Freedom of the Press

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders just released its Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2007. The United States ranks 48th in the world for press freedoms.

That's behind no less than a half-dozen former Communist countries; African nations such as Ghana, Mauritius, and South Africa; and South Korea, which ranked 39th.

That surprises me, in part because of the feud between the Roh Moo-Hyeon administration and the media regarding unrestricted access to government officials. The press staged a sit-in in the lobby on October 12.

So what makes the U.S. worse than South Korea in terms of press freedoms? Well, three things: the imprisonment of blogger Josh Wolf, the five-year detention of cameraman Sami Al-Haj at Guantanamo Bay, and the murder of Chauncey Bailey.

1.) Josh Wolf refused to comply with an FBI subpoena to turn over all documentation materials after an anarchist demonstration in July 2005 resulted in arson investigations of some protestors. In autumn 2006, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ordered Wolf be jailed until he complied.

He never did, and ended up serving 226 days in jail, more than any journalist in U.S. history ever has for protecting source materials.¹

(The judge's zeal reminds me of Utah judge Leslie Lewis' rant against deer hunters, of which a transcript can be found here and the original video here. She was later put on administrative leave before being voted out of office.)

2.) Sami Al-Haj is an Al-Jazeera cameraman being held at Guantanamo Bay as an "enemy combatant." According to civil rights lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith, he has been on a hunger strike since January 2007, and is being force-fed by the U.S. military.²

Stafford-Smith also states that of the 130 times he was interrogated (up to June 2006)³, he was hardly ewver asked about the charges against him, only about the assumed links between al-Qaeda and his employer.⁴

3.) Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey was murdered on August 2 for his investigations into a bakery owner's "off the books" dealings that allegedly included assault, intimidation, theft, fraud, kidnapping, torture and, now, homicide.⁵ His story is made even more compelling because of further news that the bakery had managed to land a $37,000 public contract,⁶ suggesting that city officials had been complicit in their less-palatable activities.

While I'm loathe to accept a French institution's take on the state of press affairs in the U.S., I'm nonetheless embarassed that my country ranks behind so many others. If we want to live up the moniker "leader of the free world," we really should fix that.