America Falls Behind Namibia and Papua New Guinea
In the United States, we rightly pride ourselves on many things. Yet it turns out that the United States is behind countries such as Namibia, Mali, Estonia, and Papua New Guinea in one very important area.
Reporters Without Borders have recently released their Press Freedom Index for 2011-2012, and the U.S. is 47th, just below Taiwan and tied with Argentina. For a country that gave birth to the Bill of Rights this ought to be at the very least embarrassing, and at the worst, shameful.
The report cites the response to protests in 2011 as justification for the United States’ poor ranking. In the space of two months more than 25 journalists were arrested, escorted off premises, or beaten for ‘inappropriate behavior’, ‘public nuisance’, and lacking accreditation. Instances like this are now easy to document thanks to modern technology, and some of the videos of such instances are depressing and bemusing in equal measure. These infringements would be worrying enough for First Amendment advocates, but the recent fiasco with SOPA and PIPA are also cause for concern.
The last decade has seen an unacceptable number of abuses of U.S. citizen’s rights. The right to privacy and the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures as codified in the Fourth Amendment is being slowly chipped away through invasive legislation such as the Patriot Act (renewed by President Obama) and NDAA. The right to keep and bear arms is being turned into an almost prohibitive bureaucratic nightmare in some parts of the country, as Emily Miller of the Washington Times has been chronicling. The Fifth Amendment has seen its own fair share of wear and tear, being ignored or treated as an obstacle by overbearing politicians in the name of security.
The Constitution of the United States is a piece of political genius, and it is a shame to see the rights it establishes being so brazenly reduced. Countries that until recently were ruled by dictators that often killed journalists are considered a more open environment in which to practice journalism than the U.S. Perhaps we should be doing a better job at reclaiming our intellectual and political heritage, and reminding the politicians of the document they swore to uphold and protect.
Image from Shutterstock/Scott Rothstein
“The Constitution of the United States is a piece of political genius..:” – it is, by the standards of the 18th or 19th century. Not by modern standards, though. This uncritical veneration of the Constitution in the US blinds Americans to its flaws, such as
- lack of effective protection against excessive punishment. The 8th amendment protects against “cruel and unusual” punishment and against excessive fines, but not against excessive prison terms, not even ridiculously excessive ones.
- lack of effective protection against highway robbery in the form of asset forfeiture
- lack of protection against politicized justice. If federal prosecutors serve “at the pleasure of the president”, what are the chances they will be independent? In which (other?) civilized country would all torture victims be denied a day in court on the grounds of “state secrets” and “executive immunity”? If in such matters justice is the five-dollar-whore of power, this is also the fault of the constitution
- lack of protection against arbitrary and eccentric criminal laws.
- lack of protection against indirect subversions of the rule of law. What good are the procedural rights the Constitution confers if the lawyer of a poor defendant in a murder case gets a flat fee of $ 1.300 paid by the state, as is the case in some States? How effective will the defense be?
- lack of protection against prosecutorial misbehaviour. What good is the Constitution if prosecutors can violate the Brady rule with impunity?
- the absence of clauses relating to the principle of proportionality
And there would be more to say.
To an outside observer, the US criminal justice system and the political system look dysfunctional. The Constitution ist partly to blame for that.
Because civilization has made us weak doesn’t lessen the genius of the constitution.
But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist. – Lysander Spooner
OP,
While all of the concerns about press freedom you mentioned are real, I don’t think that this (or any other) ranking of nations really accomplishes all that it purports to. There are too many variables, too many cultural differences, and too much focus on what happened at OWS, an event that we don’t really know much about how to classify yet.
FN: The abuses you cite are real, but in these cases the judiciary is the backstop, and if it fails us, we are forked. There is no a priori system that is guaranteed to stop abuse, because all such systems are implemented by fallible human beings. At some point human character is the axis of political morality.
After three generations of miseducation, “everybody knows” that this or that distortion is true, and you cannot find any judges to disagree. If you study the history of US public education, you will see that this was no accident.
Was the USA pushed off the cliff, or did it jump? It was pushed until everybody believed that if we jumped we would sprout wings and flap away into heaven. We are seeing the denoument of that program.
As I see it, transparency, from top to bottom, is our only hope for revealing what parts of the government are seriously at variance with reality and addressing what to do about it. Transparency heals; force destroys.
Sadly, we have not been a constitutional republic for some time. This article only addresses a few of the unfortunate consequences of this reality. I used to believe we were better than this; I was wrong. I pray we can find our way back.
The constant criticism of the media as uniformly “liberal” (which has only intensified in the years since just about every network and newspaper in the country made positive steps to include conservative voices–CNN is much more conservative than it was 20 years ago, yet I hear “Communist News Network” more often) has served to delegitimize journalism in the minds of a lot of conservatives. There’s now an assumption on the part of many that whatever the NYT has to say, they’re just pushing an agenda. (Cf. Newt’s attacks on Wolf Blitzer and Juan Williams in the debates, and how the audience responded. Or Palin’s spin on her softball interview with Katie Couric, which was dutifully repeated by all the usual suspects.)
When you’ve convinced half of the people that “the media” is trying to undermine their worldview and way of life, you shouldn’t be surprised when the government realizes it can get away with trampling on press freedom. This is at least partly the result of decades of messenger-shooting.