Status: Free
Legal Environment: 5 (of 30)
Political Environment: 8 (of 40)
Economic Environment: 4 (of 30)
Total Score: 17 (of 100)
(Lower scores = freer)
Press freedom is vibrant in the United States, with intense coverage devoted to scandals involving government figures, the more controversial dimensions of the war on terrorism, and the Iraq war. While the United States has faced a controversy over demands by prosecutors that journalists reveal confidential sources or provide access to research material in the course of criminal investigations, 2007 saw progress towards the enactment of a "press shield" law that would give journalists qualified protection against prosecution in such cases. The year was also notable for the adoption of a law strengthening federal freedom of information policies.
Press freedom enjoys a strong foundation of legal protection in the federal Constitution, in state and federal laws, and in court decisions. The Supreme Court has repeatedly issued decisions that take an expansive view of freedom of expression and of the press. In particular, court decisions have given broad protection to the press from libel or defamation suits that involve commentary on public figures. An exception to judicial support for press freedom involves demands by prosecutors for information gathered by reporters in the course of their journalistic investigations, including material from confidential sources. During 2007, Josh Wolf, a "freelance blogger" was released after having spent 226 days in federal custody for refusing to hand over video tapes he recorded of a July 2005 demonstration in San Francisco. Wolf was released after posting the video on the Internet. In another case, two San Francisco reporters, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wade, were threatened with imprisonment by a judge in a case involving steroid use by prominent athletes for refusing to reveal the identity of a confidential source. The threat of imprisonment ended when the source, a defense attorney, acknowledged his role in leaking grand jury testimony to the journalists.
As a result of these and other cases, Congress took up a bill that would grant journalists a qualified right not to reveal news sources in federal cases. The law, called the Free Flow of Information Act, passed the House of Representatives by an overwhelming margin. The measure would allow journalists to withhold sources except in cases where the testimony would be critical to the outcome of a trial, in cases of potential terrorism, or where the testimony or information would fulfill a "compelling public interest." The measure also excludes from coverage amateur bloggers and journalism students. More than 30 states already have such "shield laws."
The Bush administration had come under criticism for what some said were restrictions on the release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act. At the end of 2007, however, bush signed into a revised Freedom of Information Act that will expedite the document request process and provide mediation in cases where a federal agency is reluctant to release material.
There were several instances of violence, or threats of violence, to journalists during the year, most of which targeted reporters or editors of media with a predominantly minority or immigrant audience. In the most notorious case, Chauncey Bailey, editor of the Oakland Post in California, was murdered on the street, apparently in response to articles he had published that alleged involvement in criminal activities of a local Muslim bakery. A reporter for the Miami Herald, Leonard Pitts, Jr., was the object of hate calls and intimidating emails for articles about race, crime, and media bias. In New York, editors of two Urdu language newspapers, the Pakistan Post and the Urdu Times, were threatened and copies of the newspapers seized from distribution points and destroyed. Federal authorities continued to detain two foreign journalists. Sami Al-Haj, a Somali-born Al-Jazeera journalist, continued to be held without charge by U.S. forces at Guantanamo Bay. He was originally arrested in Pakistan in 2001 in the initial push for results in the war on terror. However, Al-Haj's lawyer contends that his detention is based on the U.S. government's belief that a link exists between Al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda and that no evidence has been produced against his client. Through year's end, American military authorities continued to imprison Bilal Hussein, an Associated Press reporter, who was arrested in Iraq in 2006 on security related charges. Authorities cited alleged involvement with Iraqi insurgents, although no details have been forthcoming.
In recent years, reporters from several prominent newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, have published a series of investigative articles that have called into question various aspects of the Bush administration's war on terror and its conduct in the Iraq war, including details of prisoner abuse in Iraq, extraordinary renditions and "ghost prisoners," allegations of prisoner abuse in Guantanamo, warrantless surveillance of American citizens, and American government access to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication in search of material that might involve money transfers by terrorists. Some of these revelations have drawn sharp criticism from President Bush and other administration officials and threats to bring criminal charges against The New York Times. No charges, however, have been brought against any newspaper.
Media coverage of political affairs is aggressive and often polarized. The press itself is frequently a source of controversy, with conservatives and supporters of the Bush administration accusing the media of anti-administration bias and liberals accusing the press of timidity in coverage of administration misdeeds. The appearance of enhanced polarization is driven to some degree by the growing influence of blog sites, many of which are aggressively partisan. Nonetheless, most American newspapers make a serious effort to keep a wall of separation between news reporting, commentary, and editorials. Ironically, the trend toward fewer family-owned newspapers and more newspapers under corporate control has contributed to a less partisan, if blander, editorial tone.
The media in the United States are overwhelmingly under private ownership. Nevertheless, National Public Radio, an entity funded partly by the government and partly by private contributions, enjoys a substantial audience. From time to time, conservatives have accused NPR of a liberal bias in its coverage and Republicans have occasionally tried to reduce funding for the network or eliminate it altogether. More recently, controversy over NPR has simmered and congressional funding has been approved by substantial margins. Under U.S. law, radio and television airwaves are considered public property and are leased to private stations, which determine content. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is charged with administering licenses and reviewing content to ensure that it complies with federal limits on indecent or offensive material. On several occasions, the FCC has issued fines against radio and television outlets for what the agency deemed acts of indecency.
The United States is home to more than 1,400 daily newspapers geared primarily toward local readerships. The number of dailies has declined gradually over the past two decades, and many of the country's largest and most prestigious newspapers have encountered financial difficulties in recent years, owing mainly to competition from the internet. Newspapers have instituted staff reductions and, in some cases, have cut back on their coverage of national and international news (and on maintaining foreign news bureaus) in favor of a more local focus. Many predict a major transformation of the newspaper business in coming years, with some newspapers closing and others focused increasingly on bolstering their electronic editions. However, the primary form of news dissemination in the country is through television news networks like CNN, Fox News, and CBS. Media concentration is an ongoing concern in the United States. This controversy has intensified in recent years following the purchase of media entities, especially television networks, by large corporations with no previous experience in journalism. The FCC commission regularly considers policies that would lift restrictions on the domination of the national or local media markets by a limited number of entities, with a particular focus on limits on a single corporation's ownership of both television stations and newspapers in a single local market. In a 2007 ruling, the FCC voted by a narrow margin to lift certain restrictions on television-newspaper cross ownership in the 20 largest media markets. The action was sharply criticized by some press freedom advocates, and efforts were launched in Congress to reverse the decision.
At the same time, diversity of the U.S. media has expanded with the mushrooming of cable television and, especially, the internet. Nearly 72 percent of Americans are Internet users, according to a 2007 survey, placing it ninth in the world in an assessment of Internet penetration. The number and influence of internet sites and blogs have expanded greatly in recent years, and blogs have proven to be an important source of information in certain political controversies. Blogs devoted to public policy questions often lean to the highly partisan, and though their proliferation adds to the richness of press diversity, it also contributes to ideological polarization. Several of the United States-based Internet corporations have come under intense criticism for having cooperated with censorship policies introduced by China and other authoritarian countries and for having provided China with information that resulted in the prosecution and imprisonment of several Internet journalists. In 2007 Yahoo! announced that it was establishing a special fund to compensate the families of cyberdissidents jailed as a result of the company's cooperation with government requests for information about the source of Internet communications.
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