May 3, 2006

World Press Freedom Day Builds on Tradition of Independent Media
Honors for maimed Lebanese reporter, journalists who died in 2005

Marking World Press Freedom Day on May 3, the United Nations presented its annual journalism award to a Lebanese broadcaster maimed in a terror attack in 2005.

In the United States, journalists read aloud the names of more than 1,600 news people who died on assignment in the past two centuries and honor the 59 journalists from around the world who died reporting the news in 2005.

World Press Freedom Day was established by the U.N. General Assembly in 1993. The day is meant as an occasion to celebrate press freedom, evaluate press freedom around the world, defend the media from attacks on its independence and pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives pursuing the truth.

May Chidiac, a popular television news presenter in Lebanon, received the 2006 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. According to a United Nations press release, Chidiac lost one of her hands and her left leg as a result of a car bomb in September 2005. The Cano Prize is named for Colombian journalist who was assassinated in 1987 after reporting the activities of powerful drug lords in his country, according to UNESCO.

In the United States on World Press Freedom Day, the independent, nonprofit Freedom Forum added the names of 59 journalists who died covering the news in 2005 to the Journalists Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, overlooking Washington. For two hours on May 3, journalists from U.S. and international news organizations -- including Reuters, the Associated Press and Al Jazeera -- read aloud the names of 1,606 journalists who died on assignment since 1812. The forum has an online database of the names at www.newseum.org.

AMERICAN TRADITION OF PRESS FREEDOM

Protecting freedom of the press is an American ideal older than the United States itself.

The John Peter Zenger case of 1735 set the precedent for American press freedom as a watchdog against oppressive government. In that case, a Colonial jury broke with the English legal tradition and decided that Zenger, a printer, could not be guilty of sedition because his newspaper’s criticism of the British government was, in fact, true.

The American Revolutionary War was triggered in no small part by the Stamp Act of 1765, intended to tax independent newspapers out of existence. In an era when news traveled no faster than horses could run or ships could sail, when opinions could be broadcast only as loud as a man could shout, newspapers were the primary way for revolutionaries and royalists to get their messages to a wider audience.

"Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (1791), elegant in its simplicity, enshrines one of the most basic beliefs of the nation: the importance of the press in nurturing democratic government by allowing a forum for free speech.

The First Amendment was the result of a lengthy political debate conducted through newspapers, and its authors knew exactly what kind of freedom they were letting loose. The press of their day was highly opinionated, partisan, and filled with vicious personal attacks. For example, the Gazette of the United States, backing the government of the first president, George Washington (1789-97), proclaimed that its mission was to oppose the "raging madness" of those who criticized administration policies. Opposition papers accused Washington, a war hero, of "incompetent soldiering."

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, strongly supported press freedom even though he had few kind words for the newspapers themselves. "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government," Jefferson once wrote, "I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." Yet, he also said, "I deplore … the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them."

Decades later, political polarization during the Civil War resulted in a barrage of press criticism against President Abraham Lincoln. In 1863, an editorial in a Chicago newspaper said Union soldiers were "indignant at the imbecility that has devoted them to slaughter for purposes with which they have no sympathy." When an angry Union general closed down the newspaper, Lincoln ordered it reopened.

More than a century later, the U.S. government in 1971 obtained a federal court order to halt the New York Times from its ongoing publication of the Pentagon Papers, citing a risk to national security. These documents, prepared by the Department of Defense, analyzed the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and had been classified as top secret. Within days the case reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the Times. Following in footsteps of the Zenger case, the court ruled that freedom of the press from "prior restraint," is nearly absolute. The court ruled that the government had not proved that publication would inflict "direct, immediate, and irreparable harm to the national interest."

Today, even though U.S. government officials sometimes seek to prevent sensitive information from being discovered by the press, American journalists and editors for the most part use their own ethical guidelines to determine whether a story would harm national security. Foreign visitors often are surprised to discover that more than 100 accredited journalists freely roam the corridors of the Pentagon in search of news, unescorted even in time of war.