As New York Times Columnist Anthony Lewis wrote in 1989, “Journalism’s high purpose is not to get close to power but to speak truth to power”. A search of the New York Times archives back to 1981 of “truth to power” produced 90 “hits”, most dealing with journalists and public figures who spoke out in one way or another against American government officials.
No doubt, the Times and Washington Post believed they were talking “truth to power” when they published reports on NSA surveillance of overseas telephone calls and classified information about CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. No journalist has been prosecuted or incarcerated for those disclosures. To the contrary, the newspapers and reporters were rewarded with prestigious Pulitzer Prizes.
Times reporter Judith Miller did spend 85 days in jail for refusing to divulge to a grand jury who told her that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. Ironically, when the special prosecutor’s investigation was done, the only indictment was one White House aide who recalled the timing of events differently than the journalist to whom he spoke.
Howard Kurtz, media writer for the Post, characterized Miller’s refusal to testify by saying, “Whether you agree with Judy Miller or not, she did a courageous thing by going to jail for three months for a principle that she believed in.”
No matter how inconvenient Miller’s 85 days in jail, nobody seriously believed that her life was in danger, or even that her jail time would somehow limit her career.
Contrast the conclusion of Miller’s confinement with that of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was brutally murdered after he was kidnapped in Pakistan on his way to meet a terrorist leader. His forced confession was captured on video, along with his throat being cut by his killers.
Fox News Channel reporter Steve Centanni, and his cameraman Olaf Wiig, were kidnapped by members of the Holy Jihad Brigades, a previously unknown Palestinian terrorist group in Gaza. Fox News has distinguished itself among sources of broadcast news by its refusal to jump on the anti-Israel bandwagon. In 2002, when most of the mainstream media were headlining what subsequently proved to be bogus Palestinian claims of an Israeli massacre in Jenin, Fox anchors were withholding judgment, pointing out that proof was lacking to support the Arabs’ charges.
But even Fox News is not immune to real threats to life and limb. Forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint, Centanni and Wiig were released after two weeks of captivity. Shortly after being freed from their kidnappers, they spoke to reporters while still in Gaza and under Palestinian security force control. Centanni, in remarks carried worldwide observed, “I hope that this never scares a single journalist away from coming to Gaza to cover the story because the Palestinian people are very beautiful and kind hearted. The world needs to know more about them. Don’t be discouraged.”
Edward R. Murrow’s critical coverage of Representative Joseph McCarthy’s 1950’s hearings made him a folk hero and became a feature film. Murrow’s actions, writer Neal Gabler observed, “Brought courage and conscience to television news”.
But there are threats, and there are threats. While the Committee to Protect Journalists last December listed 125 journalists in jails around the world, there were no American or Israeli reporters in their nation’s jails. By contrast, China had imprisoned 32 reporters and Cuba 24.
In August, CBS aired veteran newsman Mike Wallace’s interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Wallace was criticized for his softball questions and the praise he heaped on the Iranian president, whose government is actively seeking nuclear weapons and has threatened to wipe Israel off the map. Characterizing him as “more rational” than he expected, Wallace described the Iranian by saying, “He’s an impressive fellow, this guy. He really is. He’s obviously smart as hell”.
Wallace’s comments and interview carried echoes of CNN news chief Jason Eason’s 2003 confession in The New York Times that he had suppressed stories from Baghdad to protect his staff from former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Eason wrote:
“For example, in the mid-1990’s one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters… CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.”
So CNN stayed in Baghdad and censored itself while claiming to bring viewers the real story about Saddam’s Iraq.
As a column last year in The New York Times observed, Iranian reporters “don’t harbor fantasies of speaking truth to power”. One hundred newspapers have been shutdown by Iran’s “clergy-influenced judiciary.” Neither the clergy nor the nation’s leaders are subject to criticism.
Threats of real violence against journalists are not exceptional in the Middle East, other than, of course, in Israel. According to The Jerusalem Post, unhappy Israelis responded to biased BBC coverage in 2003 by boycotting “BBC news programs, declining interviews and excluding BBC reporters from briefings”.
Wow!
That debate was renewed during the recent fighting in Israel and Lebanon, when the BBC was again accused of bias. In another act of irony, BBC moved its reporters from Haifa to Beirut after the first week of the war, although Israelis have an unblemished record of non-violent dissent. Could it be BBC staff still felt safer in the Lebanese capital despite charges of massive and indiscriminate Israeli bombing, than they did from Hezbollah’s Katyushas in Haifa?
The New York Times recently reviewed its photographic coverage of the conflict in Israel and Lebanon. On the first day of fighting, the Times’ front page carried a photograph of Israelis shelling southern Lebanon, and another page one picture showed Israeli troops “on the march.” Seventeen more photographs showed Israeli soldiers on their tanks, firing artillery, or similar actions, all of which reinforced Hezbollah’s carefully orchestrated image as little David holding off the Israeli Goliath.
There was only a single photograph of Hezbollah fighters, both wounded and struggling to escape the fighting, due to Israel’s destruction of the Litani’s bridges. Although it would have provided vital visual context for Israel’s actions, there was not a single picture of Hezbollah firing some of the 4000 Katyusha rockets launched at Israel, because Hezbollah “actively discouraged” such pictures. That is a nice way of saying photographers chose not to “speak truth to power” when facing the barrels of Hezbollah Kalashnikov’s.
The self-censorship of so many American newspapers surrounding Danish political cartoons containing images of Muhammad, after death threats against European journalists backed by violent and sometimes deadly protests, is a story unto itself.
Some Middle East correspondents avoid the Palestinian controlled territories out of well-founded fear for their lives, while those who go there cannot help but recognize the very real risk of harm if they are too critical. Even Fox News cameramen complied with Hezbollah orders not to photograph rockets being fired from Tyre and other civilian areas.
Politics may no longer stop at the waters edge; but for too many journalists, fearlessly talking truth to power is something best left home when they cover the Middle East.

A portion of this article originally ran in The Jewish Exponent