Journalism Educators Ask White House to Abandon 'Anti-Press Policies'

By: E&P Staff Attendees at the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in San Francisco on Friday passed a resolution condemning "anti-press policies" taken by the Bush administration in recent years.

?This is the first statement against general anti-press policies in an administration in at least 30 years,? said David Mindich, author of the resolution and professor of journalism and mass communication at Saint Michael?s College.

Policies that members of the leading group of journalism academics (with 3,500 members) asked the White House to abandon included tight restrictions on the flow of information, "staged town meetings," refusal to allow photos of coffins returning from Iraq, "massive reclassification of documents," attempts to consolidate media, use of "bribes" to columnists and distribution of uncredited video news releases, and "using the courts to pressure journalists to give up their sources and to punish them for obtaining leaked information."

The resolution stated:

"The relationship between the presidency and press has always been uneasy. This tension is both unavoidable and generally salutary: When each side conducts its duties with honesty and integrity, both hold the power of the other in check. It is difficult to find a period in American history in which this mutual opposition did not exist.

"However, it has come to pass that the current administration has engaged in a number of practices and has enacted a series of severe and extraordinary policies that attack the press specifically and by extension, democracy itself.

"A working democracy requires a free press that is muscular in its reporting. It requires a press that holds leaders accountable for their actions. It requires a press that contrasts leaders' words with their actions. It requires a press that uncovers errors and wrongdoing by employing named and unnamed sources. We believe the actions of the current administration compromise these press functions.

"The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press. However, American press history has been marked by periods in which press freedoms have retreated. The Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790s represented one such period. Another was during the Civil War, in which journalists were jailed en masse because of dissent. The Espionage Act of 1917 paved the way for encroachments on press freedom (see Schenk v. United States). In each of these periods, politicians, judges, and scholars came to see, at least in hindsight, that anti-press policies in the name of national unity produced real harm to democracy itself. We believe that the Bush administration's anti-press policies and practices represent another major period."

The organization also voted to support the First Amendment rights of students and to protect faculty advisers and students working on school newspapers. They said media advisers, university faculty and university administrators should not have control over content in student media. Members also planned to develop a resolution for consideration next year calling for the same protections for high school media.

Members also passed a resolution calling for the reinstatement of Karen Bosley as adviser to student media at Ocean County College in Dover Township, N.J. Bosley was removed by Ocean County administrators after the student newspaper printed negative stories about the college?s president and other members of the administration. Last week the Asbury Park Press reported that a federal judge temporarily restrained the college from removing Bosley, asking the three students who filed suit on Bosley?s behalf to prove her removal was a retaliatory move by the administration.