Journalists in Canada are envious of their American cousins because of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Canada has no such protection for journalists enshrined in its Constitution. The U.S. amendment reads:
[The U.S.] Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
And yet, though that Amendment has held fast since it was adopted in 1791, the notion of a free press is under heavy attack today.
For example, Judith Miller of the New York Times has been attacked by her peers and by the public for her pre-war reporting on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. But those attacks are nothing compared to the assault on Miller by the U.S. government.
“I could be going to jail for a story I didn't write, for reasons I don't know, for something that may not actually even be a crime,” she told fellow investigative journalist Lowell Bergman in a March 17 event at the University of California at Berkeley Journalism School.
Once upon a time, the American press was more aggressive in defending or extending the rights of the press. Or at least that's the message I got reading Anthony Lewis' review of Inside the Pentagon Papers. In that review, Lewis quotes Professors Harold Edgar and Benno Schmidt Jr. of the Columbia Law School:
… The New York Times, by publishing the [Pentagon] papers…demonstrated that much of the press was no longer willing to be merely an occasionally critical associate devoted to common aims, but intended to become an adversary threatening to discredit not only political dogma but also the motives of the nation's leaders.
Later in that review, Lewis gloomily concludes:
The crucial lesson of the Pentagon Papers and then Watergate was that presidents are not above the law. So we thought. But today government lawyers argue that the president is above the law—that he can order the torture of prisoners even though treaties and a federal law forbid it.
John Yoo, a former Justice Department official who wrote some of the broad claims of presidential power in memoranda,… [said] recently that Congress does not have power to “tie the president's hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.” The constitutional remedy for presidential abuse of his authority, he said, is impeachment.
Yoo also [said] that the 2004 election was a “referendum” on the torture issue: the people had spoken, and the debate was over. And so, in the view of this prominent conservative legal thinker, a professor at the University of California law school in Berkeley, an election in which the torture issue was not discussed has legitimized President Bush's right to order its use.
David, did you actually write that Canada's constitution has no protection for journalists? Have a look at s. 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
David – one of the great eye openers for me while living in the U.S. was the way that many people – including journalists – were unable to see the constraints on freedom of expression and liberty.
The Americans that I know – people that I know to be thoughtful, intelligent, and well read – do share a great mythology. They believe that they live with the greatest freedoms, the greatest opportunities, and that their form of democracy cannot be improved on.
Because they accept as fact that no country enjoys greater liberty, they see no reason to examine all of the ways that their governments control what they can say or think, or the way that religion permeates all levels of government.
This was especially the case in the days and weeks following 9/11, when even people who had opposed Bush seemed to feel that they had no choice but to “stand behind the President”.
Well, that may have been what I said but perhaps it wasn't exactly what I meant 🙂
I do believe, though, that journalists working in the U.S. do enjoy more protection than Canadians and that may be a function of how both guarantees — the Charter's 2(b) vs the First Amendments — have been put into practice. The U.S. has the Pentagon Papers; we have Conrad Black suing Toronto Life. Sigh.