Editorial: Reporters protect our freedoms

It isn’t easy being free. Threats come from all around you. Sometimes it’s from those close to home; other times it comes from far away.

Being a journalist is particularly treacherous, especially in some parts of the world. Last week, a group of barbarians literally removed the head of one American reporter. The Islamic State – described by the president earlier this year as a “JV” terrorist team – is now proving itself to be the crazy of the crazies.

But you don’t have to travel to the far side of the globe to find crazies or to find people who don’t like to have reporters poking around. In recent weeks, we’ve seen evidence of this in the “Show Me State,” where police have been arresting reporters after a big brouhaha blew up when an officer shot and killed a man.

Was that shooting justified? That’s a topic for another column. What’s important for this discussion is that the death of a minority by a white officer brought the predictable rioting and lawlessness and the equally foreseeable over-reaction by the crisis-lovers in the White House. Ergo, the St. Louis community of Ferguson hit the national spotlight and reporters flooded in.

As of last Tuesday, a total of 11 journalists had been arrested in Ferguson.

It’s worth pausing here to say that the media usually tries to work with local authorities. Each group has a job to do, and the best journalists try not to do anything that would hinder police or other first responders. Our own paper has had a great working relationship with the sheriff’s office as well as fire and EMS personnel. In my 19 years of experience, we’ve only had two occasions where someone tried to interfere with our coverage. One was a wet-behind-the-ears deputy who didn’t last long, and the other was a volunteer who thought he had more authority than he did. In both cases, the press was still given access by higher ranking authorities.

But back to Ferguson. There the police are already under scrutiny because of the nature of the events, and arresting reporters didn’t help their image any. It’s bad enough that the local police are dressed up like paramilitary troopers (in camouflage no less!) so that the whole thing looks like a scene from “Escape from New York.” But coming down on two journalists working on their stories inside McDonald’s is really over the top.

It didn’t help that that a Missouri Highway Patrol representative told reporters that, unless they were carrying $50,000 cameras, “we may take some of you into custody.” Of course, he also said they would quickly “take the proper action” – presumably let them go – once they find out who the journalists are. The catch-and-release policy is probably of little comfort to The Washington Post reporter who says police slammed him into the McDonald’s soda fountain before arresting him without a charge.

To make the bizarre situation even stranger, President Obama took to his teleprompter to defend the “criminal” journalists in Missouri.

“Here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs,” B.O. said.

That’s a laughable comment, coming from the man whose administration has made it a habit of bullying, wiretapping, and intimidating journalists. I guess it’s okay for him to do it but not okay for some “Whitey” cop in Missouri to do it.

Here’s something for the Hypocrite-In-Chief to mull over. Under President Obama, the United States of America has dropped from 32nd to 46th in the 2014 World Press Freedom Index, which is compiled by the press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. The index looks at 180 countries on criteria such as official abuse, media independence and infrastructure to determine how free journalists are to report.

One German journalist had this to say about his treatment in Missouri: “I was in the civil war regions in Georgia, the Gaza strip, illegally visited the Kaliningrad region when travel to the Soviet Union was still strictly prohibited for westerners, I’ve been in Iraq, Vietnam and in China, I’ve met Cuba dissidents. But to be arrested and yelled at and be rudely treated by police? For that I had to travel to Ferguson and St. Louis in the United States of America.”

Beheadings and arrests are the extreme examples of hostile treatment of the press, but they show what can happen if we are not ever vigilant to protect our freedom. And trust me friends, if we don’t have a free press, we don’t have freedom. Who else is going to tell you what’s going on in Missouri or Syria? Who will stand up to report the abuses of government, whether in Congress, the NSA, or the city council?

“The media” is often trashed in the arena of public opinion. And people certainly have a right to their own beliefs and opinions. Reporting the news and printing commentaries on our life and times often results in someone getting their feelings hurt. Sometimes they get so bent out of shape that they let their emotions get the better of them, and they hurl insults or call for boycotts.

That’s fine. It’s their prerogative. But it is “the media” that will stand by their right to say those things even when they themselves would not extend it to others.