U.S. Press Freedom Tracker

mkt (66)in #news • 9 years ago

_{Visit the}
U.S. Press Freedom Tracker

Yesterday the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Committee to Protect Journalists launched the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.

Together with more than 20 press freedom groups they want to build a central research repository and document press freedom violations across the United States.

“The United States has some of the strongest legal protections for press freedom in the world and a robust and varied media landscape, but this cannot be taken for granted. Open hostility, threats of leak prosecutions, and arrests have created a precarious situation for journalists,” said Alex Ellerbeck, senior research associate for the U.S. at the Committee to Protect Journalists and chair of the steering committee for the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. “A full and honest accounting of challenges to press freedom in this country is sorely needed.”

Freedom of the press is under attack world wide, not only in the United States. But maybe the Trump era is leveling this issue up into whole new dimensions. This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

„There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an "Independent Press"! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
_{John Swinton (1829 – 1901), chief editorial writer of The New York Times 1860 – 1870}

Luckily the internet changed things a bit...