Reply #9: My latest comment comparing Enquirer to Toledo Blade unfavorably

[roseBudd]

Let's see if this comment gets approved...


The sad reality is that the only newspaper in Ohio doing any investigative reporting is the Toledo Blade. Surely it's not a Gannett vs. Knight Ridder issue. Here is an example of a guest editorial in a Gannett owned newspaper that isn't afraid to speak truth to power about things that matter. The Cincinnati Enquirer fiddles while the US burns literally.

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060304/OPINION/603040305/1014


U.S. mustn't forget about openness and honesty

snip

Inexorably, the sound of silence is spreading throughout the federal government.

At NASA, political appointees have been interfering with what the agency's scientists — including James Hansen, a leading authority on global warming — can say in lectures, online presentations and press interviews. A review of those guidelines is promised.

Meanwhile, officials at the Environmental Protection Agency continue to insist on screening all contacts with the press by its scientists.

Not even speech as a private citizen escapes the watchful eye of officials.

For example, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs last fall launched an investigation into whether criticism of the administration in a VA nurse's letter to a weekly newspaper in Albuquerque was an act of sedition.

If there are any doubts about the administration's hard-line stance on government-employee speech, its brief in a case before the Supreme Court should dispel them. The case, Garcetti vs. Ceballos, presents the question of whether the First Amendment protects job-related speech, even when it is a matter of public concern. The solicitor general, on behalf of the United States, argues that it does not.

Ironically, while government officials suppress speech and punish criticism by others, they are greatly expanding the boundaries of their own speech.

snip

The Government Accountability Office reported last week that in two and a half years, seven agencies spent $1.6 billion on media and advertising, including government-produced video news releases that both the GAO and Congress labeled "covert propaganda."

These developments, combined with aggressive tactics for withholding information from Congress, the courts, scholars, historians, the press and the people, represent a sea change in the information policies that have sustained and vitalized our democracy for more than two centuries.

This new climate of fear and intimidation is discouraging the very words that drive democratic decision-making in the right direction.

The authors of these policies appear to have thought neither long nor hard about the long-term consequences of such policies. The implications for good government and democracy, as well as the First Amendment, are profound.

A strategy of withholding, manipulating and distorting information to control and defeat our enemies works also to mislead and control allies and citizens alike.

Moreover, we are careening dangerously toward an information environment that not only punishes dissenters and critics but those who are insufficiently laudatory.

As a nation, we should not gaze wistfully toward the tactics of tyrannies and terrorists as a possible model for our own information policies.

To do so would plunge us into a deplorable mistrust of honesty and openness as a way of winning the hearts and minds of our enemies, not to mention the trust and support of our citizenry.