This July Fourth, Where's The Press?

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By: Mark Fitzgerald This is a dispiriting July Fourth for America's press.

Look what's happened in just the last weeks. Sweeping aside any of the recent nostalgia for Watergate's Deep Throat, the U.S. Supreme Court left two reporters facing the possibility of 18 months in prison for protecting their confidential sources. Joining the lengthening ranks of papers with credibility scandals, the Sacramento Bee reported last Sunday that its now-fired star writer apparently fabricated the people she quoted in dozens of her compelling columns.

And most humbling of all, a Pew Center survey found that not even half of its 1,464 respondents were willing to say the press protects America's democracy.

What a contrast to those first Independence Day celebrations of the new United States of America. Orators in village squares and city parks often credited the free press as not just one of the blessings of independence -- but its essential spark.

Among the very first acts of rebellion against the British was the defiance of a jury of colonists that in 1734 refused a judge's instructions to convict New York newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger, who had been imprisoned for a year simply for criticizing the governor general.

The Stamp Act of 1735, a tax that hit newspapers and their advertisers particularly hard, gave the colonial press even more reason to agitate against the crown on the popular theme of "No Taxation Without Representation."

Though Thomas Jefferson was pilloried by the partisan press and came to "deplore ... the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed," he famously declared in his 1787 letter to Edward Carrington that "were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

How did we in the press fall from defender of democracy to an institution the public sees as either too arrogant or too accommodating, too much a scold or too silly to be taken seriously?

Part of it is a national mood beyond the media's control. In some ways this is the nation divided Blue and Red that Fox News or Air America portray. But Americans have also taken an unexpected turn away from news of politics and terrorism in the years since 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. In its place is an intense, almost hysterical, focus these days on celebrity -- think Brangelina or TomKat -- and even on curious non-stories like the Runaway Bride.

But the press itself bears the largest responsibility for its present low estate. With their audiences shrinking, the news media are desperately chasing after readers and viewers with the light news they think will sell -- and abdicating the central mission of a free press to hold authority accountable.

"It is a newspaper's duty to print news, and raise hell," Wilburt Storey thundered when he ran the Chicago Tribune during the Civil War. A century and a half later, there's another war under another Republican administration, but there hasn't been much hell raised by the press lately -- and Americans are disturbed by it.

In the Pew survey, 40 percent of the respondents said the news media were "too critical" of America -- but 38 percent also opined that the media were "too easy" on President Bush. Americans outside the Beltway see how this White House sets a daily news agenda, and how few journalists seem to have the courage or the enterprise to defy it.

But then, why should reporters risk the opprobrium of administration officials, or go-along colleagues, when their corporate media employers back home increasingly refuse to engage in even the mildest controversy? The Pew Center survey's finding that 60 percent of Americans believe the news media are biased is kind of funny considering that record numbers of newspapers shied away from even making a presidential endorsement in 2004.

Still, Americans have some justification in thinking the press is not leveling with them in important ways.

For instance, this administration came to Washington determined to conduct the public's business behind closed doors with unprecedented levels of secrecy -- and it has pulled it off without much challenge from the media. It is striking how a press that so cherishes the mythology of Woodward and Bernstein uncovering the mysteries of Watergate rarely mentions that the White House 30 years later is a far more secretive place.

In their reach, resources and revenues, America's news media have never been more powerful -- nor less inclined to take up their principal duty of holding government accountable to the governed. In that sense, today's dazzling media array compares poorly to the old-fashioned hell-raisers like the late-19th-century editor William Allen White, who moved a national audience when he railed about misdeeds at home and abroad from the pages of the tiny Emporia Gazette in Kansas.

Small voices can still have an outsize impact. While big media have deployed an army of reporters and cameramen covering Iraq from the ground and from Washington, it was a journalist working alone and outside the pack, Seymour Hersh, who uncovered the abuses at Abu Ghraib military prison.

If the press is to be seen again as democracy's champion, it must return to the mission it took on even before the American Revolution. On this July Fourth, the news media should take up the comfort -- and the challenge -- of Thomas Jefferson's still-true description of the United States as "a country which is afraid to read nothing, and which may be trusted with anything, so long as its reason remains unfettered by law."

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