get so thoroughly hustled out of her shorts by a White House bagman, then exactly who in the media can we trust? One letter writer from New York stated this plainly: "If reporters and editors are wondering why the public has lost much of the respect for the media that they once received, they need to investigate no farther than Judy Miller."
A constant tide of right-wing complaints about the media's alleged liberal bias has also taken its toll on mainstream institutions like the Times, CNN and CBS News, which have tried to triangulate toward some ever-receding middle point in the political discourse. Like so much that the media does, this intellectually empty strategy is based on a misreading of public intelligence; Americans may be increasingly cynical, and not well-informed as a whole, but they're also not dumb. The right will of course continue to discern traces of "cultural elite" snobbery in mainstream media coverage, while the left will feel that the press has abandoned critical thinking and capitulated to mindless nationalism. For once, both sides will be right.
Even Monday's extraordinary White House spectacle, in which the press corps savaged press secretary Scott McClellan over the administration's hypocritical handling of the Rove-Plame affair, was really just another example of pack mentality in action. Sure, it's encouraging to see White House reporters behaving as if they might theoretically possess some stones, no matter the circumstances. But it's easy to play Woodward-and-Bernstein with a colleague in jail and a presidency now perceived as being on the ropes. These are the same guys and gals who spent four years dutifully copying down everything McClellan and Ari Fleischer said and telling us it was true; only the script has changed. Their anger seemed a measure of the tragically misplaced trust they had put in the Bush White House to always tell the truth.
Then there's the fact that a great deal of journalism basically has become "The View." The public may be forgiven for "not giving a shit" if the media establishment wants to wrap itself in the First Amendment with one hand and bleat about our precious freedoms while dispensing stories about shark attacks and Natalee Holloway with the other. It's not necessarily clear that a press engaged in a tabloid-esque race to the bottom, consumed by sensationalist pseudo-stories, nuggets of McNews and flag-waving rhetoric, is a free press in any meaningful sense of the term.
There's no quick-fix solution available for any of this; it's not like we can, or even should, swear off Paris Hilton and Tom Cruise forever, ditch the snazzy color graphics and go back to the mostly imaginary era of so-called serious journalism. Good reporting, solid writing and sound critical thinking are not limited by genre or topic; I suspect that Salon's TV critic, Heather Havrilesky, has more to say about the state of contemporary America than your average dozen earnest lefty bloggers. The problem is not "hard" vs. "soft" news, but canned and conventional infotainment vs. courageous reporting and independent thinking.
Nor do I think that the public wants us to dispense condescending lectures about Tom Paine and the First Amendment mixed into the Sunday funnies, or wants to sit still for public forums where journalists mull the value and risks of anonymous sourcing, or debate exactly how Judy Miller became Ahmed Chalabi's stooge. But I do believe that journalists have to become more self-critical and more willing to listen to outside criticism -- from readers, from the bloggers who zealously pick apart our deadline-frazzled copy, from whomever -- even when it violates the semi-professional norms we have so pretentiously internalized.
Frankly, if we want the public to respect our constitutional rights, we have to defend them by doing our jobs better and by explaining ourselves better. As a reader from California, who felt he had to read between the lines of Salon's Miller coverage for the real story, put it, "Whatever is happening here, I expect more accurate interpretation of all the nuances involved -- about the media, by the media, and for the American public. This is not my job, it's yours. And I expect you to do it."
My interpretation of the Miller case is that like the Skokie affair it's a kind of test. If you can't resist the feeling that Miller is being punished for her sins by a God who moves in mysterious ways, hey, I'm right there with you. Shed no tears for Judy. But this is a classic case of the poisoned chalice -- tastes great now, kills you later. The price we will all pay for this karmic redistribution of justice is not going to be worth it in the long run.
But it's only fair to let readers have the last word. After our second boatload of anti-Miller letters, Mark Hughes Cobb of Alabama responded in disbelief: "Absolutely amazing. Salon letter-writers who disdain freedom of the press. Perhaps a little reading of the Bill of Rights (certainly not a re-reading in any of these cases) would be helpful. The free press belongs to everyone; not just the New York Times, not Time, and not even to Salon and the blogosphere. If an out-of-control special prosecutor decides to come after your comments next, I'll be sure and write in with scathing remarks on your unfitness to wield freedom."
A student journalist from San Francisco, Daniel Jimenez, was more sad than angry, but his questions capture why even those in the media who believe Judith Miller did immeasurable damage to our profession don't think she belongs in jail. "Do we really want to add the United States to the list of nations whose governments use their power to punish political opponents, including perceived enemies in the media?" he asked. "Do we want the penalty for bad reporting, or at the least, falling victim to deceptive sources, to be not a correction or professional censure, but prison?"
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www.wrgb.com
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